Yuna!

I remembered  I promised to announce every time I was sitting in front of a computer writing the post, and you were supposed to assume that if I made no such announcement, it meant I had scheduled the post to be published at a future time and that the events read about had not occurred on that day. However, for the past week I have actually been in front of the computer and forgotten to announce that fact, so that plan for eliminating temporal confusion has failed. Did I use the word "temporal" correctly? I don't even know. The more Pulaar I learn, the more English I forget.

In a few sentences, you will read about events that happened earlier today. Starting...now:

I spent the day with my training village host family! I left in the morning with the two other volunteers who had host families there and we stayed until late in the afternoon.

WARNING: Today was wonderful in a uniform, wandering-the-aisles-of-a-flower-shop kind of way. Or a walking-along-the-beach-collecting-seashells kind of way. Wonderful to experience, difficult to write about, and boring to read about.

• We zigzag and loop around our destination and add maybe an extra 45 minutes to our journey, but I am a horrible estimator, so maybe we wasted 5 minutes or maybe an hour and a half.
• After we step off the gelly in Yuna, a group of women who are sitting under a nearby tree call out our names and greet us excitedly and we excitedly return their greetings even though we don't remember who they are.
• We walk over to the alkalo's compound (if you've forgotten, the alkalo is the guy in charge of the village, basically) to greet the woman who had cooked all of our lunches.
• We marvel out how big all of the children have gotten.
• Before parting ways to go to our host families, we stopped by the compound where our language and culture teacher had stayed, where we went for all of our language lessons.
• "Binta arriiii!" "Eyi, mi arriiiii!!!" "Binta's come!" "Yes, I've come!!!"
• Neene! Baa! Sarjo! Sainey! Ousman! In case the exclamation marks didn't make it clear, I was super-excited to see them all. Although I didn't get to see them all--my namesake was at her husband's compound in another village and Howa and her new baby were also elsewhere.
• And I could talk to them! Here's what we talked about:
• The journey to Yuna from my permanent site
• How much I miss Yuna
• The new volunteers arriving soon
• The weather
• Mangoes, and how they are not in season yet
• Groundnuts
• After I say, "I went by car, I think the river has hippopotamuses," and they tell me I hear Pulaar now!
• But then a few minutes later (after replying to several questions with confused stares) I'm told actually, I don't hear Pulaar yet...
• Groundnut sauce with chicken for lunch!
• Some lady who I cannot remember AT ALL comes by and gives me a hug and sits close to me and talks excitedly about how glad she is that I've come to visit.
• I meet up with the other two volunteers, we say goodbyes, we journey back to the transit house
• Oh, and sometime after meeting up with the other volunteers and saying goodbye I'm handed a large plastic bag full of oranges.