As I mentioned earlier, my CBT (Culture Based Training) site is a small – medium sized village called Tassette. I am staying in Tassette along with two other PCTs from my stage and our LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator). We each have our own home-stay families in Tassette. For Tassette, we are not the first group of “Toubaabs” (Wolof for foreigner or white person) the village has experienced, but it’s been a little while. So naturally, whatever the toubaabs are doing, it always tends to draw a crowd, especially children. 95% of the stuff we do is not very exciting, but nonetheless, anyone of us will develop an entourage of kids just to walk to the market. At first, it seemed kind of fun and sweet, but after awhile, it’s just nice to get your work done without a million little hands reaching out for you and little voices yelling words and phrases that you just don’t comprehend because you’ve only been learning Wolof for a couple weeks.
Last week, my fellow two PCTs and I were working on mapping out our community for a technical assignment. For the sake of time and sanity, we tried to be discreet in our endeavor, so not to draw a crowd. We had multiple waves of followers, but at one point, seemed to have bored everyone off. We had about 15 minutes of solidarity when we realized that children were approaching us from a distance in 3-4 different directions. After just viewing the movie “Zombieland”, the children immediately paralleled the characteristics of zombies in my mind – slowly approaching from all sides in order to trap you and suck out your life (or in this instance, hinder you from completing your task and frankly just to be annoying). I know, I’m being dramatic, but it was slightly frightening. For the most part, I like kids, but primarily in small doses and the well-behaved ones. Unfortunately, that scenario is difficult to come across in Africa.
The usual entourage of children when we go out.
2 comments:
Jill, I know exactly how you feel! I too was haunted by feral children almost daily while traveling the Pacific. I've come to believe they operate within a sort of "hive mind". Don't let them fool you though, their cuteness only disguises their brutality. They are single minded and relentless in their pursuit of candy and entertainment.
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Well, you have to like Ryan and Reese because you're their aunt even though they aren't always well behaved!! HaHa! I love your blog! It is so interesting and the pictures are great too.
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