Fun times!

Lately I’ve had fun learning culture. Here are a few glimpses into my life last week:

At the National Week of Culture, there were lots of dancers from different ethnic groups doing their traditional dances.

Here are musicians accompanying dancers. These instruments are called balaphones.

This is from the “fair” that was part of the National Week of Culture. This time I went with two of my friends – Sita and Sophie. On another day (it was 40 cents to get in, so I went a few times with different people) I went with my language helper, thinking that I could learn a lot of new vocab words in Jula. But I think that I gave her more English words for things she didn’t have words for in Jula than she gave me new vocab words in Jula. They didn’t have words for things like squirt guns (just called a gun in Jula), snap bracelets (called a bracelet, and if you wanted to specify which kind, you’d say, “the bracelet that you hit your wrist with and it wraps around it”), and pinwheels. She also didn’t know the names of licensed characters we saw pictures of: Mickey and Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Snow White, and Ariel. Though, to be fair, when I explained that Ariel was a half-fish and half-human, there was a word for a mermaid in Jula!

Sophie and I celebrated our birthdays together since they are 11 days apart. We had pork, French fries, fried plantains, a sauté dish, and a vanilla cake.

Here we are, taking my first trip to the local river to go swimming, which is the cool thing to do on a hot day.

The pastor got a new puppy! Since I basically live in the pastor’s family’s front yard, it means that I can play with it as much as I want and don’t have the responsibilities to go with it. He’s so cute!

It was a fun and busy week. The problem was that there wasn’t enough time to see and learn everything.