I have a home!

This is great news. As of last night, I moved into where I’ll be living for the next 2 years, Inchallah (god willing in Arabic, used at the end of every sentence, along with alhumdulilaye, which means thanks be to god). It was kind of weird at first, but now I’m used to it. Anyways!

So I was supposed to get to Bambey Tuesday, the lucky 13th, remember? But then I didn’t move in until the 15th, but here’s what really happened. On the morning of the 15th my boss came to pick me up and brought me to Bambey to interview a possible host family. So around 9ish, we went to the high school where Fatou (my new host mom) works. We chatted with her and Mark explained the situation of how it should all work. Then we went to her house to have a nice look around. It is just her and her daughter, N’dack, in one structure and 2 subleasers, Dabakh and Sophie, in another structure, within the same compound. I would be renting 2 rooms in the second structure like the subleasers. When she showed us the rooms I was rather dumbfounded. There was a lot of furniture and about an inch of dust and we eventually had to carry out 2 large buckets of broken cement that had either chipped off the floor and the walls, not easy sweeping. Needless to say I was shocked, but at this point I couldn’t be picky. Then she showed us the bathroom. Since no one was using it for as long as no one was using my 2 bedrooms, she shut the water off and we had to move a door that was used as a gate to keep the goats and chickens in the back of the compound. So the bathroom was a complete disaster and pretty much only had a hole cut out in the cement to potentially pee in. There is another functioning bathroom with a shower on the other side of the compound, but I would have to share this with everyone and the Peace Corps is cool about giving us our own bathrooms whenever possible. So Mark told her that we should start asap renovating the bathroom and bedrooms and PC would pay. In the mean time, I would move into one of the spare bedrooms. So when can I move in?! was my thought exactly…

Since by this time it was after 10, we would have to drive back to Thies and then back to Bambey with all of my things. It’s only an hour drive from Thies, alhumdulilaye, so we were back in Bambey before my host mom’s lunch break was up. So I was really bummed and wanted to finally move things out of my suitcases and into a real place for the first time in 2 months, but I had to wait. Things did move along quite quickly, which is surprising in this country, which I am very happy for. We went shopping the next day and had a painter there in the afternoon to start my rooms, baby blue – darling. Bought a fancy Turkish toilet and showerhead and flooring and spent money faster than I thought possible! (I’m cheap like my dad and hate spending money!) And then it got stressful again. Mind you, this is all in another language and although I’ve taken a lot of French, I still have trouble. They asked me about how I want to do the bathroom since we can’t paint it since the paint would just chip off the cement when it got wet. So, Fatou, suggested tile. Sure, thinking it would be cheap and not a lot of it right? Wrong. Since it was too expensive in Bambey, we would have to go to the next closest large city to get it. Dabakh would be the one installing it and since he knows what his doing, he brought to to Diourbel to go to the bank and to buy tile. I had to withdrawal pretty much all of my money from the PC “move-in allowance” to pay for everything possible before getting reimbursed. Then we went to the tile place. Dabakh wanted to get 15 square meters! I didn’t think this was necessary but I didn’t really have a choice at this point. We came all this way and I tried texting my boss to get a second opinion but he didn’t get back to me in time. I spent A LOT of money on tile, which come to find out, since it wasn’t necessary, I won’t get reimbursed. We could have just put fresh cement on the walls and been fine, but no. By the end of today, I will have the best looking bathroom in all of Peace Corps Senegal, thank you French degree. Now I’ll just need a set of locks to keep the whole neighborhood out.