Home Stay/Training

Overheard in garden and farming training:
"How long til it comes?"
"That's what she said."--Anonymous

Greetings from Suriname! All has been going well since my last blog--the skin problem cleared up after a couple of days. Since my last post, a lot has transpired. First, I spent three weeks living with a Suriname family--an older man and woman with 17 kids! Luckily, all their kids are older and only one comes around the house occasionally. This past week, I spent at my future site. I will be taking over for one of the volunteers who is ending service. My site is located on the Suriname River at a tourist camp! Right now, I am back in the city, waiting to go back to my Suriname family.

Home stay with a Suriname family has been real interesting. I ended up in a great situation since there are no kids regularly living in my house. Some other volunteers are living in houses with at least 10 kids. So, in the room I am staying, I am back to sleeping in a bunk bed which I assume was left over from earlier days. It is quite ironic because I can not get away from the bunk bed scene(I had a bunk bed with my bro for 10 years, but at least I get bottom bunk this time) but it beats sleeping in a hammock. Anyways, I have also been fortunate to have only one late night visitor so far. One night, at 3:30 in the morning, I was awoken by a rat. A rat! I could hear it crawling around on the opposite side of the room across from my bed. My solution: headlamp and a machete! At 3:30 in the morning, with a headlamp and a machete, I am moving boxes trying to find this rat. Unfortunately I did not find the rodent because he was actually in the vacant room next to mine. So the pest lived and made a ruckus all night.

My home stay family themselves are pretty hilarious. My homestay mom and dad are older--I'd assume 50's. When my host father first met me, he started laughing and yelling "Yonkupai! Yonkupai!" Now, the whole village where I stay calls me 'Yonkupai', which means young boy. My host father is primarily a hunter and so is his neighbor. So, I have had some interesting cuisine over the past few weeks. The low light has been one of the big rodents he catches which looks like a giant rat. Here, it is called kokoni. In America, I'd assume it is called big rat. It's more tasty than the baboon meat though. The highlight of things caught has been a turtle. Turtle meat is freakin delicious. On the other hand, turtle eggs might take some time getting used to. My host father is a pretty funny guy, he speaks pretty good English and we like to sit around and watch TV--at my homestay I have electricity 24 hours so using the headlamp to try and catch the rat was unnecessary but more fun. I have been able to see almost all of the USA soccer games here and I actually got the locals to root for USA against Spain which was an amazing game. My host father is a big Brazil fan though so I am sure he is waiting for me to come back to site to bust my chops about last weeks game since I was in the interior when it took place. For those of you who are out of the loop on the soccer scene, Brazil beat USA 3-2 in a championship game. The other show of choice has been some crap Wayne Brady show about don't forget the lyrics. Are people actually watching this crap in America too!? The funniest thing about the TV is that there are only two channels so everyone is watching the same thing. One afternoon, the first X-Men movie came on and I watched it. All the kids thought that that the movie was real and actually happened in America. That afternoon, every Peace Corps volunteer in our village was questioned about whether or not we had a mutant problem in America.

Anywho, my host mother is also a hoot. She cooks for me, makes me tea every morning and does my laundry--I freakin' love this lady. My favorite thing about my host mother is her rule with the microwave. No matter what is put in the microwave, it has to stay in for exactly one minute. When I tried to put a piece of bread in the microwave for 20 seconds she stopped me and made me set the timer to one minute--I had to let the bread cool for like 10 minutes. One time, someone else set the microwave to 1:30 and she did not understand what the heck had happened. She started calling me for help and pointing at the microwave. We had to call a neighbor over because she was so flabbergasted and because I could not understand what the heck was going on. But once I figured out that all she wanted me to do was hit the clear button, all was well in the World, again.

While staying with this family I am also in training several hours a day. For training, I have been in language and technical training while staying with my Suriname family. On the typical day, I have language school at 8 am and it is 4 hours. In the afternoon, I usually have a 3+ hour technical training session. In these technical sessions I have learned many different things from construction to gardening to methods for teaching business and life skills in Suriname.

The most memorable training experience has been the construction training. In my neighboring village, I built what the locals call a kaka wosu. Literally translated: "shit house". This was the first project we, 5 of us Peace Corps Volunteers in the village, completed. When I arrived with my fellow trainees, all I could tell people was "My name is Yonkupai and I am here to build a shit house". So, the youth in the village was completely enamored with us and when I climbed through the shit box I think I instantly made friends with every kid under 10 in town. For the whole week while we were building this kaka wosu every kid in the village would follow us yelling "yonkupai! kaka wosu! kaka wosu!" It took a group of 3 of us and 1 Peace Corps staff member about 3 days to build the kaka wosu, then we assisted in finishing a second on the other side of town with the other group. After this, myself and the other volunteers decided to build a wash house without any assistance from staff. We laid some cement and when it had dried two days later, we constructed a wash house in only 5 hours or so. And so, we have been saving the World one kaka wosu/wash house at a time.