My friends from Wales came for a week. It was absolutely fantastic. It was great to see them and spend time with them. They were super encouraging to me and it was encouraging from a language perspective to be able to translate for them and share how much language I had actually picked up!
We spent some time seeing the sights of the city, my host family had some of the ladies over for tea one afternoon and we all went out to a tiny village (600 people) for an overnight trip. That was an experience! For me it was great to get out of the city again, and to really test my language. I have gotten the basics down so to have other people depending on my language and be in a different environment was quite refreshing.
We went in three taxis to a little city about 4 hours away where the taxis drivers were from. They had never taken foreigners to their town so they didn’t really know what to do. We were a group who had never done anything like this before and didn’t want to put our expectations onto the taxi drivers so I felt there was a lot of, “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know what do you want to do?” between drivers, the 2 of us language speakers, and the group’s leaders. So that freedom lead us be the first foreigners to visit a little town (maybe 3000 people), to meet the mayor, pray for him and the town, visit a few schools and say hello to (what felt like)several hundred school kids! Then we headed on to our destination.
We got into the village and I wanted to just get to the houses where we were eating dinner but the other taxis had the good idea to stop at the little school on our way into the village. There we were warmly received by 175 kids, 15 teachers or so and the English teacher got to practice her translating too. I’m so glad we stopped. They sang songs for us, wanted us to sign scraps of paper, gave us wildflowers from the field behind the school. Foreigners had come to their village!
They wanted to show us their local mosque. 200 million dollars spent on a beautifully tiled mosque. I was surprised the kids were running around inside- I guess it’s more of a community hall than a sacred religious room. They let us take pictures of the bright chandeliers, the tiles, the kids and the old men who proudly pointed around the room. Then we asked if we could pray. So an old man prayed, then we prayed. While we were there we never heard a call from the minaret, don’t know if they have a religious leader in that village or not.
Then we (I felt- finally! my patience was not as long as others in my group!) got to the house were we were going to eat dinner. The village leader came and we chatted a bit. I asked where the kitchen was and a few of us joined the women (and about 14 kids) and started chopping vegetables and enjoying the company of villagers. I like that friendly silence is okay here and you don’t have to keep the conversation rolling. Although with 14 kids about you can go a long way with just a few questions, “What’s your name? (14 answers) What’s your favorite color? (14 answers) Do you have siblings? (14 answers)” etc. There was an 18 year old girl there and she was so sweet. I helped her get bowls from the neighbors house and lay the table.
After dinner then we split up and went to three different houses to sleep. We were all quite tired so were glad they didn’t want to give us another cup of tea when we got to the homes. I think I introduced myself to the same woman about 4 times before realizing it.
In the morning we taught some English back at the school and were on our way. I can’t wait to go back!
