Day 3 - Sorry I'm Late Posting, Finding Wi-Fi Here is Difficult

Moved into the host family’s house today.  They all seem very nice.  They are definitely not at all what I expected though.  I was told that I would be living with my host mom, her two daughters (in their late 20’s) and a twelve year old girl.  There are at least five other people who regularly come and go from the house, and I am not really sure how many of them live their all the time.  There are actually two girls around the age of 12, and then two boys, maybe 5 and 3 years old?  They are really cute.  The younger girls be-friended me really quickly, and we went on several adventures around their neighborhood in search of their friends and food.  They tried to explain to me the relations within the family, but things aren’t quite as clear cut here.  If they have very close friends, they tend to adopt them into their family, and children are often raised by sisters of their mothers, so the child calls their aunt their mother, and things like that.  It’s all rather confusing to me and I’ve pretty much given up trying to understand.  The hardest part is remembering their names.  African names are so different from U.S. ones.  The two younger girls are named Oumou and Aminata, and my host mother is Maman Collé, but I have yet to memorize everyone else’s names.  All of the Ohio State students live within walking distance of each other, but we do not really know where each other live, or how to get to WARC from our houses, so it will be interesting to see how many people get lost tomorrow morning.  Earlier today, we went to hear a lecture on Wolof, the language that most people here speak.  French is the official language, which is used for school and media, but most people use Wolof when they are speaking to one another in the streets.  The lecture was very interesting, although I wish we could have learned more useful phrases.  We learned how to greet each other, and we learned the alphabet as well as some basic words for each letter.  The language reminds me a lot of Arabic, they use very similar sounds, more guttural than English.  After teaching us the alphabet, the lecturer sang one of his poems for us, while playing the guitar.  From what I gathered, he often sings things songs to children in school.  The biggest culture shocks so far have been the traffic and the showers.  Almost no one here has hot water for their showers, it doesn’t bother them to shower in cold water.  I think that will be the thing that I miss the most this month.  The traffic is absolutely insane.  If there are rules of the road, it doesn’t seem like anyone follows them.  Everyone just kind of drives where they please, cutting other drivers off.  There aren’t any traffic lights, they use small roundabouts instead for their intersections.  The pedestrians rarely use the sidewalks, they prefer to walk along the edge of the road, right next to the cars, and they don’t have the right of way here so everyone just sprints across the street when there is a break in traffic.  They walk much closer to cars than anyone ever would in the states, there have been times when our bus was turning and someone was walking so close to the side of it that I was sure someone would be hit.  No one has so far that I’ve seen though.  It would be interesting to see the statistics for this country for how often pedestrians are killed by cars, and compare them to the States.