GranEllen – week 2 in Namibia

Week 2 was all about preparing for our training homestay. This is when we move in with a host family for the remainder of our training time. Our host family is determined by our assigned language so they can practice our new language with us in a home setting. On Wednesday afternoon my language was revealed as Afrikaans and that evening I met my host mother and daughter (18yr). My host father works out of town and the son (15yrs) is visiting other family since this is a school break right now. Peace Corps makes this a fun and exciting day by making a game out of the “language reveal” and later “finding” our host family.  PC Staff gives each Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) a piece of a puzzle for their language group. We then find similar pieces from other PCTs and complete our puzzle to know who all is in our language group. The language instructor finds their group and then we know our language because we have been working all week with the language instructors learning basic greetings for their specific language. It was a fun activity. That evening, after all the host families arrived, we did a similar activity except this time each PCT and each host family was given a puzzle piece and we had to match the 2 pieces to complete the simple puzzle. This is how we ‘found’ our host family.

I moved in with my host family Friday evening and I lucked out. They have been hosting volunteers for 10 years so they know what they are doing. I have my own room and the accommodations are very comfortable. I will be picked up by a PC van every weekday morning at my ‘bus stop’ around 7am for a day of training and then returned around 5:30pm. Weekends will mostly be spent with my host family unless PC has a field trip or other activity planned for us.