For the past week we’ve been showing two Spaniards around the village. Luis was sick with malaria so we showed Maria and Oier around the village while they worked on building Luis bee boxes. It’s really fun to have visitors because we walk around talking to the villagers, and they are impressed with our mandinka since the visitors can speak none. Neither Maria or Oier speak much English so they actually relied on us as translators because they could understand our English easier than they could understand our villagers English.
It was also interesting because although their English was very limited and neither of us speak Spanish, our cultures are so much more similar than Gambian culture that we actually understood each other better even though their English is much worse than some of our Gambian villagers. For example, Maria told me that a small boy named Fabakari was like a ‘hurricane’. I laughed and later told her that our host sister Binta was ‘Hurricane Katrina’ and she understood and laughed but the Gambians that were around us, who all spoke English very well, didn’t know what we were talking about.
One night they cooked us some canned Spanish beans and chorizo! They also gave us chorizo as a going away gift. Oh, so delicious. We had a good time talking with them about our village, Spain, and America, and we were sad to see them leave.
Entrance to Luis's compound. Look carefully at the word 'beekeeper'?
A view of the interier of the compound. A niceta!
The tiles inside Luis house in our village, in Africa
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