PC Blog 7: Host Families in the Age of COVID

Note: This post is about my own personal experience with my “Resource Family” during our training throughout the summer in Kambia. If you’d like to read the experience from another volunteer, check out Kadiatu’s Kronicles blog. Unless noted otherwise, all photos were taken by my wonderful Host Mother.

Host “Resource” Families

One of the most important aspects of Pre-Service Training with the Peace Corps are host families, which are local families from the surrounding community which the trainees stay with for the entirety of their training period. This is one of the primary ways by which trainees can quickly become “integrated” with the community, which is one of the key principles of the Peace Corps approach to service since the beginning, over 60 years ago.

However, as mentioned in my previous post, because of the required COVID precautions with the Peace Corps’ return to service, our experience was markedly different. In order to allow us the chance to quarantine if and when needed (more about that in a future blog post for sure), we were housed in a local hotel rather than with host families, though we were still matched with families, with whom we met on the weekends (and then returned to the hotel in the evenings). So, rather than “host” families, they became our “resource” families. As such, all of the valuable “resources” that we were to obtain by staying with our families, like language, cooking, and cultural skills, had to be crammed into these two days every week. I already mentioned in the previous post about the Pros and Cons of this new approach to “Resource” Families, so I won’t hash them out again here, but I will say that Peace Corps Salone plans to have the next cohort return to staying with host families, so, for better or worse, our experiences with “resource families” will have been a brief, COVID-enabled experiment unique to our cohort.

As I briefly mentioned in the post about our first arrival to the training site in Kambia, we first met with our host parents on the day we arrived, but only for about an hour as a sort of “ice breaker” where we could share food and talk a little about ourselves. Since we arrived on a Sunday, we had basically the whole week before we would go to meet with our families on the following Saturday. So for that first week of training in Kambia, between the Krio lessons, learning to use the outhouses, acclimating our bodies to the food, and all of the other sessions they crammed into these few days, we didn’t have much time to think about what the upcoming weekend might bring, but I think most of us were a little bit anxious, since we would be spending a lot of time over the next three months with these people who were still essentially strangers to us.

Trek Through Kambia

When Saturday finally rolled around, we all patiently waited for one of our family members to come get us at the hotel to escort us to their home. I don’t think any of our families were too far away, at maximum only about 15 minutes or so from the hotel, though I think mine was one of the furthest. My host father led me through all the criss-crossing winding streets of Kambia 2 (which was apparently the more southern part of town, as opposed to Kambia 1 farther north, where our training site was). We passed by many houses of various types, from small mud-brick to much larger walled compounds. We passed nearby the market which was the larger, busier, and more organized part of town with wider, straight roads and larger buildings and shops jutting right up against each other like you might find in any town. As we walked further along, however, the houses tended to spread out into a much more unorganized sprawl, and the roads seemed to wend whichever way they could to fit in between the houses, rather than the other way around. Many people, including many children, were out in front of their houses, working or playing or visiting with their neighbors, many of whom greeted my host father and many of whom (especially the children) would yell “Oputo!” at me to greet the strange, new white person. At one point, my host father had to quickly pull me aside because he thought a passing cow being herded down the road was getting too close (in my defense, this wasn’t very common - I don’t think I’ve seen a cow on the road in Kambia since then).

The House

Eventually, we finally reached a small, walled compound which I was told was my new (temporary) home in Salone. Inside were two modest sized buildings, one of which was mostly sleeping quarters for the kids, while the other was the main house with two additional bedrooms (one for my parents and one for a guest, which would have been for me if we were allowed to stay overnight) and a nice, comfy seating area. However, because of the warm weather outside and dark interior inside (Kambia hadn’t had electricity since before the civil war), we would spend most of our time outside under a large tree in the sort-of court yard between the two main buildings or else under the covered front veranda (once the rains came). My family also kept a sizable garden toward the back with many different crops, including several papaya trees (and I think some mango too? but these were out-of-season while I was there). The main house did have a flushing toilet, but like most in Salone, since there was no central water you had to flush manually with a bucket, so most used the outdoor latrines instead.

Meeting the Kamaras

When we arrived, everyone was busy doing chores or getting ready for the day, but they were all excited to greet me. For Salone standards, they had a relatively small family, with four children staying with them (one of whom wasn’t one of their own children but a relative who was staying with them for some time, which I think is pretty common). My oldest sister had just finished taking her WASSCE exams (taken at the end of Senior Secondary School, similar to our high school) - she would later help me a lot especially with cooking, laundry, and insisting that people talk in Krio around me to help me learn. My oldest brother was a few years younger in Junior Senior Secondary School who would also help me throughout the summer, like with learning how to fetch water from their well (which they were very reluctant to let me do, that I might hurt my delicate, American hands) or learning how to pick granat (peanuts) - he also adored playing and watching football (soccer), like most boys in Salone. The two youngest, a boy and girl, were a few years younger, but about the same age - they ended up having to do most of the small, menial chores around the house, so I came to learn their names very quickly because someone was always calling them to come clean this or fetch that. They were still able to have some time to themselves, though, to just play around and be kids, like one day during a downpour when everyone else hidunder cover, they spent at least an hour just dumping buckets of water over each others’ head.

Another picture of my host parents and I at our Swearing-in Ceremony.

My host father was a Secondary School Chemistry teacher, which I think may have been part of the reason why I was paired with them, because this was also what I hoped to do during my service. He was also a proud member of the Mani tribe (also called Bullom So), which is one of the smaller ethnicities in Sierra Leone, but were some of the original inhabitants of the area. While I was there, he was preparing a small manuscript about the Mani language and how it informs on the meaning of many different names throughout present-day Sierra Leone, including place names, family names, chiefdom names, etc., which I was able to help him with during my time with them. My host mother did some part-time secretarial work for some government agency in Kambia, however, most of her time and effort went into running a shop from the front of their house, where they’d sell a wide variety of everyday household items and food. Additionally, because they had a small solar array, they would also charge people a small fee to charge their phones or battery packs, so they always had at least a dozen or more phones slowly charging away in a corner, with a system of colored stickers and numbers to help keep track of them all. She also showed me a building across the road she was having rennovated, which she hoped to use to expand her shop in future and possibly rent out a few rooms.

During my time with them, I was also able to meet a few other extended family members, one of whom was staying with them at the time and who manned the shop most of the time. I’d occasionally see him watching a movie on his phone in between taking requests for food or “top up” (adding money to your mobile phone account, which was also part of their business). I later came to find out that he was exactly four days older than myself, so he was definitely the closest to me in age! I also got to know one of their aunts who lived nearby (though she was only a couple years older than the kids) who had just recently given birth a month or so prior to her first baby boy whom she would bring around for everyone to fawn over. On the second visit day, I played a very popular board game here that’s very similar to Trouble or Aggravation, though the Saloneans liked to add several additional (somewhat complicated) rules, like stealing moves if a certain dice combination was rolled.

My family also kept several animals within their small compound, like their two dogs, “Long Life” and “Majoy”, who preferred my father and mother, respectively, and a small puppy, “J-12”, who was apparently born on June 12, just a few weeks before I arrived. They also had a cat, which I think they just called “Puss”, but they didn’t seem to hold it in very high regard, because it liked to steal food. They also kept a scrawny little chicken, who apparently liked it there enough to not need to be restrained, though later in the summer when they got another, they had to tie a flip-flop to its leg to prevent it from escaping.

Salone Cuisine

In addition to helping us learn more about the language and culture, one of the main goals of staying with our resource families was to help us learn how to do simple, everyday chores in the “Salone” way so that we could later do them for ourselves at our site. Perhaps the most important, and potentially most time-intensive, was cooking. I won’t go into a lot of detail about Salone cuisine here, because I hope to cover it more in-depth some day in my Salone blog, but in short, most meals in Sierra Leone are centered around rice with different kinds of sauce, which they call a “plasa” or “soup”. Though there are many types of plasas, they’re often very similar, with a common base of red palm oil (“palmayn”), “magi” (a type of bullion), salt, onions (“yabas”), and hot peppers, with different kinds of ground-up leaves to add flavor. For protein, they’ll add fish, beans (“beench”), peanut butter (“ground groundnut”), crabs, or very occasionally chicken or beef.

Watch the Oputo beat the pepe!

All of this, including the rice, is cooked over charcoal (or else firewood) and prepared and processed by hand, which can take quite a long time. All of this my mother and sisters taught to me (though I realized later that I should have paid more attention to key details, like the proper proportion of things…), but what was the most, shall we say “entertaining”, especially for them, was showing me the very “Salone” ways of preparing the food for cooking, such as removing the stems from hot peppers without causing the juices to get over your hands (and so causing them to cry out in pain), or chopping vegetables and plasa leaves in your hand rather than a chopping board (and not, instead, chopping parts of fingers), or else the most important: grinding things by beating them with a very large stick. You may have seen images of African women slamming a large stick into a pot placed on the ground (called a “mata odo”), over and over again, and this is what they’re doing. Depending on what needs to be ground, it can take a pretty short time, like for grinding up hot peppers for most plasas, so it’s not a huge part of the cooking process time-wise, but I think because it’s such a distinct aspect of West African culture, it’s often one of the things people think of the most. There are few (if any) times in American cooking when you ever have to exert your entire body to prepare your food. I think the Saloneans themselves recognize this uniqueness of their cooking culture, because they absolutely love watching foreigners (and especially white people) attempt it. Of course, they wouldn’t let me do it for too long, so once they’d gotten their fill of laughs and pictures, as soon as my delicate American hands would start to turn red, they’d hand it over to one of the children to finish, some of whom were shorter than the stick itself but still more than capable of finishing the job.

After the large meal of the day prepared in the early afternoon, my sister would often go to the market to buy ingredients, so I’d often go with her. When we’d get back, she’d start to prepare some small food items to sell around the community in the early evening, so I’d sometimes help “small small” with this, too, especially for beating rice into flour, which takes much more effort with the mata odo than pretty much anything else. For my help, she’d usually give me some of whatever we were making before she’d leave to go sell, usually fish balls or chicken balls, which are basically exactly what they sound like, but she’d serve them with a sauce that I think(?) was made from ground tamarind.

More Work

My host sister taking over after I failed to wash thoroughly enough with the brooking board.

Besides cooking, another quite time and labor intensive everyday activity is laundry (or as they call it “brooking”). Initially, I tried doing this for myself at the hotel during the week, but because of the lack of large buckets and hanging spaces, it wasn’t really practical to do more than a few items of clothing. After the first two weeks, my family insisted that I bring my dirty laundry with me for them to show me how to “brook” the proper way, so every Saturday I’d wend my way through the streets of Kambia with a bag of laundry in my hands, both to and from their house (it may not have been uphill each way, but I’d often have to walk through small pools of water flooding the road, both ways). My sister taught me how to use a brooking board (very similar to a metal washing board you might imagine from the last century in America, though made of thick plastic), though my sister usually insisted on doing this task herself, and then rinsing and wringing each item out several times to remove all of the soap, before hanging on the line to dry. The first time we did this, the smaller kids especially enjoyed watching my exertions and inability to even hang the clothes on the line in the “proper” way (they did eventually show me how, though). By the time I’d leave in the evenings, my clothes (which took up most of their clothesline space) would be *mostly* dry, but occasionally I’d leave some overnight to come get on the following morning before church.

Me "helping" to pull weeds.

Almost everyone in Sierra Leone farms, either to supplement their own diets or else to sell at the market, and my family had space both inside their compound and also a modest lot across the street. By the time we’d arrived in Kambia, it was about half-way through the rainy season, so most of the crops had already been planted. However, occasionally they’d take me out to see their progress and “help” them to “pull grass” (weeding). I say “help” because I was afraid of pulling up the wrong plant and thus destroying their bean crop, so I mostly just piled up the pulled weeds that the other kids uprooted themselves. Toward the end of the summer, their peanut crop (“granat” or “groundnut”) was ready for harvesting, so I spent an afternoon picking peanuts from the uprooted peanut plants (apparently they grow underground with the roots of the plant - I had no idea), which can be pretty messy. Unfortunately, none of the other crops seemed to have ripened above to harvest while I was there, which was unfortunate because they had several papaya trees.

Church in Kambia

Sierra Leone is a very religious country, and even though they have a sizable number of both Muslims and Christians, they coexist very peacefully. These two religions even cut across most ethnic groups, with most having both Christians and Muslims among their number (so politics, for which the different parties are largely tied to the major ethnic groups, are often much more contentious). Some regions of the country are predominantly one religion or another, especially in more rural areas, but Kambia has a fairly equal mix. My family were devout Christians, so I decided to go with them to Church every Sunday to see how it compared to churches I’d attended in America (and I guess one in Austria). In short, there are many similarities, but also many differences. Of course, just as in America, there are vast differences between different churches and congregations, so I don’t want to paint my upcoming experiences as representative of all churches in Salone.

The church itself was fairly small, with just one room, but it was still nice and comfortable enough for the typical congregation size of about 30 or so. Though it was supposed to start sometime after 9AM, only a few members would arrive for the start of the service, but more and more would trickle in even an hour after the start. However, I’m sure this was in part because the services were stupendously long: always more than two hours and sometimes quite longer. Part of the reason was that every week, the local minister would give his own sermon, about 30-45 minutes, which he would immediately follow by playing a recorded sermon from a Nigerian mega-church pastor (I wasn’t completely sure, but it seemed like their church was directly part of his network of churches throughout West Africa, rather than aligning with one of the more “traditional” denominations like you might see in America or Europe). One fateful Sunday, they had two visiting pastors come to visit their church, one who seemed to lead the network on the regional level and one who led it across the whole country. Apparently, it was an accident that they both came on the same day (it certainly wasn’t planned), but in any case, the local, regional, national, AND (recorded) Nigerian pastors ALL gave their OWN sermons, and we were there for nearly four hours! I will never complain about the length of a typical 1-hour American church service again…

One unique part of the sermons is that they often liked to quote bible verses, especially the Nigerian pastor, which everyone was expected to turn to and follow along in their own Bibles. However, they often liked to skip around from different parts of the Bible in quick succession, even between Old and New Testament, so a lot of the listening experience involved frantically flipping pages to find the next few lines of verses before quickly embarking on the next search.

The rest of the service was also pretty similar to what you might see at any church, with community announcements (typically only said after the first hour, once most people had arrived), several songs for the congregation to sing, collection of offerings, and prayer. However, unlike most American churches, in which time given for individual prayers is given as a few minutes in silence, here they gave a good ten minutes of individual prayer time during which everyone would say their own individual prayers out-loud, often quite loudly, “I tell Papa God boku tenki tenki for…”, followed by ten minutes of prayer each from both the pastor and the recorded Nigerian minister.

Though Kambia itself didn’t receive any central power, the Church set-up a petrol-powered generator to run during the sermon, which was enough to power a microphone and speaker, as well as a TV to watch the Nigerian pastor’s recordings (the first week I came, they had just a small phone to play this from, but they had a modest sized TV for the rest of the summer). As I mentioned before, the congregation itself was fairly small, but they were all very friendly to me and several would often come to greet me after the service. Many also often brought their children, all decked out in their Sunday finest, who were generally fairly well-behaved throughout the service.

Coming and Going

Throughout the summer, as I came or left their house on my own, I managed to find nearly every possible way to get there, because I managed to get lost at least once every time I went for the first month. I was fine with this, though, because it was a good opportunity to see more of the community, and surprisingly, because the mobile signal was quite decent in Kambia, I could actually find my way using Google Maps! It wouldn’t provide me actual directions (most of the streets weren’t labeled, either on the map or in real-life, but they at least showed up on the map), but since I marked where the house was, and the GPS showing my current location worked well enough, it was easy to see the general direction I needed to go. Occasionally, they’d send one of the kids with me when it was time to go to make sure I didn’t get lost again on my way to the hotel.

Peeling potatoes under the veranda - just before the rain really started to come down!

Only one time did this set-up of weekend visits with returning to the hotel every night become an issue, and it was during the first or second visit that it started to rain about two hours before most of us would normally leave, and just never stopped raining. This was of course the rainy season, but typically it would rain for maybe an hour at most sometime during the day and quickly clear up, so it was easy enough to hide under cover for a bit to wait it out, like the first day when I found myself peeling potatoes huddled under the front veranda right next to their free-range chicken, also seeking shelter. However, on this day it just wouldn’t let up, and the downpour kept coming as it slowly began to grow darker and small rivers started forming in the streets. Because of both of these things combined, the Peace Corps decided to come rescue us a few at a time in their all-terrain SUVs (complete with snorkel so the engine wouldn’t get flooded if they hit a REALLY big puddle). So, about an hour after we normally would have left, I was one of the last ones to hop into the car behind our Training Manager, and next to the trainee I’m calling “Kitty-chan” with freshly braided hair (hers not mine). Together, we slowly made our way through the water-logged streets, past half- (or fully) naked children playing in the rain, first to the market (for our Training Manager to pick up dinner for himself and his newly-arrived son) and then finally back to our (somewhat damp) hotel rooms.

Conclusions

Though we definitely did not get to experience the full “host family” experience during our summer in training at Kambia, I am still very grateful and glad that we got to spend at least the weekends getting to know our “resource families.” Nearly six months later, I still keep in touch with them occasionally through WhatsApp or Facebook, so if any of you happen to read this, know that you made my time in Kambia special and that I’m very thankful for everything una been do for me. (And if there’s any details here I got wrong - feel free to let me know!)