Host Family Party

With training coming to an end, we were told that we were having a thank you party for the Host Families. We split into committees for the party: Cooking, Ushering, Shopping, and Entertainment. I was on the Entertainment committee and we spent a couple weeks planning what we wanted to do. I really wanted to do an acrostic poem. For those of you who don’t remember, those are the poems where you spell something (like in this case ‘Thank You’) then say ‘T is for ______, H is for _______’ etc. down the line.  Maybe it’s just having been a kindergarten teacher, but I thought it would be nice. I took it upon myself to write the English, and then had help translating it into Setswana. My friend helped me write the letters THANK YOU! on one side of a paper and RE A LEBOGA (we thank you) on the other side. I got people to volunteer to read each letter and the two sentences with it then at the end we flipped the papers and said “Re a leboga” together. The families loved it; I think they were the most happy to hear us speaking Setswana.

We also planned three skits. People seem to love skits. The three skits were: cooking, washing clothes, and pets. We were trying to show Americans in the funniest light possible. The cooking skit was about adding crazy things to food, since some of the things we cook get a strange look. The two volunteers who wrote it also stressed smelling food since here that’s not considered polite. Culturally, smelling food is implying something is rotten and so it is a big no-no. (Of course we learned this the day after I smelled all the spice mixes in the house trying to figure out what they were – go figure.) The pets skit was about how American’s love animals and treat them like pets. Dogs are kept strictly outside the house. There are used mostly for protection and are definitely not coddled. In the skit the two volunteers had the American naming every animal she passed and trying to bring it in the house as a pet. It went well.

The last skit: washing clothes was done be me and my friend Kate. She was the host mother, and I was the American. We joked about me being 25 and not even knowing how to wash clothes, when a Batswana would have learned how to at five. Then I wrestled with a sheet in my attempt to wash it. My favorite part was parodying a Setswana song. Let me preface this by saying: I love Setswana songs. It’s a great way to learn the language and culture, not to mention that the harmonies people sing here are beautiful. My favorite song is sung by a woman working in a field. Translated, the lyrics go: Aunty, please carry my child. I’m in the field plowing and I’m alone. You can see that I’m plowing, and I’m alone. For the skit we changed the words to say: Aunty, please carry my Sunlight (brand of soap). I’m trying, I’m washing, and I’m alone. It was a big hit. Like with the poem, I think they liked the fact that part of it was in Setswana.