New Hobbies and Village Trip

Hello! It’s Jaelyn again. Miss me much? Sorry I haven’t written for a while!

School let out last month, so we’ve been enjoying a nice summer break. Of course, my parents still have to work, but Nathan and I get to relax a little. It’s awesome to be waking up at 10:00 AM every morning! I’ve been reading tons but also have been cautiously taking up some new hobbies.

One of the girls on my team began to give me some sewing lessons over the summer. However, we only got to have 2 lessons before she left for Canada. I made a couple bookmarks and a little drawstring bag!! (Thanks so much Elise!!)

I'm not very good at making my seams straight...

I also have started to make cards. With my very limited supplies, things sometimes look a little bit… special, but I’m going to order some more things and hopefully will be able to make some cool cards!

We also just came back from the village. I brought nail polish again, and painted nails for the girls. This time, I also met a little girl who sat down next to me, even after I finished her nails. I gave her a paper and pencil, and was surprised when she started to do math problems! She is in a grade that is approximately equivalent to kindergarten, and she already knew how to add multiple numbers and even to carry! However, she doesn’t yet know the alphabet, and when I wrote it out for her, she didn’t quite understand what I was doing.

This is Dikkana - she looks pretty small for 8 years old, but she is the one that did the great math. She also takes care of her baby brother...he's about a month old....

 

Once word got out that I was painting nails, the girls came from everywhere...all wearing their party clothes!

After that, I went out to paint more nails, and surprisingly, a large crowd of young boys surrounded me as I painted nails. (Though none of them asked to have their nails painted J.) After gesturing to my paper multiple times, I finally figured out that they wanted paper. I took out a pad of sticky-notes, and one of the older boys took to writing the names of all the boys around me. Of course, there were about 7 boys, so it was kind of hard to remember who was who. To add to the confusion, they then began to write the name of a man in that hut over there, or the little boy wandering around outside. I very highly doubt that I’ll be able to identify them again! I did figure out that the boy in front of me was Ali, the boy to my left was Boubacar, and the one to my right was Aminou, (Sorry, I didn’t take pictures of them while I was at the village!!) but that probably won’t do me much good for identifying them in the future!

My Fulfulde name is "Amina"

So bye until next month or so! In that time, I’ll be preparing a post about Canada vs. Niger, as was requested! Remember to comment if there’s anything you would like to hear about, from the perspective of a missionary kid!!