Adjusting to Life in a Hot, Humid Florida

A Saturday at Lake Wauburg

Assalamaleykum!

Today marks two weeks exactly since arriving in Gainesville, Florida. The domestic portion of the African Flagship Languages Initiative (AFLI) is two months of intensive language study at the University of Florida. There's about 60 or 70 of us, though only 18 of us are going to Senegal. Of that 18, 15 of us are studying French and survival Wolof. The other three are exclusively focusing on Wolof. The remaining scholars and fellows will be heading to Mozambique for Portuguese, Tanzania for Swahili, or Ghana for Twi.

Monday through Friday, we have four hours of class. The first hour is Wolof, and the next three are French. Three times a week, we have an hour and a half of conversation practice. And starting this week, we'll have an Africa Eats event on Wednesdays. Twice during the two months, we'll be spending our Saturdays with local "host families." All this translates to the equivalent of one academic year of study. The program is essentially designed with two purposes in mind: 1) to drastically improve our linguistic competency before leaving the country, and 2) to recreate the feel of African countries before we actually go to them. In other words, it's all just an extended orientation.

A typical day for me might look something like this:
7:30 am – wake-up
8 am – breakfast
8:45 am – class
10:45 am – break
11am – class
1 pm – lunch
3 pm – conversation practice
4:30 pm – wow I'm exhausted, do I nap? do homework? go to the gym?
6:30 pm – dinner
7:30 pm – work on homework or otherwise practice my French, then some free time (depending on the day)
11pm – bedtime

The Senegal crew

I find myself sometimes forgetting why we're all actually here. It's easy to lose sight of the end goal: language-learning. Surrounded by the same small group of people all day, every day in such a structured environment, it often feels like I'm 16 again and back at summer camp. It doesn't help that we're in a small city (making our group somehow even more insular), in a hot, isolated place.

As for our weekends, we mostly have a lot a freedom to ourselves. This was our first full weekend here (last weekend was the Boren convocation in DC), and we spent a lot of our time at the pool and a local UF-administered lake, where we were told it's "unlawful to feed alligators," but sadly did not see any. We were, however, given tips on which trails to hike on if we wanted to find some. Maybe that's next weekend's plan?

Katie ft. Kava

In the meantime, I've been exploring some of the city and, for the most part, have found myself pleasantly surprised by what Gainesville has to offer. There's a fantastic mural scene downtown, so I've committed myself to finding them all on a self-led and mapped mural tour before the summer ends (so stay tuned for that). There are lovely spots to eat, live music downtown on Fridays, and hip Kava bars. Even the nature that surrounds me is beautiful, even if there are thunderstorms (or, at a bare minimum, rain) almost every day. I've never seen Spanish moss before (that's the moss that hangs on the trees here), and ferns grow on tree trunks. I'm even adjusting to the humidity. All that's to say that I'm starting to find myself a little at home here, and the two weeks I've spent here feel closer to a month. I wonder, then, how am I going to feel by the end of these two months? How am I already a quarter of the way there?

I am reminded of an idiom my conversation partner, Mustafa, recently taught me: "Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid." Little by little, the bird makes his nest. I'm excited to be the bird, a long way to a finished nest.