In Cape Verde, Praia, the capital city, means beach

6/25
My parents were the only ones to show up at the orientation in Atlanta. They walked in the lobby and grabbed the first two other Peace Corps people they could find and started taking pictures. I felt like a dork so I told them to leave. I love ya ma and pa - our time has been swell. But I gotta draw the line. Chao for now.

All 29 of us gathered in a conference room and shook each others hands for the first time. It was surreal, the day had finally come. Since we received our invitations to Cape Verde, only a few of us had actually heard of this country. For weeks, we scrapped information about the program from emails and scoured the Internet to learn more about what would be our home for the next 27 months.

Cape Verde is a country found 375 miles off the coast of West Africa. In the time of the slave trade a few hundred years ago, the islands were used by the Portuguese as a holding place for slaves from Africa. Once they were sold, they were shipped to North and South America or Europe. Today, with the slave trade long gone, the country is trying to utilize their strategic geographic position by building a port and airport. They’re also looking to capitalize on its surrounding ocean full of fish. Eco-tourism is another industry other countries are supporting to increase employment and revenue.

Cape Verde is located on the southernmost latitude of the Sahara Desert. The weather is very arid which makes it difficult to grow enough food to even sustain itself. They local language is Kriolu, which is about 90% Portuguese. Back in the day the slaves made up their own dialect of Portuguese. It’s still proudly spoken today.

The Peace Corps entered the country in the late 80’s to try an bolster community development and increase higher education. The 29 of us plus the 30+ current volunteers already in country will make this upcoming year the largest presence of Peace Corps Volunteers in Cape Verde, ever.

The staging program in Atlanta was designed to help us get to know one another and tell us more about what we had gotten ourselves into. After three days, our trainers put us on a bus headed to the airport and waved goodbye. We were on our own.

6/28
The flight took about 8 and a half hours. We had a 12-hour layover in Dakar. Before I even stepped foot on African turf for the first time, I overheard a conversation that stuck with me. Right when we landed, an American flight attendant motioned over the Senegalese ramp operator from the ground crew. She had a problem.

‘Excuse me sir? This woman only speaks French.’

The man adjusted his posture.
‘Ma’am, this is Senegal - everyone here speaks French.’

Peace Corps had arranged for us to stay at a hotel just outside Dakar. We grabbed our bags and met the PC Dakar Country Director just before crossing the threshold to the Senegalese Capital city.
‘I suggest you all load the bus in small groups,’ said the director. We went outside in one group. Caley, a 31yo guy from Texas, was in front and immediately realized we should’ve taken the directors advice.
‘Aight, two guys go with these girls. Stay close. Don’t make eye contact.’
Sweet, I thought, let’s do this.
Clenching our neatly packed suitcases and backpacks, we sached through a group of locals who stared us down. About thirty guys stood outside the airport at four in the morning on a Tuesday. Guess they were lucky when they thought thirty American people would be coming and would need help carrying their bags. We got our stuff on top of the buses then our helpers wanted a bigger tip. With his sheep safely in the bus, Caley, clearly the guy in charge, was targeted by the bagmen. They surrounded him and the country director. I’ve never seen a mob work so smoothly together. I was riding shotgun in a second bus and could see Caley right outside the front windshield. I look to my right and saw one guy staring at me, from maybe 10 feet away. I look at Caley, I look back and forty guys are staring at me face to face putting their hands in the window, one slipping his hand all the way in my pocket. Wow. They seemed passive but man were they swift.

The PC Country Director saved the day when he slammed some guy’s fingers in the door and took off. Our minivan then followed the bus.

We hung out at a hotel near the airport, then cruised back a few hours later for our connecting flight to Cape Verde, our archipelago 400 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. When we finally arrived in Cape Verde, the airport felt like a Carribean resort. Whether we were set up to bond through our experience in Dakar or the Peace Corps Admin wanted to make Cape Verde look good, Cape Verde wasn’t at all like our introduction to Africa the night before. We grabbed our bags and exited the baggage claim to find the current Peace Corps Volunteers and employees giving us huge welcome party in the airport. We felt like rockstars.

We drove to a hostel, dropped our bags and were immediately issued first aid kits, mosquito nets, malaria pills and textbooks (for learning Kriolu and Portuguese and our jobs). Then we dropped our two Passports (US citizen and special Peace Corps Passports) and the rest of our US cash in an envelope to be locked in a safe for two years. The next morning we lined up for shots and began getting debriefed.

Our Administrators called in a few current volunteers to help out with the PST (Pre-Service Training, everything important now comes as an acronym). After a few days of introductions, lectures and interviews, we were prepped as good as we would get for our homestay families.

7/1
For the first 10 weeks of this experience, we would stay with families in villages around Assomada, the capital of Santa Catalina. Santa Catalina is a district located in the center of Santiago, the largest island of the 10 inhabited islands and 8 uninhabited islets.

The idea behind the training is to get us, the trainees, up to speed on Kriolu, the Cape Verdean language. In some cases, Portuguese as well. In the past, trainees lived close enough to each other so they could hang out after language class and ease back into English. This is the first time the Cape Verde post has separated the trainees among different villages. The idea is to force us to speak only Kriolu and Portuguese through complete immersion in the culture.

My family lives in Achada Galego. Fernando is nha pai, my dad. He is the secretary of the local municipality. I have two brothers and a little sister: Nelson, Ulysses and Sophia. The two brothers are my age and Sophia is 5, she’s a cutie.

Nelson’s got four girlfriends. ‘Sta feesch.’ It’s cool, he says. It’s not uncommon for guys to have a few peqenas, or girlfriends at one time. I hear ‘It doesn’t matter’ by Akon all the time cuz his phone rings off the hook. Ringtones are sweet. Our house doesn’t have running water but everyone has a cell phone.

There are always different relatives hanging out around the house. It seems like the whole village is one big family. Across the street is our uncle and his family. More cousins live next door.

Only Peter, one of the other 29 trainees lives with a family with running water. We bathe with a bucket and after we go to the bathroom, we pour water down the toilet. The toilet is a normal toilet, it’s just not hooked up to a water source. It sounds like many people bought a normal toilet and are just preparing in case the village ever gets hooked up to a community source.

My second day here, I was called out for not showering. ‘Brian, in Cape Verde, we shower everyday. You didn’t shower yesterday.’ Busted. Every few days when the water runs out we go the center of the ‘hood’ and fill up big blue barrels. No one seems to know where the water comes from, ‘trucks just come out of no where to fill them up,’ they say. Or I guess this is what I understand from a few days speaking their language.

Cape Verdeans love Hollywood. The first two days here, I watched two kung fu movies, The Legend of the Drunken Master with Jackie Chan, or Jack-Shan, and the Way of Dragon with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. My brothers also showed me about as many hip hop music videos as I did before I came here: Akon, R-Kelly, TI, Ludacris and Dre ft Rick Ross to name names. Oh yeah, when we watch TV or listen to music the volume must be either super loud or muted. There is no middle ground.

The food is good. Rice everyday, then some meat and always mangoes for dinner. They also have this stuff called Kachupa - it’s a mixture of lots of stuff with the main ingredient of corn. In training, we were told that what a family puts in Kachupa is the mark of their economic status. For example, a poor family might just have pork fat and beans while a wealthier family would eat fresh tuna or beef.

‘Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside.’ Shady’s here too. He’s playing on our DVD player right now. There are a few consistencies worth noting of the houses I’ve been in so far: first, they’re all equipped with a TV and DVD player. Then they all have at least one room that looks like a grandmother’s living room - white doilies on a coffee table you’re afraid to put anything on because it looks so fragile. The room also has doilies on the chairs and couches. What’s with the doilies? The last thing that is in every house is Catholic wall art. A wall-hung rug with Mary and some angels, the last supper in Portuguese engraved on a piece of tin or just a simple picture of Jesus. This is really the only art in any of the houses other than a few pictures of the fam.

Did you know if you put a few spoonfuls of sugar in Coke it kills the carbonation? It came second nature to Lenna, Fernanado’s girlfriend. Unless I’m missing the boat, it took Americans YouTube, two nerds, a pack of mentos and a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke to figure that one out. We drink Coke almost every meal.

I have class with three other trainees, Justin, Sean and Katie. We all live in the same neighborhood and have class in a little blue one room school. Nelson has a crush on Katia. Sta feesch. Our teacher is Carlos. He’s 45yo, been teaching Portuguese and Kriolu for about 25 years now, six years with Peace Corps Cape Verde. Great teacher. He speaks real slow and enunciates. He’ll teach for a little in class, then we’ll walk around the neighborhood. So he gets the boring chalkboard stuff out of the way so we can get into the meat of learning any new language - talking to strangers.

All Cape Verdeans speak Kriolu. As I mentioned, it was the developed language of the slaves hundreds of years ago. Props to all the Cape Verdeans for keeping up their culture and showing respect to their enduring patriots/ancestors. For the four of us, the first week of our training was in Kriolu. After the first week, we’ll learn Portuguese. Each of the trainees have different requirements for what language they need to know. For example, some of us will be TEFL’s, Teachers for English as a Foreign Language, so obviously they won’t need to know Portuguese. Some of us will have to teach everything in Portuguese. So at the end of nine weeks of training, I’ll be sent to the front of a classroom and have to teach construction in a language I’ve yet to learn. Yikes.