Okay so once again I left my blog vacant for a while, but I promise it won’t happen again. I have just been so busy that I haven’t had enough time to work on my blog. The good thing is I’ll be able to post much more often. I can bike to the camping grounds which are only a short 15 minute bike ride from my home. It’s gorgeous there, and I love going for a walk along the beach when I’m finished and watching the sunset over the St. Laurent River. Quebec’s scenery is quite beautiful and I’m taking as much of it in as I can.
Life here in Quebec has been a little crazy lately. My time here is slowly ending and soon I will be venturing off on another crazy 3 month adventure in Africa! Since my last blog I have done some exciting things that I will most likely never do again after this experience is finished. I learned how to milk my first cow and yes, I actually thought it was quite fun. I like to think of it as my official initiation into the farm life. Even though I’ve been here for a little over a month, I couldn’t leave the farm without milking one cow, as that is a part of my family’s everyday life. When I was milking the cow, I have to admit I was a little scared of having a 1500 pt animal above me, but I got used to it after a while. The one thing I did not get used to or appreciate very much was having the cow’s tail in my face. I was quite disgusted, but found it really funny when Rahama was taking pictures of me and my attempts to keep the tail away from my face. My family has a sweet setup for milking the cows, and cool machines that carry the milk from the cows to the churner. They sell the milk and save some for the family, as there is plenty. Speaking of cows, my baby calve that I named Lucy has been sold, so in her place is a new baby calve which I named Annabelle! I finally found a cute calve that suites the name well, and I assure you this time she is a female. I also found a cat on the farm that I have fallen in love with and I named her Rajah. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a dog over a cat any day, but this cat is absolutely adorable. One of my favourite things about the farm is the animals, and I love working with them. But my absolute favourite thing that I have had the chance to do on the farm was learn how to drive a tractor! I drove it for quite a distance, and I loved it! I am getting quite used to this new lifestyle, but don’t plan on becoming a farmer in the future.
While in Quebec I have spent a lot of my free time getting to know the community and the people who live in Riviere Ouelle. One of my host mom’s friends started a youth group in Riviere Ouelle, so that the kids and teenagers would have something to do. It’s great because there are a lot of people involved and a lot of the teenagers are around my age. We get along really well and they meet every night for about 3 hours except on Sundays. They play football games, basketball games, etc. They also have a cool place to meet when it’s ugly outside filled with a pool table, basketball game, WII setup, Xbox, a computer, etc. It’s a really cool place to hang out, and get to know everyone. The group also does 6 big trips/ activities a summer where everyone who wants to participate can. Rahama and I were lucky enough to have been invited on a trip to the biggest water park in all of Quebec located at Valcartier Village Vacances. We went on a gorgeous day with about 45 other kids and teenagers. The park had huge tube slides, tube rides, pools and around 5000 people. It was crazy packed the day we went as it was absolutely beautiful out. One of my favourite things at the park was a tube ride that was designed around a 1600th century style castle. It was really neat and full of rustic, ancient architectural designs. There were two slides that would take you down into the underground tunnel, where you would ride for about 8 minutes. There was another ride like this called the “Amazone”. It was designed to look like it was from an Indiana Jones movie, which made it really exciting to go through on the tube. You could grab ropes and if you grabbed the wrong one, it would spill a bunch of water on you. The park was a great way to spend the day with new friends and my counterpart.
My group has been great so far and I have had great times with them. We have had two more presentations done by Jon and Djbril and Simon and Yamadou, where we learned a lot about their topics. On Friday July 23rd, our entire group was introduced to our new member from Nova Scotia. His name is Kyle and he is Anglophone! This makes us Anglophone’s in the group, a group of four again! He is very nice and has been picking up French quite fast. Unfortuantly, our group was just informed that one of the Canadians, Simon, is leaving us on Sunday. He doesn’t like it here anymore and wants to go home. Our group was really surprised to hear this news and are now wondering who is going to replace him. The rest of the Canadians love it here, and don’t have any plans to leave. Of course there are hard times with the cultural differences and such, but it gets better eventually. I hope that the new member fits in well and that everything works out fine. This past weekend, our group travelled to a place called Riviere De Loup for a weekend full of activities and hanging out with each other. We stayed in a hostel, which was really nice and comfortable. We had a lot of time to discuss important topics in our group and to just hangout. On Saturday, our entire group went to a club and danced all night. We had so much fun just dancing and the Malians loved it. I was really glad that the Malians had a good time dancing and hanging out. This past week has been full of hard labour. My host brother estimated that Rahama and I had lifted over 800 bales of hay just this past week! Crazy to imagine, but it’s slowly getting easier. I have also lifted and cut more wood and have noticed I’m getting some muscles! The work on the farm has been hard, but it’s been a lot of fun also and a good way to bond with my family and counterpart.
I know this blog doesn’t seem that long for the time I haven’t written, but I summarized everything that I figured was important. A lot of the work on the farm is repetitive and I don’t think that you would want to read the same thing every time. I will be blogging more often as I have already mentioned, so keep looking in for more news on my new life in Quebec! Until next time,
Au Revoir!
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