Ma Famille

I moved in with my new host family on Saturday. The family consists of Farita, my 33 year-old "host mom" and her 6 year old daughter Chelsea--as well as apparently 2-3 other family members who randomly sleep at the apartment. The best english speaker of the bunch is chelsea, who attends an english speaking school so yesterday morning we spent a solid three hours counting to 100 over and over again, singing heads, shoulders, knees and toes and drawing pictures of animals. While the morning was rather seasame street, the evening turned into a rather X-rated affair. When I walked in from playing ulimate frisbee with a bunch of other Americans (mostly embassy folks), Farita and her neice (who is my age) Kuku were watching some god aweful american movie "Rapid?" which alternated between extremely large fake boobs in a hot tub to guys (or in some cases sexy women) blowing up and shooting everything in site. Ah, american exports...but given the context and sad fact that farita and family probably witnessed this violence first hand, i'm amazed that they can sit through it.
In fact, earlier in the evening, Ish-a local friend and newphew of Farita-described his experience during the genocide. As a 14 year old boy on his way to school one day, he witnessed the family guard take a machette and decapitate someone right infront of Ish. Horrible. There are no words to describe this. Ish seems remarkably grounded after witnessing such things at an early age...he described going home sobbing, telling his mom what he had seen and she just hugged him and gave him a cookie. What do you do in these situations? He says he still can't watch an animal being butchered....
Once you get to know people here they are surprisingly open about their experiences. I am slightly terrified to hear others stories...