Joyful Laughter

Giggling until your stomach hurts.
This is something that we can all relate to. When you’re laughing SO hard that you actually cannot breathe and you start to scare yourself because you’ve totally lost the ability to stop laughing. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, and the tears flow out of the corners of your eyes and your abdominal muscles are shaking, it feels great.
This happened to me the other night for the first time with my new host family. When nightfalls and the earth cools everyone’s mood improves tenfold. Suddenly people have more energy, laughter is in the air, everyone is in a good mood. Myself and my four oldest sisters had finished eating dinner and were all piled on top of the stick bed where we eat. My (USA) parents called and while talking my sisters were desperate to greet them and practice their english. This brought a lot of giggles at first, but as they went on listening to eachother’s broken english the laughter mounted and by the third sister we were in total hysterics. She was so flustered and said “Hello, where is your family?” which sounds more like “heeeyloooww. Weh izz yoor famly?” I almost busted a gut, and my sister Mariata (my favorite) fell off the stick bed and onto the sand, not missing a beat. The rest of them fell all over eachother—limbs flying everywhere. Faama passed the phone back to me and I tried to explain that I couldn’t talk because we were all laughing so hard, but the words just didn’t come. Tears were flowing down my cheeks and it felt so good to laugh. Just laugh as hard as I could. There is so much love and affection among the Pulaars (my fam especially) and I am elated when I can find and share in those moments.