My Recent Acquaintances

In my current internship, I have been meeting many foreigners. All of them are from Africa, and they are black.
The African people I have met have a totally different accent from what I was taught in school. In school, listening materials for training and practising are mainly read by native English speakers from the United States and Great Britain.
I have been exposed to this accent for about a week. In the beginning, I was quite embarrassed and had doubts about my listening skills.
Now I am getting accustomed to their accent and understand more.

(Notes: In the USA, characterizing people by their skin color is usually not done. It's OK to describe people by their home country since everyone has one, but due to the history of discrimination of blacks I would not mention that the Africans are black unless it is needed to understand the meaning of the sentence. Also, Americans tend not to be "embarrassed" if they don't know or don't understand something, they think it's OK to learn what you don't know. So I don't see a good reason to mention any negatives about myself, for example ;-). HTH.