Quick Update

Survived my village visit. It is a small village called Badion (pronounced badjon) in the region of Kolda about 75km from the regional capitol city of the same name. All of my mail and banking will have to be picked up there which really sucks because that means I either have to ride my bike the whole way and stay the night at our regional house or bike the 22km to the nearest road city to try and catch the insane public transportation, negotiate a price and ride for 2 hours on an extremely bad road (condition-wise) to the capitol, hope the bank/post office is open when I get there and then figure out how to get back before dark.

My new host family is very nice. My new dad is the chief, he has three wives and owns three horses that are not very well off. He wants me to try and help him with them, bu as he says he can't even afford to feed them I don't know how much I can really do. My hut is nearly done and the backyard will be big enough to have a small garden. Going to try to plant a banana tree and a peach tree just to see what happens. I know the banana tree will do well here, not sure about the peach tree though.

Cool thing was seeing how my host volunteer, Chelsea ( who was an awesome and amazing host), spoke the language and helped translate things when people were talking to me. Fell in love with the local bread, called Tapalapa. Perfect breakfast with scrambled eggs and a tea called kinkillibasse that is very yummy. No idea if it is in my village or not, but it is what I ate every morning in Chelsea's town, which is the road town 22km south of mine.

I am back in Mbour until next Friday morning and then it is a very busy week of counterpart workshop (people from our village who we will be working with for the next two years), signing papers in Dakar, spending a night at the beach (apparently it is a tradition in PC senegal to do that), another extremely short stay here in Mbour - as in 2.5 days - then we go back to Thies for the last language test and swearing in. It is absolutely surreal to think I have been here for 6 weeks. It seems like it has been so much longer and not nearly that long all at the same time.

Got my first care package from home. Goldfish crackers are the new cocaine here, or at least for me.

Accidently left my camera with Chelsea but she is going to bring it back to Thies this weekend.Will post a bunch when I get back to the center next week.

Cheers!
Christine