The last couple of weeks have been pretty eventful, and I apologize for being slow with updating my blog. Anyway, where to start?

I guess the biggest news is that I found out where I’m going now that training is over (I'll actually be there tomorrow!!). The process of finding out our sites was pretty overwhelming, especially for me, and I’ll tell you why. I’m actually really excited about my site now, but at first I was pretty bummed. Here’s how it went down:

Everybody was pretty anxious about finding out where we would be living for the next two years. At this point in time we’d been in training for 4 weeks, which isn’t that long, but given the amount of time we spend together, most people had made some good friends, myself included. I didn’t really care where my site was, all I wanted was to have one or two volunteers near me who I liked, or at least didn’t mind having a conversation with. I didn’t think that was too much to hope for.

We found out about our sites on a Friday after lunch, which meant the 4 hours of language class in the morning were pretty torturous…everyone just wanted to find out where we’d be going! Anyway, there’s a small basketball court in the peace corps compound that has a map of Senegal painted on it. So after lunch we went to the basketball court, and we all got blindfolded. The language trainers and other staff took us individually to the spot on the map where our sites are. My language trainer took my hand and I swear we only took 4 steps and we stopped and then he let go of my hand and went to get another person. I could hear other trainees on the court talking with each other, but everybody sounded really far away. At first I thought my teacher hadn’t taken me all the way to the right place on the map, cuz there was nobody else near me. When he didn’t come back after a few minutes I kinda started to laugh (I’m glad laughing was my reaction instead of crying) as I slowly realized that my site wasn’t near ANYBODY ELSE. Eventually the trainers told us we could take off our blind folds, and I’ll never forget looking around at everybody else on the map far, far away from me and gasping for air b/c I was laughing so hard…out of pure emotional discomfort. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I was so stunned to not have anybody near me that I just didn’t know what to do with myself, so I just started laughing really hard. I really like so many people in my stage that I was really hoping to be near SOMEBODY. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I was hoping to be near somebody in my stage that I’d made good friends with, and I just assumed I’d be near somebody. It never even crossed my mind that my closest neighbor in my stage would be a 4 hour drive away (most people will live under an hour away from another volunteer in our stage, and some are just a bike ride away). It was pretty hard to swallow, but no worries, I'm over it now.

There are other volunteers near me, just none in my stage…so I don’t mean to harp on this experience, but it just really sticks out in my mind. I also vividly remember the moment when I started getting excited about my site. It was "koritay," which is the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Koritay was the Monday after we found out our sites, so and we had the day off. I was hanging out at my house and talking to my host dad about my site, and he told me that my town is a good town. I asked him why, and he said that it’s a good town because it has electricity, running water and it’s on a main road. My first thoughts in reaction to that were "whoop-dee-freakin-doo. Is that all it takes to be considered a good town here? It’s still pretty much a desert and I’m going to be the only non-african around for miles. Sweet." Then a few seconds I thought, "wait a minute, why aren’t those my standards?? I’m in Africa, and I didn’t come to Africa to hang out with other Americans. I’m also in one of the poorest countries in the worlds, yet I’ll be living in a place with electricity, running water and relatively easy access to other towns…that’s pretty amazing. I’ve got a pretty sweet site, and damn it, I’m gonna like it!." Since then I’ve been excited about getting to my site.

So where is my site? Good question. I think I mentioned on my last post that I’m not allowed to post online the name of my town, but it’s a town in the northeast, practically on the border of Mauritania. Three thousand people live there, so it’s actually considered to be a big village. There’s a weekly market that is supposed to be a big deal…apparently a lot of people from the surrounding rural communities come to the market every week, and there’s a good chance that I’ll be doing a lot of work with the market. People even come from Mauritania (which is just across the Senegal river and then a 3 hour walk to my town).

I’ve also been a lot more excited about my site since "counterpart workshop." Each volunteer is assigned "counterpart," who is a member of the community where the volunteer will be working. Counterparts are supposed to help volunteers integrate, introduce volunteers to the community, and be a "go to" person. SED volunteers have one counterpart and also a supervisor. A supervisor is a government worker and has a similar role as our counterparts, but they have more of an administrative role. For example, we’re supposed to give monthly reports to them, and then I guess they turn those reports in to the govt (I think. Something like that.) Ag and AgFo volunteers have two counterparts I think, instead of one counterpart and one supervisor.

Anyway, counterpart workshop was very interesting. First of all, the trainees were supposed to organize a lot of the workshop. Everybody was happy to help, but we weren’t really aware of how much we were supposed to do until the day before the workshop started, so we were sorta scrambling around putting skits together, making nametags, figuring out room assignments (the counterparts stayed at the peace corps center), and things like that. The room assignments turned out to be a complete disaster. Luckily I wasn’t on the "welcome committee," but they had to deal with a lot. From what I understand, there were two main problems: females showed up when a male was supposed to come and vice versa, so those people had to be put in a different room. The second main issue was that certain counterparts didn't want to be in rooms with certain people because they weren't of the same socio-economic class/caste. For example, a mayor of a town wouldn't want to share a room with a village farmer, so the mayor would demand to be put in a different room. In general, it was very obvious who were SED counterparts and who were agriculture or agro forestry counterparts. The SED counterparts were usually the ones who thought they were too good for other people, and they were better dressed, and generally the ones ones who wore western clothes. Senegalese have a word for snobby, wealthy people who think they're better than other people, and that word in "patrone." Patrone literally means "boss," but it implies that a person is snobby and materialistic. Basically a lot of the SED counterparts were called "patrone" by a lot of the volunteers.

My counterpart and supervisor seemed really cool though. My counterpart is going to be my host mom, and she's the head of the women's group in town, so I think she is a pretty important/respected person in the community. My supervisor seemed like he was really interested in being involved with my projects, and he seemed like a hard worker, so that's good. I also think that my mom told me that my host dad is the village chief. Haha. I think it would be really funny if I lived with a village chief. I'll let you know. I'll find out tomorrow, cuz tomorrow I'm offically moving to my site! I've been on the road for about a day and a half now, cuz the logistics of getting people moved in is kinda crazy.

Ok I don't have much time left online, but here's another Random Africa Moment: Yesterday morning (around 6am) I was watching the driver of our vehicle pack up the car with all of my crap and the crap of the two other volunteers I came up north with. All that was left to pack were our bikes (which are brand new and really awesome, by the way), and he needed to put them on the roof. However, the driver didn't have any rope, and I thought at first that we'd have to wait for him to go get some. Nope. I thought wrong. Instead he reaches in the car and pulls out a seatbelt. You might think that a seatbelt is too short to strap in three bikes on the roof of a car. It is. But it's not too short if you cut the seatbelt in half, and that's what he did. The driver whipped out a pocket knive and ripped the seatbelt in half, but left about an inch at the bottom to keep it together. He starts strapping everything in, and gives the seatbelt a good yank, and of course it rips completely through and he was left with two narrow strips of seatbelt (i think everyone but the driver saw this coming, but we also knew he'd figure it out soon enough, and we were all too tired to try to think of how to say "hey dude, that's totally gonna rip in half, u gotta tie it together first" in french or wolof, so we continued to stare at him with our puffy, half open eyes). It didn't take the driver long to realize that he needed to tie the two pieces of seatbelt together, and before we knew it the bikes were tied in and we were on the way. We thought we were gonna stop once we got on the road to get some rope, and we did stop at one point and he turns around to us and says "give me a 1,000 CFA" (which sounds like a lot, but it's the equivalent of two dollars). So we obliged and thought he'd come back with some rope. Wrong again. He came back with a pack of cigarettes and a pack of cookies. When we realized what he'd bought, we looked at each other, laughed, and continued on our merry way up north. The bikes made it without a scratch. So did we. Alhamduliliah.