Africa Ill!!

As many of you may have guessed I’m in THE GAMBIA now. I have to be honest it was really anticlimactic. It was a really tearful good bye to all my friends at church, work and my family. So I get on the plane to DC and things went well there. We bonded well as a group. There are 21 of us that all came over together. So we get all our shots together, get to the airport, get on the plane and about 20million hours later we are in Africa. No trumpets, no dropping of confetti or letting loose 1000 doves. Just walk off the plane and get on the bus to the terminal. We were met at the airport by lots of Peace Corps people who helped with our bags and got us all loaded into the van and off to our training site. It’s at a catholic retreat center that’s on the edge of town. The beach is 20 min. walk away. Coke is plentiful, though not nearly as good as it was in India. It’s like I’m on vacation still. Except for the 3 hours of language class a day. Then the rest of the day is filled with discussions about how to treat and prevent diarrhea and malaria. And then at meals we talk about our mefloquine induced dreams. That’s right, as a US government employee I get to take the malaria drug that makes you go crazy. So it’s actually been a bit of a let down so far.

Tomorrow, though, should change all that. The reason that we have been getting pounded with language is that we go to our training villages tomorrow. (I think they all have little wheels on them.) We travel into the bush to start living with our host families. This is where we will learn our language. I’m learning Pular, spoken by the Fula people. There are 2 other trainees going to this village so there will be 4 people total that speak English in our village, us and our language trainer. I’m actually rather excited about that. The part I’m not so excited about is the pit latrine. I’m not sure I’m down with the whole no running water thing. I guess I should have thought about that before I signed up. I’m sure that I’ll have some great pit latrine stories for you all though. I guess I’ll start to come up when people search for S#@$ smearing on google too, Tiffany! How exciting!! Anyhow, it will be 2 weeks without internet/electricity. So I will miss you all for 2 weeks. But when I get back, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of things that are making me bitter that I can rant about.