I am at Internet cafe in Dakar, Senegal where the power is certain to go out at any minute so I will only write a few scattered memories of Guinea Bissau...

The sept-place ride from Ziguinchor Senegal to GB consists of a series of walk through check points and rifles, children selling cashews, warning signs about active land mines, lush green palm and banana trees. Bissau the capital, is a sleepy abandoned ghost town. The former bombed presidential palace in the town square omniously highlights former glory or wealth and tragically how this tiny country has never been able to recover from various civil wars, coups, and economic turmoil.

I do not think I can possibly explain the series of ill fated boat rides we went on travelling between the Bijago Islands. The least miserable was the first from Bissau to the main island Bubaque. It took 6 hours rather than the estimated 4. After nearly tipping on a sandbqr we climbed out of the boat in the dark (neither the boat or the port had any lights) cutting our feet on rocks. We walked through broken seashells and mud to a hotel. Disoriented and hungry we sat at a table in black light with pictures of painted women in bikinis on the wall while the man from Benin who owns the place told us about his life. Chez Raoul was awful, everything was covered in mold.

We travelled to Orango island on another tiny splintered fishermens boats with a crew of Guinea Bissuans, Conarkians, and Nigerians. The fishermen wanted us to get special permission for them to fish in a national park because we are rich Americans. When they found out they still could not we had to buy them dinner to convince them to stay overnight so we could go see the only population of saltwater hippos in the world on Orango Island...although the financial and mental costs of getting there were huge...

On the way back from Orango to Bubaque Island we were caught in the water during a tropical storm with ligthening right beside us in the water. We had to stop our journey, hike in the pouring rain thick humid jungle with giant biting ants, through a semi abandoned island, to find an elderly womans hut where we paid 10 USD to stay the night. Then our fishermen decided it would be better to leave Orango at 2am and arrive back on Bubaque at 5am.

Leaving Bubaque to return to mainland Bissau we were caught in another storm. We had planned to leave the day before but Alfonso refused stating bad weather but in reality he wanted to make more money by waiting until the next day and transporting fish with us. During the height of the storm our faithful captian Alfonso put on a lifejacket as the motor puttered and our boat filled with water and we huddled together in the cold rain. The motor gave out several times and as we finally reached the port it died completely, which really solidified how scary the journey had been: with no lights, no GPS, no Coast Guard, no radio...

Scattered other memories...biollumnsicent shrimp in the ocean, Julio our tour guide even though he made boat negoiations worse, fermented alcoholic caju juice, not being able to find any open restaurants besides the spaghetti bar, my "good-bye" to Alfonso and his boat...

The entire time in Bissau people were trying to take advantage of us. It was quite a shock considering we speak Cape Verdean Creole which is really similar to GB Creole. The Bijagos Islands are the main tourist destination in GB, we spent hardly any time on the main land...somewhat because of our fear of land mines. The islands can only be enjoyed if you have a lot of money, time, and patience. Transport between islands is slow and expensive.

Back in Dakar with real coffee in my system I can attempt to rationalize and be less negative (it was the rainy season, we didnt go on the public ferry, etc). Tonight we take a 30 to 40 hour bus ride to Mali where we will spend the next 10 days or so. I am really looking forward to it and hope it is more relaxing than Bissau was.

“The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it” –George HT Kimble

On double-wide lined rule paper in pained cursive I wrote a report on a type of chameleon that inhabited Madagascar Island, when I was in the first grade. The allure of this island, part of a continent so removed and unalike my own, had great appeal to me as a child. How was it possible this other world existed? Was there a girl my age struggling to write in cursive a report for school while discovering new parts of the world? Did my parents know about it? The known world to me was limited to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. I wish I could remember how I felt sitting at a table in the public library with an encyclopedias a librarian had looked up for me on the old filing system back when all the names of books were stored in a roldex, before it all become so impersonalized and technologized. Back when libraries still had that aromatic musky scent of wisdom and poetry. When at the end of summer you received a personal-sized pizza from Pizza Hut for every 10 days you had read.

I told my teacher and my mother with all that astute seriousness we feel as children, certain that we are the only ones that control our lives and that love, life, babies, cars, rent, and careers will never get in the way our dreams, that one day I would travel to this place. And it seems, 18 years later, that that time has arrived.

My service as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer on Santiago Island, Cape Verde ends August 31, 2011. On Sunday August 28, 2011 my counterpart Maria is planning a dispida, going away party, for me. It will be one last bittersweet time for me to gorge on the standard festa, party foods (Xerem-corn dish served like grits, bodi-goat, fejão-beans) likely be some traditional batuka, dancing and despite my insistency not to,the older donnas, women may wail in anticipation of my departure.

This was the plan until yesterday, when the results of the presidential election were counted. The original vote was two weeks ago but none of the 3 or 4 candidates won by a majority so there was a re-vote between the two candidates of the most popular parties, MpD and PAICV. The new President is a member of MpD which came as a shock to many people; as the Prime Minister who was elected in February 2011 is PAICV and because PAICV has been in control in Cape Verde consistently for the last 15 years (?) My town is a new concelho, city, created in 2005 and its city hall has always been administered by PAICV. The president of our city hall was harassed the day of the vote and he is considering leaving the country for a few weeks until things calm down. Maria is nervous as well as she is family of the city hall president. Peace Corps Volunteers are prohibited from having political views and truly I have no interest in what party is power, it just makes an interesting context for my departure.

The fleeting following days are going to be a mess of exit-interviews, good-byes, travelling back and forth from Praia (capital) to Orgãos (my town), and giving way all my tee-shirts, half-used lotions, and Peace Corps Volunteers fighting over my pillows (I have American pillows-they are a commodity).

I fly to the island of São Vincente on September 1, 2011 where I will spend one night in a hotel, not daring to challenge the gritty metropolitan capital by myself. On September 2, 2011 I will battle my seasickness- acquired while living in Cape Verde, on a boat across the choppy Atlantic Ocean to the farthest Northern island in the Cape Verdean archipelago, Santo Antão. Santo Antão is often referred to as the most specular, most beautiful island because to its dramatic mountain peaks and valleys. In fact it is impossible to fly to the island directly because the mountain peaks create too much wind. After a week of hiking and reflection on two years of service, I will fly back to Praia, the capital of my island, Santiago.

September 8, 2011 the adventure truly begins. With a mold-covered backpack covered and two friends, who will also be Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, we will fly one-way to Dakar, Senegal. For the last two years, Jon and Brendan have been critical parts of my support system in-country, tireless sources of sympathy and advice as well as drunken adventures (grog and milk?) and bad decisions. To put it into perspective any Volunteer in Cape Verde would understand, both have held permanent positions on my POWA (Cape Verdean cell phone calling plan that allows you to select a group of people to call at a discounted rate).

This is the beginning of our three-month tour throughout Africa. We have purchased return flights to Washington, D.C. for December 15. That means I anticipate friends around the D.C. area to be prepared for a reunion night out on Saturday, December 16 2011. The itinerary is rough, our spirits optimistic, pockets currently full with all that sweet readjustment allowance and cash in-lieu of flights home, and all is likely to change. Here is a very brief overview of our plan, if you are interested in a more detailed itinerary I’d be happy to e-mail you one.

99 days of travel. Ready? Go (and don’t forget your malaria prophylaxis)

THE WEST

September 8- 18 SENEGAL

Highlights: Dakar, Saint Louis (North)-Colonial feel, the former French capital, old architecture, jazz music. Possibly Palmarin (South) kayaking through mangrove swamps

September 18-24 GUINEA BISSAU

Highlights: Only other African country that speaks Portuguese Kriolu as Guinea Bissau and CV used to be one country, Arquipélago dos Bijagos- series of idyllic islands, saltwater hippos, and crocs

September 24/25-October 4 MALI

Highlights: Dogon Country-ancient villages carved out of rocks and cliffs, people known for elaborate rituals, river boat along the scenic Niger River, Djenne- large mud hut, World Heritage Site

October 4- October 12 GHANA

Highlights: Large out-door market in Accra, Cape Coast- Castle built by Dutch and Swedish “Hippie central, Mole National Park beautiful and secluded safari walk, huge slave quarters

THE EAST AND THE SOUTH

October 12-21 TANZANIA

Highlights: Ngorongoro Crater world's largest unbroken, unflooded volcanic caldera, safaris, Mt. Kilimanjaro-Africa’s highest mountain, Zanzibar-former Arab capital in E Africa/important trading location, has beautiful beaches

October 18- 25 ZAMBIA

Highlights: Train from Dar Es Salaam to Victoria Falls, Zambia. Victoria Falls spans nearly 2km and drops over a 100m cliff. White-water rafting on the Zambezi River

October 25-November 1 MOZAMBIQUE

Highlights: Archipélago de Bazaruto - tropical paradise, turquoise waters and shoals of colorful fish, Montes Chimanimani - cool, dense forests shelter secluded valleys and traditional cultures

November 1-15 SOUTH AFRICA

Highlights: Cage diving with Great White Sharks near Cape Town, Simon’s Town to see the penguins, Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve-where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans were thought to meet, Garden Route along the coast, Kruger National Park. Possible trips to LESOTHO or SWAZILAND

November 15-22 NAMIBIA

Highlights: Namib Desert, Fish River Canyon, towering red dunes of Sossusvlei and Dune 45, Etosha National Park-one of Africa's most unusual national parks, where herds of wildlife congregate against an eerie bleached-white backdrop

November 23-DECEMBER 12/13 MADAGASCAR

Highlights: Village of Betafo in Antsirabe- interesting highland town, rolling mountains, fishermen use bamboo rods, thermal baths. Volcanic lakes, rice paddies, lemurs

December 13-15 SOUTH AFRICA

Return to Johannesburg, South Africa to fly back to Washington D.C. December 15, 2011

Each of us complains when it is our turn to carry the rapidly melting yellow cake we were bringing to lunch at Aran’s house. Aran is a Senegalese woman in her 30’s that sells cheb au jin, rice with fish, a Senegalese dish in Sucurpira, the central market in Praia. After months of sitting on crowded benches in the sweltering afternoon heat in the middle of the market eating hearty plates of red rice and chicken or fish, Aran has become a friend. About two weeks ago, Lisa and I were at my house relishing the last lazy Sunday we would spend in my house in Cape Verde. Lisa was talking on her cell phone on the roof (the best place to get reception in my house) when she saw Aran and the younger girl that sells bissap, hibiscus leaf juice with her. Lisa excitedly called to them, and I went outside to see who she was shouting to.

I insisted they “txchiga,” come inside my house to visit and have something to eat. I made mint tea with heaping spoon-fulls of sugar, my attempt to recreate the traditional three cups of sweet green tea that are served in Senegal (the first cup you are strangers, the second friends, and by the friend family). I had no food in my house, as usual, so we made popcorn. Aran and the younger girl relaxed on my bed and tried on my clothes, happily taking several items with them. They made Lisa and I promise that Sunday afternoon we would come have lunch at their house. We quickly agreed as we love Senegalese food-in particular yassa, a spicy dish full of onions served with chicken or fish that most Cape Verdean places do not serve because it is too spicy for local taste preferences.

From that first day I sat down for a huge plate of cheb au jin, red rice and fish, I could feel that Aran’s gentle and kind nature. It is something that cannot be explained; it’s something you feel. This was despite our language and cultural barriers. Lisa and I have both experienced this meeting people in Cape Verde. It is an indefinable phenomenon. I think I usually feel it when a person has sympathetic eyes, an understanding voice, or a calm presence of being (as Cape Verdeans tend to be a bit more high-strung and vocal than most Americans are accustomed to).

I also feel a tug on my heart-strings, compassion for people who come to Cape Verde from West African countries. They leave husbands, children, lovers, friends, everything behind for the chance of a better life in Cape Verde. Most end up walking all day every day from town to town, up and down the iconic mountains and valleys of Santiago Island, selling hygiene products, dresses, and cheap jewelry out of backpacks or plastic carriers. It is unfathomable to me to imagine this as my job, a career, an indefinite way of living. They have left abject poverty to try in attempt to make a better life in a country that we as Americans classify as under-developed. Poverty is relative. I have met Africans who were employed at embassies, who were teachers, engineers, and doctors in their countries and after coup d’état, civil war, general unrest moved to Cape Verde where they only way they found to earn any money is to walk from morning to evening trying to sell toothpaste and cockroach poison.

There is also an immediate bond, a togetherness created out of being dissimilar. I am a foreigner you are a foreigner. We are both outsiders here. While we came to this new country for radically different reasons, we both know it is like to leave things behind, to miss people constantly, and to not know how to feel given this new opportunity.

Back to the melting cake, which is suffering horribly. It is 11 A.M. Sunday morning the humidity and the sun are fiercely competing to out-do the other. The parched grounds beg for rain, nearly everyone has planted their crops for this year’s rain; now all there is to do is to wait for the rain to make up her fickle mind. Jon, Lisa, and I walk around a neighborhood that we were not familiar with, asking people in the street if they knew where Aran’s house was. We marvel how a year ago we would never feel comfortable enough to do this, to walk through a strange neighborhood in the city in an attempt to find someone, and now it seems routine that we stumble through series of houses, broken cobblestones, women washing clothes outside, babies with no clothes on.

We find Aran’s house eventually, after a few phone calls and a series of misleading information. An old dark and musty house made-up of several rooms rented out to people. Aran begins the preparations for lunch while her goddaughter Aranzinha (translates to little Aran) shows us photos of friends and family in Senegal. The house had no stove so she cooks directly over a gas container, like a camping stove, in a tiny corner area of the house, the stone walls blackened with grease. She sautés a huge vat of onions mixed with hot pepper, black pepper, lime, and Maggi cubes (a bouillon cube popular in Senegal). Lisa and I cut up fresh fruit: mango, apple, papaya, and banana and mixed it in a large bowl with natural yogurt, sugar, and condensed milk. We eat lunch barefoot on the floor in her completely airless, humid bedroom. On the floor eating are Jon, Lisa, and I, Aran, the younger girl that sells bissap, hibiscus flower juice at the market, another skinny Senegalese woman, Aranizha, a Cape Verdean man “H” in his 20’s who rents another room in the house, and Aran’s ex-husband . Jon, Lisa, and I try to copy Aran and the Senegalese women and eat with our right hand, causing them to laugh at us.

After the spicy yassa we eat the decadent fruit salad. I was so very full and with the room so warm I felt sleepy, like a baby. Aran demanded that Lisa and I lay on her bed. Her Cape Verdean roommate, H, and Jon sat across from the three of us. It is hard to describe how enjoyable the simple conversations we had were, because what made them so enjoyable was that they were indistinctive from conversations you might have with a group of friends in America. Aran told us about her divorce, missing her children, her views on family. We talked about Lisa’s relationship with her boyfriend in America, if they will marry or not, how she will first go to school and have her own career. I explained why I was not married or dating anyone and my philosophy that it is not necessary to search for love and better if it finds you. H spoke English decently after studying it in high school for only two years. He told us that he is an orphan who has put himself through college and is now looking for a Master’s program. It was a reminder how easy life is for us in America, with all our choices and possibilities for life, school, work.

It was refreshing to spend the afternoon with Aran and H who both have cultivated unique mentalities as compared with others in similar socioeconomic and cultural situations. At some point during the conversation I drifted off to sleep. With the warmness of the room and how secure I felt in that place, I was lulled to sleep by this exchange of ideas and tolerance among unlikely friends with backgrounds so different from one another. The heat and unlikeliness of the afternoon made it difficult to distinguish between dreaming and waking.

Aran made Moroccan couscous served with condensed milk, sugar, and natural yogurt. It tasted like rice pudding and even though each of us was full, we all ate. Everyone joked about getting fatter, the Senegalese women telling Lisa and I it would make us more rafantya, beautiful in Woloof, one of the principal dialects in Senegal. Aran gave Lisa an ornate traditional Senegalese outfit. Jon joked that Lisa’s breast would fall out of the armhole when she waved “Txchau!” so Aran put on the outfit and demonstrated that it wouldn’t happen. Jon, Lisa, and I were surprised that she would do this and in my mind it solidified that we were all friends.

After being in that small windowless bedroom in the back that old house for about 7 hours, we realized how late it was and that we had to leave. Aran pleaded with us to stay the night at her place but we refused. She walked us to a taxi where we went back to Jon’s to take much needed cold showers. The three of us chatted excitedly about how much we had enjoyed the day. Frequently as a Peace Corps Volunteer you find yourself forced to spend a long hot day in relentless heat with no shade at some party, event, activity where you find yourself an outsider, not interacting with anyone yet it’s socially unacceptable for you to leave or perhaps your house is too far away. For the entire 7 hours we were at Aran’s house I never felt that. A PCV who came from Senegal spoke about how astonishing truly warm Senegalese hospitality can be…and I believe I definitely felt what he was talking about. It was somehow different than the Cape Verdean morabeza, hospitality and friendship that I have experienced here. Perhaps it has something to do with that bond of foreigners, this bond created on the fact we are different from most other people here.

At the place where the two main roads between the towns of Praia and Assomada meet, you get out of a stuffy over-crowded Hiace, van, and climb into the back of an Hilux, pick-up truck. Brace yourself for another ten minutes at a break-neck pace on a curvy, snaking road towards the town of Santiago if you are Cape Verdean or Pedro Badejo if you are Portuguese. Up and down green mountains, you reach my house at the foot of one zona, neighborhood (Achada Costa) and up a valley from another (Levada). My town, Orgãos, hardly receives a mention in most every travel guides about Cape Verde but is what my reality and understanding of the country is based on. Along the drive I wave to neighbors washing clothes outside and walking with their inxchadas, hoes, to their tend to their crops. I buy mangoes from the women in the back of the car. She is on her way to the next town, Santiago, the port town, to sell in the street market, with the other women who sell produce and fish.

“Maria’s leg? Is it better?” I question Maria’s son as I jump out of the back of the Hilux, pick-up truck, in front of my house. He shook his finger indicating no and told me it had become infected. I asked if she was taking medicine and he said yes and that she would find me later today. I shout greetings to my neighbors who tell me they had soledadi, missing or longing, for me while I was gone for the last 5 days.

After being away from site for 5 days at our Close of Service conference, I am relieved to be home. I can feel the tension ease, my muscles relax. After all that is what this place, this house, this town has become to me. It has been my home for two years. The skies are dark today, the rain comes intermittently, and people are carrying their inxchadas, hoes, and walk to their fields to begin to plant new crops, beans and corn. Just like the rest of my town, for me, simia, planting, is an exciting time of year. A tangible, visible symbol of change and better things to come.

I yell upstairs in Kriolu “Dja bem,” which translates as “Already I have come,” and is what you say when you return home, or to a group of people you know well. My mom kisses me on both cheeks and tells me excitedly she saw me and the other PCV’s on the news. She hands me a frozen plastic container of cachupa, corn and bean stew, that she cooked yesterday when she thought I was coming home. She gives me two eggs to place on top of the cachupa, after frying it in oil. I gave her the wallet I made from an old milk container, a project that has had huge success all over Cape Verde. She smiles and hands me a ripe payapa. We talk for a bit about people in town, the rain coming, when she will plant her crops. Downstairs she gives me several bananas. There are old milk cartons she has saved for me to make more wallets.

I make coffee with my broken French press, the one with the plastic red electric tape holding it together. My bed with the flower sheets and mosquito net, the pictures of friends and family in America and Africa on the walls, the drawings kids in my town have made for me. My mom walks into my kitchen to borrow something. How can these things that were so foreign now feel so ordinary so comforting? It is amazing how many options for our lives we have as humans, how much free will and choice we have.

I hear my mom talking to people outside. It’s Donda and Sany’s family, walking down the road to their fields. The young daughter sees me and says “Look at Elyse there,” they all shout greetings and ask where I have been. They ask me to come simia, plant, I assure them I will after I talk to Maria, my counterpart, about our bathroom construction project.

“I feel so strangely optimistic,” a quote from the film “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and I do, at my house, at my desk, with my morning coffee. I don’t know what I will do today, Maria and I might go talk to the local government about our bathroom project, hopefully we will go buy supplies, but if none of that happens, I will help my neighbors plant the crops that will sustain them and me for the next year. Or I will watch a movie inside. Uncertainty use to hold such trepidation but throughout my two years I have made my peace with it.

“I’ll miss the boredom, and the freedom, and the time spent alone,” I responded to Lisa when she asked what I would miss the most about Cape Verde, a lyric from one of my favorite MGMT songs. A song that I would listen to on those early morning runs (when you went to work) around the lake that I grew up down the street from the lake that has been the setting for various snapshots of memories throughout both my youth and later years. Sledding down the hill, smoking cigarettes without inhaling, late night kisses after the bar. I could not yet imagine how much more that verse would apply to my Peace Corps life, I could not imagine how I would think back to those early mornings when even in the middle of the summer the leaves were still green and the trees so many and so tall.

It’s a weekday morning, 10 A.M. and what are you doing? Most likely at work. What am I doing? Practicing my French and daydreaming of my pan-African trip. In an hour or so I will go meet my counterpart to speak the president of the municipal government about a bathroom project I have received funding for. Maybe he will be there, maybe he won’t. We will wait for him in the street, we will talk to neighbors. They will ask about my health, I will ask about their families. I will be given mangoes to take home. I will give my counterpart another project I have written. Maybe she will read it, maybe she won’t. Maybe I will present it to a financing organization, maybe I won’t. Later today I will give an English test to my class. Half will beg to take the test a different day. The passive attitude dominates and as the days get hotter and heavier with the approaching rains, there is a sort of torpor. I try my best to fight inertia aware that my time here in Cape Verde is approaching fast, but this battle has always been a difficult one for me. Pessimism has always been a problem for the Thomas family, flash to any conversation between my brother and I, with our various laments and complaints.

In an attempt to gain control and routine I recently adopted the habit of making my bed every morning. I stare at it longingly; how comfortable and inviting it looks. The roosters outside announce the mid-morning heat and I hesitate leaving my house, will my presence will really be missed in town today? I must remind myself that I only have two more months or so to step outside and see the mountains beyond mountains with tiny pink and orange houses randomly thrown in-between peaks and valleys. Why is it that it is so much easier to reminisce about a place, a person, an event? I have always preferred romanticizing to than reality.

“Living in Cape Verde is like being in college forever!” my colleague shouted to me over the funana (type of Cape Verdean music most popular on Santiago Island where I live), as we sipped beers outside in a sky full of stars in front of an impromptu bar constructed out of scrap metal. He had a point.

Cape Verdeans love a party. There is no absolute no denying that. The festa (party) season is upon us, as people finish harvesting last year’s beans and corns and eagerly await the rains that come intermittently from June or July until September or October. Once the rains begin, everyone will be busy doing monda (daily weeding of small plants that grow around corn and bean crops) so for now, people celebrate various types of festas including dias de santos (Catholic saints’ days), festas de zona (each zone/neighborhood has a yearly celebration), and batzimus (baptisms). Each is a joyous celebration full of traditional food, dancing, family and friends.

I dreaded festa a year and a half ago. My socially awkward interactions that use to pass in college (usually because I had my roommate Sam to stand in a corner with me, drinking wine with a twisty straw) didn’t quite work in Cape Verde. Surrounded by unfamiliar sensory elements, outside for hours with uncomfortably loud bass and people arguing in Creole, festa used to be miserable. Now I find some colorful, tight outfit, put on some dangly earrings, and passa (walk around town to see and be seen), stopping at houses of families I know and help myself to a heaping plate of fejão (typical bean dishes at a parties, a white bean), xerem (a corn dish sort of like grits), galinha de terra (chicken raised in Cape Verde), and avoid eating bodi (goat) and any part of pig that is served.

Sometimes the similarities between Cape Verdeans and American are shocking. While in the kitchen, my Cape Verdean friends posed for pictures they insisted I put on Facebook. They sent text messages using cell phones much nicer than the one I have. My colleague and I translated several American idioms and they understood and agreed. They laughed out loud at “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” (Pamodi comprar a vaca si bu ta atxa leite de gras?). They also understood the classic “My friend had an emergency I have to go help her” escape phone call on a date.

There is one stark difference at a Cape Verdean festa. In America, if someone I don’t know asks me to dance with him and I say “No” that’s the end of the conversation. In Cape Verde, he grabs my arm and pulls me to dance. I continue to say “No” but my neighbors are laughing and insisting. I suppose this is innocent enough but you have to wonder what else this means for women and their ability to say “No” to a man.

It’s fairly easy to be deceived into thinking Cape Verdeans and Americans have the same concept of morality and appropriate behavior. When you live in another culture for a long period of time, the lines between the two cultures start to blur. Add in the fact Cape Verde has a lot of interaction with the United States (in terms of Cape Verdeans living in America, visiting, music, television, food, etc). I meet Cape Verdeans who speak less Creole than I do (Consider this, there are more Cape Verdeans living abroad than in the country itself). This blurring of cultural identity, this inability to separate the two and begin to identify strongly with the new culture is commonly referred to as “going Native.” This type of thinking can be dangerous, particularly as a Peace Corps Volunteer. How does one negotiate between adapting to a new culture while still keeping your own ideals?

Over the course of two years, people change. It’s inevitable. The challenges, the new encounters, cultural conceptions that are part of Peace Corps service leave an impression on you. Generally people join Peace Corps for commendable reasons based on their personal ethics, to help people less fortunate, to experience how life is for people in a less developed country, etc. It’s ironic then that Peace Corps service has the potential to negatively distort your perception of morality. When you live in culture where drinking at 10 A.M. and being unfaithful in romantic relationships is condoned as normal behavior, you start to feel confusion between adapting to a new culture and maintain your values. And just like that, you lose sight of your original perspective.

I am not sure how this blog originally about festas took a dark inward turn into my evolving (possibly devolving?) sense of morality…

One of my favorite new songs in Cape Verde. The video isn't the best, but I like the song...

My home, my land, nha terra morabeza.... the area where I live is mentioned at minute 8:40 "Sao Jorge" and again at 9:40 "Pico D'Antonio"

Thanks to Jon Berg (http://fromislandtoisland.blogspot.com/) for the video and blog idea!

I will be the “ingrata” (ungrateful person, commonly used in CV if you do not call or visit minimum once a week) making an you do not call or visit minimum once a week) making an international call full of static and delays from another country to wish everyone in Achada Costa a Happy Easter next year. It is hard to believe that I will likely be going out to lunch with my parents, brother, sister-in-law at some generic burger restaurant where I will debate over ordering a sensible salad or splurging on a cheeseburger. This Easter I spent cooking traditional Cape Verdean food outside in Achada Costa, with a breath-taking landscape of endless rolling green mountains and a view of the island of Maio, a skip over the ocean, so close you can see houses. Easter, like the year before and like most every important festa (party) or holiday, I hiked up Achada Costa with Inalida and her two daughters. I expertly balanced home-made ice cream in one hand and chatted with Inalida about our English class, feeling something more peaceful than the year before, something akin to what a majority of people probably feel when attending a holiday with extended family, something a shade away from comfortable and excited.Like with every other festa other festa (party) in Achada Costa, several neighbors asked us toto “txchega” (stop at their house to talk and eat something) as we walked to our destination. Protected by Inalida I was able to use the guise of bringing the ice cream to the appropriate house before it melted so we did not have to stop at any house. At Emilia’s (my counterpart Maria’s sister) the usual group of women and teenage girls were outside cooking, we were greeted with plates of greasy three day-old kataxupa (CV’s national dish, a stew made with ground corb, beans, and some type of meat). I ate a few bites and cleverly slipped the figado (liver, I think goat this time) on to my seven year-old neighbor’s plate. I proudly revealed the knife I had brought in my bag so I would not have to borrow someone’s knife for this festa. It was met with wide approval.I was given the task of peeling all the mandioac (yucca root). It was daunting. Mandoiac, my nemesis has time and time made my neighbors laugh at me and question my ability to prepare food for myself. If you have never peeled mandioac with a blunt knife then you must reserve your judgment; it is not a simple task, particularly surrounded by Cape Verdean women who believe there is but one way to peel/cook most type of foods and if you do it wrong-well, you are incompetent. I am proud to say I conquered the mandoiac, winning a battle of potentially innumerous metaphors that could be used to describe the challenges of my life in Cape Verde. My victory was mostly due to the fact these were unusually large pieces that could be peeled more easily (that’s not to say I didn’t slice my hand to the point of bleeding). It was fortunate I was able to overcome that tricky tuber root because this year there were significantly less people helping cook and serve food. No one even checked my progress or commented that I had done a horrible job.After picking out of the comically large witch-inspired cauldrons the good pieces of chicken massa (balls of corn pasta in a salty soup) and avoiding the goat meat (I don’t dislike goat but it was a bit chewy this time) I was ordered in the shade to protect my skin. I finished my plate and handed it to the next woman to eat. The women that cook usually eat outside, while food is brought inside and presented on serving plates for the influential men and occasional women. I drank a Strawberry Fanta, a drink which I had found unbearably sweet when I first arrived in Cape Verde, but now find myself craving after salty meals here. I left Maria’s partially full but conscious there would be a heaping plate of the exact same food at the next house on my typical festa route.

Matildy and M’s I ate a small portion of chicken massa soup. I sat outside with M for hours talking about nothing without realizing I was getting a horrible farmer’s tan. Their extended family was visiting from nearby zones and Praia. Matildy, in her normal overbearing way, explained to everyone that cared to listen that although I am white, I am a Creola and part of her family. Some guys in their 20’s from Praia were there, wearing their buzzoff (fancy) clothes, sunglasses, looking freshly showered. Matildy smacked one on his head when he asked for my phone number.

Another brief visit to another house or two, during which I was able to avoid eating dry cake by sharing the plate with a pregnant woman, I went up to the one room kindergarten to watch people dance. My favorite Hilux (car) driver was very drunk, pulled me inside the school in an attempt to force me to dance. The other girls smacked him until he stumbled away. I knew everyone at the school, each of their families, and where they lived. It felt good to be part of a community. Before leaving, Maria and I talked about the nature of development work in Cape Verde, the problems we encounter in our association. In Creole Maria said to me, she has no need to be rich, to have a really nice house, because when you die you take nothing with you, all that matter is the type of person you were. It was touching to hear her say that, especially after some discrepancies regarding our reservoir project.At the end of the day, Inalida and I walked back down the mountain (I have to note that she took a spill as we were walking, it is a treacherous path. But in true CV mannerism, everyone that saw just laughed). Tired and sunburnt, inside my house I briefly talked to Daminga (the woman I live with/my mom) about her day and the guests that had stopped by the house. I went to bed early, my hair smelling like lenha (traditional method of using wood to cook outside), feeling happier, accomplished, and more involved in my community… not to mention that I was even able to do the unimaginable, retrieve a sweatshirt I left at a Cape Verdean’s house two months ago..Here are two more pictures I wanted to share but couldn't clearly work into this posting...a bowl of goat blood we were supposed to eat until someone dropped an onion in it (probably improving the taste) and goat liver and intestines.

Why do we trick ourselves into thinking the situation is so bleak, so unresolvable? In Cape Verde I get into funks that last days, weeks . I have no idea why I am here, what I am doing, and it’s all I can do but lie in my bed and listen to Explosions in the Sky and feel sorry for myself. It doesn’t have to be like this. That’s what I always forget. The beauty of life is its ability to change without any fore-thought or planning. I was in town when I saw M. She and I have a special connection. She has this sort of inexplicable quality, when you look at her for some reason, you just feel that she is a warm person with good intentions. M is 24 years old and does not have any children—this is rare in Cape Verde. Her life is hard, her family is poor, and she did not finish high school. However, she tries. She is enrolled in the GED equivalent course that I teach the English lesson for. She recently obtained dual citizenship (Cape Verdean and Portuguese) which will allow her to travel and find work more easily. I know she feels estranged from other girls her age because she doesn’t have children, a boyfriend, and doesn’t drink alcohol. Her mom is a big, gregarious Cape Verdean woman who always has a comment about everyone’s personal lives, my health, and the weather. I told M I was on my home to wash my clothes. We got into the same car, headed back to our zone and she started the hike up the mountain to Achada Costa, where she lives. She told me she was going up there and then back down. I told her to rest, she didn’t need to. I ate lunch (cold beans and rice) outside barefoot with Daminga (my mom/woman I live with) and our neighbor Inalida as they shelled beans. M showed up and the four of us shelled beans. I was mostly silent as they talked about how kids these days lack respect, who is pregnant, who is moving to America. I brought out a snack of goat cheese Lisa had brought me from Santo Antao (it’s a Cape Verdean delicacy) and tortillas I had recently made. Everyone was impressed by the tortillas especially when I explained I eat them when I want bread but don’t have any, as our zone doesn’t have anyone close by that makes and sells bread in the mornings. I refused to let M wash my clothes with me, partially because it seemed wrong to make her do even more housework, but mostly because Cape Verdean women seem to be terrified of my granny panties (women here tend to wear skimpy thong underwear). We sat in my room at my desk, the only place I have to sit in my room. She asked to see some photos from our English class’ Christmas party. I showed her, along with some other photos on my computer, praying the folders contained nothing too damning. I don’t know what really lead to it but somehow the conditions were appropriate and we had a Real Conversation. This stands in stark opposition to the majority of my daily conversations in Cape Verde. Perhaps there is safety in confiding in someone who may not totally understand. Like a Confession you know you will be absolved against. Or perhaps she really has no one else to talk to. We talked about what we want to do with our lives, what we like, where we want to go. She told me there is a man she likes in her zone. His family however, won’t let him date her because her family is poorer and she is un-educated. I had never seen her so agitated, she nearly cried. I was touched she confided me but found the comforting words foreign and muddled in my throat. I tried to console her, hoping my genuine sympathy for her would bridge our language gap. She is good at math and wants to be an accountant. I commended her for exceling in a male-dominated field. I told her about applying for jobs in Africa in health communications. I told her about the one I had been interested in focused on preventing HIV/AIDS transmission from mother-to-child through breast milk. She didn’t know that AIDS could be transmitted like this. She thought it could only be spread through intravenous drug use. I have read Cape Verdean literature that indicates intravenous drug use is the ONLY route HIV/AIDS is transmitted. She also talked about how immigrants come from Africa and have sex with wealthy Europeans who live in Cape Verde, and that these immigrants have AIDS. I explained that anyone can have AIDS, even wealthy people in America can have it. Women in Cape Verde can’t be trusted, you can’t have real friends, she whispered to me. I truly felt sorry for her. Imagine feeling unable to relate, understand to most everyone in your own country? It is one thing for me to feel lonely, a foreigner in another country, but to feel like alone like a foreigner in your own country must be awful. I do not have a lot of young Cape Verdean friends. I live with an older couple, Daminga is like my mother. My counterpart is also an older lady, our association, and the zones closest to where I live are largely made up of older people whose principal activities involve agriculture and farming. Maybe to a degree, I understand M’s point of view. I feel little in common with girls my age, constantly have to explain why I don’t have children, a boyfriend, a husband. I feel a flutter of nervousness whenever M or anyone stops by my house. First, I am awkward. I’d be uncomfortable with American surprising me at my house. With my Cape Verdean neighbors I worry my language will falter and she won’t be able to understand me. This is compounded by the fact I feel that I should not have this type of worry this late in my service, so rather than confront it by practicing; I act like it’s not a problem and ignore it. Call it a bad habit, call it self-loathing , it comes perfectly natural to me. However her visit ended up being like what soccer practice was for me last year. I would dread going but then while there I felt so connected, in-touch with my community, I couldn’t understand why I dreaded it. The ironic part of all this is, she would probably be uncomfortable with how I live my life. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I don’t know. By that I mean Americans have the luxury of education, sensibility, prevention. Americans might drink but we are sensitized strongly against drunk driving. Young people might engage in sexual relationships but we have seemingly unlimited access to various birth control strategies. It’s like we have baby-proofed our country for all our stupid, reckless behavior.

For a person as fickle as me, Peace Corps is either the best or the worst opportunity possible. A majority of PCV’s worldwide described their service as a chaotic bi-polar adventure with high-highs and low-lows. It is the strangest thing in Cape Verde, some mornings I wake up exhausted, desperately chug coffee and am positive the day will be tiring and miserable. Then, with some mysterious batting of a butterfly’s wings in Indonesia, my day is perfect. I walk with confidence, my Creole is fluent, and I have the secure feeling that there is nowhere else in the world I am supposed to be in that exact moment. Of course then, there are days when I plan and prepare an event and no one comes except a creepy teacher from the high school to hit on me and I shut my eyes and imagine myself in the air-conditioning in Starbucks ordering a double-tall skim Hazelnut Latte. I can never predict what sort of day I am going to have and this is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. I do know one thing about myself, I thrive on this sort of nervous, indecision. I hate it but it keeps me engaged and interested. Unpredictability makes life interesting. I went to the plant research in the part of my town where I supposed to live. As much as I try to be Zen and accept things happening however they happen, I can’t help but swallow bitter resentment that I was not placed in that part of town. It is set amidst rolling green mountains, there are several stores, the houses are located close to one another, it is a compact self-contained charming town. My zone is much more spread-out with less amenities. I was visiting the plant research center with another PCV, who wanted information on tree grafting and pressing sunflower seeds for oil. We were instructed to visit the extension nursery closer to my house. There we were warmly received by an older woman I knew but hadn’t realized worked there. She walked around with us, showed us the various fruit trees and demonstrated the grafting process. She showed us an almond tree—I had no idea almonds were grown in Cape Verde! The visit re-energized me and reminded me of all the possibilities, different areas I could focus on here… I think this is the way the last few months of a PCV’s service are. It is a nostalgic time, to look at photos of yourself from a year and a half ago (how clean, how thin you looked!), to reminisce fondly over your service’s Greatest Hits (Go here to see Greatest Hits photos because I can't manage to add the cool link with text thing https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos)I remember talking to a PCV nearing the end of her service last year, everything she said was positively roses and I remember hating her for that. Isn’t that a funny manifestation of human nature? I suppose it’s a preservation tactic that we look back warmly about something we invested a lot of time in and that we all feel over-all positively about it. While I do not yet have an actual C.O.S. (close of service) date, my projected one is for September. The days are passing much too fast. The weather has become warmer to compliment my newly found optimism and I’m torn between spending my days trying to plan projects or tanning while sipping Brazilian cocktails on the beach. As much as I miss sushi and driving, I don’t think I am quite yet ready for America…

Baked red earth the color of terra cotta and the stinging sweet smell of naga champa incense. These are the two most poignant sensory memories of Senegal for me.

When we stepped off our seemingly too short flight, it was clear we were no longer in Halfrica, as we lovingly call our misfit chain of islands 400km off the coast of Senegal, where we had landed. The airport in Dakar, which is one of the best in Africa, was intimidating and confusing. Did I mention the official language in Senegal is French and I speak Portuguese Creole?

Our groups of PCV’s travelling from Cape Verde were met at the airport by Chris Murphy, a third year PCV serving in Senegal who would become our savior throughout the course of the trip. We had met him last year when he was travelling in Cape Verde. We climbed into an overcrowded bus, knocking locals in the face with Klean Kateens and hiking backpacks. This is not an un-familiar routine. We arrived at Chris’ house, a little outside of the downtown part of Dakar. As a third year he lives in a nice house with water, regular electricity, beds, etc. with other ex-pats.

I did not find Dakar remarkably different from Praia, the capital here on Santiago Island. There was more dust than in Praia, paintings of Islamic figures in imposing black and white robes, and the women wore loud solid colored tops and long skirts. It still felt like a modern city. There were cars, restaurants, banks, fruit stands, all the things I associate with a city. The highway was probably the notable difference for me, coming from a tiny island nation that boasts paved roads along heavy traffic as a huge success(previously the roads were all cobblestone). There are also peculiar knee-high concrete dividers through these daunting heavy traffic roads. Chris would stop taxis, figure out the driver’s dialect, greet him and then argue prices. The argument is much more heated in Dakar than in Cape Verde. I guess there’s something to be said about sleepy, laid-back island mentality…

For the first three days of the trip, Friday through Sunday we were participating in a West African Peace Corps Volunteer softball tournament. It was a lot of fun, sort of like a university quad fest. Basically, Peace Corps volunteers who serve in West African countries who have to act conservatively and fit in with local customs, let loose. Let’s not forget that Senegal and Mali are both Islamic countries.

Our Cape Verde team was supplemented with volunteers who had been evacuated from Niger and were in the process of being re-assigned within Senegal. Our theme was tye-dye, bright striped stockings, and capes (for Cape Verde, naturally). I completed my outfit with a pair of purple booty shorts that say CABO VERDE on the back. The days passed in a drunken blur. PCV’s were dressed up in outrageous costumes, African wax fabric lederhosen, cops and robbers, tuttu’s etc. Music was played, people drank, danced, and occasionally played softball. Each night there was a huge party for volunteers that was like a huge meat market, so much so that all I could do was sip a drink and sit with my fellow Cape Verdean PCV’s and watch the other Americans much like a Cape Verdean would have done. Being surrounded by a huge group of Americans is overwhelming. My English conversational skills get so little practice with strangers. I am even more socially awkward than I was before Peace Corps….how will I ever survive in America?

After the tournament we travelled to the far Southeast of Senegal, to Kedougou. We stumbled out of bed around 6 A.M. (Had we drank? Likely.) and went to the “garage” in Dakar. This is a place where old station wagons from America have gone to live a second life. Seven people pile into the back of a station wagon and travel hours across Senegal. It is very strange. You almost have a nostalgic feeling for family trips to a lake house or something and then the baby sitting on the lap of the women beside you grabs your blonde hair and puts it in his mouth and you reminded…oh right, this is Africa. The first car ride was 7 hours. Lisa and I were crammed in the back seat with the aforementioned Senegalese woman and baby. As we left Dakar it became obvious how different Senegal is from Cape Verde. The villages are small, spread apart, and the standard of living is much lower. Houses are small huts with palm roofs. My perception of Africa had been based on my experiences in Cape Verde and South Africa which I had known where not like the rest of the country, but seeing it was still somewhat jarring.

Around dusk our second station wagon transport left us in Kedougou. We had shaky directions from a Senegalese PCV and Jon’s three years of high school French (plus my one semester if you want to count it) to help us find the PC regional house. Several people did not know. At least the town felt safe. You may be inclined to think in the poorer more rural areas you would feel less safe, but I found the opposite to be true. We finally found a kind soul to escort us to the PC regional house. The regional house in Kedougou is composed of several large, open huts. There is a kitchen hut, big sleeping hut with 15 or so beds, a communal space/living room hut, water tanks for laundry, bathrooms, etc . For the volunteers in the region I got the sense it is a cherished space they come to when they need to escape their homestays and village life, as well as use free wi-fi Internet to talk to friends and family and work on various projects.

Our second day in Kedougou we woke up late. We ate avocado and hard-boiled egg sandwiches on French bread (egg sandwiches with beans, meat, etc. are everywhere in Senegal!). After casually discussing it with some Senegalese PCV’s Jon, Lisa, and I decided to bike 22 kilometers to Segeou, a PCV’s site. Now, Cape Verde is very different from other African PCV posts because it’s so tiny we are not issued bikes therefore we don’t bike everywhere. We left the regional house at the hottest part of the day, with a few bottles of water, and another set of directions to decipher. After the initial excitement of riding a bike on the red dirt with villagers carrying things on their heads, we realized how poor our decision to leave mid-day had been. The ride to Segeou was the same sun-baked ground with Acacia landscape for hours. There was no shade. We cursed silently (and outloud) and tried our hardest to conserve our water. The only thing I knew how to do was keep on keepin’ on….

By the time we made it to the village outside of the tourist compound, we were exhausted and dehydrated. We staggered in pushing our bicycles , all of us covered in dust, and asked for a store to buy water. The village’s French teacher informed us there was no store here. We asked for water. He took us to a pump. A shy little boy pumped milky gray water into our bottles and Lisa and I washed our feet in the run-off water. For a split second we worried about parasites then drank the water. We remembered a PCV had given us water purification tablets and put some in the water. We walked back to the small group of Senegalese people gathered outside of a hut that we had demanded a store and water from, and then asked for food. We were taken inside the hut and given a giant bowl of Mafa (peanut sauce over white rice). We were given spoons although the custom in Senegal is to eat with one’s right hand, exceptions are made for tabouabs (foreigners/white people). We thanked and paid the family and continued another 2 kilometers to the tourist encampment. The PCV whose project was establishing the place, was not there but had informed the two men running it that we would be showing up.

We were given a picturesque, quaint hut to stay in. We stupidly attempted to bike another 10 kilometers or so to the waterfall but were unable to before it got dark. That night we ate Yassa (onions stewed with spice and white rice) with the two men running the place and attempted to communicate. The people of that region speak Pulaar, which we decided is more closely related to Cape Verdean Creole than the Wolof we had been hearing in Dakar. Perhaps it was the dehydration, or the ambience of Acacia trees and the Guinean mountain range, but it almost seemed like we were having a meaningful conversation. It could also be that Peace Corps has made me comfortable with long pauses and not really understanding what someone has said to me.

That night our charming little hut turned into a fiery hellish pizza oven. We were nervous to sleep with the windows open because in Cape Verde as PCVs we are strongly advised to not sleep with windows open without metal bars on the window. The men working there had also placed our bikes and the water filter inside our room. Lisa and I started off sleeping in one bed. The air was thick and difficult to inhale. I slept maybe an hour before waking up to her turning about and complaining about the heat. Then I realized I was dizzy and my head pounding. Earlier in the day I had had cold chills in the baking sun and someone mentioned heat exhaustion but I didn’t think much of it. I could not stay in the room. I went outside. I threw-up right outside of the hut. There were chairs down in an open thatched roof area where we had had dinner. I brought two in front of our hut and slept/stared at the stars. I was out there for maybe two hours. After I cooled down sufficiently, I went back inside. There was an extra foam pad that I used to sleep on the floor.

The next morning we started off the waterfalls earlier and with water. I chugged a few liters of juice, attempting to re-hydrate myself. We biked through Savannah like plains until we reached the lusher, green area that borders Guinea Conakry. We followed trail markers finding small waterfalls, uncertain if we had reached our destination or not. We passed baboons angrily smacking the ground upon seeing us. We made it to the waterfall, unlike anything I’ve seen in Cape Verde. It was maybe 40 feet tall. We splashed around, washed ourselves and our clothes with peanut soap, and swam. A few days later we would learn that a crocodile lives there and tourists are never told until after they have gone…haha

We spent another day in Kedougou. We biked to a village where there was a lake where there were hippos. In true Peace Corps fashion we entered the village without hesitation, attempted to communicate in what little language we knew, and then were accompanied by a local. We arrived noisily the lake ruining the tranquility of a serious French couple in Safari-casual gear. After waiting 30 minutes we were bored and left to meet a new friend for drinks and swimming at a tourist encampment on the Gambia River.

We took a night bus back to Dakar, which was far more pleasant than the daytrip in multiple station wagons. We spent our last day shopping the huge market, buying wax African print fabrics and cheap bracelets and sunglasses.

I was not ready to leave. We had travelled so far, so long, yet seen only a tiny piece of the country. I had started to feel comfortable using rudimentary French and not knowing what people around me were saying. My first day back in Praia was like returning home. I understood everyone, no one tried to cheat me, I knew where and how to get places. Cape Verde felt so relaxed compared to Senegal, more peaceful. Before our trip to Senegal, I had not so deeply appreciated the serene nature of Cape Verde.

I was inspired by how well-run Peace Corps Senegal. I’d like consider extending in another country, although cross-country extensions are difficult especially considering most countries are Francophone (and Cape Verde is Lusophone). A part of me wants to go home and pursue a higher degree first. Whatever my path, this trip reawakened my love affair with Africa and desire to spijda pe (spread my feet/explore). Not all those who wander are lost…right? Truthfully I might be a little lost but where better to find myself than a vast continent that encompasses such a large part of the world...right?

Some of my happiest moments are when I am thoroughly exhausted. I am sure there is a scientific rationale, based on energy expenditure and endorphins but it still seems odd, like tricking nature. It’s as though my body is so tired and worn-out there is no other choice than to just be happy and satisfied because anything else would require too great an effort. I love the way my feet feel after hiking hours and hours in a cheap pair of flip flops. They no longer hurt I can walk on anything. I recently visited the PCV who has arguably the most rural, most difficult to reach, site in Cape Verde (or at least for sure on the island of Santiago where I live). No regular cars will take you to his zone, hiking at least an hour or two hours depending on your pace, is required. The path is dust, rock, corn stalks, and thorn bushes. His site is tranquil and peaceful. There are few houses and they are far apart. I have been told that the reason Cape Verdeans built their houses in difficult to reach places was to be out of Portuguese colonists’ reach, and that would explain how a lot of communities are set up. I cannot imagine what two years of service at site like his, one that is so isolated from any and all types of resources ranging from basic necessities like food and water to developmental resources like the local government and proximity to international organizations that operate in Cape Verde. I saw pictures of my friend who lives there before he came to Cape Verde. He was entirely different person, and based solely on his California snobby Frat boy appearance, not likely someone I would be friends with in the U.S.. However it’s incredible how this country can change you. Now I admire his calm attitude and acceptance. I wish I could practice the art of solitude as peacefully as he does. After visiting his site, when I got home the power went out. I think it was out in the surrounding towns as well because the night seemed darker than our usual power outages. In my bedroom, listening to music with a candlelight I felt serene and appreciative of my present situation. The opportunity to live in another country for two years, maybe help people, maybe help one person, maybe help no one, maybe help myself, maybe not. It’s an opportunity, none the less. Outside tonight the sky is full of stars incomparable to anything I ever saw in America except maybe that one time sleeping outside in the Appalachias right out of Tennessee. The nights have recently been cold enough that I can wear a hoodie with my shorts. The atmosphere is perfect, somewhat lonely but in such a fine way it’s not bothersome. That Sunday morning I went up Achada Costa, my favorite zone in my town. I first stopped at Donda’s house, where I stop every Sunday I am up there for Cape Verdean style cousous (dome-shaped bread). I sat on a rickety plastic chair with the old lady who lives there and attempted to comprehend her babbling. The two women would ask the one year old girl peoples’ names for her to point to the right person. I was surprised she knew my name and even more surprised when that when she was instructed to “Da-el beijo” or “Give her a kiss,” she ran over, grinning and kissed my cheek. Perhaps because this is a particularly adorable girl or I don’t know why, but I felt so very happy there. I took one of the large wooden poles used to crush corn into a fine powder and helped the women. They were all impressed and excited that I had finally learned how to “pila midju,” or crush corn. Usually two women do it at once, alternately lifting the poles up and down. I stayed for hot, fresh cousous and managed to escape without having to drink the dreaded “leite dormindo,” or sleepy milk, promising I would have some on my return. This Sunday morning coucous ritual with family was like pancakes Sundays in a big close-knit family somewhere in the Mid-West in Any Town, USA. On my way to Maria’s I stopped by two or three other houses briefly. In one house I was disappointed to find a 17 year old girl that I like is pregnant. I was assured her boyfriend will take care of her, but got his cell phone number and gave him mine in case she needed anything (she doesn’t have a phone). A little boy, Peyo, lives in that house who always crawls all over me and refuses to let go of my hand. The little boys are generally shyer but not this one. The mother of the house was sick, I was told to go into her bedroom and speak with her. I felt awkward making her sit up and talk to me so I left quickly and promised to return another time. At Matildy’s I briefly told her the information she gave me about her daughter’s eyeglasses was incorrect and I needed the right numbers to try to help. Matildy was, as usual, full of idioms and motherly advice for me regarding skin cancer, thyroids, Jesus, and life in general. I finally reached Maria’s sister where Maria was. I find her sister somewhat off-putting, as she usually doesn’t talk to me directly but instead turns to Maria for translations. At Maria’s I sat out front while she washed her family’s clothes. We chatted about project possibilities, about my parents’ visiting, about Maria’s kids, about my fake boyfriend in America (haha…that can be explained better later, suffice to say I’ve found it easier to pretend to not be single). After 2 or 3 hours of this, her husband showed up. He and I sat outside taking the peanuts off the vines that were piled up. Maria cooked. A group of young boys played soccer beside Maria’s house. I helped with the peanuts for a few hours. It was one of those days when the hours passed and little was done or said but it felt comfortable. I left around 6 P.M. with a plastic Tupperware of fish and rice wrapped in a towel placed carefully in a backpack by Maria for me to eat in my house. I hurried down the mountain, saying quick good-byes and hardly even pausing at the remarkable sunset. Orange, pink, blue…like Trix yogurt. I could see buildings and houses on the island of Maio.This calm is a peculiar thing and completely foreign to me as an anxiety-ridden goal-oriented American. I dig it.

How would Horatio Alger handle this situation? One toke over the line, sweet Jesus…one toke over the line. Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of an acid frenzy. All these horrible realities began to dawn on me: Here I was alone in Las Vegas with this goddamn incredibly expensive car, completely twisted on drugs, no attorney, no cash, no story for the magazine…

"I skipped work today….I don't know why" from the beginning of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind...when he randomly got on a train to Montauk and fortuitous events began to take hold. I should watch this movie yet again tonight...I had the best intentions of going into town this morning to talk to my association’s accountant. I wanted to make sure all our financial information and reporting to the American organization was in order. However, when I woke up with the light across my bed like the seasons changing on the East Coast where I have lived my entire life, I lost my motivation. I have been homesick for the Fall and Winter on the East Coast. The rains have stopped and the skies are cold and dark here. Sometimes you can pretend that you are in the U.S. and I think about my gray room in my parents’ house, my job at the bookstore, the lake where I go running, my friends. I will be so grateful to see the leaves changing colors in VA next year, in the backyard with a mug of coffee in hand. I will grateful just to be able to drink out of one of my favorite mugs again. I will make Susan Taylor go on a road trip to VA tech, to the mountains, with me. It’s almost Thanksgiving and then comes Christmas and the New Year. In Cape Verde, most all of us PCV’s get together for the holidays. The overwhelming amount of people combined with sunny warm weather makes it easy to forget what time of year it is. I never thought I’d miss cold weather, I always cursed it in the U.S. but it is such a comforting thing to sit by a fire in your favorite sweatshirt. My parents are coming in January. While I am a bit anxious about how they will perceive the country, I am looking forward to showing them the country I have been living in for over a year. I can’t wait to walk them up the crumbling staircase to my roof where I have to go to get service on my cell phone. The sky is full of lazy rolling, green mountains. It is an America day, for reading and staying inside...it's out of my control, it's the weather...

Song for today: “Better than” John Butler Trio. Listen to it. I love this band all their music is so optimistic. This song in particular is about appreciating your current situation rather than wanting something else. PCV’s, listen up.

Something amazing happened today, that happens pretty often to me here in Cape Verde. You might think this makes it less amazing, but that is not true. My amazement and appreciation never diminishes. What I am referring to is how everything just works out in Cape Verde. It’s like one of my favorite Rumi quotes “This was never not going to happen. You were never not coming here.” I woke up this morning with a poetic sadness for autumn in America, I call it poetic because it’s bittersweet and almost better to miss it rather than have it. After a cup of coffee and a banana de terra (a plump, red banana) I set out to visit the agricultural zone of Poliao. As I said to my neighbors in Creole “N’ ka ta passa la txcheu” or, “I don’t go there a lot.” I accidentally went to a birthday party there and met a Philosophy professor (maybe, my language wasn’t what it is now) and helped pull kernels off of dried earns of corn to make cachupa, the national dish. That birthday party could be entire another story if only I had sat down and wrote about it because now it’s only a confused, disoriented memory…like the majority of my memories in Cape Verde…the newness and dehydration do not aid in memory preservation.

Today I got out of the car near Poliao. The morning heat is stifling at 10 A.M. but I had a mission and had not gone running yet so I was prepared and excited for a strenuous walk. I had an idea of where the crops begin, where I planned to walk and meet some of the agriculturalists. Immediately events happened to ensure me I arrived not a moment too soon and not one too late. Fish Face was at the small store by the road. Fish Face, is a former student’s of my friend Andrew. Andrew was a good friend while he was a PCV here, he lived in the town next to mine. Fish Face might have threatened to kill Andrew once or it might have been another student, regardless he always been pleasant to me. I told Fish Face I came to walk around the crops to get to know the place and the farmers. He said if I had come earlier he would have walked with me. Oh well. I started towards the crops, I stopped in front of a crumbling cement block house. A lady out front was sweeping, though it seemed there was an impossible amount of debris and dirt. We spoke about vida de pobreza (the poor life), problems with crops, problems with unemployment. Then, a friendly face from Achada Costa (the zone behind my house, the primary zone I work with) showed up. I cannot remember his name I think I was told its

Estavo. Estavo told me he was going to his crops and would be glad to show me. Perfect.

We walked towards where he planted manioc. His manioc was doing well because it was planted further from where the water that overflows from the dam collects and forms a river. We walked where he planted onions and tomatoes which had not sprouted yet. We took off our flip-flops and walked through mud, on top of a tube used for drip irrigation to reach where his bananas and papayas were planted. All his crops were sufficiently irrigated, he told me he installed the drip irrigation system himself. I told him I very much want to learn how to install the systems and he told me he would show me when he needed to fix some of tubing. I sincerely hope he does not forget, I will be sure to remind him and his family. The importance of drip irrigation in a semi-arid, desert country like Cape Verde is immeasurable. Like everyone in this country he was determined to feed me papaya. None of his were ripe yet so we went to a nearby plot tended to by a group of young men. They shyly watched and listened to zouk music on the radio. Estavo cut the papayas with a machete and handed pieces to me. Inside the papaya trees there was shade and a breeze. I did not attempt to listen to their conversation, I was lost in my own

thoughts, like I tend to do when a group of Cape Verdeans are speaking to one another. It’s funny how you become used to not understanding and not paying attention. It is like being surrounded by constant white noise, like the safe hum of static on your television…you zone out and your mind wanders…

Estavo decided to continue to walk with me another 30 minutes to the dam. Along the way we chatted about the differences between American and Cape Verdean life, what I want to do in Cape Verde, the crops along the way, the filtering systems, etc. There was the biggest calabercia tree I’ve ever seen, I swore it was baobab but Estavo insisted (perhaps the two types are related?)At the dam we spoke with the construction workers building the control center where I think I am supposed to work at. We sluggishly climbed the 2 or 3 stories up the staircase of the dam. We rested in some shade under some trees at the top. Estavo found a car to take into Praia and I began to walk to my house with three papayas in hand.

On the way I stopped by Felisberto’s. He is a lawyer who also has an impressive drip irrigated plot by his restaurant neat the dam. He wants to build rooms for tourists to stay. Shoka, who worked at the primary school, was there as well. She asked when I would come eat corn with her…another question I cannot escape these days. I promised soon and continued home. Walking in the afternoon heat, drenched in my own sweat, carrying papayas is one of the best feelings I have in Cape Verde. I don’t even like papaya it has something to do with carrying a product grown in the ground here, walking and not using a car, greeting my neighbors in the local language. At home, I showered and discovered the sharp thorn of a tree engorged in my foot. I went up to Dominga, the woman I live with, to ask for help. She found a needle and fished it out. Then she gave me a big bowl of cachupa. At home, in one of my house dresses listening to music I felt calm and content with my day. I daydreamed about fruit transformation projects: jam, music, dried fruits. Now the difficult part, to hold on to the optimism and good feeling will attempting to create a project…

Of course, my foot that had the thorns in it was to become painfully infected a few days later but I did not know that yet…

For weeks, months in Cape Verde people have been talking about Akon coming to Cape Verde. I was fairly certain was a rumor because other performing artists (i.e. Norah Jones) were suppose to come in the past and people bought tickets and she never showed up and they did not get a refund. Important diplomats and embassy people included. Also, rumors have an uncanny way of being started and spread here in Cape Verde both in the Peace Corps world (in which I mean volunteers and staff) and in the Cape Verdean world. People talk about everyone, your private business is never your private business. However that’s not the point of this story…

Yesterday Akon was supposed to play. Tickets had been sold for the last few weeks for anywhere from $20 to 50 USD. No volunteers bought tickets because we were all skeptical. A PCV calls me and informs me she saw Akon getting off a plane in the airport in Cape Verde. I began to get excited. Let me explain my sentiment towards Akon for all my indie scenster a friend in D.C. whom I can feel judging me from across the Atlantic, Akon is loved in West Africa. He is from Senegal and every Cape Verdean I know can not get enough of his music. Also riding in the back of a Hilux truck, blasting “Freedom,” speeding through the rolling green mountains of my town, you have feel this quintessential feelings like…Wow, I am a Peace Corps Volunteer. I live in Africa. So, Akon coming to Cape Verde was a huge deal to me, just like all my Cape Verdean neighbors. I met up with some other PCV’s in a place I thought had tickets but was informed they were sold-out. PCV’s were meeting for a Halloween gathering so we went to the party. I could not give up on Akon that easily.

After debating and misgiving, another volunteer and I said good-bye and got in one of the last cars towards Praia. The car went a strange back route and stopped frequently for drunken chats. It seemed we would never arrive. Then I called another American living in Cape Verde who told me he had tickets he could sell to us. Optimism set in, we had tickets secured, we just had to make it into Praia and meet him. That might not sound like a feat but everything in Cape Verde is unnecessarily complex and drawn-out. We made it to a volunteer’s house where we would stay the night. I immediately “took some medicine” (read drank a Pirata malt beer, and yes Pirata means Pirate) because the day before I had a sharp prick (that is not the word I want but my English is hurting right now) in my foot for awhile. I had been walking around barefoot in crops because it was muddy. I stepped on a long sharp prick from a stick, which I did not notice until an hour later, after a bath. I had to have the woman I live dig it out with some random needle she had in the house. So naturally I decided to drink to feel better. We headed out to meet the American who had tickets for us.

When we met up with him, he informed us he was actually going with someone who had V.I.P. passes and extra ones. Everything was falling into place, like it does here in Cape Verde. It was uncertain as we pulled up at the concert if we were going to have to buy tickets, or would be given tickets, if there were tickets. It was certain we were way undressed for the occasion. All the Cape Verdeans were wearing tight, stretchy, flashy clothes. All the women had heels on. I had my stained jeans, tye-dye tank tops, and flip flops on. Somehow, we were allowed in. The group we were with split up but we stayed with this awesome Senegalese woman. There were free drinks…which I did not realize, I thought people were buying me drinks. It is probably for the best I did not know the beer was free. This Senegalese woman and us spoke in Creole, none of our first languages but we had some really good conversations as we waited to see if Akon would show up. I asked her about the prayer ritual and the drinking out of a blessed bottle I had accidentally participated in on Sal (turns out it’s just for good health, I am not married to a random Senegalese guy). We talked about the differences between Cape Verdean men, Senegalese men, and American men (it kind of seems like Senegalese men are the best). We talked about her children, her work, etc.

Finally, Akon came on stage. The crowd was so energetic so excited, people were screaming in Creole, French, English. He jumped into the crowd, threw water, took his shirt off. He knows how to perform. He came out in a big plastic ball and rolled throughout the crowd, guided by our eager hands. Us, our new Senegalese friends, and this young Cape Verdean girl who was holding my hand, danced and sang together. During the song “Oh Africa” I had that tingling Wow, I am in Africa feeling made all the more intense by the crowd singing, the flashing stage lights, and the sweat all over me. I lost my cell phone at some point. We tried looking on the floor but there were so many people. After he played we went to the V.I.P. sitting area, without tickets. I pretended to be looking in cleavage to find mine and was allowed to just walk by. We drank some juice and said our good-byes and headed back to the apartment we would be staying at, not before getting our new Senegalese friend’s number and promising to call her.

I woke up this morning with my foot hurting. I couldn’t go back to sleep the pain was too bad. My foot was swollen and I had pinkish red lines of infection. I called our doctor and limped in a cab to go meet her. It was so sweet of her to meet me on a Saturday. Peace Corps does not take foot infections lightly as they have a tendency to cause some major problems for volunteers. She scrapped my foot while we chatted about corn, the dam, and All Saint’s Day which is tomorrow. My foot is feeling much better now and I am still riding on the high from seeing Akon last night. I am now sitting in the PC office sweating because the AC isn’t working but its okay because 1) I have become super Cape Verdean and cold air makes me sick. Yes, I close windows in Hiaces here and 2) I am the only person here and am blasting a 311 Pandora station that would make anyone feel amazing and 3) I am waiting to go eat pizza and discuss the previous night’s festivities with other PCV’s.

Tomorrow there will be a festa/party at the dam in my town. I will go early and help the women skin (is that the word I want?) vegetables and cook food. We will cook all the dishes that use corn. These festas used to be boring but now I love them.

My Pandora station just put on “Wish you were here” and how perfect because I wish all my friends and family back home could be here right now…

The majority of the time I am satisfied with my boring life in Cape Verde. I walk around town, exchange pleasantries about peoples’ families, shell beans, teach English, etc. then go home and absorb myself in all things American. I don’t really share much my own personality with Cape Verdeans, it is a mixture of a cultural and language barrier compounded by the fact I take some time to warm up to people. However, once every few months the feeling strikes me to be a little more outgoing and open myself up to the possibility of friendship with Cape Verdeans. Yesterday was that kind of day. Another PCV and I were visiting the port town trying to figure out some logistics for our computer project. A car with two young Cape Verdeans guys drove past. Per usual they called us “beautiful” and tried to get our attention. For whatever reason, boredom and because he had tattoos, I decided we were going to talk to him. We got into his car and went to this hotel resort that has a beautiful view of the ocean and on certain days you can see the island to the East, Maio. We sat at the hotel, a storm was coming from Praia the capital in the South. The sky was dramatic dark grays and the ocean water very clear. We could see houses on Maio. There was a streak of lightening in the sky, which we hardly ever see here in Cape Verde. We drank Cokes and talked about soccer and sharks. There was a man who worked at the hotel from Tanzania. He told us the convoluted way in which he arrived on Santiago Island and how he came to work at the hotel. The guys we were with convinced him to show us his motorcycle and almost let me ride it (but just ended up making me pose on it while they took photos, awkward). We told the guys we needed to go shopping and attempted to make a quick escape from them but they insisted on giving us a ride. I know the other PCV and I both were feeling slightly worried and possibly judged riding around in this car with these two guys. People talk in Cape Verde. After shopping (where they tried to pay for our groceries but we refused) I said that we needed to go homeThey insisted to drive us back to my house. We stopped and bought coconuts, split them open and poured grog in them. Speeding along, laughing and drinking out of the coconuts, and speaking to one of their friends on the phone in Creole I had strange flashbacks to high school experiences I don’t think I ever had. They stopped at one of my neighbor’s house, who has an impressive drip irrigation system and talked to him about different electronic devices they had in their possession to sell. We were forced to drink sugar cane juice which was bearable because it was cold. At this point we were itching to get to my house. When we finally got there, the family I live with was waiting upstairs. All their eyes were on me. I tried to gracefully explain I could not have these guys come into my house, they did not really persist. The man I live with is well known and even sort of feared. The perfect substitute father figureAnyhow, sometimes I need adventures like this. I always feel safe because I speak the local language and in the towns close to my house, people know me. Like I wrote, it was like a strange flashback to a life I don’t think I lead…it was at least a change of pace.

The rainy season is nearly here in Cape Verde. The crops on the hills are glowing green and the sky is a perfect complimentary blue. I spent a few days working on the quarterly report to the American organization financing the water reservoir project I am here to assist with. By working on the report, I mean listening to Phil Collins with my association’s accountant in a tiny one room office without a bathroom and watching him painstakingly type in Portuguese (I forget what it’s called when people only use one or two fingers to type…that is how nearly everyone in Cape Verde types. They are amazed when they watch me type). Every day or so the power goes out and we stop working. I go back to my house, read a book, watch a movie, chat with my neighbors outside. Time passes. I am not sure if it is a good thing or not, but I have become completely fine with the slow pace of life in Cape Verde. Anytime I am suppose to meet someone in the morning, I can generally assume that will be between 8 and 10 A.M. and it doesn’t matter when they show up because that’s all that I should be doing in that moment. There is always someone else around to talk with about the weather or corn. I used to have a feeling of apprehension walking through the main part of my town knowing I had to exchange greetings with every single person in my town. Now I somewhat like the fact that everyone wants to say “Hello” to me. It’s all about convincing myself to enjoy being watched. It’s the same when I go for a run, getting high fives and blessings from old women while running usually is so amusing I forget to be self-conscious. I have also decided to stop trying to find a new house. Where I live, in a room of someone else’s house, is not what expected or wanted. Either is Cape Verde. I could spend another year attempting to move but there’s no point. The woman I live with is such a sweet lady and she knows how to make a mean plate of rice and beans. My issue had always been that I have no privacy in their house. What I’ve realized is I don’t need privacy… I also feel reconnected with my counterpart, Maria. Her and I were in Praia the other day for a meeting and had lunch together in the market place. She invited me to her daughter’s christening. I had felt detached from her because I was in a hateful phase here but it’s passed, for now. It all comes and goes but I’ve decided to stop giving a fuck about what I am supposed to be doing and enjoying doing what I am doing…

I am not going to write a full entry because I am at the Internet and can´t concentrate with the porn on the computer beside me, but I wanted to write that I will update soon because things are changing. I am on a high right now. The Peace Corps Partnership Program computer project I wrote with three other volunteers has been funded and the computers are arriving soon. I will then be setting up a resource center in my town and teaching computer skills. The local government president yesterday asked me to stay longer in Cape Verde. My language is improving daily...everything is coming up roses for now...I wonder how long it will last

Tuesday was my town’s saints’ day. Each town in Cape Verde has a patron saint and a special day to commemorate the saint. No one goes to work or school, some people go to mass, and everyone eats, drinks, and visits family. I walked up Achada Costa, the mountain community behind my house, with my neighbor Inalida around 9:30 A.M.. We went to Maria’s (my counterpart) family’s house and helped prepare the food. We were making the usual: goat stew with massa (corn spaghetti) and mandioka (yucca root), rice, xerem (corn cooked similar to Middle Eastern couscous), chicken, fijao beans with collard greens and vegetables. I got a surprise phone call from a PCV telling me she was going to pass my town. I hiked back down the mountain to meet her as well as gather chocolates and earrings I brought from America to give to my neighbors.

She and I hiked back up the mountain together. We then proceeded to have the customary multiple lunches that a festa entails. We ate first at Emilia’s (Maria’s family) then at Nana’s (which was the best, turkey with massa!), then finally at Matilda’s (she gave us cake from a box, just like America!). I walked her back down the mountain for her to find a car to go to Peace Corps training. I rested for a few minutes inside my house. I realized I was in the process of getting terrible sunburn, so I took a quick shower and covered myself in sunblock before climbing up the mountain a third time.

On my third and final summit, I began to feel tired. I gave out all the Silly Bandz I brought from the States, they were a huge hit with the kids. I had a juice at one house, gave Tuja from my soccer team a pair of earrings, dealt with some drunks rambling (You are…a beautiful!), and finally made it back to Emilia’s. Maria and I sat outside on stools with kids crawling all over us, both of us too tired to make the forced, trite conversation that is necessary when there isn’t a common language between two persons. The president of our municipal government came. I’ve noticed a pattern with him and parties. He arrives late to all parties in Achada Costa, with an entourage. Everyone who has been up there all day makes a fuss and prepares food for him then we all go sit in the other room while they eat. Once he leaves, everyone relaxes again.

As Inalida and I were leaving we were convinced to have a “cocktail.” I am not exactly sure what it is. I think it might be vermouth? I do not know if that has alcohol in it or not. Anyway we sat and drank. My cup was too full and I was desperate. Somehow Inalida read my mind and told me to leave it on the table. We found a bulelia (free ride) down Achada Costa. Inside my house I laid in my bed. A drunk guy from Santiago, Andrew’s old town, came to the gate outside of my house and told the man I live with that he and I are friends. He said he had fallen in the street and hurt his ankle. He spoke to me in English. I couldn’t be sure if I had met him before or not. I put a bandana on his foot and sent him on his way, supposedly to a grandmother’s house who lives down the road.

My goal this week is to make copies of the financial information for our ADF project. I have been attempting to do this since I’ve been back in country but have had trouble getting the materials. I also need to visit the construction work sites which I have been avoiding. The reason I have been avoiding the sites is that my association is late in paying the workers because we have not yet received our money from the U.S. to pay them. I also need to do some planning for a training session I will give to the new trainees next Tuesday.

This Saturday I will join another PCV in an umbrella march from Praia to a rural mountain town. The walk is supposed to be something like 20 kilometers. It should be pretty killer but a good way to spend a weekend.

I think I am back in the rhythm of life here in Cape Verde. Time continues to pass rapidly. I realized yesterday how I use to dread holidays and parties here but now I like them. I walk around and see everyone in my time. These days pass in a flash.

The rainy season has officially begun and like my neighbors here in Cape Verde, I am thankful. Although the reasons why I am glad it’s raining and the reasons why my neighbors are, are completely different. For me, rain means days hidden inside of my room curled up with hot chocolate and a good book, two hours of T.V. shows on my laptop, letter writing. Rain means stolen days like this one, when the Minister of Agriculture was supposed to visit but cancelled because the roads are too treacherous to travel from Praia. And for my town, heavy rains mean productive crops and bountiful harvests.

Since I arrived back in Cape Verde (about two and half weeks ago) I have been busy, gracias adeus. Being busy has really helped to “matta soledadi de Merka” (literally, kill my sadness for America). My association began construction work to build reservoirs that will siphon water from the dam for irrigation purposes, the day that I left the country. When I returned I spent a few days walking from site to site, observing the workers, taking photos, and talking with the site managers. I have also been assisting Maria (my counterpart) with payroll activities, mostly typing up the handwritten payroll sheets to send to the American organization financing the project. My role is suppose to assist with financial matters, general accounting, which sounds easy enough but with three construction sites and materials purchased constantly it is a bit difficult to distinguish where my responsibilities lie.

A fellow PCV who was a good friend of mine recently left the country. He finished his service last week. He had a “dispida” or going-away party at a sleepy little beach town that I had not visited before. I am going to miss him and “America House” (what we called his place). He also helped with a lot of technical matters in my town, like our solar panels. He left me a user’s manual for it so hopefully I can figure it out…fingers crossed.

In Cape Verde, PCV’s arrive every July while others finishing their two years of service leave. I have not yet met any of the new PCV’s but I will soon when I help with a training session. It is sort of strange phenomenon that people I have become good friends with are leaving and a whole new group of people for me to be friends with have arrived.

I am excited for my second year in Cape Verde. My language skills are decent at this point and the project that I was assigned to has actually begun. Other PCV’s have told me the second year is completely different from your first and almost always more productive.

I have not yet been up to Achada Costa, the mountain community behind my house to visit. I know everyone there will give me a hard time and call me “ingrato” because I have been back for about two weeks and have not yet been up there. The reason I haven’t been there is because I have been busy with work so I think that should pacify the situation. I also be bringing gifts of showy costume jewelry and chocolate. Tuesday is our big Saint’s day/party. There is no work that day and I will spend the day up in Achada Costa eating fijao and xerem until I burst. Vida de Kabo Verde…

Since I will be returning to the United States for vacation at the end of June, I felt obligated to write a blog entry before my trip. When I returned from my trip to the island of Fogo in the beginning of May I was pleasantly surprised by having something that resembled work or an obligation nearly every day for the last month and a half. I helped a micro-credit association from a nearby town do socioeconomic surveys of houses within my town that need repairs. I went to a few meetings with African Development Fund, the American organization responsible for the dam project, my main assignment here. Unfortunately, no official time line for beginning work was established and it is pretty much certain nothing will happen until after rainy season, in September. I attended a two day workshop on fighting poverty (which I found pretty damn useless). My association held a domestic artisan workshop (learning how to crochet, make bags, etc.) and begun a culinary one that will last the next three weeks. My supervisor spoke about the possibility of creating a group to sell jam or ponche (sugar cane liquor flavored with strawberry, coconut, peanut, coffee, etc) at the dam. That is something I would love to get involved with, fruit transformation is a subject of interest for Cape Verde where transportation and preserving produce is an issue. Fruit transformation could be especially successful in the town I live in where we have so many papayas that they go bad. I attempted to climb Pico Antonio, the tallest peak on this island. The last part of the summit was too dangerous so I decided not to complete it. I hope I will get another chance to try it, with the proper mountaineering gear. It was still a decent hike, with a view of almost the entire island, with all the valleys and mountain peaks. It was one of those moments that catches me by surprise here, and I realize how beautiful and exotic this place is. I do not know exactly how I feel about going home. I wish I was going home in Fall or Winter so that I could experience another season, wish I could see the lovely fall leaves in Virginia. Also once this trip is over, I do not know what I will look forward to. When I come back, there will be a new group of volunteers so that will be exciting. It will also be rainy season, a time for seclusion and reading, which I generally enjoy.I know my trip home will be great and that is why I am anxious about, it will make coming back very difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I am excited. Each night I lie in bed imagining the different meals I will eat in America (last night it was chicken tenders and ranch dressing from Cheddars) and think about hot showers, understanding everything in a store, being rude to strangers, and all other amazing American phenomenon.

At the beginning of May I visited the volcano island of Fogo. There was a big festa/party the week of April so a couple of volunteers were visiting. I arrived in Sao Filipe, the capital, the last festa day. The festa was kind of weird, it was centered around horses doing tricks in the middle of the plaza. I personally did not see the appeal. I was informed that this final day most people were tired and the party was not as big as it had been. Sao Filipe itself was a like a smaller version of the capital of the island I live on. However there were noticeably less people moving about: washing clothes, braiding hair, selling produce, etc. In Sao Filipe and for every other part of the island I visited, you could always see the Atlantic Ocean. In Sao Filipe everything was either straight up or straight down since Fogo is a tiny circular island, with the volcano in the middle. There was a perfectly clear view of the island of Brava from Sao Filipe, it seemed close enough to swim to.

The highlight of the trip was the climb up the volcano. We drove from Sao Filipe to Cha das Caldeiras on a long dusty cobblestone road that took hours. Cha das Caldeiras is the town at the foot of the volcano where a fellow PCV lives. There was no dirt ground (I wanted to write grass then realized there’s no grass anywhere in Cape Verde) only black volcanic rock. We spent a night at his house, watched traditional music in a bar by candlelight. I had the honor of dancing with an old man with a cane who afterward gave me a strawberry candy. We woke up early the next day to hike up the volcano. The hike took longer than anticipated. The height did not make me nervous and I did not have much trouble climbing up grappling for rocks. Although, after talking with some friends I think I have a tendency to not realize situations that are dangerous or daunting as a way of avoiding getting freaked out. We had sandwiches at the top and climbed down. When you go down, there are old lava flow fields that you can run down. It was really wild. Later that same day we stupidly decided to go on another hike estimated at 3 hours from Cha das Caldeiras to Moisteros through a riberia filled with fruit trees and views of the ocean. We left too late in the day. It got dark when we were about half way through the hike and when I had decided to separate from the group I was with and do a little trail running. Luckily I met up with the other group and we made it guided by cell phone lights.

The next day I spent in Moisteros, a town on the opposite side of the island from Sao Filipe. There are a lot of deportees from America and several people there spoke English (actually a lot of the people on the entire island spoke English). This made the town feel more American than any other town I’ve visited in Cape Verde. We were able to find several American food products (French vanilla coffee cream, Dijon mustarde, Country-time lemonade). We had planned to go to the ocean but as it tends to be on Fogo, it was way too rough that day and since no Cape Verdeans were in the water we thought it best to not venture in it.

After Moisteros we went to Cova Figueria, a town where were three female PCV’s live. We had a relaxing night with amazing food (enchiladas, brownies, cookies!) and a couple of drinks. We headed back to Sao Filipe the next day and left for our island with goat cheese and coffee (products that Fogo is renowned for) on Saturday. Upon arriving back in Santiago, I felt rejuvenated and ready to work (thanks largely to the advice of one other PCV) and since being back this last week have actually found myself busy. I have been working with the local government visiting houses that need to be repaired before the rainy season, taking photos of damage and surveying the families. Sunday, I am suppose to finally do the first agricultural survey, fingers crossed my counterpart shows up so I can have her help doing it.

I am attempting to buckle down over the next few weeks and get some work done before I head to the U.S. June 28, whether or not it will actually happen is always a great unknown. I will say that I am feeling more content these days. The man that I live with has been in Portugal so it has been just me and the older woman, Dominga. We have been eating lunch together every day, roasted coffee together and ground it. Soccer has always been helping me relieve stress and we have a tournament beginning next week. We had a game a few weeks ago on a sand/dirt field and I played much more forcefully than when we play on the cement/plaque floor and my teammates were all impressed. I cut up my leg badly on rocks there which since has served as a battle scar and my teammates are constantly looking at to see how it’s healing. I was congratulated the next day in Praia. It took me a few minutes to understand what the man was congratulating me for, when people from my town approach me outside of town it can be disorienting.

I am spending today relaxing in my house, I did some laundry and plan to study for the GRE. The power went out about an hour ago so I no longer have the option to procrastinate and watch movies on my computer. I am planning to go watch the boys’ soccer game later in town and do some grocery shopping.

It will never feel normal to have to greet every single person I pass on the street. In the U.S. I am not even from a big city, I am from the suburbs. A simple wave will suffice for neighbors I have known my entire life. Here in Cape Verde the briefest dialogue goes: Good morning/afternoon/evening, how are you? How is your health? Your family? Your family’s health? Your work? It is exhausting. Also there is generally some commentary about how you have not visited that family in a long time and how you are ungrateful. A couple of weeks ago another PCV spent the night at my house. We went to bed around 9:45 P.M. I put in my earplugs to block out the dogs barking, roosters crowing, and neighbors shouting. Every night I sleep with my window open, fitfully. During a normal night I get up to close it and re-open it 2 or 3 times. The reason being there are no bars in my window and I live on the first floor of a house and did I mention I already had one stalker? So this particular night, I am just about sleep and I hear movement outside near the gate close to my room. This is not too alarmingly, sometimes the dog or the wind makes noises, but I notice it and feel a bit on edge. Then someone says something to me, I think it is the other PCV saying a person is entering the window. I jolt awake and scream “WHAT” to realize what is being said is that “Lus dja ben” (The power has come back) by the sweet old woman I live with. According to the other PCV I sounded really angry. When I woke up in the morning she was standing outside my heavy cement door, as soon as she hears us in the room talking, she asks how I woke up and mentions she is going to the next town over to see her family. There was a payapa in my kitchen. I have had a few other incidents with her like this. At first I was so adverse to living with her and husband. They are both actually very hospitable towards me, constantly giving me payapas and kataxupa. I have felt sick (think I have the grippe, what everyone here calls the flu, and says they have whenever they have any kind of ailment or common cold) the last few days and have been spending a lot of time alone in my room. The woman I live with has came into my room a few times when I am in bed, without knocking. It startles me every time. She has given me headache medicine and scented water that you inhale and rub on your forehead, it smells like that rub you put on your chest as a child when you had a respiratory sickness. I hate mornings in this country. I try to wake up early enough to go running, come home and have coffee, before my day really begins. However the day begins so early here. I wake up to the random shouts and screams that are so commonplace here. People here are loud. There is no way around that. It makes me quieter, self-conscious, and continuously desirous of spending time alone. I have lived with people like this before and it always felt exhausting. That high energy, that hyper nature, constant communication makes me want to hide inside and nap. I am frustrated because a simple report of how donated money has been spent is over-due. Receipts and statements continue to be lost. I can’t help find them because I never had knowledge of them in the first place. A pattern is emerging where I meet up with people, ask about the report, and a problem arises that postpones work yet another day. I have no actual role in the report itself, aside from seeing that it is done. I have learned that the project I am here to work on, is actually in it’s first phrase, the construction period. The project is three years long I am only here for two. At this point we have one of two reservoirs constructed. We now need a technician to come survey the first reservoir and make sure it was completed and make any necessary changes. We then need to have other contractors bid to complete the work on the other two reservoirs, set up a committee to consider the various contractors and decide which team we want to construct the reservoirs. There is no way this process will take any less than 7-8 months, in my opinion, and keep in mind during the rainy season (roughly July through September no work can be done and there’s the possibility of previous work being destroyed). I am sort of depressed about that. My Cape Verdean friend here, who lived in the U.S. for several years and is my sort of confindant here, told me he thinks the best ways Peace Corps can help Cape Verde is in terms of medicine and education. Teaching English here has been a frustrating experience for me and I think a lot of it has to do with because I am not teaching in a school system. At least in the school system, students attend class with somewhat regularity and have had the same number of years of instruction. Every month or so I am reminded I need to go to the high school to form an after-school English homework help time. However when I told people in my association this idea, they got upset and told me that I am not here to teach English. Frustrating. March is proving to be a frustrating month, but in the beginning of May I will be going on vacation to the volcano island of Fogo so that will be a nice escape...

I found a Cape Verdean women´s soccer team in my town to play on. I went to practice last night and scored a goal. I can not even begin to explain how happy I am to be playing soccer. It would require too much time, reveal too many idosyncraises and just be weird. Anyway so the phrase "I can not even begin to explain how happy I am to be playing soccer" will have to suffice.

In other news, mice/rats are beginning to toy with my sanity. I see them out of the corner of my eye all the time. They chew holes in bags of rice and kamoka (toasted corn flour, when mixed with milk and sugar it tastes like Smacks...it´s basically Cape Verdean cereal) and eat my assortment of bandanas. I know I am becoming more Cape Verdean when nothing gives me more satisifaction then killing a mouse with my shoe and calling the dog to finish the job...then maybe, depending on my mood, hitting the dog. I swear I am not becoming ruthless, people here have a different relationship to animals.

Yesterday the new Prime Minister came to visit the dam in my town. Several important people from other ministries, television crews, etc. where there. I was told we were having a farmers´association meeting and was wearing a shirt covered in bleach. Typical. 3 of my neighbors today told me they say me on the news. During our training, PC staff repeatedly talked about how PCV´s are known world-wide for our less than professional appearences.

There´s talk of a new house for me, but I won´t jinx myself by writing about it...

All the flights to São Nicolau were full and the boat was mysteriously "not working." It seemed as though this year I would celebrate CarnivaleMardi Gras on Santiago, the island I live on, which traditionally does not have a very elaborate celebration for the holiday. I had resolved myself to the idea I´d be here while Jon continued to spend all his energy searching for a way for us to get up North. Miraculously he found a last minute flight where we would arrive a couple days before the big festa days Saturday and Sunday and leave before the ultimate festa day on Tuesday. The night before we left we were wide awake with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads...or something like that. To our shock, the cab driver we called actually came and picked us up at 4 A.M.. Our first flight was to the island of Sal. We had a 2 hour lay-over there. We had breakfast and walked around with one of the PCV´s who lives there. We began to feel our very first preliminary pangs of island envy although we really only had enough time to sense a subtle change in the air that somehow indicated we were on a different island that was just somehow...better off than ours.

From the plane, with our first glimpse of São Nicolau, island envy really began to take hold. The island is made of much taller, more drastically cut mountain formations, the ocean looks cleaner, and everything greener and livelier. The first two days we were there we went on 2 long hikes. The first was up Monte Gorrdo, the tallest point on that island. That part of the island is generally cool and foggy as it is basically in a cloud, but that day the sun was hot and unyielding. We, of course, did not bring any water. We staggered up to the top, the view was worth it. We could see the inhabited islets Rizo and Branco as well as the island São Vincente.

The next day we hiked around that mountain, near the base. One side was lush and green the other brown and dry with occasional ancient lava flows that left piles of silty black sand. This side looked like the American Southwest...or so I imagine as I have never been there.

On the third day we went to the port town in São Nicolau and met up with some other PCV´s who were just arriving. Even in this more urban part of the island, the streets felt friendlier, the people less threatening than anywhere on Santiago Island. On the beach we watched Senegalese guys doing intense leg work-outs and the sun set. We had a decadent dinner (creamy tuna!). That was yet another sleepless night as certain people convinced others that drinking grog until the sun rose was a good idea. The following day, Carnivale and beach-camping logistics took up most of the day. We went to the pier and watched fishermen bring in boat fulls of bright red, purple and brown spotted fish, octopus, and a number of things I could not identify. A group left to hike to the beach cover to camp around 3 P.M.. I stayed back and left with the second group around 8 P.M.. We hiked about 2 hours in the dark through a barren desert terrain that brought to mind weird thoughts that seemed like lonely memories of Arabia and camels in the desert. I thought we were going to get horribly lost but we had cake and honey ponche (sweeter grog) so I wasn´t especially worried. Somehow we found our way, occasionally walking through high tide waves. By the time we arrived the time we arrived, fish had been caught and most all the alcohol drank. It was the perfect place to camp, with a rock cove overheard and a bonfire to keep us warm. That night some of us went in the water to swim with bioluminescent shrimp. Whenever there was movement, thousands of shrimp glowed. With the matching stars overhead, I was glad I had braved the cold and dark ocean.

The next day we swam and played ultimate frisbee. We hiked back to the port town to prepare to travel to the center of the island, to the town where the Carnivale parade and festivities would take places. Saturday the first fest night, energy and spirits were high and doused in glitter thanks to Jon. The boys who would be wearing costumes and dancing in the parade left earlier. The rest of us headed out to the main plaza around 11 P.M. and waited. Impatience set in shortly and we went to a bar, alternating between coffee and beers. The parade did not begin until 3 A.M.. The parade is unlike anything I have witnessed. Every year there are two "teams" that "compete" against one another. PCV´s always play for Cuppa Cabana. The other team was Strella Azul. Within each team, the members are divided into age groups. The age groups have their own color, elaborate costumes, and a dance they perform as they move down the narrow cobblestone streets toward to main plaza. The music at Carnivale is deafening, the streets packed, fireworks shot over-head and ash falls on your head, and the grog is free flowing. That first night we were out until 6 A.M.. When the parade was finished all of us (about 15 people) went back and passed out in the same room.

The second night, Sunday, the parade began earlier around midnight. At the end in the plaza, a dance party emerged. A young girl who somehow knew my name (I either met her our first day when we went to a PCV´s English class and I asked 2 young girls where I could...relieve myself, or she is from the island of Santiago) grabbed me to dance with her and would not let go. I was cautious not to separate from the other PCV´s as I had no cell phone and my sense of direction is seriously lacking. We went to an after party that was strangely reminiscent of an unpopular lounge that plays music that is outdated by 20 years and only sad single 40 year old men with sports cars are dancing.

Jon and I said our good-byes on Monday, sorry to be leaving the day before the biggest and last festa day on Tuesday. At the airport our flight was delayed with no information as to why or for how long so we drank coffees and sat bleary-eyed. The flight was cancelled, we returned back and spent the day reading, lounging, eating, and relaxing with the other PCV´s. Tuesday it was delayed again but it did take off, we arrived in Sal late and missed the connecting flight to Praia. The airline told us the flight later than day and tomorrow were both booked. We called the PCV who lives on Sal and attempted to summon energy and desire to celebrate Carnivale at another huge party. Two of Jon´s co-workers who had been on the same flight as way informed us there was a flight back, but it would go Sal to Boa Vista then to Santiago. The four of us nearly missed the flight and when my name was announced over-head I could only barely understand my last name, "Thomas."

Back on our island...it felt different. The sky was grayer, the ground brown and red and covered in trash. Graffiti everywhere and menacing young guys walking around. It felt like we were back in Africa. An indeterminable amount of time we spent with our friends locked in Jon´s apartment eating everything we could find and missing São Nicolau. Returning to site I was pleasantly surprised my neighbors remembered I was going to São Nicolau. They were disappointed I missed CinezaAsh Wednesday when Cape Verdeans traditionally eat dry fish with coconut and collard greens.

I´ve been back for a week now and getting back into my routine. A run and coffee in the morning really stabilizes me. I have been spending time translating poorly written proposals at the municipal government. It has made me feel productive.

What else....I went fishing. That was an interesting experience I am unfortunately not at liberty to write about. My house now has power 24 hours a day so I am enjoying cold papaya and using my computer all the time...

Last week us Small Enterprise Development volunteers had our in-service training. All the other volunteers living on other islands came back to Santiago. It was basically a 4 day party with 7-8 hours of informational sessions during the day. A few of those nights were out of control, I am not going to go into details but let's just say we all have a lot of love for each other and a lot of pent-up need to socialize with Americans....and we broke a bed. The End.

Coming back to site I felt a mixture of emotions. I was sad to be leaving the other volunteers but felt so missed by my neighbors I was glad to come home. Very strange how this place is beginning to feel like my home.

Some odd things are happening around my house. The second night I was back my neighbor's gas stove sort of blew-up in her face, I don't really understand what happened. Lots of people were outside crying and wailing. I went out there and stood with her two little girls, two of my favorite kids in town.

The man that I live with also kicked out the niece that had been living with us. This made the woman I live with really upset. Apparently he has done this before in the past. It caused several of my neighbors to gossip with me about how they truly feel about him. Now that my language skills are getting better I am having to learn how to deal with the neighborhood gossip...

In about two weeks I will be visiting the island of Sao Nicolau for Carnivale... several days of drinking, glitter, costumes, and parades. I can't wait...

After a string of bad days, things are looking up. The week before this I spent a lot of time inside my house, avoiding my neighbors and feeling lonely and depressed.

Today I met with the English Language coordinator at the high school. I went to his 12th grade English class. He teaches language around themes rather than grammar rules or structures. His class was about human rights and his students were reading an article about the Taliban. I was impressed by his forward way of teaching. I told him I want to create a kind of English Language club to give students an opportunity to practice speaking in English and learn about American culture. He seemed excited about the idea. Tomorrow he is going to put pictures about human rights outside of the school where students play soccer and basketball (am I forgetting my English, the Portuguese word is polivalente) and see what sentences his students can come up. They are also going to learn "Where is the love” by the Black Eyed Peas. I explained to him today about the Bloods and Cryps and how in most schools in America students cannot wear bandanas because of their relation to gangs.

I am meeting Cape Verdeans who really love the English language. It really makes me appreciate growing up in an English speaking country and learning it as a child. He told me he thinks English is a rich, beautiful language because of the relationship between verbs and prepositions, the structures called phrasal verbs. It is like how I wrote “Things are looking up” or the phrase “I hope you get over it.” The Portuguese language does not have structures like that. As Americans we take English for granted. We do not realize how dynamic and powerful of a language it is. That people all over the world want to learn it, if only to understand all the films and rap music Americans make.

Today was a good day where I walked around Joao Teves (the main part of town) and knew most everybody. I sat and ate a fresh freschina with a woman who works in another community association. We talked about our weekends. I stopped by the Danish social improvement organization in town to make plans to come on Monday to talk about having a Carnivale celebration for children in town based on an environmental theme. I felt like I had a purpose, places to go and people that I knew. The only low point of the day was my supervisor telling me I looked more feminine today because I had a skirt and insisted on "Da-u beijos," giving me kisses on both cheeks. I brushed that aside, thats nothing compared to some other guys here. I am learning to have a thicker skin. These days make up for the ones I spend nervously inside reading book after book by candlelight.

Wednesday is my in-service training. It means I will get to see all the other Small Enterprise Development volunteers and hear about their experiences. It also means 3 days out of site and being able to take hot showers...amazing. Hopefully I will also gain some information on project planning and implementation. I know one topic will be small scale gardening and permaculture projects which I think might be useful in Orgaos.

My first Christmas away from home...it was weird. Like my entire PC experience it was highs and lows. Except these ones were more concentrated, more intense.

Christmas Eve I went early in the afternoon to a PCV's house nearby. I had to bring the dog I am watching for another PCV who is spending the holidays in America. The dog is proving to be a huge hassle. She is almost a year old and is quite big and so it's hard to bring her places. I worry about leaving her at my house alone though since I live along a main road. There were about 12 PCV's at one house Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During the evening we made a huge potluck dinner. That was pretty fun. It did not feel very much like Christmas though which was probably for the best. The next day most of us stayed. We ran out of gas while we were cooking our Christmas lunch. That kind of sent me over the edge. There was so much cooking, dirty dishes, alcohol, people and dogs, people who hadn't showered in days, etc. Some of us watched Hook, I fell asleep and took a much needed nap. When I woke up I was feeling a little better. We finished making a late lunch/dinner then opened our secret Santa gifts. I received a yoga mat which I am super happy about. We even found a Christmas tree left by other generations of PCVs.

Christmas Day was hectic with so many people there, so many big personalities (good call Samantha), so many different emotions throughout the two days. I also had the responsbility of watching the dog, who is a puppy and not very well trained.

I find here in Cape Verde I am not how I use to be in the U.S. At home I loved going out to the bar with my friends and having a few drinks. Here I am always tired, stressed out, and dehydrated. This makes me not want to drink. Maybe that's a good thing? I am feeling a bit depressed over the last few days, understandably because of Christmas. My neighbors were all busy celebrating with their families. I came back today and was feeling bitter that PC placed me in a house with only 4 neighbors. Why couldn't they place me in the valley where I'd have 15 families or up the mountain with 30 families? Instead there's only the 4 houses around me...and they are all related and I think I made an enemy. One of my neighbors spends most of the year working in America and comes back to CV during American winter. He gets drunk and drives really fast. He gave me and some friends a ride one day almost killing us and I yelled at him in English.

Anyway, hopefully New Years will be better. I will leave the dog at home for my family to watch. I think we are going to camp at Tarrafal, a beach town up North. Should be fun to ring in the New Year camping on a beach...although I sort of wish I could be spending it in VA at Jenny's apartment...or Rock It...

I can't wait until the week after New Years when the kids return to school. This means people will come to my English classes again and I am going to start going with the maid/niece to Portuguese class twice a week. I need this structure to my day. I have sadly realized the real problem here, when you really get lonely is when you can speak the language but you don't have a single damn thing to say to anyone because your life is so different. I've seen it with the PCV's who have been here for a year. They know everyone, know the language, but don't really have geniune conversations or friendships because there is so little middle ground. Bummer.

At least I found my favorite chocolate cookies today...small victories

I wonder if you ever stop being a celebrity when you are a Peace Corps volunteer living in Africa. Do the kids ever stop chanting your name excitedly and playing with your hair? Or lining up to give you high-fives on your morning run? Do your neighbors eventually stop giving you eggs, beans, and peanuts?

I am sure my feelings are equivalent to other celebrities. Some days I bask in it. These days I let the adoration and love wash over me and I feel elated. Other days I wish people would stop staring at me. It’s as though the entire town is anxiously awaiting my next movement. Then once it happens, everyone knows immediately (for example: I heard you did your laundry today and your fingers are bleeding! I heard you do not know how to cook fish! I heard you went running today! etc.)

I have received two love letters, written in half Portuguese and half French. Most likely from a mainlander (mainland Africa) who writes that he sees me running in the morning. I composed one back expressing that I am not interested. Hopefully this will put a stop to the letters. It is kind of un-nerving but nothing to get worried about at this point. Our security officer is a great guy.

It is a series of highs and lows. There are few in-between moments. I think I had one the other day. I was lying on the mattress in my “sitting room” reading a book and I realized that I felt comfortable. I have not had this feeling before. It is really strange how things can become familiar without your realization. I think it had something to do with the way the sunlight was coming in the window, it was like an autumn sunlight. I had this feeling again later today walking down the mountain of Achada Costa. They are constructing a pipe system to have water in their houses on the mountain so the path has been ripped up and the dirt is loose and it is very easy to lose your footing. As I stumbled several times careful not to break the two eggs I had been given during my visit, I thought how weird it was that I accepted this as ordinary. If I was in America I think I would bitch about how difficult it was to walk up and down.

I began to teach “Jingle Bells” to my class on top of the mountain, in Achada Costa. Unfortunately, the day that I started teaching it, for reasons unbeknownst to me, was not a good day to so. I was in typical Cape Verdean fashion 30 minutes late to class. This was because I had gone into town/João Teves to wait for copies of photos I had been promised the day before would be ready by the afternoon. Again, in typical Cape Verdean fashion the photos were not ready. In fact the people left for lunch and never returned to open the shop that afternoon, I was informed by my friend who owns the mini-market next door. At least I got to hang out in her store, drink a Larjana (think imitation Fanta), and watch the basic Cape Verdean channel in the back. There was an infomercial about breast exams. Let me tell you, people are not modest in Cape Verde. A woman was topless, wearing a Bob Marley panu (or saraong) around her waist, and grouping herself. I am not sure why I was surprised. Nudity is big here, especially being topless.

This Friday I am going to a Christmas party primary school in Levada. It should be fun, I love all the kids there. The PCV’s here on Santiago are going to spend Christmas together in São Domingos. We are doing Secret Santa. We all also probably make a nice meal for Christmas Eve. I am anxious for December to be over….ready to start a new year.

Feliz Natal e boa sorte para o ano novo!

I thought I would mention...if any of you are looking for tickets to Cape Verde the cheapest ones will be on the airline TACV. The airport closest to me is RAI.

Here is TACV's contact information in Quincy, MA

617-472-2431

617-472-2227

E-mail: dboston@tacv.aero

Come visit!

Last night the peanut room flooded. I was the first to find out so I told the woman I live with. Her, her niece and I put the peanuts in buckets, sacks, whatever we could find. It was still raining and was pretty cold. It was too bad I had already taken a bath in the rain earlier. No kidding, water is so scarce in this country so when it falls from the sky like a shower people go outside with their soap and make the most of it. I also put my big bucket for laundry and any other container I could find outside to collect water.

When it rains in Cape Verde, people do not leave their houses. It rained hard today. I spent all day inside my room except going outside to eat a freschina (sort of popsicle thing) with the niece and to take my rain bath. I spent the day cleaning, arranging my books, and putting up photos. It feels a little more like a living place now. Sort of like a dorm I guess. Rain days are mental health days for me. I can stay inside and not feel guilty about not going outside making an effort to meet everyone and practice my language skills.

I had hoped that after a month I would have an established pattern here, have an idea of the type of work I am going to be doing. No such thing. Generally in the morning I wait for my counterpart to come down the mountain where she lives and tell me her plans for the day. Some days we go to the agricultural association office where I use the Internet and she does paperwork. These are the best days. Other days she takes me to my supervisor/other counterpart’s office in the local government. These days I do not like. He knows some English and likes to practice it with me, I can never understand him. He also is attempting to teach me Portuguese but it is difficult as he can not fully explain things to me in English. Often, my counterpart (the woman) will send a neighbor to act as a messenger and tell me something that takes my full concentration to only vaguely understand (she is already at the office I should meet her, she went to the next town today, she is taking her son to the doctor, etc.) The days that are the best/worst/most interesting are the ones where I go out into the community to meet people.

These days I sort of wander around and have people call out to me. I go in, eat corn, talk about corn, talk about the heat, and patiently answer question about America (does America have rain? do you like America or Cape Verde more? do you eat corn in America?) and about myself (why don’t you have kids? why aren’t you married? do you want to date a Cape Verdean man?). Yesterday I went to the house of a married older couple. We drank wine, eat goat, and talked about why America is rich. I explained as best as I could in my broken Creole that there are some people in America who want to keep whatever money and resources they have for their own benefit and then there are others who want to help people. We also talked about Bush, Iraq, oil, and Obama. This is going to sound so un-P.C. but having a black president has done wonders for Americans living and working abroad. This type of day is exhausting. My part of town is sort of in between two mountain ranges and always hot. I feel pretty regularly dehydrated and have started taking electrolytes so hopefully it will get better. The people are really friendly and never want me to leave. In America I was never that social so I get overwhelmed here. Although at the end of days like this, of intense integration, I feel accomplished and happy.

My town is huge. There are between 15-21 zones depending on who you ask. I live a 15 minute truck ride away from the main part of town that has the school, a few markets, bars, the police station, youth center, etc. Where I live the houses are spread out along a main road, some are down a valley, and there a few communities up mountains. I am glad I do not live in the main business section but where I live integrating is difficult as the houses are far apart from one another.

My days are full of extreme highs and lows. There is hardly an in-between. Some times I am so lonely, miserable, and can not stand the thought of living here for 2 years. When the dog of the people I live with came into my room and took my iPod from under my mosquito net that was tucked into my bed I was ready to go home. Other times when I am having late night talks with the niece in her bedroom, or picking peanuts off branches by hand with old ladies, or swimming in the rain water tank, or having little girls braid my hair, I feel excited to be part of a new community and have all these people who want to learn about me.

I have been at my site where I will be living and working for the next two years for about two weeks now. When I first got here...it was horrible. You get dropped off, no food water toilet paper and no idea where to get these basic items, and are left by yourself. You are pretty much completely alone, tired, overwhelmed. I had no cell phone service. I think I laid on my bed and cried. At least I had sheets.

I live essentially on the bottom floor of an older couple´s house. They are sweet but always in my business. The woman gives me bread, payapa, and likes to stand and touch my stomach or hold my hand (Cape Verdeans are much more touchy than Americans).

The first couple of days were like that. I would go to the argiculture association office or the local government offices where I will be working. Everyone spoke so much faster than they did at my homestay and a lot of them spoke to me in Portuguese. Most mornings I was on the verge of tears feeling overwhelmed, confused, and really hot (it is hotter here than where I was living before).

Yesterday, things got better. A PCV who has been here for a year came and visited my site and said how green it was, how tall the corn was. He and I went up a mountain behind my house and met the community up there. It is a lot smaller and less well-off than my house and the neighbors around me. The people up there were much more friendly and I felt like that place was where I would meet people and integrate in this town. I am getting to know some people. I picked corn the other day with my neighbor and a little girl goes running with me most nights.

So far as work goes, my first project will be using money from the African Development Fund. The only dam in Cape Verde is in my town. My job will be water management, deciding who gets to use the water and how much. Most of it will be used for drip irrigiation.

I don´t really know what I am going to be doing after that. I am suppose to be working for an argiculture association, the local government, and the youth center. My first month here at site the priority is learning the language and integrating anyway.

Every day gets easier and I feel a little more comfortable. For me I can´t think that I am going to be here for two years that is just too strange. I can only accept that I am here each day.

On Saturday I officially swore in as a PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer). Like most all my time in country it seemed more like I was just watching it than having it actually happen. It is a good feeling, all technical sessions and language is finished. After the ceremony we went to a party in Praia. It was a lot of fun, drank too much wine, listened to American music, and danced. Sunday hung out around Praia. The PCVs living on other islands moved this weekend. It was really sad to see them go, our group is pretty tight knit. Compared to previous years' PCVs we have spent a lot more time together and have all become close. I am glad to be staying on Santiago with the most PCVs living here.

I move to my new home on the 23rd. We have a conference with our counteparts on Tues and Weds. Moving is going to be hectic I am sure, having to set up a gas contract and find out where to buy water and groceries. My home is in a beautiful mountainous and right now, green part of Santiago.

I want to let other people use the computer, just wanted to write a quick update to let everyone know everything is going well here. I am nervous but ready for the next step....

Power has been out here for almost 2 weeks. In the U.S. when the power is out for one night, it´s kind of fun. You light candles, tell stories, makes smores (maybe only those of us who lived in 46666). In KV it´s a pain the ass. Cooking by candlelight, cleaning, I don´t even attempt bathing. It has actually been a pretty frustrating time. It is the time in PST (Preservice Training) in which trainees start to want and need their personal space. It´s been two weeks of beers and tears, in a non-melodramatic sense. Crying is one topic PCVs can start a normal conversation with. There a lot of topics PCVs chat about that we would not in the U.S., including but not limited to: Crying, dirrhea, vomitting, shitting in your pants, children peeing on you, rashes, flies that burrow into your skin, etc. etc.

On a totally different topic, I will be living on this island (Santiago) for the next two years working with a farmer´s association.

Also if you want to read a fellow trainee´s blog who updates a lot more than I do his link is

www.joshinafrica.com

More later...

El kre nos kafe- This simple phrase has changed my life here in Kabu Verde. It means, she wants your group´s coffee. My host family had been giving me instant coffee until the PCV from last year came to visit and told them that I want the real coffee they drink (which is grown here on the next ilha South, Fogo). My life here in Kabu Verde, as I imagine it is with all PCVs in all countries, a constant emotional rollercoaster. Throughout the day I am happy, sad, angry, elated, bitter, and a series of other emotions.

A typical day is like this, I wake up at 6:45 take a bucket bath, eat breakfast (bread, fried oily egg, fried flour, or a plain cookie, etc) then go to another PCT´s house for language class at 8 AM. This is where the ride begins, language can be fun, informative and useful...I can feel like I am really understanding, integrating into the culture. OR it can be totally confusing, boring, and make me doubt being here. We break for lunch (rice, fish or chicken or pig, and beans) I watch Portuguese soap operas with my 3 sisters then go a technical session with the other SED (Small Enterprise Development) PCTs in the city Assomada about 20 minutes away. After this session which is usually about community development, safety or health, etc. I hang out with other PCTs until 6:30 PM or so and then reluctantly head home. My family eats dinner around 7:30 PM (same food as lunch usually) then watches soap operas and the news if we have power. If we don´t, which lately we have not had, my sisters and I make bracelets by candlelight and I practice my Creole with them, talking at about the level of a 4 year old (I want, I need, I think, I have). At 8:30 or 9 PM I go into my room to read, journal, and kill cockroaches. I think about writing letters but this is usually the time of day I´m not on the go and am prone to feel homesick.

Here are some highlighted experiences I want to share

-Finding a bag of 7 female puppies left in the street. No one here wants female because they keep reproducing

-Stepping on a sea urchin and getting a spine in my foot. Someone else´s host mom digging it out with a needle while the family watched

-Nearly dying attempting to forage our own path up a mountain, knocking boulders down a couple hundred feet almost hitting people and their houses

-On clear days to the West you can see the ilha of Fogu and the volcano on it, to the East you can see the ilha of Maio

-I was sick and went to the local hospital, the doctor was really callous and dismissive. I was told I had strep and given antibotics, I think I had a sinus infection and am fine now

Today I am going to demystification, which means another PCT and I go to stay with a current PCV and go to her work, see what she does for fun, cook our own food, and unwind a bit. Next Wednesday we will find out our placements, the islands where we´ll be living and working for the next two years. September 19 I say goodbye to my host family and community, officially swear in and begin service. I´m definitely looking forward to having my own place and not having to live out of a suitcase!

I have been in country for a little over a week now and it seems surreal. I feel like I´m at camp. I´m living with a family in a rural village near the mountains in Assoamada on the island of Santiago. My family works very hard each day to try to get the unproductive soil to produce some kind of vegatation. Water is an extremely scarce resource and we have to use it very careful. Bucket bath water is re-used to flush toilets. Each week day I have language class with 3 other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) usually all day. I´m generally too exhausted to be homesick not the mention the fact the realization I´m going to be here for 2 years has yet to sink in. My phone number is posted on Facebook, Skype me if you can. I´ll try to write more later I have to go to a training session.

Ti Logu!

After a full year of complications with my application, multiple doctor visits, scant information, and always being uncertain as to if I was actually going to be accepted as a Peace Corps volunteer, I am almost ready to begin my journey. This Monday July 13 2009 I will fly from D.C. to Boston for an orientation on Tuesday July 14 2009. That evening we will fly out and arrive in Praia the captial city located on Santiago Island the morning of July 15 2009 where I will be living and working for two years. Cape Verde is a small island archipelago about 200 miles off the coast of Senegal, West Africa.

Right now it seems surreal. How is it possible that next week I won't be waking up to freshly brewed coffee in the house I've lived in my entire life, getting ready for work at Barnes & Noble the job I've had for the past four years? According to my college roommate/best friend/soul mate Samantha who is serving as a PCV in Ukraine right now it takes quite some time for it to set in that this is real, this is where you will be living and working for two years.

Packing for two years is horrible. There's no way it can't be horrible. It's overwhelming. Luckily for me in Cape Verde it is relatively easy to find basic amenities. Regardless I'm still freaked out about packing the right items and am taking this out on my poor cuticles, chewing them relentlessly. Despite my nerves, I'm excited. I will be serving for two years as an Environmental Education and Small Enterprise Development volunteer. The volunteers in my sector and I will be working with the Cape Verdean government and local people to set up, maintain, and protect critical ecosystems.

I will miss my friends and family greatly and sincerely hope everyone stays in contact, writes, and those who can visit me. In the last year since I've graduated college I've made some great friends and have really enjoyed myself. It's hard to leave this behind, it feels like the timing is off but I also know that there's never a time that feels right to leave your family, home, job, etc.

I must get back to packing and spazzing out...the next time I post I should be in Cape Verde!