I'm a month late now, but here is the Summer Camp update. The last two weeks of September Peace Corps and a local development association called ADDK hosted a youth leadership in my village, Dindefelo. This is the third year that the camp has taken place; it was originally started by PCVs who wanted to create an american-style summer camp for Senegalese kids. This year was a huge jump; we had 75 teenagers from the region of Kedougou staying at the campements in town for two weeks of leadership activities. They were separated into four groups; two groups of first-years, and a group each of second and third year returning campers. I have to say, I was a little skeptical about camp going into it--I sort of got thrown into the project and helped to do the scheduling, but wasn't sure how it would actually go to have so many kids for two weeks. And there was definitely a certain amount of mayhem, but overall I think it went really well, there were some moments from camps of the make-your-peace-corps-service variety.

The third years doing challenge course--there was an entire curriculum of challenge course activites, which were meant to make the groups work together, identify leaders, and be able to discuss what qualities a leader and a team should have.

This is Karumba, a regional AgroForestry PCV's counterpart, who came to teach the campers gardening, how to make tree nurseries, outplanting, composting, and grafting. The first-years also learned how to make Neem lotion, which is a mixture of soap and the leaves from a tree here that works as mosquito repellent. Once they had made it, they bottled it and marketed it to sell in the weekly market. The second-years focused on nutrition, and made a flour of millet, beans, and peanuts that could be used to make nutritional porridge, and sold that in the market. The third-years got journalism training, and put out a camp newsletter at the end of the two weeks. It was really awesome to see kids throwing themselves into the activities.

Part of our funding for camp was HIV/AIDS education related, so I did an hour-long class on the transmission of the disease and another hour-long class on prevention with each of the groups. We played games that illustrated how HIV can be transmitted through a community and had discussions about how to prevent HIV, but also why prevention is important. It was challenging to make lesson plans on such a sensitive topic, but the kids were really attentive, and asked lots of questions.

This is a picture of the other session that I led; creative writing. Anyone who knows me knows that writing is a huge part of my own life, and so I was the most nervous to see how this session would go. In America it's completely normal for kids to be creative, we tend to encourage it. In the Senegalese system, creativity gets squashed pretty early. In school, kids mostly learn how to copy from the board, memorize facts, and repeat them. All that stuff we learned in grade school about how to think and solve problems is nowhere in this educational system. Which meant that the kids at camp had no real background for this kind of activity, but that's what camp is supposed to be about, so we gave it a go.

I picked up regular objects from the woods; a rock, a funny-looking plant, a berry. At the start of the class we talked about what makes one kind of writing different than another, and then I held up a rock and asked what it was. Everyone said, a rock. Then I told them, "now it's no longer a rock. It's a giants tooth. There was a giant that lived on top of the mountain over there, and he got in a fight with another giant, and his tooth fell all the way down the mountain into Dindefelo." Lots of blank stares. I did the same thing with a few of the other objects, and by the third or fourth try, the kids started chipping in, offering other options for what each object could be. Granted, a lot of them were cow-related, but it was still pretty awesome to see them start to get it. I gave each kid a picture that I'd cut out of a magazine and told them to write a story that went with the picture--anything they wanted. And I was amazed to see every single kid get their picture, put their heads down, and immediately start writing. At the end some of them read their stories out loud, and some of them were great--one kid had gotten a picture of the blue person from Avatar, and he wrote a story about how it was a magic marabou (a marabou is like a muslim healer/preacher person) who lived in the woods. One other kid got a picture of Erika Badu with tatoos and silver hair, and he wrote a whole backstory about how she was a dethroned princess. It was a really awesome moment for me as a volunteer; to be able to effectively transmit the idea of something I really care about, especially because I can't imagine what my own life would be like without writing teachers.

Here's a picture of everybody busily writing:

This is Thomas, a volunteer in Kedougou who actually just went home--he was the volunteer who was in charge of camp, he's hugely responsible for camp happening at all. This picture was from the egg drop; we had the campers construct protection for their eggs from nature and then dropped them from the top of the latrines to see whose egg would survive.

These are the volunteers who helped with camp, we snuck off to the waterfall on the last day. Left to write that's Kellen, Meera, Eric, David, Frank, and me.

Yay camp!

After some careful consideration, I decided that it'd be better to wait awhile and post when I had something more encouraging to write. So here we are!

First, the family update. I don't want to get into all the messy details, but things seem to have gotten worse and then better. And if not better, then at least...different. I went to IST and talked to Peace Corps about what was happening, and they did everything they could to try and help out. It's hard for me to trust Peace Corps after what happened in Benin, but the staff here in Senegal is really worthy of it; they are all very competent and extremely supportive. I came back from IST and had a very long, nervous bike ride back to post, hoping that the situation would be improved. My APCD actually said to me 'you have to go back on your own, but if anything else happens you get back on your bike immediately, go to Kedougou, and wait for me to get there.' Definitely confidence-inspiring, but Eric and I stopped about 7k from my site on the road and had a very necessary pep-talk about returning.

And things are...better. Honestly, what I was hoping for was just mutual respect and for home to be a place where I could eat, sleep, and hang out in peace. Upon returning I discovered that Vieux is definitely trying to start over; he's approaching me differently and more appropriately and that relationship seems to be workable. It's the kind of situation where we know we're not going to be super friends, but we can work together and respect each other better now. For whatever reason, his wife Ami does not yet appear to be on the same page, so I'm 1 out of 2 on that front. I don't want to get into specific examples, but the best way I can describe her behavior would be to remind female readers what the scarymean girls were like in high school; petty and really nasty. After the first day back I told myself that I needed to just not engage with her, and try really hard not to let her upset me. When I'm having a good day, that's pretty easy. But if I'm ever tired, discouraged, sick, or weaker in any way--it certainly gets harder. And it's the kind of thing that just tends to wear on me over periods of time. So for now, I'm trying to just stay as even-keeled and cheerful as possible, and making sure that I don't spend too much time at home, especially if I'm feeling the least bit vulnerable. We'll see how the situation evolves from there.

Other than that, my life here is looking up. We had IST, and while I wasn't particularly thrilled to attend IST for a second time, there was a lot of useful information and it was really nice to see everyone from my Senegal stage again. It's funny how different my relationships are with my stage in Benin and the stage here in Senegal. In Benin all of my relationships were impacted by the fact that we were all there, doing this seemingly crazy thing together, experiencing everything together for the first time. We had more similar experiences and emotions and those bonds with people are unique because of that. I think they would all agree that we, as a group, were also a little wild, and that's part of the reason I miss them so much--the volunteer culture was just different, and my place in it was different as well. But I love the Senegal stage as well. It's a very different group; they're all about playing camp games and having cuddle piles, but I can't imagine coming into a better group of people. Now that I'm more stable here I have a iittle more perspective on what a mess I was when I first came into country, and I feel indebted and attached to this group of people because they really did welcome me and support me hugely.

The other good news is that I'm a lot more comfortable in my region, I think all of the 'new stage' here in Kedougou feels better about being in the region. Right after IST we had a super-productive house clean-up and meeting, and we've all gotten more of an opportunity to spend time with people at the house. There's another stage of volunteers currently in training and I think we get something like 7 or 8 new volunteers, so we're all really excited about that. All in all, it's kind of a big transition time for the region--lots of changes and new people, and so far it's gone really well, I think.

We're also all working together on the leadership camp that happens at the end of September at my site. This camp got started three years ago and has gotten bigger every year. What's really encouraging though, is that it's not just a Peace Corps camp--there have been Senegalese counterparts involved from the beginning and they're taking over more and more of the responsability every year. This year they've been officially certified as counselors after completing some government training, and in our meetings with them they all seem to be very motivated and enthusiastic. So we're working to put together the activities and get everything ready--it should be a really stressful but fun two weeks, and it's great to have something big to work on at the moment.

So that's pretty much it. People keep telling me that the blog sounds like I'm still sort of on the fence about all of this, about staying, about the potential of being happy here. So it's nice to be able to finally update and say with some degree of certainty that I'm going to be able to make this work, which is at the very least how it feels right now.

I never know how to start these posts, it feels weird to write a greeting but I'm always tempted to start that way. Hay! Hi, readers!

Things here in Senegal are moving along. It's been a very bumpy couple of months but I've finally been at my new site long enough to feel comfortable and able to imagine finishing my service here, which is a huge relief. I will say, though, it's the kind of relief that comes with an edge of resignation--okay, I'm going to stay, I'm actually committed, am no longer on a very weird, very stressful kind of vacation.

So--what's happened in the last month: lots of things.

We as a region have all been working on mosquito net distribution, the Senegalese government, Malaria No More (a U.S. NGO) and NetLife have all been involved in organizing a census and distribution of mosquito nets. Here in Dindefello we did the census in an extremely tiring day and a half--the two health post matrons and I went to every single household in the village and counted people, sleeping places, and nets to figure out how many nets each household needed. The census was good for several reasons; I can now ask a lot of mosquito-net specific in Pulaar, I got to officially meet literally every single person in village, and I got to know the health workers much better. The two matrons at my health center are really awesome, very dedicated, hardworking, genuine people.

The actual distribution of nets was June 11th in Dindefello and happened this past week in the rest of the region. I have to be kind of obnoxious here, I really want to write about the distribution but I have to wait a few months, so look for that post in September.

Immediately following the census and distribution we had a language training here, so three other volunteers and a language teacher came out for three days. This is a really cool thing about peace corps Senegal--all new volunteers get an additional language training about a month after install, and then any time any three volunteers want the same language course (advanced pulaar, intermediate french, beginning wolof, etc), Peace Corps sends a teacher. Our language training here went really well--it was a much-needed and well-timed boost.

I wrote in my last entry about living with a family, and as I said, it definitely can make daily life and integration much easier. However, in the past couple of weeks, I've also experienced how it can make life more challenging. My family had a volunteer before me, which in some ways is good because they've been exposed to another American and they understand some of our weird cultural things better, but it can be hard for families who've previously had volunteers to understand that not all Americans are the same.

The biggest issue with my family so far has been gender-based. The volunteer before me was male, and so I suppose he fit into the family order differently. Fitting into the family is also always a challenge, you're supposed to be part of the family but at the same time, you're supposed to be an outsider who came here to work and do cultural exchange, which is such a neat, positive term for what is actually a very messy, complicated process. This is sort of the continuing difficulty of Peace Corps: accept and appreciate the culture you live in, but don't accept it so much that you lose sight of yourself or your ability to improve your community. And then it's different for every person--as volunteers we each struggle with questions daily--what can I accept? How far can something go before I have to set a boundary? Can I set this boundary and still be an effective volunteer? What from my culture am I not at all willing to let go? People often ask, "so what do you do, as a Peace Corps volunteer?" And I think we all struggle to answer that because we have our actual projects, but a lot of our work is figuring out how to be effective humans in a culture that is not our own, figuring out what we can and want to represent about America. But it's a lot easier to say, "I build gardens with womens groups" than it is to say "I pace around the inside fo my hut, muttering to myself about boundaries and cultural differences."

I've been doing a lot of that throughout the past few weeks. The head of my household here is also supposed to be one of my work partners. His name is Vieux and he's kind of like my host dad/brother. He, his wife Ami, their children, and his mother are the people I think of as my nuclear family in Senegal, even though there are many more people who live in my compound. Vieux is an interesting character and we'd had a few run-ins over the gender issue--a long discussion while biking when he told me men and women should never be equal, an incident where I was helping Ami cook dinner and he told me that it was only right that I, as a woman, was doing womans work. After that we sat down and had a long, polite discussion about how 'in my culture, that's insulting--if you said that at my house you would end up with dinner dumped over your head, I have the same job as the previous volunteer and you need to treat me the same, etc.

But little things kept happening--male volunteers who visited were treated differently than female volunteers, and the most alarming was that I realized he wasn't really ever speaking to me--he'd joke around with me occasionally but would never actually have a conversation with me. All of this came to a head during the language classes, when he started talking unfavorably about me to a male volunteer while I was sitting about a foot away from him on the porch. I raised my voice, told him that that was extremely rude, and walked away.

Obviously a normal human reaction for me to have, but it set off an unfortunate chain of events. Ami sat me down and told me that if I'm going to be a woman and live in their house that I have to "be silent and assume that Vieux is showing you the right way--he's the master of the house and so he's your master. And if you don't, I'll stop talking to you, I'll make sure nobody else talks to you, etc." It was a rough night, the kind of incident where you go back into your hut and say to yourself "F--k this, I don't know why I'm trying to live in this culture at all, I'm just going to pack it in and go home."

The next morning I talked to Ami and explained in the calmest way possible, that Vieux is not the master of my anything and of all the skills I possess, being silent is perhaps the least utilized--right up there with 'not being stubborn' and 'flying.' And thankfully, Peace Corps heartily backed me up. Adji, perhaps the most over-qualified and effective PC employee I've encountered yet, came to check in on all the new volunteers and had a conversation with both Ami and Vieux, during which she said, 'Il n'y a pas une probleme' upwards of 10 times. In West Africa, whenever anyone says 'there's not a problem' it means that there's absolutely a problem. But so far her talk seems to have been effective, and familial relations are improving.

In addition to the net distributions, community research, and Pulaar-learning, I've been exploring the region, which is ridiculously beautiful and full of people who like to camp and climb mountains and bike everywhere. Eric, who lives 7k from me, and I climbed a mountain at his site, and this week I went up the mountain that is literally in my backyard to Donde. There's caves and the sources of two waterfalls up on the plateau, and we spent the night up there as well. It's incredibly helpful, after a few rough days, to take in a mind-clearing view from the top of a mountain.

I do have consistent bad luck with regard to run-ins with dangerous African wildlife. It's kind of a running joke with one of my other neighbors, Tim, because every time I hang out with him there's some kind of incident. At his post, there's a really great spot for swimming in the Gambia River, and the first time I was there he was telling me that the villagers kep telling him there were crocodiles, but he'd never seen one. No sooner had he finished the sentence than we heard a splash and watched a crocodile enter the water. We swam anyway. The next time I was there, he sat on a huge snake, and while we were up in Donde we encountered five (yes, five) baby vipers. Babies, yes, but...vipers. So I either have really bad luck because I run into these things, or really good luck because I'm still alive.

I think that's about all of my news. Oh, except--the World Cup is happening. I'm guessing it isn't that big of a deal in the U.S. unless you accidentally turn on Telemundo, but it is a huge huge deal here, especially because an African country is hosting this year. Televisions and radios have come out of the woodwork, and been made functional by sketchy wiring and enthusiasm. Most of the African teams have already been knocked out, and people here in Senegal always cheer for whichever African team is playing. So the best and worst game so far was when America played Ghana. Eric and I watched it with what felt like the rest of my village at the health center. It was tied for awhile, and then when Ghana scored in overtime and the entire compound erupted, Eric and I realized that whether America won or lost, we were probably going to have to get out of there quick. When we lost, he and I were so close to the door that we slipped out before anyone could really rub it in our faces.

And that, my friends, is the news. This weekend our region has a huge 4th of July party which we're all really looking forward to as a nice break. And I know that everyone wants pictures: be patient. Our regional internet was destroyed by lightening and I haven't had a chance to charge my camera. I guess that's not all of it--for some reason it's hard for me to take pictures here. I think when you live somewhere it's hard to be good about documenting it until you're leaving. I don't have the pictures I wish I did from Benin, which you'd think would make me take more here and now, but it's inexplicably had the opposite effect. But I go to training in Mid July and will try to put some up then.

That's all for now, mail is arriving at the new address, so send me letters with your updates, please!

Look! Internets! Way before I said I'd have them!

I had to come into Kedougou for a training--we're doing a region-wide mosquito net distribution, so there's a training in the regional capital today, and then another training at my site on monday, followed by three days of census-taking, and then the actual distributions will happen at the end of the month.

So, site! I've finally seen it and lived there for two weeks. I'm think the best way for me to talk about this right now is to make a list, because otherwise things will get too scattered.

How my first two weeks at site in Senegal have been different than my first two weeks at site in Benin:

1. There are sandwiches.

I don't think anyone who knows me well really needs further explanation of that. I love sandwiches, and there was no food at my site in Benin, much less bread. In the morning in Dindefello I can go buy egg sandwiches, or tuna sandwiches. Tuna sandwiches!

2. I live with a family and it's way way way better than living alone.

For starters, they feed me. Which means that I don't have to spend most of my time worrying about how I will keep myself alive, like I did in Benin. I really like my family so far, there's a lot of people but they're all really great. It's also just way more culturally appropriate to be living with a family than not; in Benin people didn't really know how to classify me because I was a single female living alone, which culturally doesn't make sense to them. Here, because I live with a family and have their name, it's easier to explain to people who I am and what I'm doing here. So yeah, my new name at post is Aminata Sylla, which I have to say about a gzillion times a day. The Pulaar have this thing--there are only a few last names; Jallo, Ba, Barry, Camera, etc. And there are jokes between families, so because I'm a Sylla, I tell Cameras that they're liars, cheaters, my slave, etc. And it's all in good fun. It's a little bizarre.

3. Where I live is extremely, ridiculously, beautiful.

Not even sure where to start with this one. Mountains everywhere, trees. And the mountains are really right there, I can see them when I'm showering. If I don't have something to do for a day I can hike out to the waterfall, there's baboons and chimps and monkeys and huge monitor lizards in the woods and sometimes I'll just be walking and then out of nowhere: baboons! It's crazy. It's the start of rainy season here in Senegal now, so everything is turning really green, there's grass! It's the kind of thing that doesn't make or break your service but it's definitely a great perk. If I get in a bad mood sometimes I look around and then tell myself to shut up, and that works at my site. (Um yeah, all you people who weren't going to visit Benin...might want to reconsider.)

4. I'm busy.

This is maybe the biggest one, after the sandwiches. I have things to do everyday. I've visited my neighbor Tim's site down the road twice--he's an Agroforestry volunteer and so I've gotten to work in his gardens and swim in the Gambia River. And Dindefello is big, so it's taking me awhile to walk around and meet everyone. There's language practice, too, and I'm sitting in on women's group meetings every week. And this week there is the mosquito net training and census, and then we have a short language seminar at my post for 4 days, and then we're halfway through June! It's just really different; in Benin I would wake up and just have this whole long day with nothing in it stretching out in front of me, and sometimes that was the most discouraging thing about being there. I was kind of expecting that to happen here, too, and so this has been really great for me so far.

hoooookay.

I'm still here! Still alright! Woo!

I feel like I just updated a few days ago but as my mom so patiently/lovingingly reminded me, it's been a couple weeks.

We're in the last week of stage here, and it's very strange to be going through that again. The last couple of weeks have been intense. I spent the first week and a half in language class by myself all day while the stage was in their language villages, living with a host family here in Thies. Then I went out to Sangalkam, the PulaFuta language village, for a few days, and then we were back in Thies for a week and we met our homologues and had the homologue conference, and then i went and spent another week in Sangalkam doing language with the group, and now we're swearing in on Friday.

So things have been busy.

My counterpart came all the way to Thies for counterpart workshop, which is always stressful and kind of awkward, but was really well organized. This is a theme with Peace Corps Senegal--things here are shocking in how planned and organized they are. I don't really want to knock on PC Benin, but holy cow. To be perfectly honest, I feel like Peace Corps Senegal sets volunteers up for successful projects and supports them, and I did not always feel that way in Benin. (don't censor me peace corpssss)

My counterpart is really nice, I'm going to be living with his family and he's a teacher who promised to tutor me if I needed language help. He's a very mild-mannered, motivated person who has a lot of ideas for how to improve Dindefello, so it was all-around a good experience.

As a sidenote, you should notice that I just called him my counterpart and not my homologue. This is one of the consistently weird things about changing peace corps countries--the change in vocabulary. Here in our government organization we use an obnoxious amount of acronyms, anyone who's ever called me while I've been in Africa can attest to that. But vocabulary for common people and places and things differs between peace corps countries, so sometimes people look at me and have no idea what I'm talking about. For example, in Benin we said 'homologue' and never 'counterpart,' but here we only ever say 'counterpart.' We called our regional houses 'workstations' and here they're just called regional houses, in Niger they're called hostels. There are a lot of small examples of this and it's consistently bizarre, but I do want to say that now I really do know how you all feel, because people keep dropping acronyms on me and I keep having to ask questions about what they're talking about.

So, and language. We all took our placement exams yesterday and we're not sure of the results yet but most people feel pretty good about the test. I do. I'm also really impressed with language in this country--we got a lot of resources to learn our languages and had a huge amount of support. The other really cool thing is that we have a language seminar a month or so into post, where a language teacher comes out to our region and we get to ask all of the questions that have popped up. And then anytime any three volunteers want to have a language seminar in the same thing and put it together, peace corps senegal will send a teacher and pay per diem. I really cannot fairly stress how cool this is so all I can say is; that is really.cool. And so logical! So supportive!

Anyway. I feel good about where my language is, I think I caught up really well, and after that first terrible week the situation got a lot better. However. I do have to write about my host family in Sangalkam. There were seven of us in village, and six people lived in nice, clean, structures with nice, clean people. Annnnnd I did not. In retrospect it's mostly funny, but apparently no volunteer was actually supposed to live with my host family. Initially they had put Mike in that host family because he had already been a volunteer in Niger and they assumed he could handle it, and then as soon as someone went home early they switched everything around so that nobody would live there. And then I showed up. Mm-hmm.

This is the best way to describe it. If the other six people lived in houses, some of them in nice cul-de-sacs and some of them in modest ranch-style houses (obviously that's not real, it's for the sake of an america comparison), then I lived in the trailer park. My house was a really sandy, filthy compound full of falling-down structures and a massive number of people were constantly coming in and out. My actual room was a cement room with nothing (and I do mean zero things), and for some unknown reason the family had covered all four walls with heavy curtains, so no natural light came in, except from one tiny hole in the tin roof. Instead of natural light, there was one lone red lightbulb. We've been referring to it as 'the opium den.'

On top of that, my host sisters had um, how shall we say....a reputation in town. So there were a lot of really special, charming gentlement hanging around all the time. Before I figured that out, though, we had a homework assignment to learn all the words for body parts, and so I naively went home and sat around with my sisters and made a list of body parts. The next day when my language teacher was asking us to contribute to the class list, I started to throw in words that I had learned the previous night at home, and watched while she alternately gasped/cringed/laughed at how vulgar and rude I was being unknowingly.

So it was an interesting week. To steal a phrase from my friend Michael Tanenbaum, my stomach feels like a Balkan conflict. While part of that is probably because I came to Senegal with Amoebas and had just gotten over Ecoli again, things have failed to go back to normal (massive understatement, but I keep reminding myself that people who aren't in peace corps don't want the same kind of color/frequency/temperature/texture report that has become commonplace for us here). Regardless, after watching food preparation in Sangalkam, I'm fairly certain that some of the issue can be traced back to....that. So, kind of a bummer, but hopefully we figure out what's going on soon and get rid of it soon.

Sangalkam ended pretty well, all things considered. The last day was very strange because everybody else had been there for weeks and weeks and had gotten attached to their host families, and I was kind of like---okay! let's get on the bus! Eric (who you'll be hearing more about, he'll be my close neighbor at post) lived next door to me in Sangalkam, and his mom was really awesome and helpful with language learning. And the last day she came over and sat down on my bed to say goodbye and was very wonderful and encouraging and I actually kind of teared up over it. And then she left and I went outside to eat a final lunch with my host family and my sister was screaming at my other sister and there was a word I didn't recognize, so I asked what it was, and everyone fell on the ground laughing. If you think of four-letter synonyms for 'to reproduce' you'll be on the right track, and it was a really fitting juxtaposition for the last day.

So things here are okay, I'm doing well and everything is good, I just don't feel so spectacular. I haven't actually lived anywhere in...two months? I'm getting very weary of moving from room to room and family to family, and so at this point I'm just trying to store up as much energy as possible to move to post and settle down.

I wish this was better organized but I think it's pretty representative of how my head is right now; kind of fluttery and full of everything and mostly positive except when it's not.

This is a rock where I like to sit and read/write, etc

pretty sunset at the health center

Fulani kid herding his cattle

out in the fields

The health center

This is the sign for my health center, and that thatch you can see is the paillote, the little gazebo area where people wait and hang out all day.

This is the only road in and out/to and away from any kind of civilization

This is the church that the villagers use, it's actually across the street from the village itself. There is reseau under that big tree to the right, so if you've talked to me on the phone, I'm usually sitting right there.

This is the water pump, in the mornings and evenings there's a huge crowd of people here. And so this is where I get my water, it's not too far from my house.

Ok house! My house has three rooms all in a row; kitchen, living room, bedroom. It's really huge and absurdly nice in comparison to the rest of the village which makes me feel silly, but I also really love the house itself. A brief tour: This is the outside, that bench thing usually has either people or goats sitting/sleeping on it.

My house is actually a mud hut covered in cement, on post visit it wasn't quite dry yet.

This is pas encore, my puppy. I took this while I was packing, and you can see that he's a little worried about what's happening. Also, yo quero taco bell, anyone?

bedroom

kitchen storage

kitchen/bike storage. That yellow thing is an empty vegetable oil container, I strap it to my bike and get my water that way. I use the two silver basins for doing laundry and sometimes dishes if there are a lot. You can see my unused water filter on the floor to the right. The silver bucket on the floor is a little something called the 'everything bucket.' I'll leave that to your imagination, which is probably still not as gross as it is in real life. My stove is up on the table and that's where I do all my cooking, and the messy table shows you just about how many other practical activites happen there.

This is my bookshelf in the corner of my living room

And this is my living room--There's a table and two chairs, the bookshelf, and that's it. Any letter you've ever gotten from me was written right here.

Pictures! I'm going in reverse order and just seeing how many I can upload, so these are from when I left my host family's house in Porto Novo and moved to post. They're in reverse order but I'm not going to waste internets trying to fix that, sorry. This is the road between Bohicon, where we dropped Katie off, and my post. This is what I was looking at while I was freaking out, basically.

The morning I left my host family, nobody was home when the taxi came except for the domestique Afousa, which was appropriate since she basically taught me how to take care of myself here and was kind of my first Beninese friend. She wanted me to take a picture of her and so I did. I just went back and visited them last week and she's still there but they told me she gets to go back to her village up north at the end of January, and she's all glowy-happy about it, so that was great.

These two pictures are all of the belongings I took to post. Cement sacks, mattress, basins, buckets, water filter, etc.