10 Weeks in Summary

I've been in The Gambia for 10 weeks now and I have experienced and learned so much in those 10 weeks that I can't even imagine how much I'll learn in 2 years here. Training is almost over, just 2 days left, and then I'm off to my permanent site of Kaur for the next 2 years.

Training has been an incredible experience. When I first met up with my group in Philadelphia for our pre-service orientation, I couldn't really imagine how I could possibly be prepared to live in a remote African village by myself, teaching agricultural practices and environmental education, for two years. The transformation from Philadelphia to today is amazing, and I have to give Peace Corps a lot of credit for designing an excellent training program. Of course, that doesn't mean I feel totally prepared for the next two years, but I couldn't have imagined coming this far already in the beginning.

The first week we were in country, they kind of eased us into our new surroundings. We lived and ate in a dormitory-style setting, we had a chaparone and curfew at all times, and our day was structured from 7:00AM until 8:00PM. Then after we started getting used to our new surroundings, and after they'd stuck us with a sufficient number of needles, they trucked us off to training village where we lived for the next 6 weeks.

In training village, we were divided into groups of 3-6 in each village and we each lived with a host family. In my training village of Sare Samba we had 4, then later 5, people. In village, we would have Wolof language classes every morning with our Gambian language teacher for a few hours. After our morning language session we would either work on cross-cultural or technical assignments that we had to turn, language homework, spend time talking and working with our host families, or just hanging out and playing cards and drinking ataaya. The first week in village was pretty difficult. When we first arrived in Sare Samba, all we had learned where the basic greetings in Wolof, and so I really could not communicate with my family, or anyone else in the village, at all. It was very frustrating to be asked a question and have absolutely no idea what you were being asked or how to even say that you didn't undertand. I would just sit there mute or just trying to laugh at myself. Then the shock of village life was also hard to get used to at first, although that didn't last as long. I remember distinctly on my first day in village, sitting in my thatched hut, sweaty, having just come from the pump carrying water on my head and spilling it all over myself, thinking "what the hell am I doing here?".

But amazingly, those feelings did not last for more than a few minutes at a time, and then I would go back to thinking how lucky I am to be here and be able to experience all this. And it was also really heartening to see how much progress I made in just a week in village. By the end of the first week, I could already make some simple sentences which vastly increased what I could say. I also started to get more used to the pace of village life. Things move very slowly in a village, especially the afternoons. But I started to enjoy more and more the extra time I had to read, relax and just chat with people.

In between weeks at training village, our whole group would meet up for a few days or a week at training camp. Training camp was held at different tourist camps where we would go back to the structured 8:00 to 6:00 format and learn various technical skills like composting, fruit-tree grafting, grant-writing, soap-making, etc. etc. The list goes on and on. Going back and forth between training camp and training village was a nice balance, because in training camp we got a lot of the amenities that we were missing in training village, namely cold beer, running water and a pool. Plus, it was nice to catch up with all the other trainees who had been in their respective training villages for the past week. The training sessions were usually interesting also. But, by the end of the week I was usually ready to go back to the calmer, slower-paced atmosphere of training village.

Now I'm back in Kombo (the capital region) and we are finishing our last few days of training. We'll be in Kombo for a total of 10 days and we've been all living in the Peace Corps Staag House which is basically a hostel that the Peace Corps owns, but that volunteers have to pay for like a regular hostel if they're not in town on official Peace Corps business. The house is very much like an American frat house. There's a big living room area, with a big library of DVD's and videos (although unfortunately both the DVD player and VCR are broken), a kitchen, front and back yards and then rooms with 6-10 bunk beds each. It even has that moldy, dirty frat house smell to it. It feels kind of homey actually, but I think we'll all be ready to go to our permanent sites on Sunday and finally settle in somewhere.

That's training in a very brief nutshell. There are a lot of funny and juicy stories that happened along the way, but unfortunately, to hear those you'll have to come directly to me. That's how I bribe you into writing me individual emails.

Almost a Peace Corps Volunteer!

I have less than one week left before we finish training and swear in as Volunteers and then head off to our sites for the "3-month challenge" (where we don't leave our sites for 3 months straight). I have so much to summarize about the last 10 weeks, that I don't even know where to begin, so I won't... for now. I'll post a long blog entry sometime this week which will summarize as much as possible, but for now you can view my friends' blogs and find out from them what training and The Gambia have been like so far. I will just say that I am having an amazing time and that everything so far has been better than I could have possibly imagined. I also won't have any pictures for awhile because I forgot to bring the connector cable for my digital camera to Kombo with me to upload them all. I know, I'm an idiot. But I promise that I have been taking pictures and will have them up for everyone to see eventually!