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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Our new home

Our compound Suso Kunda II - it's very new and pretty nice! Our door is the one on the left.

Kawsu cooking on our gas burner. This is the most expensive thing we own here, except our bikes, which really belong to the Peace Corps, not us, so they don't count. Our family was upset one day because I accidentally left it outside and they said someone would jump over the wall to steal it! Oops.

Maamaa carrying water from the sweet tap inside the compound.

View you can see if you climb up on something and look over our back wall. This picture was taken last night, about 20 minutes before a tremendous (and unexpected) rain storm.

Monday, May 14, 2012


This past Friday we officially went from trainees to volunteers. It has been a whirlwind week of filling out paperwork, shopping for household items (really exhausting when you have to bargain for a decent price on almost anything) and socializing with each other before we head off to our respective villages. At some point today we (along with all our junk!) will return to Bwiam and set up our little house. We should have internet access somewhere in town once we get settled in there, so you should all being hearing from us soon!

Also, I'd like to share a quote from the toilet brush & holder set our friend Keith purchased yesterday at a store down the street (we agree with him that your pit latrine can never be too clean): (picture this in a beautiful script beside a big flower) "plastics companion you are living every a day"

Thank you China, for sending your weirdest and most cheaply made products to Africa.

Also, happy belated Mother's Day to all!



Celebrating after our swearing-in ceremony (picture thanks to the lovely Sarah Stever)

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

The Last Few Golden Weeks of Training

Hanging out with the kids in our training village compound.
The goal of this post is to let you all know that we are still alive! We survived our first experience with being sick here (everyone in our language class feel victim to the same unpleasant gastrointestinal illness), but we are feeling just fine now. We have just left our first Gambian host family and returned to Fajara to prepare for a visit to our permanent sites. Being in the crowded transit house is not that great, but there is electricity here in the big city and, thus, the store down the street has plastic bags of vanilla yogurt to suck on. Also, sometimes there is working internet! We will post again when the internet is faster.

Fo silaa kotenke (until the next road)!
-Maamaa and Kawsu/ Colette and Darrin