Sunday, July 13, 2008

Your favorite foté here

Hi all. I wanted to put up a post because we leave for pre-service training tomorrow and won't have internet access for three weeks or so. But I'd really love to have some letters to read when we get back to Conakry later on...hint, hint. I'm going to do my best to get letters out in the next few weeks; it seems like we will have some free time.

I'll give you all a quick update on our last couple of days. We've had so much orientation and so much information thrown at us, but for the most part it's been really helpful. There are also a lot of current Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs for future notice) and they have been awesome with answering the approximately 37 million questions that we have thrown at them. We've found out that we have some extra incentive to stay for whenever we get down: Soon we will be the extent of the education program in Guinea. In early 2007, they had to evacuate all the PCVs from Guinea and as a consequence, no new volunteers were sent that summer. Now, there are about 10 education volunteers that are all pretty much done teaching and are sticking around for training. They are trying to rebuild the program over the next two years, so apparently we are going to be a really important part of that.

We had some free time yesterday afternoon so a bunch of us headed down to the beach and played 2 hours or so of football/frisbee/soccer with several Guinean children. That was a GOOD time! Only a couple of people speak French very well and no one really knows the local language, but when you are playing with kids, it really doesn't matter. We've all joined in on the funniness of "foté" - which means "white person" in case you missed my e-mail. We now shout foté at each other whenever we are outside. It's good fun.

Unfortunately, I haven't really been able to take any pictures in Conakry - it's sort of frowned upon unless you enjoy being targetted by local police for taking pictures without a permit and issued a fine. Today, everyone seems to be coming down from the natural high that we've all been experiencing for the past few days. I'm tired and not feeling well and I'm just waiting for all the stomach problems I've heard so much about in the past few days to start up.

Tomorrow we will meet our host families for the next 11 weeks. I've heard that tomorrow was the most awkward day for every single volunteer that I have talked to, so I'm pretty excited for that. I'm positive that in three weeks I'm going to have lots of awkward moments to tell you all about. We have learned some "survival SoSo", which is the local language of the area we are going to. I know how to say the essentials: Hello, I'm American (as if that weren't obvious) and I'm married. Every single volunteer here is "married", even if they aren't. I've learned about imaginary husbands and fiancés back at home because it is an instant way to gain respect and apparently single females receive lots of marriage invitations from locals. The same works for the single male volunteers actually.

But tomorrow I will say good-bye to reliable electricity and plumbing and John and I will really kick off our Peace Corps Training. I hope everyone at home is doing well and we both miss all of you already! I'll post again when I can.

To awkward experiences,
Marg

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