On my way to Sokone

I am now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!! On Friday, November 9th, 39 trainees were sworn-in at the Ambassador’s residence in Dakar. All of our language and technical trainers as well as all the Peace Corps Staff were there. There were also some currently serving PCVs there including Laura, whom I demysted with back when I first arrived in September. It was really nice to see her because there was so much to say and so much to relate but of course there was too little time and we barely got to chat. After the ceremony, which was about 45 minutes long, there was a lovely reception afterwards with amazing food. We all got back in the SUVs and buses and headed back to Thiès for a big Fête after. A member of each of our Thiès host families came and we had a big meal, Senegalese music and dancing. By 11PM, all the Senegalese families had left and it was just us trainees and a couple trainers and we kept dancing until 1AM. It was so much fun to just be able to goof off and have fun after such an intense 8 weeks of training. We’ve gotten to know each other so well by now that we are very comfortable. If you can spend the amount of time that we have talking about the crazy health problems you get here in Senegal and how often you’ve been running to the bathroom because of your latest case of the runs, you have no problem dancing in front of these same people.

A bunch of us ended up staying at the center overnight which made it certainly easier to dance till 1AM but primarily because early the next morning about 8 people left for their sites down in the southern regions of Senegal that are south of The Gambia and we wanted to say goodbye. They had to leave on Saturday because it can take up to two days to get there because some of the roads they have to take basically have no right to be called roads. The most infamous is the road between Kaolack and Tambacounda (we just called it Tamba) which is so bad it takes 6-10 hours depending on if its dry or wet season and it is no more than 150 miles. My site is on the “right side” of that road. The rest of us left Sunday for our various regions of the country.

It was sad and surreal to say goodbye to them and then also to the others that I said goodbye to on Sunday who aren’t living in my region. If I think of it realistically, I had no idea of who most of these people were 9 weeks ago. Sure I knew who a couple of them were through the PC Senegal Facebook group but that was still just a web page with a picture and some random information that really in no way defines a person in any real terms of accuracy. But at the same time, I’ve been getting to know some of these people really well and feel like I’ve just barely been able to get to enjoy their company and off they go. Despite the fact that you usually get along with everyone else in your stage, there are always those who you’ve gotten to know better or seem to laugh a bit more with and it seems like most of those people have gone really far for me. I know that I’ll get to know the other volunteers well in my area too but I’ll still miss the others. I’ll see them all again in exactly 11 weeks when we come back for another three weeks of training in late January.

I left Thies early yesterday morning (Sunday) with two other new PCVs for Koalack. Koalack is the second/third largest city in Senegal. No one really seems to know if Thies or Koalack is really bigger. It is the cross-roads of Senegal as you have to go through it to get to Dakar or Saint Louis from any of the southern regions. It has the second largest covered market in Africa, and I can attest that it is very easy to get lost in!! We managed to get all our baggage as well as our three PC provided bikes as well as us and our driver into what is best described as something like a station-wagon. They are called sept-places (say it with a French accent… SET-PLAS) because it can usually fit 7 people because of additional row that has been added in the back. These vehicles are extremely rickety. The one I took to Dakar a couple weeks ago did not have any of the dashboard working so you didn’t actually know how fast you were going.

Koalack is where my regional house is located. The Peace Corps splits up the country into regions and each region, for the most part, has its own regional house that is basically a rest/guest house for that region’s PCVs. My region is actually called Fatick but our regional house is combined with Koalack because it easier for most of us to get to Koalack than the actual city of Fatick because of the delta. The house serves 40 PCVs so I hear it can get pretty crazy when everyone comes into town for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Koalack is also where I’ll access internet. I can hook up my laptop at the cyber cafés there which is much easier than trying to tackle the French keyboards. It also keeps me from getting to many viruses which can happen if you are using a flashdrive to transfer files from a personal computer to the café computers.

Well I am being installed in my site tomorrow, Tuesday. I am really excited. There are so many people in the Kaolack regional house at the moment. There are 18 people from my training group who are in this house. Plus all their baggage. It’s really a crazy mess and I am very exhausted and stressed right now because of all of it. There are people everywhere so alone time is not existent!!!