PST

I have been in county for about four days now and our days have been filled with meetings on safety and security, cross cultural, and touring around Thies. Everyone I have  meet here has been super nice. In the four days we have been here everyone has grown into a supportive family unit. Another good thing about this is out of our training group of fifty only eight of us our male. Surprising yes, in my favor most definitely. If we are not in sessions we have been working on technical skills which include gardening and tree planting. Translated to lay-mens terms mixing manurer and sand to create better soil, using tools readily available, shovels, hoes, your hands, ect.

Meals here in the afternoon consist of a community bowl that you can sit around and chat with the langue teachers. The food is mainly rice or another grain with local vegetables, Carrots, Sweet Potatoes, Morgana root (which is awesome), and some sort of meat, usually fish. Everything that has been served is wonderful. After lunch the LCF's (langue teachers) sit around and drink mint tea. Great stuff but sugar over load. Either way it is a good way to practice langue and get to know the LCF's better. Dinner has been disappointing to me only in the fact that the cooks have been Americanizing Senegalese food. Spicy bean pizza, good but not impressed.

The most exciting thing we learned to day was what langue we will be learning. I got Seereer a small rural  langue with three other volunteers. So I am ahead in the game of where your future job site is because it is only spoke in three regions above The Gambia. This also means that I lugged the Wolof dictionary around for nothing, oh well. Tomorrow is an exciting day for us because we start our host stay, which will be awesome.
I have taken pictures and will post them at a later date as soon as I find figure out how. have fun with the rest of your winter and I'll be enjoying my sixty degree weather.

Jim