Peace Corps How-To: Staying Sane at Site

For all of those [non-existent] devout followers who want to know my every move here, or for those [more likely existent] occasional readers who simply wonder how an average American recent-college-grad deals with long-term cultural isolation in a desert, I’ve started compiling a list of things I do at site that keep me relatively sane. This actually originated in my journal as a list of things to do when I’m bored, but I figured it might be of some interest to people in that vast first world country that I’ve heard exists somewhere. Here goes-

For anyone else who finds themselves sitting in a hut in Africa for two years, here are a few ways of dealing with it, in no particular order:

1) After going to work in the morning, whether it be to the field or to a meeting with the farmers, teachers or communitarial, go back to your hut, shut your door and have a snack that you enjoy. This is the main reason you require so many granola bars in care packages- since apples and other fruit don’t last for weeks in the heat, you can only stock up on fruit for a couple of days at a time.

2) Coffee and occasional baked goods that you cooked in the Kaolack regional house and brought to site in Tupperware can be added to point number 1.

3) In the case of the aforementioned coffee in point number 2, you may occasionally indulge in Starbucks “VIA” coffee packets from the States, shipped over in care packages. [Thanks mom and dad.]

4) Listen to music you like, and lots of it. I, for instance, have playlists put on shuffle for running in the morning, relaxing with breakfast, cleaning around the hut, etc. Exchange music with other volunteers to mix it up a bit and keep things fresh.

5) Make your own music. It’s amazing what a half hour playing guitar and living in your own little world can do for your overall well-being. Singing counts too. Natives find it hilarious, and the advantage is that you can sing whatever you want to in order to get out your frustrations. Curse if you need to, and nobody will understand it. Then you have the satisfaction of bad-mouthing that idiot for proposing to you for the 15^th time and the knowledge that you never actually offended anyone.

6) Make friends with teachers. I’ll leave out a long and drawn-out explanation here since my previous entry should explain this, but if you do use this method, be wary of point number 5. Some teachers understand English.

7) Decorate your room with all things that remind you of home, and if you are from the North, cold places. I now have magazine cut-outs of snowy skiing vistas plastered to my wall (thanks to my parents), along with some cut-out snowflakes (thanks to Tim’s last care package) and a string of pictures of my family and friends between them. Check out my pictures if you’re curious.

8) Sleep. Go to bed early, and take naps if necessary. It can often do a world of good.

9) After that 900^th conversation about whether or not you have a husband and if so, why do you not have kids, it may be rather rewarding to read something intellectual. It will remind you that you are, in fact, a thinking and educated human being and life is not simply about getting married and having babies. Malcolm Gladwell books (author of works such as The Tipping Point and Blink) are extremely popular here- I highly recommend them. Peace Corps is also a great time to catch up on all those books you always told yourself you would read and never actually did.

10) Sometimes, you need to counteract point number 9 with point number 10- reading something trashy. After a long day in the field, at meetings and struggling with grammatical points in Wolof or teaching your counterpart how to amend the soil and why nitrogen is important, curling up with a Cosmo magazine and oogling at pretty dresses and cute shoes can be real therapy.

11) Stay busy. The first few weeks at site are shockingly difficult to a self-defined overachiever who always had a full schedule until now. Get involved, make your own schedule and stick to it. If that means you are forcing yourself to sit and scarify seeds from exactly 3 to 5 PM, so be it.

12) Text people in the outside world. If someone texts you on gmail, you can respond to them cheaply rather than having to write a text to an American phone line and use up all your phone credit.

13) Get exercise, especially if you were one of those athletic-types in the States. It’s hard in the heat, but if you force yourself to wake up before dawn every morning and get out for a short run before it gets hot or do some yoga ever day in your backyard around sunset, your body and mind will appreciate it.

14) If necessary, spend money on phone cards for your internet key and spend an hour online browsing facebook and chatting on skype. If you are so inclined, you may also update your blog and blab about how you stay sane at site to your captive audience.

As a quick, somewhat-related addendum to this list, I will include another how-to: how to keep cool while writing a blog entry.

1) Soak a bandana and wring it out. Wrap it around your head, including your forehead. Fan yourself for a minute with a little plastic Senegalese fan. Continue typing.

Now, if you ever find yourself out in the middle of nowhere with the job of planting a bunch of trees in the African Sahel, I hope that you can do it with ease and grace. Thank you.

~E

In appreciation of teachers

My ability to read many books in short spans of time at site is dwindling, seeing as I am actually doing worthwhile things with my time now, but I did find the time to start reading Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. I haven’t finished it yet, but a book discussion is not the point of this entry. Instead, it just brings to light the fact that seldom do we take the time to thank those who spent countless hours marking up our poorly-written commentaries with red pen and, as one of my college mentors might say “making it bleed.” It’s amazing how so much constructive criticism can keep you in your place.

I could go on about the merits of teachers, how they helped me get where I am here and how they are entirely underappreciated the majority of the time, but that would simply be inflating their egos and is beside the point. Instead, there actually is a point to my discussion of teachers in relation to my life in Senegal. The past week I have been busy setting up my projects for the upcoming planting season, and it occurred to me that thus far, all of my best friends and work partners in this country have been teachers. Most of the reason for this is that teachers are by far the most educated people in the village. When you are normally lucky to talk to someone who has been to a couple years of grade school and can read a word or two, it is a breath of fresh air to talk to someone who has been to college and can have an intelligent discussion on the differences between the democratic and republican Senegalese parties, or who at least has heard of people like Michael Jackson or Bill Gates. It is not fair of me to expect educated people here to know American music when educated people in America rarely could name the most popular singer in Senegal, so I don’t take it for granted when I can play a Panic at the Disco song on my iPod and have a Senegalese friend recognize it. Oumi and I have had a couple of nights when we rocked out to “Hips Don’t Lie” and “Promiscuous” while the villagers watched on us amusedly. Of course, it is nothing out of the normal for us to act completely over-the-top and theatrical, so nobody asked any questions.

Teachers also have turned out to be fantastic work partners for agroforestry work. Back when I first installed (almost 5 months ago now!), Oumi and I walked over to Saloum Diane for a day to meet her coworkers over there, and I met one guy who wanted me to take a picture of him in the classroom. I did, and spent the next several months making excuses that I could not print it for him since I had not been to a location that prints photos. Then, a few days ago, I took a trip over to our neighboring village Keur Serigne Bamba to check out some Jatropha live fences and Ziziphus trees there, and found myself greeting him there. Apparently he lives in Serigne Bamba and just stays in a room in Saloum Diane on weekdays to teach, but he took me over to his field of 40 hectares to check out some agroforestry species. Let me assure you, nobody I have ever met in Fatick region has had a field of 40 hectares- that is simply incomprehensible when you consider that there are no machines doing any of the work in the fields and very little agricultural education. He demonstrated some of the unique trees he was propagating for live fencing, most of which Peace Corps is trying to promote itself, and referred to them by their scientific rather than their local names. He also had examples of grafted Ziziphus and mango trees, which is extremely rare in a village since it requires technical skill other than what you learn through trial-and-error.

Projects with schools themselves are also much more rewarding when you see eye-to-eye with your work partners. The school garden I am working on in Babou Njiti is probably the most fun I’ve had at site, since each time I go there we get to work in the garden, I spend a bit of time in the classroom teaching about American culture or English, then we go back to my friend’s hut where we have real conversations and joke about music or American food. Thus far, I’ve begun teaching the male teachers over there yoga and salsa. Apparently, they’ve been practicing. (As a side note, for anyone who ever plans on joining Peace Corps, learn some yoga. It’s probably the best exercise you can get given that you live in a hut and everyone laughs at everything you do outside of it.)

Within my home village, I had a meeting with the teachers yesterday planning what types of projects they want to accomplish while I’m here. We sat together in the small office and discussed logistics in a very organized and pointed way, which as an American used to meetings about projects rather than short discussions involving tea, I appreciated greatly. As of now, we are planning a small windbreak, live fence, shade trees and a few fruit trees, in addition to supplemental environmental education classes explaining what we are doing and small side projects like murals and book donations. Speaking of which, if you keep up with this blog and have actually read this far, that probably means you either need to give me money or send me a care package. Money is in the form of a donation to our book project in which we will be contributing kids books in French to form a small library and provide teaching resources for a school that has none. Here’s the link: Books! ­­­­­­­Care packages must include small scientific demonstrations: a small set of magnets, a compass, plastic thermometer, books with pictures of the human body or small models of it, or whatever you have lying around the house that takes up very little space in a package but would be of great interest to a village-bound 7-year old are all appreciated. American snacks for me are also a must.

So in conclusion, don’t forget to thank teachers for the differences they’ve made in your life, whether or not you were actually in their class. Alternatively, you can simply thank a Peace Corps volunteer for being awesome. You know it’s true.

~E

Life and Times in Dakar, and other stories

Well, the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. Since I left you, I went up to Thies for the Agroforestry summit, then spent an extra day there for our Gender Awareness and Development program summit, traveled to Dakar where we spent a day presenting our projects to NGOs in Senegal and hearing about their programs, and finally got to see the infamous West African Invitational Softball Tournament. (In case you haven’t figured it out, the abbreviation for that would be WAIST. I’ll let your imagination wander.)

The agroforestry summit was informative, and it was great to have a chance to get to know all the other agfo volunteers in country that I would not otherwise have much time to see or interact with. We went on field trips with guest speakers to learn about some projects outside our normal realm of work such as poultry farms and fish farms, conducted a seed exchange that allowed us access to many seeds for our upcoming projects, and we pooled our energy to complete a small project trenching mango saplings in the agfo teaching area at the training center. That afternoon, my friend and old homestay village-mate Peter and I traveled back down to good ol’ Keur Madaro to catch up with the homestay families and go on a seed hunt for Acacia melifera, a thorny live fencing species. It was great seeing my homestay family again; I’ve visited them twice now, and it’s a good benchmark for how far I’ve come since leaving training. Each time I visit them my language skills are a bit better and I feel more confident in my work and daily life here. It’s a pretty rewarding feeling.

Our 1-day GAD conference was also interesting; it gave us the opportunity to see what other volunteers in country are doing in relation to helping women and girls become educated and be more independent in society. We also had a chance to discuss GAD work in relation to our sector- in my case agriculture. GAD work is built into every sector to some degree- I have to work with women’s groups for gardening and teaching them improved farming techniques and hopefully marketing techniques for their vegetables and seeds. I would also love to get involved with girls and exercise. Since the village finds it hilarious that I like to run and play soccer with the boys, maybe it would be fun to start a running club. Amazingly, and it’s hard to believe I’m already saying this, it might be hard to find time now that I’m starting to get really busy.

The all-volunteer NGO conference was a good experience to present our projects and see what other NGOs are up to, but it was rather overshadowed by the fact that volunteers were reuniting, tired from traveling, and starting to get pumped up for the upcoming madness that is WAIST. Just being in Dakar is an experience in itself. We went out to fancy restaurants and real diners. One night I had Thai food, another I had sausage pizza, and the last night we had a barbeque at the American club and ate grilled chicken with garlic mayonnaise and pasta salad. It was a beautiful thing. There’s a mall along the shoreline that as my friend Teresa puts it, “looks more like America than America.” We ate ice cream and went to an American-style diner called Times café where we had (ready for this?) mozzarella sticks, garlic cheesy bread, and fancy coffees- I ordered an mint mocha latte. Ahhhh heaven does exist after all.

WAIST is a whole other ball game (haha get it?) As a representative of the Kaolack region, I donned a tutu with the rest of the team and pitched softball for a couple of innings against the Gambia, an NGO team and the northern region. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, because only a few things can happen when you get all of the PCVs in West Africa together, give them a softball field on the ocean in Dakar, and then put them all in a club with a pool and a bar. Needless to say, pictures are posted.

Originally, I thought coming back to the village and going back to daily life after that would be rather difficult, and much as it hurts to write about all the good food I had when it is now far, far away, it’s actually rather refreshing. I don’t feel healthy gorging myself on calories and just having fun all day after a while. You just need to get it out of your system and then go back to work. Therefore, I’m surprisingly motivated, even in the face of the oncoming hot season, to get myself back on a routine. This applies in all aspects: exercise, diet, work schedule, sleep schedule, etc. For example, for the past couple of days I’ve been waking up early to run before it gets hot out, then I’m off to the field to water my garden, and I’ve been talking to farmers and planning projects for the planting season. Tomorrow, I’m going back to Babou Njiti to begin outplanting the school pepinieres with the students there, and by next weekend, I have to go back to Kaolack for a meeting about the Moringa tourney we are planning. So as you can see, after a brief yet lovely diversion hanging out in mini-America, I’m hitting the ground running. What do you know? I’m actually starting to feel like a real Peace Corps volunteer.

Still, that doesn’t stop me from missing snow. I’m writing this with a piece of damp cloth wrapped around my neck to keep cool. Gotta keep everything in perspective.

Love from the desert,

~E

Thoughts from the field on education and development

Over the last few weeks, it has started to occur to me just how much I take basic information that we learn in elementary school for granted. I never realized before I came here how when you talk to somebody in America, you automatically assume they have an education level of a certain degree, which is an easy assumption since it is illegal to drop out before you have at least reached high school. Here though, I often find myself trying to have certain conversations before stopping myself and realizing that I need to back up- a lot. This morning, I was out in the field chatting with Pape about time zone differences- that if I call my family when it is 11 am here, I will certainly be waking them up since it is 6 am over on the American eastern seaboard. Somehow he ended up asking a question of direction- so if Banjul is in this direction (points south) and if Dakar is in this direction (points northwest) then where is America? I have been continuously trying to explain that America is a very large country in comparison to Senegal and hoping that it will click and they were remember at some point seeing it on a map and remember that-oh yeah- it actually is rather big. It never occurred to me that maybe they have not even seen a map of the world before. I asked Pape if he had, and he replied that no, in fact he had never seen a map of the world before. This man is about 35 years old. In all my attempts to explain that America is a very large country and you can’t simply describe what the weather is like over there in a short statement, it somehow slipped my mind that I took for granted the fact that as you go north in the world it gets colder because of the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun, or the fact that there is more than just water that separates Africa from America- there is an ocean there. Also, airplanes move quite fast. If I am in an airplane for 8 hours versus a bush taxi for 8 hours, I will get much farther in an airplane. Telling them how long the flight is will not exactly convey the distance of the trip.

There is a whole slew of other things I often take for granted about talking to people with a certain level of education that I have only just started to think about after half a year in this country. Literacy, which I’ve mentioned before, is a big one. It doesn’t quite occur to you just what the implications are of not being able to read until you try to work with these people on a daily basis. People keep asking me to teach them English, assuming they know what that entails. I now respond by asking if they can read. Often, they say they can’t, and now I have to try to explain to them the importance of writing down words and reading them over in order to memorize them or understand the necessity of a pronoun and an article. When they go to the doctor, they receive a small slip of paper similar to the ones we get on appointment cards saying when to return- those are rather futile if they can’t be read. Lately, we’ve been watching TV in Arame’s room since the AC/DC converter has been working at night, but I wonder how it interests them so much if they can’t understand the majority of what is going on when the news is all in French. The other night, an American action movie came on (I don’t know what it was but it took place on a cruise ship which is hard enough to explain as it is) and it was dubbed over in French. At one point, a woman in the movie went to a stage and started singing and the dubbing went away, so that she was speaking in French but singing in English, and I laughed at the irony of it. Almost all 20 people in the room with me turned around and wondered why I was laughing- many of the children don’t know that white people speak more than one language, too. The other problem was that this movie came on right after a news reel about a demonstration parade in Dakar involving thousands of people walking down the street holding signs and marching bands playing. For someone who has never been out of the village life, how to you distinguish between the reality of this gigantic mass of people on paved streets surrounding by tall buildings in this country and the American action film that followed it?

I’ll leave my education rant there to comment on the consequences; in short, development cannot progress without education. You don’t really notice it until you’ve been living here a while- as you try to talk about abstract concepts, technology, or the outside world, things simply go over many peoples’ heads and they lose interest or assume you are trying to speak Wolof and don’t know what you are saying. On the bright side, education is actually a large part of Senegal’s overall development strategy. The other day, Ousman told me that when he was a kid here in Keur Andalla, there was no school, and he had to travel to go to elementary school all the way up through university. Now, almost every village in the general vicinity has a French elementary school in it or within walking distance. Ousman and I both agreed that over time, the general level of literacy and education in the villages will start to increase as the current generation begins to mature. The school here, after all, was built less than 10 years ago, so the current adult generation is mainly uneducated. Even if they never progress to middle school and high school, the ability to read and write a little bit and perform basic arithmetic will make a world of difference within the next generation or two. Especially with the extension of infrastructure such a electricity and water availability that permit more widespread use of technology such as cellphones, television and internet, people will begin to see the necessity of education and understand the concept of globalization. Inshallah.

I am, after all, posting this thought to the internet for the world to see from my cozy little hut in Africa. That has not yet ceased to amaze me.

Love from the Sahel,

~E

Bananas!

After a relaxing couple of days in the house, I am back to the grinding stone- planting bananas. I helped Abdou Aziz plant a small plantation of around 10-14 banana plants in a swampy part of his field last week before I went into Kaolack, and now I’m at it again. Though the water requirements for banana plants is very high (around 20 L/day/plant) they are also very prone to rotting, so I am a tad bit worried that they might rot too much before the hot season really starts. I suppose we learn by trial and error, and I tried to make that clear to my work partners- if this doesn’t work, please don’t hate me forever. Yesterday, Pape and I went over to Keur Chorno about 2 km away with the donkey charette to visit his friend’s field and cut a bunch more banana suckers (the small offshoots from the trunk that you plant to propagate bananas) and ended up with around 33 plants. We brought them back to my hut and put them in my backyard for the afternoon, and this morning we lashed small piles of bananas onto the back of our bikes and brought them out to the field. We spent a lovely morning digging holes, amending them with a manure mixture and filling them in, and planting small banana plants. After all this work, here’s to hoping they grow (raise imaginary Nalgene bottle with me.)

I’m also working on my demonstration plot. Many of the seeds that Peace Corps gave us during install are not growing, and I have had to go to the market and just start buying some seeds of my own. God knows how long they were lying around in the training center before they decided to get rid of old seeds by handing them out to unsuspecting newbies. At any rate, I finally have something green that is sticking out of the brown stuff underneath it, and one would only hope that it is actually a plant. I have now seeded and reseeded my damn pepinieres around 5 times since install and have nothing to show for it.

Moringa beds are a similar story. I originally seeded the bed, and it didn’t grow. I thought birds ate the seeds, so I reseeded it and put branches over it to protect it from birds landing there. Once again, it did not grow. Pape then told me the other night that a small animal- a gecko as far as I can get from the rough translation, has been walking in a line after I plant them and eating each seed in the bed in succession. Today I seeded it and put dead grass over the whole thing to prevent it. Here’s hoping, again. (Cue to raise Nalgene bottle a second time.)

To wrap up, here’s a funny cultural anecdote to hold you all over until my next entry. Yesterday, on the way to Keur Chorno, Pape pointed out this little footbridge in the middle of a field that spanned a small eroded area. He told me that when black people build a bridge, that is how it turns out, insinuating that blacks are less skilled than white people. I then asked who built the bridge we have in Keur Andalla (there’s pictures of it in the album if you want to see- it’s pretty nice). He responded that they were black too, but they were outsiders. I laughed and said, “so they were black toubabs” and he laughed an agreed. The moral of the story, in case you missed it, is that Toubab is supposed to define the color of your skin here, but it really has less to do with that than Senegalese people think. It’s really about societal status and where your family comes from. If you live in upscale Dakar but you’re still Senegalese, you may very well be a toubab, but it really depends on who you ask.

At any rate, to drive the point home that the black people who built the bridge were toubabs and I was not, I drove the donkey cart home. What stupid creatures.

Until next time…

~E.

Oh and PS after I wrote this Oumi and I cooked French Fries to portray American food to villagers who don’t know what ketchup is. You might call it a cultural exchange. I thought it was the best excuse ever to eat American food at site. Yum.

Moving right along

It’s been a little while since I’ve written in this, and that is possibly due to the fact that I left myself internet-less for a while, not realizing that the fixed line I have been using is not set up to work with Windows 7 that I have on the new netbook. That will be fixed by buying an internet key which works in a similar way but doesn’t need to be charged the way a regular fixed line does, and it is a bit more expensive. At any rate, I’m typing this offline to be uploaded in Toubacouta tomorrow when I go help out some friends with terracing a garden. It’ll be a long day.

On the homefront, things have started to happen at site! After starting my demonstration plot and planting my moringa intensive bed, my friend Byron came to visit me for a day and helped me get all my project ideas into a real schedule. It is amazing how much better it can make you feel when you actually have a purpose in life. During his visit, we went to the fields to look at some of the work I’ve done already and determine logistics on things such as how many seeds I will need for live fences, where I can obtain them and when I should be starting them. By this point, I have a pretty good idea of what my life is going to be like up until the next rainy season when the pepiniering season comes to a close and outplanting begins. If that is jibberish to you, that means that we have to first seed the trees, let them grow a little bit in tree sacks where there is greater soil retention and less risk of insect attack, then we take the seedlings and plant them in the ground to their final site right after the rains begin and they will be watered around June or July.

The other great thing about visitors is the food. Senegalese love to impress their visitors, so the quality of the food is substantially greater if somebody comes to say hi. Unfortunately for me, I live out in the middle of nowhere and it is difficult for most volunteers to stop by, but when they do it is a good day for me and my stomach. For dinner, they cooked chicken with a macaroni sauce- a huge treat, and for the following lunch we had a rice dish with onions, carrots and fish called yassa. Yummy.

Since Byron’s visit, I have started to have more of a direction to my daily schedule, which is reinforced by my farmer counterparts in the village. We talked to a farmer named Abdou Aziz about planting bananas, for instance, since he has abundant water sources in his field and plenty of overgrown space that can be cleared and used. We also talked briefly about the uses of Neeme, a common tree in Senegal that has insect-repellant properties and can be used both in the field as a preventative pesticide and on the body as a regular bug spray. Today, when I got back to his field, he had already gone to a neighboring village to obtain some banana plants that we can plant, and he had attempted to make a neeme solution for his garden. Unless you are a volunteer, it is hard to describe just how amazing it is that a farmer simply took you at your word without seeing it in practice and went ahead and tried it. The small victories can really make your day.

Now all of a sudden, January is almost over, and soon I will be traveling to Thies for the agroforestry summit and Gender Awareness and Development seminar. Afterwards, we get to go to Dakar for WAIST, the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It will be a welcome break from the village for a week or so, and hopefully I will come back rejuvenated and ready to get some of these pepinieres up and running. One can always hope.

Missing home lots.

~E.

Gardening a happy new year

I started another garden today. Things that I learned as a little kid are really starting to be enforced- if at first you fail, try, try again. In this case, it applies both to the demise of my garden behind my hut and to the minor failure at teaching soil amendments the other day. Before I went to Sokone for language seminar, I went out to the field with the women in the village who were starting their plots. They were digging, and I decided that it was time to take initiative and try to explain soil amendments and their benefits before they get everything planted. I tried to speak up, and some of them clearly had no idea what I was saying, so it turned into a random mess of some women trying to throw green leaves into a pile to just mix into the soil at random. My uncle came over to me and said some people didn’t want to do that because it was extra work, and I tried to show that it really wasn’t that hard to strip some leaves from some trees and put them into the ground. In an awkward turn of events, somebody then got a phone call that someone in the village had died and everyone had to go home. The plots still haven’t been finished. Now, however, I am learning from my mistakes and I am making some big compost piles for myself, pepiniering in an area where there’s water and good soil, and in a public location where it will be easy to teach and discuss with people. This doesn’t mean I won’t retry planting in my backyard- it’s really convenient when I don’t feel like leaving my hut to just say I have work to do in my garden here. It’s also probably the most control I have over any one location since it is protected from goats and locked away from little annoying children. A public garden space has its benefits though- it’s close to outplanting sites if I want to pepiniere some live fencing species for the women’s garden next to it, and it’s next to the women’s plots that they had started so they will have to walk by my garden every time they go to work there and see my moringa beds I plan to plant- free advertisement of the fact that it is, in fact, important for them. At least that’s how it works in my mind.

Speaking of moringa, I will be traveling into Kaolack for a moringa tourney meeting in a couple of days, and this being after I just got back from my language seminar in Sokone. It is amazing that now that the 5-week challenge is over, I really am out of site a lot. Thankfully my counterpart/dad Ousman understands; I applogized that I had to travel so much the other day and he was perfectly ok with it, explaining that he knew I was learning and the village would ultimately be able to benefit from it. I can’t claim to love spending as much time as possible in the village, but traveling so much takes its toll on you when you are trying to form relationships with people and when it’s a minimum of waking up at 4 am and traveling on an overcrowded bush taxi for 4 hours just to get into the regional house. I justify it by thinking that I will have some bragging rights among other, less-remote volunteers later on. That, or I’ll just start complaining all the time.

On a completely different note, did anyone make New Year’s resolutions? Mine is to make it through the year. This year is bound to change me in ways I can’t even imagine and present challenges that may be harder than anything I’ve ever had to face, so wish me luck. Here goes, 2011.

~E