Swear-in

I am now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! Swear-in was last night at the Country Director's house and the ceremony went very well. I will be in Lome until Monday before making my way all the way up country to my post. Right now my emotions are somewhat mixed about moving to post. I am excited to leave but at the same time I have to deal with the fact that I am not going to be seeing many Americans at all at my post. The Peace Corps in general do not send many volunteers to the way north of the country for reasons I don’t know but it is where I will be living. I wanted to live in the North because of the challenges that people face up there. It is a much more arid climate that does not produce fertile soil for good crop production. This is probably the main reason why the northern most region of the country has the highest rated of malnutrition. But these are issues that I will be looking into much more thoroughly after I have been at post for a bit. Being in Lome for the past couple of days has really made me realize just how different a small village is compared to a big city (especially Lome). In small villages you will get
noticed right away and you’re the main attraction, but in Lome you are just another face in the crowd. I am trying to spend as much time as I can walking around and interacting with the people of Lome as much as possible because I will realistically only be here a handful of times during my service.

Information about my post:

though my post is really far away from all the action in Lome, I still have access to pretty much anything I need. The only thing that I will have to travel for is internet, so you can plan on me updating this about every 2 weeks.

Site visit

Week seven has arrived and it is one of the most anticipated weeks of training. Week seven is known as site visit where all the trainees get to live at their site for the duration of the week to get a feel for life after training. My site visit experience did not go as well as I would have hoped. I got some sort of food poisoning on Monday night and was pretty much confined to the bathroom and the bed for much of the week. I have been feeling better the past couple of days but my appetite has been curbed exponentially and I still feel pretty fatigued and run down. But even with being sick for most of the week I got a good feel for the village and the culture around me. My living situation is very nice comparatively speaking. I live in a compound with three other families away from the action of the main street. The volunteer that I am replacing really enjoyed the site and felt perfectly safe during her two years of service. I also have a really motivated counterpart in the community that is really excited to work on nutrition causeries and interventions with me. Speaking with him this week has also motivated me to put more time into my French and to really take the last moth of training seriously. It was also a nice surprise when I found out that my house was equipped with a bucket flush toilet rather than a latrine. Latrines really are not as bad as you might think, but being on one for most of the day when you are sick is a little much (especially at night with the cockroaches). So I am sorry to anyone who was hoping for "pooping in a hole" stories because I won’t have that experience, at least not at my compound.

From here I have one month of training left before Swear in. Swear in can be a hectic time for a lot of volunteers because everyone is down in Lomé and has to purchase most of their furniture and whatnot for their house. I’m kind of spoiled because my house is pretty much fully furnished and anything I need to for it I can get in my village which makes the whole transition from training to post a lot smoother.

wow

ok finally i can update this thing...basically I have a lot to talk about but my time as always is limited and this french keyboard is extremely fruestrating. training has been going really well, I absolutely love my host famlily and the community in general. my french has been progressing quite nicely to my surprise. learning french in africa is definitly a challenge considering the fact that I hear the local language spoken more than I do the french. I have to tell my host sisters everyday to stop speaking ewe so i can understand at least part of what they are saying. I am actually more excited to get to post so i can JUST speak French. Here at training it is tough because we speak english during alot of our technical sessions so it acts as a crutch that i honestly would rather not have right now.

on another note i found out where i will be living for 2 years after training. but technically i dont think im allowed to post in on blogs for security reasons. But to give you a sense i am very very far from lomé. The distance issue is a factor and its the reason a lot of the other trainees didnt want this post, but for me it has everything i want. such as: bigger town, availability of food; high muslim population; lots of opportunities for work in nutrition and sanitation, and electrecity.

I have alot more to say but for right now i have to leave;, the peace corps really keeps you busy during training so untill next time.......

lome

okay i have like 10 minutes to write this on a tiny laptop, sorry for the errors. Everything is going well so far. Togo is AMAZING. I absolutely love it here because the people have been so nice and the communities and culture is drastically different from anything I have ever experienced. We have 1 more day of orientation then i will be with my host family in a town an hour from lome. during this time i will not be able to get cell phone coverage so i will not be buying one until august. untill then i will try to make it to the internet cafe a bit even though that is quite expensive. I am really looking forward to being with my host family so I can constantly harass them with french questions. The Peace Corps has been incredible during our orientation process as well. They are well respected within the country and they have really given our training group alot of confidence going forward. In case you were wondering, I will be taking bucket showers and using a latrine as my toilet. yay for camp bill o wood all over again. hope everything is going well back in the states and to my dad, i will send you the financial aid
deferment papers whenever i can get to the post office.

random notes: food here is delicious, very healthy and I have not had 1 thing that I do not like as of yet.

most things here are WAY cheap, exp. 22 oz beer at a bar down the road is like the equivalent of 1 american dollar

lots of random chickens running in the street, one today was eating a frog whole

were getting our trek mountain bikes tomorrow when we go to our host families, which means I am definitly doing some journey of hope type rides through the country side

I am very pleased with how I packed. I feel like a have the perfect mix of clothes and electronics. by the way im using my roommates lap top right now and everything after this will be at internet cafes.

DO NOt send packages DHL because it will cost me a fortune to pick them up

Goodbye for now

Here I come Togo!

Right now I just got done my last orientation session in Philadelphia and we depart for Togo tomorrow morning. Orientation was great because it really cleared up a lot of issues and questions that we as future volunteers had. Our training class for the CHAP(community health and HIV prevention) program consists of 16 members. I knew from the people I met on the Internet prior to staging that the Peace Corps were looking for very qualified volunteers. I can say with great certainty that this training class is no different. We all come from a wide range of backgrounds and educations including several volunteers with their PHD's and a ton of other work experience. The one thing that was interesting to me was out of the 16 health volunteers I didn't hear one person mention that they were a Public Health major in college. Most come from backgrounds of communication, science, or other discipline( like nutrition) that is related to health in some way. Anyway I guess the bottom line is that the people I have met thus far are very dedicated and easy to get along with. It makes things a lot easier already since we have already gotten to know each other well as a group.

Tomorrow we are flying to Paris then waiting 6 or so hours then heading to Lome. We will be training about an hour north of Lome and the first 3 days of training we will be living with in a hostel before we get assigned host families. I am looking forward to meeting my host family. When I think of a host family I can't help but think back to when I first met Mohammad and Khalid and remembering the culture shock that they were being put through. I remember having to correct their English over and over again but in the end having them as friends was well worth the time. For me it will be the same deal except in French. The host families are trained by the Peace Corps so there is no worry that they will show frustration that easily.

Overall I am very excited to start my training in the Peace Corps. I started applying to join the Peace Corps in September and now tomorrow I will finally step foot in Africa.

From this point on I am not really sure how much time I will have with this blog. I know training for the next three months will be incredibly stressful. I cannot say with great certainty that I will be able to or want to update this especially if I am speaking in French all day, but I will definitely do what I can to give you some sort of perspective of how training is going. Before I go I want to thank all my friends and family for being supportive of my decision. I know it was a shock to most but it is a once ina lifetime experience to grow as a person both personally and professionally.

......and please make sure Obama takes the White House this fall, I do not want to explain to the togolese people the ideologies of McCain.

Goodbye United States

Wow, time has really moved fast here in the past two weeks. Between my sparse rosetta stone usage and the multiple family functions that I have been to recently I have not had a lot of alone time until now to even think about what I am getting myself into. It is now starting to finally sink in that I will not be back to the US for over a year. This should be a scary thought to many, however, I am not nervous about it even on the eve of my departure. How can this be? I feel like I have changed significantly over the past two years both personally and professionally. The challenges that the Peace Corps will present to me are not something that I am scared of. I look at it as the ultimate opportunity to learn more about people that are culturally much different than myself. This difference in culture is something that I am looking to embrace and I will do whatever it takes in order to be an asset to my work. I am of course going to miss so many people here in the United States but I will be back sometime next year when I finally decide to take one of my vacation breaks. I have several goals that I wish to accomplish in the Peace Corps, but for the first three months it is best that I just take in as much as I possibly can without putting to much stress on myself. I will be in Philadelphia until Friday engaging in multiple orientation sessions and vaccination field trips (yay). On friday we will depart for Paris and then from there we will fly to Lome. I have decided not to bring my computer. I think it will just be a distraction because there is little chance that my house will have electrictity and no chance that it will have wireless internet service. My cell phone broke so I am just going to wait until I get to Togo to buy a new one. The only electronics I am bringing are Ipods and alarm clocks. I know the next two years will be tough, but I enjoy adapting to difficult situations that I know will make me a better person in the long run.... and if I can cycle 80 miles a day across the USA, I have a good feeling I can make in Togo.