ellooooo!
I finally got WordPress to work so I will attempt to make all further posts on here. I had tried a tumblr account, but it wasn’t working how I wanted it to so I will stick to this.
Where to begin….
Today was again full of lots of information. We divided into our sectors this morning to find out more on what we will be doing. As many of you know, I am in Health Education (the best one of course 
Yes all the sectors make this claim). The other two are Environment and Small Enterprise Development. We discussed the goals of Health Education for Peace Corps and went through our huge manuals a bit. I don’t have the stuff in front of me right now, but the main focuses for Mali are maternal and child health, organization and developement of institutions and preventable disease. I am excited to get started even though it seems like a lot of ground to cover!
So I know you all kept asking me about how many shots I had to get, and originally I said not that many. Well, I lied. Yesterday I had to update my Meningitis vaccine and today I had to get one for rabies and for Typhoid fever. The Typhoid fever arm still hurts even after about 9 hours later. Oh well, at least I won’t get that! And I managed to avoid rabies already once while living in Hotel California
We learned all about Malaria today and how to use everything in our medical kits Peace Corps provides us with. See? A lot of information! We also learned about the upcoming Muslim holiday called Tabaski (Pronounced Ta-bas-key). Apparently we have come at a great time because this is like the mother of all celebrations. Everyone dresses in their best, women get their hair done and all that jazz. It is a celebration of when Abraham went to sacrifice his only son Ishmael (Isaac in Christian history) in obedience to God, but God stopped Abraham at the last-minute and had him offer a ram instead. Thus, on Tabaski a ram is slaughtered by the men and then cooked by the women for the celebration. It is also about giving gifts and blessings to friends, family and people of your village. I cannot wait to be in the midst of it all! I don’t know if I’ll be able to wat the ram slaughter though. It’s not the blood, it’s the fact that it will probably be squirming around a lot. We will see! Tabaski will happen this Sunday…pictures to come.
The real test begins tomorrow, when we move in with our host families. I had the best packing experience I’ve ever had with packing tonight. Other trainees coming in and out of our hut, dancing to music, sewing pants and having facials (Thanks again Akinyi!). When we get to our host families, there will be about 8 of us at each site. We will have language class everyday, trying to master Bambara. It will be about 3 weeks before we come back to Tubaniso, so no internet for a while! Even though it will be a tough transition, our group seems like it will be a lot of fun. Our whole stage is pretty great though, as I’ve mentioned before.
I wanted to post a picture here, but unfortunately I am on one of the communal computers and I don’t have my USB camera cord. Sorry! There are a few on facebook though and I’ll have more to come after homestay! For now I will use a google photo so my post doesn’t look so plain.
- These frogs are EVERYWHERE! They mainly come out at night
And I almost forgot that my 24th birthday is in 2 minutes (Mali time). It doesn’t feel like it is since it’s November and I’ve never been anywhere really warm during my birthday. Still getting used to the whole non-season thing. Tonight after dinner they made a cake and sang to celebrate all the November birthdays. The cake kind of had a banana taste to it and was covered in chocolate. YUM!
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 85
Bamako, Mali, West Africa
