sun and sand.

Week 5 of 8, and training is getting more important every day. It's also getting to be more fun, for me at least, since I feel like my language skills are starting to be acceptably passable, Sant Yalla. I've been joking around with our trainers, having funny conversations with my friends who are learning Wolof, and laughing at phrases other friends are learning in Serere and Pulaar (in Serere, to say "really?" you say "ndigol-ndigol?") Buying sodas from the guards at the gate in between classes, while they ask me in Wolof if I have any cute sisters, also keeps me smiling. Last week I was talking with my Senegalese sisters, in between studying for two tests, and after two of them asked me if I didn't have a "far" back in America ("far" is a Wolof word that means "boyfriend", but really in Senegalese culture you don't have a boyfriend unless you're basically engaged, so. anyway...) and when I said no, they didn't believe me, so to deflect attention I turned to my (very pretty) younger sister and told her I knew she had a "far", and she giggled, and said no, no, while my older sister laughed and said, "Yeah, she does! She's got 10, 11, 12..." and counted all the way up to 25! So when I told the guards who were asking about my eligible sisters that ND had 25 boyfriends, they got a big kick out of that, and said, no, no, 25 boyfriends, "baaxul!" ("no good!") :p

Things have been going really well for me, I helped organize a trip to the beach this past weekend, and I'm excited to keep going with training, though a little overwhelmed about going out to site in just under a month - gasp! We found out our site placements on Friday, and it's hard to believe that in less than four weeks we'll all be somewhere different. I feel very lucky to have the people I have here with me in this stage (our training group), and will definitely miss them when we're all spread out around Senegal. But the country is not sooo big... though one of my best friends has been posted in a village that will take about 14 hours by car to get to =( I found out I'm going to be on the coast, about 110 km south of Dakar, around the city of Joal, which has about 35,000 people. So probably no mud hut for me, actually. I have mixed feelings about this, as I really do love living in my village right now, as everyone knows me, and I feel very comfortable and safe there. But everyone has been very supportive here, and I have faith that the trainers know what they think is best for me, and things will work out okay whether I'm in a city or a village. I'm trying not to build up any expectations around proximity to amenities like electricity or running water, as I've mostly gone without both for the last month anyway (though we have them at the training center, of course), but it's hard not to be excited about the fact that my site will be, by all accounts, very close to the beach =)

Tomorrow all of us PCTs are leaving, in ten different groups, to go out into country for 10 days for what's called in PC jargon "demystification". We'll be visiting current PCVs to see what their lives are like and what their work is like, to get a little practice in our technical areas, and to continue learning our respective languages, since our language teachers are going along. I'm going to miss my family here, but getting to see what PCVs really do should be interesting, and fun, and informative, for sure. I'll let you know how it goes.