dear readers...

I apologize for my long absence from this site, realizing it is August already and perhaps you’ve given up on me, but I assure you that I am in fact still in Senegal!
Many of you close to me know that the reason I did not write during most of July is not because I was overloaded with work or laid up with dengue fever, but because I spent that time doing something I did not think I would be able to do until next spring.
Yes folks, it’s true…
I went back to the United States of America.

My trip was made possible by the letters A and E and the number 13…
Just kidding :) So many people chipped in to help me come home for three weeks, I cannot thank them all enough. Family and friends, some of whom I was able to see while I was stateside, some not, but all of whom I love dearly and whose kindness I appreciate more than they can know. You know who you are!

I’ve been back in Senegal now for two weeks already, having arrived feeling refreshed and calm, and ready to jump back in. Good thing, because I spent my first week back helping to organize and prepare for a two-day conference of Environmental Education and Health Peace Corps Volunteers which then took place last week at my site, and entailed welcoming fifty PCVs and a handful of PC staff to my town and then ensuring they had everything they needed to successfully house and feed and train them, from Monday night through Thursday morning. I ended up with some overflow, hosting four friends (three EE and one Health PCV) at my house, and only yesterday did the last guest leave for Dakar, leaving me fairly exhausted but glad it had all gone remarkably well.

Now I am at the point where I have time to sit and assess where to go from here. For the first time seemingly since the week before I left for the States, I have time and space to myself to just think. I went back to America for a few reasons, not the least of which was to remember why I’d come to Senegal in the first place. Now that I’m back, and this work summit is over, I am looking at the coming months and formulating plans. Where do I go from here? What is the next step? And I’m just talking for the next few months here. Where I will go next year when my commitment here is fulfilled is still very much up in the air.

While I’m looking forward, I’ll let you look back. Before I even got to the airport, I had left site a week earlier to spend a weekend with my original Thies village host family for a baptism party, and then a few days with a good Senegalese friend’s family in Dakar. Now instead of simply summing up my experience of going back to the U.S. after over a year spent in this developing West African country, the following are some excerpts from my journal, to give you an idea of the range of my reactions, all candid, to the wonderful and surreal fact of my trip.