Training down south

It was called IST which is an acronym I should probably know.  Pretty sure the "t" stands for training though.  My whole training class got together for the first time since we first departed to posts.  It was, as one might imagine, a bit of a shit show.  Extreme isolation ending suddenly with being surrounded by a language and culture you actually understand can lead to… certain excesses.  A couple weeks of that can take it out of you.

The training itself was relatively useful.  We brought our counterparts from all over Cameroon.  It was incredibly interesting to just watch how different people from all over interacted with one and other.  Cameroon is bilingual too; everything had to be in both English and French.  This kind of draws everything out, but can be pretty useful to someone still learning French.  Actually, it got really interesting when we broke into groups and I found myself in the middle of anglophones and francophone translating.  The classes or subjects were a bit simplistic and I found that incredibly boring and frustrating till it was pointed out how much our counterparts were learning.  Honestly the main things we taught were different methods for critical thinking.  I did learn a lot by listening to other volunteers both in my group and who have been here longer.  We shared best practices and strategies and I think I gained some useful ideas to try out in Bogo.  I look forward to what might hopefully be some fruitful projects.

The rest of the training was fantastic.  It was lots of catching up with old friends and sharing Peace Corps stories.  We looked a lot at how people had changed.  What does Peace Corps really do to a person's personality?  I will say… well, it makes sense to feel alone at an isolated post, but it is a strange thing to feel alone amongst a group of people all who are supposed to be your friends.  Even amongst people you know, love, and will always call friends, you still find yourself alone, thinking of all the people at home who know you best.

Training was an interesting transition.  It was a goal we were striving for.  "Stay at post, tough it out, and wait till you are reunited" was the mantra for the first months at post.  Now it is over.  We have no short term, easy goals.  It is "return to post and make a difference."  We have to find our own way.  Wish me luck.

Rain!

Water fell from the sky yesterday.  Hadn't seen that one in awhile.  Per usual, the Americans drew strange looks from Cameroonians as anyone from the Grand North ran outside to stand in it.  I should have snagged a few photos of us arms spread staring straight up like kids in a winter's first snow.

Two and a half months is really not a long period of time, but... it is just the strangest thing to never see rain.  Weather has always been unpredictable for me and everywhere I've ever lived has had rain pretty regularly.  I'm not the sort of person to check the weather; I just go outside and look at the sky.  And I get rained on a lot because of it.  The Extreme North (and the two other regions making up the Grand North) are completely dry for months at a time.  I can just leave things outside and it doesn't matter.  Because I know, with a hundred percent confidence (take that weathermen of the world), that it will not rain.

I think I miss rain.  I don't think about it often and sort of just got used to it.  The climate in Bogo is awesome.  It's like I'm living in the wild west and expect to run into Clint Eastwood around any corner.  Yea it is hot and going to get much hotter, but I'm vaguely getting used to that.  Plus you just hide inside of under the shade.  If you are rich, you sit in front of a fan.  I do miss bodies of water.  Also, having a river of sand is just weird.  I'd happily take a creak.  A bit of rain is a requirement for that from what I'm told.

Differing Medical Opinions

Right, you remember how I was saying that I’m not particularly good at football?  SOCCER, I mean soccer.  Well, that was an understatement.  I’m atrocious.  I’m not even good at being bad.  This time when I went down, I was not as graceful as the last.

Do you know how sometimes when you are watching soccer someone randomly falls down even though no one is around?  Like they are trying to pull a foul?  Maybe it’s my Italian blood, but that’s exactly what happened to me.  I was trying to just jump in the air and change direction, but I landed horribly on my right foot.  Collapsed like a ton of bricks.  Which was technically a change of direction.  It hurt like hell.

But it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as when my good Cameroonian buddy came running over to try to help out.  First, there was a slight communication difficulty as to where I hurt myself.  He thought knee when I tried to convey ankle and manhandled the shit out of my foot trying to straighten my leg.  Somehow through the pain I was able to communicate ankle, unfortunately they have the practice here of trying to massage out the pain.  I spat out profanities faster than ever before in my life.  The French ones were sadly lacking in force and resigned to things like “shit”, “stop”, “go away” and the like.  I was more colorful with the English.  There were moments when he would stop and we’d stare at each other as I tried to catch my breath.  Then he’d start again.  I honestly thought about how nice it would be to pass out and exasperatedly yelled “will someone who knows French please kindly tell him to fuck off?”  He finally did and I lay panting on the ground with my head swimming.

So that was fun.

I’m not really knowledgeable when it comes to first aid.  I know you elevate and rest the area, but not really why.  Maybe massaging it immediately after could help.  Pretty much every Cameroonian who talked to me about it said that it should be massaged.  Course they also said that I probably wouldn’t walk for at least a month or two.  Luckily I was promptly carried to our training center porch and had Americans who do know first aid pamper me.  I was a most humorous patient laughing and cracking jokes between my yelps of pain.  And most of my demands were for things like chocolate.

I’ve since been to see our onsite nurse.  I’ve a nifty splint and some cream that stops it from hurting and may do something about swelling.  Though not much as it has been a day and my foot still kinda looks like a balloon.  We are all relatively convinced that it’s not broken.  Course the local X-ray machine is down and when told this the nurse followed up with “so, I hope it’s not fractured”.  Pretty sure from the way I fell and my current range of motion it was just some pulling muscles, ligaments, or other optional pieces.

Probably the most fun part was trying to deal with my family (and neighbors or just general people who happened to be walking by and came in to see the commotion).  They were not OK with me waiting to see our nurse in the morning.  They called the Peace Corps a couple times to argue with them and even tried to take me to the hospital themselves on the back of a motorcycle.  To plead our case, I tried to explain to them that while I could in fact walk on it, that was a bad idea and could make it worse.  I wasn’t actually sure I could walk on it, but I hoped that would be enough.  It wasn’t and in desperation I decided to try it out.  I managed a few steps well enough and felt confident enough to support my whole weight on it.  This is obviously stupid and you should not do this.  At this point though, they had me half terrified and I figured if I failed at least I’d have a good reason to be drug to the hospital.  Anyway, it worked out fine and they let me be.  Well, minus the talking to host pops still gave me about how mad he was I didn’t call him immediately.  It’s good to feel loved.

The North West

Or the north part of the west.  It’s a bit confusing.  Cameroon is kinda shaped like a chicken (seriously, go look at a map).  There is this whole western part where they speak English.  The northern part of it is called the North West and that makes sense except there are three other regions that are much farther north.

We had quite the adventure and left Monday afternoon and didn’t get back till Thursday.  This probably doesn’t seem like much, but when every second of every day is planned a bit of an escape seems damn near the most amazing thing ever.  I think we spent half the time in a bus and that was fantastic as far as I was concerned.  It was too bumpy to actually do work which leaves hanging out, listening to music, and drinking.  I’M JUST KIDDING.  The only person who’s allowed to drink on the bus is the driver.

There may come a point when my jokes no longer make sense to anyone other than Cameroonians and Peace Corps Volunteers.  Apologies, ye faithful need just bare with me.



Cultural note: No, they do not speak Spanish anywhere in Cameroon so I’ve no idea why it’s called the “Super Amigo”.

This was our first time out in a real city since Yaounde.  Sure we still had a curfew, but it was extended to 10 o’clock.  And besides, we all went to the same hotel.  That means we got to still be together as opposed to alone (or rather with families of people who don’t understand us linguistically or culturally).  It was fantastic.  PLUS we stayed in super nice hotels.  Or… well there was hot water!  And water pressure!  Yea, we shared a bed with another volunteer, but at this point we are just one giant family anyway.  And the food… it’s like they read my blog or something, because we ate so well.  We had, oh what’s the word in English, I think I’ve forgotten… OPTIONS.  I spent infinitely more money than they gave me to spend, but it doesn’t matter; I fattened myself up quite nicely and can just live on the reserves in the coming week (actually, I seem to be shedding pounds already and I barely can find the time to work out). 

I realize I haven’t bothered showing you pictures of things like the town I’m actually living in or my home...  You will happily take whatever I give you and I will not hear a single complaint.  Anyway, I’ve really wanted to try to explain to you what I’m looking at here every day.  It’s a strange unique beauty.  The contrast between the buildings and humanity with the monster here that is “nature” is so stark I can’t always wrap my head around it.  I have tried to take a number of pictures, but they are pale comparisons to what I’m looking at with my own eyes.  It’s massive, impressive, and somehow incomprehensible.  It’s like being atop one of the mountains of the Appalachian and staring over an expansive forest only you are in the middle of some run down village that feels plucked from an old western flick.  And the sky… if you’ve talked to anyone that’s been to Africa, they told you about how much bigger the sky is here.  I know that makes little sense.  It just can’t be bigger.  But I’ve seen it.  And it is.  I’ve seen the clouds here and I’ve seen storms roll in from the distance.  You don’t need an umbrella here; you just check the sky and walk home before the rain catches you.



In the other direction there is a waterfall cascading down those mountains.  Seriously.

I’ve tried to take pictures of the stars.  It should be mandatory that cities cut power for an hour during the night at least once a month so we can all go outside and see what is really up there.

We learned a lot on our trip.  I learned how to make tofu from soy.  And it was actually incredibly tasty unlike almost every other time I’ve eaten tofu.  I also learned how to make soap, though I couldn’t stop relating it to the book/movie Fight Club.  It was intended that we learn to make wine, but somehow that got cut.  Don’t worry, I’ll get that knowledge soon enough.  All these are sort of income generating projects we use to get to communities and have them fund other projects.  It makes for more sustainable development if we set up health projects along side income sources. 

We also experienced probably the best day yet.  A lot of time is spent learning how to do need assessments and different sorts of projects we can start.  The how we actually get people and communities involved and committed seems incredibly daunting and we hear about as many efforts from volunteers that fail as those that succeed.  Sometimes the tasks seem insurmountable (like those mountains in the distance; go ahead, give ‘em another look).  But we spent a day in the most welcoming community I could imagine.  All of us including the PC trainers were taken aback by their response to our arrival.  They organized welcoming parties, a feast, songs, a work demonstration, and had speeches prepared.  It was all a thank you for a successful water project that a volunteer helped get underway.  Basically harnessing a spring and pumping clean water to a village of 1,500 people.  I can’t really describe the response except to say it was unexpected and brought, what do you call them, emotions to the surface.  Strange watery droplets and such tried to form.  It was just a reaffirmation of why I came all this way.  Hope and a sense that things really can be accomplished.

On that note, don’t go expecting as much from me.  That volunteer had more positive energy than I have cynicism.  

That’s the best picture I’ve got of a ton of people digging out a trench for the water pipes.  They are just community members, not paid workers or anything of the sort.  I have a great video… but I’m barely overcoming the picture problem at the moment.

I’d like to go into more about how the actual project started and worked.  Both technically and organizationally.  I will see about getting that info and talking to the volunteer who actually did it.  Otherwise I’ll just go back to making jokes about my life in Africa.

Dale out.

Cameroonian Foods

I don’t know shit about Cameroonian foods.  At the same time I desperately want to talk to you about it.  You just NEED to know.  The thing is, I’ve only been living in one place.  Everything I hear about food here is that it varies drastically.  They have bushmeat down south (which could really be anything, but is probably monkey) to apparently a ridiculous number of cattle in the northern center.  They have jungle down south with all the tropical fruit you could want all the way to desert in the north.  There are places in the middle where you can literally grow just about anything.  Variety is the word.

And I get none of it. 

It’s a logistical problem really.  I had a hell of a time explaining this to Mamma Alice (I really have no idea what to call the people in my host family).  She was asking me what sorts of foods I liked and ate at home.  More importantly how and I tried to explain to her that we don’t really do markets like they have here and just use the supermarket.  They have something called a supermarché and she took me.  It had one wall of food which was basically some canned vegetables, pasta, tomato paste, and margarine (is that ok unrefrigerated?).  I felt too guilty to even try to explain Harris Teeter.

They don’t have refrigerators in their homes.  Many stores have a little one that cools the drinks about to be sold, but with electricity being shoddy, it’s not really feasible to stock up like we might.  The roads are lackluster or worse; I haven’t seen a semi—much less a refrigerated one—barreling down the road.  I know they have one train line, but from what I understand it does one passenger trip overnight.  Basically what all this means is that you eat whatever is available in your area.  And since you aren’t importing anything, you eat it when it is in season.  I’m going quite mad over eating the same thing day after day, often for more than one meal.

Now, I’ve gotten breakfast decently on lockdown.  I make omelets most days.  Two eggs, bit of salt, bit of a spice mix called magi, tomato, onion, and some leafy greens (parsley, basil, whatever they have) cooked in some palm oil.  That is occasionally spiced up with a puree of avocado (the American’s most prized veggie here; we seriously hunt them and buy all in stock whenever they can be found), tomato, onion, oil, and vinegar.  Both are ALWAYS served with bread.  I’d honestly prefer not to eat either with bread, but the Cameroonians seriously cannot accept this and think it madness.  If either of those fail and I’m in a rush, I get bread mostly with chocolate or creamer… actually that creamer is a whole different sort of thing.  They have powdered milk here (so I’m told), but my family just boils water and adds coffee creamer.  Then tells me it is milk.  One of the weirder things I’ve run across, though it tastes fine.

OK, so breakfast is pretty fine.  Lunch depends.  When I’m in the larger city, it’s decent…ish.  We have some people come cater a lunch at the big training house.  They do a decent job of variety.  It basically always has fish, rice, beans, and either cabbage or legumes (both seem super overcooked and kinda gross to me).  But they will at least a couple other things, like pasta and sauce, the occasionally other meat, fried plantains, and virtually always some fruit like pineapple, oranges, or papaya (best part as far as I’m concerned).  Very occasionally they have cake, but it is almost always dry and kind just a let down for a man who loves cake as much as me (how do you make moist cake, I must know to introduce and revolutionize these people’s lives!). 

There is one other good things about lunch at the big training site: the sandwich lady.  One of the other volunteers interviewed her and asked why she served sandwiches, she said she would normally just serve anything since Cameroonians didn’t care and eat it but she discovered Americans love sandwiches.  This is true and she does excellent business.   It is run literally out of a shake thrown up twenty feet from our front door.  She stockpiles avocado and basically makes puree with beans and hardboiled eggs and puts them in a sandwich with your choice of mayo, vinegar, and a spicy sauce.  Somehow this is amazing.  It’s probably the avocado.

I can barely stand to go to lunch at our place at site anymore.  It’s just the same.  Every day.  Fish always.  Beans, rice or pasta, some sort of tomato sauce that is kinda OK but runs out, and either the cabbage or legumes.  I spent an hour today roaming the town buying ingredients to make my own replica of the sandwich lady’s sandwiches.  And it was worth it.

Home is slightly better.  For one, my family has some excellent cooks.  They can turn out the same things and they are just better.  The pasta comes out right, the fish fresher, and the plantains hot and juicy.  We do have the same sort of things.  We’ve had beef maybe twice.  The sauces seem almost identical, but they do liven it up on the occasion like last night we had something what was almost but not quite akin to pesto.  We do eat a variety of veggies that all taste sort of like potatoes.  I kinda hate them and they are always just boiled and plain.  We usually only have two things: the fish in some sauce matched with any of the other things.  But it is do-able and different enough that I don’t want to pull my hair out.

I am working on improving my situation.  I’ve picked up things at the market and brought them home so they get incorporated into meals.  I’ve had a few convos with Big Mamma and I may try to cook here.  I’ve tried to explain that while I can theoretically cook a chicken, she’s going to have to help me kill the damn thing and figure out what parts I’m supposed to keep.  I accidently told her I could make potatoes (while we’ve had tons of things that taste like them, actual potatoes are expensive and we haven’t had them yet).  I will need to figure out how to mash them or something.  Ovens seem to be an extreme rarity, we are basically cooking on a nice camping stove or at best a gas grill.  Yea, we’ll see how any of that goes…

Well, I’ve managed to stay on topic for a whole post!  How do ya like it?  A thousand plus words of yours truly complaining about food.  It’s really not that bad, but I do have moments where I just kinda panic because I just can’t get ANYTHING that I’m used to.  Hopefully these panic attacks won’t kill me… though I did make ever the slightest mistake today.  When I was out searching for food for lunch and just going into anything that looked like a restaurant asking what they had (lunch is not a real popular meal here so “nothing is ready” was often the response), I ran into a place with an ice-cream machine.  An actual soft-serve.  Now, I have to boil my water and run it through a filter so that monsters don’t grow inside of me.  Cameroonians do not do this and instead opt for the “get sick and try not to die” approach.  But it was ice-cream… and it was the five best minutes of my life.  Cold, delicious, strawberry flavored ice-cream.

Sometimes I think about food and tears literally flow from my eyes.  Right now, remembering today’s ice-cream, is one of those times.  

Cameroon!

Well, where the hell do I start?  It should be obvious now that my internet usage will be irregular.  There is some hope for when my training is complete (in two months), but I wouldn’t keep your hopes up.  There has been internet and I’ve even had free time, but, alas, the two have not coincided.  I’m actually writing this to upload later when I can connect.

First, I had a week in Yaounde (note: there will be no Wikipedia involved in the making of this blog, so expect errors).  This was the orientation part.  Or staging or some other fancy name.  We were under super tight control.  While they said there wasn’t much to be worried about, a group of 55 whites following a regular, predictable schedule and only a few of whom could speak the local language would be bound to draw attention.  We therefore basically either at the hotel or the Peace Corps HQ and chauffeured by Peace Corps SUVs the whole time.  We also enlisted the local Guandams (dammit lack of Google) armed with AK-47s to protect us at all times.  Though we mostly just used them to practice minimal French and occasionally direct traffic (seriously wonder how the locals felt about their public servants being used to move them out of the way to let a bunch of white Americans pass). 

We did manage to do two pretty awesome events during that time.  The first was a concert/dance.  Local style music which was very jazzy and drum heavy.  Loved it.  And the dancing, which I also loved, could have been considered risqué.  OK, very and I felt a bit awkward at points.  You think bouncing asses on rap videos is much?  Ha, this is Africa.  The second was a formal dinner with lots of important people.  Media and government officials and such.  I was lucky enough to sit down and eat with our US Ambassador, Mr. Jackson (my intelligence is apparently directly proportional to my ability to look shit up).  I sort of forced myself to sit with him after making a fool of myself when he introduced himself to me: “Oh, you are the important one with a nametag.”  Looks around to figure out what I’m blabbering on about, “All the tables have them.”  And he walks off.  “Yes, well, yours has your name on it instead of a title,” muttered under my breath.  I should have said plaqueard as it didn’t help that I was actually wearing a damn nametag.  ANYWAY.  I managed to be much more charismatic at the table.  He was incredibly friendly and knowledgeable.  We talked about his career and I learned all about what I could expect if I ever decided to try my luck with the Department of State.  He also had told a couple of great stories about some African mix-ups I can look forward to.  And report on to you.

Basically the first week was a massive blur.  They pounded tons of safety, security, and health information into our heads.  Everything from cultural customs to how to cook your food so that you don’t have terrible monsters growing inside of you.  I’m convinced everything here can kill me and have just accepted it.  Basically, if I get nicked I will get infected and die.  And, for any of you that know me well, I’ve already managed to cut and scrap and bleed plenty.  None of which were on purpose though, hand to God.

When I wasn’t in seemingly endless meetings, I was trying to get to know 54 of my newest, bestest friends.  Since they will be the only people able to really relate to me for the next two years.  At least in a language and culture I understand.  A lot of you may recall some reservations I had about meeting a bunch of young, doe-eyed kids.  Well, while there are probably less than ten who are actually older than me, the vast majority are infinitely more experienced in… anything remotely resembling what I’m here to do.  I’d wager half of them have masters or are working on them and the rest have some other impressive claim to fame.  What’s more than that, I really, seriously like everyone in this group.  They aren’t just people that I’ll hang out with because of the situation; these are people worth seeking out in any other place.  They are intelligent and engaging and I’m probably more excited about watching them work here than I am about myself accomplishing anything.  I mean that sincerely; I’ve found them more interesting than anything else so far.  It would also appear that I managed to sweet-talk myself above and beyond again.  Being charismatic has its perks.  Hopefully, I can translate (literally) that skill into use here.

Speaking of language, I’m finally being presented with the opportunity to learn some of one!  Seriously, during the first week we had so many other things to do that all we received was an emergency survival French lesson.  They moved us onto the training sites and in with host families with a loving kick on the ass.  After a SUPER awkward night, I was happy to get to the training center the next day to learn some French… and discovered that there was still more shit to do and we wouldn’t get to language until the next day.  Awesome.  But worry not, my friends, my French is already improving.  And I can think of no better way to learn.  My teacher is incredibly helpful and effective.  I’m in a group of four students all sharing one teacher to ourselves.  So I get to monopolize a full 25 percent of the time to myself!  And being me, I probably take another 25 percent too!  The immersion stuff I did in Italy is absolutely nothing compared with this.  Though I must say, I am starting at the bottom.  I got selected in the second to lowest class.  The one where they said “oh, you seem to know some words”.  Why, yes I do.  There are like… ten or more levels and I have to get pretty high up before they will allow me to go on with my life.  I’m fairly confident I can bullshit my way through though.  I’m busy learning things that make me sound fluent, possibly to the detriment of the rest, but whatever.  I’d rather sound intelligent than be it any day.  CHARISMA, people.

How about a little bit about the home life?  I’ve been here almost a week now (HOLY SHIT, I can’t believe that’s true).  When describing my first night the day after I went with “It was OK”.  That remains to be true.  While I am improving, I’m having a lot of trouble gauging what exactly I’m supposed to do.  On the one hand they are receiving some sort of compensation for hosting me (murky on the details of that), but I still feel like I’m supposed to help out.  I’m not exactly sure what they expect of me and I seem to fail at everything I try to do anyway.  I have a mom and a dad.  Both are super nice and welcoming while at the same time giving me plenty of space and letting me do whatever I want.  Having space is a nice relief from the super structure of everything else, but I find myself in a half panic wondering what they expect me to be doing.  There are six kids from about 5 to… 16?  I should probably ask them how old they are.  I think I just got their names all down today though, so one step at a time (I should probably go write that down immediately).  The kids take care of everything.  They are like little servants running around making the world turn.  This is good and also part of the “what am I supposed to be doing” problem.  But when I, say, sweep and mop my room which is something they do every day, one of the kids will invariably tell me I’m doing it wrong and take away whatever to do it for me.  This occurs for pretty much everything.  I can’t even but vegetables properly to feed myself.  And we are not going to discuss washing clothes.  How can I fuck up that?  It is water, soap, and a bucket.  But no, my clothes aren’t clean enough; do it again.  And my shoes?  I’VE NEVER WASHED MY SHOES.  Then again, everyone here has nicer shoes than me.  The roads are dirt in my village.  Je ne sais pas.

I got sidetracked.  I’ve done so much.  It feels like I’ve been here forever.  I went with the six kids to Catholic mass this Sunday.  It was about two hours and I understood practically none of it.  There was a lot of singing, a really, really long sermon, and then after some sort of… I dunno, but lots of people got up and spoke and everyone was happy and yelling and clapping.  I hung out with my host mom at the market and sold palm oil.  It’s scary looking in its natural form and also in basically everything I eat, so… that should be fun.  I eat fish every day.  My host dad owns a poissonerie or fish store, but it seems that everyone eats fish here.  It’s good and always fried in oil.  Actually all the food has been pretty good if a bit repetitive.  It is super high in carbs though.  And oil.  Did I mention oil?  My family held some sort of big meeting in our house.  They told me it was an association of families where they pool money for things.  Not sure what things—I got that they pooled money if someone got sick—but everyone had sweet matching outfits.  So maybe they just pool money for that.  The children have learned things.  Like how to demand a piggyback ride.  They have a variety of irregular ways of saying my name.  Mostly Dev.  I should probably pick some African name, but I am rather attached to Dale.  I still don’t really know how to buy things.  Basically, I look at my family to learn how to do anything.  But to buy things, mom and dad just yell for it and one of the kids is off to the market.  I actually chased after one and went to pick up soap with him.  Maybe I am supposed to just send the kids on errands though.  Somehow that seems counterproductive though.  The piggyback rides seem more appropriate in dealing with my white guilt.

Speaking of, one of the things that has struck me as odd is how damnably easy everything is for me.  I’ve been riding on the whole white, American, male for my whole life.  We aren’t actually all white.  There are a few African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic (-Americans? Do we say that?).  Plus slightly over half are women.  And the women here have a million more social and cultural difficulties to overcome here than I.  To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I could put up with half the shit they do or are going to have to put up with.  Basically, just want to throw as much respect to everyone else doing this that is going to have a much more difficult time than I.

Not my most cohesive piece of work, but you gents all need something!  Know that I am doing a decent job of keeping up the ole journal, so the bits you miss will exist in print someday.  The juicy bits post-humus.  I have not taken many photos yet.  It’s an odd thing.  I can’t communicate super well to ask (and particularly explain about posting them online), plus I don’t really feel comfortable enough here to be flashing any wealth.  I already stand out enough to basically guarantee being stopped on the road for a quick chat anytime I’m walking anywhere.  Hopefully, I will be able to update more.  Most likely after training is complete.  I will likely have a bit more personal freedom.  Right now, the town I’m in does not have any internet, so the only way this will get posted is when we collectively visit the larger training site.

You guys are awesome.  It does me good to know that I’ve friends and loved ones out there.  Send emails, stay in touch.  Much love.