well folks, i'm pleased to announce that i successfully made it back from demyst alive and well. we left the 16th at seven in the morning and drove all day for twelve hours to get to kanel, where we were staying with caitlyn, a current health volunteer, and her family. it was a long trip and once we got past saint-louis it really started heating up. i thought thiès was hot...silly silly girl. each day we, my language class, spent about three hours in the morning having class and then taking a six hour rest before having class for two more hours. why the long break you may ask? because between the hours of 11 and 5 one literally cannot do anything because it is so hot. one day it got up to 57°C. i won't even convert that for you... just know that we boiled water without using any sort of fuel source, steeped tea, and made applesauce in a nalgene just by putting it out in the sun. i resorted to dunking my shirt in water and adopting the holy mary head shawl to stay cool. i looked pretty ridiculous but stayed cooler. even the senegalese don't do anything during that time... and the sad part is that the hottest of the hot season is still a month away. cheers!
despite the heat our road trip was a lot of fun. it was such a great experience to see a volunteer in action actually doing work and interacting with the local community. it also gave me ideas as to what kind of projects i can do once we install at our site. she also made me and the rest of the the volunteers headed to the fouta really excited to start. it sounds like everyone up there is an amazing gourp of people and it sounds like we're going to have a lot of fun together. just a heads up... the fouta region does thanksgiving for all the volunteers so it would be awesome to get the makings for pumpkin pie, etc in the mail. just a little subtle hint. we even had a fluke rainstorm one night which caused all the toubabs (aka americans) to dance around like crazy people while the senegalese watched from a porch. for a brief while we actually were cold and then the scorpions came out and made us all scared to go to sleep.
i wasn't able to go to my site since it is a little bit of the main path, but we did stop and have lunch at the market town me and emily will be using. it is only about 7km from us and it will be a great way to get veggies and fruit. the road to my site is also paved which means i will be doing a lot of biking.
we got back to thiès yesterday after a ten hour car ride. we were so happy that it went faster than the ride out because we were all pretty anxious to get back to thiès. the change in temperature once we hit saint-louis was amazing... it felt like we crossed a invisible barrier because all at once we hit the sea breeze and it felt amazing. then we all overdosed on ice cream. right now we have the day off before we head to dakar tomorrow for some administrative stuff. i'm excited to see dakar... we haven't been there at all yet, and the only time we saw it was at midnight when we drove through it our first night here. it'll be fun to see it during the day and walk around. we only have about ten days before we officially swear-in as volunteers so things are starting to get busy. we have a big language test coming up as well as our counterpart workshop where we get to meet the local partners we'll be working with during our two years. emily and i will have the same counterpart since we're practically in the same village. we've heard nothing but good things about her and we're excited to start a few projects right away. we swear in the ninth of may and immediately after head back to the fouta to install into our site. the installation process takes a while, we have to get things for our huts and everything so we'll have a little break after pst to rest. at least i hope we do.
well that's all for now, take care everyone!
peace, jaime
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