When we arrived the bugs were a little frightening. Okay. Seriously frightening. And it wasn’t the size or the look of the bugs. I am okay with that. It is the shear quantity of bugs. Swarms of anything have always freaked me out and there were literally hundreds and hundreds of what look like dragon flies crossed with may flies buzzing around every light source. These things burrow out of the ground and fly around for one night. Then they lose their wings (so there are these nasty wings covering everything the next day) and they burrow back into the ground…. I think. Id rather they died but sadly I do not think that is what happens. The worst part is that the bastards cannot even fly well so they constantly get stuck in my hair and my food and run into me in unfortunate places such as my sticky back and neck. Eck! There are also termite hills that could engulf several small children. I have never gone close enough to one to touch it for fear of being attacked, but suffice it to say they frighten me….. in later posts I will describe how these creatures have become the bane of my existence.
Also, Sonja may or may not have gone through the trouble of taping up all the holes in the bathroom and main room screen windows to keep the bugs out. I of course thought this was an awesome idea … only to discover several days later that the hall window had zero screen. The entire screen was missing. Lol, our efforts were totally effective right? The part that makes me the saddest about that story now is actually not the complete lack of effectiveness of our efforts, but the tape that was wasted in the “repair” process. It was good tape.
Anyway… we did not have too much time to start adjusting to the new time zone and climate because we began classes the next day. Classes were the same old same old in general (culture, security, paper work, PC rules and so many more classes), but one interesting event was the welcoming ceremony that they took us to attend at the house of the Country Director of the Peace Corps (Jeffry Cornish).
They took all 16 of us to the Cornish’s backyard where they had a circle of chairs arranged and an African drumming group with dancers situated on one side. The drummers did an awesome! job (though I could have done without the addition of the whistles as I highly doubt they used those damn plastic things twenty years ago) and the dancers (some of which were costumed) were even better... The only slightly awkward part was that we were all completely jet lagged and had no idea what was going on. We definitely looked like zombies… and we felt a little bad because we did not know when to clap or how to dance etc. It the end we all managed to stay awake and embarrass ourselves with attempted dancing and clapping (at least that is what mine should be considered).
One of the costumed dancers
Our fearless PCVL Leader - Ian -- Pretty much our savior during training
To wrap this post up because it is getting a bit long, during out time at Yuna we were also interviewed to discuss where we wanted to live and what we saw ourselves doing during the next two years. This was called out placement interview. Although they were going to wait another month to tell us our final placement PC needed to make the decision now to determine which language we were to learn and to divide us into training villages. For my interview I drew a picture of myself teaching math/computers at a university or large school building (and yes my drawing was in crayon) and let the rest of the pieces fall where they may.
A few days later I was told that I would be learning Mandinka in Mariama Kunda and that Nathan and Jay would be my classmates -- of course out of 16 people, only four of which are guys, I end up in village with these two fools :D We also learned that Erin, Lilly and Josh would be on the other side of Mariama Kunda learning Wolof. These are the 5 Americans that I would be spending a very significant about of time with over the next month and a half….
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