swearing-in!

Blog 5
So it's been a little while since I've written a blog. The last couple weeks have been crazy and I'm so ready to be done with training. Two months is a really long time to be living out of a suitcase. We've had to pack up and move our things more times than I care to count. Time is moving so fast and so slow at the same time and I'm using my mefloquine to try to keep track of the number of weeks we've been here... it's hard to tell some times.
Anyway, about two weeks ago we had our second language test. I was feeling really good about my language and I knew I had improved and when I learned that I tested at intermediate low for a second time it really brought me down. It upset me a lot and it was at the same time that we had our counterparts from our final villages visiting. It was so stressful and we had to move around from place to place and room to room and speak with our counterparts in our languages about villages that we hardly know anything about yet. I had a bit of a breakdown and I was feeling homesick and it all just snowballed into this crazy awfulness. The two days that the counterparts were here felt like an entire week. The same day that the counterparts left we all had a very rushed and very busy day trip to Dakar. We had a very rushed 30 minute tour of the area and then met many important people who spoke about mostly uninteresting things. It would have been fun if we had had some free time, but alas... The next day we had our first real weekend. We all ventured out to the beach and had a blast swimming in the ocean for a day and just bonding with each other and all the while dreading our return to our homestays for our last week.
Our last week of homestay was bitter sweet. I feel like I'm finally a part of my family and I am going to miss them a lot. They have started calling me Neene Adama, which means mother Adama... not in a Catholic Monastery kind of way though. In this polygamous society the children call the other wives Neene insert name here. The children have really started to see me as a mother figure and I love it. It wasn't the most eventful week because I spent so much time studying and practicing Pulafuta so that I could pass my test at intermediate mid but I did have a few adventures. One day I cooked pasta and tomato sauce for my family and they LOOVVEDDD it! While this is a dish that would take 20 minutes in the U.S., it took me 2 hours here! The pasta itself took half an hour because we cook “camp-out” style over hot coals and I was cooking a quantity that would feed 15 people. Simple meals are not simple here. Even tea is a long 2-3 hour long process. They cook the tea over coals with so much sugar it's disgusting. They only have two shot glass size cups that everyone shares and they have to make this foam by pouring the tea back and forth from glass to glass and it's rude to leave early and not drink it. It's awful when I feel like I'm in a rush to get somewhere and I'm being held back to drink the most sugary tea any American has ever had. I had another adventure with another volunteer on a different day. We had the afternoon off and we ventured a kilometer down the road to the “Tortoise Village”. It's a rehabilitation/breeding/tourist site for sulcata Tortoises. I love sulcatas and it was so nice to see them!!! They had different enclosures for different ages. I learned a really fun fact about Baobabs trees. There are two types of Baobab trees.... there's the Baobab Digitalis which has branches that look like fingers and there's the second type which is called the Baobab Sulcata. The Baobab Sulcata as it gets older has a hollowed out trunk like a sulcata tortoise shell. Senegalse burry important people in the hollows of the baobab trees. It's amazing to me!
Well anyway, this week is it! We're all back at the training center and we had our final language and tech exams yesterday. We're done with the hard part and next week we move to our villages!!! OFFICIALLY!! On Friday we have our swearing-in ceremony in Dakar where we are sworn in as official volunteers. It's going to be televised nationally. We all had special clothes made for the ceremony and my host dad made mine for me. There is SO MUCH EMBROIDERY that it's so crazy and so tacky and so perfectly Senegalese!
November 11th I will be moving to my village where I will have no electricity or running water. I will be 45kilometers from Kedegou City where the post office is. Letters are welcomed and expected. I will update my address on Facebook when I can this week. For the first month and a half after I move to my village I will be out of commission because we are not allowed to leave our villages for 5 weeks. I miss all of you.

Look out for my mailing address!!

Ilana