Sunday, August 24, 2008

Pictures!

The moment my moms have been waiting for/asking about non-stop since I got here/threatening me about has finally arrived. I spent most of the afternoon for the last 3 days uploading pictures, so enjoy! Here's the link--they're on facebook but you should be able to see them even if you're not (in other words, mom, please don't make a facebook page).

First album

Second album

Enjoy!

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Last day of homestay...

...and I'm pretty happy about it! Don't get me wrong, it's been a great few months, I'm just so ready to move on. My family has been...ok. For the most part they're nice to me, although I'm pretty sure one of my aunts is crazy even by US standards and yells at me at random. No big. There are some days when I'm sitting there surrounded by people all talking at me in Hassaniya (they know I don't speak it, but that doesn't stop them!), kids climbing on me, eating weird food and I can't help but think "OK, where the heck am I??" But then there are days when I'm sitting there surrounded by people talking at me in Hassaniya, kids climbing on me, eating weird food and I know I'm going to miss them. I won't miss the pancake batter with pasta in it for dinner though. Eew.



Anyway, the only real news recently is that model school is over! It was really great to have three weeks actually in the classroom, working with real kids. My class was really small (we had a record 8 of them show up for the test), but even so I learned a lot about the kind of problems I'll no doubt run into. The girls can be painfully shy and hide in their mulafas when you try to get them to answer questions, even when they know the answer. It's considered OK here for kids to snap their hand and yell "teacher! teacher!" when they want to get your attention/ask a question/give an answer. Might not sound like a big deal, but it is when 60 of them do it! I'm fine with the snapping, but I'm making a no yelling teacher rule from day one. We'll see how that goes. Of the 8 kids who took the test on Friday, we had 6 pass. That's considered really good. We (Mike and I taught 5th year together) were really happy with it since one girl who failed only started coming for the last week (she got 3.5/20, and they were totally lucky guesses...she filled in some vocab blanks to make sentences such as "Shakira is very jump," and "I don't know where the post office is, can you score me?") The other kid who didn't pass stopped coming by the end and only filled in half the test. If he'd bothered to do the rest of it, I'm sure he would have passed, he just didn't for some reason. But at the end of the day, our students who came to class did well. That's a good feeling. And I taught them the word awesome, so what more do they need?



So tomorrow morning I leave my house in Satara for the last time (I really hope my family fully understands this...they've been know to be a little slow/forget that I've told them things) and go to the model school cerimony, then to the center. It will be nice to have a week or so all together before heading out to Selibaby. I'm excited to start my real life here, although since it will be Ramadan right as we get to site, it will be a slow beginning. Maybe my new family will teach me some Pulaar. Good thing I had those 3 weeks of Hassaniya! : ) Megan and I did set a record with a total of 5 different teachers during stage. Pretty impressive!



That's all for now. John, who's sitting across the cyber from me, just informed me that he's stalking my blog so I better post this for him. Creep : )

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Coup

Don't worry, I'm OK! things are fine here. It was actually about as uneventful as a coup can be. Here in Rosso you wouldn't have even known. People are still having some trouble getting in and out of Nouakchott...but other than that and the old president and PM being under arrest it's business as usual! There seem to be really mixed opinions about it here, and depending on who you talk to you could get a vastly different answer.

In other news, I started actual work this past week. We spend 3 weeks teaching at Model School--basically classrooms with actual kids who get a certificate for going to English school over the summer. I taught 3 days last week, and teach1 or 2 hours a day for the next 2 weeks. It's hard because we skip around between classes, and it's so hard to know where the students are at! These are seriously multi-level classrooms. So far, I've taught 1st year (they start the first year of middle school), 5th year and the adult class. It's a ton of work, but I really, really like it. I spend my nights making lesson plans, which include things like how to set up the chalk board and stuff that I never thought I'd plan out, but it's so important to keep control of the class, especially here. Next week, I'm switching between 4th and 5th year, and then will stick with 5th year for the last 7 days.

I also started learning Hassaniya, which is fun and intense. It's hard to learn a non-written language! The Peace Corps basically made up an alphabet with French letters to make it easier for us to learn, but there are so many sounds we just don't have. It's also really interesting learning one foreign language in another (the class is taught in French). My family really likes that I'm learning, even though I haven't had much time to study yet! The whole switching languages and starting school at the same time thing was a lot for one week, plus the whole coup thing and just general toubab fun...it was a really busy but wonderful week.

OK, I hope all is well at home! Keep in touch! And thanks to people who have sent mail! I got a letter from Natalie and a bday card from Linds, and it rocked my world. And as always my moms are the best mail senders :)

Lots of love!

Friday, August 1, 2008

Update and my site!

Hi all,

Sorry I've been out of touch! On my birthday I got the wonderful gift off finding out my site where I'm going to be for the next 2 years. I'm going to a town called Selibaby, down towards the south of Mauritania (if you look at a map, there's a little part of the country that dips down by the border of Senegal and Mali--it's by there). We left to go to our sites for a week on th 22nd. It was quite a trip! To get there, we went from Rosso to Boghe, then to Aleg, then through Kiffa and spent the night in a tiny little village (maybe 10 houses) outside of Selibaby. Most of the trip between Kiffa and Selibaby was done with no road, literally going through rivers and bouncing around so much that one of the Peace Corps guys with us threw up out the window. It was certainly an adventure! It took about 16 hours.

Selibaby is wonderful. It's a regional capital, but it's small. Much smaller than Rosso. I'm going to be living and teaching in a part of town that's mostly pulaar, which means two things: 1) the hassaniya i'm starting to learn on sunday won't be as helpful and 2) I won't have to wear a mulafa when I'm there!!! So as usual everything as ups and downs. I plan on learning Pulaar when I get there. It's very green right now in Selibaby because it's the rainy season, and I guess the trade off for being nearly impossible to get to is that there's grass and trees! The current volunteers there are great, and the other 4 people coming to the region with me are wonderful. It will be really nice to get there and finally be in one place, not living out of a suitcase! There are definitely some challenges, like the trip to get there and getting used to not having all the things we do in Rosso (less veggies now, but there will be some during the drier season, general smaller town things). But there is a guy in town who makes sandwiches on Pita bread!!! You have no idea how exciting that is. A vegetarian sandwich here is pretty funny: french fries, sometimes egg, ketchup and mayo on bread. I kid you not. It's actually really good, maybe just because it's different but don't knock it til you rock it! What else can I say about it...I had my first run-in with a blister bettle. Basically they crawl on you and release an acidic liquid which give you blisters. I got it on my neck. Good times! Really we're all covered in weird skin things, bug bites, sand all the time...you get used to it!

The trip back to Rosso was shorter because there hadn't been rain for a few days and we could take the other road to Kaedi and then spent the night in Boghe with some other volunteers. I got back to my family yesterday, and they were really happy to see me. The two little kids came running to me and threw themselves on me, as did my aunt when she got home (about an hour and a half later she was yelling at me to give her a gift even though I had brought back food for the family...she does that from time to time, I think she's a little crazy. After a little bit she was totally happy with me again). It's nice to be back, but I'm also glad it's only for 3 more weeks. I'll be living in my own little place in a Pulaar family's complex in Selibaby, and in general they're more relaxed than Moor families. They were kind of upset to hear I was going to Selibaby for 2 years and kept saying how far away it is, but I promised them I'd visit. They loved hearing my stories, and after a little while it was back to normal at my house--they spend a lot of time debating which other toubabs I should marry, and I just tell them I can't get married here because my mom would be mad! Tonight we're going to a wedding in the neighborhood so that should be fun.

OK, that's all for now. More to come soon!