Estage gasi

Hip-hip-hooray I am done with training again! It was a bit rough going through two months of training all over again, but my Pulaar really profited from it. I feel like I didn't really learn any more Pulaar over this past year that what I knew from training in Mauritania. I was much more interested in learning and using French. However, my new village is much smaller and there are a lot of folks that don't speak French, so I will probably end up using Pulaar more.

I am really looking forward to going out to my village, getting established there, and beginning to do something productive again. Its been three months since I had any work to do and I am itching for it. Although having spent those three months with Americans, its going to be a real adjustment to go back to village life, which is sort of funny because all of the other adjustments that I have had to make here in Senegal were getting used to things being nicer. Absolutely everything would be an example of that, and I am sure that the new Senegalese PCVs are tired of hearing it, but I'll just give one example. For our official swear in here in Senegal we had a Police escort to take us into Dakar so we didn't have to get stuck in traffic (I thought that this was a bit awkward since we weren't really doing anything that important and it seemed unfair to do just because we had the money for it, but I suppose it was more about not keeping the Ambassador waiting than us being a big deal). The swear in was held at the Ambassador's residence and it was attended by other Ambassadors and Senegalese government representatives. After there were fancy hors d'œuvres and we went to a bar with a pool. By contrast, for our swear in in Mauritania, we had to do it in one of the dorm rooms at our training center because there was sewage seeping through the floor of the room we would were supposed to have it in. No Mauritanian government representatives were there because the coup d'etat had just happened and the US hadn't decided how they were going to handle relations with the new government. After we had a party out behind a hotel outside of town because it was far enough away that we could drink without anyone seeing us and we danced like we had ants in our pants because the whole compound was infested with them. Things here are definitely nicer. Some one asked me the other day if anything was better in Mauritania, besides the people I knew there the only thing I could come up with was that the family I ate with cooked better a better lunch (rice and fish with a bunch of veggies and an amazing leaf sauce paste.)