Hey Everyone,
We just got back from Site Visit and are VERY excited about our placement! This is really the first week where we have been pretty much on our own instead of being carted around with Peace Corps vehicles and staff to translate and give directions. Therefore, it was very exciting as well as very challenging.
Our House: A 2 room mudbrick house with cemented walls, a tin roof, and a nyegen. We live in the teachers area so it is on the outskirts of town and overlooks some beautiful fields. We also have a huge mango tree right out front so we’re very excited for mango season to co me around! We also have a hanger outside to give us a place to sit in the shade. Finally, our village is building us a wall around our yard so that we can have more private space.
Our Village: A small village of about 2000 people. So far everyone has been very welcoming and seems very excited to have us here. It is quite a bit off the main road but once you get there, we love that our village is very clean and picturesque—unlike some of our homestay villages. Another perk is that we also have a very large market once/week in our town where we can buy almost anything we want. This is a huge difference from some villages where you cant find any fruits or veggies whatsoever! We discovered upon arriving to site that everyone in our village speaks another local language-different from the Bambara which we have been learning. However, men and most women can also speak Bambara, so we are going to continue with Bambara for a while but this just means that we can’t communicate with any of the children for the moment. Another huge plus is that our local mosque does not have a loud speaker, so we are not woken up at 4:30am every morning with the call to prayer. YES! Our village does have a small protestant church too! So we plan on attending once we move in.
Our Banking Town: In Peace Corps, a banking town is the town with a post office, bank, and internet access, where you go 1-2 times/month to connect to the outside world. Most people use a larger city or regional capital, but since all these things exist in the town 12K away (1.5 hours by bike) where Jim will be working, Peace Corps has designated this as our banking town. Unlike our village, our banking town has internet and electricity and is the center for a lot of government buildings: Mayor’s Office, Ministry of Education’s Teacher Training facility. etc. We spent one day walking around this city with our homologues and introducing ourselves to all the “big-wigs” of the city and it looks like having this larger city close by will be a very nice complement to living in a small village.
Aside from seeing our village, we also had the opportunity to visit a sub-regional and regional capital and realized that we’ve actually traveled through a huge portion of Mali in the past week. It was nice to visit the cities that are smaller and cleaner than sprawling dirty Bamako but have the same amenities as most big cities. We even got to stay in a hotel one night with air-conditioning, a hot shower, and a toilet (no Toilet paper, but we brought our own :) ) !! After being here for 6 weeks this was a HUGE deal. So we now have only a few weeks left at homestay before we officially “Swear-In” at the US Embassy on September 3rd and become Peace Corps Volunteers instead of simply Trainees. We’re really looking forward to moving to Site for good and starting to build relationships with the people we will be working with during our service. Thanks again for reading! Don’t forget to update us on what you are up to! We love hearing from home :)
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