Travels with Tavish

Last week we had Field Orientation Training (FOT), where each of us trainees traveled to the village that will be our permanent site. A current first-year or second-year volunteer (who can speak the language) went with each trainee to help facilitate the weekend site visit. At 6am last Friday morning, I packed into a sept place ("seven places") with six other trainees and we headed out for Kedougou. The sept place is the main form of public transit that I will be using during my time in Senegal. The cars are very old 8-seat Peugeots, many of which are in various states of disrepair. I have not yet broken down in a sept place, but I hear from current volunteers that that is a fairly common occurrence. We drove east down the national highway, stopping every 3-4 hours. I had a bean sandwich--similar to what I eat at the training center for breakfast every morning--from a small roadside stand at our first stop. The drive was overall relatively uneventful other than making very...

My second stay at my Jaxanke host family was all too short, just three days. I wish I could have spent a longer period of time there. I feel as though I am becoming more integrated (or maybe simply more comfortable) living with my host family each day that I spend there. Again there was lots of sand, lots of sun, and lots of Jaxanke practice. I am learning little by little (donding donding). Sometimes the slow progress can be frustrating, as I often have to learn a word multiple times before I finally remember it, but when I realize that I have committed a new set of words or a sentence structure to memory it is very exciting to use it. Finally the day for site reveal had come, October 15th. We had a policy session in the morning; I anxiously sat in my chair knowing that in a couple short hours I would find out where I will be spending the next two years. After a small snack of bread and beans during the morning coffee break, I walked over to the basketball court with my fellow trai...

At the start of the second week of training, we had language announcements. I was assigned to and have begun to learn Jaxanke (pronounced something like jaw-haw-n-kay)! I was really excited to be assigned this language because that means I will almost surely be serving in the south of Senegal where the climate is more humid. Almost all Jaxanke volunteers serve in Tambacounda, Kolda, or Kedougou. The climate in the south I expect will be somewhat easier to manage for me than a very hot, dry site in the north, but it will still be very difficult to deal with the intense heat. Many sites in the southern regions of Senegal are also more than one day's drive away from the training center, making commuting back and forth for trainings in Thies a little more time-consuming. In addition to being assigned a local language, I also got assigned a host family in Mbour, a city about an hour southwest of the Peace Corps training center in Thies, where I will spend 5 weeks over the course of O...

I have arrived safely in Senegal! The first two weeks of training have been a whirlwind of information and activities to prepare me and the 60 other trainees for our two years of service ahead. After my one-day staging event in Philadelphia and a "good-bye dinner" with some fellow Peace Corps trainees at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant near our downtown hotel, our group departed for Senegal. On our way to the JFK airport, the bus drove through Times Square in Manhattan. I don't know the roads all that well, but I am sure there was a quicker way to get to the airport and avoid some traffic. We decided that it was a good-bye present, a last look at one of the most well-known places in the country before living abroad for more than two years. I enjoyed every second of it. Our flights to Belgium and Dakar were relatively uneventful, other than having long waiting periods in the airports. As we descended into Dakar we flew over the Sahara desert: barren, sandy, and hot. I...