All Vol Mayhem

I'm back from the All Vol Conference and I'm slightly recharged, but I'm really excited to go back to village! I checked my email yesterday, first time in a long time and noticed my sister's email about how she couldn't donate to my grant online because it's been fully funded... WHAT!! Fully funded, that means all these amazing people donated to my grant and now I can start workin' on it! Well not just yet, I haven't received an update from Peace Corps about this being fully funded, just Huda and the Peace Corps website. Once I get the update from Peace Corps and they tell me what the next few steps are, my village and I will be executing just that! I'm so excited, I feel like this is the part of my work actually starting. Lately at site I've been feeling so lazy, and useless. Just sitting around not having any work to do, waiting for people to come back in town (many people leave the village for the holidays).
*For all of those who weren't able to donate to my project, save your donation for the next project I do through that funding.

This project probably wont be starting until mid January, because it'll take a while for me to get the money from the grant and then getting the village to follow through with what they promised for their contribution, including the monetary donation. But once it does start I'll be having some other Peace Corps volunteers come visit my site and help me paint the Health Hut (the village said they refused to have someone paint the Health Hut for free because no one knows how to paint, so I got frustrated and told them I'm gonna paint the Health Hut because they're all babies- oh and that I'm gonna have my friends come help.)
All Vol was a great conference we had a very detailed breakdown of the schedule getting to pick which ever presentation we wanted to go to for the hour, then being completely finished around 4 to let loose, and of course catch up with friends! A lot of my great friends are located in other regions, (and my region of course) so it's nice having these conferences where I get to see all my other friends I wouldn't normally see at my regional house. Some of the presentations I went to include, Working with Talibes, Visual Aids, Water Wise Schools, Working with ECHO, Sustainable Projects, etc. The second day of All Vol (it was only 2 days long) in the morning we had a display of appropriate technologies various volunteers have been working with. It was great seeing these creations displayed every where and really got me thinking a lot of the work I want to be doing is working with appropriate technologies. I don't necessarily see my village in need of a lot of the ones displayed but they were really exciting getting to see them in action.

Now I'm hanging out in Ndioum and I'll be leaving tomorrow to go back to site and attempt to bust out some projects, I just really need a counterpart or a few! I'm gonna try to just corner the new school director and be like "sir, start helping me!!" hopefully it works. So that's the update for now. Oh, I got a new camera because mine broke a few months ago, thanks for the camera momma!! Enjoy the pictures posted.