Breaking News!

I need to get better at updating this blog. What am I saying? I’ve only got a few more months here, and I doubt there is going to be much to write each month. Things have been really slow lately. The villagers are going to the fields, school hasn’t started yet, it’s summer vacation – I guess I feel as if I’m on summer vacation as well, but it’s not much of a vacation. I’ve still been working on the Health Hut, it’s been an incredibly slow process, we’ve been waiting to receive the medication we ordered from the medical dispensary, but they never have all the medication we need at once so it comes to us slowly, slowly. Sarah Keyes, and Madeline Tiee came to Aram and helped me paint some murals. They were so helpful! I’m a horrible artist and thankfully they really took charge and I just had to paint inbetween the lines of their drawings. I really enjoyed it, and I’m so appreciative for their help. We busted out 4 beautiful murals in one day!! That’s a lot of hard work, and amazing team work. It wasn’t even messy, which is surprising when I’m involved with paint.

So, the breaking news about my service. I have a few months left as I’m sure you’re all aware of. I’ll be moving sites soon. I do not know when exactly, but my time spent in Aram will be coming to an end. And I’ll be moving to a large city in the Matam Region, Ourissogui. They're currently looking for housing for me to move to in Ourissogui and then I'll be telling my host family and my village about the move. When I move to Ourisoggui I'll be working with a new NGO out there called Yaajeende. I'll be working with them to create new interventions with the various branches, nutrition, husbandry, and agriculture. I'll also be coordinating them with Peace Corps Volunteers in the area. This is a new position so it's going to be developing the position while I'm there. I'm really excited for this position, and fresh start. I'm sad to be leaving my village, and host family, including all my close friends in the village. It's going to be hard, but after many months of debate and endless conversations with other peace corps volunteers I know this is the right decision for me. I'll be able to come back to my village and visit them frequently. It's scary, new, and exciting. And of course I've got a lot of feelings about this move, but that's neither here nor there.

We recently had new peace corps trainees come up north to view their future sites, they're still in training but part of their training is for them to meet who they're replacing or get a tour of their future site. After their visit they go back to Thies and finish their training. We're getting 3, that's right 3!!! new volunteers. It's so exciting! The North is such a large region it's hard to spread out all the new volunteers through the whole north, but Podor Department is getting 3 new AGRICULTURE volunteers. It's rare that we get agriculture volunteers as well. It's so exciting, and the 3 new volunteers are sooo cool! We got the pleasure of hanging out with them before they had to go back to Thies, they seem like a great bunch of enthusiastic volunteers. So I hope they enjoy the North. It's sad I'm leaving when they get up here, I'll just be moving to the west, but it's pretty far out west. I hope I'll still be able to get to know the new volunteers and help support them however need be. I'm just really excited to get some agriculture volunteers up north! I was lucky enough to take one of the new volunteers to her site, and introduce her to her future home; the people in her village were so kind! It's a new site, so they've never had a volunteer before and the people there were just so kind. I really hope it works out for her, and I think it will. She seems like the type of volunteer with the right mind set when going in to this. I feel as if sometimes volunteers (including myself!) forget that nobody said Peace Corps was going to be easy. It's not suppose to be easy, and it's hard to remember that when everything else seems so difficult.