Soon

So I just wanted to send an update of the basics of what's going on here these days:

We finished language training last week and have had tests for a few days now in oral and written Kiswahili and in education (kind of a silly test- "list ways in which kids might misbehave in class and appropriate punishments"). Now I'm done! Tomorrow I'm going to visit a volunteer in Dodoma, the political capital of Tanzania in the middle of the desert, for five days to shadow him, see what life is like at site, relax a bit, and ask gobs of questions. They paired us all up for these visits, and I'm going with a friend named Chris. I think we'll have a lot of fun and get a lot out of the trip because we get along well and he loves to ask questions. I don't think I'll have any questions left by the end because he'll ask them all!

We'll then travel to Dar es Salaam straight from shadow for site announcements. I can't wait to find out where I'm going! I requested a cooler site in the mountains in a smaller village where I can really get to know people, so I hope that comes true. I really don't think I'd be happy with going to the desert, but I guess that might change after shadow. Mostly, though, I'd just like to be near the people I get along with best, especially the closer friends I've made during training. It would be frustrating to be so far away from my good friends, but I guess we would make the effort to get together on occasion anyway. Plus, there will be many volunteers already out there to get to know when I go. So any site will be amazing, I'm sure. I can't wait!

We come back to our host families after a couple of days in Dar and an early Thanksgiving dinner. We'll have a couple of days of training in gardening and permaculture, which should be awesome (I can't wait to have my own garden at site!), and then we have our swearing in ceremony to become real volunteers. The next day we're supposed to travel to site with all our crap (more than I can carry myself by far) and our headmasters (awkward! we've never met them and we're supposed to travel with them for a few days to get to site?!). We don't start teaching until mid-January, so we have a month and a half to get to know our sites, get settled, and prepare to start teaching. It will be nice at first to have my own house and do things independently, but I think it might end up being a long, lonely month of heavy rains. We'll see.

So that's the basic schedule. I've got plenty more adventures to relate, but I can't write them all here right now. Please write to me (although I'm getting a new address when I get to site) and send me your address so I can write to you.