Home

I have been at site for 2 weeks now.  I can’t describe how strange that is.  It feels like I’ve been here for so much longer.  When I arrived here I’m not going to lie I had a moment, the kind of moment where you say to yourself, “What am I doing here”.  It lasted for about 30 minutes and then I was good.  It was partly because I was alone for the first time in 10 weeks, partly because I was suddenly expected to be a functioning volunteer, partly because there were herds of cockroaches and spiders the size of my hand, there were  many reasons (mostly the cockroaches and spiders though).  Anyway I went for a walk in to town to get my bearings and everything was good.  The people on the way in to town were so friendly and welcoming I forgot I was worried very quickly.

In the time since then I spent most of the first 3 days cleaning and painting my house.  I guess I’m a nester because now my house feels like it is 100% mine and I LOVE it.  I have a great house and I am so comfortable there it really is my home now.  I am so glad I took the time to make it my own place.  The biggest issue as you might have guessed were my new roommates, the cockroaches and MASSIVE spiders.  Let me be clear, I’m really not exaggerating, there were 30-40 cockroaches at any given time in my kitchen, even in the middle of the day, my bathroom had 10-20 also at all hours.  This is what I chose to focus on first, little did I know it was going to turn in to my very own bad horror movie, Attack of the Zombie Cockroaches.  Dun, dun, dun…  I wish I was exaggerating.  I sprayed the house, excessively, with insecticide and left for a few hours.  When I returned it was night time and I saw their bodies all over the place.  I really didn’t want to deal with it yet so I left them for morning.  They were dead, on their backs, legs curled up and everything.  Ok, so morning time, I go in to the bathroom and make my way around all the dead bodies.  As I am sitting on the toilet I look down and see the bodies between my feet is starting to move!  It was coming back to life.  I looked around at the rest of them and saw that many of them were starting to twitch too, I was out numbered, by a lot.  I had to act fast so I put on shoes and ran around my house stomping on the evil cockroaches.  I never want to hear that terrible popping, crunching noise again, that morning I heard enough for a lifetime. 

I have had many not terrifying experiences as well.  I love going to the market now.  It started as an intimidating, claustrophobic place, but now I love it.  It is one of the only places in town that you can interact with local women.   They all stay at their houses, which now that I am doing all my own cooking and cleaning I understand why, keeping a house running here takes all day and then some.  In the market though, after you get over the craziness, you can interact with them and it’s a lot of fun.  They know me now, I’m trying to learn their names, they know what I like to buy and help me find it.   We joke around now and it’s really become one of my favorite places to go. 

Peter, one of my site mates, and I went to find Teddy the poyo tapper the other day, it was better than ever.  We found him in the jungle and followed him around as he climbed and tapped the palm trees.  It was so cool, I can’t even tell you.  We talked with him about his life and he took us through a bunch of tiny trails through the jungle while we sipped on fresh poyo.  Watching him climb the trees was terrifying, the harness he uses is just a bunch of sticks tied into a circle with him and the tree trunk in the middle.  He leans back against it that’s how he keeps from falling out of the tree.   Scary. 

I have been getting to know the teachers that I will be working with as well.  This is nice.  I have one teacher that comes over and spends time with me on the patio and this is really nice.  I had dinner with her and her family the other day and it was great.  It can be a little intimidating to make new friends here with the differences in culture, but little things like that help a lot.  The family that share the compound with me are really nice.  They are always kind and helpful.  It is also really entertaining to be so close to them, I can watch how they are and how they do things without being involved. 

I’m going to wrap up here by saying that I am so excited to be in my new home.  It’s a great place and there are some really wonderful people around me here.  Hope everything is going well for all of you!

xo

It's Official!!!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written.  Things have been really crazy.  The biggest news is that I finished training!!!  I am now sitting in my own house in my own town.  The end of training was hard, it was really hard to say good bye to our host families.  It was also intimidating knowing that we were all about to go off on our own and really not see that much of each other.  Over the 10 weeks of training and seeing everyone every day I have become really good friends with people here.  I don’t think I have ever become so close with so many people so quickly.  We have been in Sierra Leone for 3 months now and unfortunately we‘ve already had 3 volunteers decide to go home, very sad. 

Anyway, yes it was hard to leave Bo.  From Bo we all went to Freetown for the swearing in ceremony.  It was kind of strange, most of us were staying in the same hostel that we stayed in when we first arrived in country, the difference between us then and now was obvious.  We got to see the Peace Corps compound and that is a really cool place.  It has a med building, volunteers tend to need that a lot, it has a couple of admin and programing buildings, and it also has a hostel for the volunteers to use when they have work to do in Freetown.  The whole compound is beautiful and sits on top of a tall hill overlooking Freetown and the ocean. 

The swearing in ceremony was exciting.  We were all dressed in traditional Africana gara.  A lot of the Salone 3 volunteers who had helped train us came too so it was great.  The American Ambassador was the one who swore us in.  I think they said it was the same oath that all appointed positions of government must take, except Obama, but his is similar just with more added on ha ha.  Anyway from there we went to the beach.  Finally.  It was a great, great day.  We swam and ate and drank and had fun together all day, after working our asses off for the last 2 and a half months.  That ceremony was in a way the culmination of years of effort to become Peace Corps Volunteers for many of us.  It was an awesome day.  At the end of the night though things did get a little sad.  We were all going to our own sites in the morning and I had to say good bye to my best friend here and that sucked.  She was placed in the South of the country, which is not super easy to get too.  Sad.

The next morning saying goodbye to all the people I care about was really hard.  I’m very lucky to have made such good friends here, but it made saying good bye that much harder.  I left Freetown around 9 in the morning with 2 of my site mates and another volunteer who lives near our town.  On top of our car were our 4 huge metal trunks, 4 mountain bikes and a mattress covered with a tarp because it was pouring rain.  It was about 3 ½ hour drive, not too bad.  Then we got to my house, unpacked my stuff and I was alone in my new home. Wow.