So since my last post life has been a lot more of the same here in Saclepea. School has been running fairly smoothly and nothing really had been that different. At some point last weekend however one of my site mates had a minor accident and hurt her ankle - prompting Peace Corps to send her to Monrovia, and then the US for medical care. She was supposed to attend a warden training (for key volunteers around the country that are responsible for getting information out, etc in the event of an emergency like the one we had in Guinea), but because of her injury she couldn't go, and by the line of succession I became the warden for Nimba County volunteers. This meant I had a day to pack some stuff, and let my students know I would be gone for the rest of the week.
So yeah, last Tuesday I left my house (for the first time since getting to country that I did not travel with Jesse) and made my way to Gbarnga, to meet the other volunteers at this training. We stayed at the Catholic Mission/Convent in Gbarnga which had delicious food (potato salad, fried chicken, jollof rice, and a fairly tasty attempt at pizza). I met some volunteers from Liberia that I didn't know yet, and we had a good time with several beers in a palava hut (basically, a gazebo) talking about all sorts of stuff. The training itself was pretty benign, it didn't take too long, and the sessions were actually relevant and useful. After the training Alison showed up in Gbarnga (having left Freetown, Sierra Leone that morning) and met up with us former Guinea volunteers and all of us had another night of inebriated conversations in the shelter of the palava hut before we all took off to our respective homes.
Because it was easter weekend, Alison, Luke and I all made our way to Saclepea to pick Jesse up before continuing down to Tappeta where we met Levi, Jon, and Kim. We spent a couple of nights in Tappeta chatting and reminiscing about Guinea - talking about differences between Sierra Leone and Liberia, and generally just catching up/making future plans. Eventually Jesse and I came with Alison back to Saclepea, and she left early this morning for Monrovia, as she needs to be at work in Freetown Wednesday morning.
Now I'm back in Saclepea, ready to recommence the last push before the end of Period 5. It looks like school is going to wrapping up for 12th grade pretty soon, and they will spend this next month preparing for the national exam mostly on their own - though apparently the good students will still show up for class...we'll see.
As for COS plans, I talked to Levi and we're getting together on deciding we want to over-land from Monrovia to N'Zerekore in Guinea, see the forest there and in Gueckedou, move on to Kankan, continue up into Mali, see Bamako, travel up to Timbuktu on the riverboat along the Niger, come back through Dogon country and see Scotty, Yik and Molly who all transferred from Guinea, enter Burkina Faso and visit with Isy, and the other Guinea transfers (Phil, Dylan, etc), then enter into Ghana to see it before flying out of Accra sometime in mid september. It's a sketchy plan at this point, but I think it will make for some good adventure stories, and I'd get to see a couple more countries in West Africa before my time here is up. I've also been talking to Jarrad, Jon and Kim about a trip to Freetown once school is over to visit Alison (so that would bring my total visited countries in West Africa up to 6 by the time I leave in September - 8 if you count layovers).
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