The End of an Era

So I ended my Peace Corps service officially last week on Friday. The summary of what I did in Liberia between my last post and now is that I painted a world map at my school right before leaving (which apparently is a tourist attraction in my town now, according to the new volunteer). I then went to Monrovia to meet the new training group for Liberia (the first volunteers that will actually spend 2 years there) and do their training for a little over 2 weeks. The Liberia training was super stressfull for a number of reason which I won't get into, but let's just say I was working 12-14 hour days planning sessions, running them, and/or typing up documents for the trainees, then hanging out with them (which admittedly was pretty fun, but was still a bit stressfull since I was the constnt source of information on everything and anything that they could think to ask). At the end of my two weeks there I had all the trainees over to my house and showed them how to make tortillas, refried beans and mexian rice using local market ingredients and also introduced them to palm wine and cane juice (locally produced liquors which taste sort of like old sourdough and gasoline respectively).

I had a few days rest then went to Sierra Leone to train that group for their final 2 weeks of pre-service training. They were a tougher nut to crack since they were at the end of training and sort of jaded with the whole process. I did make some great friends there though, and overall the program was structured in such a way that I didn't need to work 12 hour days to keep the training from falling apart, which was a nice change of pace.

I spent my final week in Monrovia doing my close of service process, then the day after my COS I took my final bush taxi ride up to the training site to say goodbye to the Liberia trainees and cook them curried daal and garlic naan (again, using market ingredients) and drink lots of local gin with them (tastes sort of like rubbing alcohol). I somehow found my way back into Monrovia and met up with some friends there for a final beer at the Golden Beach bar (which was conveniently close to my airport shuttle). I caught the shuttle to the airport (the airline offered the hour-long ride for free) at about midnight, checked in for my flight and slept in the corner of the waiting area for a few hours before being woken up to get on my 5:30am flight to New York.

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So that's it, so ends Next Stop: Liberia. Time for a title change and a new blog post to talk about what I'm doing next, and how far along I am in the process. To my loyal readers, I'm sorry I've slacked recently but I hope you'll stay tuned for my upcoming adventures in France (I might even start putting pictures up on this damned thing - won't that be nice?).