Work Hard, Play Harder

We spent this last week preparing for and hosting a workshop for all of our village counterparts, the people that the Peace Corps has selected to work with us on projects and be our liaisons to the community. All of us have two counterparts, so for two days we worked to entertain and corral 80 Senegalese people from all over the country. Most of the workshop was spent in meetings about Peace Corps goals, and what they can do to help us help them, but we did get some time to sit down with our counterparts to get to know them and talk about some things we want to work on in the first three months before In Service Training.

My official counterpart is Abdoulaye Dia. He lives in my road town, Keur Sosse, and is the director of the school in my village. He doesn't speak much Seereer, but he speaks French, Pulaar, Wolof and even a little English. I'm going to be working with him on integrating more environmental education into the school curriculum as well as starting a garden and building a latrine so the kids don't poop behind the building anymore. He's also going to tutor me in French and teach me Wolof once my Seereer is up to par.

My community counterparts name is Ngor Mbodg and he lives in Sambande so he will be my go to guy for any projects I want to do in the community. He works as the director of the school in the next village over so I might do some work with him there as well. They both seemed really enthusiastic and excited to help me get settled in and meet everyone so here's hoping for a good working relationship for the next two years.

After working so hard hard preparing and facilitating the counterpart workshop we took the weekend off our whole stage piled into two Alhums and went to the beach in Popenguine. For 5,000cfa each we rented a gorgeous house right on the beach and spent the whole weekend swimming in the ocean, lounging in my hammock and napping on the beach. I even managed to get a little barefoot bouldering in! I was worried I would loose a lot of my language spending the whole weekend speaking English, but lucky for me the bartender at the restaurant next to our house spoke Seereer, so I got a lot of practice and a couple of free drinks too. Tomorrow we go back to our villages for our last week of language class...I'm already dreading having to say goodbye!