Today I found out what site I will be living in for the next
2 years after PST. This entire day
everyone here has been anxious waiting to learn where we would be going. It made concentrating on the subjects of our
seminars even more challenging than usual.
It could just be though that the sessions were especially boring
today. Actually, the sessions were
pretty interesting today. We had two technical
sessions on malaria reduction and nutrition.
Anyway, we were all thinking about finding out where we would be going.
So the time finally rolled around when the site
announcements were scheduled for. It’s
actually pretty interesting how they tell us where we are going. On the basketball court there is a large map
of Senegal broken down into the various regions. It’s made playing horse more interesting, as
we could learn Senegalese geography at the same time.
So we all gathered on the basketball court
(some of us in our Senegal best). We
were then all blindfolded and led to location of our site on the map. Once all of us were in place we were
instructed to take off our blindfolds and look around.
So in this way I found out that the village I will be living
in is called Nianghe. Although it is a
village of only 310, it is only 7 kms away from the regional capital of
Kedougou City. I was given a folder with
papers explaining the demographics of the village and the state of my homestay
site. It doesn’t go into much detail
about the environment or the weather, but being in Kedougou it will probably be
hot and humid. One of the current PCVs
who is in Thies right now says that his friend will be in my area and knows the
site that I’ll be at. He says my site is
on the top of a mountain in a mango forest next to a waterfall. At least he thinks that’s the site; so I’m
not sure if that’s exactly what it will be like.
All in all I am happy and excited about my site, though I
haven’t been there (I go to visit the site in 3 days). It seems like it will be a great mix of rural
living, but within proximity of a largeish city.
