Our room at the transit house (sleeps eight and has both a fan and AC!)
The rest of these are from the reptile farm:
Me with a ball python
Pythons curl into tight balls when they get scared
The owner of the reptile farm (which is really a catch-and-release educational center). He's British and married a Gambian woman. He gave us his email address and said we could send him pictures of any critters we run across and he would tell us what they are.
Cross between a scorpion and a spider. Yikes!
HUGE centipede. Repulsive.
Bad picture of a chameleon.
Our group at the reptile farm.
Monitor lizard (sp?)
Crocodile.
Hibiscus.
Jacob's parents asked us to talk about the other people in our group. There are 35 of us (the largest group ever for The Gambia I believe), plus one girl who transferred here from Guinea and is doing an abbreviated pre-service training. I said before that we are split about 50/50 Health and Environment, but it's actually more like 2/3 Environment, 1/3 Health. It's a very diverse group, but so far we are all getting along amazingly well. There are two other married couples. We range in age from people right out of college to a retired nutritionist. We have people from all over the country as well. We haven't done a count yet, but I would guess at least 20 states are represented.
We had interviews today to help Peace Corps narrow down our site options enough to assign us to a language group. They won't assign specific sites for quite a while yet, but it will be huge to know which language we will be learning for the remainder of training, so we are all really looking forward to the announcements (either tonight or tomorrow morning).
A little background on languages here. The Gambia is rather unique in that there have been 3-5 major ethnic groups living together here (mostly peacefully) for a very long time, and often in the same villages. One of the reasons this works is the various ethnic groups have distinct roles in a community, all of which are important, allowing them to co-exist peacefully. Apparently it is quite normal for different compounds within a village to speak different languages. While this seems like it would be incredibly confusing, every Gambian speaks at least two languages, and many speak as many as four or five, so apparently there are enough willing translators on hand that it isn't really a problem.
Peace Corps focuses on the three most common languages and only expects us to become functional in one (although some volunteers do end up learning others), but this context explains why it's important to at least know the basics of the other languages.
More to come tomorrow, with news on our language assignment!
5 comments:
Loved the picture of Sarah with the snake! You are doing a GREAT job with your blog! Let us know when and how we can send you a letter or package.
All sounds great! Just don't meet any of those critters on a dark night!
I'm so happy that you guys are finally in Africa! And it's amazing to get your updates in near-real time.
Have fun with all the languages :-)
This is a bit delayed, but while watching out for scorpion spiders, remember to avoid the jumping light-spiders too!!! (ewwww)
They have those scary spider/scorpion things in the caves in Puerto Rico! They are called Guabas or the Tailless Whip-scorpion. There were a couple times where I put my hand far too near one!
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