P.S.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this already or not, but just to be safe, I'm going to do it again.

We have been overwhelmed and touched and insanely grateful for all the mail and packages everyone has sent us over the course of our service (you know who you are - thank you SO much!!). However, given our impending departure and the length of time it takes to receive things here, we're going to have to ask that people stop sending us stuff, because it might not make it here before we leave. Thanks!!

It's amazing how time flies when it's almost time to leave...

Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been almost a month and a half since I last posted. I’ve been slacking. Sorry guys :-( Unfortunately though, with all we’ve got going on during the next couple months, I can’t make any promises that I’m going to be much better moving forward. That said, we’ve been BUSY! In the interest of time, I’m going to just going make a laundry list of all the stuff we’ve done since I last posted. Here goes, more or less in chronological order:

· Traveled to Basse for a meeting to plan an environmentally-focused girls’ leadership camp.

· Met our new sitemate, an IT volunteer – Jacob is thrilled!

· Got data collection started for a safe delivery barrier analysis research project and started entering it in a database as completed surveys started coming in.

· Had a brief but awesome trip home to the US which unfortunately involved me being stuck in Casablanca for two days (stuck on the wrong side of the hurricane) and most of my clothes being lost.

· Collected reproductive health data for a returned Peace Corps Volunteer in the US working on his Master’s thesis.

· Traveled to Basse to help with the previously mentioned girls’ camp and a counterpart training for an upcoming HIV education bike trek (pictures from the girls’ camp to come later when I’m not on a connection where I pay by the kilobyte, I promise).

· Priced out an upgrade for the Community Health Nursing School computer lab and found funding for it, then travelled to Kombo to purchase necessary items.

· Started the loooong process of applying to 6-8 graduate programs each, which we want to have completed by the time we leave here in early Dec(!).

· Started working on required documents for our impending close of service conference.

· Continuing to work sporadically on planning our post-Peace Corps travels.

And that’s just the big stuff that I can think of off the top of my head! We’re in the home stretch now though and we’ll be done before we know it. Love and miss you all and looking forward to being stateside again more than you know…