Staging

Greetings from Philly! I only have a few minutes on the computer at the hotel, but I just wanted to write a quick post to let everyone know that we are safely in Philly and staging went well today (basically just a lot of paperwork and an introduction to Peace Corps). There are 35 people in our group and everyone is quite outgoing and friendly. There are several people who were originally in our Mauritania group. Talk about coming full circle!

Tomorrow we have to be up bright and early to get our Yellow Fever shots, then we will be off to the airport. Our flight takes off at 6:35pm and we have a couple hour layover in Brussels. From Brussels, we will be flying through Dakar then on to Banjul (but not deplaning in Dakar as we previously thought). We should be arriving in Banjul around 6:30pm on Thursday. So assuming all goes as planned, our next post will be from The Gambia! I will leave you with a few pictures from our departure...

Before starting to pack (~10pm last night)

Casualties of the last cut to get down to 80 lbs apiece (~2am this morning)

All packed up

Loaded up outside the Cohns' house

I will post our final packing list later on when I get the chance. Tomorrow will be an extremely long day, so I'm off to bed...goodbye for now!

~Sarah