Kipilefti

Every day we arrive at Swahili school at 8 and leave around 4 (although we’re technically supposed to leave at 5). With 40 hours of school during the week, you’d think we’d get a whole weekend off, but we have half- or whole-days on Saturday as well (Sunday is off). Today we went until lunch, […]

Eastern-style toilets. I will have much stronger leg muscles when I leave Tanzania than when I arrived. The fact that it’s rude not to greet someone if you walk by one another. Actually enjoying learning for the first time in a long time. Swahili is really fun, like a puzzle. Wearing a skirt all the […]

The days of easy Internet access are at a halt (subiri in Kiswahili), at least for now. Once I reach my posting in late November the Net will once again be freely available. For now, I am in my host family’s home (nyumbani) and learning Kiswahili slowly and incompetently. I do well in the classroom […]

I woke up at 1.30 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, my punishment for oversleeping yesterday. Wandering around my room, later around the compound, lying under the mosquito net with the fan on full blast. The flourescent light in my room reveals me as glowingly pale, grey-eyed, with hair an unreal color that’s […]

Not dead! Landed in Dar at 10 last night and (aside from a power outage that made things hard to see) got through customs really smoothly. Today was the beginning of our pre-service training (PST). I overslept (the alarm didn’t work! Hopefully a new battery will make it fine…) and was awoken by one of the current Peace […]

Staging finished, I walk the now-familiar path to my hotel room in a haze. One of the women running the staging said the words “when you arrive in Tanzania on Wednesday” and suddenly my stomach was full of butterflies. This is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, but not quite something I […]

So…wow. Today. Woke up early; my parents made popovers and fruit salad and we had a family (minus Sister Dear) breakfast. I said goodbye to the kittycats and we drove to Union Station, where we wound up buying a new train ticket since the paper ticket never arrived. So I didn’t get to ride the […]

The rough draft of packing happened tonight. My father aided me and I amassed a pretty sizeable pile of things that I guess I don’t need right away and he can bring when he visits in late September/early October. The large suitcase still weighed about 45 pounds, and my hiking backpack around 30. (We are […]

I finally finished my Peace Corps application last February or so, had an interview in March, and was accepted shortly thereafter. Upon acceptance I was told that there was a program departing in October that I would probably be placed in. I heard nothing all summer (besides that I had to get my wisdom teeth […]