Pictures? No.

our bedroom on the left. front door on the right. this is the only picture i was able to upload. sorry......



Three weeks down and seven more to go. thats how we;ve been looking at training. its hard because we have to be at school from 7am to 4:30 pm and we're not allowed to speak english anymore. its immersion time. hen we have to be at our homestay house by 7pm. we're usually home by 6 after a beer or walking around with other trainees. then we talk with our little brothers and sisters or do homework. then eat, wash up and go to bed. its rare if 8:00 comes around an we're not in bed.


our family is really great and seem to understand us well. i think we get more freedom than the other volunteers because we're married. some of the other PCTs have complained about their families being conc erned with where they are all the time. if they dont come home right after school, their families are concerned. i think it also has to do ith the fact that our mothers are out later than us every night either working or attending a communiot meeting. when we get home our siblings are doing their homework or cooking dinner. speaking of dinner, we're finally eating in th esame room at the same time as our family. or at least with our sisters and mothers. the boys still eat outside. the first few weeks, they would make us eat inside before they ate outside. we kept asking to eat together, and i think we've gotten as close as we can to eating 'together'. they sit on the floor and eat fufu while we eat our 'american food' that they make for us.

the food is also better now. when we arrived, we told our famly that we were vegetarians at home but that we will eat fish and chicken here because we didnt want to inconvienence them. what we dindt know was that they rarely eat any chicken or fish (that we would recognize as such). they pretty much eat the exact same thing every night; fufu an green gooey sauce. at first they made us things with whole (dried) fish. bones and skin and all, yumm. finally we were able to commnicate that we dont actually want to eat chicken or fish anymore. now we eat lots of beans, spinach, tomatoes and starches. rice, potatoes and yams at every meal. but no more fish bones.

we've lost two of our fellow trainees already; one becasue of a technicality( no helmet on a moto) and the other by choice. ther eare 28 of us left, 13 health and 15 agros. they say that training is the hardest part and it seems to be that way. not having our own schedule and sitting through up to four hours of language a day along with technical training can be difficult. especially when we go hom to someone else's house where we have just a small room to ourselves. add to that the fact that our room is consistantly 10 degrees hotter than outside ( where its usually hot). so we spend most of our time at home outside of our room where there;'s no couch or comfy chair to sit on. we are either on the wooden bench or a wooden stool. but like i said, our family is great and knows how to have a good time, so its really not so bad.....

it rained again last night, whihc is good because it means that it is cool (relatively) for anothe day. last year the rains stopped on \October 15. i'm hoping for a few extra this year. by thanksgiving it should cool down. people have been asking me what it looks like here...i guess it depends on the weather because its still raining every few days, its still green. during the dry season it turns brown. there are mountains all around us....maybe 5 or 10 miles away. i have pictures but i was only able to upload one....i'm emailing my family now too, so hopefully i can send some that way for them to post.

thanks for all the comments and emails. sorry i can not respond individually, but i think i covered most of the questions here. its great to hear from home. ashley--glad to hear everything is OK. miss you all!

-j