My homestay is now officially over and training is coming to a close. There are a lot of emotions running through me right now as I move into the time for actual service, but excitement and apprehension for the future and sadness for what I'm leaving behind are those at the forefront.
Despite the improbability of the people that the following message addresses ever having access and the ability to read it, I'd like to include a piece that I wrote about Sinsina first, and then a thank you to my host mother, because I found it so hard to express myself in person:
To Sinsina kaw:
N ye degeke caman nin kalo fila temenen. Awn ye Bamanakan kalan, awn ye ji ni saniya kalan, awn ye Mali dumuni tobi, ni awn ye baroke caman. N ye ji taa ni n kungolo, n ye dumunike ni n bolo, ni n ye n ko ni shiyo kelen. Kungolo dimi, kono dimi, kono boli, ni mura tun be n na, nga minogo ni kongo te i la. Aw ni ce kosebe, aw bee nyanafin be na n na.
I have learned so much in the last two months. We have studied Bambara, we have studied water and sanitation, we have cooked Malian food, and we have talked a lot. I have carried water on my head, I have eaten with my hands, and I have showered with a bucket. I have had headaches, stomach aches, diarrhea, and a cold, but I haven't been hungry or thirsty. Thank you all so much, I will miss you!
To Kaja:
In the last few weeks I have come to the realize how much you mean to me. I couldn't have asked for a better host mother. In the beginning of my stay you gave me the space I needed to learn about culture and language, but also helped me to learn the little things that are so inherent to life as a Malian woman. You were the person who allowed me to work on my grammar in the concession, sitting with me in the evenings, and, amidst the “sho dunna!”s and the “di a”s, you asked me relevant questions that I could understand and respond to. You fed me wonderfully without question, which I didn't even recognize as a rarity at first, and provided me with my shower bucket every night without fail, even knowing which mornings I would want another. I was amazed and grateful that last day that you did my laundry, remembering exactly which clothes I had already worn and taking care of it, despite my repeated forgetfulness. Despite everything that you did for me, you are also the only woman in your concession who never asked me for anything. You are an amazing woman and mother, and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to live with and learn from you. On Sunday as we were leaving, it was the tears in your eyes that brought mine, and you are the person in our family that I am most exited to see when I do make it back to Sinsina. Thank you so much!
I will miss Sinsina immensely in the next few months as I adjust once again to a Malian village, but I also remember that a lot of the things that I'm worried about now are the same things I was worried about before going out to homestay. I only hope that Drametou can accept me and forgive my cultural and language faux pas as readily...
And so:
Friday I will officially swear in as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. In the morning I will put on my new complet (traditional Malian skirt and shirt that I had made by a tailor in Sinsina from fabric I bought at the market of a nearby town), and we will all head off to the embassy in Bamako. After swear-in we get to go to a bbq at the American Club in our honor, complete with a huge swimming pool (by Mali standards) and volleyball, tennis, and basketball courts. Afterwards there will be a big party at a couple different bars in Bamako before we finally crash at a nearby hotel. It should be a lot of fun, and, perhaps more importantly, it is a last chance to spend time with all of the people that I won't be seeing again until January's In-service-training (if at all).
On Sunday (I think) I will head out to Manantali, where I will stay at the stage house while buy all of the household items I need to outfit my two huts in Drametou that are currently sitting empty awaiting my arrival. Then on Tuesday I will head out to site. Due to the fact that the closest internet connection is a 4 hour train ride or a 6 hour bus ride away, and the fact that I have to bike, boat, and then hire a taxi to get to either of these forms of public transport, I probably wont be online again until January. So, I'm now going to give you a break-down of what I expect for the next few months.
Once I'm installed at site, I will get to work integrating into my community. Because I have been learning Bambara for the last 2 months, I intend to continue with it during my sessions with a local tutor, but because people in my village actually speak Khassonke instead (the two languages are closely related, and everyone can understand me when I speak Bambara properly), I will be picking up on that language as well. I will also be trying to get to know everyone in my village and make myself familiar with their daily patterns and sanitation practices, esoecially water usage. Later on, when I have the language skills, I will be able to utilize all the information I have gained through observation to teach and implement sustainable development projects. I will probably be going in to Bafoulabe every few weeks to go to market and/or the bank, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to cook for myself a couple times a week with the supplies that I get there. The closest volunteer to me lives in Bafoulabe, so it will also give me the opportunity to speak some English. Erin, a female volunteer that I have gone through training with, will be using Bafoulabe for market and banking, so we will likely meet up there. As of now, we are also planning a ~50km bike ride back to Manantali in late October to celebrate my birthday with another volunteer from my training class whose birthday is the week before mine.

Obviously, many things will happen in my next 3 months in Drametou that I could never anticipate, but it will be an incredibly challenging, exciting, sometimes lonely, often overwhelming time. As new volunteers, we aren't supposed to leave our region for the first 3 months of service, but I'm guessing that I will have enough to do(or at least enough fears about traveling alone on Malian public transport) so that it won't really be an issue. I'm very sad that I won't see any of my friends from homestay for that period of time, as none of them are in the Kayes region with me, but we should be able to keep in touch by phone or messages sent via Peace Corps.
Oh, and sadly, my camera is officially broken, so any hopes I had of posting pictures of my times here, and any hopes you had of seeing pictures have now been dashed.....sad!
Until next time, k'an ben!

My site is beautiful! I just returned from my village of Drametou, and it is your quintessential West African village, complete with round thatch huts, lots of little children running around, and gorgeous views in every direction. (I did not, however, take any pictures of this. Every time you bust out a camera here you are swarmed by small children, so I’d like to put that off for a least the first few months at site so that I’m not viewed as the foreigner with all kinds of fun expensive gadgets. Sorry…) Another aspect of Drametou that is quintessential West Africa is how brousse (remote) it is. In order to arrive in village I took a train for 14 hours (they stop for a few hours during the night to let everyone rest), followed by a 6 km trip in a bachee (old van gutted out and filled with benches, people, and rice that is used not unlike a taxi) to the town of Bafoulabe, then a trip across river in a pirogue (large canoe-like boat steered with one paddle and a pole), followed by a 9 km bike ride into village. It was an adventure to say the least. This was our first real time in the metaphorical “deep end” of the Peace Corps pool, but I was taken out to site by my future language teacher and then I remained in village for 4.5 days with one trip into Bafoulabe to set up a bank account for the next 2 years. I will also be going into Bafoulabe for market every week or so, picking up cooking supplies, mail, etc.
The three people I will be working with most closely in Drametou are the local teacher (the one who brought me out to village and will be teaching me Khassonke, the local language), the local mid-wife (my first homologue, otherwise know as the local person who will help me integrate into the community and help to spearhead projects), and my second homologue (who is also a baker and farmer). I live in a relatively large luo (grouping of huts that are usually surrounded by some semblance of fencing and lived in by large, sometimes extended, family) with a remarkably small family. The family is only a man and his wife and their two small children, but I was routinely visited by many more people from the village during the day. My meals were brought to me by one of my neighbor girls, who also ate with me three meals a day. For breakfast I had porridge, typically rice, but sometimes mono, which is mildly sweet with balls similar to tapioca and made from some variety of grains. Lunch was always rice with either peanut sauce (runnier that Thai-style, but very tasty) or a green sauce that I can best describe as spinach-like. Dinner is prepared all day by the women because it is millet couscous, so it must be pounded with an oversized mortar and pestle, sifted, then cooked. The couscous is accompanied by a slightly spicy sauce, and both it and the rice are eaten with your hands, the porridge with a gourd spoon.
About 2 days into my site visit I was checked on by PC staff and taken into Bafoulabe for banking and to meet the current PC volunteers closest to me. We also figured out at that time that I would try and catch the train back to Bamako on Thursday, so I returned to village for one more full day and then headed out.
On Thursday homologue #2, Modibo Dembele, and I biked and boated into Bafoulabe where I learned from the PCV there that the train had derailed earlier that week and wouldn’t be running, instead a Peace Corps vehicle came to pick me up and then I proceeded to the stage house in Manantali (if you look at a map of Mali it’s right next to the big reservoir in the southwest). The house is actually 2 large huts, one of which houses a current volunteer and the other which serves as a place to crash for other PCVs while in town. Great things about Manatali: there’s a butigi (store) with a lot of American-like food (meaning junk food) that includes a soft-serve ice cream machine (unheard of in Mali and brand new), and the house is also on the river complete with hippos (yea! My first sighting!). I stayed in Manantali for one night and hung out with the other trainees and volunteers there and the next morning headed for Kita, which is on the way to Bamako.
In Kita we met up with several other trainees and volunteers that were coming out of site visit and spent a couple of days just decompressing, sharing stories, watching movies (they actually have a lot of amenities at the house), and eating more familiar foods (which the volunteers there were generous enough to fix and then share). It was kind of surreal and like being in mini-America for a few days.
Yesterday I left Kita and came to Bamako on a bus laden with PC people, so much so that Malians would stare at the bus in wonder because of all the white faces. We arrived in Bamako, unloaded our gear at the bureau and then headed out to a tubob (foreigner) restaurant for a burger and ice cream. After that we took Peace Corps transport back to Tubaniso for a day of training, and tomorrow I go back to my little village of Sinsina for 3 final weeks of pre-service training and then….(drumroll please)….I will swear in as an official Peace Corps volunteer!

I got my site assignment today! I'm really excited and really nervous...it's in the Kayes region (pronounced kie) which is the area of Mali closest to Senegal, and in a village of about 550 along a tributary of the Senegal river near Bafoulabe and Mahina. The village is called Drametou, but you probably can't find it on any map because it is so small. I'll be heading out there for my first site visit in about a week, so I'll have a lot more information then...

I heart pygmy goats! They are (so far) my favorite thing about Mali. I just completed my first two weeks at my homestay site of Sinsina living with a Malian family and taking Bambara language and Malian culture classes with 4 other Peace Corps Trainees. Sinsina is a town of about 2000 people, which is deceptive, because about 1200 of them are children under 15 and the families are big, so there are probably less than 100 families. My family is one of the big ones: I haven't totally deciphered how I am related to some of the members, but I do know I have 3 moms and 14 known siblings. Normally I get up in the morning, make (instant) coffee for my dad and I, eat breakfast and go to class. We have about 4 hours of language instruction from our really amazing teacher, Salifou, with a break for tea and then I return to my concession for lunch. I usually eat lunch with the women (and girls) in my family and spend some time attempting to communicate with them through my broken Bambara and pantomime before returning for 3 or so hours of class in the afternoon, which is usually a combination of language and culture. After class, we (the PCTs) have started to either take a walk on this path towards another village or play frisbee before we head back to our concession. I then have dinner with the men (and boys) in my family and then continue with the same Bambara/pantomime accompanied with sketching and (thanks to the genius of my fellow PCT Audra) some singing. The name song (Karmen, Karmen-bo-barmen, banana-fanna-fo-farmen.....) and the kissing frog song (mm-ah went the little Mr. Bullfrog....) are popular due to repetition and hand movement, and I'm currently in the process of translating The Itsy-bitsy Spider into Bambara.
All in all I am enjoying my stay in Mali. I genuinely feel as though Mali, Sinsina, and my host family are exactly where I am supposed to be at this point in time. Although I am happy to be back at Tubaniso right now, able to check email, visit PCTs from other homestay villages and having food that resembles what I'm used to (eaten with utensils instead of hands), I'm also excited to return to Sinsina tomorrow!
***I apologise for my lack of photos, hopefully I will have some worth posting on my next trip in to Tubaniso***

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for the first 2 weeks of my home stay in the village of Sinsina. The village is relatively small, with about 2,000 people, and is south from Bamako. The homestay is essentially a dry run for the site I will eventually be at, and I will live with a Malian family, have meals with them, take language and culture classes from my “Language and culture facilitator” in Bambara (the most prevalent local language in Mali), and generally try and integrate myself into this community alongside 4 other PC trainees who are also going to be water & sanitation volunteers. We’ll be taking 10 ceremonial nuts with us to present to the village chief, and this is where I’ll be doing most of my training for the next 2 months.
Yesterday, in preparation for our entrance into Malian society, we had a cultural festival here at Tubaniso. There was a dance troupe with accompanying drummers as well as a Tuareg band (from northern Mali near Tombouctou). Several people were selling bright African print cloth and there was also a tailor with his treadle sewing machine in the middle of the courtyard taking orders. I purchased two 2 meter pieces with the intent of getting “tafe” (tah-fay, or wrap skirt) with matching head wraps made, as well as some bracelets beaded by an organization that has been started by a PC Mali volunteer. The fete was really great, with quite a few trainees joining in with the dancing, though I was unfortunately waiting in line for the tailor for most of that and couldn't bust out moves from my African dance class. There was a flurry of color and excitement that was only a small taste of what I will probably experience in a real market town, although with all of the information we’ve been receiving for the last few days I’m happy that yesterday was such a simplified version.

I ni ce! (Hello in Bambara)
I've successfully made it through 2 days and 2 nights in Mali! We (all 77 PC trainees) arrived at the Bamako airport Thursday evening to a full-on welcome wagon of PCMali staff and current volunteers, and, amazingly, my luggage arrived as well. We've all been learning the ropes of the nyagen (pit toilet), some language and cross-culture classes, and the proper way to combat malaria (pills, nets, and bug spray - there aren't actually as many of the little suckers as I was expecting).
All of the other trainees have been pretty great and the Malian staff are incredibly friendly and helpful. We had a friendly tarantula waiting outside our hut's door yesterday morning, and I've seen several geckos racing around. There's a ton of vegetation here at the training compound, but now there is also a fair amount of mud, as it stormed last night with a heavy downpour from about 0430-0500 this morning. It may also come as a surprise to some that our food here has been really good...and I haven't gotten sick quite yet.
All in all, I can't believe I've only been here for such a short period of time. Our days have been pretty packed, and the "camp atmosphere" feels really comfortable. I've got a couple more days here at Tubaniso (it means "dove house" in Bambara and is the training center) before I head off to my home-stay village with about 5 other volunteers, when we'll be doing a lot more cultural and language (probably Bambara) lessons with a Malian instructor. I'm so excited!!