We made it!

Hello all! I made it to Mali two days ago after goodness knows how many hours traveling...the highlight was that almost the entire group of 66 PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees - what I am right now) slept for eight hours on the floor of the Paris airport! It was pretty hilarious to see, I'm sure the French were appalled. We did see the Eiffel Tower from a distance though just as we were leaving, after we ate our last Ben & Jerry's ice cream for the next 27 months (I had cookie dough and phish food, if you were curious).

In Mali, we are at the PC training center, called Tubaniso. It is a beautiful place, and very green!! I have two fabulous roommates in my hut, and it is actually pretty cool in the evenings. Yesterday morning we woke up to a rainstorm so it was cool all day. So lovely! We have classes all day, every day - in technical aspects (that's environment for me), language, cross-cultural, and health. Today in my environment sector classes we learned how to conduct a Farmer Field School (FFS), where we would act as facilitators to a farmers group - it turns the farmers' fields into classrooms. Instead of the old top-down approach of development, the FFS acknowledges the knowledge that people already have and the skills they bring to the table. Hopefully I'll be able to implement a group like that in my village. We also learned about gathering seeds and creating plant nurseries.

Speaking of my village, I have a very very tentative site placement! I will potentially be in the Mopti region of Mali in a small village 20 km outside of a city. I will be working with a NGO worker in the areas of reforestation and agricultural ecotourism. It sounds really cool, so I hope that it works out! I would speak Fefeulde (I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right, sorry). Apparently it's a little harder to learn than Bambara, but the language teachers are great, so hopefully I won't have too much of a problem.

In other news, I saw a monkey today!! And I bought my first pagne (like a skirt) yesterday and love it, I plan on wearing it when I go to my host family on Wednesday. I will be there for a week, and am very excited to meet them and hopefully speak a little bit!

To answer some questions I've got via email:
- The time difference is 4 hours
- I am not sick (yet)
- I am not sunburned
- Only 2 mosquito bites! The bug zapper thing that my Uncle Ron gave me really works - they don't itch at all!

Hope you are all doing well, the emails and fbook posts from home have been great. I know I've only been here three days, but with all the things we've been doing, that feels like a long time! So thanks for all the support :)