Welcome to Thiès Training Center!

I have finally arrived in Senegal!  It was quite the adventure.  We had staging for less than 24 hours in New York and as we were about to leave for the airport, the two coach buses scheduled to pick us up did not arrive (they were, however, at the hotel at 1pm, 4 hours before we needed to depart for our flight).  We were supposed to load the buses and check into the airport as organized alphabetical groups, but since things did not turn out as anticipated we took 8 passenger vans (in no particular order) and then waited in the longest security line that I’ve ever seen.  Surprisingly, we made our flight and then proceeded to sit on the tarmac for almost an hour.  It turned out later, that the person we were waiting for was another PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who won the Blog It Home contest, a sustainable agriculture volunteer, named Erika Hooker (http://senegalwritinghome.wordpress.com/). 

            We landed in Dakar and they immediately took our temperatures to check for any signs of Ebola.  Then we went through border patrol and retrieved our bags.  We had put orange yarn on all of our bags.  It is a Peace Corps tradition for each stage (that is what each sector/country group is called) to tie yarn to all of our baggage so that they are easily identifiable.  People also keep their yarn on their bags for years after service so that at any time another PCV could easily recognize another. I got one of my bags but the other never showed up (and I went through the process to report it missing through Delta) but it turned out that another trainee had pulled off my bag because they noticed the orange yarn, but never told me where it was.  Anyways, because I was the last person out of the airport I missed the large group going through customs (which we all got so skip) and upon leaving the airport this other PCV immediately started taking photographs of me, sweaty and completely overwhelmed.  This photograph you can see on the Peace Corps Senegal (peacecorpssenegal.org) website.  As the latest arrival to the vans I got the royal treatment and not only did I get a ride in one of the PC land cruisers, I also had the pleasure of sitting next to this woman, Erika (the woman who ended up our plane and won the Blog It Home competition and had just recently been in Washington DC on a tour for Peace Corps about PC Senegal, her work, and technology and the third goal of Peace Corps which is “helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans (in her case, as in mine, that of the Senegalese)).  Our vehicle that Erica and I were in, was driven by the head of safety and security, Mbouille who I have come to know is awesome.  We arrived at the training center to a huge dance party led by the Language and Cultural Facilitator (LCFs) who will be the ones who live in the same villages with us for CBT and teach us our languages.  It has been amazing and wonderful so far.  We haven’t left the Peace Corps Thiès Training Center but it has been nice to get acclimated to the weather, which has been humid, but less hot than I thought.  I have been speaking French to anyone that will talk with me and we have sat through many information sessions, mostly introductory about Pre-Service Training and the various thematic areas we will cover. 

            We have had sessions on international development and the role of Peace Corps in Senegal, as well as a session on the role of the volunteer in Peace Corps development.  We also had a session on food security and the relationship that Peace Corps has developed with USAID since 2008.  We are currently working with a $1 million budget from USAID on two goals that make up our project framework.  All of our projects within the agriculture sectors must align with this work.  Today we had language interviews, technical interviews, and medical interviews.  We will be finding out what language we will be learning at the end of this week and next Monday we will leave the training center for our CBT sites.  Today we also got fitted for complets, which are full Senegalese outfits.  We all got to choose fabric and a simple design because our first Senegalese holiday called Tabaski is coming up on October 4^th and we will participate in this holiday with our CBT families.   

            If there is something else that you would like to know, or if you have a specific question, please feel free to ask me because I can’t write about everything but I’m happy to try and give you as much information as I know.