Holy Crap, A Month's Worth of Updates All At Once!...or not

So I am at my regional capital (the closest "big city" with a Peace Corps transit house - there are 3 currently in Guinea). I'm here with the other members of my stage (training group) who have been assigned villages in the Basse Cote region to do our site visit - that is see the house we will live in, meet the principals of our respective schools, discuss which classes we will teach, etc. Currently we are having a party with the intermittent electricity as a welcome to the 6 of us from my training class that will settle in this region after training around 6 weeks from now.

I have been assigned to a small village in the northern Basse Cote named Bintimodia, I will teach middle school Chemistry here, and probably do an additional project (secondary project) which will be developed with my communities needs in mind (health education, english lessons, community development, pretty muchanything I want to do that seems appropriate). Bintimodia is a reasonable bike ride from Kamsar (a village that has a US mining company, and thus some ammenities such as internet, american food stores (expensive by Guinean standards, which I'm sort of being paid at....sort of), and a pool. It is also a short bush taxi ride to Boke, the prefectorial capital. There are supposed to be lots of monkeys in/around my village, as well as lots of rice fields. I am in one of the hotter regions of Basse Cote, which is the most humid region (by far) of Guinea. I have heard that in order to get out of my village I will need to get on a pirogue (small canoe) to cross the rivers around my village (Rio Nunez is one of them). What I've seen of the region so far is the epitome of small villages nestled alongside rivers in a tropical humid environment with wildlife all over.

As far as training has gone, I have so much to say and so little time and space to say it in. My paper journal has about 60 densely handwritten pages already describing the experience of adjusting to life in a smaller Guinean village with my host family. I will attempt to summarize it for the rest of this post. Here goes:

Ok, I don't have time to summarize my journal, but I photocopied it and sent it to Tim, hopefully in a couple of weeks he will get it and be able to post a summary on my behalf. I'll have internet again in a week or two, hopefully I will upload some pictures to Facebook then. I'm on my way out the door to go to Bintimodia now, later.