Honeymoon is over!

Hello!
Our initial honeymoon-ish stay at the Peace Corps training site ends tomorrow, and we all move into our respective homestays in villages! Bye Bye Club Med Mali! Our language skills are low, but our motivation high, so I'm sure we'll all get along fine. The rest of our two month training (with the exception of a few days here and there) will be done on-site in local villages. They'll teach us how to eat, speak, laugh, and dream Malian-style. Drop me an e-mail if you'd like specific whereabouts so you can look me up on a map.

I'll be learning Bambara, the language of the largest ethnic group in Mali, which I'm hoping will make it a lot easier to get around. We haven't actually gotten to see the world outside of the training site doors yet, so this will be a rude awakening for some (including myself, perhaps). We've been spending the last week getting what I've started calling the All-You-Need-to-Know-About-Living-in-a-Developing-Country primer: how to hand-wash clothes, eat out of a communal bowl, use Turkish toilets, etc... Yesterday they taught us how to properly tie our wrap-skirts (pagnes, in French) so as not to invite unwanted attention. They also took time to explain the art of a bucket bath! The PC invited local artisans and musicians to a cultural fair yesterday here at the training site, and we were able to buy beauitful cloths to get tailored into traditional Malian clothes. I'll get mine tailored in my village in the coming weeks, and will post pictures when the final product is ready!

I'm feeling pretty good about everything (except eating w/my hands, a skill I have yet to master), because thus far, it's pretty similar to the skills I used in Madagascar.

Hope all is well in the US!