MALI!

And the results are in!! We received the Peace Corps invitations in the mail today. We're going to Mali! We leave July 26th.



I can't believe how excited I am about this. I'm not even sure where I should begin. The country is land-locked and consists mostly of arid Saharan regions and flood plains along the Niger River. The country is 90% Muslim and 60% of the people speak an assortment of tribal languages. French is a less common language, but it is the official one, so I'm assuming its more of a backup type of thing.



So yeah, this is going to be amazing. They say most likely there will be no running water or electricity where we'll be living AND both Michele and I will receive mountain bikes as our means of transportation to and from work. Its pretty cool. We'll both be working around the Health Services area; Michele will be teaching AIDS/HIV and sex awareness classes and I will be working in water/sanitation services. The nice thing is, the booklet says that my job is seasonal since certain seasons people are too busy with farming and managing their crops to assist with well construction etc. I'll most likely get a lot of time off during those seasons which will be perfect for taking pictures and writing my book. I seriously can't wait.

3 months of training in the captial city of Bamako and then who knows what. After the initial training, they say they'll assess our skills and assign us to a certain region in Mali. The booklet says to be prepared (for my job) to ride about 25km a day going off to rural villages to talk with them about water purification and sanitation. I'll most likely be working with a group of other PC volunteers in the field which will be really cool.

And it gets better (for me at least as this is where my true bias shows): the architecture. Mali is the country where you can find the legendary city of Tombouctou (or Timbuktu if you learned it that way). Tombouctou is the definitive city for great African architecture because of the Mali Empire in the 15th and 16th Centuries.



One little catch though. This probably won't be much of an issue if we stay near the capitol Bamako, but internet connections are nonexistant in the rural areas. Bamako is decent because of internet cafes and electricity, but elsewhere is, well, less modern. This might makes things a bit more difficult when it comes to my digital photography (since my camera needs to be recharged instead of taking batteries) and keeping the blog updated. I'm crossing my fingers. I know I would really love to keep the blog going and update it with pictures of Mali constantly.