I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. Despite being thousands of miles from home, I had one of the best Christmases ever. Thirteen of my closest Peace Corps friends came from their villages to celebrate our first Christmas in the Sahara Desert. Even though we have limited resources, we were still able to make some excellent food, including latkas for our Jewish friends, hummus, spinach dip, onion dip, breadsticks, salad, homemade pizzas complete with cheese and crust made from scratch, and brownies and banana bread. Not exactly your traditional Christmas dinner, but we were going for food we can't get on a regular basis. Of course, the food wasn't as good as it could have been with a proper oven rather than a brousse oven (a pot filled with 1 inch of sand and an old soup can on which you place another pot with the food--this creates the perfect temperature for baking without having food directly on the burner). In any event, the food experiment went over well, especially considering the food we normally eat (goat, sheep, fish, rice, and couscous). Of course, when you add multiple boxes of bad Senegalese wine into the picture, you get some deep conversations, including the value of monkey butlers, the proper way to celebrate Christmas in 90 degree heat, maladies such as scurvy, my partial deafness (or as I like to call it, my hearing situation), university degrees for Lord of the Rings trivia, the fact the no one under the sun has ever seen the movie Tron, and the coolest game in the world, Mafia.
Now I am set to begin a new year filled with what I hope will be some amazing projects. In fact, I just completed an AIDS seminar in the brousse (the French word for bush, i.e. village life). Next I plan to give a nutrition presentation and then I begin doing adult English literacy classes 4 hours a week. At the same time, I will be visiting neighboring villages once a week with a mobile vaccination team. If all goes well, I will also be doing health talks at a nursery school and trying to find an exchange program for a school in the States to donate used supplies to the kidnergarden here. In addition, I plan to spend 3 days a week with adolescent girls doing health talks, self-esteem building exercises, computer training, career development, and life skills management. There is such a need for that here, especially since so many of these girls are forced into marriage at 14 or even younger. It's an uphill battle, but I am going to try to reach out to them and encourage them to stay in school.
Thanks again for everyone's holiday wishes and packages. They really mean the world to me. Here's wishing you all a happy, healthy, and peaceful New Year.
Janine
