Swear in

I had the good fortune to be placed in training village with some of the greatest bloggers I have ever met.  This couple wrote blogs while we were in village and past-posted them once we got back to the city.  Their blog is great!  Probably the most comprehensive way to catch up with all I missed blogging about is to look at their blog.  Since we were in training village together, we've been in the same place almost the whole time until today when they left the city to go to their site, so it is pretty representative of what I have done.  Their blog is SandJwalkingamile.blogspot.com- enjoy it!  If you want to ask me anything about what is on their blog, just post on here or facebook me.
Over our Christmas holiday we got our site assignments.  I am posted to a tiny village in the Western Region of The Gambia.  I'm not supposed to post the name on here for safety and security reasons, but we'll just call it Salliyaa, which means "Salli's place" in Mandinka.  Salliyaa is a Jolla village.  Jollas are one of the smaller tribes in the country.  I am going to be learning Jolla now. It's the primary language in my village, but luckily over time they have borrowed a lot of words from Mandinka so what I have learned so far was worthwhile.  Speaking of that, I passed my language test, ranking as an Intermediate High Mandinka speaker.  I was happy to score above what I had to have to swear in. 
Our whole training class swore in last Friday.  It was only the second time Peace Corps The Gambia has had a group make it through training without anyone quitting the program.  Our ceremony was at the American ambassador's residence, right on the beach.  It was really nice.  It was even televised on Gambian national television.  Hopefully I will be able to post some pictures of swear in on the blog before I head to my site.  The two days after swear in were spent shopping for things we would need at our new houses.  Yesterday I was in one of the markets and a guy came up to me and said he had seen me on TV.  It was funny- he did an impression of us making our oath and was talking about our song.  I guess people really did watch it.  Our musical performance went much better than I had expected.  In the practices we usually sounded unenthusiastic and the song didn't sound too good, but I guess for the real thing we were all excited enough that the song didn't sound half bad.  The song was in Mandinka and it translated loosely to: Brotherhood and love, Peace Corps has come, Peace group.  We all wore matching outfits, which is a big deal here- the people love it.  When a group gets matcing outfits for an event, the outfits are called asobees.  Lots of people do asobees for weddings, pretty much like bridesmaids' dresses.  It was so funny hanging out at the house in the morning before the ceremony with 35 people all dressed in the same fabric walking around.
I'm going to be in the city for another couple of days, probably heading to Salliyaa on Thursday, so I should be able to post another time or 2.

The Kaiaf Crew: Sarah, me, Bakary (our teacher), Casey, and Jacob

All of the Environment Volunteers

All of the new volunteers plus some importsnt people:  (L to R) the guy who runs the PC house, our training manager, out country director, the ambassador's wife, the ambassador, our former environment program coordinator and the education program coordinator