Fotota

There's nothing like friends with pictures, and extra cameras for that matter! My roommate here at the training center brought her old camera with her, and is letting me borrow it for the next few weeks! Awesome. Also, thanks to Mom who has sent me my old camera. Hopefully my picture taking will be back in action soon!

In the meantime, I have some pictures to share from Kristin and Matt, who I live with at our homestay site. Enjoy! I should clarify: most of my two months of training has been spent at "homestay" where I live with a Malian family and have daily language lessons. It is basically total immersion into Malian culture and language, and has been a very good and difficult way to adapt to living in Mali.

About a week ago, my homestay buddies and teachers got together to make a "normal" dinner. We bought three chickens at the market, here is a picture of Kristin, myself and Diatrou (my language instructor) with our dinner:


Here is my host sister, Kiatou, helping to prepare the chicken. She helped us do a lot of the cooking, since we aren't really used to cooking with coals, and didn't have most of the "normal" kitchen utensils:

In addition to chicken, we made tortillas, an enormous salad, guacamole, beans and ate cheese and crackers. It was kind of like home. Here is a picture of Jeremy and I preparing the dough for the tortillas (pay no attention to my sunburn...I can't go 5 minutes without sunblock in Mali!):


Here is part of the group hanging out before dinner (left to right: Diatrou, Souleymane, Ali, Jeremy, Matthew, Nick). We also invited our friends from down the road to come over, so we had quite the party.


Here is a picture of Kristin and I at the National Museum in Bamako. We went there about a week ago before heading back to our training center from our homestay villages.


Here's another picture from the bar down the road. There are a lot of people in the picture, but the ones actually looking at the camera are from left to right: Justin, myself, John and Tyler:
Last but not least, here is the President of Mali, ATT, about to lay the first brick for construction across the street from my village:


Glad I could get some pictures up here, even if none of them are mine! I am off early tomorrow morning to visit the village that I will be living in for the next two years. Should be a good week!