Being back at site without Mary is being difficult, but these are old battles that I don’t want to revisit on my blog. Some good things are happening. Tomorrow I head to Tindo again to meet with a groupement there for the second time. We are going to review their finances and management of money practices. Then Monday is the second meeting of my business group, and Tuesday I am meeting with another groupement to discuss how we can work together. Monday I will also meet with my counterpart to discuss the elaboration of themes for the entrepreneur’s workshop that they are planning on doing. So work is going fairly well, which is good for getting me out of the house and especially good for making me feel like I am doing something worthwhile.

My garden is amazing. My cilantro is exploding, and my peas are already about two feet tall. I also have good watermelon plants and some basil. The other stuff doesn’t seem to have come up much. Spinach is non-existent, as is thyme, parsley, sage, and oregano. I might have three bell pepper plants or so, but I am not sure they are actually bell peppers and not some weed. Still things grow so much more quickly at 1000 feet, daily rains and temperatures between 80 and 100 than they do at 7,500 feet and temperatures between 40 and 80. I suppose that goes without saying, but its still surprising.

While Mary was here we had a series of ‘worsts.’ I wanted to remember them all, but instead I forgot most of them. We had “Worst Pet Owner Ever” (when I accidentally dripped a ginger drink in my cat’s eye). And then there was “Worst Volunteer Ever” (when I accidentally called a six year old girl a penis instead of saying “it’s good” in local language. The differences are relatively small and I had just learned both phrases). We also had some great headlines relating bizarre life here.

I am trying to put a little thought into what I want to do when my service is finished. I did some research into school in France. There is a one year program that starts in English and moves to French, includes French classes, and provides the first year of a master’s degree, and then you can apply to French schools to finish the second year. I also am interested in doing a third year of Peace Corps service in Morocco or Jordan. There is an Arabic teacher here and I could learn Arabic and then go to one of those places to actually speak it for a year. Or I could apply for the Foreign Service or some other international position. Then there is law school in all its variations (Northwestern’s two year program, standard three years, Cornell’s two years in the US two years in France program, or a dual Master’s and JD).

I think law school is in my future, and I am feeling like getting another M.S. would be, not exactly wasteful, but possibly not worth the two years it would take. I like the idea of a third year of service, but I would have to find an NGO in Jordan or Morocco that wanted to take a volunteer with no speaking background in Arabic. And most of Morocco ends up being a berber language anyway. Then there’s the Foreign Service, which could be really cool, except that I am starting to feel the need to set down roots, and I don’t know that I want to live the expat life. A French M.S. in economics would be neat, but I don’t know that I would want to live and work in France after that point, and again there is the questionability of whether it would be worth it or not.

I have been trying to get law school web sites downloaded onto my laptop so that I can research schools without paying for internet, but it is slow going and I am having technical difficulties.