zot in Niger bush camels

So much has happened that I don’t know where to start. We arrived in Mali Wednesday night. Thursday more people arrived, and Friday morning we had an information session in which the director tried to answer any questions we had. It was a good session in that he was very up front and informative and didn’t try to talk around any questions. The whole process has been pretty emotional for some volunteers, and the session was of course emotional as well.

So let me describe what happened then. We were ordered to “consolidate” by the state department, and it is up to them to decide if we can come back at the end of two weeks, or to just evacuated. The evacuation was political, perhaps because the US is intending to be fairly strong against the president here, or because they want to make a statement. Someone from Washington will arrive on Tuesday to work with us about our options if we don’t come back, and we have been having with our program directors to talk about which programs we might like to join and where of course that means a lot of decisions, most of which we haven’t had a lot of time to think about.

The rest of Friday was relaxed, and today we went to the “American Club” which is a place that has a pool and a bar and volleyball nets and is sort of like a country club for expats or something. It was nice to spend time there just having fun and relaxing and not stressing out about the evacuation. They have offered it to us to use for the foreseeable future. Tomorrow we will be going to watch a soccer game between Mali and someone else to qualify for the world cup. They are trying to give us activities that we can do while we essentially wait around to see what is going to happen.

We won’t really know a lot more until Tuesday, but it is not going too badly here. It is like a summer camp while we wait.

We arrived in Mali last night. Their compound is really gorgeous, and much more reminiscent of a summer camp. We are three to a room, and we have electricity and theoretical internet, which works only rarely. Most of us have arrived. One more bus load of volunteers is arriving tonight, and tomorrow morning we will get our first session and hopefully some answers to all our questions. Actually it will probably be more like we are told the things we already know and the questions we want answered will be deftly avoided. It is maddening.

We will be here for at least a week, and we will be having some crash courses in local language (Bambado) and some other sessions on a variety of things. There are rides to Bamako twice a day and several different activities. They are trying to keep us busy and have been good about providing comfort and amenities, especially considering there are something like 100 of us. We also got new orange (phone) numbers that work in Mali and a per diem.

We have broken down the future options into the following:

- G15, having served nearly their whole service, will simply COS and be done.

- G16 and G17 (my group) may have the option to take interrupted service and go home to the states, or to transfer to another country.

–Or–

- G17 and G18 will be sent home to wait a few months until the program reopens. That would suck and most of us would probably ET.

–Or–

- We go back to Guinea and there are no problems. This is unlikely.

We left early this morning in a Peace Corps car. I have been getting only a few hours of sleep for the last several nights, and my house has been full of other volunteers, so I was glad to get on the road. But it was also very hard, much harder than I expected. My students were crestfallen, they were losing not only the classes but also the projects working with teenage girls that we were going to do together.

My family was less concerned, but Cece was of course upset, and I was pretty sad to leave them also. I wanted to say goodbye to the kids but I didn’t get the chance to this morning because they were sleeping. How can a three year old understand the reasons I am leaving?

Anyway, we are in Dabola now until tomorrow, staying at a nice hotel with electricity, running water, and electricity. It is nice to drink cold water again.

Anyway, everything will be up in the air for the next couple of weeks, but I will let you know what is happening when I get the chance.

Tomorrow we head up to Dabola and then Wednesday to Bamako. It is frustrating dealing with Peace Corps, in that we don’t know what we can believe that they tell us. The problem with not being completely open about information from the beginning is that people stop believing what is said. So most of us believe we wont be coming back, and if we aren’t, I would like to know that now so that I can say goodbye properly to my family and friends. If we might be, then that’s okay, but I don’t know whether I can trust what is said.

Anyway, I have yet to pack or think at all about how to get ready. I was up at 4:30 this morning thinking about leaving, and I will probably be up very late tonight getting ready. I wonder when we will be leaving in the morning. Also we turned down a ride for an American who is not a volunteer, supposedly because our car is full. We will see if that is true when we get picked up. Yet another piece of potential misinformation.

Yet my frustration is probably coming through too strongly here. Its just that I would like to know what is happening and what will happen, but we can’t really know that yet.

If we are officially evacuated, I don’t really know what happens, but I am under the impression that we will be given a choice of some other countries to go to.

Anyway, I don’t know if I will have easy ways of updating this for the next few weeks, we will see though.

We received word this afternoon that we will be consolidating to Bamako for the next two to four weeks. I have Sajay and Caitlin at my house, but they are headed out to (re) pack their stuff for the trip. We think its a little strange that we are leaving Guinea now when the major day of protests has already happened and everything is calm. It has been a few days since any reports of anything bad have reached me.

There is some speculation that because the state department has evacuated nonessential personnel they don’t want us to stay either, or that the administration has some inside knowledge as to the state of the government that makes things more dangerous than it is, but the truth is that we really don’t know and don’t understand why we are leaving.

So, anyway, it is what it is, and we are now thinking about what to pack in our one bag we are allowed to take with us, and the other bag that we will be leaving in our houses to be shipped home in the case that we don’t come back to Guinea.

We got a lot done on the world map today, and also spent a lot of time with Michael, who is an American volunteering with a chimpanzee rescue organization at the national park here. He just finished his six months, and so he may be headed into Mali and the rest of West Africa until he heads back to the states in a few months.

Tomorrow we will hopefully finish the map, and maybe have cell phone reseau again. Not sure what is going on with that. And we will go to the internet to post some of these posts and read the news. BBC continues to disappoint.

But we are all fine and despite news and rumors to the contrary, ridiculously safe.