Things are progressing. Yesterday I went to see a Taekwando class, which was a whole lot of talk and only a tiny bit of Taekwando. I was surprised that anybody wanted to take it, more than that there is such a class at all in this village of 3,000 people. I’ve also been to see the gardens of some of the scouts. I know where the recharge place is and what it is like. Each day my house and concession get a little more put together.

Thursday I attended the weekly meeting of the scouts leaders. It was a fun meeting, just seeing what they did and how they tried to make things happen. If I understand correctly, they were founded by the volunteer who was here before me, and they basically meet each Wednesday to do some charitable act, like clean the school or mosque. I am going to see if they want to paint a map on the wall of the primary school. We discussed a lot of things, and have an English class starting next week and a business group starting the week after. It will be similar to my business group in Guinea, which would have been pretty successful if I had had time to finish it, except that it will be with younger kids who do not have a university future to look forward to. It also means I can probably lend them a tiny amount of money to start small businesses over the summer. I haven’t quite developed how that is going to work but I am pretty excited about it.

Today I woke up and went running, which was wonderful and I didn’t get nearly the same amount of attention as I expected. Sometimes its really nice that there was a volunteer here before me because the people expect me to be a certain way and that makes it easier. It can also make it harder if I do things differently, but so far it has been positive.

I also spent a bunch of money to buy wood and put up a shade hanger in my concession with the help of some of the scouts. I am pretty happy with it and I spent the evening planning out the rest of the yard and a small garden space. I hope to find or at least order a wooden bedframe tomorrow so that I can set that up permanently, which will let me hang up my mosquito net outside and start sleeping outside without having to take everything back in each morning (now it will just be the mattress and sheets). It is a major thing to have done and I am very happy with it. My counterpart was supposed to make sure I got one, but he is less motivated than he was with the previous volunteer… I also hear that he came and took the last one down and kept all the stuff. Sweet.

Anyway, things are going swimmingly, especially for having only been at site a week and a half. Today there was a protest against the president because he refuses to leave office, and tomorrow I am meeting with the presidents of several women’s groups to talk about what kind of work they are doing and what kind of work they would like to do. I will take that and everything else and write it up into a kind of program because my mayor wants a program.

Starting to think of trips and things. Anyone from the states want to come down and do a tour of Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Mali and Niger? We can stay with Peace Corps volunteers nearly the entire time and if we time it right we will see Elephants and our costs would mostly be the buses and the very cheap visa (like $50). And the plane ticket of course . One advantage of having a Peace Corps diaspora is knowing an ex-Guinea volunteer in almost all of those countries.