Mud stoves and mango groves

Hi everyone!

TL;DR: We are fine, we love Mali, and we're going to see our permanent site next week! Hooray! Oh and we love you all too!

So, for the last several weeks we have been learning Bambara at our homestay sites about an hour away from Bamako, where we don't have internet. Sorry for the dead blog! It will be like this until January though--definitely off and on. Cass and I are in different villages, but we are only about 2k away from each other, so we bike over and hang out at each other's houses. It's pretty fun! The last bike ride we took together was in the mango groves at sunrise in Cass's village. Personally I don't think it gets any better than that.

A bit into homestay

Hey guys! We know it's been a while since you heard from us and it's because we've been incredibly busy with training and learning and living with our host family. Homestay has been great so far and usually consists of about 6 hours of language training a day with a few breaks in between for food and sanity with the rest of the day spent walking or biking around the area greeting people or trying to use our new language skills with our host family. Which is to say that there's a lot of laughing at various faux pas that we commit on a daily basis.

Post-staging and good to go!

Hi everyone!

So after staging in Philly, a long long flight, and lots of fun at the airport in Mali, we are here! We've already survived day one and even our first lesson in Bambara. Cass and I get to stay in the same hut which has a mosquito net, a slow fan, and a light. Yay electricity! We do have taps outside and showers with running water (sometimes) as well, but the toilets are holes in the ground you squat over. And as you can tell, here at the training center, we have computers and wifi to communicate with y'all, though it's only temporary.

Beginning of our service

Hi guys...I am testing this out. As you probably know, Cass is WAY more technically inclined than I am. Please bear with me! And big ups to Cass for setting all this stuff up!!

Apparently if you want to sign up for updates you can put your e-mail in in the box to the right and it will magically send you updates from us. Hooray! I think you could also use RSS to get this into your Google Reader somehow, or link our blog to your blogger.com blog. Blog blog blog blog.