Chapter 5: Tour of Niena

Now that we're evacuated, we can actually disclose to you where we lived and give you a brief tour of Niena (below), a small rural community in southern Mali. The following is a photo tour of our village that we composed right before we had to evacuate.

Coup Runnings

Hi Friends!

We were evacuated from Mali on Sunday after a lot of time consolidated at our regional capital, Sikasso, and at Tso, our training center. In both instances, it was mostly hanging out and holding our breaths to get details on WTF was going on. Basically a lot of this:

Evacuation

Hi everyone,

We are very sad to say that we have been evacuated from Mali. While it's the completely correct decision to make with the security/coup/Touareg situation going on, it doesn't make it any less heartwrenching. We love Mali so much and love our community, our family, our friends, and even our stupid chicken, Pizza. This is extremely difficult for everyone whose lives have been touched by PC Mali.

We are currently in a super-secret, safe, and lovely country in West Africa doing a "close-of-service" evacuation conference for several days to discuss our options and do all of the paperwork to close out PC Mali. Things are very intense right now as we try to make decisions about our lives for the next months and years, so we will try to update you guys when things are less insane. Right now I think it is safe to say that we will not be transferring to another country to serve right away (as in, straight from secret location to a new country next week), but we may not return to America yet either. We still very much want to serve, so we are exploring those options and will let you all know what happens.

Please keep all of us PCVs, and all of our Malian family we love so much, in your thoughts this week as we try to deal with our loss, grief, confusion, and disappointment.

-Caro & Cass

Chapter 4: Malian Fashion Show

We know you all want to know what we wear every day in Mali...so here is our fashion show for y'all! You are bound to see other outfits too as we post pictures from our lives in PC, but here is a good start of all our awesome outfits we've had made here in country.

(Creeping in this photo is Jeneba on the far left, and Toshi in the middle--our neighbor's kids. They are adorable and hilarious! Toshi deserves her own blog post for the entertainment she provides us.)

Chapter 3: Moving into Site

Welcome to our house! These pictures are all from when we first arrived at our site. There was NOTHING inside the house--apparently the previous volunteer (who we have heard horror stories about, even from the Malians) gave away everything in the house when she ET'd ("early termination", or quitting), including stuff that wasn't hers to give away, like the Mayor's chairs! Anyway, this is what we started with. We bought the two chairs to the left, but the ones to the right are the Mayor's.