It's Official -Dec 15, 2006

I'm now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! Our swearing in ceremony was this past Friday and I am now living in my permanent site in Jali. Before I tell you all about Jali, however, it's time for a rather large recap of the past six weeks....

When I last wrote I believe it was Korith and I was back in Bambako enjoying the festivities and drinking ataya under the mango trees. We were only in village a few days before we departed for our volunteer site visits - I went to Kafuta to vist Tina, who had served in Jali for 10 months before moving to Kafuta because of security concerns and was almost finished with her service at the time of my visit. Those of us that went on site visit relatively near the Kombo area, traveled to the Peace Corps office a day early so we could catch a ride with the Coaster the following morning to Bansang - where we would be staying during out Technical Field Trip. This was a very welcome surprise, and I spent the afternoon at the beach, languishing in the waves and enjoying a nice cold Julbrew - that's the local Gambian beer, while watching the sunset. A few of us went out to dinner - which was amazing in itself, smply because I didn't eat rice, but was made even better by stoppng for ice cream on the way back to the Peace Corps Transit house.

"The stodge" - as it is lovingly known by PCV's is quite the place. It's a large 2 story house surrounded by a high cement wall that encloses a really nice yard containing mango, lime and orage trees. The huge cement wall is complemented by a garrison of guards, 2 of which are on duty 24 hours a day to keep us Americans safe . Despite the imposing first appearance the Stodge is actually really nice. There are seven dormitory-style rooms, 3 of which are airconditioned and all the rooms have a separate bathroom, complete with showers that may or may not have hot water - but who wants hot water anyway? The ground floor has a TV room with couches and a wide selection of DVD's - most of which are the illegally copied ones that you can buy on the street here. There's also a pretty decent library and a number of board games, cards and puzzles for other entertainment. The kitchen is well-stocked with a fridge, stove, oven and plenty of storage space for volunteers's food. The backyard has a nice porch for chatting and beer-drinking. The second floor is all bedrooms, but it has a porch all the way around it - which is, I found out firsthand, is perfect for launching surprise water balloon attacks onto unsuspecting bystanders below. I spent that night in ar-conditoned bliss, and got up early the next morning to meet the Coaster at the PC office.

As I mentioned in my first etter, I had alraeady experienced the joys of travel on the South Bank Road, so although I had heard the North Bank Road was considerably better, wasn't exactly lookkng forward to the trip to Bansang, which is located or stuck 2/3s of the way upcountry. To get to the North Bank Road from Kombo, we had to drive to Banjul and take a ferry from Banjul to Barra accross the mouth of the Gambia River. Peace Corps has a handy little slip of paper that essentially allows them to cut to the front of the line when waiting for a ferry crossing and although the line at Banjul wasn't too long that little piece of paper would prove its worth a little later in the trip. Aside from good views of Banjul from the water, the crossing itself was pretty uneventful and we reached Barra in about 45 minutes. We unloaded the ferry at Barra and started our long journey upcountry on the NOrth Bank Road.
Now, comparing the North Bank Road and the South Bank road is a bit like comparing Interstate 80 to a 2 lane dirt track in Kentucky. Suffice it to say that the North Bank road was many magnitudes above the South Bank road and we made excellent timing to Janjanbureh. Somewhere along the way I had to request a quick pitstop to get rellief from a still-adjusting digestive system, and discovered that the leaves of the wooto plant make for excellent T.P.
Janjanberuh is a decent-sized city located on an island in the middle of the river, and it is here that the N B. road crosses to join up with the SB road. There are no brdges, however, so one must navigate not one, but two ferry crossings. It is an island after all.

Of the two ferres, the first, and smaller one, is reminiscent of the old cable-guided ferries that you see in old Western movies, only this one had cars on it, not horses. It's small, very small actually, only two cars (or one Coaster) will fit. Being that the outboard that usually propels the craft across the river was broken, the ferry's small size actually worked in our favor, becase we had to hand propel the ferry across by yarding on the big steel cable that ran the length of the crossing. As you can imagine, this made progress very slow, and we had to wait for an hour of so. Finally, it came our turn to load, but the angle between the loading ramp of the dock and the loading ramp of the ferry was so great that the coaster fully bottomed out its rear end tryuing to load. John, the driver tried again to no avail, so we stacked up some logs from the bush and used them to decrease the angle. This time the coaster made it onto the ferry, but almost lost ts rear bumper in the process. ( I am having trouble with the web site - this is just the first part of this letter )-