I'TS OFFICIAL!!!

I am an official Peace Corps Volunteer! The Swearing In ceremony was quite impressive, and emotional for all of us. I will give you a full report and post pictures soon. It will take me a few weeks to update my blog about the swearing in ceremony, and the weekend in Lome, and my new house and first few weeks in Tcheckpo. Everything takes a long time here. You spend so much time just surviving, cooking your meals, doing your laundry, walking everywhere, but I will soon get into a rhythm and pattern and hope to start posting on a regular basis.

For the swearing in ceremony my host family had this "complait" (outfit) made for me

In the meantime, I finished a couple old posts I had been working on, which I will post today. I'll probably publish a couple posts a week until I get current (sorry they are so old, but I thought the old ones might be worth posting anyway, just to keep things in some sort of sequence??) The two that follow this one are from the last two weeks in July.

For now...and for the first few weeks, I'm setting up my house, and meeting people in the village. While I'm setting up house I am also working on my first project which is to create a map of Tchekpo. with the help of my community partner, I am forming a committee of villagers who are helping me with this. This project will introduce me to the community, and introduce the community to me. There are 10,000 to 15,000 people in the village (Tchekpo.) There is a clinic, and the Chiefs House, and ethnic neighborhoods, for example the Voodoo neighborhood is on the outer edge of the village. There is a police station, and the market and tailors and couteaires, and carpenters and grade schools, and a high school, etc. This projet will help me know where everything is, and how things work in Tchekpo and it will give the people of Tchekpo a view of Tchekpo they've never had.