Bootcamp is officially over and we are now Peace Corps Volunteers!  We took oath yesterday at the residence of Madame US Ambassador.  We all dressed in traditional Senegalese outfits - boubous for the men and complets for the women - and the room was bursting with color.

swear-in1

swear-in2

The entire ceremony was was televised and included speeches from the US ambassador, the Secretary General of Senegal, and three volunteers from our group who spoke in the local languages (Mandinka, Pulaar, and Wolof).  At the end of the program, we had cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and deserts, which was really nice, yet for some reason The Last Supper came to mind.

Afterwards, we went to a magical place in Dakar called The American Club.  I walked through the gate and felt like I was walking through the wardrobe into Narnia.  Tennis courts, a swimming pool, American food, a lounge, a playground… It was an incredibly surreal experience but it was great to play some tennis and swim some laps.

pool

Tomorrow, we are off to our villages to get installed.  We will spend a couple nights in a hotel in a neighboring city, where we will buy our household supplies, then we will set up camp in our villages.  We stay there for two months, and in mid-July we come back to Thies for In-service Traing (IST).

In other news, I want to congratulate the Pulaar group from Mboro for winning the garden competition!  We put in long hours, worked hard, and almost always came home with goat poop in our fingernails.  I think we did a surprisingly great job considering we only had a two hour gardening demonstration at the training center and only one person from our group had any gardening experience.

garden

If you would like to see photos of the Trainee vs. Trainer soccer match, the ceremony with our host families, and more photos of the winning garden and swearing-in, click on ‘End of PST’ on the right.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 7:21 am and is filed under Pre-service training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.