Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

First off, thank you everyone who sent cards and or packages, it's greatly appreciated! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and I must say that I am slightly envious of all the snow you've been getting. I can't complain though, I've been on vacation this week and instead of dealing with shovelling I've had to worry about sunburns! So I left my site on the 23rd and spent Christmas here in Kolda with the other volunteers. We had a pretty good celebration that including plenty of good food, Christmas music, and Christmas movies. We had everything to eat from two ducks to peanut butter fudge. The ducks were extra fresh as you buy them alive and get to kill and pluck them yourselves... it makes you realize how lucky we are to be able to eat them when you have to see them running around one minute and on your plate the next. We even got a little Christmas tree.

Two days after Christmas two other volunteers and I left for the beach to relax until New Years. We stayed in a small campemment in a two bed room where the beds were made out of concrete. We spent about five days there doing pretty much nothing but eating food that isn't rice and relaxing on the beach. There were big waves, very few people and even a herd of cows that apparently love the beach. After the first couple of days two more volunteers showed up to celebrate New Years with us. At the end of the day it was a great vacation, relaxing and leaving me ready to go back to site (I just hope I havn't been speaking English for so long now that I forget my French and Pulaar!)

So tomorrow I will head back to Velingara where I will likely stay untill my In Service Training at the end of January. I am going to be starting to give computer training classes to the people who work at the Inspectors Office (Superintendant of Schools) and then go around to the other schools to teach people there how to effectively use computers as well. I'm a little nervous for the first lesson, as it's for a room full of more educated Senegalese men and not for High School students or someone like that. I certainly know more about computers than they do, but the biggest problem will likely be my ability to add appropriate structure to my computer knowledge so I can teach with results. Also, I need to practice my French technical vocabulary a bit. But it will be nice once I've gotten the first lesson out of the way and have a better idea of the problems I will face in the future.

Well I hope everyone had a great holiday season! Peace and enjoy the new photos I put up on webshots!