Preface

I had a successful trip to my post and saw a lot of things that I thought you would like to know about, so I decided to draw up my findings in a report form.

Housing

I did not stay in "my house" during my entire site visit. The first and second nights, there was a family already there. The third and fourth nights, it was completely empty. I hadn’t brought any kind of gear to stay in a completely empty house, so the entire time I was there I stayed with my community host, M. Youdom. Each night we went to the house to see if it was more or less ready, he ended up going to bat for me in the French/patois that they speak up there. M. Youdom is the star of this story; I feel like he really went above and beyond the call of duty.

The things you asked me to look at were:

• painting: The house was still not repainted. They seemed to be in the process of working on it when I left Monday morning.
• windows: The only broken window I saw was in the door to the outside.

The front door is a metal frame with glass panes. The lock in the door itself has rusted through; the door is secured with a chain/padlock that is threaded through the broken panes of glass in the door. Repairing the glass in the door would therefore make the house less secure, as it would not be possible to lock the front door. It could be possible to change the lock in the front door, but it would be difficult to tell who had a key to that lock. For this reason I think it may be best to just leave the chain and bring my own padlock when it is time to live there.

The house is in two "wings", as you said. One wing is now uninhabited, unless that family moves back in. The other "wing" is apparently used by the proprietor of the house. M. Youdom insisted that a partition be put in to close off the other wing, so that I could rest assured that nothing funny would happen.

The bathroom has a toilet and a drain in the floor. There are two bedrooms, both of which have locks, but I didn’t see keys for either of them. There is also a place to padlock one of them from the outside. There are two working lights that I saw, plus perhaps places to put other light bulbs.

To get water, there is a forage across the street at the Lycee, but it is broken and no longer gives water. M. Youdom said something about there being "l’eau de la source" nearby but I didn’t get to see it.

Academics

The Lycee looks very nice. It’s fairly small, but it has a computer lab with 11 computers, most of which seem to be working. They have a contractor who deals with all of their maintenance issues. There is at least one other informatics teacher. In fact, it seems they used to have another teacher, possibly a vacatere, who they fired now that they have me. This seems like a possible step backwards.

All in all, it does not seem like they have a great need for me. I know that there’s a fairly rigorous process in order to host a PCV, so I was wondering if you knew anything about what their needs might actually be.