Some stuff to note after I got to my house: My bleach leaked onto some clothes in the same suitcase. Kind of annoying, but only one shirt I really liked got ruined. When I first got to my house, the bathroom smelled foul. I spent a bit of time last night scrubbing the toilet with […]
As Claire writes, it turns out that putting clumps of dirt/grass in the road is a signal to drive slowly here. I got to see it in action on the bus ride out of town when we drove past a few such clumps in the road, marking the site of a fascinating accident where two […]
Lots happened in the last few days, the conclusion of which is my installation here at my post. We’re all officially Volunteers (with a capital V). Let’s try to break it down a bit. One: the impending. Somehow, and I have no idea how really, I went from "fucking tired of these stagiaires" to "I […]
Getting ready to head out. Packing up everything. This reveals a certain amount of "What do I do with this?" — for example, house keys for back home. Bittersweet. Last Saturday wasn’t so bad. Allison’s birthday. I left before people went to the nightclub, figuring I didn’t have enough money to participate. Jenny reports that […]
Presentation went well. I could give you notes if you wanted, but they’re in French and they basically just boil down to "languages with tones" and "noun classes". Instead I want to talk about the "soirée culturelle", which is an event in which all the students show what they’ve been working on the entire "semester" […]
Spent a little time talking with my host family. Relaxed conversation. Christelle asked how I will feel after I leave next week. I said I’m ready to be independent, but a little scared, and a little sad to go. Vladimir is rambunctious as always. Today we started chastising him, and he responded by throwing a […]
A number of good things happened today: Got an opportunity to just chill and play with my laptop for a few hours while we waited for another teacher to fill out their grades. Then, was able to use my spreadsheet skillz to rapidly calculate the students’ averages and give them all ranks. Filling out the […]
Note: The original uses the name of the Organization directly, and some Organization-specific acronyms. I have elided these for the sake of generality. You will note that the behavioral reactions listed below all tend to be negative. This is NOT meant to imply that your [Organization] experience produces only difficult, unhappy emotions. It’s just that […]
Someone bleached the entire well. All of it. I thought I was just smelling something funny, but I asked a local, and she explained that it was to kill microbes, and that if you don’t bleach the well, you could get "the gane" (although I have no idea what that is). I guess I’m safe. […]
Well, at least now I know it’s not the booze; it’s something else about Saturday nights that makes me unhappy like this. I should probably just stop going out with the other stagiaires. Twelve more days like this (unless I bomb the next language test, in which case it’s twenty-six more days).