Wait, what, I'm in Africa??

Hello gang!  I am at the internet right now for 2 hours!  Seems like a wealth of riches (or time, which is riches when internet access is sketchy).

Last week we went on our site visits, which is 4 days of each trainee visiting their village that will be home for the next 2 years.  My home away from home is Yele, a town of about 4,000 in the center of Sierra Leone.  Apparently when you look up Yele, Sierra Leone, on google maps it shows up as an island in the south of Sierra Leone.  As cool as it would be to live on the Turtle Islands for the next two years, that is not, alas, where my village is actually located.  If you look at a map of Sierra Leone it's about dead center.  I was actually reading a middle school kid's social studies notes the other day and there was a sentence that read: 'The town in the middle of Sierra Leone is Yele.'  That might explain why every time I tell someone I'm going to Yele they excitedly exclaim, "Oh, the center of Sierra Leone!'  And for most people that's the extent of their knowledge about Yele.

A few facts about Yele:
1. It is in the center of Sierra Leone (did I say that already?)
2. It is part of the Gbonkolenken Chiefdom (Gbonkolenken pronounced without the 'g' although technically it changes the way the 'b' sounds.  Still haven't mastered that in Temne.)
3. Gbonkolenken means 'behind or beyond the forest,' which if you look on the map Yele is right next to the Kangan Hills Forest Reserve.  There's also, apparently, a pretty cool wildlife sanctuary not far from Yele.
4.  Yele is the main village in the Gbonkolenken Chiefdom (comprised of 300 villages in the surrounding area) which means that the Paramount Chief lives in Yele.  My P.C. is awesome.  He studied as a mechanical engineer in Scotland and loves to joke.  He has some pretty high expectations for me and mentioned something when I first met him about staying for 5 years.  Yikes!  We'll see if I can easily let him down on that one.
5.  There is a major river that runs through Yele called the Teya River.  It runs all the way to Freetown.  They're working on building a hydro-electric dam on it right now, which they're hoping will be operational by September.  In Sierra Leone time that means probably September of next year, but there's still a chance that I'll get electricity at some point in my service!
6.  My supervisor's name is Abdulai Jalloh.  He's also great.  He loves to laugh and is a pretty popular man around town.  He kept introducing me to people by saying, "So, this is your stranger for the next 2 years." In Sierra Leone, a stranger is anyone who is not originally from that town or village.  It's just a little odd to be introduced as a stranger 50 times in a day.
7. Yele is known for having a palm oil plant, which supplies palm oil to most of Sierra Leone.
8.  It's pretty cool.

If I forgot anything I'll be sure to add it in my next post.  I got to see the house I will be staying in when I get to site and it's a very nice apartment right across the street (and by street I mean dirt path) from my chief.  They were originally going to put me in this awesome house right on the river, but it's on the edge of town so the Peace Corps told them it was too isolated.  So now I have about 100,000 neighbors within a 10 foot radius.  At least I'll be making lots of friends.  The inside of the apartment is really nice; I think my village has been putting a lot of effort in to making it nice for me.  It consists of a parlor, the first room when you enter, an indoor latrine with a tiled bathing area, and a bedroom in the back.  The bedroom has a little cut out section that's going to be made into a closet area.  I've always wanted to have a walk-in closet, who knew I'd have to move to Africa to get it!

During the site visit I got to visit my school a few times.  I will be teaching at the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) secondary school.  It was built in the 50s by SDA missionaries.  It's a pretty nice school and all the teachers I met seemed very happy to have me there.  I'm a little overwhelmed at the idea of teaching a class of 70 students when I don't have any teaching experience.  They're doing their best to give us a lot of teaching experience during training (we start summer school this week), but it's still going to be totally different once we get to site.  I'm sure I'll learn fast, at least as soon as the spitballs start flying.

Once we got back from site visits, and after talking to my fellow trainess about their sites, I started getting really excited about traveling around Sierra Leone to visit people.  There are a couple people about an hour from me by car (and one about an hour by bike) that I'm sure I'll see frequently, but I'm also looking forward to trips down south and up north.  I'm also excited to go to some beaches, and climb some mountains.  So many things to do!  Good thing I've got 2 years.

Time to go mentally prepare myself, my host sisters are having me cook rice tonight.  They seem so shocked that I don't know how to do domestic activities here as much as try to explain to them that cooking over a coal stove is completely different from cooking over a gas stove.  They constantly ask me "Yu sabi kuk?" Which translates to "Do you know how to cook?" To which I respond, "I do in America."  But then my sisters fling a flood of Krio at me, most of which I don't understand, but the jist is I need to know how to cook in Salone.  Needless to say this will be an adventure.  My task is to cook 1 cup of rice.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard my right, just 1 cup of rice.  We'll see if I pass...