Tomorrow I leave for my site visit, the first time I'll see my new home for two years. The bus ride is going to be at least 15 hours but I'm excited to really see Mali for the first time. So far we've been coddled......which I guess is certainly a relative term. Whenever we go from the training center to our respective homestay villages, or vice versa, we're taken by Peace Corps transport directly to the site which in this country is pretty cushy. In my homestay village, I never go much farther than a one mile radius from school, to home, to the river or to the cyber cafe. When I'm at Tubaniso, the peace corps training center, we're here for good and can only venture down the rural road a little ways. This trip will be the first time I've taken public transportation on a long trip and the first time I'll actually really get outside Bamako, aside from a technical field trip the natural resource management trainees took to a small village several days ago. No AC, crowded with animals bags, people etc. ill be able to paint a better picture of it after the "experience"

The village/town I'm going to is located North of Bamako, in the desert and the population is half Tammasheq, half Songhrai. Bess and Jared will both be placed in my town and their house is only a couple hundred meters from mine! My job as it stands now is working on organizational development and technical assistance with a union of 86 associations. They have several project ideas concerning biodiversity conservation efforts, agro-business and reforestation and they need help to realize their goals. One of the associations in the Union is a group working to protect the nomadic desert elephants in my region, so hopefully, I'll get to work on that along with another volunteer who will be stationed on the other end of the conservation area. I met my homologue, or my colleague/supervisor who will be supervising me for the next two years and we get along great. He speaks tammashek songhrai french bamabara and fulfide! and he makes me speak tammasheq. He works in the mayor's office so I'll be doing some work out of there but also will have to travel to the surrounding villages. However, because there's so much sand, I won't be able to ride my bike sometimes so I may have to ride a camel to work. cha.

Apart from the camel rides that lie in my future, I have already had several adventures. This past week, Bess and I went to the market in our homestay "village", which is really a suburb in the city of Bamako, and it was, well, dirty. Not to gross anyone out but the flies on the meat, the trash on the ground, the kids with ripped clothes were certainly not pleasant images. They did have lots of fresh looking vegetables and plenty of nuts (Bess walked away with two kilos worth--language miscommunication) and I bought a beautiful fabric to make in to a skirt or tarfu in tammasheq. I also went on a field trip with the other Natural Resources people to a farm and a tree nursery in a vilalge outside of Bamako and was actually really encouraged by what we saw. The farm was amazing--the owner used crop rotation and alternated fields so that he never had to leave one in fallow and he also had great ideas about composting and tree nurseries. We also visited another tree nursery where the farmer is growing jatropha plants which have a really high concentration of oil and can be used as a biofuel to run cars etc. They are just beginning to develop plans to open refineries to harvest the oil from the seed of the plant and one refinery should be opening soon.

With every positive there are lots of negatives. The sanitation problem, especially around Bamako, is really startling. They have basically no sanitation system in Mali, so any trash they have is just dumped in the street or taken from Bamako and dumped outside the city just along the road. On the way to tubaniso, you can see fields fertilized with trash, plastic bottles and candy wrappers littered among corn stalks. Its something thats really shocked all of us and I can't even begin to explain the extent of it. I'll have to post a picture to truly get the point across. Its frustrating because sometimes you're surrounded by so much poverty and degradation that you don't even see the suffering anymore but instead just see it as normal. There's so much that needs to be improved almost everywhere just so that people can live at a basic level of proper health and the environment and economy are suffering because of it. I'm beginning to see more and more how much they all rely on each other.

I have to go pack for site visit but I promise I'll post pictures of my site when I return.
I have a cellphone now. if you want the number email me!