Posts

House Tour / Why I'm Here

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Oh my, oh my what a July If you don't feel like reading about my month, this classic sums it up well enough: Boy did I come out of the gates slow: on July 1st, I tested positive for COVID-19 and squirreled myself away in my apartment (which you will get to see soon!) and isolated for a week. After a brief respite, where I got to meet some awesome Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs), I was ravaged the next week by some bacterial throat infection that resulted in another week of isolating. So the first two weeks of the month were a bit of a nothingburger, I relaxed my ban on content binging and leaned into being sick, watching a Ghibli movie per day and drinking tons of tea. I was better by the middle of the month and really flipped the month's vibe on its head; I  managed to get through drafting some of my essays for the Fulbright Fellowship I'm applying for at the London School of Economics next year (wish me luck),  met a whole other gaggle of amazing PCVs on the fourth weekend ...
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A Month in The Gambia

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I've drafted a few posts for this blog, but none have felt right  so I've kept them in the catacombs of Blogger for now; one day those posts may see the light of day, but today I just want to share a bit about my day-to-day in The Gambia over the past month, instead of my other grand musings. For some background, I am spending a year (May 2023 through May 2024) working as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in The Gambia. My site is "in Kombo," which is what rural Gambians call the capital region: I live with a Fula host family in a village called Abuko and commute to an area called Bakau. I work a desk job with the Department of Agriculture, in their office of Monitoring and Evaluation; while we will start going on treks to the provinces in the next couple of months, the first month has focused on developing data collection and reporting tools from the office as I settle into life in The Gambia. A Little About The Gambia The Gambia is the smallest country by land mass i...
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Start the Countdown at 5

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 I remember when moving to The Gambia was going to happen "next year", "a few months from now", and "in May," but since I got back from Mexico City on May 6th, "next week" has been the prevailing term. It's not that I feel any sort of dread about the experience, though I am a little scared, it's more like a mixed drink where the two elements aren't well combined - but instead of spirits, it tends to be strong emotions that hit me when I don't expect them. The principal two ingredients in the cocktail are anxiety and excitement, with a flourish of insecurity and a splash of reckless abandon.  The Peace Corps (PC) pre-service process has been frustrating at times, due to things like the 17 required immunizations making my stomach turn for all of November and December, the unexpected 5 month delay when I was 2 weeks from shipping out in January, or trying to get any information about what to expect from PC workers. I've come to u...
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