life's great!

i am really fortunate. i have a really awesome host family. my host dad is a professor at the high school, so in terms of familes my family is really progressive.
i am studying french, all of the other trainees are divided into the 5 languages spoken here, you are placed based on the city that you will be living in for the next two years. I was placed in a departmental capital in the south called boghe, i am learning french and pulaar because it has a huge population of french speakers. tommorow i will visit my site for the first time, and stay there for about a week.
the people of mauritania are really nice, and yes on numerous occasions i am mistaken for a mauritanian. There have been many times when people have either had a hard time believing i was american or didn't believe i was american.
the other pct's are so really awesome, there are about 71 trainees.
i am a trainee until the first week of september then i become a volunteer andmove to my permanent site. I will have 5 site mates, inshallah.
training is basically organized where you have a training village, after one week at the training village all of the trainees moved to our host family villages called cbt sites. at my cbt site there are 6 other trainees. i have french class with 2 of them monday-friday. from time to time we come into the training village for tech sessions{ for me thats health sessions}. but most of the time is spent in our cbt sites with our families, basically intergrating and practicing our language. my cbt site is awesome there isn't any electricity but there is a cell phone charging store that is powered by generators. its amazing how much i appreciate little things here for example, the peace corps gave us some old copies of newsweek and it was the only contact we had to american media for 2 weeks, we sat around reading them for a couple of hours and it was the hightlight of our day. {so instead of throwing away magazines, just send them to me} i can't tell you how many times i have read my marie claire.
and i can't tell you what a luxury it is to drink cold water.
when i eat vegetables its the greatest thing ever.
at christmas we are able to visit the capital, and i am so looking forward to eating pizza. b.c mauritania doesn't have cheese.
the other night the peace corps made us american spagetti and i seriously thought i was going to die, it was so good. i am not saying that the food here isn't good, its just it lacks variety.

for most of you, you know what i had to go through to get here, so even though its a challenge,i wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
just know that receiving any thing in the mail would be the greatest thing ever.
its not very expensive, when the post office asks you whats in the package just say religious material or educational materials.

tiff