My new home

My new home to be is in the Fouta region and it is gorgeous! I am pretty much in the middle of nowhere in a small village that has taxi service to the big city of Labe twice a week. The roads are dirt and pot hole ridden. I likely will not be going the 2 to 5 hours to Labe much (60 km). I have a big once a week market 5 km away and there are a couple of other Americans only 15-20 km away.

Because taxis don't go to my village every day, I took a taxi to a neighboring Peace Corps Volunteer's site. I was packed into a small truck with 16 of us, 10 in the back. It took us 4 hours to go 60 km. The next day another Peace Corps Volunteer and I hiked 14 km to my village.

I will be living in a two room concrete house that has a shower room, an outdoor pit latrine, and outdoor pump water. It is quite luxurious about 600 square feet. The school is right across the road from my place.

There are gardens everywhere. Food is plentiful: rice, cassava, corn, avocados, oranges, eggplant, limes, bananas. We even have fresh baguettes daily.

I am excited about my village. There is a lot of hiking and biking to be done in the beautiful setting of rolling hills, dotted with round hut filled villages, pastures filled with free range goats and cows who are kept out of walled up gardens.

My village is an outdoor person's dream. Getting to my village from Conakry is the hard part. It is a 2 day trip in bad cars packed full of people. If you think you can endure it, there is a slice of paradise waiting for you in West Africa.