finally here!

after a million hours of traveling (or so it seemed), we have finally arrived at our training site. we got here late last night, found our respective huts and pretty much immediately went to bed. surprisingly, our training site (which is about an hour's drive from Bamako, the capital) has electricity, showers! and fast internet! also, my phone, which i turned on for fun not expecting anything to happen, gets almost full reception here. i'm probably not going to use it though. for all the luxuries we have, though, we still have to use the squatty potties. i think i'm getting pretty good already!

we start language classes tomorrow- "survival Bambara" is first up. exciting! i haven't gotten to practice my French too much but i'm pretty confident about it. there are 80 people in my training group and we run the gamut of French knowledge, from absolutely none to close to fluent. most people in Mali speak Bambara in addition to French, but the language I will learn will ultimately depend on where my final site is, because a bunch of other languages are spoken here too.

for the next few days we'll be going to classes on safety, health, cross cultural adaption and language and then on wednesday we leave for our home stays (i don't know where mine is yet). i have a feeling we won't have high speed internet at our home stays, but we'll travel back to the training site every week or so for more classes as a group.

more updates and hopefully PICTURES! in a few days!!