togo!

Made it!

As it turns out one of the hotels that we're in has a decent internet connection (even though it's not the one I'm staying at). The weather is hot and the humidity high, but it is nothing unbearable at all. As I'm writing I sit in the resataurant portion of the hotel, under an ubrella with three other trainees, keeping an eye out for a very quick lizard which is darting around the table. My connection is vey slow but I have about ten minutes to write a quick note before we have lunch.

It's tough to know what to talk about! A million different things have hit home about all things different here. Thus far it's nothing but good impressions, despite a variety of initial discomforts. I've been loading my journal with numerous things as I take in and adjust to all of the things about where I am.

If the reality of what I'm doing hadn't sunk in before, things are really starting to hit home now: when I stepped off the plance at 6:30 (it was already dark, no daylight savings time) and was blasted immediately by the sticky humidity, as locals loaded our baggage into a canvass covered truck, as I rode in the bucket seat of the back of an SUV and looked at all what was happening around me (motorcycles, venders, plenty of commotion and nothing that I'd ever come close to seeing before), when I heard the African French and local languages swarming around me and then as I let it all sink in, trying to fall asleep on my little mattress inside of a mosquito net.

I have a good feeling about things here. It's going to be wild! There's plenty more to tell, but I can't tell it all now!

A bientot!