downtown as seen from the restaurant in the picture below

Our group at lunch during training.  The woman with the gray hair and glasses is my roommate, Kathy.  Very very nice lady and she did her two year PC assignment in Bulgaria 98-2000 so we speak in Bulgarian once in a while....very rarely to be sure ...but we get a chuckle. 

The restaurant could not accomodate our group so they set up a table at the house next door !!!

Close up of traffic

Loading up the vehicle at the PC office to take us to our sites for the first time.

View from our living quarters in Kakata, Margibi County, Liberia during the rainy season.  I am not sure how lush it will be during the dry season which starts in a month or os but we will see.

A road near our quarters.  We walk this way to get to the town where we have to do all our shopping except when we can get to Monrovia and that is 1 1/2 hours of adverturesome travel

Hello readers,

This is my first post from Kakata, Margibi county, Liberia in West Africa.  I got here about a week and a half ago and spent the first 4 days in a hostel type place in Monrovia, the capital city.  That is also where the PC office is located so we had the orientations at the PC office and a tour of Monrovia one afternoon.  I will post some photos below.

First of all, let me say that the people here are amazing.  Sooo friendly.  I would say a majority of the 2 year volunteers who get assigned here, extend for a third or 4the year.  Life here is, very hard and poverty is everywhere but just like Nicaragua, somehow the people have the resilience to find joy in their  day to day work.

I will spend the next 10 months as a teacher trainer at the Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute.  They get about 250 students each year who either are wanting credentials so they can begin teaching or are already teaching but don't have the credentials.  They stay in dormitories here and have classes all day for 10 months.  They have to pass a test at Christmas to stay for the second semester and they also have to pass another test to receive their credentials at the end of the program.  We will be using a curriculum developed by USAID and we will get our first look at it this weekend.

I am sharing a small house on the grounds of the Institute with another volunteer in my age group.  She is from NYC born and raised ( East 84th street) a real New Yorker and we are getting along just fine.  She taught kindergarten for 37 years in the city and has traveled a lot so she will be a great trainer here.

Our little place was not quite ready for us when we arrived so we have spent the last week supervising the comings and goings of various workmen.  Until today when we were hooked up to the city water system, we had water brought to us in big 5 gallon jugs perched upon the little head of some of the janitorial staff.  We still don't have a way to cook and no refrigeration but we're going for a gas stove next week.  Until then we have been very creative with cucumbers, rice, bread and peanut butter.  No, its not easy....but, its filling :)

We attended a full staff meeting yesterday and got a good idea of the other teachers and staff.  The director who is currently in her third year is Precious Dennis who is a native Liberian but was sent by her family when she was 18 to the US in the 80s when the war here broke out.  She has returned after 30 years to try to help restore the educational program here.  She seems to be a very strong leader and has a lot on her plate.  In the past two years she has started having written contracts, started a small farm with animals and crops, and done a ton of other stuff that seemed sort of basic but apparently had been neglected over the years.

I am going to end this now and try to attach a few of the pictures I have taken so far.  We only have electricity for 4 hours each evening and I'm using a 2G connection so it will take a long time to upload a few pictures...