Kayira be

(This is Mohammed, our language teacher Nya Isatou's baby)

So far we have been introduced slowly to Gambian society. VSO have been babysitting us by providing all our food, taxiing us around etc. We are staying at the Safari Garden hotel which is a little haven complete with swimming pool. I think they are lulling us in a false sense of security before they turf us out to fend for ourselves. We had a rest day on Sunday and made it to the beach and went swimming in the Atlantic. The waves were quite powerful and it was good fun and great for escaping the heat.

We began our Mandinka language training this week which has been really good fun. Our trainer is called Nya satou (pronounced nice a too). She is lovely and we have had quite a laugh. My group is Phil and Kate. Phil is the high flier in the group and we all laugh at Kate who tries desperately hard but finds it all exasperating. The staff at the hotel have also found it exasperating, I think, putting up with our attempts to practise on them, but they are very patient and try to help us learn. Greeting is a big thing in Gambian society and people find it very rude if you don't take the time to greet them and ask about their family. So we have been practising our greeting dialogues.

The other volunteers are great and we have had a lot of fun. The make up of the group is Phil, a youth for development volunteer from Leeds, Kate who's my next door neighbour in Soma, from Brighton but orginally up North, Rachel from Victoria in Aus, Phil and Liz, a married couple from Cardiff, although they're really English and Kanti, who's Canadian but originally from India. Kanti is also going to be our neighbour in Soma(which is great because she's a legend but she's also going to cook her speciality Indian dishes for us and has brought her entire spice rack with her.)

The evenings we spend playing various games in the hotel by candlelight. The name game, the alphabet game. Kanti usually keeps us amused with her superior joke telling ability. She usually begins to giggle as soon as she starts telling the joke, most of them about Morons. We were all a bit baffled when she started talking about maroons but we soon caught on. I think you had to be there really!

Today we met our employers for the first time and learnt a bit about what we might expect at our placement and what might be expected of us. Our employer is Mr Bah who is head of training in our regional office. We had to make a 3 week plan for the beginning of our placement and draw a map to our compound which went something like cross over the river and turn left at the mango tree and you're there! We are only half a kilometre from our office. But we have 84 schools in our cluster. Our furthest school is 80 kilometres so we have to do those schools by motorbike. Apparently there are 2 peace corps volunteers also in the area. They come from America as do all the peace corps volunteers and they are graduates working in health. So I daresay we will see a bit of them. The peace corps works slightly differently from VSO. They have 9 weeks language training and then they stay with a host family in a village and are fully immersed in village life. They spend 27 months out here.

Anyway tomorrow is our trip to Banjul where they leave us there and we have to get a gelle back, which should be fun. Friday we are kicked out of the hotel to fend for ourselves. We are all living in the VSO community house in Kanifing so watch this space.

Anyone who wants to write me a letter the vso address is VSO The Gambia, PO box 677, Fajara, The Gambia. I have a pigeon hole there so any mail just goes in there until I get a PO box up country. Lots of love xxxx