Hello beautiful people! I've missed you! My deepest apologies for the long stint of writer's block, but I've been cured and blessed with relatively fast reliable internet for the past few days, so I figured I should take the opportunity to update you on the last five months. Whew! Where to begin?
First off, hope the holidays have been treating you all well. My 24th year of life began early August and so far its been a wonderful year. My friends all showed up to celebrate at the Kolda regional house and we all dressed up as pirates. What's a peace corps party without a completely random theme?
The end of August a few of my fellow health stage members gathered back at the Thies Training Center to teach the newest health volunteer group about our work in malaria prevention. It was truly amazing to sit back and listen to the incredible projects my colleagues have done within their communities. Such a motivating, inspirational team.
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| Volunteer Ian Hennessee presents to the newest volunteers about his malaria work. |
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| Newbiest listen attentively |
After the malaria training was over, I headed to Dakar to join five more volunteer friends for the annual Access English Camp. We had five days with 90 wonderful middle school students, and the design of the program's curriculum was completely up to us! The first day we spent getting to know each other, playing ice breaker games and simply having fun.
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| Volunteer Sarah Keuch talks to her students about the lessons of the week |
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| Volunteer Will Lebourgne rallies the students for a good ole round of duck duck goose |
The rest of the week we focused on health and environmental subjects like nutrition and malaria with fun activities on the side like a field day and a science fair.
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| volunteers holding mosquito nets for our educational "sharks and minos" game, mosquitoes instead of sharks, nets being "saftey zone" |
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| kiddies finding refuge under the safe zone net, trying not to get tagged |
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| teams competing against each other to find the best definition for malaria "treatment" |
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| Volunteer Andy pochedly showing students how to plant moringa in a tree sack |
My favorite part was "America" day where we were able to share our culture with them by playing Jeopardy, cooking popcorn, and letting them listen to all kinds of famous artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Paul Simon. These kids were so driven and intelligent and spoke English incredibly. A few of them even call me from time to time in order to practice their English or to simply say that they miss their english camp teachers. That week was honestly one of the highlights of my service.
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| Student cheering each other on |
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| Access camp volunteer teachers! |
The second week of September was full of even more highlights. I finally got to see my family again after one whole year!! The best part? We met in Barcelona!!
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| moeller fam loving life on a top of a castle in barcelona |
After Spain, we flew to Paris and then to Rome before returning to Barcelona. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing it was. We ate all the pasta, pizza, baguettes and cheese we could muster. And don't doubt there wasn't an extravagent amount of pastries and expressos in between.
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| love from a cafe across from notre dame |
We slept in luxury, saw almost everything there was to see, and loved every minute of being together again in such beautiful cities. It was only mildly painful to experience the high-life again, but I soaked up the comfort and enjoyment as long as I could for those two weeks before returning back to Senegal.
