IST

Actually, before talking about IST: I recently snail-mailed an SD card with a bunch of photos and videos home to my parents. Note that these photos are mostly from the beginning of training, in Morogoro, but a few are from my house in my village. And if you remember that an alien freak showed up in my bathroom one night, there’s photos of that in there.

Anyway, word on the street is that these are now available online at www.paffl.net/chris.html . Word on the street is also that the page is sort of tossed together ATM but will be made prettier/nicer in the near-ish future.

Well, I’m at IST. It’s pretty good. Lots of things I could potentially say, but alas, time is finite and I am not all-powerful, so let’s see…

Journey from Karatu to Morogoro was pretty uneventful. Although for a while it was raining really hard around Karatu and the roads were unuseable, so I thought maybe I’d have to delay my trip and be late. And then when the rain let up and drivers were actually willing to drive, it was pretty exciting. One of my sitemates described it as “a Disneyland ride”.

I’m pretty sure lots of mud is worse to drive in than lots of snow. With mud, there’s random holes in/near the road that you have to avoid, and sometimes the mud will just randomly decide to turn your car sideways and let you slide without being able to steer, and hopefully not run into a hole/ditch/etc and hopefully not tip over.

IST is basically really great so far. The sessions are informative/relevant/exciting, and it’s great to catch up with everyone. And last night we had the first annual Peace Corps IST Prom at a nearby fancy restaurant, which was fun.

I’m hoping to post some sort of overview of what we’ve been learning about sometime soon, but it looks like it will probably not be today.