new entry, finally

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hello everyone,

I havn't written in a while. Don't know why since I've being in atar a few times. Just lazy I suppose. Well school is done with for the summer. I gave my final test to the students and unfortunately their were not that many that did good. We had a teachers meeting,which I missed, because I was in atar and found afterword that a great majority of my students either will have to repeat the class or are kicked out since that means that they've repeated the class twice already. Dissapointing to hear that so many of them did bad but it's not just in English that they do bad, it seems to be all of their classes as well. Many of my students are not from Aoujeft so they have now gone home for the summer, so I have to say it has being pretty boring at site. I suppose I should have thought of some projects to do for the summer but with the students being gone I don't know what I could have done. Plus we are in the hot season now, where it is 104 on up during the day, all day from about 7:00, it is already 90 degrees, it is just to hot to want to do much. I just lay in my house trying, unsuccessfully to keep cool.
But on to some good news. I will be coming home for a month in the summer. I will be coming home the middle of july and staying through the middle of august. That is if I get my passport in time. I applied for new one since mine was stolen in Senegal and it hasn't come in yet. I'm hoping that it will be in before I leave or I will have a mushkile kiibir.( hassaniye for big problem). I'm really looking forward to coming home and seeing everyone. I feel like I need a break from this Mauritania already. This country is a tough place to live. Hot and dry and sandy and windy, at least in the north. It's tiring to hang around with people when you can't really speak their language fluently to join in in the conversation and it's tiring to always have to speak in another language or deal with the unwanted marriage proposals and attention that you get from the men here. While everyone in my village and in other places I've being here have being very friendly toward me, it's still hard at times being the foreigner. And I'm missing my family and friends and American food again and the ocean.
June 29th will be my one year anniversary of being in country. Hard to imagine that I've being here a year. At times I look back and say where did that year go and what did I do? Other times the days and weeks seem to drag on so slowly. As much as I complain about my site and life here at times, I find it pretty neat that I've being able to make it here a year. Yes my site is hard at times to live and I often complain a lot about it, but there is also a certain amount of pride that I take in knowing that I live their and can manage to live their with all of the san and blowing wind and heat. Well everywhere it is hot, not just my site. During the day temp. are over 100. yesterday it looked like about 112 or so. Nighttime it gets to be about 90 sometimes in the morning around six or seven it is in the high 80's but then creeps back up again. I sleep outside but unless there is a breeze it is very hard to sleep. I wouldn't mind for some cool days or rain. That is the one good thing I liked about the southern part of the country where I did my training, we had brilliant thunderstorms, but awful humidity. But rain was very nice. Up here in the north, no humidity, just oppressive heat. Nice thing about being in atar is our office here has a fan and the Girls mentoring center has a air conditioner for the computers so we hang out their a lot.
Anyhow that is about it for this post, hope everyone take care.

jolene

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