scorpions and marriage proposals

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hey everyone,
it's being awhile since i last posted and alot of stuff has happened. after christmas i went back to my site for a month which is the longest i've being at my site without going into my regional capital. my freind from madden, which is two hours away from my site. he was on his way back to madden from atar and the taxi stopped at my town and he had to switch cars to go back to madden. he ended up staying at my place for a day or two and everyone in my village assumed we were married. when they found out that we were not married they all said that we should get married.
dealing with marriage proposals is one of the annoying things about being in mauritania. most men that i meet, anywhere, one of the first questions that you are asked, at least for the women, is wether or not you are married and then if you are not married why not, and if you will marry them. after awhile it gets slightly annoying i must say. expecially when you have men wanting you as a second or third wife, which some men in my village have wanted me to become.
Moving on to a new topic is the one of scorpions. I havn't seen many around my site but a few weeks ago i came home from dinner with a friend, and i found one in my house. very scary since it was night and i just had my one flashlight and those things moves fast. I mangaed to kill it but all the same I am now paranoid about finding them in my room again.
Work has being difficult I must say. It has being difficult. The students don't really care about much about learning english and it is very difficult to teach and try to get them motivated when they just don't care. I'm actually starting to care about these students in my classes and it is very discouraging when they don't want to learn and they don't care. I find that my motivation is lacking because i feel like their is only so much teachers can to motivate students but they also have to contribute as well. That is making it hard to go back to site and to teach when the students arn't interested.
Enought of work. This past weekend I went with all of the Volunteers down to Senegal for WAIST which is the West African Invitational Softball Tournement. This is where teams from all over west africa get together in Dakar for three days and have a softball tournement. I went as a spectator since i can't play softball so it was nice to be able to hang out with all the other volunteers that i don't get to see often and talk with them. it was a really fun three days and our team, the Mauritania Pirates won the tournement which was fun. The only downside was when i was leaving to go back to mauritania, i was in rosso senegal and my purse was stolen with all of my money, passport, visa and peace corps ID. Very frustrating and upseting. well this will about all for now. i will try to update again when i come back into town again. till next time.

jolene

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