Guest Blog - Presenting Dan!!

(Ed. note - Dan is a cool, newly minted SED PCV who grudgingly agreed to write a guest blog for all nine of you reading this blog. He is a reformed hipster most recently hailing from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You've drooled over his pictures.... now check out his parôle.)

Just so everyone knows, this post is being written by fellow PCV extraordinaire, Daniel. That means, not Maggie. If it’s not as clever and insightful as the usual posts on this blog do not write angry emails to Maggie about this, write them to yourselves and ask yourself why you’re so angry about a blog anyways.

To start, I’d like to say for the first time, in writing and internet sphereologically, congratulations to all the former PCT’s who are now PCV’s in Burkina Faso as of Dec. 19. It’s very exciting. Especially since everyone in this staging group made it through the entire two months, which apparently never happens. How often it never happens is still unclear, but I’ve heard anywhere from 2 years to 9 years (in Burkina, not the world), just to give you an idea of the incredulousness of the event.

Right now we’re all sort of still in a limbo stage-like week. Which is confusing, and even as I write this I’m getting nervous about how to explain the whole situation, but I’ll do my best. Basically the Peace Corps thought it would be a cruel joke to dump all the newly trained volunteers to their isolation tanks/ sites, just days before Christmas, so as a way to avoid that, we have an extra week of training which would normally be voluntary and would normally take place long after we had sworn in as volunteers, right now. It’s kinda the worst experience I’ve ever been through, kinda not that bad. Its pretty much like some sort of bizarre corporate retreat on how to become better citizens of the world in general, like that’s even possible for us.

As part of this bizzaro corporate retreat we worked on a group project today, and my team (which included Maggie) stole an episode of ‘The Office’ and had people walk around with names of things/places/people on their foreheads without knowing what it was, the zinger being that someone out there was your forehead card’s object’s partner and you had to figure out not only what you were but also who your partner was. An example being, if my card read “Starsky” someone might say “you like tight bellbottoms and sliding over car hoods to get to criminals before they are lost in a sea of disco-lovers." If I was clever, I’d immediately know this was Starsky from "Starsky and Hutch" and I’d seek out the person that had “Hutch” written on their forehead card and voilà. It’s brilliant really. After that we did another sort of card on your body game, except this time we just had people write positive things about us on the card. It was surprisingly kinda cool, I’m planning on keeping my card for rainy days and reading it over and over to myself in a chant like trance until everything is great again.

(Ed note: "Mista, why you so grimey? I'm chappy!!")