Puppies and Sunshine

It appears that it is not as difficult to get kicked out of the Peace Corps as I'd hoped! Just in the last few days I've come across multiple people who were kicked out for 1. not trying to integrate culturally 2. buying school supplies for girls who weren't in their host families and 3. blogging (more specifically, what's on the blog)

I'm not worried about 1. or 2. because I intend to really try to integrate and don't imagine that I will be completely unsuccessful. And I won't buy things for people if I'm told by the PC that I can't because I really don't want to ruffle any feathers before I even get sworn in as a Volunteer, although I can completely see where someone would want to give gifts to people in their communities. But the PC has to try and keep it "fair." Whatever that means, given that there are 1.1 billion people living on under $1/day and many of them are in Africa and specifically Guinea.

But 3 might be tricky, since I can't imagine I'm going to want to write the same damn thing over and over in my letters. It would be much easier just to send one letter home and have my lovely mother update the blog. That way I can make my letters more personal, since I won't have to describe what I'm doing again.

I know that living conditions in Guinea are tough and being in the Peace Corps is tough and teaching English to high schoolers will definitely be tough. I don't like the idea of keeping those problems out of the blog, but I'd rather keep the bad out of the blog and not get sent home! That would not be hot at all.

Anyway, I'm going to do some more research about this. I want to be as culturally sensitive as possible without sacrificing my accounts of some of the problems that I will inevitably encounter. We'll have to see - I have been told that Guinea is so remote and has so little internet access that this probably won't be an issue...it appears to be more of an issue in countries where the nationals have regular internet access and where there have been problems in the past.

I definitely want to keep up the blog while I'm gone, so that my family and friends, as well as potential Peace Corps volunteers, can see what I'm doing. But I will be very cautious about what I'm writing, because I will be working for the US government at the invitation of the Guinean government and I would never want to write anything that jeopardized my relationship with Peace Corps or my soon-to-be Guinean friends!

So if the blog ends up being all Puppies and Sunshine, don't despair. I promise that I won't change that much! But if you want to hear the gossip on Peace Corps parties, internal PC politics, or about whether Guinea really is a dating desert, you may have to wait for snail mail.