Tim and Jolene

Here are some pics off my camera from the first few months.  Hopefully I'll pull some off of Jolene's also in the next few days (weeks?) Anyways, for now hope you enjoy these:

Hi All!

This is going to be quite short, cuz I haven’t a lot of time before I head back to our new home outside of Maradi ville, but I wanted to just say hello to everyone and let everyone know that things are great out here. Tim and I have both started work, which mainly consists of learning Hausa and working on our French. In the morning we leave around 8:45 and Tim heads to the education inspection and I head to the mairie (mayor’s office). For the first three months we are mainly suppose to assimilate into the culture-which includes making friends, meeting counterparts, and learning a new lifestyle for our daily routines. The town itself is great. The people are friendly and so willing to help us learn Hausa. There is good food sold on the street, but we have to be careful because we have both got amebas from soemthing we ate. We celebrated Sala in our town a little over a week ago which was amazing! Sala is the end of Rhamadam where people are finally able to eat again during the day after a whole month of eating only when the sun was down, oh yeah that includes drinking. Barak da Kokari for sure. Anywho… there was a lot of dancing and horse races and fun stuff like that and it lasted about 4 or 5 days. It was supposedly the biggest celebration in Niger (the one in our town) because the Chef du Province guy lives in our town and he is like a king, that dates back to five thousand years ago, and reigns over this huge region that goes all the way down into Nigeria. Crazy huh! it really is quite incredible… just another reason why Tibiri is so great. Our house is coming along well too… we painted the walls yellow inside and I bought some curtains and it looks pretty cute inside- It’s bright and happy. Tim has read like 5 books in the past three weeks and I have read a couple and done about 50 crossword puzzles. Life is good, slow paced and rich. Well it’s time to catch a bush taxi back home.

Lots of lOve

Jolene