permanent site announcements!

I find myself craving the oddest things in Nepal. I may or may not have eaten an entire jar of peanut butter over the past 2 weeks using only my fingers to scoop it out. But at home, I never crave peanut butter. Hell I dont even eat beef at home but here I find myself wanting buffalo to eat with daal bhaat just so I can actually chew on some food instead of swallowing mouthfuls of rice that require no active jaw movements. The other day I actually got angry because I really wanted a pancake and yet I had no access to one. I dont even like pancakes that much! But sitting up on my roof after showering all I could thing about was a whopping plate of pancakes from Perkins with apricot jam (do I even have a Perkins at home? No). Nepal does weird things to you.

Things have been getting busier as we approach the end of our PST. This week we've had 3 group training days in town, presenting our "Each 1 Teach 1" projects. They were 1.5 hour long presentations done by each village on a different subject. Chhap presented on Family Poultry Farming and how to create a sustainable poultry farm for your village. Other subjects we learned about were breastfeeding, maternal/child health, creating a budget, and how to create a homestead family farm.

This Saturday we leave on our 3 day long "individual experience trips." We're paired up in boy-girl pairs, and I'm going with my friend Alejandro to a town called Melamchii. None of us have any idea what we'll find in our villages, but im excited to explore! Peace Corps is giving us daily stipends and we're responsible for figuring out our transporation and food and all of that.

We had a regular old party in my house tonight! Its rice cutting season, so my sister and brother are gone all day in the fields cutting rice with half of Chhap. I think it is custom that when your family's rice gets delivered by a big truck its customary to feed everyone who helped out that day. So we had 20 people over for dinner last night (you can imagine how much rice was cooked). My parents slaughtered a chicken and I was a little skeptical because all of was cooked and floating around in this stew with random parts but then my family pulled out some breast meat they had set aside for me! They had cooked it earlier because they knew I'm not a huge fan of random chicken parts. Its little things like these that makes me realize how much my family actually cares and want to make me happy.

I FOUND OUT WHERE I'LL BE LIVING FOR 2 YEARS! we had our site announcements today...all of us were SO nervous. I'll be placed in Tulsibhanjyang, Syangja district for the next 24 months!! Somehow I ended up being volunteer who is farthest away from everybody...PC staff put up a map of the 3 districts we are placed in with little pictures of our faces over our sites, and my head is wayyyyy at the bottom of the map. I'm about a 2 hour bus ride away from the nearest volunteer, Kerry. My job roles include seed production, beekeeping, and vegetable cultivation! We all got packets describing our job titles and who our counterparts/supervisors are. I can't go into too much detaills about my family for safety reasons, but they all look great and the pictures of my house look pretty nice!! I think i'll have electricity again and maybe running water. I'm actually really overwhelmed right now...its frankly a bit scary to be the volunteer who is the most isolated, but its also weird to know where i'l be living for 2 years...I feel as if lately that PST would never end!

Will update next week with pictures from my individual experience trip!

-Alex