Wanna feel small?

smaller...

infinitesimal?

It's true that I have too much free time at the moment...

Bend is good times

Bend was buzzing... or maybe it was just me. It was like everyone graduated and is back and not ashamed to live on their parent's couch and go out every night. The entire MV graduating class of '01 is chillin in Bend! Unexpected, but I love it. If I tried to relay my many elating experiences of the week, it would just be lame so INSTEAD... a top ten list! See Davey m'friend I told you they'd come in handy!

Top Ten Best Things About My Week In My Old Stomping Grounds of Bend, Or:
1. Oregon hikes (manzanita, spruce, pine, and river) smell like a vat of honey with an entire spicerack dumped in, heated and stirred.
2. Jason's delicious delicacies; also his wit, charm and good choice of girlfriend.
3. There is still no super-wal-mart; I love the way Bend has grown.
4. I score a pair of autographed old man shorts and find a crazy boy to yearn for from abroad.
5. Hillary, Al and I... that's it really.
6. Hill and Al trying to surf the Deschutes.
7. Seeing every constellation possible, at once, from a trampoline. The dots connect themselves, I swear. (;
8. Gettin inked up- as Al tells the guy we're virgins.
9. I randomly get to see Kevin and Brian again! Brian's ski-theme bathroom and hot tub are better than I remember.
10. Allison and Hil are my soul mates fo-eva!

This is poem-ish... spoken word folk music I think! I wrote this in Guatemala, it's kinda awful, kinda halrious...just wanted to tell about this awesome drunk guy in my bar one night and his good advice...

He looked at me with bleary eyes and said he had just one piece of advice...
You've got to EAT the world, Stephanie
and I said I try and he said no...
You've got to EAT the world,
and I said alright...
He leaned forward and I could smell the gin, but I could tell he was serious and he said it again
You've got to eat the world!
Where I had been wary before, I now saw something more...
he was a soul-searcher, a traveler, his accents a mess,
he worshipped his moments, treated life like a quest
I quit smiling at him and looked in his eyes, then I smiled with him and then ate his advice
Take it and cook it however you like
Change is a must cuz we all love the spice
Some things gotta sit, til their time is ripe
Then we tear into life with big juicy bites

Since the Gambia is tiny, the tiniest country in Africa, and people always ask me where it is... so there it is!
In the left picture, there is an orange arrow pointing to the Gambia. In the middle picture, the beige worm-shaped area is the Gambia- it's just the 15 km above and the 15 km below the gambian river. In the right picture, the gambia has an orange square around it. It's entirely enveloped by Senegal, cept for the little part that's coastline. Where I will have my vacation house, my second mud hut. Right on.

Sweet! Got my staging kit!

I finally did get my staging kit... they said it would come 30 days before we were supposed to leave for ze gambia, and I think they made me wait 31. Not very nice to do to over-excited girls like me... But it didn't really say much, except that, yes, we are going to the Gambia and I will get to be a PC volunteer, and yes I'll being doing something involving the ever-elusive "environment"...ah the vagueness! The staging event is like a conference, in Philly, just giving us the run-down of PC rules and what-not. I'll be meeting the whole crew of gambian PCVs, and, I have to get shots, God help me, probably lots of them.

So I'm packing... trying not to defeat the purpose of living simply by buying too much stuff..
Things I Have Bought:
-Camera- a Vupoint, can play movies, record voice and video and play music. Lo me gusta mucho.
-Hydration Pack- which I already love like my firstborn
-KEENS- you know, the shoes- which yes, are an ugly overpriced outdoorsy-people fad, but are really doing the trick and i'm starting to love them too
-Bug spray- DEET-free, expensive stuff developed in Florida so I believe them
-some clothes, books, art stuff

I know I'll be speaking one of 5 tribal languages, which I'm gonna have to be fairly fluent in after 10 weeks in the Gambia so that I can be sworn in. During that training time, we'll living in a rural area with a host family, near-ish I guess to where we will eventually be placed. From the blogs I've read it seems like "they" decide where you're gonna go and therefore what language you'll be speaking within like 2 days of getting there. It's cool, who doesn't like surprises? Like, Hey! Here's your life for the next two years!! Why does our government expect us to just trust them so often?

They gave me a CD, that has online materials on like how to keep bees, how to dig a well, how to build a building, how to grow rice, ect. Ya know, stuff you always wanted to know. Funny, but I can't wait to learn.

So yay-ah, if anyone has any advice or good stuff like that, totally tell me. I'm SO excited yall!

Volcan Agua from my front porch.

From Guatemalan Time to 75 MPH

So I had to do it, I had to return... from soothing, soul-smoothing Antigua, Guatemala, which has it's own time zone we affectionately call "Guatemalan Time." Guatemalan Time does not include anything more specific than half-hours... any increment of time smaller than a half-hour is not worth nothing. Like you would never worry about someone being 10, 20, 29 minutes late... that's ridiculous, chill out man. When meeting up with someone to go out, the most common way is to just walk around and find them... try their work, el parque central and then the bars, one by one. If you start early, you will definitely find them before the night is over. If you showed up at Riki's and someone told you they had just headed to the Mono Loco for ladies's night but were actually next door salsa dancing at Sin Ventura's, don't be sad, cuz you can always catch them at Cafecito at the after-party because on Guatemalan Time, 2:00 A.M. is early and everyone goes to the after party. Even on Tuesday nights.

Anywho, I didn't wanna leave. No quiero regresar.
Leave the land of bright colored stucco, trees that want nothing more than to give you mangos or limes or avacados, the land of 70 degrees all the time? Leave the land of happy-lazy, es todo bien for the land of hurry up cuz remember, you have to do something with your life! I couldn't remember why I would want to do such a thing.
It's not that my stay in Guatemala was particularly exciting or productive. I didn't travel Guatemala or Central America extensively, I didn't contribute a ton to improving anything- although I was a faithful volunteer at a school and clinic for two months. The thing that made my stay so great, and made me not want to leave, was the lack of activity... Antigua is soooo chilllll! Almost to the point of being a bit slothenly. Sloth? I'm not sure if that can be an adverb, but I know it's one of the seven deadly sins. From the first morning I was shuttled in from the airport, I could feel it... the satisfaction with not a whole lot going on, no rush, no tengo prisa... tranquilo. You can cut the peaceful apathy with a knife- and like a tractor beam, it sucks ya right in.

I miss Antigua for sure, the colorful little crumbling city, everyone just bobbing along under the direction of Mama Volcan Agua. She sits all gorgeous and comfy and cloud-ringed above the town, conducting the goings-on below. She keeps it goin I think, she's the reason for the satisfied rhythm and rhyme of Guatemalan Time. She was my front yard and my walk-to-the-project view, so I know her pretty well. Moody, but totally cool. (:

So it's a good thing that I took off on a little road trip as soon as I got back, to remind me of my own country's goodness. The US can seem so sterile, colorless, manipulated and worked over... like an uptight overachiever? Why aren't all the houses pretty colors and why don't all the buildings have courtyards? Why would you NOT want that?
But, there's little better than renewing your faith in the beauty of your country from inside a little wheeled box, pumpin the good jams, being with some of your favorite people. I parted with my dear friend in Arizona, leaving him to explore the cool clash of tropical vs. desert in the southwest, solo. A little sad after being so physically close for so long, and battling a few of life's pink robots together, but the good-bye was due. I breifly viewed then flew the coop of stupid sinking barely vivando Las Vegas, then joined up with my mom and brother in the climbing canyons of Utah...I think Utah is one of the country's best-kept secrets... Mormon yes, but pleasantly so. I like Mormans, and I like Polygamy Porter. While sipping beer and eating a buffalo burger, one can almost ignore the looming temple in the middle of town (not that's it not pretty, or at least interesting...) And there's never an end to how many jokes you can make about having/not having/sneaking in without the special Moman underwear. My brother took us on a seriously amazing day hike, complete with moose, a billion wildflowers, amazing alpine lakes and craggy cliffs... so gorgeous.
From there, my mom and I drove across the corn-n-soy-corn-n-soy of Nebraska and Iowa, and the story gets much more boring... a million farms irrigated from the speedily shrinking Ogallala Aquifer, really cool other-worldly wind farms, law-breaking at Illinois toll-booths... and then a quick visit to my uncle in Chicago who teaches English at a highschool. We stayed in his art deco-style apartment, walls lined with books and movies and took in a little tour of Chicago. Really cool city, more middle-America-ish than I expected, borderline wholesome. But there's the sweetest silver bean in Milleum Park... there's not a chance I can explain that, so I say just go see it.

Alright, so I really really like America! Seriously, I have so much of it to explore still. Welp, time to go to Africa! hahaha

The Gambia... like The Game, likes to make "the" part of its proper nounness.

Ever since I was invited to The Gambia for the Peace Corps I have been seeking out and taking in as many PCV Africa blogs as possible... Since they all started their blogs in the conceptions stages of their PCV application process, I´m thinking it´s high time for my own. Although, I'm impressed that anyone could find their application process woes interesting enough to read... a stretch even for their mom, no? (thanks mom!)

I'm leaving Sept. 20, and won't know much more till I get my a big envelope in the mail, with staging event info... till then!

So i´m a blogger, which sounds like a British slang word for something nasty, does it not? Bienvenidos.