Un défi inattendu - Mike in West Africa!?!

Just got off the phone a couple hours ago with a placement officer in the health skills field. I was originally nominated for a math secondary education position in non-french speaking Africa, but as the Peace Corps seems to often do, they threw me a bit of a curve ball.

She said that she would like to invite me into a WATER/SANITARY HEALTH EXTENSION position in FRENCH SPEAKING Africa! Leaving early July. Wow. That's pretty loaded.

Apparently my job description would be either dealing with local health officials in an urban area to design and install water and sanitary sewer facilities, or traveling to local rural areas teaching the local populations how to construct latrines and facilities to maintain clean water.

She also mentioned what I knew would be a significant challenge - I would have to learn not one, but TWO languages during training; those being French and a local ethnic language. Normally people have to have prior recent experience in French to be considered for deployment in this region. I took french early on in high school, some ten years ago!

I must say that I have mixed emotions right now. For the most part, I am absolutely thrilled that I have the opportunity to serve in the Peace Corps, and go to Africa, my region of choice! I am somewhat disappointed about the job change, however, as I was looking forward to working in the education sector and felt that I would be strong at it. But I also understand that I am more qualified for this job based upon my experience in civil engineering, and should probably trust their judgement.

The prospect of learning two languages is rather daunting, especially in the span of a few measly months. And since it is in francophone Africa, I will not be able to fall back to English in any circumstance. I understand that no matter where I went I would be learning a language to communicate with locals, but expected English to be a possible means of communications with city officials and the like. That being said, I am excited about the challenge and have faith in the language training within the Peace Corps that we've all heard so much about.

Based upon it being an early July departure date, it appears that it is one of two countries:

July 1 = Mali

July 7 = Niger

So for the moment, I am just waiting (but not for long, this time) for the placement officer to contact the local officials in the country to determine whether they will be willing to waive the language requirements for me. I'm expecting to find out for sure within a couple of days!