Tudo Dretu!-July 20

Well I finally have a minute to tell you about what has been going on the last week. For the last 5 days we have been shadowing current volunteers all over Cape Verde. I shadowed a current volunteer on Fogo. She works in a Camara (governmental building- "city hall") but she also does stuff with kids and women. So I won´t bore you with the technical stuff but I did have an intersting time there. I learned a lot about the relationships between men and women. She pretty much gave us the dirt on how men treat women and how women just seem to take it. She says that if you are going to have a relationship with a guy you have to set up concrete guidelines for a relationships ( i.e. telling him that you believe in monogamy, that as a woman you want to be respected publicly and privately, etc.) I don´t think that all guys are like that but most of them believe in having a lot of pikenas (girlfriend) and having a lot of children not with their wife. One of the guys we met father has 27 kids, 9 with his wife and the others all over Cape Verde; and he is definitely not alone. I met another guy who had 33 siblings...crazy! I mean I hate to generalize but it seems that monogamy is not of great importance. However, it´s partly the fault of the women here, who accept that behavior, thus the low divorce rate. Some women even let the husband´s kids stay with them! But I still wanna make sure that everyone knows that I mean there are a lot of men and women like that not all of them.
We received our site preference sheet today. It is just the sheet that asks you where you want to live (urban, rural, etc.), who you dont want to live with, and which exact job for particular islands you want. Í am pretty sure I am gona end up on Santiago because I have boldly expressed that to my sector leader and I think I might be right in the city (Praia). So if anyone comes to visit I will be able to really show you around the hub of Cape Verde. someone will be staying in Mindelo, which is the center of Karnaval which will be cool bc we will have someone who really knows about the town. I am excited because I am pretty sure I am going to Karnaval this february so i will get to test the waters before anyone wants to come to karnaval in 2009. oh, and a current volunteer is actually starting a trip to Ghana in January and she said that anyone who wants to come can (it´s only about $600!!). So melissa, I might get to see your old stomping ground a lot sooner than I thought. It´s cool here because a lot of the other trainees here are really open to going places with other trainees, and people are already making plans to start a trip to Brazil and Portugal, and since a lot of people will be in fluent in Portugese that trip will be amazing! On a sad note, we already had one person ET (early terminate) which was sad because no one saw it coming and I spent most of my 4 days on Fogo with her. However, it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I am sure it will still be difficult everytime.