THANK YOU!

My Peace Corps Partnership Project has been fully funded! Wooooohooooo! Thanks to all who contributed, all who tried to contribute, and all who thought of and prayed for me and the project. I know the women are all super excited to learn accounting/business skills, and they are all appreciative of "mes amis et ma famille aux Etats Unis" for paying for this. Most of these girls weren't able to go to school, so this is a big deal for them.

I know there was a lot of you who wanted to donate but didn't get to because the project amount was small (a lot of people commented on how my project is $250 when most others on the site are in the thousands...I guess it just depends on the type of project) and it quickly got paid for. Never fear: I'm sure I'll be hitting you all up for another project in the future!! ;-)

I'm at Tubaniso right now. We just finished a two-day training about (what else?) financial management. It's a bit different than the accounting training for my tailoring association, but a lot of the material was very similar. There were only three of us volunteers that could make it, but there were around 10 Malians who came as well. It was put on by a woman named Betty. Betty was actually a RPCV (returned volunteer) who served in Segou ten years ago as an artisan volunteer. It was great to meet her and talk about what has changed (for better or for worse) in our site. Mali was her THIRD country she served in! She also was in Cameroon and Barundi. She now lives in Kentucky but travels around Africa doing these financial mngmt trainings -- mostly in Zambia and southern Africa. She is an amazing woman (she's elderly, but extremely vivacious) and was very inspiring.

(The group who attended/led the training. Betty is standing above me and her daughter Cathy is standing on the left)

Other than that, I've been keeping busy planning my Ghana trip and studying for the GMAT. I should actually get back to that, so I'll leave you with a random photo I took while driving down w/Peace Corps from Segou to Bamako the other day:

(Typical way to travel in Mali...those are all goats and what not on that roof. I wish you could've seen (and heard) it in real life -- it was quite something)