Intro

Well, after more than a year of paperwork and waiting Lydia and I are about to head out to The Gambia in West Africa to serve as Peace Corps Volunteers. We will be there for approximately 27 months and are excited to finally be on the verge of departure. Lydia will be working as a Teacher Trainer and I will be working as an Information Communications Technology Teacher. We won't know exactly what our jobs will be until sometime after we arrive in country. I'm sure there is plenty about the application process and all the work leading up to this point that I could fill you in on but that will have to wait for later.

Right now we are just doing our final preparations for departure. Packing, last minute shopping, visiting family and friends, and finalizing paperwork. We leave Fort Walton Monday morning and fly to Washington DC for a 3 day staging event with will include a few full days of training and a trip to the clinic to get shot full of vaccinations. On Wednesday evening we depart for The Gambia via Belgium and Senegal.

Check out the following links for some more info on The Gambia.

CIA Factbook

Wikipedia

Peace Corps

Lonely Planet


A word about the blog and its future. First off, the name. Nasdrovya is a Slovak word which basically translates to "health". Something you say at toasts like "salud" is Spanish. This comes courtesy of one of my Slovak friends. Thanks Martin! As far as the future of the blog goes, it's anybody's guess. I will have sporadic Internet access during the first three months of our training. We will be moving around the county quite a bit during that time but i will try to update these pages as much as I can. Once we get to our permanent home site we may or may not have access to the Internet readily available. If so I will certainly try to update everybody as much as possible with the latest news and pictures. If not then you better start writing letters. (Yes, the ones with the stamps and all). I would like to say that this is not intended to be a professional document. Therefore you will be required to suffer through, among other things, bad grammar, misspellings, poor humor, and general rambling. But, as those are things that are normally associated with me this should come as no surprise.

I won't post my email address on the blog because it will get picked up by spammers, but if you need it and don't have it feel free to leave a comment on one of the posts with your email address and I will eventually get back to you. The comments sections will be private and only be seen by me so you don't have to worry about yours being out there for the world.

That's about it for now. Let me know if you guys have any questions. I hope to stay in touch with everybody somehow why we are away.

Nasdrovya