Holiday happenings

Sorry it's been awhile. Merry (happy) Christmas and a happy new year!
I'll try to just catch up chronologically..
The term ended and then we gave exams for the last week. In order to reduce corruption with teachers taking bribes for grades, we don't 'invigilate' (proctor) our own exams. Each teacher gets a class and we give them all of the exams for their classes. I've got SSS4 which is a small class, so it was really easy.
Only one of my exams has been taken so far. The first week of second term is going to be another exam week. The logic here is that having finals the first week of the new term will get them to actually show up when they are supposed to. The problem is that all of these exams are probably going to be failed because the students will have forgotten everything over the three week break. My exam for SSS4 over organic chemistry should be fun.
I haven't graded the physics test yet, but looking at it I am a little bit disappointed. I basically made it too difficult for them. Next term I have some things I want to change. I am going to use more disciplinary measures, set solid classroom rules, and have more assignments. I am going to have to slow things down a bit, probably, since I think only a few of the bright students are actually getting anything I am saying.
So yeah, after exams were given, all of my peace corps group had to go to Makeni, big city, for our in-service training (IST). It was sort of like pre-service training but only about 10 days (thankfully). We stayed at this nice catholic mission for boys and girls that had electricity most of the time, and running water, most of the time. It was luxury! Our sleeping situation was not too great though, since we all just had to stay in this big room together. I have some weird skin infection in a couple places, but I think it will go away. Shrug.
Makeni is a really cool place. I like it much more than I did Bo. It seems to be rapidly developing. They have an electrical grid that is mostly reliable, solar lighting over lots of nice paved roads with good water management and even trash cans (I know, crazy). It is really dangerous to walk around in, but it's neat. It is just a crazy developing african city.
The training involved teaching practices, some discussion about grants, youth development, and our counterparts, mostly teachers, came the last couple days. It was pretty productive and I think interesting for the Sierra Leonean counterparts. A lot of people rarely ever travel and many have never been outside of their district despite being like 30. There were a couple educated and intelligent Sierra Leonean women that were there, and I think just their presence and input may have been one of the biggest benefits of the conference. Most men here are incredibly chauvenistic because they never see intelligent women because girl's education here sucks because of all of the barriers to education they face.
It was nice to see the whole group of us together again (37 now), but I am pretty happy to be back to my village. I get pretty exhausted from the whole group dynamic and lack of independence. I can't believe I went through 10 weeks of it during PST! Now, there isn't really another long training. We have MST at the 1 year point, but it is only a few days long.
We spent all of our off time just going around Makeni. There wasn't really much to do at the center we were staying at besides play ping pong (we had two tournaments). I didn't bring my laptop and forgot to bring any shirts. I have an explanation though. I bought a new lock for my house before leaving site, and locked it the day I was leaving and then came back in order to get the rest of my things packed and leave, but the lock wouldn't open. It was the best lock I could buy, but it was still from china and low quality. But yeah, it caused me to have to break into my own house.
Luckily I had a key to a back room. The room isn't connected to the main house, though. My ceilings are at least 10 ft high. I tried to put a bicycle on top of a plastic chair to make a ladder, but I ended up breaking a leg on my nice plastic chair. The ceiling there wouldn't bang through. I climbed up a window and had to shimmy across to the corner that I could get into my room from, and had to bang in a ceiling panel there, pull myself up into the ceiling, then bang in the ceiling panel in my room while holding myself up, and hop over the wall without impaling my hand on the nails sticking through the boards. I managed to hang from the wall and drop into my bedroom with only a single scratch on my hand from a nail. It was a total mess, but I had to just change, wash really quick, and leave. Luckily the way I broke in is still from a place only I have the key to.. I don't want to have to do that again.
Back to Makeni. We went out to the nightclubs a few times. One night, I was dancing, and some guy danced right in front of me. I was having the habit of checking my pockets every once in awhile to make sure my few items were still there. I checked, and my wallet was gone. I knew it was the guy that had just gone in front of me though, so I turned around towards him and felt down his arms going for his pockets. He had my wallet in his left hand. I'm really happy I didn't lose my ID or money! A couple other people on another night were successfully 'tiefed'. One  had her money purse cut with a razor blade, and somebody else had his smart phone stolen from out of his hand. Apparently Makeni is nice but there are a lot of thiefs! Nobody was hurt, luckily.
I bought two more gallons of paint in Makeni and managed to get them back to my house safely. That was quite the dangerous task! But I'm still alive and now my bedroom is nice and green. Shebora painted some weird thing that looks like a robot.
My counterpart told me that Christmas at my village would be 'fantastic' so I decided to come back and spent it here rather than go to the beach like most everybody else was planning on doing. It has indeed been fantastic! My village has this tradition of making these 'devils' and having somebody wear them and walk around town. Different parts of the village make their own devil. The one I ended up supporting was named 'Salone Money' from Ropollo (area of town) that Shebora's family made. This thing looks ridiculous. It is like the tackiest thing you've ever seen. It's pretty cool though and everybody says we are going to win the competition for best devil because they had the white man supporting it.
This thing is pretty huge. People from all over the country came for the festivities, even from the city. When I got there, the thing was about to start, and somebody handed me the stick in order to defend our devil. So I was one of the people holding people back from the devil dancing around, which was pretty cool! I don't know if I was protecting the devil from the crazy drunk people or the people from the devil. At one point some drunk dude fell down near the devil and the devil fell over him. I should have gotten the guy out of the way!
This whole thing was pretty intense. There are two devils that dance at a time. There were two yesterday, and will be two later today. But each devil has its group of supporters, so we were afraid that there could be violence. So, we had the police around. I'm pretty sure they were drunk, though. I'll put up pictures sometime. I was really happy to see this, since I rarely ever see genuine Salone culture. Unfortunately I think a lot of it died in the war..
In a couple days I'll be meeting the rest of the people from Kambia (my district, the Kambia Family Crew) and going down to the beach near Freetown for New Years. We are taking the boat all the way to Freetown, which should be great! It's going to take like 12 hours apparently.
I'm reading War and Peace. It's really long and boring, but starting to pick up.
So, I'm doing pretty well. I am not really looking forward to school starting back but there is still a little while to go and some intensive relaxation and surfing still to come.
I hope everyone has had a nice Christmas and stays safe on New Years!