Martine and Maimouna just graduated from the teacher training college. They are both now officially French teachers. Unfortunately the organizational structure for teachers in this country is pretty messed up. First of all, their graduation ceremony was originally scheduled for December and only now took place in March with very little notice. In the meantime, all the candidates had prepared their documents for the December date. With such a huge delay, all of the stamps attached to the various documents expired and they ALL have to redo their entire folders.... annoying, but even more annoying is that each of the stamps required costs pretty much money and now everybody is getting stuck paying the cost again. They also released their affectations. Despite Martine requesting to be placed in the extreme north, and the chronic shortage of teachers up here and the fact that basically no southerners want to be sent to the extreme north, she got affected down south. This means that she now has to go down to her new post asap to present herself. She'll then be expected to teach and live there where she doesn't know anybody and the government won't start paying her salary for another year or two. Pretty difficult.
Getting the weird affectation news put a bit of a damper on the festivities. However, in general the day was a ton of fun. I got my hair "tressed" - braided with the addition of fake blonde strands - for the occasion. Then we visited everybody's graduation party and ate lots of food. We finally ended up chilling out at a bar (pretty similar to American graduations I guess) and then this crazy guy walks in. This picture doesn't really do him justice because he also had his butt stuffed it was pretty histarical. But, turns out that he's actually one of my neighbors from Tok, which was pretty silly.
