Last night in Princeton

Family and Friends,

Tomorrow I head to Philadelphia for a brief meet and greet with the other Peace Corps Volunteers, and on Wednesday I am off the Guinea. For those of you who believe Guinea is a colorful pet rodent who defecates an absolutely mind-boggling amount…(as I did pre-June)….check out Google Maps. It’s the Kidney bean shaped country near the center of the W. African Bulge. I have assembled this list of college and high school buddies, teachers, family friends, basketball coaches, family, and others that have helped and cared throughout my life- in the hopes that moving to Africa will be an excuse to keep in touch rather than fall out. While Guinea is richly endowed with natural beauty, wildlife, and flies whose larvae destroy your eye and cause river blindness, it does not boast widely available Internet access or cell phone coverage. How often I email, talk on the phone, or post to my blog (info to follow), will vary depending on whether or not I am posted near a major city (of which there are about, umm one). This however, only excuses me. The unfortunate recipients of this email are charged with keeping me in their thoughts, prayers, letters, and emails, as often as possible. Letters take 4 weeks to get to the capital (Conakry), and that is only if they are not opened and ransacked by an underpaid customs official or waylaid en route to my village. Yet letters will be my lifeline to home and the world I know, please please please send them anyway! Word on the Guinean street is that marking the front of your letter or envelopes with ‘feminine products’ or ‘religious materials’ drastically increases the likelihood of safe delivery. Go figure. Also, if you send me something, I promise I will write you back. Circumstances permitting I will periodically be posting to my blog at http://congod.blogspot.com. If you promise to peruse my posts from time to time, I’ll promise to keep them lively and humorous and chalk full of earthshaking insight into West African life.

This will be a crazy adventure. I even have a floppy brimmed safari dude hat (courtesy of the Lavery's), and you know that crazy things happen when you where those hats. Please share it with me, and also share adventures of your own. Try your best to hold off any major events until I can be there to share them, but if they have to happen, I definitely want to be in the loop. Much love to all, and stay tuned for more news.

Address:

Conor Godfrey, PCT
Corps de la Paix
BP 1927, Conakry
Guinée (West Africa)

P.S. I will post this email as the first entry in my blog at congod.blogspot.com as a reference.
P.P.S This email list is not complete! It is pieced together from old email lists and random facebook searching. If you find out someone is not receiving it, please email me and let me add them.