Off to Homestay

Today is, or at least most likely, will be my last day with internet for the next 2 weeks or so (until July 21st). Today was the day where we found out our Homestay sites. Homestay is where we go live in a village that will kind of be similar to our actual site assignment. Right now we are at Tubaniso which is PC's training site, it kind of looks like a summer camp. So Tubaniso is fake, and Homestay is as close as we can get to the real thing without actually going to our actual site. My Homestay assignment is this little village outside of Bamako, the Capital. During Homestay I will be living with a family by myself. I will get my own room and stuff, but I will have to share the bathroom and eat all my meals with the family. During the day I will go to language classes where I will continue to learn Bambara and I will also continue to go to Cultural classes and then classes specific to the Education sector. In my Homestay village there will only be 3 other PC trainees like myself, and one of them will be learning a Dogon dialect so she won't be in our Bambara classes. This means that I will only have 2 other people in my class which allows for almost one-on-one learning.
I don't reallly know how to put how I feel about going to Homestay in words. I have no idea what to expect so I can't be super excited, but I'm also kind of disappointed that there will only be 4 of us in my Homestay village. Most other homestay villages have 6-8 people. Also the people that I'm with aren't people I've spent very much time with so I don't really know them. Oh well, you can't always get what you want, and I guess I'll get to know them because I will basically be spending the next 2 months with them.
Another kind of disappointing thing is that I won't be near internet on my birthday. We also don't have any form of identification on us (for now) so that means we can't leave our village. For example, if I wanted to go out for my birthday, to say Bamako, I wouldn't be able to because if you don't have ID and you get stopped by the police, there is a very good chance you will spend a few hours in police custody.
Anyway wish me luck! Oh and I actually have a cell phone now, so I can be called, but I'm not sure if you have to dial a country code or something first. I have 2 numbers (Mali has 2 cell providers, Malitel and Orange, so most people here have sim cards for both because you can't always get service for one provider in certain areas so you just have to switch out your sim card to get service with the other provider. This would be like having a phone plan for Verizon and one for AT&T and using the sim cards for both on the same unlocked phone). So my Orange number (the one sim that is most often in my phone) is 7000-7708 and my Malitel number is 6634-6330.

*** just looked up how to call Mali. dial 011 223 then either of the two numbers above. so to call my orange number you would do 011 223 7000 7708