Wow what a week it's been. Now that I'm back on-line, I'll just keep writing untill my internet time runs out.
Sunday - Tuesday 7/8 -7/10
On Sunday we all took early early busses out of Ouahigouya to the capital, Ouagadougou for our counterpart workshops that would take place on Monday and Tuesday. What is a counterpart? For us Secondary Education volunteers, a counterpart is someone, usually another teacher or the director of the school we'll be teaching at, who is assigned to us to help us be in the community. Since they are also teachers, they know our job responsibilities and the particular schools we'll be working at so they can help guide us with work and also with integrating into the school community. They are also usually residents of the villages that we are each being sent to so they can tell us where to buy food so we don't starve and good stuff like that. Also if I had a problem with my house, I could tell my counterpart and he could help the issue get resolved. So together as a group of SE volunteers, we had a workshop with all the Burkinabé counterparts for two days. This was primarily a get-to-know each other thing and also a way for the counterparts to better understand what exactly the Peace Corps is and also some ways in which the American work place differs from the Burkinabé workplace. We talked about all kinds of things from pop trivia to how women are perceived in the workplace. Women in the work place is an interesting topic. It seems that a woman who is in a place of authority in the workplace would have her decisions questioned and challenged quite frequently. Woman being in functionaire positions, like my teaching position, is not that common, and indeed, of all the tens of functionaire/military/police/government people I met this week - they were all men.
But for Sunday, we had nothing to do since our bus got there so early so we all checked into the hotel and started exploring. We took taxis to the hotel. It was gloriously sketchy. We have to be attached to our mountain bikes at the hip so they were with us and we flagged down some taxis and haggled over the price and got in. Here there aren't really taxi companies; anyone can go and get their broken down, ratty, compact car painted green and just like that, now you have a taxi. So bikes and packs went in the trunk plus the driver in the front and 5 PCTs in the car. Apparently you can get 10 people in there, say the experienced PCVs.
Our hotel was great. Three stars, says the guidebook. It would have been a crappy hotel if if were in America but we all felt like we were at the Ritz. There was AC! A pool! Alright food! Cold drinks! A lot of us were sick coming into it and several others got sick while there so the Burkinabé counterparts must have thought that Americans just look crappy all the time and need to go to the bathroom a lot, but, what choice did we have.
But Ouagadougou is magnificent. It is expensive, but it is expensive because you are paying almost-American prices for food with Burkinabé money. But the Peace Corps gave us some extra dough and so we went hog wild. What wonderful foods did I have? I had: ice cream, crepes, a cheeseburger, pizza, spagetti carbonera, red wine, cheese, and a real salad. Unless you've been through this kind of a complete American food deprivation thing, there's just no way to tell you how good it all tasted.
The sodas are really cool here. There's coke and fanta and sprite and they come in glass bottles, which I actually prefer, and are usually very cold when you find them. Inside the cap there is a chance to win a prize. If you collect the 4 parts of a moto, then you win a moto! The hard piece to find is the helmet, and none of us have yet, but here's a cute picture of two of my best friends here, Chris and Jamie (one of our 2 token married couples) showing off their non-winning pieces during one our our nights out on the town. Jamie's a GEE volunteer and Chris is SE. They actually had a real life before they quit it and joined the Peace Corps. I really hope they stick around.
My counterpart is great, so far. His name is Issa Kere, and he teaches Geography, History and French and he is also the director of the Collège where I will teach. A lot of teachers have to do this kind of triple duty kind of thing since there just simply aren't enough teachers. He's also pretty familiar with the Peace Corps because he's worked with two PCVs before. Not in Bagré, but in other places in the country. Here in Burkina Faso, teachers can be sent anywhere to teach, which is why there is usually housing very nearby the schools for the professors to live in when they are sent there. He loves Bagré, and one reason why is that he used to be a teacher up north, and he says that physically, it is just easier to live in Bagré. That was good to hear. He's 34, has a wife and two kids with one on the way. He says that when I am his age I will have three kids and a husband maybe in Bagré. I told him that was impossible and forbidden. Two other men told me I would find a husband in Bagré while I was there - and I've been told this is normal - and almost a game. It's nothing against the Burkinabé but I don't want to marry anyone and certainly I don't want to have three kids. Mr. Kere told me to not be so hasty about the kids, because after all, he said, it's a decision for the man and the woman, not just the woman. He said that if my husband wanted 4 kids and I wanted 0 then I would have 2. I said nothing.
Wednesday 7/11 - Bagré
How do you get to Bagré? Well, if you are in Ouagadougou, there's a bus that will take you as far as Tenkodogo, my regional capital, which is 45 KM from Bagré. From there you "find" a bush taxi to take you the rest of the way. A bush taxi is just a tiny van meant to seat 12 that they put 18-20 in. They're usually extremely beaten up, cracked windsheilds, doors falling off, optional windows, etc, but they are they only way around much of this country. My counter part traveled with me since I had no idea what was going on. By this point I had acquired a full blown head cold and was awkwardly sneezing everywhere and my ears were plugged and believe it or not, it made understanding the French a lot harder. Because I have good French compared with the overall SE group (not the same as
actually very good French) I think my counterpart thought I could actually speak French better than I can. He didn't seem to baby me at all and seemed surprised when I didn't know weird vocabulary like the word for Bee or Guinea Fowl.
Buses here are interesting. It's kind of like greyhound, if you take one of the major bus companies, except with narrower seats and music that is so loud you can't really talk to your neighbor. Then there are smaller busses, about half the size, for which the luggage gets strapped to the roof along with all the goats and sheep that are coming with. They handle goat and sheep here kind of like sacks of potatos with legs. They scream and fuss but get strapped to the roof nonetheless. I can't stand the sound of a goat screaming. It makes my skin crawl, and to me it sounds like a child being tortured or something equally bad. Here's a sheep going up. There were 10 sheep and goats on top of this bus.
There are two parts to Bagré. I forget the actual words for the names, so I will just call them Old Bagré and New Bagré. Old Bagré starts where the paved road, 45 Km from Tenkodogo stops. So you get off the taxi and get your stuff and then start biking. 2 km down the road is where my counterpart lives and where I will be teaching, at the Collège. They say the Collège is en brusse, meaning, in the bush, and it is, about a 2 minute buke ride off the big dirt road out into the real country. But I don't live here. There are not enough houses and the houses aren't nice enough, by Peace Corps standards. I live another 5 km down the main dirt road in what I'll call New Bagré. Old Bagré is old. It's been there as long as Bagré's been there, but New Bagré has come about as a result of the hydro-electric dam and the fishing and the like that has allowed for another small village to pop up down the road from Old Bagré, next to the huge lake and the hydro-electric dam. So after you get 5 km more down the road from the collège you'll see the Lycée on the left.
The Lycée and the housing associated with it was built just this year. So I live there on the left, in a row of houses intended for professors. On the right side of the road, if you look off that way, you can see the lake. That's closer to the water than I am in Mystic! Quelle chance! This lake is enormous. I was told the dam itself was 3-4 km long and the electricity produced there powers a lot of the electricity in the country. Interestingly, I feel very safe at my site because of this dam. This dam is gold to the Burkinabé, and if anything were to happen to it, it would be very very bad. So there is a military presence, a police presence, and a local government presence in Bagré, so I know I have nothing to worry about.
This is my house. Kind of like suburbia USA except with a lot fewer neighbors and the fence is wire, not white picket. The yellow building is the main house, and it has 4 rooms. One big one that is half the house and then three others which are 2 bedrooms and a storage room or washroom. Outside to the left of this photo is the outdoor kitchen and pantry. To the right is my latrine and shower. You can see my tent popped on the porch there and my bike there in the yard, for scale. There is also a picture taken from the entrance of the front door of the big room.
There across the room is my only piece of furniture so far, a plain table and a chair that i borrowed from the neighbor. If you zoom in you can see the yummy American food my wonderful parents sent me in a care package that I picked up while in the capital. That food saved me beacuse I was able to just tell my counterpart that I was sick and couldn't eat a lot and instead eat powerbars and the like instead of eating as much as a guest would had to have eaten to feel polite and probably actually then gotten sick and miserable. My pack is there on the table and when I opened it up in the morning; about 200 mosquitos flew out of it. I don't know why that happened, but I do know two things: (1) That was the last time I'll leave the door open at night and (2) I am going to build a bat house ASAP on the back of my house when I get set up there. I am very impressed with my house. It is the nicest house I have seen herefor the non super rich and I feel very lucky.
Bagré is lush and green. The crops are healthy, there is grass everywhere, and because of the lake, I saw real fog in the evening before it got dark. There are huge lush trees and my counterpart says that even though the grass will die in the dry season, the trees won't lose their leaves like the do up north. This picture below is to the right of my house, what i see if I look away from the road.
Depending on how good my early morning photography is, you will probably be able to see traditional mud huts in the center/right of the photo above if you click on it so it gets bigger. There were a bunch of dogs playing outside between my house and the Lycée. A ton of bulls went through, and it's so strange; they seem as calm as can be. My counterpart and my neighbor says that when I get moved in they'll tell the gardien of the Lycée to find me a puppy. I can't wait. I feel like between the fish and rice and lizards and stuff that are able to flourish in Bagré I'd be able to feed a dog. Not to mention the other dogs here don't exactly "get fed", so I wouldn't have to do all the work. It was nice to see animals that didn't look like they were starving. And there is grass! I can't tell you how little of this there is up north. In fact I can tell you - there's none. The rainy season is late and weak so the crops are suffering everywhere but down south.
So how did the night go? Well it was traumatic, but that's not Bagré's fault. It's been a long time since I was that alone. I have one neighbor, but after dark it's not appropriate to socialize with him unless something was actually wrong. I knew I was afraid of unfamilar buildings at night so I put my tent outside on the porch and settled down to sleep at about 8:30 pm. At about 1:45 a storm started moving in and I woke up because of how strong the wind was. My tent was acting like a sail, and I was being pushed across my porch. And all the doors and windows in my house which weren't secured very well started banging and clanging and making wierd noises and all the geckos and bats and whatever else that was seeking refuge in my house started moving around a bunch, and I got spooked because, as we all know:
I'm afraid of the dark. There was lightning that lit up the sky about 1/3 of the time. The rain only fell for about 30 minutes, but the wind and lightning continued all night until dawn at about 5:30. I was too scared to get out and pee or lock my doors so I just sat there and read
Things Fall Apart until I was done with it, and then I listened to my iPod until the dawn chorus of donkeys and roosters and birds that weren't vultures. But what can you say? When my counterpart came around at 7 he asked how I was and I said ca va because that's what you say.
[as an aside, i finished 2 books this week and i strongly reccomend both of them. I can't really take credit for picking these since Katherine, the book know it all reccomended them to me, but they are both really excellent. They are
Things Fall Apart and
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Pick one up if you get the chance.]
The picture above is looking across the road away from my house. You can see the start of the huge lake there in the distance. I was introduced to everyone it seemed of importance in the village. Millitary, police, staff at the school, local government. I met the regional education director in Tenkodogo. Tens of people I met and, yes, they were, every last one of them, men. I hear though that one of the 4 teachers at my school is a woman, and that is exciting. I also learned that I will be the only biology teacher, because, they didn't have one before me. Everyone I was introduced to thought I was going to be an English teacher, and when they learned I was going to be teaching science, they were surprised.
Koupela 7/12-7/13
So I packed up my stuff the next morning, rolled my tent, bathed, and went off to meet more people and then wait for a bush taxi to fill up to take me out of Bagré. I was to spend the next 2 days with a Small Enterprise Development Volunteer in the "city" Koupela, along with the other three SE trainees in the Central East region, to get to know a real volunteer and to get a taste of life in the region. It wasn't as helpful as it could have been since Koupela is even more north from Bagré than Tenkodogo, and it is hard to say why I would ever need to go there or know the city. Additionally, I am an SE volunteer, and so the buisness work that our host was doing wasn't very pertinent to our future lives. We stayed in a hostel/hotel thing which was nice, especially when I got sick the next day and could just relax and read/run to the bathroom.
We went to a Baptism that morning (probably the source of my illness). Muslim Baptisms take place here, usually on the 8th day after the birth and are a cause for large gathering, eating, and happiness. The men gather, segregated by age, outside in the courtyard, and sit in mats and give the benediction. They are simply asking God to take care of the baby and they wish it health and a good life. When I got baptisms, and this was my third, I am asked to sit with the men. Not the oldest men, but the mid-aged men. Nassaras are placed this way in the social heirarchy, even though I am a young, unmarried girl. The women are separated and do not sit and pray but instead prepare food and serve food after the benediction. They will sit together later in the day during the presentation of the presents to the mother, also segregated by age. Usually a goat or sheep is killed and the meat is prepared and eaten. The head is saved and washed, to be made into a soup the next day. As we sat there eating the riz gras and drinking the zom-kom that was presented to us after the benediction, we could hear and see the hacking apart of the goat body just a stone's throw away. A young boy happily carried away an armful of plump glissening organs and the head was lifted into a bowl and brought inside. I'd never stopped and thought about what it sounds like when a body is being hacked apart by a machete, but after hearing it, it's remarkably clear how different it sounds from chopping wood or something I've heard before. The baby never goes outside though,even once the name is given. It stays in the house, with the mother, and slowly but surely, small groups of people are asked inside the house to view and hold the baby and to eat more food, and if you're lucky, drink a cold soda. Usually one brings a small present to the mother, like a bar of soap. I've gone to three baptisms though, and gotten sick after each one, so maybe I'll sit the next one out.
Anyway - hope you don't mind the enormous amount of writing - there's just so much to say.
Yes and then there's teaching. Here is a picture of some of us SE volunteers in the salle de profs preparing our lessons / relaxing after teaching. It takes quite a lot of time to prepare lessons. I mean I always kind of understood that about teaching in general, I think, but it's really something that you can't rush unless you've taught it before or you want it to show that you weren't prepared because every little weakness gets amplified with the whole in-French aspect. There are always at least 10 words in the biology lessons that you have never heard or seen before so you always need some time to practice pronounciation or something. That's, from left to right, Marty, Pete (also from Cornell), Garrett, Lara and An. This is also a pretty good shot of an average classroom, shot from the door. Nothing fancy. These are the rooms into which a hundred kids or more get put for the 6th grade classes. Three or four to each bench.
And this is a picture I stealthily took of Ray while he was teaching the other day. It's important to be stealthy about it because if the kids see a camera they freak out and get really excited and all swarm you trying to get you to take a picture of them. Ray wouldn't have liked it if I'd dome that to his class. He's teaching half of the 8th grade model school class here and watching a kid do an exercise on the board. TomorrowI'll start teaching 3eme which is 9th grade and I'll teach them about bones. Bone growth, anatomy, problems, etc. It'll be a big class too - like 80. There's so many because they're thirsty to get some more practice on the material since the 3eme material is what will be on the BEPC test which determines whether they can go on in school.
This picture is of the GEE trainees who live in the village of Komsilga. Komsilga has a sign, indicating that it is Komsilga, but the sign does little good since there isn't really a road that goes to Komsilga and you don't get to the sign until you go off 4 km through the bush and then over a hill and then see the village along with it's sign. It's literally in the middle of nowhere. The girl there in the middle, Christina, also went to Cornell; It's like a Cornell convention. The Komsilga crew are the ones in GEE who had the best French. They started learning Fulfulde right away, and they will go up in the north where the Foulani and the Peul people are who speak Fulfulde. It's about an hour bike ride for these
guys to come into town and PC is being a pain about giving them a ride sometimes. It's a tiny tiny village though. Tiny. This pic is during a storm out that way. The lightning here is always extrordinary. Anyway, enjoy the pictures, I'm going to go home and plan out my lesson and start a new book I think and eat some granola and maybe clean my room. Thank you all for the emails and such. I'd love to get more real letters! So far Addie's the only one who's mailed me anything. Emails rock but real mail is amazing. I also love comics or magazine clippings or pictures or anything else like that fits in a normal envelope.
