SITE ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!

Today was site announcement day!! Very exciting for us all. And what a crazy thing to go through - basically we got together and everyone got up and said a little thing and then the staff presented us with an enormous hand drawn map of Burkina Faso, showing the main roads, paved and unpaved, and the locations of all the main cities, towns, and volunteer sites. The map was probably 8 feet tall and realllly wide. We posted it up against the wall, and began the unvailing of who will go where.

Our country director prefaced this whole experience with the thought that it is hard to really know what to take from your site annoucement. You're given a paragraph of information and she said that sometimes people come away from site annoucement crying, and that she herself - when she was a trainee - when she got her site annoucement and visited her site - she thought she was going to go home right then because it was traumatic for her. But it is hard to know what will really matter to you in the end about a site, and of course, usually what means the most to someone is the personal relationships and teaching and all that ... but of course we all wanted to know as much as we could.

One person would go up, and draw a piece of paper out of a box and read the description of the site that was on the piece of paper. Then, Seb, (the person in charge of assignments) would identify who was going to that place and then the lucky volunteer would come forward, take a little paper stick person figure and search for the name of their site on the enormous map, find it, and then place their stick figure on the map with some tape. This person would then draw a new piece of paper out of the box that describes another volunteer's site, and the process continues. Here's a picture of Becca reading about another volunteer's site.

Here's what I got on my slip of paper:

Bagré
"Welcome to the region of Tenkodogo. You are amongst the first volunteers to be serving in this region! Your CEG [middle school] is located in centra Bagré, but your home is located at a new building site about 4 or 5 km away. About three fourths of the village population lives in this new development, so you won't get lonely! The village is also home to a hydroelectric dam and large rice fields. The transport between Bagré and your regional capital, Tenkodogo, is regular and the distance is just 45 km. Bagré is very green and beautiful, and I'm sure you'll love your site! This year your school had from 6eme [6th grade] to 3eme [9th grade], one class per each level with a total of 312 students. Your regional capital has many perks as well. In Tenkodogo you will find such luxuries as internet, a supermarché, and a good restuarant where you can also spend the night. There is also a Japanese volunteer working there in the agriculture sector. The local language is Bissa, but don't worry, Mooré is also well spoken."

Wow. The whole experience was really really overwhelming. Some people were really happy. Some people really weren't. Some people learned that it'll take a whole day to get to their sites, and some learned they weren't going that far at all. Mac found out that he's going way up north where there aren't any paved roads or reliable transportation. A beach without the water, is I think what his paper said. He'll get moto training at the end of stage.

I learned that I will be the southern most volunteer. I am pretty close the border of Ghana and Togo, in the East of Burkina. The south is not something I demanded, but in my site interview I definitely emphasized that I would probably be happier if my town didn't look like the scene from a deserted western town in the US 200 years ago. I said that I'd love to be somewhere green, and that I knew we were mostly going up north, so maybe I'd learn to plant trees. In the end though, this isn't a vacation, and I was ready to take whatever I got handed. But I got lucky and I'm going to be in the south where there are trees already. Not the south like the southwest (which is what people here call the real south) but south as in close to Ghana, and where the land is supposedly actually green. My town has even more green because of the hydroelectric dam. A dam - a dam!! That means some amount of water!! On the hand drawn map with all the stick figures that represent the education volunteers, I am the most south one on the east side. I am there along with two others who will be relatively close to me kind of along the way to Tenkodogo, Marty and An.

This is supposedly in the range of all kinds of cool animals too like Hippos and Elephants and technically lions and cheetahs and things like that but they are rare to say the least.

I'm including a map of Burkina that has more of a true scale and is potentially easier to get perspective with than the hand drawn map. I want you to click on this map and open it up in a separate window or however you choose to to make it big and legible. Now find the capital, Ouagadougou. Now look to the south west to the country Togo, and find where the word Togo is written in big letters. Now take a ruler or the edge or a piece of paper or whever and follow a straight line connecting the square that marks Ouagadougo to the last O in the word Togo. Along that line, south and west of Tenkodogo is the word Bagré and that'll be where I'll be working!!

And please keep the calls coming! Calling cards aren't THAT expensive! I love you all!