Happy 3 1/2 weeks everyone!!

We were told once during training that one thing people who return to America after the Peace Corps often feel that people back home don’t really take that great of an interest in what you did during your service. As you might imagine, and as I am sure of now, this could be a pretty big let down. But in the end it seems pretty inevitable since a job that is so far removed, literally, from America would be hard to ever really relate to. There are exceptions of course but maybe this could all be fixed…

Yes… say for example, we figure out a way to rig it up so that we are all being filmed for a certain amount of time each day, and the film would follow the utterly ridiculous, mind-stretching and often touching things we face everyday, and then it could all be edited and turned into one of those awful reality TV shows where ever one tunes in to see who’s going home next except instead of Survivor IX it would be Peace Corps Burkina Faso 2007, or something. I suppose since we’re supposed to be volunteering here, we wouldn’t get to win a million dollars at the end, but we would get to go back to America, and eat good food, and that’s just about as good. BUT, more importantly, we could better accomplish one of the three goals of the Peace Corps, which is to share the cultural understanding of another country with the dear USA. No I know it would never work, but it’s sure funny to think of. In fact I think of it just about every time something ridiculous happens to me, and every time someone goes home. Speaking of which…

Beth, Katherine, Jamie, Chris, Christine, Alexia, Hope: we miss you and I hope you’re living it up back home.

Jamie: I used your little tube of shaving gel the other day and it was so great. I spent like thirty minutes shaving my legs, only knees on down of course, on my front porch while listening to BBC. It was pretty difficult considering the amount of skin-breakage I have on account of the mosquito bites and other such things. But THANK YOU!

Let’s see, what have I done in the last week and half to keep myself from going crazy out of boredom:

Painted my nails bright pink (WTF?)
Put a Burkina Map on the wall with everyone’s locations (but it keeps falling down and then Neo pooped on it)
Laundry, including 36 pairs of underwear*
Listened to Music
Read a lot of books
Written this Blog entry
Talked to people at home
Slept
Tried to housebreak the puppy
Danced
Made lentil soup
Went birding

*You have to understand that when you live with a host family, you can’t give your underwear to the person washing your clothes because it’s inappropriate. You’re supposed to wash it out in your bucket bath, in your bucket of water that you use to do every other hygienic thing, but somehow this never seemed good enough to me.

I have a puppy, and this is him. A yuur la a Neo. His name is Neo. He has a pretty predictable routine now. He wakes me up at 5, but lets face it, I was practically awake already anyway, then I tell him to chill until at least 5:30, maybe 6:00 if I’m lucky and then we get up and he gets all excited to go outside and then we go outside and he zooms around the yard and then comes back and asks me if I’m going to feed him. I do. Then he bounces around for about 20 more minutes and then it’s his naptime. This pattern repeats throughout the day and he’s still pretty tiny so he takes 6 or 7 naps a day. He is NOT housebroken yet and I fear that this may take a while. In the mean time I’ll be glad I don’t have a carpet.

There are two boys who are becoming my friends. I see them everyday for at least a hour, sometimes 5. I don’t know the little one’s name but the 8 year old is called Yassi and his little brother is 6 I think. They were the first ones who watched me all the time when I arrived and brought lunch to share with me and watch three bulls in front of my yard. I’ve now realized that since these tiny bull-watching children really do have complete control over where these bulls go that the reason there is such a high density of bulls in front of my yard is that the kids want to hang out together and they want to stare at the nassara. Anyway, I let Yassi and his little brother come in because they seem more… kind than most of the other kids. They are also willing to talk to me. They also are looking out for my best interests. For example, while he was in no position to stop it, he watched and then carefully informed me that a certain kid had squeezed through my gate to steal some of my powdered milk that he then ate with his friend. They call me Tantie (Auntie) and give me all kinds of advice from when I need to lock my kitchen to what I should feed the dog to make him big and strong and how to attach nails to my gate so that kids won’t climb over it (see picture). They’re pretty neat.

But I didn’t bring EVERYTHING inside yesterday before I went to the market; I left some dirty dishes and my solar battery charger on my porch. Neo’s pretty red leash that my parents had sent me was draped over the top of the window frame. When I came back the Proviseur told be he’d seen a kid squeezing out of my gate carrying something as he was coming home from the office and Benoit (the teenager who lives with him) was about to chase him down but the kid was too quick. I don’t know why, but the kid took Neo’s leash. Which is sad because what the hell is this kid really going to do with the leash (they don’t use leashes here) and Neo and I had just gone on our first real walk that morning. Turns out a kid, maybe the same one, took some of Benoit’s best clothes as they were hanging out to dry. Well the Proviseur wasn’t happy so he took me down to the gendarmerie (like the police, but different) and because this is a small place, he told the gendarmes who the kid was, where he lived, and within a few minutes, the kid had been fetched and appeared at the station in handcuffs. Well at this point, I felt AWFUL. I looked at the kid and I recognized him, kind of. Mainly I recognized him as being one of the sorrier looking kids around. I mean none of the kids have new clothes here, and why would they. But this kid was wearing a real torn up long T-shirt that was covered in dirt, no shoes, and his face was really dirt streaked. His hair wasn’t growing in very well and his belly was swollen up, pushing out the baggy T-shirt a bit (that generally isn’t because of worms or cancer or starvation or anything, it’s usually a protein deficiency thing, or so I was told).

Burkinabé men, on the whole, are not big people. They are taller or shorter, but on the whole, based on their height, they are not NBA material. Well they must select gendarmes based on their build or something because when I walked in there I saw the highest density of big, built men I’d seen in recent memory. They brought the kid in in cuffs and sent someone to find his parents. They asked us what happened, and the Proviseur talked for me and then they brought him in and started yelling at him. Not screaming, just speaking loudly and authoritatively which to this kid who must be younger than Yassi was terrifying. They asked him if he understood French and he said no and then they said several things to him in Mooré and asked a few questions and the poor kid looked like his eyes were about to start gushing tears any moment. Then the head guy turned to us and said his family name and went on about how you might expect this from that family. At this point I just wished everyone could forget about the leash and I could have left a t-shirt out there for him instead. I know that’s not right but it’s how I felt. They feel very strongly that if they let a kid steal small things then sooner or later he’ll learn to steal big things.

That’s one reason there’s a superstition about giving kids eggs. Eggs are a very good food and not normally given to kids because people feel that if you get a kid in the habit of having good food like that then when he doesn’t have it, he’ll steal it. And there’s a saying that goes something like: Si on vole un oeuf, on volera un boeuf (if one steals an egg, one will steal a cow). Yassi told me I should watch out for these two girls because they stole some of my neighbor’s food growing in his yard. One day they came over and stood outside my fence while I was peeling hardboiled eggs and eating the whites and giving Neo the yolks. The stared at me and then asked for eggs, and I said I didn’t have anymore. They didn’t steal my eggs the next day, but they did come into my yard and scrounge up the scraps still stuck to the shells and eat them, covered in gravel and all. I told them it was their choice.

Being here is definitely getting easier. There is so much so nothing to do that it’s ridiculous. I think I’m going to get used to having nothing to do just in time to have loads to do come la rentrée scholaire in about three weeks. Not sure how much things are going to lag behind this year… I was told there was a meeting scheduled for the 15th but that there was no way that was going to work because everyone was out of town so who knows when the administrative stuff will get worked out so I can know my schedule and when the heck classes actually begin. I’m not that worried; I’d just kinda like to know. I did manage to drag out of my homologue that I will be teaching 6e, 5e and 4e SVT (life science) and 6e math. That adds up to about 14 hours of teaching a week, which isn’t too bad.

On the upside of things, because I’m the VAC (Volunteer Administrative Committee, I think) representative, I get to be in the capital for a meeting on Wednesday and then I heard the big head honcho of all of Peace Corps is stopping by Burkina and would like to meet with the VAC that Friday so I get to spend the better part of a week relaxing and going online and doing nothing in civilization and sucking down chocolate milkshakes and getting reimbursed for it. Thank you to the American government for those chocolate milkshakes. Speaking of food, I had this dream that we were all sent out to our sites but really we all ended up in this overly complex dorm thing and some of us were having trouble moving in because of this torrential rainfall but some of us who were more inclined to cook started cooking up a storm and I stumbled up on TALITHA standing, African-market-style, under a hanger selling fresh chocolate chip cookies and grilled cheese sandwiches. I think I must have stood there for like an hour in the dream eating cookies and sandwiches. She didn’t even have me pay for them! Thank you Talitha! It’s frustrating to be constantly fixated on food back home, yet not wanting to eat hardly anything and also continuing to be disenchanted with the food here.

Like I set out to make rice the other day. Well, let me tell you, this ain’t no instant rice or Uncle Ben’s like at home. You buy the rice and then you have to sort through it. Pick out the gravel. Wash off the dirt, the sand, the hulls that are remaining. Rinse it again, maybe three more times since the water seems to always be cloudy. Cook it. Again, rice is difficult in America for me without a rice cooker, and here without a very controllable stove it’s downright up to chance. Rice is done. Somehow, it’s just not the same, in a way that doesn’t make me want to eat much of it. But I had a half a cup or so with soy sauce and cucumbers and that’ll be most of what I eat for the whole day. I don’t know what’s going on with my appetite. Neo seemed to like it. Yassi and his brother brought over a whole big thing of rice porridge and told me that’s what the feed the dogs with powdered milk at their house and sure enough I sprinkled some powdered milk on the porridge and Neo sucked it down. Milk doesn’t seem to make him sick and he ate so much his sides bulged out. Sometimes they take him out for the afternoon, which unless it’s ridiculously hot, is fine by me.

Wednesday night at about 7 pm I was handed an invitation for a birthday party that was to be held that same night at 9. The Proviseur and Benoit and I went together and checked it out. Well since we are teachers and I am American if someone tells you that something is going to be held at 9 then we assume that it’s going to be held at 9. Not the case here. I think the guy who’s birthday it was showed up a little after 10 along with most of the guests. It’s just understood here that things generally start an hour or two or three after they’re said to. But at the party I met this white guy. I had seen him on a moto the other day and was completely floored and found myself saying Nassara!!! to the people around me and asking if they knew him. They said he was in some kind of agriculture training thing here and he lives here and he’d be here for one more month. He’s French, his name’s Gwenn and all he wanted to do was speak English with me and the man he lives with here, which was fine by me. I think his English may be at the level of my French but it is hard to tell a thing like that. I felt so stupid to be so glad to see a white person, I mean he isn’t an American, but it was still nice. So we’re going to have language sessions now and again for him and his friend to speak English till they leave in a month. Hopefully by then I can get my Moore and Bissa classes going.

On Sunday I went to church! Can you believe it? I got roped into it easily since it is hard to refuse a social occasion here and I guess deep down inside I was curious. Daniel came to get me at about 7 and we left for church, which is just on the other side of the local market. Since we were early and everyone else in this country is late, we stopped at a place across the street to sit and where men were happily drinking calabashes of Dolo (millet wine) at this fine hour of the morning. I tried some, it was ok, maybe better if it were cold. Then the men caught three baby doves out of the tree they were sitting under and we passed them around. I held my tongue.

Church was a run down building (by Burkina standards) with benches filling the room, a simple alter in the front with some nice table clothes draped across and some figurines, fake flowers and a lantern. A doorway in the back of the room gave way to a whole other uncovered area behind this first room. By the time everyone had shown up, it was well past 8:30 and the benches were very full. When I covertly glanced behind me I saw that the other seating area was also packed, with people sitting on mats on the ground. This room that is the church was no bigger than twice my living room at home. I don’t have a particularly big living room. The boy I had come with had seated me next to him and once the room filled up I realized that as with most things here, the church-goers were separated by age and gender. I was in the adult male section. No problem there, it seems that white woman equates with black man here in may situations.

But the service was great, for many reasons. I feel awkward going to church in the US, mainly because I am not religious. There’s a certain amount of uncomfortable I think I will always feel in a church simply because I don’t believe a lot of what most people who come there do. Even if my values coincide with those of a certain religion, I still feel kinda fidgety in church. Fidgety alternating with bored and frustrated. This service was not like that though. For one, most of it was in Mooré, so I didn’t understand hardly a word except for wend (god) and sida (truth) and a few other words that didn’t amount to much. But I still find just sitting and listening to Mooré to be pleasant if not interesting, so that was OK. Secondly, there was African drumming and singing. Now because of the not understanding Mooré thing I can’t tell you about what they were singing but if you had me listen to their music outside of a church context, I would not have guessed it was religion-related. It just sounded like some really great traditional music with big drums and noises I couldn’t make with my mouth if I tried. I’d say about a quarter of the time was spent singing.

On the way back home Daniel took me past someone selling pork and we sat around under a small hangar to wait for it to finish cooking. I narrowly avoided eating pig liver. I had to refuse in two languages about five times before they would eat without me. After a while some pig muscle was done and we took it and headed back to my place. Pig is delicious. Neo got the bones.

Then Yassi and his brother showed up with a bag of uncooked rice, a Maggi tablet (used in practically everything here, a MSG loaded bullion cube I think) and some oil and said it was for me to make Riz Gras. But I don’t know how to make riz gras. They looked at me like I was from Mars. In the states this would be the equivalent of telling someone you didn’t know how to make pasta. They said that they would try to do it if I would just show them where the charcoal and lighter fluid and pan and water and all that was. I said sure and a couple hours later there was riz gras. Well kinda. They’re young kids after all, so it wasn’t perfect. The rice wasn’t really cooked that well and not all the gravel and sand had been picked out. They had also made a remarkably large mess on my porch. But that’s ok. It was cute and touching and Neo liked it.

Daniel hopped on his bike and said he’d be right back. Sure enough he appeared in a few minutes with a chicken under his arm. My brain took a deep breath. “What are you doing with a chicken here,” I asked him. “It’s a cadeau,” he said. And insisted that he prepare it for me. “Ok,” I said. I gave him my Gerber knife and he went around the side of the house and dug a little hole in the ground with the knife. Then he stepped on the wings with one foot and the neck with the other and held the head in his hand while he carefully slit the neck and bled the chicken neatly into the hole. Then he somehow twisted the wings and neck together so that the chicken was self-contained. It twitched and jerked for a couple minutes but that was all. He covered over the hole, handed me back the knife and commenced to plucking the chicken. Neo didn’t care about the chicken so much as he found the feathers fun to play in, and a couple minutes later he emerged with white fluffy feathers stuck to everywhere and coming out of his mouth.

Then we sat together over a bowl cutting up the chicken, which I’ve learned is easier to do with two people. Hold the neck here, cut, ok now hold the wing, cut, ok now hold this, etc. He slit the chest and pulled out the crop and let it dangle and then chopped through the breastbone and then pulled open the abdominal cavity and removed all the organs. He cut off the head entirely and pulled out the trachea and then took the feet and put them through where the trachea used to be, up and out of the chicken’s beak. Then he wrapped the head and feed in the intestines. He discarded the lungs, some major blood vessels, one other part I couldn’t identify, the crop and the trachea. Everything else we put in the bowl and then he washed it all and said “Here you go!” I thought long and hard about how I would prepare it, and I decided on coating it in flour and frying it, like my mom always did, would be the best. I found vegetable oil in town and came home and fried it all up. Ok that’s not true, I discarded the organs and head and feet – I just can’t eat it. I’d have given it to Neo but Yassi and his brother had taken him for the night. When they’d asked me permission I had agreed and then 5 seconds later when I was well past them on my bike did I really realize what they were asking and by then it was too late and Neo was going to have a sleepover with his biggest fans. The next day they told me Neo had cried during the night but that was OK because they gave him some coffee to calm him down. WHAT???? I said. I had to give them a little lecture on dogs and caffeine and not to ever give him that ever again.

Before the afternoon was too far along, Ryenamatu (I have no idea how to actually spell her name) came (she’s Yassi’s big sister) and said that her father had requested that I come down and see the dam. Their father is a big to-do military guy. I asked her if it was far and she said, “Oh no, not far at all.” As an aside, it is almost always a mistake to ask someone if something is far here. It is, I would say, one of the two rules of asking directions here. Rule 1: Burkinabé want to be helpful so they will probably give you directions somewhere even if they don’t actually know exactly where it is, so, you will probably get lost. Rule 2: If you ask someone “Is it far?” the response will almost always be “Oh no, not too far,” and it will almost always be pretty damn far. Like getting down to the hydroelectric plant; pretty far. We were so winded getting there since the road was very hard, even for my snazzy Peace Corps mountain bike. We got there and their father greeted us and I realized that this whole area around me was a pretty high security deal. Daniel and Ryenamatu and I were definitely being checked out by every person we passed to make sure that indeed her father had OKed us to be there.

He took us down into the hydroelectric plant, and it was like going into another world. It was like a reverse culture shock or something. This plant was no small deal. It was huge and nestled down in the center at the base of the dam and inside looked like a completely different country. He gave us the grand tour and it was really a crazy experience, following this huge military guy around with these two kids dressed in traditional clothing around and under and over the whirring of a million different control panels and tanks and valves and motors. He brought us into this dark room through this little door and pointed to this huge thing in the center making an unfathomable amount of noise and asked me if I knew what that was. I looked and I realized that I was standing a couple feet from one of the two enormous turbines. Now I don’t know how dangerous standing that close to that thing actually is, but I felt like I should not have been there. The military pretended to push his daughter into it and she screamed and grabbed my arm. I guess it was scary because it seemed with those kind of huge loud fast-moving machines, if and when something went wrong, it would really go wrong. I couldn’t imagine how this looked to the teenagers who don’t live in a world with jet engines and race cars and furnaces and trains and other big/loud machines. Step outside the plant again and the noise is just a hum and you look around and there’s just miles and miles of breathtaking African landscape. SO peaceful. Then we went up about a billion stairs to the top of the dam itself to see the water feeding into it. I thought I could see the water from where I lived, but that was nothing. The guy explained that the dam itself is 5 km wide and then he pointed to another town off in the distance across the water and said it was 70 km away. That’s a lot of water. It looked not all that different from sitting on East Beach on Watch Hill actually, in that most of what you could see was just water, but you could tell that out there somewhere was more land. This is the Nakembe River.

Then the military gave some directions in Mooré to his daughter about where we were going next which I didn’t understand other than, based on their length, we were probably going somewhere far. We biked along the remainder of the length of the dam and then kept going out a little west of the dam to see what looked like some pretty intense rapids. Now it all made sense. Everyone had been talking about how there is all this rain this year and it’s unprecedented and that they had to open the damn to let some water out. Well, they don’t like actually open the actual damn, but they have these 4 gates that open, kind of like oversized garage doors, to let some water through, and that’s where we were. Normally they have to open the gates for a couple days. This year they have been open for 16 days and still counting. The military pointed to where the rapids were flowing and said the water was flowing to Ghana.

Great rain! you must be thinking. Africa needs rain! Well kind of. Why do they have to open the gates? They open the gates because the acres and acres of rice fields that are feeding Burkina that are irrigated by the run off from the reservoir were being flooded. There’s so much rain that they can’t get the water to decrease fast enough and as a result, a lot of crops are dying. The way the soil here is and the way the rainfall comes all at once and heavily necessitates a very delicate balance between not enough and too much. I’m no expert but I would venture to say that this is climate change in action here. The rains were late this year but then now there is more rain than anyone alive can remember (that’s not just Bagré’s opinion, it’s the case across this latitude of Africa). It gets hotter and dryer in the hot season and wetter with more violent storms in the wet season. People think that global warming just makes things hotter. But it actually creates more intense weather on top of just making it warmer. And getting warmer is no small thing here either. They say that if the temperature goes up just a few degrees in Africa then a lot of the most productive farmland will not be very productive anymore. People here are 80 percent of them subsistence farmers, and that’s not going to be a pretty situation.

But the rains are too heavy across Africa from Senegal in the West to Ethiopia in the East. Northern Ghana has been declared a disaster area. Last I heard on BBC 250,000 people are homeless. Not like there was a little floodwater that got in their basement; homeless like the rain destroyed their homes. And how do you bring aid to people who are cut off in villages by roads that are impassable? The BBC said people are concerned about outbreaks of Cholera and Malaria and Acute Watery Diarrhea. Acute Watery Diarrhea, I thought to myself, so that’s what you call it.

The next day Ryenamatu insisted that we go out to see the new hotel. I assumed that hotel was really just a word they were using to mean something else since there were certainly no hotels here. Well I was kinda wrong. Ryenamatu told me it was kinda far. “Oh boy”, I thought, and loaded up my messenger bag with three litres of water. Well the ride down there was definitely the most beautiful bit of nature I’ve seen here. A thin little dirt path that hugged the coastline of the lake for miles, passing the most beautiful trees and a whole landscape that was just the most vibrant green. And the birds! I could have spent hours and hours down there birding. I stopped Ryenamatu several times to follow some brightly colored bird across a field but without my bird book it was pretty hopeless. We passed tiny little villages of huts, the suburbs of the big village, I guess you could say, and dozens of little creeks where old women with boobs down to their waist and little naked kids were bathing. Finally we came to the hotel.

It wasn’t a hotel like the Econo Lodge, it was more like something I’d expect to find on Cape Cod or the Vinyard or something. There was a big long building that would be the main hall, reception, boutique, restaurant, bar, conference room. Then closer to the water were little buildings, almost what I would describe as a mud huts crossed with cottages. Closer to the water was where a swimming pool was being installed. It wasn’t finished, but I could tell already that this was going to turn into a pretty upscale place, for Burkina’s standards. I mean that’s the case wherever you put something like that; a place where people can go to get away from it all and go fishing in fresh, clean air. Sure there might be schistosomiasis in the water and no reels on the fishing poles but still, this was a nice place. It kind of made me a little said because it reminded me of how people in the States would use nature like this as a form of tourism. But that’s how it is I suppose. Ecotourism, after all, is supporting parks and stuff in the East of Africa, and that, in turn, is keeping the megafauna around at least a little longer.

I came home to find Yassi and his brother on my porch, quietly guarding my hanging laundry. They said a kid came and tried to steal one of my shirts but that he hit him real good with a rock and the kid ran off to his mother. I gave him a high five. They asked if they could take Neo out to play and I said sure just come back by sundown. By sundown no kids or puppy had appeared so I cleaned house a bit, chased a bat out of my living room, and then went off to Yassi’s house to find Neo because I was pretty sure they’d snuck him off for another sleepover. Yassi’s family lives in a nice, large courtyard with good-looking huts and no electricity. Kids were sleeping on the ground and Daniel and I sat down and waited. Sure enough someone handed me a sleeping puppy.

Their father, the military, showed up and we talked for a while. He was born in Ghana and has been with the military for quite a while and explained to me his philosophy on life. He believes that French-speaking countries have a real problem. He says people here don’t want to work, unlike in English speaking places. He believes that in a place where people can’t afford or don’t want to go through years and years of general education, that maybe it would be better to have more technical schools so that people could have more skills. With training then a person has worth and whether their father dies or no matter what happens, they’ll be able to earn a living. So he keeps his military salary for himself and his wife has a restaurant and he tries to keep his kids occupied and learning even during vacation. That’s why the two boys go out and watch the bulls. Even though the family does not raise cattle for a living, it gives them a sense of self or a sense or responsibility, he says. I thanked him for the conversation and then tucked sleeping Neo in my backpack and we went back home. By then it was 9 and since I had to get up in the morning, I headed to bed. Isn’t that a strange phrase? “I have to get up in the morning.” I noticed that the kids had been a little too creative with the scissors I let them borrow that afternoon and had cut 6 uneven lines of fur off Neo’s back and given his whiskers a trim. Nothing too damaging, but now he definitely looks like a mut.

And now I’m here in the capital. Until next time. I love you all.