Happy 5 months in country everyone!

HELLO TO RAEBECCA AND FAMILY! I'm sending you a letter but it's gonna take a little while to get there.

African Grey Hornbills are like Zazu from The Lion King but in grayscale. They remind me of Toucans but slimmer. They swoop around in flocks here in fields where there are interspersed trees, which is pretty much most of what you’ll find here. When they vocalize they sound exactly like a squeaky playground swing, and they sure are loud. I don’t know if it’s something about this particular swing but when I hear them I automatically think of the swings on the beach on Mason’s Island – so much so that when I hear the Hornbills I am almost surprised not to hear seagulls and waves.

This is my favorite hut in Bagre so far. I bike past it everyday to get to school and it's there all by itself in a huge field. Sometimes there's a bike outside. This is much the style of most of the huts here. The other style is simple mud walls. One day when I can speak Bissa or Moore I'll go over and see who lives there. If we could make postcards of our villages, this would be the picture i put on mine.

Nassara! Vous avez maigri! Faut bien manger! is what hear in various forms or another, I’m losing weight – and I should eat better. The pudgy American form here is seen as very healthy and attractive and so what I am becoming is not an improvement to them. Nutrition aside – I know that I am in fact healthier – just by virtue of the fact that I exercise daily – no exceptions, I’m starting to listen to my body more when it asks for nutrition. Like someone gave me a smoked fish today and normally I would have needed to pick out the muscle and leave the rest to have found it appetizing but now everything goes down except the bones.

The rains are gone for good now, and in their place has come extremely dry air, a bit cooler, and a good strong wind. The wind kicks up about midday and blows almost constantly. I no longer have beads of sweat all over me since it all evaporates so fast. The salt on my skin tells me I’m still sweating like a pig though. You know that amazing feeling you get when you pop open a cold soda or whatever your beverage of choice is and start to take those first few glups on a really hot day when you’ve been out working or playing and you swear that what you’re drinking is the single best thing on the planet? Well, that’s a feeling I get pretty much everyday with room temperature water. I wish I had a place on my body – maybe on my foot or something – that I could just run water into so that I could have enough water all day without constantly being attached at the hip to my Nalgene.

And my nosebleeds are back. I’m really going to have to be diligent about putting saline solution or gel up my nose because having to bike a half hour in dry wind is not going to do my nose any favors. I’m back to about one nosebleed a day. With saline it should get better. My iron intake is low to begin with – I don’t need to be losing more for no reason.

Because of the dam and the reservoir, the mosquitoes haven’t left with the rains. Either way though I think that I’ve conditioned myself to feel itchy in places below the knee at around 8 pm every night regardless of whether I’ve gotten any bites or not. I’ve learned the limits of what’s ok to scratch and what’s not ok to scratch though. I’ve learned that you can just plain scratch through your skin if you do it long enough - even if you don’t use or have any nails to do it with.

A couple weeks ago I came home from working at Steven’s office and it was late – about midnight – which is to say that no one was awake at all in my area. The moon was full and I could see just about everything, and I moved to my door, took out my keys and started to open my extremely loud lock when I heard a loud hissing that could be nothing other than a snake. I looked down, and there it was – about a foot from my feet and reared up. My first thought was: Someone put a snake on my porch – since only days earlier all the weeds and grass and anything plantlike had been bulldozed away everywhere around the school grounds for this vary reason – to get rid of snakes. My neighbor, Moussa, had told me even just the day before not to worry because there were no snakes here. Well this was a snake believe it or not. I ran to the car where Steven was waiting because I didn’t have a light on me to see very well and while the full moon was bright it wasn’t good enough. “There’s a snake on my porch!” I told him – but he didn’t catch it. “Il y a un serpent sur ma terrace!” – I tried in French but this was no better. “Just give me a flashlight!” I said and by this time he’d gotten the English and I now saw that he was much more scared of snakes than I. I ran back to the porch, relieved to see the snake hadn’t moved, and of course by now my puppy, who usually makes herself scarce when I’m away, had come to see what was up. I grabbed her and threw her in the kitchen and then grabbed her water bowl, threw out the water, and trapped the snake under the bowl. I put a large rock on the bowl and told Steven I was going to sleep now.

The next morning I woke to find a dead pigeon in the yard and the bowl still where it was. I think the pigeon died of a sickness completely unrelated to the snake since in fact several of my other pigeons have since died the same way. I went to the neighbor’s, and within minutes men with big sticks came and killed the snake. That week following we found three more snakes in and around my neighbors yard. Now it makes sense to me why they’re there: as the weather cools off and gets drier, it really cools down at night and for a snake, my cement porch which has been baking in the sun all day is certainly a more attractive place to be if you’re cold blooded than in the dirt. But since then everyone talks about how brave the nassara was to trap the snake like that. Call me crazy but, in my opinion it’s always better to know where a snake is than where it isn’t.

Life is really picking up here. Tests to give, tests to grade, lessons to plan, lessons to give, places to bike, people to greet, food to find, local languages to learn. I learned the other day that originally i was meant to be placed on the other side of Bagre - in the traditional Bissa village. But they couldn't find a suitable house for me, so that is how i ended up in the nice new houses across town and why I have to bike every day. Living there would have been a different bag of worms. Bissa bissa bissa and little else.

But I can see how time's gonna fly here. It's starting already. But i'm fine - Turtle's fine - and I hope everyone's enjoying the cooler weather of November back at home. I'm jealous.

Hello everyone!

Well school’s been in session for two weeks now. Burkina Faso has the same date for school starting as France does (Oct 1), but here, for various reasons including the timing of the harvest, school doesn’t actually start on that day. That’s a day when people get together, introduce the staff, etc. In the days following the staff have a meeting to discuss the calendar and other administrative things, and the kids will clean up the school grounds and the classrooms. It’s amazing how much dust accumulates in these classrooms over night let alone throughout an entire summer vacation. When classes actually start varies by school, as it does in the States. For me I started last Wednesday. I didn’t know it was going to start till that morning, so I held off and started on Thursday.

I’m teaching the equivalent of two classes of 6th grade life sciences, one class of 7th grade life science, and one class of 6th grade math. There are approximately 75 kids in each of the classes. All the kids have uniforms, which are plain light brown cotton material with a left front chest pocket and above it’s a little black writing saying C.E.G de Bagré, which is the name of the school (College des Enseignements Generals de Bagré). The girls have long skirts and the boys have pants. The combination of uniforms in such a bland color scheme keeps making me think of prison uniforms. But after it wore off I’ve decided I like how they look and having everyone dressed in one color is just something very hard to get used to here where everything seems to be covered in abnormally large amounts of different colors.

Because I bike 5 km to school every day, I can’t just wear anything to school. I have several nice skirts that I’ve had made here but I can only wear on of them since when it comes down to it, it’s pretty hard to bike in a skirt. If it’s long then you can’t move your legs and if it’s too short then you’re going to flash your knees in the wind and that’s the equivalent of flashing your boobs in the States pretty much, or at least I was told.

No one can believe that the Nassara doesn’t have a moto and actually has to bike to school. Some people think it’s funny, some people are just confused, and some people think it’s not fair. The correct answer, of course, is that I’m forbidden to ride a moto by the Peace Corps, and biking is good for me. It’s not that hard of a ride, especially not at 6:30 in the morning, but the ride home around mid day is pretty hard, and sometimes I’ll think it’s starting to rain but it’s just sweat flying off my head onto my arms or legs. When I get home and the sweat dries I have a fine powder of salt all over my arms from the sweat. But most of my students have to make the same bike ride, so it’s not that unreasonable. Supposed to be living at the level of the people I’m serving right?

So then I decided to be on top of things and do my laundry so I hauled out my basins and filled them with water and washed my clothes. If anyone ever tries to tell you that washing clothes in basins by hand is not a sport, do not believe them. But I finished and i was about to hang my clothes up to dry when this bull came by my fence. Daniel was planting a replacement papaya sappling for the one Turtle tore up and he splashed some water at the bull. The bull licked his lips and Daniel laughed and said "he's thirsty!" (well not in english). Next thing we know he comes lumbering in my gate and I go up to him and pet him and he starts frantically licking my hands. My hands are both wet and soapy so I assume that he wants water, not soap. So I give him a bucket of water and he sucks it down. Then he goes back after my hands and then he smells my laundry. I figured he'd smell the soap and back off but that just got him more excited and he stuck his big face into my laundry and started chewing on my clothes. Then he wanted the bar of soap; in fact the poor bull wanted nothing more than to lick and chew my soapy water and laundry. He wasn't enormous but he was still an uncastrated bull, so Daniel, the neighbor's kids and I tried to suggest that he stop chewing my clothes and leave. It took a lot of shoving and stones and clothes that eventually needed to be rewashed.

And then the neighbor’s goat got in my yard and ate my banana tree. Still unknown how said goat gained entrance into my locked and fenced-in courtyard. Here’s turtle pulling the goat by its lead. It’s a fun game for her. This way the goat wants to pull the other way cuz goats are stubborn and if she gets to close to them then they butt her. Here she is "playing" with the goat that ate my tree. The goat seemed very confused.

A bulldozer came through and over the course of three days plowed away all the grass and shrubs around my and my neighbors’ courtyards and on all of the school grounds of the lycee. Now it’s just brown. Everything. I was kind of sad because to my eyes it’s not very beautiful at all now, even though my neighbors can’t keep quiet about how beautiful they think it is, but one of the real motivations for doing it is that where there is no tall grass and shrubs, there will probably be no snakes. And where there are kids there should be no snakes, because snakes can kill kids. Can kill me too, I’d just have more of a chance. So if no grass means no snakes for me and my dog and my friends, then that’s fine by me.

School started off pretty awkwardly. I don’t really see how it could have gone otherwise though. I mean the whole “Hi, you don’t know me, I come from America, I’m a volunteer here, I work for le Corps de la Paix American.” It’ll get you blank stares every time. But since I have no other perspective, maybe I’d get blank stares no matter what. I didn’t really plan out what I wanted to say very well for the first day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I knew what I wanted to accomplish but anything else just felt like scripting it and then I’d feel really dumb in addition to just sounding dumb. I explained that my learning French is a process and that there are some things that I know about the language that they don’t, but there are lot more things that they know that I don’t and could they please be patient and don’t hesitate to point out errors and raise their hands when there are errors; don’t just talk amongst themselves. Saying la monde versus le monde might be hilarious to them but I might not even notice.

I am not used to teaching and getting no response. I mean when you ask if they understand they’ll respond yes – but other than that – try to ask critical thinking questions or even answers to seemingly logical progressions of things and you get mostly nothing. I’m just going to hope it’s the beginning and a consequence of that.

I finally made it out to the rice fields on bike a couple times. Once by myself and once with Daniel and Turtle in my bag. That's where Daniel works everyday since he doesn't go to school and his family has a lot of rice. Here's a picture of the rice fields we visited. This is all possible because of the dam here. They can give water to these enormous fields all year long. The plants were just the most brilliant green and the birds were completely different down there because of the water.

I’ve gone over to the Commader of the Gendarmes’ for dinner three times now. Would have gone four times but my French comprehension is so bad on the phone that I came away from the conversation thinking he was coming to my place so I stayed home instead of going to market but then I found out that they’d been expecting me for dinner. Oops, He gets paid well and I know that but it’s a little puzzling since we eat really well. Like bottles of soda and chicken and salad. And then he gave me thirty eggs and a thing of instant iced tea. I must consult my LCFs about how to know when too many gifts are too much. I know this would be too much for a normal person but I also know he gets paid a good deal more than the average person and having been in France he knows more what I would probably like to eat (chicken not To). No wife to speak of though so just trying to keep my eyes open. From what I’ve heard it’s not a big deal or a problem to date a Burkinabe here but it is a great deal more difficult to back track or stop dating someone. So best not to accidentally lead anyone on by accepting too many gifts. Just need to figure out where the line is.

Well as I’m writing this blog entry I’m being kept awake cuz Turtle is eating chicken bones SO LOUDLY that there is no way I can sleep. If you’d seen my chicken eating before Burkina Faso you’d be blown away by what I eat now. Still absolutely no organs – they still turn my stomach – but as far as your standard pieces of chicken, I eat it all except the cartilage and bone. If Turtle’s not there looking pitiful then I’ll clean the bones right off. Never thought that would happen. Turtle is doing well and growing real fast. She’ll sit and stay and come and even wait to eat till I say OK when she’s calm but when she’s excited I’ll say sit and she’ll just bounce around. By my estimate she’s only 3 and a half months so that’s still pretty good. She’s best friends with the dog next door who will growl and bite every other dog but her even though all she does is bite his ears and tail all the day long. If you'd like to see a cute movie of her playing with the neighbor's mutt (yes I know she's a mutt too but she's just really pretty) then go here: Turtle movie.

But everything's going well. Thank you for your emails and letters and care packages again! I'm going to actually learn how to have a post office box and send letters now so maybe you'll see some coming the other way in a few weeks! Love you all!

School Starts Tomorrow

Went out to sneak up on a big flock of Cattle Egrets today but they startle really easily. Man how much would you pay to have wings like that. All's well here. School starts tomorrow (like I actually start teaching), so wish me luck!