I would just like to mention that I have received some AMAZING care packages from you all at home. Parents – as usual you are amazing, but I need throw a special thank you to Raebecca, Katherine’s MOM, Don, Talitha and Agnes and also to Julia’s mom for the Halloween card that played the theme from the Adam’s Family. Talitha had this beautiful collar made for Turtle (see photo). I will be eating reading and living well for a while thanks to you all. I love you all.THANKSGIVING:
Even though this is wicked late, I should fill you all in a little on our Thanksgiving. Jill and Marcus, a married couple living in a northern village called Titao, decided to host a Thanksgiving gathering. Ouahigouya, where we trained, is pretty darn North but Titao’s about an hour bus ride North and East of that. Burkina Faso is roughly the size of Colorado – just keep that in mind. So 7 am I start out in the Southeast of the country and meet up with Marty a couple hours later in Tenkodogo. We take the 9:30 am STMB bus out of Tenkodogo to Ouaga and meet up with lots of other Volunteers there. We take off out of there and get a 1:30 pm STAF bus out of Ouagadougou up to Ouahigouya. We meet up with Clay others at the gare, but I mention Clay because he’s transporting a live TURKEY, which he has been transporting from the very south south west of the country in a cardboard box.
I ask if they’ve given him water or food and the answer is no, so I school up some corn laying on the ground give it to him and then hold out a plastic bag with water for him to drink. This did not help the getting-too-much-attention factor. Turkey’s are actually pretty expensive here, because they are rare, especially in the North, fetching about 40,000 CFA (80 bucks) in some places, so we had to constantly be babysitting this thing. Traveling in groups always ends up being more difficult than traveling alone, even though it’s immensely more enjoyable. That many more bikes to get put on the bus, that many more bags not to lose, that many more people to have to fit on the bus. Gotta argue about whether the bikes will fit, gotta watch your bag be put on the bus and stay there, and gotta push and shove your self and your friends on the bus or you’re not gonna go anywhere (even though at that point your bag and bike might). Our dear turkey had to go too, shoved under in the baggage compartments with the rest of the stuff. We get to Ouahigouya around 4 pm, our first time for many of us in the city since our training ended. Some of us stay with the bags and some of us go looking for a way to keep going North to Titao since we really needed to get there before nightfall.
We find a bus up to Titao and all pile on. We’re running late though so we’re the last ones to board and we squish into the last seats left, in the back left corner of the bus. It was immediately apparent why these seats were empty: one of the huge windows of the bus was just plain missing in front of our seats which means that once we started barreling down the dirt (or should I say dust) roads, clouds of dust would float right in and onto us. Wish we had a picture of us sitting there, the only nassaras to be seen, all crammed into the back of the bus. This was my first trip down a dirt road in a greyhound sized bus and oh dear lord. Becca and Ray were in the very back where the seats were so broken that there wasn’t even any cloth covering the metal beneath where the seats were. The road was bad. We crawled down the road and the bumps were so big that slamming back down on our seats each time was actually pretty painful. I was praying that my nose which had been bleeding about 4 times a day would not pick this moment to let loose. We get there. It’s dark. We find all our stuff and start walking to the house.
We spent two wonderfully relaxing days at their house, full of eating and eating and more eating, sleeping, drinking, and of course lots of talking. Mac was charged with having to kill the turkey. Most knives are dull here. If you are out there and are joining the Peace Corps, I would recommend bringing a good knife or at least a sharpening stone. Mac basically had to saw through the turkey’s neck with something only marginally sharper than a butter knife. We also got a pig to roast and try as we did to get a really sharp knife to use to cut it’s throat, it did not go well and let’s just say I’ll never forget that pig’s screaming.
In addition to the meat, we were able to make mashed potatoes and gravy, a couple good salads, falafel and an apply pie-ish dessert. DELICIOUS. Here are lots of pics from Turkey Day. Up top is me and Caleb and Mac, two of my best friends here. Below that is our bonfire. Below that is half of us sitting at our lovely Thanksgiving Day table. And right here is Becca and Clay (big beard) and Mac again. We had a great bonfire and popped our REI Bug Huts out in the courtyard like pod people (we all own the same tent) - and down 2 pictures is me in my tent.
We’ve come to the end of our first trimester here at the CEG. I don’t really understand why it is that we are on a trimester system where as even across town the school I live next to is on a semester system. And then on top of that, our director tells us that we have to give three tests a trimester, where as the teachers at the school I live next to are only obligated to give two per semester. It really wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t really matter how much material we get through, but we are really pushed to get through more material that even the Burkinabe teachers manage to do. A test takes two hours and then another hour for correction, so all told, on test eats one week’s work of SVT (Biology) and so three tests a semester eat three weeks.
I have friends (in village)! I’m really falling into a groove with my neighbors, so much so that I don’t ever really find myself alone with nothing to do in the evenings anymore. That sure beats my first impression of what life here in the evenings was going to be like: me and BBC and the puppy and enough mosquitoes to make you almost need to turn up the volume on the radio.
A brief introduction to my neighbors: Well there’s the Proviseur and his family (wife, three kids, niece, a bonne, another guy who’s boarding with them, two goats, a dog and a cat), Actually the cat just died. Belly swelled up and it started vomiting blood and then keeled over. Probably a snake. In any case, They are wonderful people. They are definitely my source of stability in this little neighborhood. I just watch them if I’m ever confused about what to do and if I ever need an explanation or advice on how to act or what to say, I can usually find it next door. The Proviseur’s wife is really the best. Definitely becoming my village mother.
My neighbors have stated opening up to me about the reality of teachers’ behavior with respect to students. In particular, to the reality of the male teacher’s behavior with female students. To be fair, I should really say it the other way around: female students’ behavior with respect to male teachers. Now I wouldn’t know this unless I lived close enough to my neighbors to throw rocks through their windows (not so serious since we don’t have glass on the windows), or if my other neighbors weren’t such gossips, but it is how it is. Teachers sleep with students. Period. The vast majority of teachers are male and so the vast majority of these relationships are between male teachers and female students. Some teachers refuse to be with their own students because think of how badly that kind of thing could blow up in your face the day the girl tries to disrespect your authority in the classroom and you have to put her in her place except now you’re the vulnerable one.
My other three neighbors are all men roughly my age living alone. There’s Ouedraogo (math and science teacher), Traore (English teacher), and Banse (History/Geography teacher). Ouedraogo’s really a teacher in training, but he can still have the job. Traore just graduated from University in June and has the best English I have heard here in Burkina Faso so far. Banse has an interesting story. He was diplomat type figure working for the ministry of foreign affairs and one day he went on strike for an hour and because of circumstances and such, this was not OK for him to do. He and many others of his colleagues who had done the same as he were separated from their jobs temporarily and sent out into villages to teach. He was sent out to Bagre. Banse and Traore are both Burkinabes who grew up in the Cote d’Ivoire.
Finishing out the semester and calculating grades is certainly done differently here than in the States. The kids have roughly the same subjects as you would find in the States, and similar to grades at University, each class gets a grade which is weighed based upon how many hours a week the class is held. So at the end of the semester or trimester, your grade for each class is multiplied by the coefficient representing the weight of the class and then the results from each class are added up together and then divided by the total number of hours of class to find the kid’s trimester grade. All grades are expressed out of 20, Unlike in America, kids, even in the youngest classes, have to make a certain grade to pass on to the next level. This means that those little 6 yr olds are graded on how well they make their numbers and letters and drawings. At the secondary level, the kids need to make a 10 to go onto the next level. We call this the moyen. It’s really pretty tough to make the moyen, and I’d say that based on the grades I saw, at the 6th grade level, about half the kids didn’t make that moyen this first trimester. This changes based on the school you’re at and the grade you’re talking about, but the point is, school is a survival of the fittest and grades above 15 are rare wherever you look.
(This is Mac pointing to his ridiculously North site on the map. Notice how few roads there are up there).
Even though this is wicked late, I should fill you all in a little on our Thanksgiving. Jill and Marcus, a married couple living in a northern village called Titao, decided to host a Thanksgiving gathering. Ouahigouya, where we trained, is pretty darn North but Titao’s about an hour bus ride North and East of that. Burkina Faso is roughly the size of Colorado – just keep that in mind. So 7 am I start out in the Southeast of the country and meet up with Marty a couple hours later in Tenkodogo. We take the 9:30 am STMB bus out of Tenkodogo to Ouaga and meet up with lots of other Volunteers there. We take off out of there and get a 1:30 pm STAF bus out of Ouagadougou up to Ouahigouya. We meet up with Clay others at the gare, but I mention Clay because he’s transporting a live TURKEY, which he has been transporting from the very south south west of the country in a cardboard box.
I ask if they’ve given him water or food and the answer is no, so I school up some corn laying on the ground give it to him and then hold out a plastic bag with water for him to drink. This did not help the getting-too-much-attention factor. Turkey’s are actually pretty expensive here, because they are rare, especially in the North, fetching about 40,000 CFA (80 bucks) in some places, so we had to constantly be babysitting this thing. Traveling in groups always ends up being more difficult than traveling alone, even though it’s immensely more enjoyable. That many more bikes to get put on the bus, that many more bags not to lose, that many more people to have to fit on the bus. Gotta argue about whether the bikes will fit, gotta watch your bag be put on the bus and stay there, and gotta push and shove your self and your friends on the bus or you’re not gonna go anywhere (even though at that point your bag and bike might). Our dear turkey had to go too, shoved under in the baggage compartments with the rest of the stuff. We get to Ouahigouya around 4 pm, our first time for many of us in the city since our training ended. Some of us stay with the bags and some of us go looking for a way to keep going North to Titao since we really needed to get there before nightfall.
We find a bus up to Titao and all pile on. We’re running late though so we’re the last ones to board and we squish into the last seats left, in the back left corner of the bus. It was immediately apparent why these seats were empty: one of the huge windows of the bus was just plain missing in front of our seats which means that once we started barreling down the dirt (or should I say dust) roads, clouds of dust would float right in and onto us. Wish we had a picture of us sitting there, the only nassaras to be seen, all crammed into the back of the bus. This was my first trip down a dirt road in a greyhound sized bus and oh dear lord. Becca and Ray were in the very back where the seats were so broken that there wasn’t even any cloth covering the metal beneath where the seats were. The road was bad. We crawled down the road and the bumps were so big that slamming back down on our seats each time was actually pretty painful. I was praying that my nose which had been bleeding about 4 times a day would not pick this moment to let loose. We get there. It’s dark. We find all our stuff and start walking to the house.
We spent two wonderfully relaxing days at their house, full of eating and eating and more eating, sleeping, drinking, and of course lots of talking. Mac was charged with having to kill the turkey. Most knives are dull here. If you are out there and are joining the Peace Corps, I would recommend bringing a good knife or at least a sharpening stone. Mac basically had to saw through the turkey’s neck with something only marginally sharper than a butter knife. We also got a pig to roast and try as we did to get a really sharp knife to use to cut it’s throat, it did not go well and let’s just say I’ll never forget that pig’s screaming.In addition to the meat, we were able to make mashed potatoes and gravy, a couple good salads, falafel and an apply pie-ish dessert. DELICIOUS. Here are lots of pics from Turkey Day. Up top is me and Caleb and Mac, two of my best friends here. Below that is our bonfire. Below that is half of us sitting at our lovely Thanksgiving Day table. And right here is Becca and Clay (big beard) and Mac again. We had a great bonfire and popped our REI Bug Huts out in the courtyard like pod people (we all own the same tent) - and down 2 pictures is me in my tent.
We’ve come to the end of our first trimester here at the CEG. I don’t really understand why it is that we are on a trimester system where as even across town the school I live next to is on a semester system. And then on top of that, our director tells us that we have to give three tests a trimester, where as the teachers at the school I live next to are only obligated to give two per semester. It really wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t really matter how much material we get through, but we are really pushed to get through more material that even the Burkinabe teachers manage to do. A test takes two hours and then another hour for correction, so all told, on test eats one week’s work of SVT (Biology) and so three tests a semester eat three weeks.I have friends (in village)! I’m really falling into a groove with my neighbors, so much so that I don’t ever really find myself alone with nothing to do in the evenings anymore. That sure beats my first impression of what life here in the evenings was going to be like: me and BBC and the puppy and enough mosquitoes to make you almost need to turn up the volume on the radio.
A brief introduction to my neighbors: Well there’s the Proviseur and his family (wife, three kids, niece, a bonne, another guy who’s boarding with them, two goats, a dog and a cat), Actually the cat just died. Belly swelled up and it started vomiting blood and then keeled over. Probably a snake. In any case, They are wonderful people. They are definitely my source of stability in this little neighborhood. I just watch them if I’m ever confused about what to do and if I ever need an explanation or advice on how to act or what to say, I can usually find it next door. The Proviseur’s wife is really the best. Definitely becoming my village mother.My neighbors have stated opening up to me about the reality of teachers’ behavior with respect to students. In particular, to the reality of the male teacher’s behavior with female students. To be fair, I should really say it the other way around: female students’ behavior with respect to male teachers. Now I wouldn’t know this unless I lived close enough to my neighbors to throw rocks through their windows (not so serious since we don’t have glass on the windows), or if my other neighbors weren’t such gossips, but it is how it is. Teachers sleep with students. Period. The vast majority of teachers are male and so the vast majority of these relationships are between male teachers and female students. Some teachers refuse to be with their own students because think of how badly that kind of thing could blow up in your face the day the girl tries to disrespect your authority in the classroom and you have to put her in her place except now you’re the vulnerable one.
My other three neighbors are all men roughly my age living alone. There’s Ouedraogo (math and science teacher), Traore (English teacher), and Banse (History/Geography teacher). Ouedraogo’s really a teacher in training, but he can still have the job. Traore just graduated from University in June and has the best English I have heard here in Burkina Faso so far. Banse has an interesting story. He was diplomat type figure working for the ministry of foreign affairs and one day he went on strike for an hour and because of circumstances and such, this was not OK for him to do. He and many others of his colleagues who had done the same as he were separated from their jobs temporarily and sent out into villages to teach. He was sent out to Bagre. Banse and Traore are both Burkinabes who grew up in the Cote d’Ivoire.Finishing out the semester and calculating grades is certainly done differently here than in the States. The kids have roughly the same subjects as you would find in the States, and similar to grades at University, each class gets a grade which is weighed based upon how many hours a week the class is held. So at the end of the semester or trimester, your grade for each class is multiplied by the coefficient representing the weight of the class and then the results from each class are added up together and then divided by the total number of hours of class to find the kid’s trimester grade. All grades are expressed out of 20, Unlike in America, kids, even in the youngest classes, have to make a certain grade to pass on to the next level. This means that those little 6 yr olds are graded on how well they make their numbers and letters and drawings. At the secondary level, the kids need to make a 10 to go onto the next level. We call this the moyen. It’s really pretty tough to make the moyen, and I’d say that based on the grades I saw, at the 6th grade level, about half the kids didn’t make that moyen this first trimester. This changes based on the school you’re at and the grade you’re talking about, but the point is, school is a survival of the fittest and grades above 15 are rare wherever you look.
(This is Mac pointing to his ridiculously North site on the map. Notice how few roads there are up there).Didn’t make the moyen? Well you have to retake that year of school. You’re allowed to do that once per block of school (as in: once during primary school, once during first cycle secondary school, and once during second cycle secondary school). If you don’t make it for the second time, then you’re not allowed to continue at that school. You’re welcome to try to get into another school if there’s room, but for many kids this is impossible. Most villages have one secondary school so that means that if you’re going to switch schools then it might mean biking 20 km to get to another one every morning or moving away from your family to another relative somewhere else in the country to attend school there. Or most likely, your family has a bunch of kids and maybe your parents will decide that you’ll be better used in the fields. Most kids are not in secondary school, so the kids that are got a lucky break to begin with. The ones that can stay in are even luckier.
I was talking about calculating grades. Well, it’s all done by hand. Hundred’s of student’s grades handled with pen and paper. Once you have their grades for your class calculated, you get the class together and read off the grades in front of everyone. They’ve done their own calculations so this is their opportunity to tell you if you’ve made a mistake. Grades are also incredibly public here. Then you take the grades for the kids in your class and you enter them into the bulletins, which are these huge books of grade reports for each kid and carbon paper. You write in each kid’s grade, carefully placing a piece of cardboard below each set of papers before you write, and then write your remark about the grade and sign. Over and over and over.
To boot, I am the professor principale for the 5eme class, which means that I am responsible for taking all those individual class grades and calculating each kid’s trimester average. After that is completed, you rank the students. These are all super fun activities to do by hand. How many kids? 93 for each 6eme class (186) and 68 for 5eme. That should show you how many get weeded out from 6th grade to 7th grade.
(Everyone loves absolutely ridiculous pictures of themselves! This is me and Christina (we both went to Cornell) and apparently we thought what we were hearing was outlandishly strange. We like to call this picture "CORNELL SAYS NO!")
I was talking about calculating grades. Well, it’s all done by hand. Hundred’s of student’s grades handled with pen and paper. Once you have their grades for your class calculated, you get the class together and read off the grades in front of everyone. They’ve done their own calculations so this is their opportunity to tell you if you’ve made a mistake. Grades are also incredibly public here. Then you take the grades for the kids in your class and you enter them into the bulletins, which are these huge books of grade reports for each kid and carbon paper. You write in each kid’s grade, carefully placing a piece of cardboard below each set of papers before you write, and then write your remark about the grade and sign. Over and over and over.
To boot, I am the professor principale for the 5eme class, which means that I am responsible for taking all those individual class grades and calculating each kid’s trimester average. After that is completed, you rank the students. These are all super fun activities to do by hand. How many kids? 93 for each 6eme class (186) and 68 for 5eme. That should show you how many get weeded out from 6th grade to 7th grade.
(Everyone loves absolutely ridiculous pictures of themselves! This is me and Christina (we both went to Cornell) and apparently we thought what we were hearing was outlandishly strange. We like to call this picture "CORNELL SAYS NO!") Next trimester, life’s going change a little bit for me. The other SVT teacher at my school passed this examination he took to get into a training program he wanted and so he’s left the school. Now I have a choice: I either start teaching all his classes in addition to mine, or let the kids go without a teacher. Doesn’t really matter for 4eme, and since I already teach 6eme A I could just take the 6eme B class too, but I really want 3eme to be covered since they’re the ones that have to face the BEPC exam at the end of the year to be able to move onto high school.
My birthday fell on the same day as our 6th month anniversary of being in country! Birthday’s here aren’t at all what they are in the US – in village a lot of people don’t even know theirs. Their birth is described in terms of the seasons and the rains and without need to ever put a date on an identification card, they’ll never know the date really. I mean to start with, there’s a lot of people who don’t use the days of the week. I remember asking my first Moore teacher for the days of the week in Moore and she had to really struggle to remember them and even then she couldn’t think of Thursday. Most villages are on a every-three-day-market schedule and so that is their week equivalent. At any rate, I told a few people it was my birthday and in return got some very touching gifts. Some of my 6eme kids came and presented me with a bag full of about three pounds of fresh peanuts. Banse tried his best to sing the Happy Birthday song to me and we had an extra large meal of attieke and fish between my neighbors and me.
(Here are our 5 remaining volunteers from my training group in GEE - Girls Education and Empowerment. They started as 12).
My birthday fell on the same day as our 6th month anniversary of being in country! Birthday’s here aren’t at all what they are in the US – in village a lot of people don’t even know theirs. Their birth is described in terms of the seasons and the rains and without need to ever put a date on an identification card, they’ll never know the date really. I mean to start with, there’s a lot of people who don’t use the days of the week. I remember asking my first Moore teacher for the days of the week in Moore and she had to really struggle to remember them and even then she couldn’t think of Thursday. Most villages are on a every-three-day-market schedule and so that is their week equivalent. At any rate, I told a few people it was my birthday and in return got some very touching gifts. Some of my 6eme kids came and presented me with a bag full of about three pounds of fresh peanuts. Banse tried his best to sing the Happy Birthday song to me and we had an extra large meal of attieke and fish between my neighbors and me.
(Here are our 5 remaining volunteers from my training group in GEE - Girls Education and Empowerment. They started as 12). Speaking of food: I really like eating with my hands now. It’s usually how it’s done in a group – you all sit around a bit bowl and eat with your hands – but in the beginning it was really embarrassing. I was constantly afraid of dumping the food on myself or smearing too much of it on my face while trying to get it in my mouth and of course sometimes I really would. I had to learn when it was appropriate to lick my fingers or when to put them in my mouth, which foods can be squished into balls and how to not get that drippy sauce all over my pants. Now there’s really no doubt: I like eating rice and attieke better with my hands. Traore likes hold out his hand and say that god gave us our fingers for a fork, the palm of our hand for a spoon and your teeth for a knife.
I’ve gotten really good at eating fish now. I still won’t eat the heads but I’ll eat everything else but for the bones, including the fins if the fish was fried. The other day my language tutor came over and afterwards he took me to meet one of his friends. He wanted me to meet the girl he said had “eyes like mine”. He explained that there was a family with children who had a grandmother who was Portugese and so they have very claire skin compared to other Burkinabe and this one girl has green brown eyes. We walked in and took a seat. I noticed the empty bowls on the table and hoped that at ten o’clock this Sunday morning I wouldn’t have to face anything too challenging at the table. The picked-clean jawbone in the bowl across the table didn’t give me much hope. Different children came out, many toting babies on their hips, who would each start crying and clinging to their older sibling when they saw me. They tried experimenting with how close each baby would have to be to me before it started freaking out. Then the mother brought out bowls of soup and I learned that it was indeed sheep head soup. My language tutor was very good and sensitively explained that eating heads was against my totem and that he would take what bits of meat were in my bowl. It was a simple tomato and sheep head based soup with little fried millet based dough disks in it (the word for that is galettes). I fished out the bits of hair and skin and bone and meat that had found their way into my bowl and deposited them in Anatole’s bowl.
About a month ago I got a bad head cold. Four of my pigeons had recently kicked the bucket from a respiratory disease and so I was terrified there for a moment that I had bird flu, but the symptoms moved nicely along and all I was left with was a sore throat and no voice. Maybe it has something to do with the sand and the wind here but all I can say is that BY FAR that was the worst and longest sore throat of my life. I’ve also never really lost my voice like that before. Just gone down to a whisper. My kids must have had some level of compassion for me since they were inordinately quiet those days when I came to school. Took over a week for it to come back.
In each class there are one or two kids designated as the chefs de classe. They are sort of the leaders of the class who are responsible for fetching the ruler and other tools before math class and also helping me to maintain order and silence in the classroom and other tasks like that. Well sometimes your chefs can be your greatest asset, and sometimes they can actually work against you. In my 6eme biology class I didn’t know for three months that this kid was one of my chefs since he was such a big talker himself. I mentioned casually to the surveyant (disciplinarian) one day that 6eme was way too chatty that day, and he promptly went into the classroom and gave the class a lecture and then instead of punishing the talkers, he called out the two chefs and ordered them to fetch enough buckets of water from the pump to give three buckets of water to each of the 18 trees on the other side of the school yard. Ever hauled around buckets of water in the hot sun? I’d have to say that the chefs were more effective after that day.
The weather’s beautiful now. I’ve stopped sleeping outside because I actually get cold at night and since I shelled out for a nice bed frame, there’s really no reason not to sleep in my house. I still don’t have a mattress other than the thin foam pad that goes with my cot, but since I haven’t slept on a real mattress for months now, it’s easy to keep putting off getting one. Turtle sleeps with me on the bed and she is ADORABLE. Burkinabe dog’s don’t usually ever get to know the concept of sleeping on a bed so everyone makes fun of me for letting her go there but whatever, it makes me happy. When I got back from Thanksgiving Traore told me that Turtle had gone in his house and snuck under his mosquito net and gotten on his bed. He laughed about it but it was pretty embarrassing.
I’ve gotten really good at eating fish now. I still won’t eat the heads but I’ll eat everything else but for the bones, including the fins if the fish was fried. The other day my language tutor came over and afterwards he took me to meet one of his friends. He wanted me to meet the girl he said had “eyes like mine”. He explained that there was a family with children who had a grandmother who was Portugese and so they have very claire skin compared to other Burkinabe and this one girl has green brown eyes. We walked in and took a seat. I noticed the empty bowls on the table and hoped that at ten o’clock this Sunday morning I wouldn’t have to face anything too challenging at the table. The picked-clean jawbone in the bowl across the table didn’t give me much hope. Different children came out, many toting babies on their hips, who would each start crying and clinging to their older sibling when they saw me. They tried experimenting with how close each baby would have to be to me before it started freaking out. Then the mother brought out bowls of soup and I learned that it was indeed sheep head soup. My language tutor was very good and sensitively explained that eating heads was against my totem and that he would take what bits of meat were in my bowl. It was a simple tomato and sheep head based soup with little fried millet based dough disks in it (the word for that is galettes). I fished out the bits of hair and skin and bone and meat that had found their way into my bowl and deposited them in Anatole’s bowl.
About a month ago I got a bad head cold. Four of my pigeons had recently kicked the bucket from a respiratory disease and so I was terrified there for a moment that I had bird flu, but the symptoms moved nicely along and all I was left with was a sore throat and no voice. Maybe it has something to do with the sand and the wind here but all I can say is that BY FAR that was the worst and longest sore throat of my life. I’ve also never really lost my voice like that before. Just gone down to a whisper. My kids must have had some level of compassion for me since they were inordinately quiet those days when I came to school. Took over a week for it to come back.
In each class there are one or two kids designated as the chefs de classe. They are sort of the leaders of the class who are responsible for fetching the ruler and other tools before math class and also helping me to maintain order and silence in the classroom and other tasks like that. Well sometimes your chefs can be your greatest asset, and sometimes they can actually work against you. In my 6eme biology class I didn’t know for three months that this kid was one of my chefs since he was such a big talker himself. I mentioned casually to the surveyant (disciplinarian) one day that 6eme was way too chatty that day, and he promptly went into the classroom and gave the class a lecture and then instead of punishing the talkers, he called out the two chefs and ordered them to fetch enough buckets of water from the pump to give three buckets of water to each of the 18 trees on the other side of the school yard. Ever hauled around buckets of water in the hot sun? I’d have to say that the chefs were more effective after that day.
The weather’s beautiful now. I’ve stopped sleeping outside because I actually get cold at night and since I shelled out for a nice bed frame, there’s really no reason not to sleep in my house. I still don’t have a mattress other than the thin foam pad that goes with my cot, but since I haven’t slept on a real mattress for months now, it’s easy to keep putting off getting one. Turtle sleeps with me on the bed and she is ADORABLE. Burkinabe dog’s don’t usually ever get to know the concept of sleeping on a bed so everyone makes fun of me for letting her go there but whatever, it makes me happy. When I got back from Thanksgiving Traore told me that Turtle had gone in his house and snuck under his mosquito net and gotten on his bed. He laughed about it but it was pretty embarrassing.
(Here's Turtle chasing a Hammerkop - a huge ducklike bird).
Speaking of Turtle, she’s sick. The day before I left village I found her under a tree crying behind my house. I went to her and called her but she wouldn’t come. She was panting because she was in the sun and couldn’t move herself out of it. So I went to her and scooped her up and carried her to the porch. I put her on her feet but she wouldn’t put any weight on her back legs. She wouldn’t even try. I’d stand her up and she’d just flop down like her back legs were made of Jello. I didn’t know what to do so I pushed her water dish over and she drank almost a litre. Then I tried to get her to come with fish heads and she really wanted to move but she just couldn’t. I brought her inside and we took a nap and then I took her over to the neighbor’s house to explain what happened. Now my neighbors are functionaries, so their thinking is a little more progressive than your average family living in village, but what followed was definitely a cross cultural moment. I carried her in and put her on the floor and showed them what happened to her. “Must have been a snake,” the mother said. “Looks like you need to get a new dog,” said the Proviseur, “This one’s no good anymore.” The kids tried their best to get Turtle to get up, calling her over and over “Churtle, Churtle! Kom!” It was so sad. I started crying, which is totally inappropriate to do in public, especially over a dog. So I just tried to hide it, and to their credit, they were very sensitive to how I felt. Daniel and Alimatta decided to put her on their moto and take her too the vet across town, but he’s just the vet who checks the health of the animals to be slaughtered and gives Rabies vaccinations so I wasn’t expecting much. She came back with a bloody mark on her leg from an injection and two pills of antibiotics. No change. Left her with the neighbor since I had to leave that next day and so far she’s still the same way. I don’t know what’s going to happen.Before she got sick, Turtle used to follow me everywhere, especially over to Traore’s house for lunch everyday where a handful of us go everyday to eat. We eat a lot of attieke, which is made from pulverized manioc and oil and vinegar and is usually mixed with cucumbers, onions, tomatoes and fish. Delicious. Does anyone know if you can find Manioc in the States? Attieke’s an Ivoirian dish. The other weekend we decided to go all out and buy some pork and make a good rice and peanut sauce. When it was ready, Traore gave me some food and was really surprised when I left the skin and fat alone. “But I gave you the best pieces!” he told me. “You eat that?” I asked, totally non-judgmentally I might add. I guess just as the heads are seen as the best part of the fish, the skin is seen as the tastiest part of the pig. Before that had much time to go on about my strange eating habits I put a small piece of skin in my mouth and started chewing. Definitely edible, but I just don’t see how that can compare to good pork meat. I told Traore that over Thanksgiving, we killed a pig and ate it, but we threw all the fat and skin into the big bonfire we had later that night. He was speechless.
Anyway that's enough for now. The vast majority of my training group is heading down to Ghana on Saturday to spend Christmas and New Years on the beach. Can't wait. 22 hour bus ride to get there. Ick. I wish you all happy holidays. My cell phone won't work after we get into Ghana but i'll be back in Burkina on the 2nd. Love you all!!
