It’s really difficult to take pictures here.

Everyday I wish I had my camera with me, but that of course is unfeasible. Even if I had it, the more difficult part is that taking your camera out here is not like taking out a camera in America. You can imagine.


But today before my 6th grade class’s last math test, I took out my camera and took a few pictures. I greeted them in English and they replied, though they didn’t know I was filming. They would have been absolute monkeys if they had known. They know very little English and are all embarrassed to speak it at all, so I started punishing them if they didn’t greet me in English or ask permission to leave the room in English. Now they don’t mind it so much.

My dear neighbor Oued was very sick. Danny brought him some leaves. He told him to boil them and drink the resulting liquid. Leaves do everything here it seems. You eat some because they taste good. You put others around the house to keep away snakes or sorcerers. Others you drink to heal your body – but these rarely taste good at all.
“Even snakes do this!” Danny asserted to me.
“That’s impossible Danny,” I told him.
“Uh uh, I saw it! In Cote d’Ivoire! With my own eyes!” he assured me.
“Ok what happened. I’m listening.”
“Two snakes, big ones, gros gros,” he held up his hands wide apart. “They were fighting to decide who was the stronger one. They fought and fought and one snake won. The other was very weak and just laid there. The winner left and brought back leaves for the other one to eat.”
“Snakes have no hands, Danny. What did he get the leaves with?”
“A noore. His mouth.”
“Oh.”
“And the weak snake got better.”
“I see. Then what happened?” I asked.
“We killed both snakes, of course,” he said plainly.
“Oh.”

April has come and passed and I eat Mangos like they’re going out of season. Actually they’re only just coming into season. The women sit at their market stands with tables full of piles of mangos in threes like tiny yellow pyramids. They’re not the mangos I would be eating if I were in the Ivory Coast – down there in the south the mangos are huge and very sweet with a very smooth texture. When ripe, their skin shows colors of green, yellow orange and even red. Everything’s a bit rougher about life up here, even the mangoes it seems. Ours are small, barely even the size of your fist and completely yellow. Inside you’ll find a seed that’s enlaced in long tough fibers, tying it to the skin. Les mangues fibreuses. Because the pulp is between all of these fibers, it must be torn away from the seed and skin with your teeth and to eat it successfully without washing your face and hands with it is a real skill. I only successfully completed it yesterday for the first time. They’re 10 for 20 cents now, making them cheaper by volume than rice, and so you can sit around with friends and a bucket full of mangoes and just eat and eat (the diarrhea that ensues is free). Here’s how it goes:
1. Find where the stem was attached to the mango.
2. Bite off a piece around the stem connection and spit it out; it’s bitter
3. Suck on the hole you made a little.
4. Wrap your hand around the base of the mango and squeeze as you turn it around and around to loosen the fibers from the skin. Make sure to continue sucking or else juice will spew out like a volcano.
5. Once you can hear and feel the seed detach, start pulling it out with your mouth and start sucking the pulp off it.
6. Put seed in your mouth and suck it clean. Spit out seed.
7. Start taking bites of the skin. You can’t eat it but there’s still pulp on the inside. Take bites, suck them clean and then spit out the skin. Keep going till it’s gone.

My previous method of peeling the skin off first with my teeth, then trying to bite off pieces of the fibrous pulp and then scraping the skin with my teeth only resulted in two things: 1) I looked like the weirdo during group mango-eating sessions and 2) I got it ALL over my face and hands which has made me start to feel a bit allergic to mangos. My eyes and mouth itch a little now. So I sat Moussa down and made him teach me. It took three mangos but I’m ok now.

This is my house and me sitting in front of it. My two closest PC neighbors came to visit this past weekend and so I could tell someone to take a picture of me! We had a great time. Killed a couple chickens and had some cold coke. Doesn't get much better than that.

My school is out of money for the year. More money has been asked for and it may in fact come but we don’t know when and we don’t know how much. Until then teachers are only paid for the hours they owe the state. Any hours they work over this minimum (which can often be a lot) they won’t be paid for. There’s no money for recreation activities. There’s no money for a soccer ball (anyone want to donate a soccer ball?). There’s no money to go out and have a drink to celebrate the end of the year. Oh and of course the school won’t be buying anymore chalk or paper.

The results from the second trimester at my school were absolutely depressing. Remember: to be considered as passing, a student’s grades must average out to a 10/20, 10 being la moyenne. Now earning 50% of the points here and 50% in the States is not the same thing. In my school in America at least, most kids got Bs (80-89% of points), others got less and some got more. Here, I would say that a kid doing B-level work like that would get about 11 or 12 out of 20. If they make 10/20 as an average at the end of the year they can continue on to the next grade. If they don’t pass once, they repeat the year, and if they don’t pass twice then they can no longer continue at the school. At the end of the second trimester, we had only 30% of our 6th grade students with the moyenne. In the 9th grade class, there were only 5 students (out of about 60) who had the moyenne. The class average for this class was about 7/20. Think about that. That means that for their tests, on average, a student will only earn about 1/3 of the points. At the end of this year these students will take their national BEPC examination to see if they have “passed” the first cycle of secondary school and can continue into high school. How do you think the class is going to do if their grades are this poor?

There are two reasons that results like this are depressing. First, if on average only a third of students will be able to continue in school, the school will not be able to function for long because unlike a free public school in America, most of a school’s money here comes from the students’ annual fees. Without enough students, there’s not enough money to pay teachers, buy supplies, and in short a school cannot run.
The other side has to do with where these kids go if they don’t go to school. They go to the fields or they go to town and look for work. And then they face hard times because there’s just barely any good ways to make money here, let alone good money, and while they’re no longer burdening their families with having to pay school fees, they’re certainly not able to really help their families either. There are still so many families who, even if they had the money, don’t see the importance of education. I don’t mean that they should see the value as an American does. I mean that they don’t seem to really believe that if their children go through school that the amount of money that they’ll be able to make (and therefore use to support the family) will be so much greater than if they had never been to school. If the child is actually motivated then this difference will eventually completely outweigh all the trouble – time and money – that school was.

This mindset is a real source of frustration for me. Investing in the future is just not something done here by most. Investing in the coming harvest: yes, investing in not angering the ancestors: yes, investing in preventative health care: no, investing in your children’s futures: not really. People are focused on what will go in their bellies tonight and perhaps on tomorrow but you can’t count on much beyond that. Who can blame them? They don’t have a choice. But with school they kind of do have a choice. Yes there will still be many families who simply cannot afford school fees; this I understand. But for other families, maybe if the father went and drank beer less often or bought a less fancy moto or cut down on other frivolous expenses then more families would come up with the means to send more children to school. Finding the money has to start with prioritizing education. Certainly there are starting to be a lot of families who are learning by experience what an asset an educated child can be.

(These next 2 are pictures from Traditional-Clothing-Day at the Lycee I live next to. These girls/boys won - which means this is the most accurate traditional dress that was seen that day).

Take my neighbor’s family for example. He was the oldest of 7 children in a poor farming family. He started out, like many children here, studying the Koran at a very young age. People recognized that he was bright and pressure was put on his father to send him to 1st grade. He was the only one to be sent to school. He succeeded every year until finally at the level of 5th grade, his father tried to sabotage his education by asking his teacher to fail him so as he couldn’t continue in school. When he was old enough to understand the importance of education himself, he started pressuring his parents to send the others to school, but his father would hear none of it. While his mother had some money to work with she would just throw up her arms when asked and say that she was not the head of the family and so she could do nothing.

Since no one can change this African mentality overnight, what’s the solution for now and this school year? Are the teachers grading to harshly? Are the students not working? Do they not want to work or are they prevented from working because of circumstances at home? Should we lower our standards to let maybe 50% of kids through? Or should we stick to our standards even though we know we’ll be sending so many kids into the streets. Is this a problem of Bagre or of village life? Or is this drop in performance something seen all over the country?

(The tall boy is one of the 20 10th graders in my town. His name is Tongsouri. In Bissa this means Chicken. His mom killed a chicken when she was pregnant with him and in order to not upset any one living or not living, she had to name him chicken).

When we had our end of trimester meeting it was just discouraging. Each class’s results were reported in front of the whole staff, and the student representatives of each class were brought in to hear and respond to their class’s performance. Since performance across the board was so bad, it just turned into a meeting of pointing fingers. Each class was accused through their representatives and then the representatives themselves were accused of not handling their classes’ problems. They just sat there looking at the ground, unable to speak even if they had had something to say. Then once all the results were reported, our director started pointing the finger at us, the teachers. He implied that our grading was too harsh and our lessons were not effective. Though he never said it directly it was clear that he was saying that if we were really doing our jobs this would never have come about. Easy to say from a director’s point of view but he’s also a teacher so presumably he sees first hand the students’ behavior. I felt like the subtext he was sending us was to do whatever it took to get 50% of the kids through, even if it meant bending the numbers. It’s hard to say for sure though – Burkinabe subtext in French isn’t something I’m that good at yet. The meeting, which would usually end with a trip to a local bar to have a soda to symbolize our closing of the trimester, was instead ended with the news that there was not enough money to go and have this drink. I watched as all eyes went to me to see if I would offer to pick up the tab, and when I didn’t, eyes went back down to the table. We packed up our things and I biked home just as darkness was falling.

It seems that it doesn’t matter how many times I explain it, people still don’t actually believe that I have the same salary as a teacher here. So when teachers complain about the rising cost of living and having to buy less of this or forgo that, I have the same issues, except people just laugh when I say it. It’s true I don’t have a family to support here. That does make a difference. But when there is enough money, or if there are guests coming, or if you have a reason to celebrate, it's always wonderful to buy a chicken. I can't kill it, but I have learned how to do everything else. Moussa's plucking this particularly delicious chicken for me... using my bath bucket... with boiling water inside.

I had the rare opportunity of walking past a thermometer today and found that it was 107 degrees in the shade. I’m not complaining… ok maybe I’m complaining. I think they should start giving the forecast using the temperature of hell as a reference point. You know like: “Today’s forecast calls for clear skies with temperatures 5 degrees hotter than hell.” or “Extremely hazy with temperatures as hot as hell.” Or how about: “Expect to see rain today when pigs fly.” or “Strong hot hairdryer wind today at 20 mph.” That wind is no joke though, I’ll tell you. When it blows it blows constantly and hot. The only thing I can compare it to is like being inside an enormous sauna that you can’t get out of that’s full of fans on high. Moussa was sleeping outside the other day with his head down on a desk, hand dangling over the edge, and he said he was awoken by the feeling that his hand was burning. The wind had kicked up and was actually unbearable to be out in. It’s the hot season. What can you say. My best guess is that it’s about 100 in the house most days. No you can’t sleep there unless you want to wake up feeling like a dehydrated fruit covered in sweat/salt slime. I was resisting making the move to sleeping outside again, I’m not sure why, until I woke up one morning and realized I could see the outline of my body on my sheets in salt. Ka soma ye. Not good.

Hot season means that bush taxi rides become more tedious than ever before. I was recently in Ouaga for a few days for VAC meetings, and on the way home I took the long way home to see Moussa for the weekend. I was running really late, and I was afraid I would miss the “3 pm” bush taxi. It’s funny how the very second that life gets hectic here all my American, stressed-out, must-be-on-time instincts come right back even though by now it’s clear that a “3 pm” bush taxi has little hope of actually leaving before 5 pm. I ran to the office and took the forms I needed, biked back to the house, packed my bag, drank a liter of water, signed out, took my ID, and started walking to a main road to catch a cab. I had brought my bike into Ouaga to get it repaired but had forgotten my helmet and in case no one’s explained this yet, if you’re in the Peace Corps, you have to wear a helmet when you ride your bike. Of course there must be consequences for everything, and for the offence of being caught without a helmet on a bike, the repercussion is having your bike taken away for a month. With no helmet and the office only a few blocks away, I was obliged to walk my bike with my bags the half kilometer to the main road. The normal calls of “nassara” or “ma cherie” or “jolie fille” from men along the road were twice as frequent because now they wanted to know if my bike was broken and if they could get me to come over and talk to them about that. I explained that no, my bike’s fine, I’m not tired, and yelle ka be (no problems!). By now it was almost 4 and after the half hour cab ride through traffic across the city I arrived to find a loaded bush taxi almost ready to leave. Leaving the house, I’d had a nalgene half filled with rock hard ice. By the time I’d arrived at the gare, it had melted down to the size of a golf ball.

Though bush taxi’s always leave late, it’s risky to wander too far from your vehicle because it seems that once the driver gives the word, a van and a half worth of people seem to materialize out of nowhere and pile in to the car in under 3 minutes. The driver acts as if he’s upset at the passengers, blaming them for the fact the car is late, though it’s clearly the other way around. He’ll honk the horn, rev the engine, and be impatient to peel out of the gare, so if you don’t watch out, your car might take off without you. The Ouaga/Beguedo bush taxi set a new record this day and left the gare shortly after 4:30, only 10 minutes after I’d arrived. When it’s over a hundred degrees in the shade, there’s nothing worse than to be crammed into an unmoving car, pressed up against each other like the canned sardines I feed to Turtle. The van pulled out of its parking spot and came to stop for gas at the station at the exit to the gare. For reasons I cannot explain, it took at least 20 minutes before we moved from the pump. In situations like this, the amount of sweat coming off my body becomes ridiculous. Every bit of my skin becomes wet. I can feel streams of sweat running down my head and down my neck, accumulating above my collarbone before running down my back and chest like a liquid necklace. If you’ve had your elbows on your knees, your pants will be wet at the points of contact; if your knees are bent, you’ll have streams of water running down your legs to your ankles, mixing with the dirt there, and then leaving strange lines across your feet. After you’ve been sweating like this a while, your skin starts to become itchy with the amount of salt and if you rub your eyes they’ll burn and burn.

The car pulled out on to one of the main roads of Ouaga where the heat is more than oppressive. We quickly pulled off the road to take a dirt road, heading southeast out of the city. We only made it about 2 kilometers before we pulled over for some of the guys running the car to check the engine for something. Didn’t look good. We kept going but had to pull over again just a few more meters down the road and were told to get out. Engine trouble. While I could not understand the Bissa explanation, I could see that a large quantity of oil was in the process of leaving our engine and pooling on the red dirt below. Several people tried to get under and into the engine but soon the car left, headed back to town, leaving all of the passengers sitting on the side of the road. I started reading a book and eventually leaned my head back against a wall and took a nap, clutching my purse across my belly with both arms. Almost an hour later the vehicle returned, apparently repaired, and we continued. I was seated to the right of a woman about my age who didn’t speak French or Moore but seemed to really want to talk to me, in front of an old man with a white beard and dressed up in a bu-bu of different greens, and in back of a young functionniare who was so tall that if he leaned back his head would almost hit mine. Thankfully, there was a window to my right. We were 24 in this 15 passenger van.

About an hour out of Ouaga, the car slowed down and made a U-turn to head back from where we’d come. Heads turned and people started jabbering to each other trying to figure out what had happened. Turns out we’d blown past a police check point and were headed back to try to beg our pardon. We were carrying almost the van’s volume in cargo up top, including a new moto one of the passengers had purchased in Ouaga. New motos are a big deal here and are often stolen or illegally imported so their paperwork must be presented in full at every check point or the authorities get very upset. They were already upset because we hadn’t stopped, and everyone unloaded and waited for the driver and the moto-owner to negotiate with the police. People spread out to pee and find shade. Different passengers tried in their own ways to argue and beg pardon for our action from a distance, but there was no hope. Twenty minutes later the police confiscated the moto and the guy who owned it looked as if someone had released a valve and deflated him.

We continued on again and soon reached the half-way point, where the road turns to dirt for good. At this point in the voyage, it was starting to get dark and we stopped at a village that bombards passing cars with huge bowls of fruit for sale; this season: mangos and oranges. It was time for people to pray so, yet again, we unloaded from the vehicle and people dispersed into the darkness to pray. I inhaled a mango and after 10 minutes got back in the car. It was in vain though because just as the vehicle started to roll on, we heard that the old man in back of me had forgotten his cell phone where he’d been praying. Everyone unloaded again and we waited for him to find it. Success. Back in the car. The road from this point on is literally like driving on a dirt rumble strip. The road has been cut into a constant succession of divits, covering most of the road and no matter how the driver drives, you feel such loud, disturbing vibration throughout your body that you’re sure your joints are going to come undone. I had my computer in my backpack crammed between my legs on the floor and I dug my toes underneath it to cushion it from the shaking. Ten minutes outside of Beguedo, we stop for everyone to pay the driver as the wind started to kick up like a rain was coming. I have to stop myself from hoping too much for rain; it’s not time yet. All the wind did was to cool us down some and kick up enough dust that we really wanted to close the windows. We pulled into Beguedo and everyone unloaded. I was extremely unbalanced trying to keep my shoes on and handle my two heavy bags and as I stepped backwards out of the van, I almost fell down. Moussa was right there waiting for me, worried sick because of how late we were, and I onto him instead of to the ground. Friends here are great. If you’re lucky enough to find a real one, you can be sure he’d do anything for you and that when you least expect it, he’ll be right there for you.

Early Monday morning, just as it was getting light enough to see, I awoke to the cries of a very distressed baby goat. Then I heard the proviseur’s wife yelling “Churtle! Churtle! Arrete!” (“Turtle, Turtle, stop” (they never quite got that T sound down)). My dog was in slow-motion but intense pursuit of a poor newborn goat who was wondering down the line of our houses. The tiny kid’s bleating was so loud that Turtle couldn’t bring herself to actually touch the goat, so she just followed intently with her nose to the ground, about one goat length in back of the newborn.

I shot out of my tent and went after the dog. She seemed almost relieved that I was removing her from her self-created stressful situation. I tied her up and the Proviseur’s wife in her house to my left, Oued in his house to my right, and myself in the middle watched the tiny goat’s path. She had obviously lost her mother, but where was she going? She wobbled down the line and finally turned into Oued’s courtyard. She seemed quite sure that Oued’s house was where she was headed. Oued stood out on his porch in a towel, back leaning against the pillar, brushing his teeth, and eying the kid skeptically. The goat marched right up his walkway and joined him on the porch, right next to his feet. He was like a giraffe next to her, tall and lean. Head craning to look up at him while she cried, she barely surpassed his ankles in height. She was crying her little head off. Ignored by Oued, she turned around sharply and went straight away over the threshold of his door and into his house. Her unreasonably loud voice combined with the big hollow of Oued’s living room created quite the effective amplifier for her cries. She was on loudspeaker now for the neighborhood, and Oued finally responded by making her a few spoonfuls of milk to drink. It was love at first sight, and after the goat finished her homecoming meal, she settled down in the corner of his house to rest. The poor little thing couldn’t be more than 2 days old, She stands only about 8 inches tall with a snout about the width of my thumb and ears that stick out so far they triple the width of her head. We are going to call her Hillary, after Hilary Clinton.

We had some heavy rain the next couple nights and Hilary got lost twice. I recovered her but the last time she was so weak from hunger that she couldn’t stand or drink. I took her home and fed her milk every hour through the night but by the end of the weekend she died. Things don’t seem to have a storybook ending here very often. At least we tried.

And most recently I've started some work with the Taiwanese cooperative group that is here in Bagre. Seems I'm actually the only person here who is both fluent in English and has proficient enough French to do translation. Now that they've figured this out, I'm being put to use. There are a handful of Burkinabe students at the fish farm that are also going to become my english students. They're all really kind. Since I'm in the Peace Corps and can't take money, I get compensated by other things: mangos, fish (we grow tilapia), Bagre rice, internet, etc. Here's the director of the fish farm holding up one of the Tilapia he just caught for me in my kitchen. DELICIOUS.

Anyway I'm going to sign off for now. I just write when I can in my house and then when I get to the internet I post. Makes for less frequent but bigger posts. Whatever works. I hope everyone's doing fine wherever you are and whatever you're doing. Merci encore for your support; it doesn't go unappreciated. Ciao.