Happy Holidays everyone. Here are pics from Tabaski and the forced vacation in Beguedo. An and Moussa and I played lots of scrabble, ate lots of sheep and had a good week of relaxation.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Sorry it’s been so long guys – being on the internet just doesn’t come easily here and when I do get online, there seem to be other things that need to get done.
Wow the election was exciting, wasn’t it? I don’t know how it was at home (everyone said it was a true drama) but here people followed along with anticipation and hope. I voted via an Absentee Ballot and the help of the diplomatic pouch, for yes, Barack Obama, like there was any question. As the days got closer, everyone seemed to be counting down – even BBC wouldn’t stop talking about it – hell, even my 7th graders wouldn’t stop talking about it. BBC World Service focus on Africa has become somewhat like listening to CNN without the flash of the TV. They talk about America about half the time and about the rest of the world mixed with random stories and amusement for the rest of the time. The amount of emphasis placed on America and what our government’s doing is really remarkable. Really takes getting out of the country to see just how much the rest of the world follows what’s going on chez nous. Not like they have a choice.
The day before the election I took a 2 hr. break from math with my 7th graders and gave them election info 101. Unlike how little American students learn about Africa in middle school, 7th graders here spend their whole year in Geography studying America. Some of them have televisions but 95% of them are living in mud huts without TV so while they all seemed to know about Barack (how couldn’t you even with a short wave radio) – they were a little mixed up about who stood for what and why. So I taught them about Democrats and Republicans, some generalities of both parties, taught them which party Bush was from, which party Clinton was from and then opened up the floor for questions. Got ALL SORTS of questions like:
Who is Bill Clinton?
Who is his wife?
Can a woman be president?
Who is Osama Bin Laden?
Does Osama Bin Laden exist?
Is he dead?
Why does the US want to find him?
Why did the US start a war in Iraq?
Why won’t you leave Iraq?
Who attacked the US in 2001?
Why does America like war so much?
What are you doing in Afganistan?
How much money does the president have?
How much does a functionnaire (someone who works for the state like a teacher) make in the US?
How much does someone who washes dishes make in America?
How much does a sheep cost in America?
Does it snow a lot there?
How much do tapettes (flipflops) cost there?
How much does benga (beans and rice) cost there?
Do you have mangoes there?
What is the economic crisis?
Why do people say it’s the US’s fault?
Is Barack really black? (Here they would say no, he’s not, actually – he’s a mélange).
Is his wife black?
How many black people are there in America?
How much does it cost to fly there?
etc.
And then election night: I followed BBC until I couldn’t stand to even look at another test I had to correct and it became clear that we wouldn’t even have the East Coast’s results until after midnight. BBC cuts out for me after a certain hour and I’d made arrangements with my parents to call me every hourish after midnight with any results they might have. At about 2, Addie called me and said that we don’t know anything really and that she’d call me back at 4. At 3 I started getting text messages from people asking if anything was for sure and at 4 I started getting phone calls with people trying to tell me that Barack had won. Some were not so effective, like Tiana’s:
“Elizabeth,” said as if to a kindergartener since I was half asleep, “I just wanted to tell you – click” The network cut out. But that was enough. I reached around the bed for the radio and found BBC and started replying to the messages and calls. McCain was giving his concession speech. Then Obama spoke and because the cell phone’s so cheap in the middle of the night and the early morning, I spent the rest of the time before school talking about what had happened.
Got to school and told my 7th graders and they CHEERED like he was a celebrity and their president. Amazing. All the day people shook my hand and congratulated me. Many congratulated me in they way one would if I had had a baby or passed a really important test, a long handshake with touching of the foreheads 4 times, side to side. My director took me out for a coke and a chicken to celebrate. Doesn’t beat that.
In other news the Harmattan has arrived! Not my favorite time of year, but sure beats the hot season. The Harmattan is the hot dry wind that blows off the Sahara and dries out EVERYTHING. I don’t mean like a breeze, I mean like a constant wind all day. I bike to school and (if only candid camera were there) the head on wind and the sandy roads slow me down so much sometimes that I just stop. Stop and then laugh at myself.
The Taiwanese, in preparation for the Ambassador’s visit, scraped the main roads in the village with their big machines so that there wouldn’t be so many holes and giant rocks as you see after the rainy season and it would make the visit nicer for the Ambassador but unfortunately it destroyed the roads. They just turned to dust. No not sand – DUST. Now a moto makes a dust cloud that a car would have made before and my dog makes a dust cloud like a moto used to make. A car or a big truck lifts so much dust into the air that it settles over the surrounding fields like morning fog. They promised to fix the roads and lay down new dirt but it’s slow going. Meanwhile I have the first sinus infection of my life and am on antibiotics thanks to the dust. Turtle coughs and so do the chickens.
Turtle followed me to school every day and then one day she just stopped. She follows me to this invisible line just before market and then just stops. Maybe she realized she doesn’t have to follow me or something. Strange. Just one day up and stopped. She’s overall well. Energetic as a 6 month old puppy and runs like the wind. Her pregnancy was in fact a fake. Her stomach shrank and her breasts got tiny again. But now there’s a new problem. I’m not a doctor but it seems like her uterus is prolapsed. Her cervix is visible from the outside. I don’t know how much worse it will get and there’s nothing to do but wait and see because there’s really nothing to do. She doesn’t seem to notice. She terrorizes the neighborhood dogs and runs circles around them.
Today I saw a strange African thing. Once in a while someone like this comes through town: a man with about 15 dogs following him. They say that some people have the power to get dogs to do this. They find someone who wants to get rid of their dog or just a stray dog, give them this certain food and then the dog will follow them. A man came through town like that today. Strange.
We also had a féticheur (not sure how to translate that – like someone who practices traditional medicine / fetish / magic stuff) come through town and he gathered a crowd all day long. Little bags filled with different powders, parts of animals (heads, bones, tails, furs, teeth) and all sorts of rings with different powers, mostly protective, all presented in a very alluring/entertaining way. I think part of the reason non-africans have such a hard time believing the traditional medicine type stuff is because it always seems to be next to black magic or other things that really don’t have to have anything to do with traditional healing. I’m determined to see some magic before I leave.
You all following the mess in the DRC?
Two Burkina Peace Corps were very lucky the other day when their bus slammed into a tree, replacing the driver’s seat with the tree trunk. They were evacuated to South Africa (not exactly right around the corner is it?) for medical care and are fine. We had a horrible accident on Saturday that made it onto BBC actually. I heard “In Burkina Faso …” and I knew that if Burkina had made it on the news it couldn’t be anything good. A bus carrying 75 people heading south of Ouaga en route to the Côte d’Ivoire slammed into a sugar truck and burst into flames killing 59. No there’s no ICU here.
I got in an accident with a moto a few weeks back as I was biking home from school. I really don’t know how, but I was fine. Just skin injuries. With the speed the man was going I should have been really hurt. It was his fault. There were like 30 students and 15 peasants who gathered around to watch. My director came to my rescue and lectured the man and took me and my battered bike back home.
School’s carrying on pretty well. I’m kept really busy – teaching my 6th graders about flowering plants and math and my 7th graders about non flowering plants and math. I look forward to teaching now which is a nice change. Only downside this year is that I’m the only woman secondary teacher in the village – so at staff gatherings I’m really the odd one out. Oh and a colleague told me today that the statistics say that the average number of children that a woman in Burkina has is 6. SIX.
We finished out our first trimester of school. Despite various administrative problems including a week of canceled school because of the government's wanting to avoid protests/demonstrations by the people against their unacknowledged assassination of a journalist Norbert Zongo 10 years ago.
Wow the election was exciting, wasn’t it? I don’t know how it was at home (everyone said it was a true drama) but here people followed along with anticipation and hope. I voted via an Absentee Ballot and the help of the diplomatic pouch, for yes, Barack Obama, like there was any question. As the days got closer, everyone seemed to be counting down – even BBC wouldn’t stop talking about it – hell, even my 7th graders wouldn’t stop talking about it. BBC World Service focus on Africa has become somewhat like listening to CNN without the flash of the TV. They talk about America about half the time and about the rest of the world mixed with random stories and amusement for the rest of the time. The amount of emphasis placed on America and what our government’s doing is really remarkable. Really takes getting out of the country to see just how much the rest of the world follows what’s going on chez nous. Not like they have a choice.
The day before the election I took a 2 hr. break from math with my 7th graders and gave them election info 101. Unlike how little American students learn about Africa in middle school, 7th graders here spend their whole year in Geography studying America. Some of them have televisions but 95% of them are living in mud huts without TV so while they all seemed to know about Barack (how couldn’t you even with a short wave radio) – they were a little mixed up about who stood for what and why. So I taught them about Democrats and Republicans, some generalities of both parties, taught them which party Bush was from, which party Clinton was from and then opened up the floor for questions. Got ALL SORTS of questions like:
Who is Bill Clinton?
Who is his wife?
Can a woman be president?
Who is Osama Bin Laden?
Does Osama Bin Laden exist?
Is he dead?
Why does the US want to find him?
Why did the US start a war in Iraq?
Why won’t you leave Iraq?
Who attacked the US in 2001?
Why does America like war so much?
What are you doing in Afganistan?
How much money does the president have?
How much does a functionnaire (someone who works for the state like a teacher) make in the US?
How much does someone who washes dishes make in America?
How much does a sheep cost in America?
Does it snow a lot there?
How much do tapettes (flipflops) cost there?
How much does benga (beans and rice) cost there?
Do you have mangoes there?
What is the economic crisis?
Why do people say it’s the US’s fault?
Is Barack really black? (Here they would say no, he’s not, actually – he’s a mélange).
Is his wife black?
How many black people are there in America?
How much does it cost to fly there?
etc.
And then election night: I followed BBC until I couldn’t stand to even look at another test I had to correct and it became clear that we wouldn’t even have the East Coast’s results until after midnight. BBC cuts out for me after a certain hour and I’d made arrangements with my parents to call me every hourish after midnight with any results they might have. At about 2, Addie called me and said that we don’t know anything really and that she’d call me back at 4. At 3 I started getting text messages from people asking if anything was for sure and at 4 I started getting phone calls with people trying to tell me that Barack had won. Some were not so effective, like Tiana’s:
“Elizabeth,” said as if to a kindergartener since I was half asleep, “I just wanted to tell you – click” The network cut out. But that was enough. I reached around the bed for the radio and found BBC and started replying to the messages and calls. McCain was giving his concession speech. Then Obama spoke and because the cell phone’s so cheap in the middle of the night and the early morning, I spent the rest of the time before school talking about what had happened.
Got to school and told my 7th graders and they CHEERED like he was a celebrity and their president. Amazing. All the day people shook my hand and congratulated me. Many congratulated me in they way one would if I had had a baby or passed a really important test, a long handshake with touching of the foreheads 4 times, side to side. My director took me out for a coke and a chicken to celebrate. Doesn’t beat that.
In other news the Harmattan has arrived! Not my favorite time of year, but sure beats the hot season. The Harmattan is the hot dry wind that blows off the Sahara and dries out EVERYTHING. I don’t mean like a breeze, I mean like a constant wind all day. I bike to school and (if only candid camera were there) the head on wind and the sandy roads slow me down so much sometimes that I just stop. Stop and then laugh at myself.
The Taiwanese, in preparation for the Ambassador’s visit, scraped the main roads in the village with their big machines so that there wouldn’t be so many holes and giant rocks as you see after the rainy season and it would make the visit nicer for the Ambassador but unfortunately it destroyed the roads. They just turned to dust. No not sand – DUST. Now a moto makes a dust cloud that a car would have made before and my dog makes a dust cloud like a moto used to make. A car or a big truck lifts so much dust into the air that it settles over the surrounding fields like morning fog. They promised to fix the roads and lay down new dirt but it’s slow going. Meanwhile I have the first sinus infection of my life and am on antibiotics thanks to the dust. Turtle coughs and so do the chickens.
Turtle followed me to school every day and then one day she just stopped. She follows me to this invisible line just before market and then just stops. Maybe she realized she doesn’t have to follow me or something. Strange. Just one day up and stopped. She’s overall well. Energetic as a 6 month old puppy and runs like the wind. Her pregnancy was in fact a fake. Her stomach shrank and her breasts got tiny again. But now there’s a new problem. I’m not a doctor but it seems like her uterus is prolapsed. Her cervix is visible from the outside. I don’t know how much worse it will get and there’s nothing to do but wait and see because there’s really nothing to do. She doesn’t seem to notice. She terrorizes the neighborhood dogs and runs circles around them.
Today I saw a strange African thing. Once in a while someone like this comes through town: a man with about 15 dogs following him. They say that some people have the power to get dogs to do this. They find someone who wants to get rid of their dog or just a stray dog, give them this certain food and then the dog will follow them. A man came through town like that today. Strange.
We also had a féticheur (not sure how to translate that – like someone who practices traditional medicine / fetish / magic stuff) come through town and he gathered a crowd all day long. Little bags filled with different powders, parts of animals (heads, bones, tails, furs, teeth) and all sorts of rings with different powers, mostly protective, all presented in a very alluring/entertaining way. I think part of the reason non-africans have such a hard time believing the traditional medicine type stuff is because it always seems to be next to black magic or other things that really don’t have to have anything to do with traditional healing. I’m determined to see some magic before I leave.
You all following the mess in the DRC?
Two Burkina Peace Corps were very lucky the other day when their bus slammed into a tree, replacing the driver’s seat with the tree trunk. They were evacuated to South Africa (not exactly right around the corner is it?) for medical care and are fine. We had a horrible accident on Saturday that made it onto BBC actually. I heard “In Burkina Faso …” and I knew that if Burkina had made it on the news it couldn’t be anything good. A bus carrying 75 people heading south of Ouaga en route to the Côte d’Ivoire slammed into a sugar truck and burst into flames killing 59. No there’s no ICU here.
I got in an accident with a moto a few weeks back as I was biking home from school. I really don’t know how, but I was fine. Just skin injuries. With the speed the man was going I should have been really hurt. It was his fault. There were like 30 students and 15 peasants who gathered around to watch. My director came to my rescue and lectured the man and took me and my battered bike back home.
School’s carrying on pretty well. I’m kept really busy – teaching my 6th graders about flowering plants and math and my 7th graders about non flowering plants and math. I look forward to teaching now which is a nice change. Only downside this year is that I’m the only woman secondary teacher in the village – so at staff gatherings I’m really the odd one out. Oh and a colleague told me today that the statistics say that the average number of children that a woman in Burkina has is 6. SIX.
We finished out our first trimester of school. Despite various administrative problems including a week of canceled school because of the government's wanting to avoid protests/demonstrations by the people against their unacknowledged assassination of a journalist Norbert Zongo 10 years ago.
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