Hi everyone, it’s been a long time, as usual, since I’ve sat down and written a decent entry. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me how I’ve managed to get a schedule that leaves basically no free time during the week and only a little on the weekend (if I’m not traveling). I'm putting a lot of pictures up in this entry that really have little to do with what I wrote since I wrote this at home and my pictures are rather random.

[Here's Turtle. She's too fast for her own good. Oh and below that's the cat nursing the dog. Yup. You saw it here first.]


So I guess I’ll give some updates by area:

Sad News:
The Peace Corps community got some sad news a couple weeks ago. A second year education volunteer was killed in Benin. She was my age and basically living my life which is why it’s so disconcerting for me to hear the news. She was found dead in front of her house; she'd been sleeping outside. My condolences to the family and friends of Katie – que son âme se repose en paix.

Also the Madagascar program recently got evacuated. The military was no longer supporting the government and shortly after there was a coup d’etat. All the one hundred and something volunteers got evacuated safely and the training group that was literally just about to depart from the States to go to Madagascar got their program cancelled. Katherine was in that training group and they all got reassigned across Africa – she’ll be going to Mauritania to do forestry work instead. Not quite the same gig as in Madagascar but there’s something so beautiful about living where people really have it rough - I don’t mean like war-torn areas – I mean like in the desert. I hope she ends up in a good place and can help save the world from deforestation. I know she’ll do great!

[It's food season! (The no-food season is when it's raining and everything's growing). This is about what I can get for $1! Basically I have become a vegetable eating machine.]

Good News:
The Lycée I live next to and I collaborated to put together a Peace Corps Partnership Proposal for a big reforestation project at the school. Peace Corps itself doesn’t give us money to fund project since the vast majority of our work is meant to not involve funding, and shouldn’t for that matter. But there are certain cases where you can still work within the philosophy of the Peace Corps with funding to help. That’s what Peace Corps Partnership does. It’s a program to match potential projects with donors in America who want to help out a community that’s motivated to get a project going. In order to apply you need a minimum contribution of 25% from the community. The projects get posted on the Peace Corps website and anyone can donate. I was so surprised to find that in less than 2 weeks of my project going on the web it was fully funded! We had asked for almost $2000 and all but $50 dollars given by my parents (thank you!) was given by the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Madison! We learned about this group when we were learning about Peace Corps Partnership. I was convinced that the rainy season would come before the money would, making the project unfeasible for this year – but we have been saved! Now to figure out how to thank them.

To make the project fit in with the philosophy of the Peace Corps, we’re making it as student-run as possible and as low-budget as possible. We’ve chosen native tree species that are not often eaten by animals and found price-cutting strategies to keep costs down (using empty discarded water bags instead of buying seedling bags for example). We’ll also bring in a local expert to train the teachers who will train the students in how to grow seedlings, saplings and how to plant trees and take care of them. Hopefully by July we’ll be able to put over a thousand trees in the ground, which is pretty barren right now. As I said in the project proposal, this particular area of Bagré is in a river valley and should be full of trees, but the tree growth is really very sparse, and I hope that the whole community can learn from the example of the school! I’ll send updates and pictures when I can or when we’ve actually accomplished something.

[Andrea came to visit me! And she's Taiwanese like the Taiwanese members of the NGO in my village who work with the rice fields. Here we are visiting some rice.]

School:
We just finished our second trimester for the year and are enjoying spring break. And unlike breaks in America where even though you’re on vacation you have 354232 things to do or 4434 places to go and don’t actually end up relaxing, I am extremely relaxed. I have basically nothing to do and am enjoying 1.5 weeks off with the dog, cat, Moussa and the fan. For some reason, the trimesters get shorter from the first to the third, so that the third trimester that’s coming up won’t even be 2 months. Nothing really drastic to report at school, other than, like last year at this time, there’s no more money. The teachers’ base salary still comes from the state but all the hours they work on top of that is for free for now. I’ve gotten really good at all that by-hand grade tabulation stuff now. It really works out for the best if you grab a couple of your best students and make them help you out with some of the busy work (i.e. someone writes rank on the board while you call out averages).

I’m still teaching life skills to the ninth grade. But to tell you the truth, I have not figured out how to manage the boys. I also do extra-help math class with them, but at least in math I clearly have the upper hand and they are struggling to keep their heads above water which limits the amount of cocky, annoying, disruptive behavior they give me in class. So, being as fed up as I am, I’ve just started asking the boys to leave and working with the girls. There’s enough girl-focused material anyway that it can’t hurt. It’s too bad I can’t manage the boys but I attribute it to two things: 1) the class size is 75 students and 2) the boys ages range from 16-22 which is hard to work with even if there were 3 of them. Anyway, the girls don’t mind getting extra attention (there’s only about 20 of them).

[Here's Moussa relaxing in my yard with one of Barak Obama's books (thank you Addie!).]

Actually I made a really funny French mistake for the first time in a while (not that I don’t make plenty of mistakes but they’re not usually that funny) when I was asking the boys to leave the other day. A few were hanging back and told me that they wanted to stay and even though they were the good students I had to make them leave anyway which I kind of felt bad about. One of them gave me the reason “But teacher, you’re forgetting that there are two sexes, not just one.” What I wanted to say to him was that “No I haven’t forgotten, it’s just that there’s a problem with the male sex” but what I said instead would be best translated as “No I haven’t forgotten, but there’s a problem with your penis!” (sexe means gender and genitals and I didn’t use the you plural I used the you singular so it was like I was telling him personally that there was a problem with his penis). Ooops. The class loved it.

One of the reasons I’ve been asked to do this extra-help math class is because the math teacher we have is, by anyone’s standards of teaching, horrible. He’s new this year. Last year two of our teachers were (only partially their fault) victim to one of the state’s harsh lashing-outs against corruption. I’ll explain: at the end of each school year, there are the national exams that the 5th, 9th, and 12th grades have to take. They are written and taken at the school that the kids attend. To avoid problems, they assign teachers to grade the tests at a different school. Some of our teachers were sent down to Bittou, half way between here and the Togo boarder, and that’s where the problems started. Before the grading started, they were approached by a superior and asked to take money (10,000 F cfa ~ $20) to change the grades of some students’ tests. The woman refused. The man fought but finally took the money to get the person off his back but said he wouldn’t change the grades. Later it was discovered (someone else ratted the guy out) that this had been going on and the two colleagues from my school got punished for not ratting the corrupter out themselves. That’s right: even the woman, who refused, got punished. The man, I can understand him needing to get a slap on the wrist, but what they did instead was just way to harsh in the opinion of even the people here. They were both stripped of their jobs and their teaching licenses. That means that not only are they unemployed but they are no longer able to ever work again as teachers which is really serious since it is what they have been spending all of their education on up until that point. It’s not so easy to switch jobs here as it is in America because of the specialized training needed to apply for so many jobs. The man also had to serve a month in prison, and I assure you that the prisons here are not like the prisons where I’m from.

[Here's me and my 7th grade class!]

So we got replacements, be it over a month after the new school year started, but we got them. We were a little surprised at how easily we got a replacement for the former math/physical science teacher because they are by all accounts the most rare kind of teacher. But no, the state sent a math/PS teacher from Garango on the double and we thought we were saved. We were wrong. The new teacher was one of those people that from the first minute you met him, you knew he was probably going to be problems. Coffee, tea, beer, cigarettes, anything stimulating/mind-altering he could get his hands on he took, even if it was between classes. And he is a very small person – small in build and skinny – with a huge inferiority complex, making even relationships with other colleagues challenging. We thought he had been sent here by choice, since rumor has it that he knocked up one of the 7th graders here last year and maybe he wanted to be a father, but no, it seems that Garango was trying to get rid of him.

Teaching math and physical sciences is not a small thing. I means that you’re holding two of the most important and difficult classes in the exam year, 9th grade, and based on how well you do your job and how well the students do theirs, you either have a high success rate or a low one at the end of the year. So when we learned that the new teacher was not just not teaching well but verbally abusing the students, we didn’t know what to do. His general teaching style is to rush through lessons, giving too difficult and abstract examples and not EVER allowing a student to ask a question. Ok I guess he would allow a student to ask a question, but the consequences that the student would suffer because of the question, no matter what the question, would make him not ask it in the first place. What would he do, you ask? Anything, well first of course he would insult the student for being so dumb to ask such a question, and then either send the student outside or take points off of his next grade or something equally ridiculous. This turns his classes into silent lecture halls, where even the misbehaved boys I can’t handle don’t speak. He calls them dogs (very insulting here), tells them they’re dirty, tells them they’re idiots and that there are students in this country who deserve him but he’s stuck here wasting his time on students that vaut rien (are worthless). Sometimes he’ll come to class and just sit there for 2 hours and stare at them, not saying a word. Sometimes he’ll come to class, drunk, and set up some sort of evaluation for the class where everyone is doomed to fail and most people will be humiliated. All in all we realized that almost no one was passing his classes and that if his grades were an accurate reflection of how well they master the material then no one would pass the national exam either.

Why doesn’t my headmaster fire him? He can’t – teachers are assigned by the state and the headmaster has no more ability to fire him or tell him how to teach than I do. So lacking any other solution, and not being able to confront the teacher, I was told to start doing extra-help classes 2 hours a week. What a mess. Really.

CSPS (Health Clinic):
I started volunteering with the village clinic and I’m finally getting along with my boss. At first, she was really cold and strange and I just thought maybe this was because everyone says she’s kind of cold and strange in general but then it became very clear that she was not very comfortable with my being there. Some days she would barely greet me (which almost a slap in the face here – I take that back – to purposely not greet someone IS a slap in the face). I don’t know, maybe she though I was there to judge her or criticize her or be some sort of undercover inspector or something or maybe she just has really low self-confidence. Anyway I tried my best to play a little bit dumb, like I didn’t have 5 more years of schooling than her, and it worked out for the best. I feel accepted there now. Anyway she’s getting married in a week so she’s in a good mood.

Basically we weigh babies and give them vaccines. Babies from 1-3 years should come in once a month and get put in these sacks and hung like meat from a standing scale and we weigh and record their weights. If mothers do this regularly then they can see if their baby is putting on weight properly or, as happens here sometimes, is losing weight and how much. Getting mothers to come in regularly is practically impossible even if everyone involved wants it to happen. The babies hate it – that feeling of being suspended and often cry so much and flail around so much that getting an accurate weighing is practically impossible too. We try. The maternity part of the clinic is one room with benches along the sides of the room and on Tuesdays and Thursdays when the weighing happens the room gets stuffed so full of women that there’s a crowd standing outside the door and women lining all the walls with their breasts all hanging out and babies everywhere. African women often talk very loudly when they are in a heated conversation, even if it is just about the price of tomatoes, and between the heat and the volume, it’s all a lot to get used to.

[This is one of the life skills activities I did with the ninth grade. You're not going to get that much out of the picture unless you can read French or have a lot of time and a dictionary. We talked about gender roles how they vary by culture. I asked them to put each of the words on the cards into one of three columns on the board according to the values of their culture: Man, Woman, or both. They cards ranged from things like power, asking for sex, sweeping, digging graves, cooking etc. Then we did the whole activity again but this time according to who could physically do what (logically everything except giving birth ends up in the both column). Then for their amusement I did the activity myself, showing them my culture. If you can actually read French or want to try, click on the image and have a look at what these kids see as their culture's gender roles.]

One day I came into the clinic to tell the women I weigh babies with that I wouldn’t be there the following week and I found the room practically empty with only 3 women sitting there. I knew one and sat beside her. I saw no signs of the nurse but I was picking up strange words in the Mooré conversation I was trying to eavesdrop on next to me. They were talking like someone was giving birth but I saw no evidence of that at all. Then after a few minutes a very old woman came out and said it was a boy. Everyone cheered. WHAT?!? I thought – how could someone have just given birth in the room over with the door open and I didn’t even know? The old woman reappeared with the baby and took him to the next room. Less than 15 minutes later the mother appeared – a Fulani girl who couldn’t be older than 16. She walked alone to the room where her baby was and I pretended not to be as shocked as I was inside. What does the birthing room look like, you ask? It’s actually just a metal and plastic cot that’s on the far side of the nurse’s office with a curtain that you can draw between her desk and the cot. One window. No running water (in the whole clinic actually).


House:
I got electricity! I was so sad a couple months ago when I heard that the lycée was going to get partial electricity after all before I left but that my house was no longer being made a priority so I wouldn’t get to enjoy any light, Priority was given to the headmaster, of course, followed by my other direct neighbors to the left and behind. Not all the houses would be electrified because of money, of course, what else. The cost to put in the wires and light bulbs for each house runs about $300 so the school budget could only afford three houses this year. They also managed to electrify 3 classrooms and the administration building. One step at a time I guess. Anyway, after a couple weeks I had pretty much dealt with not having electricity, since I had made it over a year and a half without it and was happy it wasn’t a big deal to finish out my service in the dark. I at least could be sure that it would probably be the only time in my life that I would have to live without light. It did look a little ridiculous though when you looked at the school housing because there were three houses electrified and then mine in the middle of them, in the dark. Raised a lot of questions.

[This is the bandit cat. Could his ears be any bigger?]

Then one night Danny caught me as I was walking Turtle behind the Proviseur’s house one night. He said he had a secret, and that I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought he was just going to ask me for something so I kind of blew him off but he seemed excited so I let him talk. “If God is great, then you will have electricity tomorrow,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. I grabbed his wrist and dragged him 25 feet more away from the house. “What do you mean if God is great, what does God have to do with my getting electricity; what are you talking about?” I asked. He explained that the Proviseur had just gone to market and gotten one big light bulb, one socket, and the other related materials needed to install partial electricity in my house. “But they said there was no money!” I told him, convinced Danny had no idea what he was talking about. Actually he did. They were not going to give me fuil electricity with my own meter. They were just going to connect a wire from the headmaster’s house to mine, as if they were taking electricity from a house to a shed, and do enough work so that I could have one light bulb and one socket.

Well it is Burkina Faso, after all, and what with finding the electrician, making an appointment, having him blow off the appointment, and then finally show up, it took more like 2 weeks than 1 day, but who’s counting. Moussa saw the sunset approaching the day of the appointment, and saw that no work had been done to prepare the ground for the line that would have to cross the lawn between our houses, so he took a pick axe and started digging. Danny immediately relieved him but with in 10 minutes Danny showed us his bleeding palms and admitted it was his first time using a pickaxe and he didn’t know how to do it without hurting himself. Moussa took back the axe and finished the work just in time for it to get pitch dark and for the electricians to finish their work inside. The light is long, about 4ft. and provides enough light to work anywhere in the living room. I bought a surge protector and so now I can plug in as much as I want! I still forget often that I have light, especially when I get home after dark. The reflex to turn on the flashlight on my cellphone wins out and I stumble around my house for a few minutes before realizing that if the neighbors could see me they would be laughing because I’d forgotten about the light switch. Unfortunately though light allows me to work later, I don’t get that much more time because little did I know it but by about 10 pm the mosquitoes in the house are actually so bad that even if you’re wearing bug repellant and long pants you won’t be able to think straight. Best to go to bed at 9 like I always did, safe under my mosquito net.

All of this work should have already been done, I should add. Total electrification was in the building plans and everything. But like with the courtyard walls that are actually just chicken wire fences or the indoor showers that are actually outdoors or the equipped laboratory that is bare and unfinished, there is often a difference between what is promised and what is done. The difference of course ends up as spare change in the pocket of the builder.

[This is a bad picture of what I think is a Great Blue Heron in our resevoir. Am I wrong?]

The best consequence of electricity at a school is without a doubt the fact that students now have a lighted place to study in the evenings. For some their houses have light, for most they don’t, but either way it’s nice to see that students are able to come and have a quiet, focused place to work at night. I ask myself when my school out in the sticks will ever get electricity; maybe in 30 years. It was relatively easy to get electricity to the lycée because the electricity that is produced by the hydroelectric dam that goes towards Ouaga travels down the main road of Bagré for a while, directly passing the lycée. That electricity gets diverted and cuts across the country side away from the road before my school, and of course, before the actual village of Bagré. It’s amazing that a village whose river produces a good chunk of electricity for this country doesn’t even get electrified itself. The fact that a school 1 km away from the source of the electricity, directly next to where the electricity passes, took over 2 years to get partial electricity is just ridiculous.

Cat:
Mice pretty much took over my house. I’d buy tomatoes and wake up and find half of them gone. Not like 3 out of 6 gone but like one half of each of the 6 tomatoes gone. They started running around the house as if I didn’t really live there, sure that nothing was going to get them. I’d find about a nest a week, in a box, under my stove, in a hole dug in the wall, and have to fish out the screaming babies and throw them outside. The ands of course do the same thing since Africa ants and America ants are not the same thing. There’s this species that is pretty large, I’d say each ant is about 1 centimeter long, their head is black but the rest of their body is amber and they are incredibly organized. When they find out that I’ve left some tea in a cup on the counter over night I wake up to find about 300 ants inside the cup drinking. They’re strong enough that they can carry away baby mice and they do so regularly. Being mice and not cats, killing the baby is another thing. They do the only thing they can do which is bite the baby so much that it bleeds to death and then carry it away to the nest.

They also ate into pretty much everything else – some things I’d never expect mice to bite into: my clothes, my sponge, my books, my bed frame, my mats, and my chairs. I decided it was time to get a cat – and so came Jack – the cat I put up a picture of a couple weeks ago. He’s pretty useless with mice right now at his age but nonetheless they all moved out as soon as they smelled cat in the house. He’s starting to catch lizards though so I hope that pretty soon if I go away for the weekend he’ll be able to feed himself alright.

One thing that’s pretty strange about him is that he nurses the dog. I mean the dog has no milk or anything, but I guess he likes the feeling, that’s all. The dog and he didn’t get along at all in the beginning but now they think they are mother and son. They play together and eat together and sleep together even though Turtle’s a giant next to him.

COS conference:

[This is me and one of my bestest buddies Caleb (though we never see each other because he practically lives in Niger) at our COS party! Go us!]

Just a couple weeks ago we had our COS (Close of Service) Conference. COS conference doesn’t mark the end of service, but is rather the final training you receive during your service about 5-6 months before the actual close of service. We were taught all sorts of things about what it’s like going back to America, reintegration, perks of being in the Peace Corps, all the endless administrative forms to file, how to find a job, how to interview, how to be normal again etc. There were 16 of us there (we started as 29). All in all we all found it to be a pretty traumatic experience. We were told that while most people manage to reintegrate (yes they actually said most not all), basically everyone has difficulty doing so and that the readjustment period usually lasts from 3 months to a year. Most people actually report that going back is harder than coming ever was. But they told us coping strategies – you know – like don’t go into Big Y the first week you’re home. The CD (Country Director) said about half of us ended up in his office in tears during the week. But actually looking back on it, I thought it was by far the best training conference we’ve had as far as how informative and how useful that information is.

[This is me and Danny's mom (my left), dad (my right) and his dad's other wife (left of the dad).]

One thing I worry about quite honestly is my English. While I’m probably justified in saying that I’m fluent in French now, my English has certainly taken a hit. Let’s hope that once I’m back I can keep the French fluency and get my English back too and that every time I see a black person in America I don’t start speaking French.

As far my post-Peace Corps plan goes, I guess it’s not that bad. I mean some people really have no idea at all what they’re going to do – or what they want to do for that matter – when they get back. It’s really true that the freedom you have after being a Peace Corps volunteer is really unmatched. You can apply the skills you learned during service here to pretty much any job – kind of like being a physics major but much more so.

[This is me and my neighbors' younger kids. Irene (e-ren) and Anicet (ah-nee-say) in my living room. Daniel's camera skills are unparalleled I must say.]

As for me, I’ve spent lots of long hours reading and listening and researching, trying to understand the difference between the aspects of training/a career in advanced practice nursing and training/a career as a doctor and which one I want to pursue. As much as financially I didn’t want it to be the answer, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really do want to pursue becoming a doctor. Eh, Peace Corps has really shown me that there’s always a solution – and I’m sure it’ll work out one way or another. And I’m not even saying that with a knot in my stomach like an American would – I really believe it now. Either way: 1 year of getting ready for med school + 1 year of applying and getting rejected + 1 year of applying and getting accepted will probably mean 3 years till I go which means that in the mean time I’ll be working doing who knows what. Ça va aller! For the time being, I’ve submitted an application to the UConn Post-Bac Program, which is for people like me looking to get ready to apply to med school.

My official COS (again, that’s Close of Service) date is July 29. I’ll be COSing with Marty and Caleb and Julia. My COS date is not the day I’m leaving the country – it’s just the day that I end my service. I’ll be coming home mid or late August or the beginning of September – depending on what happens with this Uconn Program and what not.