africa and other things

This is my annotated Packing List for all those out there looking for packing advice. This is also linked to on the side of this blog.

2009-04-08T19:02:00.001-07:00

****** I've edited this list with notes about what I brought, how much i appreciated it, what I don't recommend, etc. If you have any more questions, email me. *******

*Definitely the most appreciated items were (in no particular order): shortwave radio, iPod, computer, bug tent, leathernman, nalgene.
* As far as gifts for people, like for your host family, bring something simple, like a postcard from your hometown or a hat from your favorite baseball team or a picture of yourself. It's getting easier to develop digital pictures here, so even a picture of them with you could be possible. I actually sent pics to CVS online and had my parents send them to me here of my host family and the loved it. Also, a deflated soccer ball (your fam will have kids) is really cool. Small things go a long way. Oh, and Jolly Ranchers. You're not expected to bring any gifts at all, and it's probably better to give the gifts at the end of your stay with them anyway. There are plenty of things they would love here that you can get here. Don't sweat it.

The packing list evolves... This was compiled based on the information sent from the Peace Corps and by the opinions of other girls my age who went to West Africa/Burkina Faso, what they loved having, what they regretted bringing, etc.
Items in pink are things I don't own yet, items in yellow are things I own, and items with question marks are things I'm not sure I need to bring or don't know much about. Hurray to all the companies offering discounts to goverment/service individuals like PCVs! I can't even explain how much money I've saved on these things.

FINAL PACKING LIST
Backpack (Arcteryx Bora 75, Women's)
- - This is an amazing pack. Daily village life has no place for big packs but for any big traveling and even for bringing stuff from Ouaga to village once and a while . Most of the time it sits in the closet; but you have to get here somehow. You can get big bags here, but they are not sturdy. Not sure you need a pack THIS good, but I got it on eBay cheap.
Messenger bags (Timbuk2 XS and Medium)
- Timbuck2 bags are like the most useful and durable bags ever. I use mine every day - especially the small one for going to school and market every day and they will be still be pretty much intact when I go home.
Sleeping bag ( Tropic Traveler from Cocoon 2.0 lbs), and Travel Sheet (7.8 oz)
- My sleeping bag is very useful. When I sleep outside I use it when it's cooler. The travel sheet is even more recommended because it is so hot here. With a tent and a sheet you can be comfortable all but maybe 2 months of the year. I got a discount on both when I ordered (I asked).
Pack towel (XL and hand towel sizes, here's an MSR one)
- I use these - particularly the small one - but not as often as I thought I would. There is always fabric around here. I use pagne fabric much more if for nothing other than the fact that it's prettier. You really don't need to worry about getting something to dry here so maybe bring a face towel but you can skip this.
Compressible Pillow , (I've heard the pillows there are less than par, thermarest is always nice)
- Very useful. You can buy pillows here but this thermarest pillow is fluffier than they are, and you can travel with it.
Hammock (travel ones are light and cheap) and I got one free - (will have this shipped)
- Ok you totally don't need a hammock but I am so glad I have it. Hang it at the school I live next to when I'm not there and it's one of the ways to keep cool. When you lay on a matress in the heat it is like laying in a pizza oven.
Therm-a-rest Trekker Lounge 25 (turns pad into lounge/chair) (will be shipped)
- Not really that useful. You can get chairs made or you can buy them. I don't recommend it.
Therm-a-rest sleeping pad, ProLite 3, (discount)
- Sleeping pad was very useful, for travelng to see people and stuff like that. Oh and everyone who didn't have one of the lighter, smaller pads was jealous. Mine has a hole now, but that's because Burkina is thorny.
Screen Tent (seem to be really recommended ... like the REI Bug Hut 2)
- Buy this tent. Just do it. Don't buy another one. Buy this tent.
Seal Line 6L Dry Case , Seal Line See Pouch (discount)
- Not that useful. Never really had any water problems here. I use it to keep dust off of my electronics, but could easily have done without it.
3 pair light Cotton Pants (like good ol' Gap pants)
Shirts..... hmmmm
2 long skirts - macabi
4 pair socks, 16 prs cotton underwear, 3 bras/3 sports bras
- This is what I have to say about clothes: I don't regret the 'teaching' clothes i brought and of course a favorite t-shirt or jeans but the truth of the matter is that there is no shortage of clothing here. Even if you bring lots of clothes, you will wear through a lot of them. That's ok. Lots of salvation army clothes end up here and you can buy a new shirt for 50 cents in the market and if you want, you can get as many amazing, excellently fitting clothes made here with tailors which I highly reccomend. Tailors can make western like clothes or african like clothes and there is never any shortage of fabric. Don't bring a lot of white things. I have never, not even once, worn socks. I gave them away. People who run do use them. Bring good bras, they are hard to find here. Same with underwear. You can never bring enough bras and underwear. I would have brought maybe 2 more bras and the underwear was sufficient. I've lost at least a couple of pairs through unfortunate bowl accidents.
PJ pants, Running shorts
- You're going to feel uncomfortable running no matter what. Try to make sure your running shorts aren't so short. PJ pants are great. GREAT.
2 pair Chacos (50% off! to PCVs!) (I like ZX/2 and Zong)
- Chacos are great. I use mine all the time. If you don't think you will or don't think you want them then don't worry, you can get cheap shoes here in any marché. Both the cheap flipflop kind you shower in and nice looking ones to teach in. 50% off discount.
1 pair Merrell Waterpros
- You can get lots of shoes here but nothing as sturdy as this. I used them to run. But my feet get really hot easily and I stopped using them and used open shoes all the time. You can teach in Chacos.
Swimsuit
- There is a swiming pool in Ouaga and in the training town, Ouahigouya. Bring it.
2 Bandanas, Canvas Hat
- Never realy used hats or bandanas. Other people do. Just not me. I gave them away. But I did get a really cool hat that had bug repellent built in and it was cool for a while for that at night.
Laundry bag
- Eh, not that useful. If you need to put clothes in something you can just tie them up in a pagne. You can also get things like baskets here and stuff if you want a laundry thing.
Umbrella
- Gave it away. Everytime it rained I just wanted to get wet. If you don't like getting wet then consider bringing one. Like one of those tiny ones they sell at walmart.
thin sweatshirt (the cornell one or lighter?)
- Bring at least one piece of warm clothing like this. It does get uncomfortably chilly in the 'cold' season and even when it's raining sometimes you're going to want something to cover up with.
Small non-stick frying pan, nesting pots, plastic spatula, tupperware (nesting)
- You can get any kitchen supply you might ever need here. It might just be a little expensive if you want America quality or not such good quality if you don't want to spend so much. I use a non-stick frying pan everyday. Bring a good one and take care of it and it'll last you the whole time.
Parmesan cheese, Koolaid packets, Easy Mac sauce packets and the like
- No there is really no shortage of these things ever. Ever.
can opener, sharp kitchen knife (apparently all the knives are dull there)
- You can get everything you need here but bring a can opener if you want. The knives here are not good quality but you can get them sharpened for like a nickel. I'd recommend bringing a good chef's knife.
ziploc plastic bags, small roll of duct tape
- Bring it.
carabineer (1)
- Eh, there are cooler things to use as keychains here.
pocket knife (Gerber Paraframe II), multi-tool (Leatherman Wave yay eBay)
- My gerber knife was so awesome and then it got stolen. I still use my Leatherman all the time. For the prices you can get on eBay, it's worth it. VERY USEFUL.
headlamp (energizer), flashlight (Maglite LED)
- Invest in a good headlamp / flashlight. Assuming you'll have no electricity you'll be using these everyday. EVERYDAY.
frisbee, uno, cards
- Some people's frisbees got a lot of use; mine didn't. UNO cards are great to kill time with friends. Regular playing cards you can get, even in village.
hand sanitizer (small bottle)
- There were volunteers who used this every single day before eating anything. You'll get sick regardless. I never missed it.
small mirror (kinda like this)
- You can get small mirrors here in the marché for cheap. Hard to travel with anyway.
burt's shampoo bar ? (1) + leave in conditioner?
- At the supermarket in Ouaga you can get any kind of American shampoo conditioner stuff you might want. And even though I wasn't expecting it, I did fine using these sorts of things in a bucket bath. The bar was actually kind of frustrating. I did appreciate it during training though because it was convienent when living with a hose family (not having to card 5 bottles to the shower). For my hair, leave-in conditioner wasn't good enough. I missed real conditioner.
soap bar (face and body), st. ives apricot scrub, Loofa
- You can get the equivalent of a loofa here. Um, apricot scrub is the best stuff on earth for getting crap off your face. You can get lots of bars of soap here.
lotion, lip balm, small amount of makeup
- Yah, a little bit of makeup was nice. Now and again you'll go out in Ouaga and want it. Peace Corps will give you lip balm, but if you want gloss to be pretty, bring it. In the dry season bring lotion if you like good lotion. You can get pure shea butter here for cheap, but if you're someone who appreciates your lotion in the States, bring a bottle and later on you can have more sent.
2 cheap watches
- You know, if they hadn't broken, I would have kept wearing them still. But everyone and their mother has a cell phone here so I just started using my phone as my watch. It's always on me. You can get really really cheap watches here too in any marché.
2 pr glasses, 1 pr prescription sunglasses, eyeglass repair kit, clotth/cleaner for glasses
- Peace Corps says to bring 2 pairs of glasses. Do it. I appreciated my prescription sunglasses because the sun is F'ing strong. Repair kit is so small and cheap it's worth it (leatherman tiny screw driver also works). Cleaner is worth it for glasses and for screens of electronics.
- Though they say not to, I, and several others, eventually went back to contacts, like we had in the States. I've had no problems.
1 Nalgene, 1L, Platypus 2L Platy Bottle + Drinking Tube + cover)
- Worth it. If I had to choose between the platy bottle and the nalgene, it'd pick the nalgene as far as being here.
6L Platypus Water Tank, Platypus Shower Adapter
- Don't recommend it. Bucket bath's are fine! Really! Water pressure's not enough in this thing anyway.
Scissors (for things like haircutting)
- I don't regret bringing a pair of haircutting scissors. Useful!
toothbrush, toothpaste, FLOSS
- Can get toothpaste and toothbrushes here. Floss - eh - in Ouaga yes, but bring some.
hairbrush,tweezers, razors/blades
- Bring a good hairbrush. You can get tweezers here. You can get cheap razors here, for really cheap. I gave up on my nice razor finally - it was just easier to buy cheap bic razors, which you can get in village.
accordian style folder
- Can get this here, but Peace Corps starts throwing lots of papers at you and never really stops so bring one, you won't regret it.
1 journals, address book, 18 mo. planner (Moleskin), book of US stamps
- Worth it.
Photo album (personal/public)
- A must. You can't bring too many pictures.
pencil case + pens pencils, crayons?, paperclips or stapler or something
- Bring a few of your favorites, but you can get anything like that here.
some form of Biology text
- Anything you need to know about the curriculae in the school system will be explained to you here and you will be given text books to help you. Beyond that I would say that you don't really need to bring anything - especially because the internet is never really that far away, and the questions I did end up having didn't really have their answers in my freshman bio book. It was a lot of weight that I never really used.
french dictionary / grammar book, french technical dictionary
- Peace Corps will give everyone a decent French/English dictionary and a very good grammar book. Bring a technical dictionary if you think you need it. They will give you vocabulary lists to help but I appreciate my scientific dictionary dictionary.
west african bird guide
- You can say what you want about Burkina not having much 'cool' wildlife but take my word for it, the birds are as good as they were in Kenya. I love birds, so this was really worth it to me, and this is a great guide.
star chart, map of Burkina, map of World
- Unless the budget got really bad, they will give you a great map of Burkina when you get to training. Starchart was great but that's because I'm a star nerd.
surge protector + adapter (US to French)
- You do not need to bring an adaptor. Almost everyone will, but you can get them for like 30 cents here in any market. If you need to bring a voltage adaptor for anything - that you can't find here - that's another story. Read your electronics and they will tell you what voltage it can take.
MyPower All battery thing
- Donated. Worked with my solar panel. Solar panel charged this battery pack and then the battery pack charged things, like my phone, gameboy, and even extended the life of my computer. Pricy if you were gonna buy it, but this was donated.
solar AA batt charger
- Before I had friends who had electricity, this was all I used. I don't use it anymore because I have a plug in my house now, but is very effective and I reccomend it. Will charge AAAs too.
16 AA rechargeables, 4 AAA rechargeables, battery charger (all donated by Sanyo)
- All Eneloop batteries by Sanyo. GREAT BATTERIES. You can get AA and AAA batts here but they are SO bad you'll wish you had rechargeables!
shortwave radio (Kaito KA1102)
- This might make the difference between feeling really alone in your house and feeling kind of connected. VERY GOOD radio. Highly recommend it.
Camera (Cannon S3IS), extra memory cards / CDs
- This is a great camera, but it's not new. Bring a cam with a good zoom is what i'd say. Never used CDs. Bring a USB key with a good capacity.
ipod mini and headphones (+ otterbox case + arm band)
- BRING an iPod. And the otterbox case is by far the best protection out there for your iPod.
Travel Speakers (Altec Lansing IM3C)
- GREAT small speakers. The sound quality is great and the sound fills my house and yard. Music is pretty much the best therapy here for feeling better and relieving stress.
laptop - Powerbook G4 (+ extra battery + case + keyboard cover)
- IF you have a laptop there is NO reason not to. We have internet at the hostel. Everyone who has one and didn't bring it regrets it. Most laptops do not need voltage conversion.
12W Flexible Solar Panel (like the Sunlinq one)
- This panel will do everything except charge a laptop. It extended the battery of my laptop but won't charge it like the wall would. If you want that then buy a higher wattage one. This is a great panel. Got a discount.
Game Boy Micro (am i a bad person?)
- Before I had friends and a life in village, this was what I did while listening to the radio and hiding in my tent because I was afraid of my house. I guess it was not necessary at all but looking back it definitely served it's purpose. Is now unexplicably dead. Cheap on eBay!
calculator (for grades)
- Very useful. Doens't need to be the TI-83 i brought, but having a calculator is a GOOD idea.

2009-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry I don't have time for a real post but I just wanted to show you a picture of my new kitten! I got him about a month ago and he's here to kill the mice that are taking over my house. Oh, and that's a guinea hen head, his pacifier. His name is Jack (jakuma means cat in Dioula).

Christmas in Bagré / New Year's in Toussiana

2009-01-03T17:13:00.000-08:00

Happy (late) holidays everyone. Last holiday season I spent on the coast of Ghana but this year I did it up village style. Christmas was chez moi in Bagré and then after a stop over in Ouaga we continued on south to Toussiana to celebrate New Year's and see the family there.

For Christmas I decided to get a sheep. Usually functionnaires flee the village to go to the cities during school breaks but once I started talking about a sheep, I noticed that people's travel plans started after Christmas instead of before. Buying a sheep, while a fairly common thing in village, is not that easy to do as a white person. Naturally the thing to do was to delegate the task to someone else. So first we tried to get one through a Peul (the ethnicity that raises livestock) high school student at the lycée. They kept saying that the sheep was coming, the sheep was coming, but no sheep. Finally, one day late and at night, the students showed up on a moto with a sheep in their arms. I'd saved up 60 dollars for the sheep, so it should have been a real big one. The sheep they'd brought was more like a 35 dollar sheep, but they were asking 50. After much questioning we found out that the students had told the sheep's owner that it was professors who wanted to buy a sheep, which explains why the price was so high. We told them to take their sheep and go. And they did.

The next strategy was to ask the old man who is the watchman for the school to do it for me. A real villageois, the man doesn't speak any French and wears a long boubou and muslim cap everyday. He rides a bike around and often puts his youngest baby in the basket in front of the bike. I told him in broken Mooré that I wanted to buy a sheep, how much money I had, and the day we needed it by. I asked if he could got to market the following day and he said that he couldn't - that he needed to travel. I felt silly because it hadn't occurred to me that the old man did things like travel. Anyway, the following market day, which was Christmas Eve, he went to market with a colleague and i wished them good luck (may god let them find a good sheep). I didn't see them for over 2 hours. I was convinced no one had brought sheep to market that day and that Christmas would be sheep-less but just as I was giving up hope they came barreling into the school yard on Oued's moto with the guardian holding the sheep on the back. He was beautiful! Cost: $55. He's pictured there below with me and Moussa's brother Brama who was visiting from the Cote d'Ivoire, which is the other big news. Brama, and all of Moussa's direct family, lives on the Coast of the Ivory Coast and while all the kids are Burkinabé, they've never been to their own country. So Brama, at the age of 24, took a tour of his country and got to see where his people come from.

He's the only one of us who actually says his 5 daily prayers, so he was the one to slaughter the sheep. I thought that coming to a place where one day animals are alive and the next they are on your plate would make me either like playing with animals less or like eating them less.

2008-12-26T17:19:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-12-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

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.

pictures! (explanations to come!)

2008-11-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

Where the electricity will one day be in my house. This is my shelf of last minute things i need before leaving the house. Bug spray, sun block, emergency phone numbers, dust masks and Tiana reminding me to take my phone.

Summer rain in Toussiana.

Mmmm sautéed bat.

Burkinabe car. Mom and fam coming home from fields.

One of the two buildings of my school. Four classrooms in that building.

Peanut harvest chez moi. The kids in the pictures are from two ethnicities (Mossi and Peul) can you see it? Boy in the yellow shirt is Danny.

Beautiful bird, forgot the species name. Actually a very small bird.

Me very very tired in a car going to visit An with the Taiwanese in their truck.

Turtle hates cameras. This is my living room, by the way.

Moussa's mom and I in her courtyard in the Ivory Coast.

2008-08-03T08:12:00.001-07:00

Kids in Bagre Village. This is that so-familiar 'what are you?' look. They stood there for 5 minutes like that.

2008-07-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

Ca fait deux jours! (It's been a while...)

Hi everyone, it's been about two months since I wrote last, and in that time I've been doing mostly non-Peace Corps typical things.

There was of course the mad dash to get school finished, including a mind-splitting amount of by-hand or by-calculator grade and rank calculations for both the third trimester and for the end of the year. I worked ahead without hardly any procrastination (amazing I know) and it took me almost three whole days at school to do the calculations. Oh if we only had our grades on computers...

Then there was the scandal about money. My director had told the teachers to continue doing their work and report their year end grades because there was no need to go on strike because the money they deserved was coming, it was only a matter of time. Nope: it was a lie. Money didn't come, wasn't coming in time for school to end, the director told the teachers as they showed up for their last obligation of the year: the end of school meeting. The director had won - instead of the teachers' withholding their grades in order to force their salaries to come - the teachers had already done their work, and telling them on the morning of the end of school meeting meant there was nothing anyone could do about it. The teachers were livid and we went around the back of the school for a meeting before the end of year meeting. After lots of yelling and anger, the teachers struck a deal and went to sit down to get the meeting started.

Directly after, I was taken to the intersection about 20 km from the village to wait for a car going in the right direction. After I found one, I made my way to the capital and made myself at home there for a few weeks. First was (Peace Corps loves acronyms!) TDE (training design and evaluation), a week of closely analyzing and revising the pre-service training program to improve the whole thing for the new guys coming in at the beginning of June. Pete and I went to represent the teachers side of things. After TDE was a week of TOT (training of the trainers) where everyone who was scheduled to be a facillitator in the next pre-service training came to learn about what we had talked about in TDE, what we changed, and some basic information everyone should know.

Then i went back to village and just RELAXED for not even a week before being called go to up to the capital again to meet the new people at the airport! Babette, Chrissy, Kevin and I met them their first night and were there to support them during their first four days in the country before they moved up to the north where they would train. Boy my first impression of them was that these American people, they sure are white, fat and clean! It was a very memorable experience to get a glimpse of what I and my stage-mates looked like and how far we've come (not just on the fat, white and clean side of things, obviously). After their first few days we went up to Ouahigouya with them and I stayed with them for their first two weeks of training, helping be a role model, support system, and teacher. They're all really cool and I hope they all stay. One thing that was weird was that they pretty much had all read this blog before coming and so they knew who I was before I knew them ... they also knew strange details about me and my digestive system, dog, and village.

After my work in pre-service training, I went back to the captial to meet with VAC (the volunteer student counsel, basically). Meetings went well, and are a great deal more organized now than I remember their being when I first joined VAC.

After VAC came AMERICA! Very clearly, indisputably the BEST vacation of my life. So good in fact that it made me want to quit my job. Amazing food, amazing people, and ballroom dance everyday! Also... comfortable couches, microwaves, glass windows, grocery stores, cold wine, junk food, big TVs, fast internet, starches other than rice, vegetables as big as your head, dogs that are treated better than any single person in this village, flowers, driving, exercise bikes possessing none of the negative characteristics of actual biking, showers with strong water pressure, clean hair, clean feet, hot dogs, seemingly unlimited ice cream, and a bed that doesn't form and stay formed to your body. Also, I never knew that the transatlantic flights which seemed so horrendous on my way over to BF could seem so luxurious and roomy after the horrors of transport here. I was carrement a l'aise! Did you know that Royal Air Maroc actually served me bread and lox???

My mother turned 71 while I was home. It's ok, parents, if you get as old as dirt, but at least stay healthy!

Came back to Burkina the night of the 23rd, I guess actually the morning of the 24th. The 24th was ok since I was just sleeping off the travel, but the 25th made me just want to go back home. I'm back in village now... trying to cheer up about the whole thing, but it's hard to do since everyone has fled village during the school vacation. Either they've left the village for the summer or they're out in the fields. SO that leaves me and the dog, and books, and that bed that forms to my body and stays that way, the mosquitoes, and silence.

Katherine's coming to visit next week, and I'm super excited to have a guest! Especially one who is of the joining-the-peace-corps-is-a-good-idea mentality rather than a I-don't-like-bugs-and-nature-and-dirt mentality.

Anyway, I'm alive, everything's fine, AmericaLand is paradise (you should go see this place if you haven't already), and I'll write more when there's something to write.

2008-06-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Nothing about me this time. I'm sad to report that a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana was killed this past Friday. She died in an automobile accident. I certainly never knew her but as PCVs we're all in this together and share in this tragedy together. Be safe everyone.

http://cathysaltwickmemory.blogspot.com/

2008-05-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-25T03:39:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! A lot has happened in the last two months. As my dad said there have been a lot of restrictions on where we can and can't go because of security so I've been kept away from internet for a while. Also school sucks all my free time these days so I'm so sorry I've not posted in so long. The issue in the country is the cost of living which recently shot up because of inflation. It's not Burkina specific, but when you're the second least developped country in the world, the inflation hits particularly hard. Things have stayed for the most part peaceful but there have been demonstrations and riots in the big cities so that's why our travel has been restricted. Don't worry, I'm fine. Think of the Peace Corps as a really strict parent during times of civil unrest; if anything they're too careful - as they should be.I decided that climbing a mango tree would be a good thing to do. I haven't climbed a tree in a long while.

Sometimes living here in just-barely-sub-Saharan Africa feels like fighting a bunch of battles that you have no chance of ever really winning. A lot of it comes down to the just-barely part of being just-barely-sub-Saharan, that is, the lack of humidity for most of the year. As a consequence, you’ll rarely find yourself in a comfortable temperature. There are the times of ridiculous heat which coupled with constant strong wind makes walking around village feel like walking around outside a gigantic hairdryer. With no humidity to moderate how the temperature feels to your body, when the weather does cool down, you find yourself freezing at night.

A few weeks ago: I boil a pan of water to add to my bucket I bathe with to make pouring water over my body tolerable. But with the strong wind, once that bucket runs out, I grab my pagne, wrap it tightly around my body and sprint for the house to find Turtle on my bed staring at me, wondering if I could possibly act any stranger. I sit there huddled under the comforter my until my skin dries off, and I can stand to go find some clothes to wear.
But now: Hot season’s coming. I bathe two to three times a day and with in minutes of drying off again, I feel uncomfortably hot again. Sometimes it feels like nature is just slowly roasting me since when you merely are next to something else you feel such strong heat coming off of it that you want to move away. This includes my house, my mattress, my water, my dog, and the air. Turtle can no longer stand to be on my bed because of hot mattress and instead sleeps stretched out on the floor by the door, panting.

The land is screaming out for rain but when the rains come, they will be so strong that the ground won’t be able to handle the volume and the water will just flow in little rivers through the dirt until everything turns to mud. Until there are grasses again, the sun will bake the mud until it dries and cracks and turns back to dust, usually before the afternoon is over. Down where I live we have been lucky enough to have a couple rains in March; they aren’t like rainy season rains, but they are longer and drizzlier. They’re called Mango Rains since Mango Season will be coming up in a few weeks, just as the hottest part of the dry season arrives. (How is that possible?) I eat about two mangoes everyday now; I can’t wait until there are so many I can eat as much as I want.

Cleaning is another battle you can’t hope to ever win. With the constant wind blowing, you can almost see the dust coming in the window, settling on the floor behind you where you have just swept. I dared to wear white pants to school the other day. No, that didn’t work too well. They were orange by noon. The neighbor’s son comes over and sweeps for me sometimes, which tends to be a lot more effective than when I do it myself. I joke with my neighbors that they’ll never be able to marry me off to an African since I make such a ridiculously poor African woman. Yes, they agree. And I’m getting skinnier. That doesn’t help.

This is a pretty typical shot of the residential area of Bagre Village - the traditional Bissa part of Bagre. I was originally supposed to be put out on this side of Bagre to live but they couldn't find a house that met Peace Corps' standards. It's as stereotypical africa as you can get: mud huts and thatch rooves behind mud walls. As you know it's the dry season so everything is this brown grey dead color. Life would be different out here.

My doctor came to pay me a visit in village a couple weeks ago. Nothing much to report. I’m healthy. My house is safe. They said I have the single nicest house of all the Peace Corps Burkina Volunteers.

My best friend in village had to move away. Moussa was a vacateur, which means that he was teaching but without really actually being trained as a teacher. He was simply a university graduate helping, as I am, to fill the desperate need for teachers. Well he sat for a competitive exam to get an actual teaching title and position in English and he scored at the top of everyone! They select about 10 out of 300 who try and they get promoted to teachers. Since it was an English test I tell him he only succeeded because he’s been talking to me so much. Anyway, normally he could have just stayed here and continued teaching at the school he was at but the higher ups do things sometimes for their own reasons and not for what makes sense. After we all did everything we possibly could we found out there was pressure coming from one of the higher up higher-ups and that there was nothing to be done. He left within days to Beguedo, about 45k from me as the crow flies. I got him a ride in a truck thanks to the CB and I went with him under cover of darkness at 5 am to his new village. We went with a big sheep too. The boy who takes care of the CB and his house said that the sheep had to go to the pastor in Tenkodogo on the way but turns out that said sheep actually was going to Garango, not so far from Beguedo. Anyway sheep got dropped off at the wrong place and so on the way home we picked him up and took him back to Bagre. Was sad to see Moussa go. Could be worse though – Beguedo is An’s village, the closest Peace Corps Volunteer to me. It’s more like 100k by road but it’s really not that far. It’s really hard with him gone. The neighbors, he and I, we were all like a family. We spent basically all our non-teaching time together.

These are my neighbors and me. There's Moussa, me, Bance and Ouedraogo (we call him Oued).

I biked out to see Anatole’s garden a couple weeks ago. It’s about 4 k past Bagre village out in the bush. It’s amazing to see because here in the dry season everything is almost the same color of brown. Dead dry brown. And then out of nowhere is this enormous green garden – the collaboration of several villagers and wells dug by the government – which stands out like some oasis you think you could be hallucinating in the desert. He’s playing with different ways to make money and he tried his hand at gardening this year. I guess with gardening at the very least you’ll have enough to eat if not make money at market. The gardeners were thrilled to see a camera.

This is Anatole being the ham that he is laying down in his garden for me. Those are mango trees in the picture. How the F are they so green when everything else is so dead and brown.

On the way home we passed a lot of people heading to one courtyard where we could hear a lot of singing and drumming. Anatole said it was the funeral of a very old woman and that everyone in the village would be coming at some time or another to greet the family. Anatole took me to the courtyard where there was a huge circle of women and children dancing and in the middle were drummers and women singing/wailing. As I walked in everyone turned to look at me and the drumming paused. Nassara. I wasn’t sure what would come next… laughter? more silence? greetings? stones? After all I didn’t know the family in the least. Well luckily it was greetings and hands dragging me into the circle to dance. And I guess then laughter at my attempts to dance the dance while greeting everyone at the same time. And Anatole’s crazy. He took my camera out of my bag and took a picture of me. Yes I feel even more overwhelmed than I look.

Then Anatole’s wife got really sick. I heard that he had gone to Tenkodogo to the hospital there and I was really worried. For someone with no money in their pockets to pick up and take their wife to the hospital probably means she was sick enough to die. Villageois don’t go to the doctor to prevent problems here; they go at the latest possible moment when nothing else has worked. They spent over a week there and she almost did die. Still unidentified stomach problem coupled with bad malaria. His medical bills were huge. I sent them 50 dollars in a bush taxi which he said he spent all on the medication that saved her life. Like I said, his pockets were empty. Crazy. This is him and his wife Joyce and their only son Godwin.

Another weekend I decided to bike out to see Moussa in Beguedo. Anatole had found me a path through the bush that cut the 90 km ride down to under 60 km. That distance isn’t so bad so I agreed to give it a try. I paid a kid a dollar to do the first 16 km with me since the road was bad – only passable by bike – and there were a lot of little turn offs leading to tiny villages along the way that could confuse me. Before I left I asked for how to say “I’m lost” in Moore but Anatole just looked at me strangely and told me in Moore that if someone has a mouth he cannot be lost. He said that if I knew where I was trying to go and from where I was coming then there could be no problems with being lost. The ride was hard, but a lot of that was my fault because I left at Windiga (midday). I drank the 4.5 liters of water I carried on me and drank at least another 2.5 that I bought but still as I was pushing through the last 10 km I knew I was in trouble. My skin felt strange. I was hot and cold at the same time and my skin on my face was starting to burn from the amount of salt on my skin. My muscles kept going but my stomach started to feel tight and nauseated. CRAP how did I get that dehydrated? I pushed on since I was only going to be able to recover once I got to a house and I wasn’t going to be able to do that till I was in Beguedo. I got to Moussa’s place and he was still at school with An, teaching. So I locked the door and stripped down to wash. His water was warm from the afternoon heat but I didn’t care; I drank it down and then sat in the shower trying to cool down my skin. After I had relaxed a little bit I started to really feel sick. Moussa came home and, like EVERY Burkinabe it seems, noticed that I was sick to my stomach and then tried his very best to get me to eat. He made me a gorgeous salad.
“Liza I know you like salad; you must eat this,” he said handing me a salad big enough for four people and half a baguette.
“In America when someone tells you they want to puke, you don’t make them eat.”
“Are we in America? You have to trust me – you need to eat this now,” he insisted.
“I know we’re not in America. I’m saying if I eat that I will throw it up.”
“It’s better to throw it up then to not have eaten any!” And he placed the monster salad on my legs. I gave up; I didn’t have the energy to argue. I ate one slice of tomato and two bites of cucumber and with in 3 minutes had thrown them back up.
I should have downed salt and sugar with some water but it took me a while to realize it was still dehydration that was getting me. Within another hour I felt strangely fevery and finally I realized I wasn’t sweating like I should be and that that was why my body couldn’t cool down normally. I wet down a pagne and wrapped myself in it and tried to replace my fluids/salts.

When I got back home (by car) I found out later that week that the gendarmes from my village had caught a man who had killed 4 women near that path I took through the bush. Why did he kill them? He killed them to take their blood to sell to a traditional doctor. Someone told me that women’s blood is good for many things, including foot problems. Needless to say I will not be biking that route again.

Turtle is doing well but she is ka soma ye! Not good! A man came to my house the other morning and told me that Turtle had killed 4 of his Guinea Fowl. I would have completely not believed him except he didn’t ask for money. It’s unbelievable because Turtle seems like she’d make a crappy hunting dog and everyone makes fun of her. On top of that, Guinea Fowl are big, fast, aggressive, and can fly. We ordered some Guinea Fowl from the gardien of the school about 2 weeks ago and still don’t have them because they are so damn hard to catch. Anyway if it’s true or if it’s not he asked me to tie her up. If they see her there again then they’ll shoot her. Mam wumdame; I understand.
This is her with her bandage from her operation on. It's around her waist and it's her-colored so it's hard to see. She gets this really confused look when I take out the camera. She has a lot of really dog-y insincts. I gave her a piece of meat the other day and she couldn't finish it so she took the leftovers out of the yard to take to her hiding place but another dog was between her and her hiding place so she tried to fight him but realzed she would lose her meat so she came back in the yard and then cried to come in and then proceeded to follow me around with her mouthful of meat whimpering for me to take it for 10 minutes. I scolded her for being a wuss and then put the meat, for lack of a better place, on my window sill. Of course I had company later that day and they must have seen the meat. Wierd Nassara.

School is going well. Classes are classes. Lots of work. Lots of frustration with students. I’ve done a couple sensitizations on Malaria and a couple on girls’ excision. I’ll write more about that another time. The second trimester is over and now we are on spring break! I hope to get another post up during this vacation.

Thank you all again so much for your support (every kind). Raebecca my students go crazy over the stickers you sent. *HUGS*

Joyeux Noel et Bonne Annee!

2008-01-19T05:26:00.000-08:00

(Ok: Puppy is still fine after operation and I shelled out for a new phone and then went to CelTel and they did their magic and made it so that I have my old phone number. So if you tried to contact me in the last couple days, all bets are off, but as of now, my phone number still works.)

Joyeux Noel and Bonne Annee everyone! Below you will find lots of Ghana pictures. It’s 2008 and what better place from which to make New Year’s Resolutions than the Peace Corps. Here are some of mine, in no particular order:

1) Improve the nutrition of my diet. Not like losing-weight; like nutrition.
2) Keep practicing ballroom – do it more regularly – in my spacious ballroom
3) Start a girls’ club. Make it awesome like Babette’s.
4) Write more letters. If I’m not going to do it now, when am I going to do it?
5) Get more serious about my Moore learning. Be able to have a non-stupid conversation by the end of this year.
6) Go birding more.
7) Go on a safari in the SW or the SE of Burkina Faso.
8) Persuade and succeed in having at least one of you come out and visit me this year. You really have no idea what you’re missing, and I mean that.

The trip to Ghana was great. It was exactly what we needed. Getting down there and getting back were filled with hours upon hours of fun transport stories. All told getting to where we were going took 33 hours from when we got to our Ouaga gare. Our bus left 4 hours late at 11 am. Here are Pete and Christina trying to talk to the transportation people about why our bus was so late to leave and that if they didn't pull out by a certain time then they owed us all bananas. Yes we got the bananas. We drove and drove and drove to the boarder of Ghana, got told repeatedly to get off the bus, walk a little ways and then get back on, sometimes after not having done anything at all while being off the bus. Got to a rest stop at about 11 pm; it was an area of concentrated egg sandwich/hot chocolate/Nescafe in the dark next to a market lit by candles. No one had been able to sleep a bit. The bus was just too hot/bumpy/uncomfortable for sleep to be possible. Look how pathetically tired we look.

Ghana was beautiful. It was such a change to be in an African country that by anyone standards is pretty developed. Even as we crossed over the boarder it was clear: guardrails on the roads, cars that weren’t falling apart, houses made of things other than mud and thatch and tin, pagnes that were just a little bit brighter. We stayed for several days chez Christina's friend down there in a small town called Ada Foah. We were right on the beach with no tourists and only the locals who were hauling in fishing nets on the beach. Our own private Ghanain beach. The waves were really strong and I lost one of my pairs of glasses when a wave pulled me off my feet (I was only wading!) and planted me on my back. For Christmas Even night we went on a long walk down the beach to look for sea turtles with our hosts who study them. Leatherbacks and Olive Ridley's come up to nest on the beach. We left at about 10 pm and started on what would have been an 18km walk had we all not crapped out in the middle to rest before returning home no earlier than 2 am. No turtles.

Then we moved on to a more touristy town caled Bousuwa. The place we first arrived at was dark and dingy and was at the moment without electricity and running water and mosquito nets. The owners lit candles and stuck them to the tables and as the sweat started beading up on our dirt stained faces, we decided it was time to move out. So we took a walk down the road and found lodging on the beach at a nice place for only 5 dollars a night. Sweet.

Turtle a gueri! Turtle got better! Daniel called me on the bus as we were heading out of Burkina to say that one of my pigeons was dead and that Turtle could walk and run again. She was a gimp for almost a week, he said, and now she’s fine. Bizarre.

But when I got back, and I went to see the Proviseur’s wife, it was a little difficult. Well I mean for one thing, when I brought Turtle over to them in the first place, it was sad. I mean the combination of how overwhelmed I was about leaving for Ghana the next day and then Turtle being so suddenly sick and the kids trying to call her and her not being able to move just was really sad so I cried a little in front of them. Not like sobbing but just quiet crying. Totally inappropriate, I knew that, but I couldn’t have not.

Well turns out it was stranger than even I thought. They’re my friends so they’re not going to be upset at me for crying, but they did do their fair share of making fun of me for it now that Turtle’s better. I swear madame must have told at least half the town that nassara was crying over her sick dog. I have all my friends coming up to me and asking if it’s really true. It’s seen like: crying in front of people = rare and crying over a dog = crazy and doesn’t happen, so crying in front of people about a dog = so strange it couldn’t even be true. So everyone mocked me for a couple days but I think it’s over. It’s easy to let things like this get under your skin, right? Cuz these people are supposed to be your friends and support system, not mock you for crying. But it’s how it is, they are my friends and support system, and mocking me is their way of enjoying that she’s better and finding humor in how strange their nassara is. If they weren’t being supportive then they would have just mocked me while I was crying, which they didn’t. The kids were just all scared and confused-looking – making their version of subtle but actually obvious hand signals to their mother that the nassara was crying.

A couple days later I was outside with Anise and Irene and another little girl I don’t know and I saw Moussa chasing the Proviseur’s goat around and around his courtyard, trying to make her leave and in the process find out where she had managed to sneak in. She refused. So when she was cornered, he picked up a handful of small rocks and started pelting them at her. (People throw rocks at animals all the time; I was barely even phased). She had eaten his one banana tree. Anise yelled “Basa! Basa! Basa!” (“Leave her alone!”) And Irene looked upset. I told him to stop, that I knew where she got in, and he let her go. I went into sit with Moussa and then we saw Irene walking her bike home, sobbing into her hands as she walked. You see, the goat was pregnant, and even though he was hitting her feet and legs mostly, it upset the kids, and Irene in particular. Later, the Provieseur’s wife seized an opportunity to make fun of her daughter crying over a goat, calling her my sister, a nassara in Africa, a crazy girl who cries over animals. Irene wasn’t pleased, and I went over and shook her hand, the equivalent of a hug in America.

A few days ago Anise (Proviseur’s youngest) took pink chalk and he and his friend painted their entire faces with it. Then they snuck into my courtyard, up onto my porch and peered into my door until I saw something out of the corner of my eye and turned to look at them from my table. They bolted. I chased them around our houses, gave up and went to stand with his mother on the porch.
“What will you do to imitate him?” she asked me, doubled over laughing.
“Imitate him? Why do I want to imitate him?” I asked her.
“Because he’s imitating you of course!”
“Oh, I get it now,” I said. He had made himself into a nassara. Very cute. I told him I would put charcoal on my face to be a ni-sabalaga (a black person). I haven’t, but I have started calling him nasara Anise. He doesn’t like that too much.

Turtle is nearly 30 pounds now and runs like it’s her job. She has followed me to school a couple times in the morning, which is 10 km there and back, and she loves it. It’s great to have the company. In fact her following abilities are really amazing. I can go with her to market now and she’ll follow right with me like I was telling her to heel but without a leash or anything. She’s also completely fluent in dog language now. Taking her through Bagre means she runs into a lot of dogs and having to follow me on my bike means she has to run through all of their territories, which generally pisses them off. But she’s got it down now: a dog’ll come at her, she’ll put her hair up and tail between her legs, bear her teeth lay her ears flat and when the dog goes to bite her she falls down fast and lays on her back and looks away. The other dog lets her go and she runs to catch up with me. We passed 4 camels with their Peul (ethinicity) riders on the way to school the other day. Every time I see camels it blows me away how utterly huge they are and how proudly they carry their heads.

The CB (Commander of the Gendarmes = Commandant de la Brigarde = CB) gave me a smoked wild hare to cook and a traditional mask of a bird’s face to hang in my house. I gave the hare to my neighbors and told them that if they prepared it for me then they could all eat it with me. It’s this black rigid vaguely rabbit shaped thing, arms and legs outstretched, ears back like it was running. They said it will be really good, that the meat’s really sweet. They also said I should teach Turtle to hunt rabbits for me. All Turtle does is chase goats, and I think that’s because she thinks they’re dogs.

The surveyant of the Lycee found a snake in his son’s bed. That’s 3 doors down from me. Must remember to close my screen doors ALL THE TIME.

My French really is picking up now. I think that my almost-month in an English-speaking country helped somehow. It feels as if a lot of the fuzziness of what is right and wrong just kind of dropped out. LOL this could all just be an illusion. I hope not. I’m going to start paying Moussa to do some French work with me. It’s not helping as much to just listen to villagers since now I can see that their French isn’t that good. And why would it need to be.

Anatole and I went to market for to practice Moore and we went to the vegetable section of the market and I greeted everyone in Moore and Bissa. Their smiles are from ear to ear when I speak to them in local language. Then I told Anatole to go bargain a price for a big watermelon for me. The vegetable ladies are all very nice, and perhaps too generous with their prices with me, but the watermelon ladies are quite the opposite. Where as a Burkinabe might pay 200 CFA for a watermelon of a given size, I’ll pay 400 or 500 CFA. This is a good example of what can happen when nassaras have been somewhere before you, but they, not being poor Peace Corps Volunteers, don’t fight high prices so much and so then the villageois get used to this, and then some of them don’t mind charging me twice as much for a watermelon. At any rate, I hid myself over in the vegetable section, with Turtle and let Anatole go on ahead to get me a melon.

With Anatole gone, I felt absolutely naked. I’d already bought the tomatoes I needed, so I just stood there awkwardly, looking at my feet. Ladies sitting on mats, their legs outstretched in front of them, crossed at the ankles, up and down this aisle of the market path, all staring at me. Low tables or other mats spread out in front of them with their produce. Some old ladies motioned to me, so I went over and greeted them. One was sitting there on the mat selling her tomatoes, onions, eggplant, and zucchini, and the other was standing to my right. I held her hand with my right hand and put my left hand under my right forearm and bent my knees and looked down as I greeted her to show her respect (not to mention she was sitting down), and then I turned to greet the smaller woman next to me. “A wumda moore! A wumda moore!” the message passes down the line of women as if it’s still a big surprise that I know some Moore. The tiny woman was so old and fragile looking that I swear I could have blown her over if I sneezed. She was wrapped in several pagnes, hiding her form somewhat, but after looking at her more closely I saw that even though I thought she was bent over, she was really standing up. She was just so tiny! I gave her the most gentle of greetings. Her voice was as frail as she looked but I could hear that familiar enthusiasm that comes from so many older people here when they hear me speak their language. She walked past me, ever so slowly, and I found myself staring at her a little, amazed she was still alive here, wondering what her age must be. The woman sitting on the mat started speaking to me, “She’s an old woman, it’s hard.” I nodded and then stood there awkwardly again.

“How long does it take to buy a watermelon, really, Anatole?” I thought to myself. With everyone staring at me, I didn’t know what to do so I kneeled down next to the woman on her mat. Turtle came over under my arm and so I did the only thing that made sense at the time, I started introducing my dog. “This is my dog. Her name is Turtle. She lives with me at the Lycee. She is beautiful and kind and she is my family here.” (I know what you’re thinking: I’m practically fluent hahaha). The woman smiled, laughed, and then echoed what I had said. It was awkward Moore, it was awfully American, but it broke the ice, and I sat there until Anatole came back for me, proud that he had bargained the watermelon down to only 175 CFA (that’s just under 40 cents).

So what can you find at the market anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly answered this question. Well the answer is: a lot. but for today I’ll try to explain the things that you eat. Foods are seasonal, so I’ll give you the list for now, the cold season. This holds for most Burkinabe markets, but obviously the list is longer at bigger towns and terrifyingly small in the smaller villages, Rice, beans (black eyed peas), rice, millet, sorghum, village peanut butter (not Jiff!), tomatoes, okra, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, green onions, eggplant, hot peppers, ignamme (kind of like a yam?), potate (kind of like a sweet potato?), garlic, salt, sugar, peppercorns, sesame seeds, MSG-filled chicken boullion cubes, soumbala, many other spices I don’t recognize and am still scared of, dried fish, fried fish, smoked fish, live chickens, hunks of all parts of goat, sheep, and cow.

Some things aren’t sold in what people call the market; they’re more out along the road in tiny one-room shops called boutiques. There you can buy pasta, tomato paste, canned sardines, palm oil, cotton oil, soap, glucose biscuits, credit for your cell phone, nails, powdered milk, tea, shea butter, Vaseline, bleach, and the list goes on, but not for very long, I just can’t remember. You step up to the opening to the little room, which is a screen covered window and you tell the person sitting there what you want and they fetch it, after you greet them of course.

Also along the road is where you find fruit, which is highly variable throughout the year. I know that at least for me I wasn’t at all used to what it means to really eat seasonally. Right now there are watermelons, tiny bananas, some papaya, and pommes sauvages (don’t know a good translation for that but it literally means ‘wild apples’, which they don’t resemble at all). Women and girls walk around with huge platters balanced on their heads selling slices of watermelon or bananas.

It seems that almost all the women are selling the exact same fruits and vegetables and almost all the boutiques sell exactly the same things. Yes, it’s confusing how they’re all still there. And any image or stereotype you have ever been exposed to about what African women are capable of carrying on their heads is not short of the truth, I assure you. I’ve seen women carrying loads on their head, and by carrying I really mean balancing, that I wouldn’t come even close to being able to manage standing still, breastfeeding their infant while biking, and I just don’t understand how it’s possible. I guess everything comes down to a matter of habit. They start when they’re tiny and it’s just a matter of building on what they start with.

Classes are going well. Particularly in 5eme, the kids really work hard and sometimes they work so hard that I really have to question myself about whether I’m giving them hard enough tests, but I think the truth really is that they work hard. We have a new SVT teacher to replace the one that left at the end of last trimester, which is wonderful for me because it means that I don’t have to take anymore classes that I had at the end of last trimester. Being that the case, I have the time to try to get the beginnings of a girls’ club started. I hope that by the end of this school year I’ll have done enough so that next year I can have things running smoothly and if everything really goes well then I hope that in the end of it all it can be something sustainable.

Lost phone and dog operation.

2008-01-17T06:07:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone! Just a quick note to say that I'm in Ouaga for a couple days in when I arrived I realized that my cell phone went missing so I am without a phone now. When we tried calling it you get an error tone on the line which means that someone took out the SIM card which means that I'm not getting it back. Will get a new phone tomorrow and try to go to the company and try to get my nunmber back.

In other news Turtle is with me here in Ouaga and this morning she got spayed. Quite the adventure. No problems. The operation cost, in Burkina standards, what a young village house keeper might get paid in a year, roughly the same cost as it would in America. There's a comparison for ya. Will write more tonight - just wanted everyone to know why my phone doesn't work.

Happy 6 months!

2007-12-21T05:37:00.000-08:00

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).

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!")

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).

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.

(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!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2007-11-26T00:19:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone!

I just got back from the north where about 20 of us had a wonderful thanksgiving. There are notable pictures and stories from this adventure, and since I am not with camera or a lot of time right now, I'll just say that it was great and I'll write about it later.

I'm seriously behind on other things I should have written about by now so I'll just keep writing till I run out of time here.

Be Thankful to Have Your Parents:
It was Tuesday morning, 7 am, and I was beginning my 6eme biology class. The kids were being little bandits so I was having to raise my voice and try to convince them that they wanted to be quiet for me. Then the Surveyant (who's the disciplinarian/administrative kind of person) knocks and asks for a minute of my time. "Pas de problem," I tell him and he comes in and commands full, standing attention of the class in under two seconds. I wish I could do that. At any rate, he explains that he's here to collect the names of any students who had lost both their mother and father. It's a class of 6th graders. Three hands go up: a tiny girl in the front and two boys in the back. He starts with the girl: "Your mother's dead?" he asks. "Yes, monsieur," she whispers. "Your father?", he asks. "No, he's alive," she says quietly to her desk. "Didn't you hear me?", he barked, "I want names of kids who have lost both their parents!" He proceeded to take the boys' names and then thanked me and left. I don't know why they were taking those names down - maybe some sort of tuition break for the kids' families. But at any rate i was floored. 2 kids out of 93 had lost both their parents by 6th grade. 1 in 50. Now I know that it's not as bad as it coud be or as bad as many places in Africa, but it was still a real reality check since life in Bagre's pretty nice. You have to look for the real suffering, even if it's there all the time, since all in all, life's ok down here. Sometimes you can just forget that a lot of people don't live very long, especially kids under 5, and that someone who looks healthy today, even if it's one of your 6th graders, could be gone next week. The life expectancy is slightly under 50 years and the median age is under 17.

So When Do You Run Out of Water?
Being up North for Thanksgiving really let me see the difference between the northern Sahel region and the southern Sudan region of Burkina, especially now that I've lived down there for three months. Au Sahel, the ground is dusty sand and the trees are more sparse and the land is more flat. In the day it's still hot but at night it gets really cool. Water starts to really be a concern up here during the second half of the dry season, and way up there in the north (you can see it on the map), the concentration of people just starts to drop off. We weren't THAT north, but some of us are placed in villages that are. Brian, for example, lives only a few km from Mali up in the north in a small village. We were chatting the other night about things and Mac, a felllow Sahel-dweller, says to Brian, "So when do you run out of water?" "Oh about February I guess," Brian said. And then he explained that his village runs dry about that time and that they have to get water from another village. I complain about having to haul water across the street - so i can't even imagine.

Interview with the Mayor
A few weeks ago I made the 8km bike ride between my house and my local language teacher's house over in old Bagre village, a visit that was probably well over due. I'd been in village for a while now and hadn't yet really presented myself to the village over there since my site visit in July. Anatole, my teacher, took me over to the Mayor's house. It's the first time Bagre village has had a mayor, since being like most villages here, rule is left completely to village cheifs. Well now they have both. The idea has something to do with trying to help the economy of the village. So we biked out to his house and found the Mayor sitting with a friend under a big tree listening to some sort of traditional african chanting on a tape deck that was easily as old as I am. The conversation started in Bissa, went to Moore and then to French. Soon it went to English with Anatole translating for me. Sometimes I drop into English when I have the chance because while I can certainly can get through any converstaion in French, sometimes I'd like to sound more like someone my age instead of a 6th grader. As you might imagine, my introduction to the Mayor was one of those times. He started with the basic questions about how my stay was going, how work was, how was my health and family and then we moved to the 10 point question section of the test and he started asking me about why I was here, how I was going to help Bagre, what I saw in store for Bagre's future and the suffering of its people, and how I was going to be a part of that future. You can see why I switched to English. I gathered all my smooth-talking skills and explained that the government of Burkina Faso and the education administration had invited volunteers here because of the dire need for teachers and I had come as a response to that as a part of an American organization called le Corps de la Paix. So what I was doing was to help educate kids. As for the future of Bagre, I told him I wasn't worried since it has become exceedingly clear to me that the dam here has really made Bagre an exception among villages its size. With the right organization and advice and time of course, Bagre'll be fine and it's very much on the cusp of really starting to develop. He was impressed with my answers, I was told the next day, and he gave me a watermellon. Score.

Ok that's all for now. Hope everyone had a GREAT Thanksgiving and ate a TON of good food.

Happy 5 months in country everyone!

2007-10-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-10-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Starts Tomorrow

2007-10-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

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

My dog is actually a girl

2007-09-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

*BEFORE I START BLABBING I WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE CARE PACKAGES AND PHONECALLS AND THE LETTERS AND EMAILS AND COMMENTS FROM YOU ALL - NO JOKE, IT REALLY KEEPS ME GOING - YOU GUYS ROCK*

So I can sex flies, snakes, crabs, fish and you'd think most mammals. But! By puppy is actually a girl. There was some know-it-all-teenager hanging around my gate and so I went out with the puppy and he looked at it and asked what it was. I assumed "a dog" was not the answer he was looking for, so I said "a boy" and he doubled over laughing. I picked the pup right up and put it's underside in his face and said "a boy" and he said "no that's a girl, nassara". Then he called over about 10 people from the road and they all confirmed: paaga, female. In my defense, a young puppies genitals are pretty strange. I'd asked for a boy and when I got the pup I thought it looked pretty strange for a boy but it looked even stranger to be a girl so I let it go. No, he's a she. So I changed her name. Now she's called Turtle, after the character in Barabara Kinsolver's book The Bean Trees. I also just like turtles. And they are good luck here. Just about every morning she goes out and plays with a herd of donkeys that come through. She loves jumping up on their faces. They're as calm as can be. She probably feels like they're playing back as they dodge her to try to get to the grass.

But now I need to figure out how to not let her have babies. She's still young, maybe three months now, so I've got some time till she needs to be spayed. I spent some time using by best Googling skills to see if anyone had tried this before and had written about it. The best thing I came up with was a woman who had spend 9 years in Ouagadougou and had gotten her cat spayed with success. Unfortunately for me, how she succeeded was by colaborating with friends and flying up a legit vet from Ghana to spay the cat in a hotel room. Cat's fine; I just need an option in Burkina. She was so nice though and told me about a vet that treats domestic animals in Ouagadougou and that despite the fact that the vet is said to be on the up and up, she had a friend who got a cat spayed by her and the cat died during the operation. I don't really understand how unless it was something about the cat that it could die during a spay operation if the vet was on the up and up. But it seems like the best option I have. Having a dog here is kind of different anyway. You have her and you love her and you also understand that between snakes and people that would happily have her for dinner, her life is really just a stretch of good luck. So I'll take a chance on that vet. Other than that, the local vet in Bagré should come over next week and give her her vaccines. I heard the price is 1000 CFA; that's 2 dollars. She's doing well though; she's gone from a clumsy dopey puppy to a very high energy puppy on legs and paws that look to big for her.

I read an amazing book this week. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. If you're not willing to come visit me but you still want to get a good idea about life in rural Africa you should pick up this book. It's fiction, but in so many ways it's not. I kind of feel like Barabara Kingsolver must have been spying on my life here for a while before she sat down and wrote about the culture and people. It's kind of creepy. Like, how does she know that? Aside from all that it's regarded as a damn good book.

The rains are slowing down here now. Instead of raining most days, it just threatens to rain. Makes a big fuss, gusts wind, picks up dust, slams all my doors and blows around the birds but then just quiets down instead of pouring. Here's a picture of the last good rain coming in. I would like you to notice the cows on my future neighbor's front steps. They say that it'll all stop within a couple weeks now and then the grasses will die and they'll burn them all up around the school yard so that people can walk around easier and there won't be any snakes in the grass. The next picture is literally of thirty seconds later and the total drop in visibility when it pours like that. I wonder, are there any clouds during the dry season? What will it really be like to live here when I won't see rain again till next year?

La rentrée scholaire is tomorrow, the day school is supposed to start. But school doesn't really start then and I don't really know when it will. I'll show up tomorrow and hopefully will find out my schedule and then we'll talk about when school can start. It's all based around the harvest and when the teachers are getting to town. School can be very important to people but in the end for subsistence farmers, the harvest will always be more important and one of the most valuable things about having kids is that they can help work around the house and the fields. So if you say school will start tomorrow then no one will show up. In the end starting school late just makes sense. I've started getting a little nervous about teaching. Without a schedule or a starting date it's hard to get nervous about anything but that but I think that preparing for 4 different classes on 4 different things each week is going to be a challenge.

I met a Tiawanese man this week. He works in Bagré along with a few other Tiawanese agriculture engineers. They have a cooperative with Burkina and work on growing rice in Bagré. He took me out in his air conditioned truck and showed me the rice fields. Bagré is enormous. I had no idea. Not in people but in fields. We drove for miles and miles and he showed me the bridges that carry water to fields like they do in Taiwan, he said. He showed me other work they are doing with showing the Burkinabé how to farm fish. We went down to the fish pools and there were just dozens of black kites (see bird page) hanging around picking off fish just a few feet from me. He also took me to his office and let me use the internet for a few minutes. That's right: the internet. In Bagré. At times like this I feel very confused. Simultaneously in a village that is mostly mud huts and tradition you can find AC and the internet. He wants me to teach him French. I don't know how I feel about that. Meeting him was great and it's comforting to know that there is the net close by if I really need it but I also felt kind of appreciative of how I am living here. Living poor is what I mean. The man was doing great things for Bagré but he was not integrating at all. I have no electricity or running water but my porch is full of company every night. But it wasn't part of what he was here for. I felt a little sad that I hadn't elected to go see the rice fields with Daniel on our bikes instead of inside the bubble of a truck.

Well until next time; and that next time might be from Bagré.

Happy 3 1/2 weeks everyone!!

2007-09-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

We were told once during training that one thing people who return to America after the Peace Corps often feel that people back home don’t really take that great of an interest in what you did during your service. As you might imagine, and as I am sure of now, this could be a pretty big let down. But in the end it seems pretty inevitable since a job that is so far removed, literally, from America would be hard to ever really relate to. There are exceptions of course but maybe this could all be fixed…

Yes… say for example, we figure out a way to rig it up so that we are all being filmed for a certain amount of time each day, and the film would follow the utterly ridiculous, mind-stretching and often touching things we face everyday, and then it could all be edited and turned into one of those awful reality TV shows where ever one tunes in to see who’s going home next except instead of Survivor IX it would be Peace Corps Burkina Faso 2007, or something. I suppose since we’re supposed to be volunteering here, we wouldn’t get to win a million dollars at the end, but we would get to go back to America, and eat good food, and that’s just about as good. BUT, more importantly, we could better accomplish one of the three goals of the Peace Corps, which is to share the cultural understanding of another country with the dear USA. No I know it would never work, but it’s sure funny to think of. In fact I think of it just about every time something ridiculous happens to me, and every time someone goes home. Speaking of which…

Beth, Katherine, Jamie, Chris, Christine, Alexia, Hope: we miss you and I hope you’re living it up back home.

Jamie: I used your little tube of shaving gel the other day and it was so great. I spent like thirty minutes shaving my legs, only knees on down of course, on my front porch while listening to BBC. It was pretty difficult considering the amount of skin-breakage I have on account of the mosquito bites and other such things. But THANK YOU!

Let’s see, what have I done in the last week and half to keep myself from going crazy out of boredom:

Painted my nails bright pink (WTF?)
Put a Burkina Map on the wall with everyone’s locations (but it keeps falling down and then Neo pooped on it)
Laundry, including 36 pairs of underwear*
Listened to Music
Read a lot of books
Written this Blog entry
Talked to people at home
Slept
Tried to housebreak the puppy
Danced
Made lentil soup
Went birding

*You have to understand that when you live with a host family, you can’t give your underwear to the person washing your clothes because it’s inappropriate. You’re supposed to wash it out in your bucket bath, in your bucket of water that you use to do every other hygienic thing, but somehow this never seemed good enough to me.

I have a puppy, and this is him. A yuur la a Neo. His name is Neo. He has a pretty predictable routine now. He wakes me up at 5, but lets face it, I was practically awake already anyway, then I tell him to chill until at least 5:30, maybe 6:00 if I’m lucky and then we get up and he gets all excited to go outside and then we go outside and he zooms around the yard and then comes back and asks me if I’m going to feed him. I do. Then he bounces around for about 20 more minutes and then it’s his naptime. This pattern repeats throughout the day and he’s still pretty tiny so he takes 6 or 7 naps a day. He is NOT housebroken yet and I fear that this may take a while. In the mean time I’ll be glad I don’t have a carpet.

There are two boys who are becoming my friends. I see them everyday for at least a hour, sometimes 5. I don’t know the little one’s name but the 8 year old is called Yassi and his little brother is 6 I think. They were the first ones who watched me all the time when I arrived and brought lunch to share with me and watch three bulls in front of my yard. I’ve now realized that since these tiny bull-watching children really do have complete control over where these bulls go that the reason there is such a high density of bulls in front of my yard is that the kids want to hang out together and they want to stare at the nassara. Anyway, I let Yassi and his little brother come in because they seem more… kind than most of the other kids. They are also willing to talk to me. They also are looking out for my best interests. For example, while he was in no position to stop it, he watched and then carefully informed me that a certain kid had squeezed through my gate to steal some of my powdered milk that he then ate with his friend. They call me Tantie (Auntie) and give me all kinds of advice from when I need to lock my kitchen to what I should feed the dog to make him big and strong and how to attach nails to my gate so that kids won’t climb over it (see picture). They’re pretty neat.

But I didn’t bring EVERYTHING inside yesterday before I went to the market; I left some dirty dishes and my solar battery charger on my porch. Neo’s pretty red leash that my parents had sent me was draped over the top of the window frame. When I came back the Proviseur told be he’d seen a kid squeezing out of my gate carrying something as he was coming home from the office and Benoit (the teenager who lives with him) was about to chase him down but the kid was too quick. I don’t know why, but the kid took Neo’s leash. Which is sad because what the hell is this kid really going to do with the leash (they don’t use leashes here) and Neo and I had just gone on our first real walk that morning. Turns out a kid, maybe the same one, took some of Benoit’s best clothes as they were hanging out to dry. Well the Proviseur wasn’t happy so he took me down to the gendarmerie (like the police, but different) and because this is a small place, he told the gendarmes who the kid was, where he lived, and within a few minutes, the kid had been fetched and appeared at the station in handcuffs. Well at this point, I felt AWFUL. I looked at the kid and I recognized him, kind of. Mainly I recognized him as being one of the sorrier looking kids around. I mean none of the kids have new clothes here, and why would they. But this kid was wearing a real torn up long T-shirt that was covered in dirt, no shoes, and his face was really dirt streaked. His hair wasn’t growing in very well and his belly was swollen up, pushing out the baggy T-shirt a bit (that generally isn’t because of worms or cancer or starvation or anything, it’s usually a protein deficiency thing, or so I was told).

Burkinabé men, on the whole, are not big people. They are taller or shorter, but on the whole, based on their height, they are not NBA material. Well they must select gendarmes based on their build or something because when I walked in there I saw the highest density of big, built men I’d seen in recent memory. They brought the kid in in cuffs and sent someone to find his parents. They asked us what happened, and the Proviseur talked for me and then they brought him in and started yelling at him. Not screaming, just speaking loudly and authoritatively which to this kid who must be younger than Yassi was terrifying. They asked him if he understood French and he said no and then they said several things to him in Mooré and asked a few questions and the poor kid looked like his eyes were about to start gushing tears any moment. Then the head guy turned to us and said his family name and went on about how you might expect this from that family. At this point I just wished everyone could forget about the leash and I could have left a t-shirt out there for him instead. I know that’s not right but it’s how I felt. They feel very strongly that if they let a kid steal small things then sooner or later he’ll learn to steal big things.

That’s one reason there’s a superstition about giving kids eggs. Eggs are a very good food and not normally given to kids because people feel that if you get a kid in the habit of having good food like that then when he doesn’t have it, he’ll steal it. And there’s a saying that goes something like: Si on vole un oeuf, on volera un boeuf (if one steals an egg, one will steal a cow). Yassi told me I should watch out for these two girls because they stole some of my neighbor’s food growing in his yard. One day they came over and stood outside my fence while I was peeling hardboiled eggs and eating the whites and giving Neo the yolks. The stared at me and then asked for eggs, and I said I didn’t have anymore. They didn’t steal my eggs the next day, but they did come into my yard and scrounge up the scraps still stuck to the shells and eat them, covered in gravel and all. I told them it was their choice.

Being here is definitely getting easier. There is so much so nothing to do that it’s ridiculous. I think I’m going to get used to having nothing to do just in time to have loads to do come la rentrée scholaire in about three weeks. Not sure how much things are going to lag behind this year… I was told there was a meeting scheduled for the 15th but that there was no way that was going to work because everyone was out of town so who knows when the administrative stuff will get worked out so I can know my schedule and when the heck classes actually begin. I’m not that worried; I’d just kinda like to know. I did manage to drag out of my homologue that I will be teaching 6e, 5e and 4e SVT (life science) and 6e math. That adds up to about 14 hours of teaching a week, which isn’t too bad.

On the upside of things, because I’m the VAC (Volunteer Administrative Committee, I think) representative, I get to be in the capital for a meeting on Wednesday and then I heard the big head honcho of all of Peace Corps is stopping by Burkina and would like to meet with the VAC that Friday so I get to spend the better part of a week relaxing and going online and doing nothing in civilization and sucking down chocolate milkshakes and getting reimbursed for it. Thank you to the American government for those chocolate milkshakes. Speaking of food, I had this dream that we were all sent out to our sites but really we all ended up in this overly complex dorm thing and some of us were having trouble moving in because of this torrential rainfall but some of us who were more inclined to cook started cooking up a storm and I stumbled up on TALITHA standing, African-market-style, under a hanger selling fresh chocolate chip cookies and grilled cheese sandwiches. I think I must have stood there for like an hour in the dream eating cookies and sandwiches. She didn’t even have me pay for them! Thank you Talitha! It’s frustrating to be constantly fixated on food back home, yet not wanting to eat hardly anything and also continuing to be disenchanted with the food here.

Like I set out to make rice the other day. Well, let me tell you, this ain’t no instant rice or Uncle Ben’s like at home. You buy the rice and then you have to sort through it. Pick out the gravel. Wash off the dirt, the sand, the hulls that are remaining. Rinse it again, maybe three more times since the water seems to always be cloudy. Cook it. Again, rice is difficult in America for me without a rice cooker, and here without a very controllable stove it’s downright up to chance. Rice is done. Somehow, it’s just not the same, in a way that doesn’t make me want to eat much of it. But I had a half a cup or so with soy sauce and cucumbers and that’ll be most of what I eat for the whole day. I don’t know what’s going on with my appetite. Neo seemed to like it. Yassi and his brother brought over a whole big thing of rice porridge and told me that’s what the feed the dogs with powdered milk at their house and sure enough I sprinkled some powdered milk on the porridge and Neo sucked it down. Milk doesn’t seem to make him sick and he ate so much his sides bulged out. Sometimes they take him out for the afternoon, which unless it’s ridiculously hot, is fine by me.

Wednesday night at about 7 pm I was handed an invitation for a birthday party that was to be held that same night at 9. The Proviseur and Benoit and I went together and checked it out. Well since we are teachers and I am American if someone tells you that something is going to be held at 9 then we assume that it’s going to be held at 9. Not the case here. I think the guy who’s birthday it was showed up a little after 10 along with most of the guests. It’s just understood here that things generally start an hour or two or three after they’re said to. But at the party I met this white guy. I had seen him on a moto the other day and was completely floored and found myself saying Nassara!!! to the people around me and asking if they knew him. They said he was in some kind of agriculture training thing here and he lives here and he’d be here for one more month. He’s French, his name’s Gwenn and all he wanted to do was speak English with me and the man he lives with here, which was fine by me. I think his English may be at the level of my French but it is hard to tell a thing like that. I felt so stupid to be so glad to see a white person, I mean he isn’t an American, but it was still nice. So we’re going to have language sessions now and again for him and his friend to speak English till they leave in a month. Hopefully by then I can get my Moore and Bissa classes going.

On Sunday I went to church! Can you believe it? I got roped into it easily since it is hard to refuse a social occasion here and I guess deep down inside I was curious. Daniel came to get me at about 7 and we left for church, which is just on the other side of the local market. Since we were early and everyone else in this country is late, we stopped at a place across the street to sit and where men were happily drinking calabashes of Dolo (millet wine) at this fine hour of the morning. I tried some, it was ok, maybe better if it were cold. Then the men caught three baby doves out of the tree they were sitting under and we passed them around. I held my tongue.

Church was a run down building (by Burkina standards) with benches filling the room, a simple alter in the front with some nice table clothes draped across and some figurines, fake flowers and a lantern. A doorway in the back of the room gave way to a whole other uncovered area behind this first room. By the time everyone had shown up, it was well past 8:30 and the benches were very full. When I covertly glanced behind me I saw that the other seating area was also packed, with people sitting on mats on the ground. This room that is the church was no bigger than twice my living room at home. I don’t have a particularly big living room. The boy I had come with had seated me next to him and once the room filled up I realized that as with most things here, the church-goers were separated by age and gender. I was in the adult male section. No problem there, it seems that white woman equates with black man here in may situations.

But the service was great, for many reasons. I feel awkward going to church in the US, mainly because I am not religious. There’s a certain amount of uncomfortable I think I will always feel in a church simply because I don’t believe a lot of what most people who come there do. Even if my values coincide with those of a certain religion, I still feel kinda fidgety in church. Fidgety alternating with bored and frustrated. This service was not like that though. For one, most of it was in Mooré, so I didn’t understand hardly a word except for wend (god) and sida (truth) and a few other words that didn’t amount to much. But I still find just sitting and listening to Mooré to be pleasant if not interesting, so that was OK. Secondly, there was African drumming and singing. Now because of the not understanding Mooré thing I can’t tell you about what they were singing but if you had me listen to their music outside of a church context, I would not have guessed it was religion-related. It just sounded like some really great traditional music with big drums and noises I couldn’t make with my mouth if I tried. I’d say about a quarter of the time was spent singing.

On the way back home Daniel took me past someone selling pork and we sat around under a small hangar to wait for it to finish cooking. I narrowly avoided eating pig liver. I had to refuse in two languages about five times before they would eat without me. After a while some pig muscle was done and we took it and headed back to my place. Pig is delicious. Neo got the bones.

Then Yassi and his brother showed up with a bag of uncooked rice, a Maggi tablet (used in practically everything here, a MSG loaded bullion cube I think) and some oil and said it was for me to make Riz Gras. But I don’t know how to make riz gras. They looked at me like I was from Mars. In the states this would be the equivalent of telling someone you didn’t know how to make pasta. They said that they would try to do it if I would just show them where the charcoal and lighter fluid and pan and water and all that was. I said sure and a couple hours later there was riz gras. Well kinda. They’re young kids after all, so it wasn’t perfect. The rice wasn’t really cooked that well and not all the gravel and sand had been picked out. They had also made a remarkably large mess on my porch. But that’s ok. It was cute and touching and Neo liked it.

Daniel hopped on his bike and said he’d be right back. Sure enough he appeared in a few minutes with a chicken under his arm. My brain took a deep breath. “What are you doing with a chicken here,” I asked him. “It’s a cadeau,” he said. And insisted that he prepare it for me. “Ok,” I said. I gave him my Gerber knife and he went around the side of the house and dug a little hole in the ground with the knife. Then he stepped on the wings with one foot and the neck with the other and held the head in his hand while he carefully slit the neck and bled the chicken neatly into the hole. Then he somehow twisted the wings and neck together so that the chicken was self-contained. It twitched and jerked for a couple minutes but that was all. He covered over the hole, handed me back the knife and commenced to plucking the chicken. Neo didn’t care about the chicken so much as he found the feathers fun to play in, and a couple minutes later he emerged with white fluffy feathers stuck to everywhere and coming out of his mouth.

Then we sat together over a bowl cutting up the chicken, which I’ve learned is easier to do with two people. Hold the neck here, cut, ok now hold the wing, cut, ok now hold this, etc. He slit the chest and pulled out the crop and let it dangle and then chopped through the breastbone and then pulled open the abdominal cavity and removed all the organs. He cut off the head entirely and pulled out the trachea and then took the feet and put them through where the trachea used to be, up and out of the chicken’s beak. Then he wrapped the head and feed in the intestines. He discarded the lungs, some major blood vessels, one other part I couldn’t identify, the crop and the trachea. Everything else we put in the bowl and then he washed it all and said “Here you go!” I thought long and hard about how I would prepare it, and I decided on coating it in flour and frying it, like my mom always did, would be the best. I found vegetable oil in town and came home and fried it all up. Ok that’s not true, I discarded the organs and head and feet – I just can’t eat it. I’d have given it to Neo but Yassi and his brother had taken him for the night. When they’d asked me permission I had agreed and then 5 seconds later when I was well past them on my bike did I really realize what they were asking and by then it was too late and Neo was going to have a sleepover with his biggest fans. The next day they told me Neo had cried during the night but that was OK because they gave him some coffee to calm him down. WHAT???? I said. I had to give them a little lecture on dogs and caffeine and not to ever give him that ever again.

Before the afternoon was too far along, Ryenamatu (I have no idea how to actually spell her name) came (she’s Yassi’s big sister) and said that her father had requested that I come down and see the dam. Their father is a big to-do military guy. I asked her if it was far and she said, “Oh no, not far at all.” As an aside, it is almost always a mistake to ask someone if something is far here. It is, I would say, one of the two rules of asking directions here. Rule 1: Burkinabé want to be helpful so they will probably give you directions somewhere even if they don’t actually know exactly where it is, so, you will probably get lost. Rule 2: If you ask someone “Is it far?” the response will almost always be “Oh no, not too far,” and it will almost always be pretty damn far. Like getting down to the hydroelectric plant; pretty far. We were so winded getting there since the road was very hard, even for my snazzy Peace Corps mountain bike. We got there and their father greeted us and I realized that this whole area around me was a pretty high security deal. Daniel and Ryenamatu and I were definitely being checked out by every person we passed to make sure that indeed her father had OKed us to be there.

He took us down into the hydroelectric plant, and it was like going into another world. It was like a reverse culture shock or something. This plant was no small deal. It was huge and nestled down in the center at the base of the dam and inside looked like a completely different country. He gave us the grand tour and it was really a crazy experience, following this huge military guy around with these two kids dressed in traditional clothing around and under and over the whirring of a million different control panels and tanks and valves and motors. He brought us into this dark room through this little door and pointed to this huge thing in the center making an unfathomable amount of noise and asked me if I knew what that was. I looked and I realized that I was standing a couple feet from one of the two enormous turbines. Now I don’t know how dangerous standing that close to that thing actually is, but I felt like I should not have been there. The military pretended to push his daughter into it and she screamed and grabbed my arm. I guess it was scary because it seemed with those kind of huge loud fast-moving machines, if and when something went wrong, it would really go wrong. I couldn’t imagine how this looked to the teenagers who don’t live in a world with jet engines and race cars and furnaces and trains and other big/loud machines. Step outside the plant again and the noise is just a hum and you look around and there’s just miles and miles of breathtaking African landscape. SO peaceful. Then we went up about a billion stairs to the top of the dam itself to see the water feeding into it. I thought I could see the water from where I lived, but that was nothing. The guy explained that the dam itself is 5 km wide and then he pointed to another town off in the distance across the water and said it was 70 km away. That’s a lot of water. It looked not all that different from sitting on East Beach on Watch Hill actually, in that most of what you could see was just water, but you could tell that out there somewhere was more land. This is the Nakembe River.

Then the military gave some directions in Mooré to his daughter about where we were going next which I didn’t understand other than, based on their length, we were probably going somewhere far. We biked along the remainder of the length of the dam and then kept going out a little west of the dam to see what looked like some pretty intense rapids. Now it all made sense. Everyone had been talking about how there is all this rain this year and it’s unprecedented and that they had to open the damn to let some water out. Well, they don’t like actually open the actual damn, but they have these 4 gates that open, kind of like oversized garage doors, to let some water through, and that’s where we were. Normally they have to open the gates for a couple days. This year they have been open for 16 days and still counting. The military pointed to where the rapids were flowing and said the water was flowing to Ghana.

Great rain! you must be thinking. Africa needs rain! Well kind of. Why do they have to open the gates? They open the gates because the acres and acres of rice fields that are feeding Burkina that are irrigated by the run off from the reservoir were being flooded. There’s so much rain that they can’t get the water to decrease fast enough and as a result, a lot of crops are dying. The way the soil here is and the way the rainfall comes all at once and heavily necessitates a very delicate balance between not enough and too much. I’m no expert but I would venture to say that this is climate change in action here. The rains were late this year but then now there is more rain than anyone alive can remember (that’s not just Bagré’s opinion, it’s the case across this latitude of Africa). It gets hotter and dryer in the hot season and wetter with more violent storms in the wet season. People think that global warming just makes things hotter. But it actually creates more intense weather on top of just making it warmer. And getting warmer is no small thing here either. They say that if the temperature goes up just a few degrees in Africa then a lot of the most productive farmland will not be very productive anymore. People here are 80 percent of them subsistence farmers, and that’s not going to be a pretty situation.

But the rains are too heavy across Africa from Senegal in the West to Ethiopia in the East. Northern Ghana has been declared a disaster area. Last I heard on BBC 250,000 people are homeless. Not like there was a little floodwater that got in their basement; homeless like the rain destroyed their homes. And how do you bring aid to people who are cut off in villages by roads that are impassable? The BBC said people are concerned about outbreaks of Cholera and Malaria and Acute Watery Diarrhea. Acute Watery Diarrhea, I thought to myself, so that’s what you call it.

The next day Ryenamatu insisted that we go out to see the new hotel. I assumed that hotel was really just a word they were using to mean something else since there were certainly no hotels here. Well I was kinda wrong. Ryenamatu told me it was kinda far. “Oh boy”, I thought, and loaded up my messenger bag with three litres of water. Well the ride down there was definitely the most beautiful bit of nature I’ve seen here. A thin little dirt path that hugged the coastline of the lake for miles, passing the most beautiful trees and a whole landscape that was just the most vibrant green. And the birds! I could have spent hours and hours down there birding. I stopped Ryenamatu several times to follow some brightly colored bird across a field but without my bird book it was pretty hopeless. We passed tiny little villages of huts, the suburbs of the big village, I guess you could say, and dozens of little creeks where old women with boobs down to their waist and little naked kids were bathing. Finally we came to the hotel.

It wasn’t a hotel like the Econo Lodge, it was more like something I’d expect to find on Cape Cod or the Vinyard or something. There was a big long building that would be the main hall, reception, boutique, restaurant, bar, conference room. Then closer to the water were little buildings, almost what I would describe as a mud huts crossed with cottages. Closer to the water was where a swimming pool was being installed. It wasn’t finished, but I could tell already that this was going to turn into a pretty upscale place, for Burkina’s standards. I mean that’s the case wherever you put something like that; a place where people can go to get away from it all and go fishing in fresh, clean air. Sure there might be schistosomiasis in the water and no reels on the fishing poles but still, this was a nice place. It kind of made me a little said because it reminded me of how people in the States would use nature like this as a form of tourism. But that’s how it is I suppose. Ecotourism, after all, is supporting parks and stuff in the East of Africa, and that, in turn, is keeping the megafauna around at least a little longer.

I came home to find Yassi and his brother on my porch, quietly guarding my hanging laundry. They said a kid came and tried to steal one of my shirts but that he hit him real good with a rock and the kid ran off to his mother. I gave him a high five. They asked if they could take Neo out to play and I said sure just come back by sundown. By sundown no kids or puppy had appeared so I cleaned house a bit, chased a bat out of my living room, and then went off to Yassi’s house to find Neo because I was pretty sure they’d snuck him off for another sleepover. Yassi’s family lives in a nice, large courtyard with good-looking huts and no electricity. Kids were sleeping on the ground and Daniel and I sat down and waited. Sure enough someone handed me a sleeping puppy.

Their father, the military, showed up and we talked for a while. He was born in Ghana and has been with the military for quite a while and explained to me his philosophy on life. He believes that French-speaking countries have a real problem. He says people here don’t want to work, unlike in English speaking places. He believes that in a place where people can’t afford or don’t want to go through years and years of general education, that maybe it would be better to have more technical schools so that people could have more skills. With training then a person has worth and whether their father dies or no matter what happens, they’ll be able to earn a living. So he keeps his military salary for himself and his wife has a restaurant and he tries to keep his kids occupied and learning even during vacation. That’s why the two boys go out and watch the bulls. Even though the family does not raise cattle for a living, it gives them a sense of self or a sense or responsibility, he says. I thanked him for the conversation and then tucked sleeping Neo in my backpack and we went back home. By then it was 9 and since I had to get up in the morning, I headed to bed. Isn’t that a strange phrase? “I have to get up in the morning.” I noticed that the kids had been a little too creative with the scissors I let them borrow that afternoon and had cut 6 uneven lines of fur off Neo’s back and given his whiskers a trim. Nothing too damaging, but now he definitely looks like a mut.

And now I’m here in the capital. Until next time. I love you all.

Birds I've Identified So Far

2007-09-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

Birds I've positively identified so far:

White Fronted Bee Eater (Merops bullockoides)
Little Green Bee Eater (Merops orientalis)
Great Egret (Egretta alba)
Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus)
Piapiac (Ptilosomus afer)
Chestnut-Bellied Starling (Lamprotornis pulcher)
Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis)
Hammerkop (Scopus umbretta)
Spur-Winged Goose (Plectroperus gambensis)
Hooded Vulture (Necrosyrtes monachus)
Shikra (Accipter badius)
Dark Chanting Goshawk (Melierax metabates)
Senegal Parrot (Poicephalus senegalus)
Beautiful Sunbird (Cinnyris pulchellus)
Pied Crow (Corvus albus)
Black Kite (Milvus migrans)
Long-Tailed Glossy Starling (Lamprotornis caudatus)
Red Bishop (Euplectus orix)
Laughing Dove (Streptopelia senegalensis)
Senegal Fire Finch (Lagonosticta senegala)
Speckled Pigeon (Columba guinea)
Abyssinian Roller (Coracias abyssinica)
Rufous Crowned Roller (Coracias naevia)
Purple Glossy Starling (Lamprotornus purpureus)
Helmetted Guineafowl (Namida meleagris)

I survived a week and a half

2007-09-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone,

[WARNING: this blog entry might be … hard to read… it’s pretty long and full of gritty details of my moving to site and my inability to deal with life there]

I’m laying (not lying) on a comfy bed, the same bed, actually, that I stayed in on my way down this way to my site a week and a half ago. I am more relaxed than I can remember being, and seeing as it’s only 10:38 pm, I’m going to try to write out a big mental dump about the last week and a half, which was my first week and a half in Bagré, the village where I’ll be working for the next two years. That’s two years minus a week and a half, I might add, not that I miss America like it’s nobody’s business or anything.

We went to Ouagadougou first, since most of us needed to buy at least the most basic furnishings for completely empty houses, myself included. Ok it wasn’t completely empty – in my house’s defense there was a leaky canary and a modest table inside. We walked from the Transit House to the main road and waited for taxis. I was with a group of maybe 9 other PCVs (that’s right, I’m all sworn in and no longer a PCT). We got in two cabs, discutéd the price and headed off for downtownish. All told we hit a Burkina version of what’d I’d call the dollar store crossed with ocean state job lot crossed with target to get things with which to feed ourselves such as utensils and other hard to find items like cutting boards or sifters. We also bought stove tops here. Yes, stove tops. It’s like what you yourself have at home except two and a half burners instead of 4, half the area, and not including the oven below it. Therefore: stovetop. Then we sent two of us home to the Transit House with a cab filled with all the rest of our stuff and the rest of us went on to brave buying everything else. Long story short we ended up on a street corner with dozens of vendors coming up to us, competing to sell to us, competing to be heard. We we’re basically immobilized after a while both because the items we were buying were heavy (gas tanks, for example) and because the sellers were completely surrounding us. Eventually we got all we’d come for: mattresses, cots, pots, buckets, basins, pillows, clothesline, etc. We hired a guy in a pick up to haul it all off and take it back to the Transit House with Ray, Andrea and myself packed in on the back like sheep. Then we told the guy to drive us to the US Embassy where I indulged in a double cheeseburger with fries and KETCHUP and a large chocolate MILKSHAKE. The US Embassy has magical food.

Then I started to feel real sick. I went to the TV room and watched a little bit of that ballroom movie I can’t remember the name of staring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez which all told isn’t that great of a movie unless you are obsessed with ballroom like yours truly. There is one particularly good tango in there, if I remember correctly. Then I started to really miss dancing. Like REALLY miss dancing. Wherever I go to grad school or med school there will be a good ballroom team there, no questions asked. It’s one of my requirements. Even dancing at a studio like the one in my town is fun and all but it’s not the same as having everyone around you competitively focused. Not that competition is the point but more like that’s the kind of ballroom I like. So I told myself it’s ok because if I set my living room up right then I could dance in there as much as I wanted (sans partner) since the floor is cement and I have socks and I don’t have nor will I ever have nearly enough furniture to need to fill in that space. The neighbors wouldn’t be able to see and I’d get my fix. Sometimes I wish I could fire my parents for not making me start ballroom when I was 3, en lieu de ballet, but then I quickly remember what a ridiculous thought that is.

Right, so I was feeling really sick. Not cuz of the life changing burger or orgasmic milkshake but more like the flu. Now let me tell you, getting the flu in the States sucks but getting the flu in Africa really blows or bites or whatever you want to call it. You just feel really dumb in a place where you could be suffering with Malaria or Tuberculosis or some exotic rash suffering with symptoms of the flu. I quickly hit the grocery store (bang) and went home to the Transit House and crashed with a couple others who had decided not to go out to the wine bar. Most of us had early departures the next day so it was the wise place to be anyway. Mainly I just wanted to die so I crashed on a mattress in the hallway and talked to Katherine in the States (as opposed to Katherine here) and then talked to a couple people who would be leaving before anyone got up to say goodbye.

Next morning was blurry and bleary. Everyone was over tired, over stressed, and sad and excited aux meme temps. Drivers came, quickly loaded up everyone’s mounds of stuff, and off went the first round of people. Just like that – most of us were gone. I wasn’t officially going to site till Monday so I chilled and went to breakfast and then came home, did some last minute labeling and took off with An and Marty’s kitten. Marty was hanging in the capital for another week to work on French, so I got his kitten. Not a bad deal since I knew I was going to be lonely out of my mind pretty soon.

An and I passed the night in Tenkodogo and Marty’s kitten stayed with me and eliminated all over me and the room (amazing really – she’s so tiny) so I got up early and washed out the sheets and scrubbed the mattress and the floor and then sat down to tea and waited for An’s driver to appear and whisk her away. We stayed and are again staying at this cute little auberge called Restaurant Leina. A small restaurant and a small auberge in a quiet part of Tenkodogo where you can spend the night for pretty cheap. Even running water and electricity! An’s driver came and took her away and then I was alone. Well not really I mean you are really never alone here, but I felt alone and it was sudden and clear and profound. My driver appeared shortly after and we drove the 45 km down to Bagré and I tried not to cry.

Crying, you see, would have done no good at all because this driver, who I don’t even know, is trying to be as nice and helpful as he can and all I want to do is scream and tell him, no no go back it’s not time yet I need you to turn around there’s no way I’m ready for this. But there’s no turning around and soon we were in Bagré and then no sooner were we at my house. But where is the key? Well… I don’t know. Last I saw, my neighbor had them. Well where’s my neighbor? Oh, he’s at Tenkodogo, says a boy. Of course he is; we were just there. Well that’s ok he lives with a boy who could get them. Ok well where’s the boy? Oh he’s at work. Where’s he work? The Prefecture, 7 km back. Ok well someone call my neighbor and have him call the boy and have the boy come here and find the keys and then give them to us. I don’t mind the wait. The hard part doesn’t really start till the car drives away so the longer we sit here doing nothing because my door’s locked the better for me and my fragile mind. Well wait we did. Almost an hour in fact but no one showed up. So the driver decided it was time to go to the Prefeture and find this guy and so we headed that way but ran into him at the gendarmarie, shooting the breeze with some gendarmes. My driver, being much the boy’s senior, chewed out the boy for his inconsideration for our situation then lectured him on the importance of delivering something like a key in a timely manner. The boy hung his head and admitted he was wrong and then gave us keys and helped sweep the dust and bat guano from my house. I don’t yet know my neighbor’s name, but he is the Proviseur for the Lycée I live next to and the boy who lives with him is named Benoit and best I can tell, he’s roughly my age.

Kids watching the bulls in the field between my house and the Lycée were called over to carry everything in the house and then two were told to start weeding my yard. Since my hard is 99.5 percent weeds, this was pretty straightforward. I don’t know why but there are separate and different keys for my house, kitchen and pantry respectively. It took another hour to track down the keys for the kitchen and pantry but by then everything was pretty well moved in the house. I let Marty’s kitten out of the box and her oversized voice filled my hollow house and could be heard at least three houses down.

Then the driver started saying his well-wishes for me and my stay at Bagré. He said all those sentimental things I couldn’t stand to hear at that time like what a good thing I am doing and how lucky they are to have me and how I’ll have a whole two years here and all that stuff. I started crying but looked away, down, over, turned around, whatever, to avoid crying in front of the driver and my new neighbor’s housemate. On top of it not being helpful to the situation, it’s just plain inappropriate here really. Crying in public’s not really an acceptable way of dealing with things here. The neighbors urged him to pass the night here and they started rolling out exceptional offers of hospitality that Burkinabé are notorious for, but the driver soon said he was sorry, but he had to go but that maybe one day he and his family would come down this way and get some cows and some land and be happy. After all, he said, it’s beautiful here.

And he’s right. A whole week and a half later and I still wake up every morning and look outside and remark to myself or to the cat how beautiful it is here. Everything is so vibrant. The green of the grass and trees is so green and the sky is such a blue with the most textured, deep clouds I’ve ever seen. The wind moving through the village creates an almost steady breeze through my house and the great barrage and lake are only a stone’s throw away, providing, much as the Atlantic did at home, a slightly milder climate to my village. Unless a nasty storm’s rolling in, I can always see at least a few big old bulls grazing, being observed by one or several boys. At least one point during the day a good sized group of thirty or more moves through and mows the field around my yard. These bulls are enormous! But boys of even 6 or 7 years old can watch them, herd them, push them, shove them, yank their tails, and even ride them without the bulls barely blinking an eye.

So they left and soon the kids weeding left and then finally I was alone. That’s ok, I told myself, I have plenty of things to do since all my stuff was plopped in the middle of my living room. The cat had plenty of things to do to, and helped me unpack every little thing. I moved the cot into one of the bedrooms. I moved the table against the wall in the living room. I put my filter up on the table. I moved my clothes in the bedroom. I rediscovered where I’d left my flashlights and toiletries. I kept going till within hardly any time at all everything seemed to be in it’s respective place; either in my bedroom or not. I looked at the other two empty rooms and frowned; I really didn’t like having rooms I didn’t know what to do with. I mean there’s really no way for one person to really need 4 rooms. So I closed the other two doors since the rooms were starting to scare me and I knew that come nightfall, I’d be even more scared. I hate houses I don’t know at night. So I was doin’ pretty well, so I sat down on the porch (as I had no chairs) and realized it had begun. The sense of not knowing what to do had started. So I just sort of sat there and felt pathetic with the kitten. Just sat there and inevitably thought to myself the worst thing I could have thought which was, wow, I’m going to be here for two years. In just two years I can go home. Two years?? Like that is anything even resembling a comforting thought.

It’s not that I don’t like it here. I mean I really kinda do. The people are so friendly and generous and welcoming that you wouldn’t even believe it if I told you. And so far being stared at wherever I go like I have a 5th arm hasn’t really bothered me. But it’s not America, and if I haven’t mentioned it by now, America is the best country in the world. Someone remarked over dinner the other night that perhaps the Peace Corps is a right-wing, super-patriotic-driven program, designed to attract recently graduated youth who are just about fed up with America’s problems, send them off to do good in the world, and in the process thoroughly convert them into more patriotic individuals than they ever imagined they were capable of becoming. It didn’t take long either. I went from someone who seriously considered living at least some sizable portion of my adult life in another, better, country – a country I didn’t have to feel so ashamed of – to being someone who has no intention of ever wanting to live anywhere else, all in a matter of a couple months. Live somewhere else? Who would do that? That’s crazy talk.

Sooner than I had time to really start feeling sorry for myself, sitting out there on the front porch with the kitten, two boys arrived with three bulls. They sat themselves down on a rock just a stone’s throw from my front gate and watched. Watched what? Watched the nassara. For hours they did this. I went up, introduced myself in Mooré, asked their names, promptly forgot them if I even properly heard them in the first place, and asked them how they were and how their bulls were. Ca va they said, in the quietest voice they could muster. And so it went. They were so sweet and I wished that there was someway I could get them to understand that their simple presence there on the rock in front of my gate was so comforting. With them there I wasn’t alone. The next day I gave them some bread with nutella on it and every day following their oldest sister, who brings them lunch in the middle of the day, has invited me to eat with them. It’s usually To, but it’s good on the scale of To, and anyway it’s nice not to eat alone. That’s how it goes here. Not everyone has everything they need, and some people have more than others, but if everyone constantly shares what they have then it sure does make for a better situation in the long run. That’s hard for me to get used to. Not that it’s good to share, but just the act of sharing in the first place. Not like I never learned how, it’s just that if you’re the one in the US who’s always the giving one, always the one that shares what she has, then more often than not, you’re going to get walked on and taken advantage of and not feel very good about it. Here it’s quite the opposite. The more you give, the more you get. On the order of… 7 catfish, 3 sodas, 3 bananas and 2 smoked fish. Not to mention my neighbor, the Proviseur, took me to the market and bought my whole first found of groceries for me along with a broom. He also took my stove to market to get it fixed for me when it wouldn't work and has since lended me 3 chairs. He's also shown me where to find most anything I want, or sent a kid to get it for me, took me to the carpenter and all in all has been a superb neighbor.

Meanwhile the cat has managed to figure out that I won't see her crapping in the house if she goes into my bedroom to do it since I can't see there from the door.

Food. Yes, now I get to cook for myself, which is generally a good thing. I don't require much to be happy with food, and if I'm cooking for myself then no problem right? Well kinda. Somehow this past week and a half I've managed to have no appetite. Like less appetite than I can remember ever not having in my entire life. I don't feel really sick either. Just don't want to eat. Take tea in the morning and then might feel a little hungry but not nearly enough to want to cook or eat what I had cooked. Thankfully for my body, people offer you a lot of food and I am obligated to eat some of it so I haven't been totally wasting away. It's not that it's that hot either. Sitting on my porch is nicer right now than Mystic is back home.

And going to site is really depressing - I'll be frank about that. The first three days were terrible. Listless in the day, not knowing what to do, not knowing anyone, meeting everyone, speaking three languages, being watched - stared at or glared at - scared at night by every little noise and feeling so profoundly alone. It's a beautiful place with wonderful people and it's not that hard to survive here anymore but there is such an utter feeling of emptiness. Two of our group went home this week. 2 more of my favorite people - Beth and Katherine. Now there are just 22 of my training group left.

So what made it bearable? The BBC world service, which I listen to at least 5 hours a day, my iPod (I swear I would have ETed by now without it), the kitten who talked so much you almost wanted her to go away and leave you alone (funny huh) and more than anything CALLS FROM HOME. I don't mean to sound pathetic, but without those things, I would have probably turned around by now.

And I have a puppy now! I'm giving back Marty's cat, but when I get home I'll still have this cute little clumsy male puppy who I've named Neo. He's gonna be a B---- to train. But we'll work it out. Ca va aller.

The other morning Benoit brought me 6 eggs I had asked for and 9 others he said were a cadeau, a present. This is something people do here - you go to market and buy 5 tomatoes and the lady throws in an extra one as a cadeau. But 9 eggs?? that's an enormous cadeau. Good thing I had 2 animals to feed. I cracked open the 5th egg and *bam* there it was: a tiny guinea fowl embryo. About 1 cm long, with some intricate blood vessels, two huge eyespots and a beating heart. I felt awful. Obviously cracking that shell was an irreversible action, so the chick was going to die, but that didn't mean I wanted to eat it. I mostly wanted to barf. I also didn't want to have to watch it cook or stir it up with the rest of my eggs. I also didn't want the cat, who was clawing up my pagne to slurp it down. So I tossed it in the compost - I just didn't know what to do. It was so unexpected and I was unprepared.

I met my new language tutor. I can't remember is name but he holds the national record for some sort of running in Burkina Faso. Since Burkina Faso's government doesn't treat atheletes quite the same way as America treats theirs, he's gone to America to train for some amount of time and I can tell since he speaks great English. Not awkward classroom English like I speak French, but when I talk to him I feel like I'm really talking. He will teach me Mooré, Bissa, and more French. The Peace Corps will pay up to about 20 dollars for this a month. Here, that amounts to a lot of classes.

One other thing that made this week and a half easier was text messaging. Here, relatively speaking, sending a text to another volunteer is super cheap and I must send between 1 and 10 texts a day. It's not much writing room but it's enough to say "I hate my life can I go home now? I got run over by a cow today how are you?" and get a really quick response back. Not like anyone's got much to do now; we're all sitting around being lost and often depressed, and possibly waiting for texts.

I made rice but there was so much gravel and sand in it that I couldn't eat it. I was afraid of breaking my teeth, which is one of the most common Peace Corps injuries. All of you out there buying pre-degraveled bagged rice should be ashamed of yourselves. My olive oil is gross only beacuse it tastes like olives and I don't like olives. The olive oil in the states is more mild and doesn't take on such a strong taste.

I went to the carpenter with my neighbor and had some shelves made so that the kitten and puppy would have a lower probability of crapping on my stuff and not the floor at night. Well here everything is custom made so I couldn't just say "I want shelves"; I had to give exact dimentions I wanted and since I'm here, those had to be in meters. Well I guessed. I now have the largest set of shelves in existance and they tower next to my cot that I sleep on. On the bright side they hold most of my belongings and food I don't want to keep in the pantry. I've also asked for the local old man to make me 4 wooden chairs. They're beautiful and I'll have to send you a picture once I get them.

But all in all everything's going to be ok. Once school starts time will fly instead of drag and in just a week and a half more I get to go to Ouaga for the VAC meeting for a couple days.

Things are getting easier instead of harder. But let me repeat, this isn't for everyone. You've got to be really good at feeling alone and different. Anyone at this point who quits ... well... no one can say anything bad about that. Not a bit.

So that's all for now. I will be back here in Tenkodogo at some point and at the least I'll be able to get online from the capital in less than a week and a half. Sorry no pictures at this time. All my solar stuff works great, but as a result of being down here in the rain belt, there's not a lot of sun. That'll change soon, and in the mean time I'll make do.

And CALL ME! A call from home literally makes my day or two days or possibly week.

Love you all, hope everyone's doing great.

Last post before going to post plus yummy pictures

2007-08-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

Sorry it’s been FOREVER since I’ve updated but this last week and a half has been very busy. We’re ending the last week of training, which in reality isn’t much training at all because we’ve finished pretty much all the meat of it. Last week on the other hand had me busy from dawn till dusk practically, and thus no cyber café time.

Last week we had our last few days of model school, I gave my test to my 3eme class, and they actually did alright. Then came a couple days of number crunching and writing out grade report cards (no computers to do that here) and then finally Thursday was the closing ceremony where we got to award the top performing students and get to watch the students give little presentations. Three of the girls who sat in front of my class gave me two little bracelets and asked me if we could sing the American National Anthem. We ran out of time and so I just wrote out the words for them but I couldn’t remember them so all the other teachers and I sat around trying to come up with the right words in the right order. Kind of embarrassing, huh? I never had to say the anthem in school… yah that’s my excuse.

Anyway after that we had a thank you ceremony for our host families on Saturday afternoon, replete with free brochettes (meat on sticks) that all the Americans stood around and ate like starving beggar children. We tried to communicate to the families what an important role they play in our transition to living here. I mean even for those of us who didn’t get along really well with their families, we would have never made it with out the home stay program. But no matter how many times you try to help them understand that they are the ones who need to be thanked, they feel like they need to thank us. They presented each family with a certificate of appreciation and when we got home my host mother told me that she was going to get it framed and put it on the wall. Put it on the wall. There is not one thing in the single house on the wall and she is going to put it on the wall.

But my mother is a sweetheart; she told me that she wanted to get me an outfit made for swear in (Friday) and so she took me to the tailor and I picked out the model I wanted and then we went to get fabric. There are a bzillion fabrics here…well actually only one kind of fabric per say, but a bzillion prints. Here’s a picture of 4 that I have, which may not really be a fair representation of prints here, but if anything these are more tame than average. I just had the light blue one with birds on it made into a fun skirt and the red one with squares and the crane is my shower pagne (towel). Tailors here are amazing. Once they actually start your stuff, they are FAST and since it is practically impossible to buy clothes premade here, you have to go to a tailor if you want new clothes. But it’s OK because they’re also remarkably cheap. I had the skirt made for the equivalent of 3 USD and a full out matching outfit made of the navy with orange flecks print for the equivalent of 7 USD. Anyway my mom took me to the tailor and then to get fabric and since I am terrible at making quick decisions and she is not, she asked me after about 10 seconds which of the 100 prints I liked and so I picked two that caught my eye and asked her opinion. We talked about it for a bit and then I picked one and so she said Ok and told me the price and then she said she was going to get the other one for me anyway. So she’s getting my swear in outfit made in the model I picked and then she got my second choice fabric as well and said she’ll get another outfit made for me that she gets to pick the model for. That is SO nice. I hope that that’s my going away presents because that’s a huge present already and I’ll feel awful if she gives me anymore.

But I am going to give them presents! My actual parents were awesome to send along a small soccer ball for my brother and a pump for it as well as a Mystic Seaport T shirt for my host dad. I also had a big picture of my host mom and little brother printed that I’ll give to my host mom, which will probably be one of the only pictures she has of herself. Definitely the only 8x10. And then I’ll also give my brother Abbass a nice deck of cards and then my sister Toma who’s not here right now a nice zipper pouch thing she can keep whatever she wants in, maybe pictures or maybe stuff for school.

The other present I’m giving my family is the gift of cooking. Yes, yes I know what you might be thinking… why does Liz think that her cooking would be something that people would want … but no really it’s an interesting story. My family’s really awesome. Like aside from things like me getting sick which was inevitable, nothing’s really gone wrong. And that’s partly because they get training and partly because they’ve had volunteers before. The girl who was here last summer left three boxes of Velveeta Shells and Cheese (I only learned of the third today). My host dad emerges with these goods one night about a month ago and explains that Stephanie the old volunteer had made it a couple times and asked whether I knew how to prepare this mysterious and tasty dinner. My first question to myself was, WTF was this volunteer doing with so much Velveeta Shells and Cheese (VSC) and why in the world would she leave three boxes with her family who doesn’t even know how to prepare it. Well whenever I find this Stephanie, I will thank her because I am a major fan of VSC.

So when they asked me to prepare it one night, a bunch of thoughts flew through my mind. Obviously the best occasion to do this kind of thing would be a goodbye dinner type of thing. But could you think of something less appropriate in US standards (maybe aside from take out from McDonald’s) than VSC? Yet here is my host family regarding the VSC as if it is a magnificent sacred dish and asking if I, the nassara, hold the secret to recreating the tastiness they had last summer? The other side of things that ran through my head was how much I would die to have some VSC right about now. And how secretly I hoped that they all somehow hated it so I could eat as much of it as I usually do of their food, which is just. well, not as tasty.

Well so I stopped at the marché and bought 4 tomatoes and 4 onions and some garlic and was going to try to sauté them and add them to the mélange so that I would feel slightly less shady preparing VSC as my goodbye dish. Got home, started chopping things, and laughed as one by one the whole neighborhood almost stopped by to watch the Nassara cook. Oh look nasarra’s cooking?!?!?! And somehow it all worked out and I finished and then went to wash before eating. I was hoping this would be just a small family gathering both because I wanted there to be enough to go around and because I wanted to be able to eat more than a couple bites, but despite my best efforts to make this a covert operation, by the time I came back from washing, my father and 4 of his friends had shown up, making this dish of two boxes of VSC and veggies needing to stretch for 8 of us. If you’d have been there, you would have thought that these people were eating fine caviar or something. They insisted that I make the third box tonight. Here’s a picture of everyone before we ate.

After they finished they followed it up with a course of To with snot sauce… I mean gumbo sauce, in which I did not partake.

Then a dust storm kicked up and followed by heavy rain and so we all ran inside and talked about my leaving, which is gonna be pretty sad. The other night my 2 year old brother woke up from sleeping on the mat on the floor at about 9 pm all disoriented and stuff and he stood up and started fussing and stumbled over to me and just sort of collapsed, and so I picked him up and he fell asleep on my shoulder and I just wanted to start crying because it was the most comforting thing I’d felt in a long time. People just don’t show affection like they do in the States. People don’t hug here. And my little brother doesn’t let me or anyone hold him really except his mom at bedtime so this was the first time I got to actually hug him. My mom hugged me twice this summer, which was unexpected and adorable.

SO plan for the rest of this week: Wednesday morning, move out of host family house and into ECLA rooms. Stay in ECLA rooms till swear in on Friday morning and then leave for Ouagadougou that afternoon. Spend that night and Saturday in Ouaga, eat cheeseburgers and pizza, buy necessities for my new house and then bright and early Sunday, take off for Tenkodogo with An and Marty. I’ll buy more things there, stay the night, meet the Peace Corps car the next day and get driven out to Bagré that afternoon. And that’s that.

What else… we’ve been playing a version of Secret Santa with the stage group and the staff and I have one of my tech trainers and for the final present tomorrow I’m giving him a live chicken. This is both easy and normal and costs the equivalent of 2 USD.

We’ve all been trying to slowly move our stuff back to ECLA since bringing it all on our backs wouldn't exactly fly. The Peace Corps also gives us a crap load of books and other things so for most of us we can’t fit what we now have into the bags we came with. Or for others of us, we’ve accumulated a lot of trash and need to get rid of it. If we had been doing what the Burkinabé do we would just be throwing out trash out in the streets or in the courtyard, but we’re not comfortable doing that so most of us had a sizable amount of trash in our rooms. An unnamed volunteer came into ECLA today with 4 liters of pee that he had accumulated in his room in bottles since sometimes you just can’t or don’t want to go to the latrine.

I have strange fungus growing on my hand. It doesn’t hurt or itch though.

Instead of including pictures of that sort of thing, here are some random nature-y pictures. In Kenya I took pictures of crazy awesome megafauna but here I just take lots of snail pictures. It’s ok; invertebrates are underrepresented anyway.

AND THANK YOU TO JULIA’S MOM FOR THE SECOND CARD SHE SEND ME! YOU’RE AWESOME!!

And hello to Clay's mom!

So in just 4 days I'll be at post. This means a few things about communicating with me.

1) I won't be able to go online unless I go to my regional capital which can happen at most twice a month. So the blogging will slowdown in frequency. Maybe not in content since I have my computer and I can write while I'm at site, but we'll have to see how it goes. So don't worry if you email me and I don't respond for 2 or 3 weeks.

2) My address is still the same for now, except the PCT after my name changes to PCV. (since I'm a volunteer not a trainee). If I set up a post office box closer to my site than the capital then I'll let you know once I've done that. Till then just keep using the address here on the blog.

3) The sudden lack of people i know and things to do in my life is gonna be really hard. So if you were hesitant about picking up a calling card and dialing me, go for it. I'm sure I'd love to hear from you. I don't even start teaching till october something so there's gonna be a whole lot of nothing to do for a while. What's a good way to get a calling card? Well one way is to go to callingcards.com and search for cards from the states to burkina faso CELLULAR. The first one in the search results works fine (says Katherine) despite the maintenance fee thing. It should be something like 11 cents a minute. An easier but more expensive way is PINGO.com which has rates at 23 cents a minute or something. So yah, CALL ME.

I think that's all for now. Not sure if I'll be posting anything from the capital this weekend. So à la prochaine ( till next time).

2007-08-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. First! An appology to Julia's mom: in my post about mail, I said that only my parents had sent me mail, but in fact Julia's mom was so sweet and sent me a get well card when I was sick as a dog with E. coli. Thank you!!!

Classes are going well, language is going well, local language classes are going to start soon. I've been tutoring with Biba in Mooré after classes on Tues and Thurs so now I can say really, simple, simple things. Like: Mam tara baaga [I have a dog]. My middle brother is back in Ouahigouya and my nephews are still visiting so there are a lot of kids about the house. I had my first real conversation with my oldest host brother last night about gender and AIDS and STD education. He wants to be a doctor. Truth be told, not many people really understand much about AIDS here. And unless you're in school at a high enough level to get that kind of education in school (not many are at that point) then how are you gonna get educated. Your family certainly isn't going to talk about it. This is definitely one of those cultures where, especially out in the villages, you never say the word sex, and a lot of girls don't know why they get their period. A lot of people in Burkina would tell you can get AIDS from a mosquito bite. The AIDS rate here is actually pretty low - around 4% - better than the 30% that South Africa has. Sub Saharan Africa has 10% of the world's population but 60% of the world's cases of AIDS.

Anyway after the conversation, he fried up some fish and something else (i'm not sure what) and gave some to me and I felt obliged to eat it since we'd had such a nice conversation, even though I'd already eaten dinner, so I did. Ugh. Fish aren't the same here as they are at home!

We're under the three week mark now - three weeks and I'll be in Bagré all by myself! We're not allowed to leave our site except to go to our regional capital for three months - so it'll certainly be a test.

2007-08-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Helllo everyone. This is my 3ème class of human biology for summer school. That's me in the back. I'm wearing my traditional pagne my mom gave me. There's about 80 kids in this class and it's a big room. It's not going to be pretty when there are 100 or more in a room half that size. I guess it kind of works out though because that will only happen for 6ème, where the kids will be about half the size : ) This week I taught them about bones and bone growth. I gave them dictations since there isn't enough time to write it out on the board and even though my french pronounciation is pretty good, they laugh and laugh and laugh at me. The more I work to correct my pronouciation, the more I will sound French, not African, so to a certain extent it's futile to try. I'll just resign myself to being hilarious, even when teaching about bones.

Wish List!

2007-08-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my wish list.

First, some general comments about mail and mailing things to me.

1) If you write me a letter, sent by airmail, it should cost you $0.84 (or about that) and should get to me in 2-3 weeks. Letters are awesome awesome awesome to get and so far I've gotten none but from my parents, so get out that stationary and write to me or draw me a picture for my new house!

2) If you send me a package, you must write "par avion" on it (that's airmail). If you don't, it might go by boat and then I might not get it before I leave this place. Sent by non priority mail or priority mail (just pick the cheapest) it should take between 3 -4 weeks to get to me. Use sturdy sturdy boxes and lots of tape because 3 weeks is a long time to get thrown around in the mail system and a lot of packages get here really beaten up or partially opened.

3) You might laugh, but to decrease the chances of packages getting opened and stolen from while going through customs, there are a couple stragegies which seem to actually hold water: 1) don't explain exactly what's in the package on the custom's form. Instead of saying "chocolate, granola bars, clothing, CDs" write "educational materials" or "hygiene products" or "religious materials"; 2) Address things to me as if I am a nun. Sister Elizabeth Jordan, PCT. Really. 3) Use some red ink on the package. Maybe not on the address because it might be hard to read but maybe write par avion there or something like that. Red ink and religion are two things that would help boxes not to get broken into. Not that the mail system is that bad here but if you're taking the time and energy to send me something, may as well be safe.

4) My address is on my blog and will be correct until I change it. But you'll know when I do that.

Forever and Always Wish List:

[This is a list of things that I could never have too much of. Which is to say that if you decide to send me any of this, you should never worry about whether I have too much or if someone else has sent me some already. And I'll love you forever.]

Clif Bars / Power Bars / Balance Energy Bars
Crunchy (not puffy) Cheez Doodles or Doritos
Tuna packets (they're lighter than cans)
Gatorade/Koolaid/Crystal Lite
Beef Jerky
Dried Fruit
Ketchup packets from McDonalds
Mac'nCheese sauce packets / Taco seasoning packets
M'nMs (any kind - for there is no chocolate here)
Gummy Worms
Poptarts
Velveeta Shells and Cheese
Parmasean Cheese (did you notice? there's no cheese here)
A really good DVD/book you think I'd like or pics from home
Pens/markers/crayons/stickers/anything like that
American Magazines

Once-Only-Please Wish List:

[These are things that I probably only need one of, so let me know if you're gonna send me something like this and I'll take it off the list... and love you forever.]

super glue
My Hammock! (that's to my parents since it's at home)
To be continued...

Hello Loomis People out there!!

2007-07-29T08:56:00.001-07:00

This is a hello to all those Loomis people out there who have gotten a hold of my blog this way or that! Thank you for reading and THANK YOU Chrz for your comments and THANK YOU SO MUCH FITZ for the package!! (Fitz sent me a package of yummy food even though I haven't talked to her in a bzillion years and it managed to get here faster than any other package... Fitz, care to explain?)

Also a quick note about being sick a lot: a lot of people seem to be worried about the amount of sick i/we am/are but I want to make sure everyone rests assured that we are well taken care of and well educated on how to handle stuff. (Yay PCMOs). We aren't allowed to take things like imodium because it could turn out really bad if you stop bad bacteria from being able to get out of your body. And a lot of the time it isn't even bacteria that are causing the problem so there aren't even any good drugs to take to get rid of things like viri, so instead we learned about how to properly replace fluids and electrolytes in the meantime. Everyone knows you're supposed to eat bannas and toast and rice and apple sauce when you have diarrhea but in addition, especially if it goes on a lot time and you aren't able to eat because you're puking or can't stand to eat or eating just gives you insta-diarrhea then you need to drink some oral rehydration salts. The recipie is something like 1/2 tsp table salt plus 4 tbs sugar plus 1 ltr water. And you also start to get a feel for how much more water you need when you're sick versus normally and how all that changes with whether you're sweating. Some people don't really get into this stuff but I think it's interesting.

Anyway this is the first day in a while that I've been able to get pictures up so here are a lot. This first picture is of my tutoring group and my LCF, Patrice. We meet everyday after classes for another hour to have just french conversation since there can never be enough practice and Patrice is an amazing teacher. He does that perfect amount of correcting you while you speak for it to be really helpful. The other PCTs are Ray and Cassandra. Ray just got his Master's in Mecanical Engineering before coming here and Cassandra's two years out of college where I think she was a Psychology major. Patrice grew up for a lot of time in the Ivory Coast where his parents still are and now he's here. He's a real nerd. He knows 5 languages, including English which makes language class easier sometimes when you're looking for a particular phrase or something. He's been my LCF from the start so I also had a ton of regular classes with him and he's also been the one to come over to my house and make sure my family is taking care of me and that we are able to communicate well and to tell them that I don't like to eat fish heads. Yay Patrice!

Next up is a picture of my host father (who I don't think has made it up on this blog yet) and my littelest host brother, Nayeme. Nayeme is a perfect example of the french word bandit. But that's OK, he's 2. That's the family's moto, which is what people have here instead of cars. I figgured out why my family is so enormous! My host father has 20 siblings (that's by 7 mothers) and so that's why my family has seemingly no end. Last night the family threw a party for three kids who had passed their important academic exams and it was a real good time. Lots of dancing by the young and older and cold drinks and being happy about academic accomplishments. It went till 2 am which is exactly 5 hours past my bed time so I kept wanting to fall asleep but everyone kept pulling my arm to go dance more... so i tried to keep it together.

Yes and then there's teaching. Here is a picture of some of us SE volunteers in the salle de profs preparing our lessons / relaxing after teaching. It takes quite a lot of time to prepare lessons. I mean I always kind of understood that about teaching in general, I think, but it's really something that you can't rush unless you've taught it before or you want it to show that you weren't prepared because every little weakness gets amplified with the whole in-French aspect. There are always at least 10 words in the biology lessons that you have never heard or seen before so you always need some time to practice pronounciation or something. That's, from left to right, Marty, Pete (also from Cornell), Garrett, Lara and An. This is also a pretty good shot of an average classroom, shot from the door. Nothing fancy. These are the rooms into which a hundred kids or more get put for the 6th grade classes. Three or four to each bench.

And this is a picture I stealthily took of Ray while he was teaching the other day. It's important to be stealthy about it because if the kids see a camera they freak out and get really excited and all swarm you trying to get you to take a picture of them. Ray wouldn't have liked it if I'd dome that to his class. He's teaching half of the 8th grade model school class here and watching a kid do an exercise on the board. TomorrowI'll start teaching 3eme which is 9th grade and I'll teach them about bones. Bone growth, anatomy, problems, etc. It'll be a big class too - like 80. There's so many because they're thirsty to get some more practice on the material since the 3eme material is what will be on the BEPC test which determines whether they can go on in school.
This picture is of the GEE trainees who live in the village of Komsilga. Komsilga has a sign, indicating that it is Komsilga, but the sign does little good since there isn't really a road that goes to Komsilga and you don't get to the sign until you go off 4 km through the bush and then over a hill and then see the village along with it's sign. It's literally in the middle of nowhere. The girl there in the middle, Christina, also went to Cornell; It's like a Cornell convention. The Komsilga crew are the ones in GEE who had the best French. They started learning Fulfulde right away, and they will go up in the north where the Foulani and the Peul people are who speak Fulfulde. It's about an hour bike ride for these guys to come into town and PC is being a pain about giving them a ride sometimes. It's a tiny tiny village though. Tiny. This pic is during a storm out that way. The lightning here is always extrordinary. Anyway, enjoy the pictures, I'm going to go home and plan out my lesson and start a new book I think and eat some granola and maybe clean my room. Thank you all for the emails and such. I'd love to get more real letters! So far Addie's the only one who's mailed me anything. Emails rock but real mail is amazing. I also love comics or magazine clippings or pictures or anything else like that fits in a normal envelope.

2007-07-27T04:44:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday everyone!

Teaching is in full swing now. It's starting to feel like a real routine. I am sick again, but (i guess) unfortunately for me, this time it's not a bacterial infection, since I don't have a fever. Without a bacterial infection, I get no help from antibiotics, and will most likely have to just suffer through it for several more days. It's kind of funny sitting around thinking about what your game plan is going to be if you're teaching and have to run to the bathroom in the middle of class. Maybe I should just start having some exercises on hand for the kids to do in case I need to sprint to the latrines.

Today was the first day I taught without being unobserved. Normally the LCFs (language and culture facillitators - basically super-language teachers) and the technical training staff all sit in on people's classes so you always feel super nervous because you're getting critiqued all the time, but today I got to teach without observation which was nice since I didn't know what it was like yet. I was less afraid to just talk and explain stuff however I wanted in a more conversational style this time, which is always intimidating to do infront of your teachers who are fluent in french and a bzillion other languages. I really needed to do that though because I had been just teaching out of the book, but the book just makes no logical sense in the context of what these kids know and don't know at the start of 8th grade (they don't even start chemistry type classes till this year). So I'd been using the term viscosity over and over with respect to distinguishing different types of lava and eruptions and the like of volcanos and I was pretty sure they had no idea what that word meant. So today i bit the bullet and asked them if anyone had any idea what viscocity was - and they all said NO. So I did my best to explain and it was all ok in the end but wow that french must have been a hoot.

Yesterday we had a cooking class! We were given money and time and supplies to cook a full out meal in our language classes. It was great (minus my chronic diharrea). We made macaroni and cheese, crepes with mango jam, a tamale pie and onion rings (healthy, i know). Some of the current PCVs compiled a whole ton of American food recipes in a book they gave us (called Where There is no Microwave) which was such a relief to see. There's a lot of American food that could be made here with the food and supplies but without the recipes that have been tried and tested by PCVs, there would be a whole lot of discouraging trial and error. We also learned how to have a canary to have cold water, learned about the benefits of composting, and learned how we can easily dry our own fruits and veggies and meat if we want, especially for those folk headed up in the Sahel where they can't get a lot of fruits and veggies for some parts of the year.

Two days ago we had a the police commisioner come and talk to us about safety and security here in Burkina. He told us that things like murder are truely rare and that stealing accounts for 60 percent of crime here. Which is actually kind of confusing since I was told by multiple sources that if someone stole something from me in a market (or anyone else) and someone yelled "theif!" that a mob of people would form and chase the person down and kill him. So there are places here where stealing just doesn't happen. On the other hand, the police commissioner himself had his own cell phone stollen from right beside his own head during the night while he was sleeping. So I guess it just depends. He said, and all the staff agreed, that the best thing any of us can do for ourselves is greet our neighbors. If you greet your neighbors when you see them every morning and night then you will have nothing to worry about if you are ever in trouble because they would always come running and help you. But if you don't great your neighbors than you shouldn't expect them to help you out if you're in trouble. GREETING IS REALLY IMPORTANT HERE. I doubt I will ever be able to explain that well enough.

I was hoping to get some picures up but the internet is not cooperating today. So alas, the next time.

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAYS TO MY MOTHER AND DAN!!

I am finally teaching but today is a sad day

2007-07-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

I appologize for being so out of touch lately. We have started "model school", which is essentially a summer school the Peace Corps staff set up during which kids can pay a nominal amount of money to come and be taught by us teachers-in-training. They win because they get extra practice on material they need to know for the coming year and get to be taught by americans and we win beacuse we get to practice on students in a situation where it doesn't really matter that we aren't very polished yet. I'm bringing my camera tomorrow so I'll be able to explain more about schools here and the like. Anyway, each of us are teaching an hour each day, and I am particularly short on time beacuse it does take a lot of time to plan a lesson in French when one is not fluent in said language.

On top of that I have signed up to be tutored with two of my friends after the close of classes each day. With the start of model school, there are fewer language classes, and so I feel like I could use the practice. Monday, Wednesday, Friday will be French and Tuesday Thursday will be Mooré. Anyway with that on my plate I get home around now; about 7 pm. That gives me enough time to bathe, eat dinner, and plan some lessons before bed at 9 pm.

I got to talk to Tiana on Sunday for the first time since I got here which was a great!

But it is a sad day because my two best friends here, Chris and Jamie ETed today. ET is code for Early Terminate. They decided they were going back to America. Chris didn't show up for class today and then after teaching I found them both back at ECLA all packed up, and so we all got to be sad and say goodbye. Normally the ETs just evaporate out of here without a trace, so it was nice to be able to say goodbye, even if it was awkward for them to hang around a little longer.

So we've lost two SE volunteers out of 17 and three GEE volunteers out of 12. That makes us 24 now. I'll miss them a lot. But whatever makes them happy - this certainly isn't for everyone.

2007-07-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Dude, look at this really awesome snail! I would have eaten him if i knew what he'd been eating. He was huge - his shell was about three inches long! Maybe I'll raise snails and eat them.

Yesterday I saw a Beautiful Sunbird (that's the species name). You should look up a picture of the species because they're really exceptional. Yes I know most of you are too lazy to do that, so here's a link.

I'll write more tomorrow but for now, I hope everyone's having a good day and know that I'm well and I'll write something of more substance later.

2007-07-15T09:35:00.001-07:00

Wow what a week it's been. Now that I'm back on-line, I'll just keep writing untill my internet time runs out.

Sunday - Tuesday 7/8 -7/10
On Sunday we all took early early busses out of Ouahigouya to the capital, Ouagadougou for our counterpart workshops that would take place on Monday and Tuesday. What is a counterpart? For us Secondary Education volunteers, a counterpart is someone, usually another teacher or the director of the school we'll be teaching at, who is assigned to us to help us be in the community. Since they are also teachers, they know our job responsibilities and the particular schools we'll be working at so they can help guide us with work and also with integrating into the school community. They are also usually residents of the villages that we are each being sent to so they can tell us where to buy food so we don't starve and good stuff like that. Also if I had a problem with my house, I could tell my counterpart and he could help the issue get resolved. So together as a group of SE volunteers, we had a workshop with all the Burkinabé counterparts for two days. This was primarily a get-to-know each other thing and also a way for the counterparts to better understand what exactly the Peace Corps is and also some ways in which the American work place differs from the Burkinabé workplace. We talked about all kinds of things from pop trivia to how women are perceived in the workplace. Women in the work place is an interesting topic. It seems that a woman who is in a place of authority in the workplace would have her decisions questioned and challenged quite frequently. Woman being in functionaire positions, like my teaching position, is not that common, and indeed, of all the tens of functionaire/military/police/government people I met this week - they were all men.

But for Sunday, we had nothing to do since our bus got there so early so we all checked into the hotel and started exploring. We took taxis to the hotel. It was gloriously sketchy. We have to be attached to our mountain bikes at the hip so they were with us and we flagged down some taxis and haggled over the price and got in. Here there aren't really taxi companies; anyone can go and get their broken down, ratty, compact car painted green and just like that, now you have a taxi. So bikes and packs went in the trunk plus the driver in the front and 5 PCTs in the car. Apparently you can get 10 people in there, say the experienced PCVs.

Our hotel was great. Three stars, says the guidebook. It would have been a crappy hotel if if were in America but we all felt like we were at the Ritz. There was AC! A pool! Alright food! Cold drinks! A lot of us were sick coming into it and several others got sick while there so the Burkinabé counterparts must have thought that Americans just look crappy all the time and need to go to the bathroom a lot, but, what choice did we have.

But Ouagadougou is magnificent. It is expensive, but it is expensive because you are paying almost-American prices for food with Burkinabé money. But the Peace Corps gave us some extra dough and so we went hog wild. What wonderful foods did I have? I had: ice cream, crepes, a cheeseburger, pizza, spagetti carbonera, red wine, cheese, and a real salad. Unless you've been through this kind of a complete American food deprivation thing, there's just no way to tell you how good it all tasted.

The sodas are really cool here. There's coke and fanta and sprite and they come in glass bottles, which I actually prefer, and are usually very cold when you find them. Inside the cap there is a chance to win a prize. If you collect the 4 parts of a moto, then you win a moto! The hard piece to find is the helmet, and none of us have yet, but here's a cute picture of two of my best friends here, Chris and Jamie (one of our 2 token married couples) showing off their non-winning pieces during one our our nights out on the town. Jamie's a GEE volunteer and Chris is SE. They actually had a real life before they quit it and joined the Peace Corps. I really hope they stick around.

My counterpart is great, so far. His name is Issa Kere, and he teaches Geography, History and French and he is also the director of the Collège where I will teach. A lot of teachers have to do this kind of triple duty kind of thing since there just simply aren't enough teachers. He's also pretty familiar with the Peace Corps because he's worked with two PCVs before. Not in Bagré, but in other places in the country. Here in Burkina Faso, teachers can be sent anywhere to teach, which is why there is usually housing very nearby the schools for the professors to live in when they are sent there. He loves Bagré, and one reason why is that he used to be a teacher up north, and he says that physically, it is just easier to live in Bagré. That was good to hear. He's 34, has a wife and two kids with one on the way. He says that when I am his age I will have three kids and a husband maybe in Bagré. I told him that was impossible and forbidden. Two other men told me I would find a husband in Bagré while I was there - and I've been told this is normal - and almost a game. It's nothing against the Burkinabé but I don't want to marry anyone and certainly I don't want to have three kids. Mr. Kere told me to not be so hasty about the kids, because after all, he said, it's a decision for the man and the woman, not just the woman. He said that if my husband wanted 4 kids and I wanted 0 then I would have 2. I said nothing.

Wednesday 7/11 - Bagré
How do you get to Bagré? Well, if you are in Ouagadougou, there's a bus that will take you as far as Tenkodogo, my regional capital, which is 45 KM from Bagré. From there you "find" a bush taxi to take you the rest of the way. A bush taxi is just a tiny van meant to seat 12 that they put 18-20 in. They're usually extremely beaten up, cracked windsheilds, doors falling off, optional windows, etc, but they are they only way around much of this country. My counter part traveled with me since I had no idea what was going on. By this point I had acquired a full blown head cold and was awkwardly sneezing everywhere and my ears were plugged and believe it or not, it made understanding the French a lot harder. Because I have good French compared with the overall SE group (not the same as actually very good French) I think my counterpart thought I could actually speak French better than I can. He didn't seem to baby me at all and seemed surprised when I didn't know weird vocabulary like the word for Bee or Guinea Fowl.

Buses here are interesting. It's kind of like greyhound, if you take one of the major bus companies, except with narrower seats and music that is so loud you can't really talk to your neighbor. Then there are smaller busses, about half the size, for which the luggage gets strapped to the roof along with all the goats and sheep that are coming with. They handle goat and sheep here kind of like sacks of potatos with legs. They scream and fuss but get strapped to the roof nonetheless. I can't stand the sound of a goat screaming. It makes my skin crawl, and to me it sounds like a child being tortured or something equally bad. Here's a sheep going up. There were 10 sheep and goats on top of this bus.

There are two parts to Bagré. I forget the actual words for the names, so I will just call them Old Bagré and New Bagré. Old Bagré starts where the paved road, 45 Km from Tenkodogo stops. So you get off the taxi and get your stuff and then start biking. 2 km down the road is where my counterpart lives and where I will be teaching, at the Collège. They say the Collège is en brusse, meaning, in the bush, and it is, about a 2 minute buke ride off the big dirt road out into the real country. But I don't live here. There are not enough houses and the houses aren't nice enough, by Peace Corps standards. I live another 5 km down the main dirt road in what I'll call New Bagré. Old Bagré is old. It's been there as long as Bagré's been there, but New Bagré has come about as a result of the hydro-electric dam and the fishing and the like that has allowed for another small village to pop up down the road from Old Bagré, next to the huge lake and the hydro-electric dam. So after you get 5 km more down the road from the collège you'll see the Lycée on the left. The Lycée and the housing associated with it was built just this year. So I live there on the left, in a row of houses intended for professors. On the right side of the road, if you look off that way, you can see the lake. That's closer to the water than I am in Mystic! Quelle chance! This lake is enormous. I was told the dam itself was 3-4 km long and the electricity produced there powers a lot of the electricity in the country. Interestingly, I feel very safe at my site because of this dam. This dam is gold to the Burkinabé, and if anything were to happen to it, it would be very very bad. So there is a military presence, a police presence, and a local government presence in Bagré, so I know I have nothing to worry about.

This is my house. Kind of like suburbia USA except with a lot fewer neighbors and the fence is wire, not white picket. The yellow building is the main house, and it has 4 rooms. One big one that is half the house and then three others which are 2 bedrooms and a storage room or washroom. Outside to the left of this photo is the outdoor kitchen and pantry. To the right is my latrine and shower. You can see my tent popped on the porch there and my bike there in the yard, for scale. There is also a picture taken from the entrance of the front door of the big room. There across the room is my only piece of furniture so far, a plain table and a chair that i borrowed from the neighbor. If you zoom in you can see the yummy American food my wonderful parents sent me in a care package that I picked up while in the capital. That food saved me beacuse I was able to just tell my counterpart that I was sick and couldn't eat a lot and instead eat powerbars and the like instead of eating as much as a guest would had to have eaten to feel polite and probably actually then gotten sick and miserable. My pack is there on the table and when I opened it up in the morning; about 200 mosquitos flew out of it. I don't know why that happened, but I do know two things: (1) That was the last time I'll leave the door open at night and (2) I am going to build a bat house ASAP on the back of my house when I get set up there. I am very impressed with my house. It is the nicest house I have seen herefor the non super rich and I feel very lucky.

Bagré is lush and green. The crops are healthy, there is grass everywhere, and because of the lake, I saw real fog in the evening before it got dark. There are huge lush trees and my counterpart says that even though the grass will die in the dry season, the trees won't lose their leaves like the do up north. This picture below is to the right of my house, what i see if I look away from the road.

Depending on how good my early morning photography is, you will probably be able to see traditional mud huts in the center/right of the photo above if you click on it so it gets bigger. There were a bunch of dogs playing outside between my house and the Lycée. A ton of bulls went through, and it's so strange; they seem as calm as can be. My counterpart and my neighbor says that when I get moved in they'll tell the gardien of the Lycée to find me a puppy. I can't wait. I feel like between the fish and rice and lizards and stuff that are able to flourish in Bagré I'd be able to feed a dog. Not to mention the other dogs here don't exactly "get fed", so I wouldn't have to do all the work. It was nice to see animals that didn't look like they were starving. And there is grass! I can't tell you how little of this there is up north. In fact I can tell you - there's none. The rainy season is late and weak so the crops are suffering everywhere but down south.

So how did the night go? Well it was traumatic, but that's not Bagré's fault. It's been a long time since I was that alone. I have one neighbor, but after dark it's not appropriate to socialize with him unless something was actually wrong. I knew I was afraid of unfamilar buildings at night so I put my tent outside on the porch and settled down to sleep at about 8:30 pm. At about 1:45 a storm started moving in and I woke up because of how strong the wind was. My tent was acting like a sail, and I was being pushed across my porch. And all the doors and windows in my house which weren't secured very well started banging and clanging and making wierd noises and all the geckos and bats and whatever else that was seeking refuge in my house started moving around a bunch, and I got spooked because, as we all know: I'm afraid of the dark. There was lightning that lit up the sky about 1/3 of the time. The rain only fell for about 30 minutes, but the wind and lightning continued all night until dawn at about 5:30. I was too scared to get out and pee or lock my doors so I just sat there and read Things Fall Apart until I was done with it, and then I listened to my iPod until the dawn chorus of donkeys and roosters and birds that weren't vultures. But what can you say? When my counterpart came around at 7 he asked how I was and I said ca va because that's what you say.

[as an aside, i finished 2 books this week and i strongly reccomend both of them. I can't really take credit for picking these since Katherine, the book know it all reccomended them to me, but they are both really excellent. They are Things Fall Apart and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Pick one up if you get the chance.]

The picture above is looking across the road away from my house. You can see the start of the huge lake there in the distance. I was introduced to everyone it seemed of importance in the village. Millitary, police, staff at the school, local government. I met the regional education director in Tenkodogo. Tens of people I met and, yes, they were, every last one of them, men. I hear though that one of the 4 teachers at my school is a woman, and that is exciting. I also learned that I will be the only biology teacher, because, they didn't have one before me. Everyone I was introduced to thought I was going to be an English teacher, and when they learned I was going to be teaching science, they were surprised.

Koupela 7/12-7/13
So I packed up my stuff the next morning, rolled my tent, bathed, and went off to meet more people and then wait for a bush taxi to fill up to take me out of Bagré. I was to spend the next 2 days with a Small Enterprise Development Volunteer in the "city" Koupela, along with the other three SE trainees in the Central East region, to get to know a real volunteer and to get a taste of life in the region. It wasn't as helpful as it could have been since Koupela is even more north from Bagré than Tenkodogo, and it is hard to say why I would ever need to go there or know the city. Additionally, I am an SE volunteer, and so the buisness work that our host was doing wasn't very pertinent to our future lives. We stayed in a hostel/hotel thing which was nice, especially when I got sick the next day and could just relax and read/run to the bathroom.

We went to a Baptism that morning (probably the source of my illness). Muslim Baptisms take place here, usually on the 8th day after the birth and are a cause for large gathering, eating, and happiness. The men gather, segregated by age, outside in the courtyard, and sit in mats and give the benediction. They are simply asking God to take care of the baby and they wish it health and a good life. When I got baptisms, and this was my third, I am asked to sit with the men. Not the oldest men, but the mid-aged men. Nassaras are placed this way in the social heirarchy, even though I am a young, unmarried girl. The women are separated and do not sit and pray but instead prepare food and serve food after the benediction. They will sit together later in the day during the presentation of the presents to the mother, also segregated by age. Usually a goat or sheep is killed and the meat is prepared and eaten. The head is saved and washed, to be made into a soup the next day. As we sat there eating the riz gras and drinking the zom-kom that was presented to us after the benediction, we could hear and see the hacking apart of the goat body just a stone's throw away. A young boy happily carried away an armful of plump glissening organs and the head was lifted into a bowl and brought inside. I'd never stopped and thought about what it sounds like when a body is being hacked apart by a machete, but after hearing it, it's remarkably clear how different it sounds from chopping wood or something I've heard before. The baby never goes outside though,even once the name is given. It stays in the house, with the mother, and slowly but surely, small groups of people are asked inside the house to view and hold the baby and to eat more food, and if you're lucky, drink a cold soda. Usually one brings a small present to the mother, like a bar of soap. I've gone to three baptisms though, and gotten sick after each one, so maybe I'll sit the next one out.

Anyway - hope you don't mind the enormous amount of writing - there's just so much to say.

2007-07-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

Turns out that many people know of or have been to my site or very close to it. My host father knows two people there and he says that sometimes he goes there on vacation to fish. I thought he must be making that up, but then he showed me his fishing pole and told me that there are lots of fish there in the lake that is created from the dam and that some of the fish are electric and that there are also sacred crocodiles. I will get to visit Bagré next week and I'll be sure to send along pictures.

But now we have the scary task of trying to learn/understand/problem solve the topic of public transportation. Busses or trucks or bush taxis here can be crowded, smelly, slow, unpredictable, overpriced, and hot. Goats and sheep and cows and chickens go wherever people go. But the staff is doing a great job of teaching us about how to get along as best we can with all the new things we're not used to - and of course - to prepare us for next week's travels.

Today kind of sucked though. Got up - got sick - used my trusty pringles can again (different can) - went to ECLA - tried to catch a toad but only managed to split the crotch of my pants - etc etc etc - it's just stupid stuff though and it can almost be made all better by some cold juice.
Anyway... that's all for now.

Thank you all for your comments and emails. I' d love some real mail though - so get out those pens and stationary! Calls too! It's lonely out here and most of us go to bed everynight with our cell phones, on the off chance someone will call .... yes, we're pathetic. Ciao!

SITE ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!

2007-07-04T05:48:00.001-07:00

Today was site announcement day!! Very exciting for us all. And what a crazy thing to go through - basically we got together and everyone got up and said a little thing and then the staff presented us with an enormous hand drawn map of Burkina Faso, showing the main roads, paved and unpaved, and the locations of all the main cities, towns, and volunteer sites. The map was probably 8 feet tall and realllly wide. We posted it up against the wall, and began the unvailing of who will go where.

Our country director prefaced this whole experience with the thought that it is hard to really know what to take from your site annoucement. You're given a paragraph of information and she said that sometimes people come away from site annoucement crying, and that she herself - when she was a trainee - when she got her site annoucement and visited her site - she thought she was going to go home right then because it was traumatic for her. But it is hard to know what will really matter to you in the end about a site, and of course, usually what means the most to someone is the personal relationships and teaching and all that ... but of course we all wanted to know as much as we could.

One person would go up, and draw a piece of paper out of a box and read the description of the site that was on the piece of paper. Then, Seb, (the person in charge of assignments) would identify who was going to that place and then the lucky volunteer would come forward, take a little paper stick person figure and search for the name of their site on the enormous map, find it, and then place their stick figure on the map with some tape. This person would then draw a new piece of paper out of the box that describes another volunteer's site, and the process continues. Here's a picture of Becca reading about another volunteer's site.

Here's what I got on my slip of paper:

Bagré
"Welcome to the region of Tenkodogo. You are amongst the first volunteers to be serving in this region! Your CEG [middle school] is located in centra Bagré, but your home is located at a new building site about 4 or 5 km away. About three fourths of the village population lives in this new development, so you won't get lonely! The village is also home to a hydroelectric dam and large rice fields. The transport between Bagré and your regional capital, Tenkodogo, is regular and the distance is just 45 km. Bagré is very green and beautiful, and I'm sure you'll love your site! This year your school had from 6eme [6th grade] to 3eme [9th grade], one class per each level with a total of 312 students. Your regional capital has many perks as well. In Tenkodogo you will find such luxuries as internet, a supermarché, and a good restuarant where you can also spend the night. There is also a Japanese volunteer working there in the agriculture sector. The local language is Bissa, but don't worry, Mooré is also well spoken."

Wow. The whole experience was really really overwhelming. Some people were really happy. Some people really weren't. Some people learned that it'll take a whole day to get to their sites, and some learned they weren't going that far at all. Mac found out that he's going way up north where there aren't any paved roads or reliable transportation. A beach without the water, is I think what his paper said. He'll get moto training at the end of stage.

I learned that I will be the southern most volunteer. I am pretty close the border of Ghana and Togo, in the East of Burkina. The south is not something I demanded, but in my site interview I definitely emphasized that I would probably be happier if my town didn't look like the scene from a deserted western town in the US 200 years ago. I said that I'd love to be somewhere green, and that I knew we were mostly going up north, so maybe I'd learn to plant trees. In the end though, this isn't a vacation, and I was ready to take whatever I got handed. But I got lucky and I'm going to be in the south where there are trees already. Not the south like the southwest (which is what people here call the real south) but south as in close to Ghana, and where the land is supposedly actually green. My town has even more green because of the hydroelectric dam. A dam - a dam!! That means some amount of water!! On the hand drawn map with all the stick figures that represent the education volunteers, I am the most south one on the east side. I am there along with two others who will be relatively close to me kind of along the way to Tenkodogo, Marty and An.

This is supposedly in the range of all kinds of cool animals too like Hippos and Elephants and technically lions and cheetahs and things like that but they are rare to say the least.

I'm including a map of Burkina that has more of a true scale and is potentially easier to get perspective with than the hand drawn map. I want you to click on this map and open it up in a separate window or however you choose to to make it big and legible. Now find the capital, Ouagadougou. Now look to the south west to the country Togo, and find where the word Togo is written in big letters. Now take a ruler or the edge or a piece of paper or whever and follow a straight line connecting the square that marks Ouagadougo to the last O in the word Togo. Along that line, south and west of Tenkodogo is the word Bagré and that'll be where I'll be working!!

And please keep the calls coming! Calling cards aren't THAT expensive! I love you all!

2007-07-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a pretty cool lizard that was taking advantage of the fact that an ant colony was moving itself and its brood along these vines. He just sat there and went hog-wild. I guess if I liked ants I would have been doing the same thing.

All Better

2007-07-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

Well don't worry everyone, I'm better. Cipro really is magic, and withing several hours of taking it my fver was already on the way out. I feel just fine now, and aside from a sore throat, I think I'm doing just fine.

Yesterday was the day of good meat. I really do enjoy meat in the US and it was so frustrating to find that, like in Kenya, most of the meat you get here with meals is very different from the meat at home. There's a lot of bones and cartillage and stuff like that with meat in there too, but not much. Chicken is usually really good and fish is hit or miss but always very boney. But my LCF told me about a place in town you can get some really good pork and sure enough, it was excellent. Then later I had some Brochettes (think small hunks of meat on a stick) which were also excellent and then late at night the teenagers in my house took me out to have chicken which was really excellent. Gotta make sure you ask for fillet on the brochettes though because you might end up with liver or something and I'm not ready for that yet.

Last night was a trip. My parents are out of town this weekend in Ouagadougou for the second stage of the funearl ceremonies for whoever in the family died about 40 days ago. Apparently there's a long mass that starts at 9 pm and goes really late (m LCF said people usually don't sleep) and then there is a closing ceremony in the morning. I was all set to go but I didn't finish my atibiotics till yesterday morning so the PC wasn't down with me going out of town and maybe relapsing so I stayed here. Totally fine by me - we all need as much R&R as we can get. But I was told that I was going to go out dancing with Usmann and Fati at 9 and that I could bring a friend. I invited another trainee, Jamie, and we met at my house and then the when and where and why or everything to really confusing. After about an hour I realized it was so needlessly confusing because no one really knew what time it was.

We went several blocks down the road to a dance hall but there wasn't anyone there. Fati asked me what time it was and I told her it was 8 - but it wasn't 8 - I had just converted to military time wrong. She tells me that that must be why no one is there since it starts at 9. Realizing my mistake I tell her it's actually 10 and she tells me that it must be going to start soon then. No one here wears watches really. 8, 10, what's the diff, right? lol

So we go across the street where my host aunt is selling things and sit with her. My little brother, Abass, and Usmann find us, somehow, and Usmann tells me that the dance hall would normally be packed, but tonight it was too cold and people probably didn't want to go out. "Too cold???" I asked him, a few times. How could it be too cold? Because it was approaching the high 70s instead of the mid 80s?? But I wiped the disblief off my face and nodded in aggrement, as if that made total sense to me. We ended up going somewhere else where people were eating and had some amazing chicken, grilled outside with onions and spices. Got home and Usmann took Jamie home, which is normal here - if you're a girl it's OK to be out at night like that in a group but a guy needs to accompany you home.

This week we learned something really interesting about Burkinabé culture, which is that it is appropriate in your personal affairs or all kinds to often use a third person. This is because the Burkinabé are very concerned with not losing face and allowing others to also save face. This could be appropriate if, for example as my mom did to me this past week, you are inviting someone somewhere but you want to give them room to say no then you could send the invitation though a third person, in my case through my LCF. So she sat there on the couch with us both and told Patrice, my LCF, about the thing this weekend and all that, but in Mooré so I couldn't understand, and then the next day, Patrice told me about it, and then I was able to talk to him about it, he got back to my mom, and my mom and I never exchanged any words about it.

This also holds for situations where there is an argument or fight. Instead of being confontational, one of the fighting parties will go to a third neutral party and talk it out and then the third neutral party will talk to the other fighting person and a resolution and appology and pardon will probably be found that way. I find that so interesting to be in a culture where you also have to go to the market and bargin hard for good prices and it is totally normal to tell a shopkeeper his price isn't fair or that you could get it cheaper elsewhere. Seems like you feel like you end up questioning the seller's integrity - but it's more of just a process and doesn't really mean that much, I know.

Last Friday we did our first peer teaching in French and everyone did a great job and on Monday we'll do a similar teaching except to real students.

On Wednesday we'll hear where each of our sites will be. Very exciting - so stay tuned. That is also July 4th and later that night we'll be going out to the village Bogoya F for a BBQ, complete with hamburgers and potato salad and stuff. Pricy to pull off here but totally going to be worth it. That's all for now though - I'll put up more pics real soon. Can't wait to get that first care package - I know it's on it's way!

Sick as a dog

2007-06-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

Well we all knew it was coming... and now it's here: my first aggressive intenstial bacterial infection. And let me tell you, these last 24 hours have been hell on earth. Yesterday afternoon I started feeling fevery and weak and so I went home and took a nap, woke up, checked my temp: 102.

Patrice, my LCF (Language/Culture Facillitator) came over for dinner and we had chicken and french fries and it was delicious. I already knew I was getting sick so why not eat food that tastes good. What's a little more diarrhea, right?

Went to bed at 8:30 and woke up at 10:30 and the stomach sickness started. Nausea, diarrhea etc etc. Didn't want to have to march past my family with the toilet paper so I just held it in as best I could (dumb I know). Woke up later and couldn't hold it anymore but by then the rain had started pouring and pouring so I couldn't go out without probably having a lengthy conversation about going out in the rain with the family so I opted for my bath bucket and a pringles can. Did I mention the Peace Corps steals your dignity? lol

Dragged myself into training this morning but only could make it half a day before crashing in the med unit. I slept through my interview with Seb about my site and when I woke up at 4:30 my fever was up to 103.3. I knew i needed to find some IBuprofen fast, but go figure, there isn't any on hand here. I can't ever remember having a fever that high. Usually at home when I run a fever it's 100 or something. So the driver took me to my house (which I didn't mind because of the AC in the car) and I found my med kit (has everything under the sun you might need medically w/o a prescription) and my MIF kit (stool sample preparation kit) and went back to training. I scarfed down some Ibuprofen and submitted my MIF kit to the lab, got the results back, and here I am just a few hours later with the knowledge that I have a bacterial infection, probably E. coli and have to take some Cipro (hardcore antibiotic) for a few days.

The Cipro will clear stuff up real soon I hope. My family is really sweet; they wanted to know if they could come visit me at ECLA tonight (I'm staying at our training site in the med unit tonight). It'll all be fine soon, so don't worry; antibiotics are magic. I've never had a fever that high though - I was really starting to feel insane. Scary stuff.

2007-06-24T10:44:00.001-07:00

And Hi to Lara's family and Julia's awesome mom and Andrea's awesome mom any any other PC trainee family out there! : )

2007-06-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

Alright time for more pictutres. Everyday I am in hours of class, lately language class, and instead of sitting inside a classroom, my class (three of us) bikes out somewhere in the town and has class there. Often we go to the outside of a cyber café and these little birds like to hang out there in pairs. The male is a bright red and the female is green and red. They're the most common birds I see around here other than hundreds of vultures but I don't yet have their species name - but I'll look it up soon in my bird book! So here's a male.

This is a picture of a lot of my host family. On the left is my 11 yr old sister Toma (TOH-mah) and then my mom Ami (AH-me) and her yongest son Nayeme (nah-YEEME) and Ami's aunt (I think) who was in town for a visit and then Abbas (ah-BAS) my 14 year old brother. This is a shot of most of the living room - the only indoor space that they spend any time in, and a great deal of the size of the house. There on the table is my normal breakfast: bread and powdered milk or tea. There in the background you can see the stove they use - it's similar to a camping gas stove. A lot of the cooking is done outside though because it gets really really hot in that room when that stove is on.

The other night a whole lot of family showed up all of a sudden and started cooking a lot. I was supposed to go out that night with the volunteers so I wasn't around for most of it but when I woke up the next morning there was a lot of cooked things and a lot of Zom-Kom (this cold sweet drink that is kind of fruity, kind of tea-y, and has a lot of millet flour in it. I'm not yet used to it's taste or the fact that there is flour in what I'm drinking but maybe I will be soon. Millet makes its way into a lot of things here like little cooked grains of it are put in yogurt type stuff, for example. But anyway that morning I was told that someone had died 33 days ago. I'm pretty sure it was 33 days ago. It was an old man in the family - not the direct family - but in the larger, African family - and that took place before I got there but the family is Muslim so there are several death-processing events. There's the immediate one and then there's usually something a week later and then if it's a man 33 days after the death (or 44 for a woman) and then usually something 100 days after the death. This could be slightly off since these sort of details are hard to get in fast french that you're not really expected to be fully understanding anyway - which is a shame since the culture is really interesting. Anyway that morning on my way out of the courtyard and into the street, I was accompanied by my mom who was escorting me past all the men that had gathered along the street on mats because of the occasion. The food was an offering I think and also something nice to do for the direct family. Death here for older people is not a sad thing, persay. It is only a tragedy when the person is still young. This was an elder person though.

Here's a couple shots of the inside of my room. I don't know for sure but I think that I might have the only bed in the house. Everyone sleeps outside, either on matressess or little thatch mats. So this room is pretty cush. You can see such features as my big white water filter, my green mosquito net, and some African pagnes (wraps) hanging around. You can also see that I al very privilaged to have a standing fan. That is a real treat here. But it's necessary for that room - because as you can see with the size of the window - it would quickly become a clay oven in there w/o air movement.

there in the foreground. On the right you can see a couple metal doors and those go to the latrine and the shower area (bucket bath). On the left you can see a little door which goes in a little house which is what all the houses are like here in my courtyard. There are 3 orMost of the time is spent outside in the courtyard though which is pictured here. This is a shot from the front door on my way out in the morning. That's my sweet Peace Corps mountain bike 4 of them - all belonging to this family - surrounding this courtyard. I don't really understand the center yet - because it looks like either something was/is/or will be being built there. That door that i referred to is actually a tomb, it seems, for my mom's late parents. She says we'll go in there someday. The houses are hard to count though - it's hard - it all kind of resembles a maze. And yes - that there on the left is a sateillite dish - my family has enough money to have TV and there the dish is, smack dab in the middle of this African courtyard. I really haver grown to like the bucket baths though - especially when you take them around dusk. Around that time of day, if the water hasnn't been out in the sun all day, you can almost feel nice and cool. This courtyard is on a side street right off of the main drag of Ouahigouya so this is a downtown place. And the next picture is a pic of the side street just down the block from my house. This is a pretty typical side street. The road goes from busy and paved to dirt and lined with trash and animals in less than 2 blocks. No the trash doesn't smell good. Yes I should ideally be greeting every person I meet on the street. Even if most of what I hear down these roads is "NASSAARRA". On one hand I think it's great that I have to do so much greeting because it kind of makes me think that just walking by people without even looking at them in the States is kind of wierd, but at the same time the whole greeting routine and frequency of greeting is hard to get used to for someone like me once you've done it for the 50th time in one day. That's abnormal since I'm in class so much but on the weekends it's not that far off. I'm at least comfortable with the greeting process in Mooré now. Goes something like: Good morning, how are you / good / how's your family / good / how's your work / good / etc etc. This can be abbreviated for perfect strangers or you might go through the whole thing with someone you don't know at all.

There are a lot of animal noises here. It's worse/louder/more noticable in the villages but there are a fair number of donkeys, chickens, sheep, goats, bulls in the couple blocks around me. Here's a random picture of one bull on my street. I'm not used to being able to just walk by a bull. They're all lightly tied up like this one and all seem pretty low energy. I heard there's a camel in one of the villages and I told my host mom I wanted to ride one and so she said she'd take me to go see him sometime.

The swimming pool here is amazing. It's a real pool! And the water isn't too hot. It's a little pricy but it's totally worth it.

Anyway - those are all the pics for now. Feel free to ask any questions since things that might be self apparent to me might not be to you.

Thank you for the care package offers and phone calls and emails and messages. There is no way to explain exactly why or how these three weeks have felt like a year to me and to everyone here, but they have and there is also no way to explain how nice it is to hear from you all. Ciao for now.

Cell Phone!

2007-06-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

I bought a cellphone today with the spare money I had left over from the states. For 30,000 CFA which is somewhere around 50 USD.

My number is : 011 226 76 79 3367

Those are all the numbers you would need to dial to call me from the states.

Once again; it's free for me to receive calls; really expensive for me to call out, but you should all be able to find calling cards that end up being about 11 or 12 cents per minute from the states. When you're looking up rates or whatever keep in mind that you're calling a cell; sometimes the rates are different. I have no idea what your local phone company would charge you w/o a calling card but I can assure you that the calling card is much much cheaper.

I've heard that there's a calling card on callingcards.com that is 11 c per minute but I don't have any verification that it's a good deal yet (you know like no hidden fees etc).

You can call me at anytime but the times I am for sure not in class are:
Sunday: anytime
Saturday: anytime after 8 am EST
M-F: anytime after 1:30 pm EST

In general I go to bed before 7 EST but you can call anyway I'm sure I'd love to hear from you and please let me know about what calling cards work so i can know for the future.

Ciao!

First pictures!

2007-06-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Alright - here come the first pictures. You might be thinking, " What's all this writing?" .... well you see, one of the most interesting hours we've had so far was the morning after our first night with our host families. For us science and math teachers this was the first time we left the group and got scattered across Ouahigouya and for the girls ed and empowerment people they got spread out into villages that are a 30-45 min bike ride away . There are three sheets here detailing the group's contributions to answering three questions, and they are, in order of their appearance, "What was challenging or embarassing for you?" "What was your first culture shock?" and "What do you like/enjoy in your homestay so far?" These are worth it; click on the image and no they're not rotated right and yes the handwriting's all over the place but they're in high enough resolution to read and they'll make you laugh or smile or maybe fear for my health but you should at least read them - particularly the first one. It was a hard night but it's over and we're all for the most part doing better.

The next pic (the one with the red dirt) is a snapshot from a little movie i took w/ my camera as we were driving out of Ouagadougou. This isn't where I am now and it was out the side of a crammed bus, but it's a pretty accurate representation of what most of what I've seen of Burkina looks like. Most of the time there are fewer trees and here in town there are more kiosk/shop things but that's what not downtown looks like. I'll put up some pics of Ouahigouya soon. The pic next to it is the hostel place we stayed at in Ouagadougou - it's a resort compared to village life.

One of the first things we did here in Ouahigouya was to go see the cheif. We brought him a live white rooster (I was picked to offer it to the cheif) and some cola nuts which are a sign of peace here I think. In turn he answered our questions and said we could stay here in and work and thanked us for being here and said we could consider ourselves Burkinabé. It is considered good luck to get the cheif's blessing. Here is a picture of the cheif on his throne with the rooster I gave him there next to his son.

We are all starting our third week in this country and we should all be proud. There's no doubt about it - the Peace Corps is for real and not for everyone. I think it's getting easier. Maybe? Maybe it's just not quite as hot.

We found a great place in town to get egg sandwiches. For 350 CFA - that's less than a dollar. They taste good and it mean's I'm eating protein. Yay.

Thank you all for the comments and questions - I miss you all.

Dust Storm

2007-06-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I had my first dust storm. The winds picked up as it was getting dark, like they often do when it is threatening rain. My host mom took me for a walk to see her friend down the road. The two women I met there were very sweet and my mom and they had what seemed like Mooré girl talk for a few minutes and then one of the women asked me what women did in the United States. I told her that for the most part they did what men did and that it was becomming more like that everyday but that there were still some housewives.

We left and everything was kind of glowing reddish brown as the dust started to pick up and the light continued to fade. Already it was painful to not cover my face. We got back home as the wind really picked up and soon all the kids ran in the house and even one from another family and we sat there and listened to the wind. Dust seemed to pour through the front door. They gave me some foul smelling goo to put up my nose. My skin was shades darker from the dust. Then the electricity cut out. The wind door down the thatch roof that partially covers they courtyard.

The baby slept but my younger sister and brother and their friend played hand clapping games to wait it out. They taught me some too. It was remarkable that they were not afraid. Then the rain started and it was so loud on the tin roof that you couldn't hear yourself think. I headed to bed and fell asleep right away; it was after 10 - way past my bedtime.

2007-06-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

I just had a great sandwich for lunch. I probably wouldnt have said that about the same sandwich in the US but it was the first lunch i've had here that I liked.

Thank you for all of your messages and emails - they are worth gold - for those of you who think it would be better to let me settle in first before blabbing in my direction - think again. I welcome all the emails and everything - the more the better - it can really turn your day around - even if you're just telling me about that delicious iced coffee you got today or anything. I can dowload everything on flash drives and read it at my leisure, even though I have to pay for internet.

I will be getting a cellphone - probably this weekend. I'll let you know the number when I do. It is super expensive for me to call out but free for me to receive calls. SO that means that if you want to talk to me or if you think i want to talk to you, please try to figure out a cheap international calling card situation. I know that PINGO (pingo.com) has calling card options to BF but not sure if its the cheapest. I dont have a lot of time or money to hang out on google and figure out the best option so help me out if you can. PINGO is also sposed to have some sort of PC discount but I havent asked. You should be able to get some sort of generic calling card i think too. Should come out to about 11 c per minute. Enough of that for now.

Training is really hard. Its strange though because - at least for me - it's everything other than what we're actually being taught that is hard. I meaning they're going pretty slow and very thoroughly through how to teach, we're getting lessons on health and safety, and language classes are, well, language classes. I'm in the top French group for the teachers which is reassuring but at the same time scary since I don't feel that i can speak that well.

The heat is really hard. The rain is late this year - but it keeps threatening every day. I sleep outside now and fall asleep listening to the 2 old women in the family chatting either to each other or no one in particular. Its about as stereotypical as it gets - old women missing half their teeth, speaking in a tongue i dont know yet; topless with breasts stretched down to their waists and their bottom half covered in a pagne or two. Still though sleeping outside i wake up drenched in sweat at 5 or 5:30 when the sun comes up.

Last night my mom here took me for a walk (I think she is proud she has a nassara) and we walked down the road and in the street there was a large gathering of people. I learned that there is not much water left for my neighborhood, so they are rationing it out till the rains come. Imagine if your concern wasn't over having clean water but having water at all.

The food is hard too. I like about 25 percent of what I've eaten here, but I've learned to eat dinner without tasting it if I need to and maybe i'll grow to like things. It's hard to convince yourself to like liver or sheep or goat or stomach when you see all the animals eating from the trash that lines the streets of the city here.

But my family is great. They are just so nice I can't even tell you. The kids do all the work here. You just say waka to someone younger than you and they come over and do whatever you want. Thats for your family. I could say that to any kid on the street though and they would do whatever i wanted. It strange to be able to call my family wealthy - I mean they are - but they really have nothing. They have some clothes and a 4 room house about as big as 3 tinycollege dorm rooms and then one larger one that serves as the kitchen and the dining room and the living room. There is a lock on my door (thank you Peace Corps) and there's a 14 inch TV in the main room and a small fridge. A gas powered camping stove and some chairs. The dust that is outside is inside too, and my little sister taught me how to use the little straw brooms to clean my room and tomorrow my mom will show me how to make To (TOE) which is this corn or millet tasteless play-dough textured thing that everyone eats and if you're not in the city you eat with every meal.

I've started feeling sick a lot. I knew it was coming. But today is a good day.

My mother here gave me a pagne and a top to match and i went to training the other day wearing them and it felt great. I'll send pics soon. It was so sweet of her. Everyone said it looked great. It felt great to be nassara but to blend in too. The hoards of kids screaming nassara as I bike home had to look twice. I got a flat tire on my bike already but so have many others. I also learned how to fix it : )

Peace out for now.

2007-06-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Alright I'm here. I emailed a few of you last week to prove i hadn't yet died and now I have a few mintes to post here until my hunger wins out or I have to go back to class.

Last week we spent a couple days in Ouagadougou (the capital) and now we have arrived in Ouahigouya (big "city" in the north) where we will stay until swear-in at the end of August. We have been sorted into 5 groups: 4 groups of us going to surrounding villages (these are the girls' education and empowerment folk) and the 5th group, the science and math teachers, who will stay in the city here in Ouahigouya. For the GEE flk this means they're living village life now and face a 30 - 45 min bike ride into the centre for class whereas we are all with in 10 min of here and live with more wealthy families.

This means I've got it good. My family is a group of about 30 people who all live in a few tiny houses surrounding a small courtyard. In the house I'm living in there's a mom, dad, and 3 kids. There's electricity, a fridge that keeps things moderately cold, and a TV. The house is clay, I use a pit latrine, take 2 or 3 bucket baths a day (as is the custom), and eat using only my right hand. Let me emphasize, this family is very rich. Most of the volunteers in the villages simply didnt sleep last night because the temperatures in the mud huts are unbearable. Everyone is waiting for the rains to start to calm this ridiculous heat.

I have never felt heat like this. 100 degrees in the shade during most middle of the days. I drink about 6 liters of water every day and i'm still thirsty. I bet if it were physically comfortable, and the water was cool and not room temperture (i.e. HOT) I would drink 10.

My French is getting much better already. I'm not really afraid of the teaching in French part any more.

I haven't gotten sick yet but i know it's coming. I'm no good at latrines yet.

If you love me and want to send me things to make my life happier, you could send me any of the following:

Granola bars (no yogurt coating or chocolate or things that would melt) In particular I like the simple versions of the Nature's Valley ones. Breakfast here is simply a piece of a baguette and some tea or milk from powdered milk so I'm craving grains.

PRE-SWEETENED powder for drinks. I'm not living on my own so I don't have a personal sugar supply yet so anything really - what I have now is lemon though so as long as theres the choice; I'd prefer berry or cherry or grape or whatever and what ever brand. Just not the Koolaid packets that aren't presweetened, yet.

My blue Nalgene (this is to the parents). Needless to say, I'm drinking way more here than at home so I could use the bottle.

Cheez Doodles. I'll love you forever. The crunchy kind. They're light I promise.

The postage gets much cheaper the heavier the package (you can look it up at usps.com i think) and it'll take like 3 weeks to get here but it will be much appreciated. In fact I'll appreciate anything you send I'm sure. I'm not desparate yet but I may be in 3 weeks. Thank you in advance! Address is on Blog.

Got to run for now but I am fine and will write more soon and maybe even some pics. The Burkinabé are the nicest people i have ever met.

Ok tomorrow i'm gone for REAL

2007-06-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

Alright I've completed Staging. Today was a long but completely tolerable and even enjoyable day of bonding, team building, and loads of education about Peace Corps policy. We looked at case studies, learned about the myriad of ways in which we will all be harassed, learned of our flight arrangements and even laughed a lot. I mailed off my driver's license home and mailed off my loan deferment forms to Cornell and the government. I went to CVS and bought envelopes, a thing of shampoo, granola bars, an accordian folder and some stickies. I got some take-out chinese food and a coke.

Going is not so hard anymore. When I got here and I was late and I was rushing to the ballroom and the bellhop showed me to the doors in which my staging was starting I really had to push myself to walk in. I took about 5 seconds of him wondering why I wasn't going in and me wondering why I wasn't going in before I flipped a switch somewhere and walked in. And since then it's been really overwhelming but at least I know the 28 other people I'll be doing it with and I had no idea how relieving that would be. Unlike other meet-so-and-so-group situations, there's no one here I don't like. Not one bit. There's not even any judgments I've incorrectly made about anyone in a negative way. We're all - well - great. No, we don't know each other THAT well, but I sure haven't felt that close to 28 total strangers after 30 hours before. No one's playing tough either.

There's been some nerve-wracking unanswered questions about baggage. Tomorrow goes something like: get up at 5, eat, check out at 6, go to clinic at 7, get shots, hang there so we don't puke because of the massive shots, get back on bus, drive to NYC, go into airport, fly to Charles de Gaulle en Paris. Then next day goes something like: 8 hour layover in airport, fly to Burkina at like 4 pm, get to Burkina around 8 pm local time. At the airport, we identify our luggage and then let go of all but what we need for 2 days. We'll be staying in Ouagadougou (Oh-ah-ga-DOO-goo) for two days in a place with showers! The rest of our stuff will be going to where we'll be training, Ouahigouya (why-ee-GOO-ya). We'll see it when we get there and then repack our bags so that we only bring one bag to our host family where we'll be for three months. That's my best understanding, but there is some confusion about when exactly we will and when exactly we won't have access to our stuff and just how strict that one bag rule is.

There is both phone and internet in Ouahigouya. I'll be able to call home on Thursday night, but not before then.

But for now, I feel like the leaving has already happened, and now I just have to put up with two long flights and an 8 hour lay over in the airport, like I had when I went to Kenya. I'm not really scared anymore, just REALLY anxious.

Here's some pictures of things that happened right before I left. There's a gull at Watch Hill. And there's the living room table before I left. And one last shot of my mom's driveway/house and the bridge going up in downtown Mystic.

Love you all - talk to you on the other side!

I'm still alive and actually only in Philly

2007-06-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well I got to Staging in one piece. I was one of the late ones due to complications with my shuttle and my flight getting in pretty close to registration, but all in all it was fine. My stuff is carry-able. In fact, I did much better than some others. There are some of those duffel bags here - you know - the kind you could fit into no problem. No I'd not like to carry my crap very far, but it could be done if need be.

There are just shy of 30 of us here. That's more than I expected. We're having our Staging at a hotel here in Philly and in just a few minutes we're going to venture out in search of a good philly cheese steak and a beer. Yep, continuing on the trend of enjoying foods I won't have for a while. And I should mention my very wonderful Katherine made me an excellent hamburger at 9 this morning that I wolfed down as I packed the last stuff and was the only thing I've had to eat today.

Thank you everyone for your notes and pictures and well-wishings and good-lucks. It really means a lot to me. That's all for now-

Time to go

2007-06-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

Well I leave tomorrow morning (later this morning really) at around noon out of Providence. These last couple days have been really surreal and have gone by in a flash. Went to the beach at Watch Hill, ate clam fritters, had hotdogs and Mike's, played Pictionary, and got together the stuff I had been putting off getting. And It's as if I'm going through all the right motions and actions of someone leaving for Africa for two years but at the same time I feel a real emotional disconnect from the whole concept. I know what I needed to do, I've done most of it, and now I'm leaving - but it doesn't register yet. It was like when we visited Kenya, it took me a few days to really look around and believe I was in Africa - zebra and giraffee everywhere and everything. I've been packing up and leaving for a while since I was 15 for boarding school, and though this will be longer, much farther from home, and well THE PEACE CORPS - I feel like my brain's still regarding it as another year of school or something.

My bags are packed and they are heavy. I know practically nothing about backpacking - but I know that my backpack is amazing. I have 4 bags, really: a really big backpack, a normal backpack, and a messenger bag and a tiny messenger bag as carry on. Total checked baggage weight is probably between 70-80 lbs which my brother says is nothing considering the circumstances (he does know about backpacking)- but it still seems like a lot. The big bag is the most comfortable, despite its 48 lbs. We'll see how it goes.

So I'm up late taking care of lose ends I shoud have taken care of by now such as insurance, paperwork, finding my immunization records, loan deferrment stuff, and this blog entry.

FYI, my cell phone will be no longer working as of about 3 tomorrow. Sprint agreed to put me on a military suspention thingy which is pretty neat: you pay nothing for the time you're gone and then when you get back, when you're ready, you can pick up your number again, and have a cell phone again.

Katherine's still here which has been great, and Tiana came down from Boston this evening, after moving herself, and we all hung out with my parents. Now it seems like everyone, including the cat, is asleep and snoring, so after I print a couple papers, I'll do the same.

I get really nervous about leaving for a long time. Not that I've really ever had that much practice with it, but I start thinking about all the worst things - such as the fact that my parents and all my pets are rather senior. But really there's nothing to do and it's not something to put your life on hold about so you just gotta get goin.

I'll be in the States until the morning of the 5th, and then we'll fly to Paris, and then down to Burkina. If the hotel we're in isn't a shack on the side of the road, I'll have wireless at the hotel we'll be at, so I'll post more once I've actually ventured out of Connecticut.

Peace.

2007-05-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

Oh and I just got my Bio GRE scores back and despite my pathetic attempts to study well for the test, I got in the 90th percentile so GO CORNELL for making my brain swallow so much science so quickly.

2007-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Alright lets see - these last days have been pretty crazy. I went to Minnesota to visit my brother David, his wife Jodi and their three kids Tristan, Gabriel and Sierra. My brother Tim wasn't able to make it out - but that's how it goes sometimes. Katherine came out with me which was super awesome and we had 5 days jam-packed with dodgeball, wiffle ball, the sound of music, popcorn and tons of family pictures and home movies. It's crazy to think how old the kids will be when I get back - i'm so used to seeing them every Christmas and summer that it's quite the change. Here's a pic of Sierra playing soccer at her soccer practice.

Yesterday I went to Pine Point to visit people and see the school and use their scanner to take many of the film prints I have and convert them to digital files so that I can print them all in one go and for much cheaper than if I just copied the actual photos. The school is really changing - in a good way I think. They have these crazy solar panels now and have built a new observatory with a 12" Meade SCT scope in it! How sweet. Anyway, it was good to see people before I left and get some email addresses and such and talk about where I was going and stuff - Burkina Wha????

And last night Eliza and I drove up to Boston to see Tiana for her birthday party. We went out to dinner and then to a strange bar with pretty drinks and loud music and danced for hours. Then we retired to her apartment where the real party began. We stayed up all night and finally crashed as the sun came up.

So now I'm getting together pictures and things for my photo album and tying up other lose ends. It's basically one week now.

GRE = DONE

2007-05-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

Well I took the General GRE today and it's OVER. I did alright. The writing section felt really good and the rest was a 1300. Math part was good but the verbal wasn't as good as it usually is. Oh well - I can always take it again when I get back and in the meantime a 1300 won't keep me out of too many places and I shouldn't have trouble doing better if I redo it.

I feel like I should buy myself a beer or something.

Happy Mothers Day!

2007-05-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

Plane Reservations

2007-05-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Well I called Sato Travel today and set up my travel arrangements to get to my Staging. Staging, for those of you who don't know, is a couple days at the beginning of your experience with the Peace Corps where you're still in the US and you get your vaccinations and get introduced to the Peace Corps and get ready to go overseas. Mine will be on June 3 - June 5 in Philadelphia. So I'll be flying out of Providence at 11:55 am on the morning of the 3rd.

Had the first of two going away parties last night. We were at Ally's with Nick and Jatoya and Kristen. We made a lot of margaritas. Like - a lot. And I took my first Tequilla shot the right way - you know - with the salt and the lime and all that. Other than that we just sat around and talked and danced and sang and made a 3 am Dunkin' Donuts run - on foot no less. These people are so different from my Cornell crowd that it's refreshing.

2007-05-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

Today I got my very first pair of prescription sunglasses (pricey but well worth it), and a spare pair of normal glasses for the PC and the guy waiting on us threw in 5 lens cleaning cloths, an extra case, and extra sets of screws when he heard I'd be in West Africa for the next two years.

Went to Sprint, and they said that canceling my contract would be no problem. That was too good to be true, especially for Sprint.

I think that my solar panel set up will now work just fine *knocks on wood*. It's a MyPower All by Tekkeon (they gave me one free!!). It powers and charges my PB 15" laptop and i *think* my solar panel (Sunlinq 12W) charges it. I'll know for sure tomorrow and try to figure out the charging rate.

This is really gross I'm sorry you have to look at it but inquiring minds want to know

2007-05-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

Two months ago I shut my right index finger in the door to the Saab and then the door auto-locked. When I got it out it hurt quite a bit. Doctor looked at it 2 days later and burned a hole through the nail and let out a lot of blood and now, two months later, the nail's falling off. Problem is, it's falling off from the bottom first, and the top is very much alive. EWWWWW.

2007-05-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Well, my leave date got pushed one day earlier. I'll now begin my staging on June 3rd, not June 4th. Everyone and their mother has expressed interest in getting together between now and when I leave so this might get kinda crazy.

Getting deferments on my loans is going to be easier than I anticipated *knocks on wood*. Even though I owe Cornell about 12 grand at the government about 27 grand, they both have simple "are you in the Peace Corps?" forms to fill out and that's that - for up to 36 months.

I scheduled my general GRE for next Monday at 11:00 am in Warwick, RI (that's more a reminder for me than juicy gossip). Four hours of standardized, computerized fun!

There's a pair of Canada geese nesting in the pond across the way from my house - so I think I'll wander down there with a piece of bread and see if I can feed them. Based on the friendliness of the Canada geese around Ithaca, I figure it can't hurt.

I'm trying to get better at crossword puzzles but it's not working. I was alright at the ones from the Cornell paper since they were from the LA Times, and therefore current, but the ones that Addie has laying around are designed more for older persons so I don't stand a chance. That's ok! I'll keep trying. Here's a nice pic of Addie facing down the daily crossword. Mwuahaha sneaky pictures.

Here's my schedule for the next few weeks:

GRE Mon 5/14
Go up to Cornell 5/15
Come back from Cornell with Katherine 5/16
Fly to MN 5/18
Come back from MN 5/22
Tiana's BDay Party in Boston 5/27
Going away Party in Mystic 5/??
Fam from RI get together in Mystic 5/??
Leave 6/3 for Philidelphia
Leave 6/5 for Burkina Faso

So yes, I'll be in Ithaca for the evening of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th and chances are - I'd love to see you. I'm coming up so I can see people and help move out Katherine so I'll be wicked busy but I hope I see you all - you know who you are - cuz yah - it'll be a while to say the least.

New shoes!

2007-05-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

I have new shoes! They're not my Chacos - who knows when they'll arrive. These are Merrell waterpros - got them on super sale since they're a weird color. That's ok! They'll blend in with the red African soil or something...

They're meant for water but also for hiking and they're super good for hot weather beacuse the orange parts are mostly mesh so your feet can feel the breeze.

And then I ran over my wallet

2007-04-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

Well Tiana came down this weekend and that was great, and the time came on Sunday night to drive her up to the Providence train station, so we left as it was getting dark and stopped to get some gas a few exits down in N. Stonington. I got out with my wallet and cell phone (bad plan), paid with my credit card, got confused about the nozzles, put my wallet and cell phone on the back of the Focus I was driving, put gas in the car, capped the gas tank, and drove off.

Oops.

Got to Providence, couldn't find my phone, asked Tiana to call it, but there was no ring. Couldn't find my wallet. Immediately remembered what must have happened. Dropped off Tiana, drove back to N. Stonington. Asked at the desk: no wallet or phone. Searched the pump: no wallet or phone. Searched the trash: no wallet or phone. Searched the road: no wallet or phone. Searched the on-ramp and 1/8 mi. of highway: no wallet or phone.

Drove up on the highway to the next exit. Nothing. Looped back around and did it again: ran over black thing. Looped around again and pulled over near black thing: Found wallet! in two pieces! Then I searched around and found my cell phone in two pieces and no battery to be seen. Luckily those two pieces were the back of the battery compartment and the rest of the phone. All in all, i'm damn lucky and will never do it again.

But my wallet feels so soft now after being run over a few times.

An Inconvenient Truth

2007-04-28T01:39:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Al Gore's documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

Relatively speaking, I've had a lot of education on global warming. I could explain most of what Gore presents in his film to a neighbor, friend or my cat. Could you?

The film was an outstandingly clear representation of the facts and scientific theories surrounding carbon emissions and their consequences. I thoroughly advise any of you who have not seen this film to see it, and I hope you do. I'm sure many of us can just do what we're told and don't need the understanding, but it's obvious only few of us are doing anything at all. So as far as I'm concerned, knowledge is power, and power and empowered people lead to action and change. So maybe more knowledge could help.

Not only that, there are still many people who still doubt that global warming, in any significant way, is happening. Of those that acknowledge that it's happening, many don't really believe that we're the cause of the all time CO2 highs and abnormal temperature fluctuations. They think that man could never have the scale of impact that it's being said we're having on the Earth. I mean cuz obviously, the atmosphere's really BIG.

THE CONCEPT THAT ANTHROPOGENIC ACTIVITY IS CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING IS NO LONGER A QUESTION IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

It's that simple. It was, and rightfully was, up for debate in the past, but today it is clear. Not only is it clear, but it is overwhelmingly clear. In fact, it's so clear that the theory of global warming has become one of those theories - like evolution, relativity, and a few others - that have so much supporting evidence that their only weakness is that they are labeled theories.

Scientists don't test facts, they test theories so no matter how correct a theory is, it will be called a theory, but it is essential that all you non-science folk separate this out from the colloquial use of the word theory.

So I am DONE listening to people tell my why they think it isn't happening, and I'm DONE listening to people explain to me that we just couldn't possibly be the root of all this. I'd be happy to help you better understand the situation, and I'd be happy to answer any questions that I can, but I cannot sit there and tolerate people I know refuse to face the way ALL the evidence is pointing. I'm all for open minded scientific thought, but quite frankly, that's just not relevant to the topic of whether this all is really the case. There may be subtleties and unexpected aspects of the issue, but that's not one of them.

I've included a graph showing this stark reality. Aside from that last point at 2100 (which actually is a very educated prediction), that graph is ALL fact. Take a look at how high that last CO2 point in 1994 is compared with the natural fluctuations (brown) for thousands of years. And that was THIRTEEN years ago.

General update and a buffalo

2007-04-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

Well the days are going by. I guess that's a good thing? I sent my résumé, aspiration statement and final Cornell transcript to the PC.

I ordered Shoes, hat, sleeping bag, sheet, folding knife, santoku knife, leatherman, 2 cheap watches, travel speakers, journal, planner, and some other things recently. I can't wait for the shopping to be over. I mean I know i probably "need" all these things considering I didn't even own a sleeping bag, but it just feels like i'm focusing on stuff stuff stuff which is exactly what I don't want to be the case. It should be almost over though. Only a couple more particular things and then beyond that it'll just be taking care of my spare glasses/sunglasses and some toiletries type things like soap, Purell, etc etc. And now I can put a lot of the stuff that I do own up for sale on eBay and the like, to help lessen the net amt. of stuff I have.

Tiana says she's going to take time off between Memorial Day and that next weekend - making it possible for me to see her from the 25th of May till the 4th when I go. Seems like not that long of a time but it'll be eons compared with how often i see her now. I miss the good old days where summer was like one constant sleep-over. Still have sleep-overs? hell ya we still have sleep-overs. : )

I went over to the Banisters' house tonight for dinner, which was quite nice. Alan Banister was my science teacher at Pine Point School 8th and 9th grade, and remains a great friend and someone I look up to quite a bit. His wife, Patience, was my field hockey / lacrosse coach way back in the day, and she is one of the most kind, gentle people I know. I'd include a picture, but to be honnest, I don't think i have a picture of either of them. Maybe i'll get you guys to let me take one before I go - to go in my enormous photo album : )

So naturally it's time for more gratuitous wildlife pictures from Kenya. Did I mention I love my camera? This is a close up on a Cape Buffalo (Syncerus caffer). One of the "big five" and very impressive. Very impressive in twos, and rather overwhelming in a large herd that makes a solid wall on the horizon.