Last post before going to post plus yummy pictures

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).

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.

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!

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!!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!