Joyeux Noel et Bonne Annee!

(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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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

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

*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!!

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.