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

http://cathysaltwickmemory.blogspot.com/

It’s really difficult to take pictures here.

Everyday I wish I had my camera with me, but that of course is unfeasible. Even if I had it, the more difficult part is that taking your camera out here is not like taking out a camera in America. You can imagine.


But today before my 6th grade class’s last math test, I took out my camera and took a few pictures. I greeted them in English and they replied, though they didn’t know I was filming. They would have been absolute monkeys if they had known. They know very little English and are all embarrassed to speak it at all, so I started punishing them if they didn’t greet me in English or ask permission to leave the room in English. Now they don’t mind it so much.

My dear neighbor Oued was very sick. Danny brought him some leaves. He told him to boil them and drink the resulting liquid. Leaves do everything here it seems. You eat some because they taste good. You put others around the house to keep away snakes or sorcerers. Others you drink to heal your body – but these rarely taste good at all.
“Even snakes do this!” Danny asserted to me.
“That’s impossible Danny,” I told him.
“Uh uh, I saw it! In Cote d’Ivoire! With my own eyes!” he assured me.
“Ok what happened. I’m listening.”
“Two snakes, big ones, gros gros,” he held up his hands wide apart. “They were fighting to decide who was the stronger one. They fought and fought and one snake won. The other was very weak and just laid there. The winner left and brought back leaves for the other one to eat.”
“Snakes have no hands, Danny. What did he get the leaves with?”
“A noore. His mouth.”
“Oh.”
“And the weak snake got better.”
“I see. Then what happened?” I asked.
“We killed both snakes, of course,” he said plainly.
“Oh.”

April has come and passed and I eat Mangos like they’re going out of season. Actually they’re only just coming into season. The women sit at their market stands with tables full of piles of mangos in threes like tiny yellow pyramids. They’re not the mangos I would be eating if I were in the Ivory Coast – down there in the south the mangos are huge and very sweet with a very smooth texture. When ripe, their skin shows colors of green, yellow orange and even red. Everything’s a bit rougher about life up here, even the mangoes it seems. Ours are small, barely even the size of your fist and completely yellow. Inside you’ll find a seed that’s enlaced in long tough fibers, tying it to the skin. Les mangues fibreuses. Because the pulp is between all of these fibers, it must be torn away from the seed and skin with your teeth and to eat it successfully without washing your face and hands with it is a real skill. I only successfully completed it yesterday for the first time. They’re 10 for 20 cents now, making them cheaper by volume than rice, and so you can sit around with friends and a bucket full of mangoes and just eat and eat (the diarrhea that ensues is free). Here’s how it goes:
1. Find where the stem was attached to the mango.
2. Bite off a piece around the stem connection and spit it out; it’s bitter
3. Suck on the hole you made a little.
4. Wrap your hand around the base of the mango and squeeze as you turn it around and around to loosen the fibers from the skin. Make sure to continue sucking or else juice will spew out like a volcano.
5. Once you can hear and feel the seed detach, start pulling it out with your mouth and start sucking the pulp off it.
6. Put seed in your mouth and suck it clean. Spit out seed.
7. Start taking bites of the skin. You can’t eat it but there’s still pulp on the inside. Take bites, suck them clean and then spit out the skin. Keep going till it’s gone.

My previous method of peeling the skin off first with my teeth, then trying to bite off pieces of the fibrous pulp and then scraping the skin with my teeth only resulted in two things: 1) I looked like the weirdo during group mango-eating sessions and 2) I got it ALL over my face and hands which has made me start to feel a bit allergic to mangos. My eyes and mouth itch a little now. So I sat Moussa down and made him teach me. It took three mangos but I’m ok now.

This is my house and me sitting in front of it. My two closest PC neighbors came to visit this past weekend and so I could tell someone to take a picture of me! We had a great time. Killed a couple chickens and had some cold coke. Doesn't get much better than that.

My school is out of money for the year. More money has been asked for and it may in fact come but we don’t know when and we don’t know how much. Until then teachers are only paid for the hours they owe the state. Any hours they work over this minimum (which can often be a lot) they won’t be paid for. There’s no money for recreation activities. There’s no money for a soccer ball (anyone want to donate a soccer ball?). There’s no money to go out and have a drink to celebrate the end of the year. Oh and of course the school won’t be buying anymore chalk or paper.

The results from the second trimester at my school were absolutely depressing. Remember: to be considered as passing, a student’s grades must average out to a 10/20, 10 being la moyenne. Now earning 50% of the points here and 50% in the States is not the same thing. In my school in America at least, most kids got Bs (80-89% of points), others got less and some got more. Here, I would say that a kid doing B-level work like that would get about 11 or 12 out of 20. If they make 10/20 as an average at the end of the year they can continue on to the next grade. If they don’t pass once, they repeat the year, and if they don’t pass twice then they can no longer continue at the school. At the end of the second trimester, we had only 30% of our 6th grade students with the moyenne. In the 9th grade class, there were only 5 students (out of about 60) who had the moyenne. The class average for this class was about 7/20. Think about that. That means that for their tests, on average, a student will only earn about 1/3 of the points. At the end of this year these students will take their national BEPC examination to see if they have “passed” the first cycle of secondary school and can continue into high school. How do you think the class is going to do if their grades are this poor?

There are two reasons that results like this are depressing. First, if on average only a third of students will be able to continue in school, the school will not be able to function for long because unlike a free public school in America, most of a school’s money here comes from the students’ annual fees. Without enough students, there’s not enough money to pay teachers, buy supplies, and in short a school cannot run.
The other side has to do with where these kids go if they don’t go to school. They go to the fields or they go to town and look for work. And then they face hard times because there’s just barely any good ways to make money here, let alone good money, and while they’re no longer burdening their families with having to pay school fees, they’re certainly not able to really help their families either. There are still so many families who, even if they had the money, don’t see the importance of education. I don’t mean that they should see the value as an American does. I mean that they don’t seem to really believe that if their children go through school that the amount of money that they’ll be able to make (and therefore use to support the family) will be so much greater than if they had never been to school. If the child is actually motivated then this difference will eventually completely outweigh all the trouble – time and money – that school was.

This mindset is a real source of frustration for me. Investing in the future is just not something done here by most. Investing in the coming harvest: yes, investing in not angering the ancestors: yes, investing in preventative health care: no, investing in your children’s futures: not really. People are focused on what will go in their bellies tonight and perhaps on tomorrow but you can’t count on much beyond that. Who can blame them? They don’t have a choice. But with school they kind of do have a choice. Yes there will still be many families who simply cannot afford school fees; this I understand. But for other families, maybe if the father went and drank beer less often or bought a less fancy moto or cut down on other frivolous expenses then more families would come up with the means to send more children to school. Finding the money has to start with prioritizing education. Certainly there are starting to be a lot of families who are learning by experience what an asset an educated child can be.

(These next 2 are pictures from Traditional-Clothing-Day at the Lycee I live next to. These girls/boys won - which means this is the most accurate traditional dress that was seen that day).

Take my neighbor’s family for example. He was the oldest of 7 children in a poor farming family. He started out, like many children here, studying the Koran at a very young age. People recognized that he was bright and pressure was put on his father to send him to 1st grade. He was the only one to be sent to school. He succeeded every year until finally at the level of 5th grade, his father tried to sabotage his education by asking his teacher to fail him so as he couldn’t continue in school. When he was old enough to understand the importance of education himself, he started pressuring his parents to send the others to school, but his father would hear none of it. While his mother had some money to work with she would just throw up her arms when asked and say that she was not the head of the family and so she could do nothing.

Since no one can change this African mentality overnight, what’s the solution for now and this school year? Are the teachers grading to harshly? Are the students not working? Do they not want to work or are they prevented from working because of circumstances at home? Should we lower our standards to let maybe 50% of kids through? Or should we stick to our standards even though we know we’ll be sending so many kids into the streets. Is this a problem of Bagre or of village life? Or is this drop in performance something seen all over the country?

(The tall boy is one of the 20 10th graders in my town. His name is Tongsouri. In Bissa this means Chicken. His mom killed a chicken when she was pregnant with him and in order to not upset any one living or not living, she had to name him chicken).

When we had our end of trimester meeting it was just discouraging. Each class’s results were reported in front of the whole staff, and the student representatives of each class were brought in to hear and respond to their class’s performance. Since performance across the board was so bad, it just turned into a meeting of pointing fingers. Each class was accused through their representatives and then the representatives themselves were accused of not handling their classes’ problems. They just sat there looking at the ground, unable to speak even if they had had something to say. Then once all the results were reported, our director started pointing the finger at us, the teachers. He implied that our grading was too harsh and our lessons were not effective. Though he never said it directly it was clear that he was saying that if we were really doing our jobs this would never have come about. Easy to say from a director’s point of view but he’s also a teacher so presumably he sees first hand the students’ behavior. I felt like the subtext he was sending us was to do whatever it took to get 50% of the kids through, even if it meant bending the numbers. It’s hard to say for sure though – Burkinabe subtext in French isn’t something I’m that good at yet. The meeting, which would usually end with a trip to a local bar to have a soda to symbolize our closing of the trimester, was instead ended with the news that there was not enough money to go and have this drink. I watched as all eyes went to me to see if I would offer to pick up the tab, and when I didn’t, eyes went back down to the table. We packed up our things and I biked home just as darkness was falling.

It seems that it doesn’t matter how many times I explain it, people still don’t actually believe that I have the same salary as a teacher here. So when teachers complain about the rising cost of living and having to buy less of this or forgo that, I have the same issues, except people just laugh when I say it. It’s true I don’t have a family to support here. That does make a difference. But when there is enough money, or if there are guests coming, or if you have a reason to celebrate, it's always wonderful to buy a chicken. I can't kill it, but I have learned how to do everything else. Moussa's plucking this particularly delicious chicken for me... using my bath bucket... with boiling water inside.

I had the rare opportunity of walking past a thermometer today and found that it was 107 degrees in the shade. I’m not complaining… ok maybe I’m complaining. I think they should start giving the forecast using the temperature of hell as a reference point. You know like: “Today’s forecast calls for clear skies with temperatures 5 degrees hotter than hell.” or “Extremely hazy with temperatures as hot as hell.” Or how about: “Expect to see rain today when pigs fly.” or “Strong hot hairdryer wind today at 20 mph.” That wind is no joke though, I’ll tell you. When it blows it blows constantly and hot. The only thing I can compare it to is like being inside an enormous sauna that you can’t get out of that’s full of fans on high. Moussa was sleeping outside the other day with his head down on a desk, hand dangling over the edge, and he said he was awoken by the feeling that his hand was burning. The wind had kicked up and was actually unbearable to be out in. It’s the hot season. What can you say. My best guess is that it’s about 100 in the house most days. No you can’t sleep there unless you want to wake up feeling like a dehydrated fruit covered in sweat/salt slime. I was resisting making the move to sleeping outside again, I’m not sure why, until I woke up one morning and realized I could see the outline of my body on my sheets in salt. Ka soma ye. Not good.

Hot season means that bush taxi rides become more tedious than ever before. I was recently in Ouaga for a few days for VAC meetings, and on the way home I took the long way home to see Moussa for the weekend. I was running really late, and I was afraid I would miss the “3 pm” bush taxi. It’s funny how the very second that life gets hectic here all my American, stressed-out, must-be-on-time instincts come right back even though by now it’s clear that a “3 pm” bush taxi has little hope of actually leaving before 5 pm. I ran to the office and took the forms I needed, biked back to the house, packed my bag, drank a liter of water, signed out, took my ID, and started walking to a main road to catch a cab. I had brought my bike into Ouaga to get it repaired but had forgotten my helmet and in case no one’s explained this yet, if you’re in the Peace Corps, you have to wear a helmet when you ride your bike. Of course there must be consequences for everything, and for the offence of being caught without a helmet on a bike, the repercussion is having your bike taken away for a month. With no helmet and the office only a few blocks away, I was obliged to walk my bike with my bags the half kilometer to the main road. The normal calls of “nassara” or “ma cherie” or “jolie fille” from men along the road were twice as frequent because now they wanted to know if my bike was broken and if they could get me to come over and talk to them about that. I explained that no, my bike’s fine, I’m not tired, and yelle ka be (no problems!). By now it was almost 4 and after the half hour cab ride through traffic across the city I arrived to find a loaded bush taxi almost ready to leave. Leaving the house, I’d had a nalgene half filled with rock hard ice. By the time I’d arrived at the gare, it had melted down to the size of a golf ball.

Though bush taxi’s always leave late, it’s risky to wander too far from your vehicle because it seems that once the driver gives the word, a van and a half worth of people seem to materialize out of nowhere and pile in to the car in under 3 minutes. The driver acts as if he’s upset at the passengers, blaming them for the fact the car is late, though it’s clearly the other way around. He’ll honk the horn, rev the engine, and be impatient to peel out of the gare, so if you don’t watch out, your car might take off without you. The Ouaga/Beguedo bush taxi set a new record this day and left the gare shortly after 4:30, only 10 minutes after I’d arrived. When it’s over a hundred degrees in the shade, there’s nothing worse than to be crammed into an unmoving car, pressed up against each other like the canned sardines I feed to Turtle. The van pulled out of its parking spot and came to stop for gas at the station at the exit to the gare. For reasons I cannot explain, it took at least 20 minutes before we moved from the pump. In situations like this, the amount of sweat coming off my body becomes ridiculous. Every bit of my skin becomes wet. I can feel streams of sweat running down my head and down my neck, accumulating above my collarbone before running down my back and chest like a liquid necklace. If you’ve had your elbows on your knees, your pants will be wet at the points of contact; if your knees are bent, you’ll have streams of water running down your legs to your ankles, mixing with the dirt there, and then leaving strange lines across your feet. After you’ve been sweating like this a while, your skin starts to become itchy with the amount of salt and if you rub your eyes they’ll burn and burn.

The car pulled out on to one of the main roads of Ouaga where the heat is more than oppressive. We quickly pulled off the road to take a dirt road, heading southeast out of the city. We only made it about 2 kilometers before we pulled over for some of the guys running the car to check the engine for something. Didn’t look good. We kept going but had to pull over again just a few more meters down the road and were told to get out. Engine trouble. While I could not understand the Bissa explanation, I could see that a large quantity of oil was in the process of leaving our engine and pooling on the red dirt below. Several people tried to get under and into the engine but soon the car left, headed back to town, leaving all of the passengers sitting on the side of the road. I started reading a book and eventually leaned my head back against a wall and took a nap, clutching my purse across my belly with both arms. Almost an hour later the vehicle returned, apparently repaired, and we continued. I was seated to the right of a woman about my age who didn’t speak French or Moore but seemed to really want to talk to me, in front of an old man with a white beard and dressed up in a bu-bu of different greens, and in back of a young functionniare who was so tall that if he leaned back his head would almost hit mine. Thankfully, there was a window to my right. We were 24 in this 15 passenger van.

About an hour out of Ouaga, the car slowed down and made a U-turn to head back from where we’d come. Heads turned and people started jabbering to each other trying to figure out what had happened. Turns out we’d blown past a police check point and were headed back to try to beg our pardon. We were carrying almost the van’s volume in cargo up top, including a new moto one of the passengers had purchased in Ouaga. New motos are a big deal here and are often stolen or illegally imported so their paperwork must be presented in full at every check point or the authorities get very upset. They were already upset because we hadn’t stopped, and everyone unloaded and waited for the driver and the moto-owner to negotiate with the police. People spread out to pee and find shade. Different passengers tried in their own ways to argue and beg pardon for our action from a distance, but there was no hope. Twenty minutes later the police confiscated the moto and the guy who owned it looked as if someone had released a valve and deflated him.

We continued on again and soon reached the half-way point, where the road turns to dirt for good. At this point in the voyage, it was starting to get dark and we stopped at a village that bombards passing cars with huge bowls of fruit for sale; this season: mangos and oranges. It was time for people to pray so, yet again, we unloaded from the vehicle and people dispersed into the darkness to pray. I inhaled a mango and after 10 minutes got back in the car. It was in vain though because just as the vehicle started to roll on, we heard that the old man in back of me had forgotten his cell phone where he’d been praying. Everyone unloaded again and we waited for him to find it. Success. Back in the car. The road from this point on is literally like driving on a dirt rumble strip. The road has been cut into a constant succession of divits, covering most of the road and no matter how the driver drives, you feel such loud, disturbing vibration throughout your body that you’re sure your joints are going to come undone. I had my computer in my backpack crammed between my legs on the floor and I dug my toes underneath it to cushion it from the shaking. Ten minutes outside of Beguedo, we stop for everyone to pay the driver as the wind started to kick up like a rain was coming. I have to stop myself from hoping too much for rain; it’s not time yet. All the wind did was to cool us down some and kick up enough dust that we really wanted to close the windows. We pulled into Beguedo and everyone unloaded. I was extremely unbalanced trying to keep my shoes on and handle my two heavy bags and as I stepped backwards out of the van, I almost fell down. Moussa was right there waiting for me, worried sick because of how late we were, and I onto him instead of to the ground. Friends here are great. If you’re lucky enough to find a real one, you can be sure he’d do anything for you and that when you least expect it, he’ll be right there for you.

Early Monday morning, just as it was getting light enough to see, I awoke to the cries of a very distressed baby goat. Then I heard the proviseur’s wife yelling “Churtle! Churtle! Arrete!” (“Turtle, Turtle, stop” (they never quite got that T sound down)). My dog was in slow-motion but intense pursuit of a poor newborn goat who was wondering down the line of our houses. The tiny kid’s bleating was so loud that Turtle couldn’t bring herself to actually touch the goat, so she just followed intently with her nose to the ground, about one goat length in back of the newborn.

I shot out of my tent and went after the dog. She seemed almost relieved that I was removing her from her self-created stressful situation. I tied her up and the Proviseur’s wife in her house to my left, Oued in his house to my right, and myself in the middle watched the tiny goat’s path. She had obviously lost her mother, but where was she going? She wobbled down the line and finally turned into Oued’s courtyard. She seemed quite sure that Oued’s house was where she was headed. Oued stood out on his porch in a towel, back leaning against the pillar, brushing his teeth, and eying the kid skeptically. The goat marched right up his walkway and joined him on the porch, right next to his feet. He was like a giraffe next to her, tall and lean. Head craning to look up at him while she cried, she barely surpassed his ankles in height. She was crying her little head off. Ignored by Oued, she turned around sharply and went straight away over the threshold of his door and into his house. Her unreasonably loud voice combined with the big hollow of Oued’s living room created quite the effective amplifier for her cries. She was on loudspeaker now for the neighborhood, and Oued finally responded by making her a few spoonfuls of milk to drink. It was love at first sight, and after the goat finished her homecoming meal, she settled down in the corner of his house to rest. The poor little thing couldn’t be more than 2 days old, She stands only about 8 inches tall with a snout about the width of my thumb and ears that stick out so far they triple the width of her head. We are going to call her Hillary, after Hilary Clinton.

We had some heavy rain the next couple nights and Hilary got lost twice. I recovered her but the last time she was so weak from hunger that she couldn’t stand or drink. I took her home and fed her milk every hour through the night but by the end of the weekend she died. Things don’t seem to have a storybook ending here very often. At least we tried.

And most recently I've started some work with the Taiwanese cooperative group that is here in Bagre. Seems I'm actually the only person here who is both fluent in English and has proficient enough French to do translation. Now that they've figured this out, I'm being put to use. There are a handful of Burkinabe students at the fish farm that are also going to become my english students. They're all really kind. Since I'm in the Peace Corps and can't take money, I get compensated by other things: mangos, fish (we grow tilapia), Bagre rice, internet, etc. Here's the director of the fish farm holding up one of the Tilapia he just caught for me in my kitchen. DELICIOUS.

Anyway I'm going to sign off for now. I just write when I can in my house and then when I get to the internet I post. Makes for less frequent but bigger posts. Whatever works. I hope everyone's doing fine wherever you are and whatever you're doing. Merci encore for your support; it doesn't go unappreciated. Ciao.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joyeux Noel et Bonne Annee!

(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!!