Last post before going to post plus yummy pictures

Hi everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And hello to Clay's mom!

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

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

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

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

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