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.

Birds I've Identified So Far

Birds I've positively identified so far:


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

I survived a week and a half

Dear everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love you all, hope everyone's doing great.