Happy 6 months!

I would just like to mention that I have received some AMAZING care packages from you all at home. Parents – as usual you are amazing, but I need throw a special thank you to Raebecca, Katherine’s MOM, Don, Talitha and Agnes and also to Julia’s mom for the Halloween card that played the theme from the Adam’s Family. Talitha had this beautiful collar made for Turtle (see photo). I will be eating reading and living well for a while thanks to you all. I love you all.

THANKSGIVING:
Even though this is wicked late, I should fill you all in a little on our Thanksgiving. Jill and Marcus, a married couple living in a northern village called Titao, decided to host a Thanksgiving gathering. Ouahigouya, where we trained, is pretty darn North but Titao’s about an hour bus ride North and East of that. Burkina Faso is roughly the size of Colorado – just keep that in mind. So 7 am I start out in the Southeast of the country and meet up with Marty a couple hours later in Tenkodogo. We take the 9:30 am STMB bus out of Tenkodogo to Ouaga and meet up with lots of other Volunteers there. We take off out of there and get a 1:30 pm STAF bus out of Ouagadougou up to Ouahigouya. We meet up with Clay others at the gare, but I mention Clay because he’s transporting a live TURKEY, which he has been transporting from the very south south west of the country in a cardboard box. I ask if they’ve given him water or food and the answer is no, so I school up some corn laying on the ground give it to him and then hold out a plastic bag with water for him to drink. This did not help the getting-too-much-attention factor. Turkey’s are actually pretty expensive here, because they are rare, especially in the North, fetching about 40,000 CFA (80 bucks) in some places, so we had to constantly be babysitting this thing. Traveling in groups always ends up being more difficult than traveling alone, even though it’s immensely more enjoyable. That many more bikes to get put on the bus, that many more bags not to lose, that many more people to have to fit on the bus. Gotta argue about whether the bikes will fit, gotta watch your bag be put on the bus and stay there, and gotta push and shove your self and your friends on the bus or you’re not gonna go anywhere (even though at that point your bag and bike might). Our dear turkey had to go too, shoved under in the baggage compartments with the rest of the stuff. We get to Ouahigouya around 4 pm, our first time for many of us in the city since our training ended. Some of us stay with the bags and some of us go looking for a way to keep going North to Titao since we really needed to get there before nightfall.

We find a bus up to Titao and all pile on. We’re running late though so we’re the last ones to board and we squish into the last seats left, in the back left corner of the bus. It was immediately apparent why these seats were empty: one of the huge windows of the bus was just plain missing in front of our seats which means that once we started barreling down the dirt (or should I say dust) roads, clouds of dust would float right in and onto us. Wish we had a picture of us sitting there, the only nassaras to be seen, all crammed into the back of the bus. This was my first trip down a dirt road in a greyhound sized bus and oh dear lord. Becca and Ray were in the very back where the seats were so broken that there wasn’t even any cloth covering the metal beneath where the seats were. The road was bad. We crawled down the road and the bumps were so big that slamming back down on our seats each time was actually pretty painful. I was praying that my nose which had been bleeding about 4 times a day would not pick this moment to let loose. We get there. It’s dark. We find all our stuff and start walking to the house.

We spent two wonderfully relaxing days at their house, full of eating and eating and more eating, sleeping, drinking, and of course lots of talking. Mac was charged with having to kill the turkey. Most knives are dull here. If you are out there and are joining the Peace Corps, I would recommend bringing a good knife or at least a sharpening stone. Mac basically had to saw through the turkey’s neck with something only marginally sharper than a butter knife. We also got a pig to roast and try as we did to get a really sharp knife to use to cut it’s throat, it did not go well and let’s just say I’ll never forget that pig’s screaming.

In addition to the meat, we were able to make mashed potatoes and gravy, a couple good salads, falafel and an apply pie-ish dessert. DELICIOUS. Here are lots of pics from Turkey Day. Up top is me and Caleb and Mac, two of my best friends here. Below that is our bonfire. Below that is half of us sitting at our lovely Thanksgiving Day table. And right here is Becca and Clay (big beard) and Mac again. We had a great bonfire and popped our REI Bug Huts out in the courtyard like pod people (we all own the same tent) - and down 2 pictures is me in my tent.

We’ve come to the end of our first trimester here at the CEG. I don’t really understand why it is that we are on a trimester system where as even across town the school I live next to is on a semester system. And then on top of that, our director tells us that we have to give three tests a trimester, where as the teachers at the school I live next to are only obligated to give two per semester. It really wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t really matter how much material we get through, but we are really pushed to get through more material that even the Burkinabe teachers manage to do. A test takes two hours and then another hour for correction, so all told, on test eats one week’s work of SVT (Biology) and so three tests a semester eat three weeks.

I have friends (in village)! I’m really falling into a groove with my neighbors, so much so that I don’t ever really find myself alone with nothing to do in the evenings anymore. That sure beats my first impression of what life here in the evenings was going to be like: me and BBC and the puppy and enough mosquitoes to make you almost need to turn up the volume on the radio.

A brief introduction to my neighbors: Well there’s the Proviseur and his family (wife, three kids, niece, a bonne, another guy who’s boarding with them, two goats, a dog and a cat), Actually the cat just died. Belly swelled up and it started vomiting blood and then keeled over. Probably a snake. In any case, They are wonderful people. They are definitely my source of stability in this little neighborhood. I just watch them if I’m ever confused about what to do and if I ever need an explanation or advice on how to act or what to say, I can usually find it next door. The Proviseur’s wife is really the best. Definitely becoming my village mother.

My neighbors have stated opening up to me about the reality of teachers’ behavior with respect to students. In particular, to the reality of the male teacher’s behavior with female students. To be fair, I should really say it the other way around: female students’ behavior with respect to male teachers. Now I wouldn’t know this unless I lived close enough to my neighbors to throw rocks through their windows (not so serious since we don’t have glass on the windows), or if my other neighbors weren’t such gossips, but it is how it is. Teachers sleep with students. Period. The vast majority of teachers are male and so the vast majority of these relationships are between male teachers and female students. Some teachers refuse to be with their own students because think of how badly that kind of thing could blow up in your face the day the girl tries to disrespect your authority in the classroom and you have to put her in her place except now you’re the vulnerable one.

My other three neighbors are all men roughly my age living alone. There’s Ouedraogo (math and science teacher), Traore (English teacher), and Banse (History/Geography teacher). Ouedraogo’s really a teacher in training, but he can still have the job. Traore just graduated from University in June and has the best English I have heard here in Burkina Faso so far. Banse has an interesting story. He was diplomat type figure working for the ministry of foreign affairs and one day he went on strike for an hour and because of circumstances and such, this was not OK for him to do. He and many others of his colleagues who had done the same as he were separated from their jobs temporarily and sent out into villages to teach. He was sent out to Bagre. Banse and Traore are both Burkinabes who grew up in the Cote d’Ivoire.

Finishing out the semester and calculating grades is certainly done differently here than in the States. The kids have roughly the same subjects as you would find in the States, and similar to grades at University, each class gets a grade which is weighed based upon how many hours a week the class is held. So at the end of the semester or trimester, your grade for each class is multiplied by the coefficient representing the weight of the class and then the results from each class are added up together and then divided by the total number of hours of class to find the kid’s trimester grade. All grades are expressed out of 20, Unlike in America, kids, even in the youngest classes, have to make a certain grade to pass on to the next level. This means that those little 6 yr olds are graded on how well they make their numbers and letters and drawings. At the secondary level, the kids need to make a 10 to go onto the next level. We call this the moyen. It’s really pretty tough to make the moyen, and I’d say that based on the grades I saw, at the 6th grade level, about half the kids didn’t make that moyen this first trimester. This changes based on the school you’re at and the grade you’re talking about, but the point is, school is a survival of the fittest and grades above 15 are rare wherever you look.

(This is Mac pointing to his ridiculously North site on the map. Notice how few roads there are up there).

Didn’t make the moyen? Well you have to retake that year of school. You’re allowed to do that once per block of school (as in: once during primary school, once during first cycle secondary school, and once during second cycle secondary school). If you don’t make it for the second time, then you’re not allowed to continue at that school. You’re welcome to try to get into another school if there’s room, but for many kids this is impossible. Most villages have one secondary school so that means that if you’re going to switch schools then it might mean biking 20 km to get to another one every morning or moving away from your family to another relative somewhere else in the country to attend school there. Or most likely, your family has a bunch of kids and maybe your parents will decide that you’ll be better used in the fields. Most kids are not in secondary school, so the kids that are got a lucky break to begin with. The ones that can stay in are even luckier.

I was talking about calculating grades. Well, it’s all done by hand. Hundred’s of student’s grades handled with pen and paper. Once you have their grades for your class calculated, you get the class together and read off the grades in front of everyone. They’ve done their own calculations so this is their opportunity to tell you if you’ve made a mistake. Grades are also incredibly public here. Then you take the grades for the kids in your class and you enter them into the bulletins, which are these huge books of grade reports for each kid and carbon paper. You write in each kid’s grade, carefully placing a piece of cardboard below each set of papers before you write, and then write your remark about the grade and sign. Over and over and over.

To boot, I am the professor principale for the 5eme class, which means that I am responsible for taking all those individual class grades and calculating each kid’s trimester average. After that is completed, you rank the students. These are all super fun activities to do by hand. How many kids? 93 for each 6eme class (186) and 68 for 5eme. That should show you how many get weeded out from 6th grade to 7th grade.

(Everyone loves absolutely ridiculous pictures of themselves! This is me and Christina (we both went to Cornell) and apparently we thought what we were hearing was outlandishly strange. We like to call this picture "CORNELL SAYS NO!")

Next trimester, life’s going change a little bit for me. The other SVT teacher at my school passed this examination he took to get into a training program he wanted and so he’s left the school. Now I have a choice: I either start teaching all his classes in addition to mine, or let the kids go without a teacher. Doesn’t really matter for 4eme, and since I already teach 6eme A I could just take the 6eme B class too, but I really want 3eme to be covered since they’re the ones that have to face the BEPC exam at the end of the year to be able to move onto high school.

My birthday fell on the same day as our 6th month anniversary of being in country! Birthday’s here aren’t at all what they are in the US – in village a lot of people don’t even know theirs. Their birth is described in terms of the seasons and the rains and without need to ever put a date on an identification card, they’ll never know the date really. I mean to start with, there’s a lot of people who don’t use the days of the week. I remember asking my first Moore teacher for the days of the week in Moore and she had to really struggle to remember them and even then she couldn’t think of Thursday. Most villages are on a every-three-day-market schedule and so that is their week equivalent. At any rate, I told a few people it was my birthday and in return got some very touching gifts. Some of my 6eme kids came and presented me with a bag full of about three pounds of fresh peanuts. Banse tried his best to sing the Happy Birthday song to me and we had an extra large meal of attieke and fish between my neighbors and me.

(Here are our 5 remaining volunteers from my training group in GEE - Girls Education and Empowerment. They started as 12).

Speaking of food: I really like eating with my hands now. It’s usually how it’s done in a group – you all sit around a bit bowl and eat with your hands – but in the beginning it was really embarrassing. I was constantly afraid of dumping the food on myself or smearing too much of it on my face while trying to get it in my mouth and of course sometimes I really would. I had to learn when it was appropriate to lick my fingers or when to put them in my mouth, which foods can be squished into balls and how to not get that drippy sauce all over my pants. Now there’s really no doubt: I like eating rice and attieke better with my hands. Traore likes hold out his hand and say that god gave us our fingers for a fork, the palm of our hand for a spoon and your teeth for a knife.

I’ve gotten really good at eating fish now. I still won’t eat the heads but I’ll eat everything else but for the bones, including the fins if the fish was fried. The other day my language tutor came over and afterwards he took me to meet one of his friends. He wanted me to meet the girl he said had “eyes like mine”. He explained that there was a family with children who had a grandmother who was Portugese and so they have very claire skin compared to other Burkinabe and this one girl has green brown eyes. We walked in and took a seat. I noticed the empty bowls on the table and hoped that at ten o’clock this Sunday morning I wouldn’t have to face anything too challenging at the table. The picked-clean jawbone in the bowl across the table didn’t give me much hope. Different children came out, many toting babies on their hips, who would each start crying and clinging to their older sibling when they saw me. They tried experimenting with how close each baby would have to be to me before it started freaking out. Then the mother brought out bowls of soup and I learned that it was indeed sheep head soup. My language tutor was very good and sensitively explained that eating heads was against my totem and that he would take what bits of meat were in my bowl. It was a simple tomato and sheep head based soup with little fried millet based dough disks in it (the word for that is galettes). I fished out the bits of hair and skin and bone and meat that had found their way into my bowl and deposited them in Anatole’s bowl.

About a month ago I got a bad head cold. Four of my pigeons had recently kicked the bucket from a respiratory disease and so I was terrified there for a moment that I had bird flu, but the symptoms moved nicely along and all I was left with was a sore throat and no voice. Maybe it has something to do with the sand and the wind here but all I can say is that BY FAR that was the worst and longest sore throat of my life. I’ve also never really lost my voice like that before. Just gone down to a whisper. My kids must have had some level of compassion for me since they were inordinately quiet those days when I came to school. Took over a week for it to come back.

In each class there are one or two kids designated as the chefs de classe. They are sort of the leaders of the class who are responsible for fetching the ruler and other tools before math class and also helping me to maintain order and silence in the classroom and other tasks like that. Well sometimes your chefs can be your greatest asset, and sometimes they can actually work against you. In my 6eme biology class I didn’t know for three months that this kid was one of my chefs since he was such a big talker himself. I mentioned casually to the surveyant (disciplinarian) one day that 6eme was way too chatty that day, and he promptly went into the classroom and gave the class a lecture and then instead of punishing the talkers, he called out the two chefs and ordered them to fetch enough buckets of water from the pump to give three buckets of water to each of the 18 trees on the other side of the school yard. Ever hauled around buckets of water in the hot sun? I’d have to say that the chefs were more effective after that day.

The weather’s beautiful now. I’ve stopped sleeping outside because I actually get cold at night and since I shelled out for a nice bed frame, there’s really no reason not to sleep in my house. I still don’t have a mattress other than the thin foam pad that goes with my cot, but since I haven’t slept on a real mattress for months now, it’s easy to keep putting off getting one. Turtle sleeps with me on the bed and she is ADORABLE. Burkinabe dog’s don’t usually ever get to know the concept of sleeping on a bed so everyone makes fun of me for letting her go there but whatever, it makes me happy. When I got back from Thanksgiving Traore told me that Turtle had gone in his house and snuck under his mosquito net and gotten on his bed. He laughed about it but it was pretty embarrassing.

(Here's Turtle chasing a Hammerkop - a huge ducklike bird).

Speaking of Turtle, she’s sick. The day before I left village I found her under a tree crying behind my house. I went to her and called her but she wouldn’t come. She was panting because she was in the sun and couldn’t move herself out of it. So I went to her and scooped her up and carried her to the porch. I put her on her feet but she wouldn’t put any weight on her back legs. She wouldn’t even try. I’d stand her up and she’d just flop down like her back legs were made of Jello. I didn’t know what to do so I pushed her water dish over and she drank almost a litre. Then I tried to get her to come with fish heads and she really wanted to move but she just couldn’t. I brought her inside and we took a nap and then I took her over to the neighbor’s house to explain what happened. Now my neighbors are functionaries, so their thinking is a little more progressive than your average family living in village, but what followed was definitely a cross cultural moment. I carried her in and put her on the floor and showed them what happened to her. “Must have been a snake,” the mother said. “Looks like you need to get a new dog,” said the Proviseur, “This one’s no good anymore.” The kids tried their best to get Turtle to get up, calling her over and over “Churtle, Churtle! Kom!” It was so sad. I started crying, which is totally inappropriate to do in public, especially over a dog. So I just tried to hide it, and to their credit, they were very sensitive to how I felt. Daniel and Alimatta decided to put her on their moto and take her too the vet across town, but he’s just the vet who checks the health of the animals to be slaughtered and gives Rabies vaccinations so I wasn’t expecting much. She came back with a bloody mark on her leg from an injection and two pills of antibiotics. No change. Left her with the neighbor since I had to leave that next day and so far she’s still the same way. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Before she got sick, Turtle used to follow me everywhere, especially over to Traore’s house for lunch everyday where a handful of us go everyday to eat. We eat a lot of attieke, which is made from pulverized manioc and oil and vinegar and is usually mixed with cucumbers, onions, tomatoes and fish. Delicious. Does anyone know if you can find Manioc in the States? Attieke’s an Ivoirian dish. The other weekend we decided to go all out and buy some pork and make a good rice and peanut sauce. When it was ready, Traore gave me some food and was really surprised when I left the skin and fat alone. “But I gave you the best pieces!” he told me. “You eat that?” I asked, totally non-judgmentally I might add. I guess just as the heads are seen as the best part of the fish, the skin is seen as the tastiest part of the pig. Before that had much time to go on about my strange eating habits I put a small piece of skin in my mouth and started chewing. Definitely edible, but I just don’t see how that can compare to good pork meat. I told Traore that over Thanksgiving, we killed a pig and ate it, but we threw all the fat and skin into the big bonfire we had later that night. He was speechless.

Anyway that's enough for now. The vast majority of my training group is heading down to Ghana on Saturday to spend Christmas and New Years on the beach. Can't wait. 22 hour bus ride to get there. Ick. I wish you all happy holidays. My cell phone won't work after we get into Ghana but i'll be back in Burkina on the 2nd. Love you all!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello everyone!

I just got back from the north where about 20 of us had a wonderful thanksgiving. There are notable pictures and stories from this adventure, and since I am not with camera or a lot of time right now, I'll just say that it was great and I'll write about it later.

I'm seriously behind on other things I should have written about by now so I'll just keep writing till I run out of time here.

Be Thankful to Have Your Parents:
It was Tuesday morning, 7 am, and I was beginning my 6eme biology class. The kids were being little bandits so I was having to raise my voice and try to convince them that they wanted to be quiet for me. Then the Surveyant (who's the disciplinarian/administrative kind of person) knocks and asks for a minute of my time. "Pas de problem," I tell him and he comes in and commands full, standing attention of the class in under two seconds. I wish I could do that. At any rate, he explains that he's here to collect the names of any students who had lost both their mother and father. It's a class of 6th graders. Three hands go up: a tiny girl in the front and two boys in the back. He starts with the girl: "Your mother's dead?" he asks. "Yes, monsieur," she whispers. "Your father?", he asks. "No, he's alive," she says quietly to her desk. "Didn't you hear me?", he barked, "I want names of kids who have lost both their parents!" He proceeded to take the boys' names and then thanked me and left. I don't know why they were taking those names down - maybe some sort of tuition break for the kids' families. But at any rate i was floored. 2 kids out of 93 had lost both their parents by 6th grade. 1 in 50. Now I know that it's not as bad as it coud be or as bad as many places in Africa, but it was still a real reality check since life in Bagre's pretty nice. You have to look for the real suffering, even if it's there all the time, since all in all, life's ok down here. Sometimes you can just forget that a lot of people don't live very long, especially kids under 5, and that someone who looks healthy today, even if it's one of your 6th graders, could be gone next week. The life expectancy is slightly under 50 years and the median age is under 17.

So When Do You Run Out of Water?
Being up North for Thanksgiving really let me see the difference between the northern Sahel region and the southern Sudan region of Burkina, especially now that I've lived down there for three months. Au Sahel, the ground is dusty sand and the trees are more sparse and the land is more flat. In the day it's still hot but at night it gets really cool. Water starts to really be a concern up here during the second half of the dry season, and way up there in the north (you can see it on the map), the concentration of people just starts to drop off. We weren't THAT north, but some of us are placed in villages that are. Brian, for example, lives only a few km from Mali up in the north in a small village. We were chatting the other night about things and Mac, a felllow Sahel-dweller, says to Brian, "So when do you run out of water?" "Oh about February I guess," Brian said. And then he explained that his village runs dry about that time and that they have to get water from another village. I complain about having to haul water across the street - so i can't even imagine.

Interview with the Mayor
A few weeks ago I made the 8km bike ride between my house and my local language teacher's house over in old Bagre village, a visit that was probably well over due. I'd been in village for a while now and hadn't yet really presented myself to the village over there since my site visit in July. Anatole, my teacher, took me over to the Mayor's house. It's the first time Bagre village has had a mayor, since being like most villages here, rule is left completely to village cheifs. Well now they have both. The idea has something to do with trying to help the economy of the village. So we biked out to his house and found the Mayor sitting with a friend under a big tree listening to some sort of traditional african chanting on a tape deck that was easily as old as I am. The conversation started in Bissa, went to Moore and then to French. Soon it went to English with Anatole translating for me. Sometimes I drop into English when I have the chance because while I can certainly can get through any converstaion in French, sometimes I'd like to sound more like someone my age instead of a 6th grader. As you might imagine, my introduction to the Mayor was one of those times. He started with the basic questions about how my stay was going, how work was, how was my health and family and then we moved to the 10 point question section of the test and he started asking me about why I was here, how I was going to help Bagre, what I saw in store for Bagre's future and the suffering of its people, and how I was going to be a part of that future. You can see why I switched to English. I gathered all my smooth-talking skills and explained that the government of Burkina Faso and the education administration had invited volunteers here because of the dire need for teachers and I had come as a response to that as a part of an American organization called le Corps de la Paix. So what I was doing was to help educate kids. As for the future of Bagre, I told him I wasn't worried since it has become exceedingly clear to me that the dam here has really made Bagre an exception among villages its size. With the right organization and advice and time of course, Bagre'll be fine and it's very much on the cusp of really starting to develop. He was impressed with my answers, I was told the next day, and he gave me a watermellon. Score.

Ok that's all for now. Hope everyone had a GREAT Thanksgiving and ate a TON of good food.

Happy 5 months in country everyone!

HELLO TO RAEBECCA AND FAMILY! I'm sending you a letter but it's gonna take a little while to get there.

African Grey Hornbills are like Zazu from The Lion King but in grayscale. They remind me of Toucans but slimmer. They swoop around in flocks here in fields where there are interspersed trees, which is pretty much most of what you’ll find here. When they vocalize they sound exactly like a squeaky playground swing, and they sure are loud. I don’t know if it’s something about this particular swing but when I hear them I automatically think of the swings on the beach on Mason’s Island – so much so that when I hear the Hornbills I am almost surprised not to hear seagulls and waves.

This is my favorite hut in Bagre so far. I bike past it everyday to get to school and it's there all by itself in a huge field. Sometimes there's a bike outside. This is much the style of most of the huts here. The other style is simple mud walls. One day when I can speak Bissa or Moore I'll go over and see who lives there. If we could make postcards of our villages, this would be the picture i put on mine.

Nassara! Vous avez maigri! Faut bien manger! is what hear in various forms or another, I’m losing weight – and I should eat better. The pudgy American form here is seen as very healthy and attractive and so what I am becoming is not an improvement to them. Nutrition aside – I know that I am in fact healthier – just by virtue of the fact that I exercise daily – no exceptions, I’m starting to listen to my body more when it asks for nutrition. Like someone gave me a smoked fish today and normally I would have needed to pick out the muscle and leave the rest to have found it appetizing but now everything goes down except the bones.

The rains are gone for good now, and in their place has come extremely dry air, a bit cooler, and a good strong wind. The wind kicks up about midday and blows almost constantly. I no longer have beads of sweat all over me since it all evaporates so fast. The salt on my skin tells me I’m still sweating like a pig though. You know that amazing feeling you get when you pop open a cold soda or whatever your beverage of choice is and start to take those first few glups on a really hot day when you’ve been out working or playing and you swear that what you’re drinking is the single best thing on the planet? Well, that’s a feeling I get pretty much everyday with room temperature water. I wish I had a place on my body – maybe on my foot or something – that I could just run water into so that I could have enough water all day without constantly being attached at the hip to my Nalgene.

And my nosebleeds are back. I’m really going to have to be diligent about putting saline solution or gel up my nose because having to bike a half hour in dry wind is not going to do my nose any favors. I’m back to about one nosebleed a day. With saline it should get better. My iron intake is low to begin with – I don’t need to be losing more for no reason.

Because of the dam and the reservoir, the mosquitoes haven’t left with the rains. Either way though I think that I’ve conditioned myself to feel itchy in places below the knee at around 8 pm every night regardless of whether I’ve gotten any bites or not. I’ve learned the limits of what’s ok to scratch and what’s not ok to scratch though. I’ve learned that you can just plain scratch through your skin if you do it long enough - even if you don’t use or have any nails to do it with.

A couple weeks ago I came home from working at Steven’s office and it was late – about midnight – which is to say that no one was awake at all in my area. The moon was full and I could see just about everything, and I moved to my door, took out my keys and started to open my extremely loud lock when I heard a loud hissing that could be nothing other than a snake. I looked down, and there it was – about a foot from my feet and reared up. My first thought was: Someone put a snake on my porch – since only days earlier all the weeds and grass and anything plantlike had been bulldozed away everywhere around the school grounds for this vary reason – to get rid of snakes. My neighbor, Moussa, had told me even just the day before not to worry because there were no snakes here. Well this was a snake believe it or not. I ran to the car where Steven was waiting because I didn’t have a light on me to see very well and while the full moon was bright it wasn’t good enough. “There’s a snake on my porch!” I told him – but he didn’t catch it. “Il y a un serpent sur ma terrace!” – I tried in French but this was no better. “Just give me a flashlight!” I said and by this time he’d gotten the English and I now saw that he was much more scared of snakes than I. I ran back to the porch, relieved to see the snake hadn’t moved, and of course by now my puppy, who usually makes herself scarce when I’m away, had come to see what was up. I grabbed her and threw her in the kitchen and then grabbed her water bowl, threw out the water, and trapped the snake under the bowl. I put a large rock on the bowl and told Steven I was going to sleep now.

The next morning I woke to find a dead pigeon in the yard and the bowl still where it was. I think the pigeon died of a sickness completely unrelated to the snake since in fact several of my other pigeons have since died the same way. I went to the neighbor’s, and within minutes men with big sticks came and killed the snake. That week following we found three more snakes in and around my neighbors yard. Now it makes sense to me why they’re there: as the weather cools off and gets drier, it really cools down at night and for a snake, my cement porch which has been baking in the sun all day is certainly a more attractive place to be if you’re cold blooded than in the dirt. But since then everyone talks about how brave the nassara was to trap the snake like that. Call me crazy but, in my opinion it’s always better to know where a snake is than where it isn’t.

Life is really picking up here. Tests to give, tests to grade, lessons to plan, lessons to give, places to bike, people to greet, food to find, local languages to learn. I learned the other day that originally i was meant to be placed on the other side of Bagre - in the traditional Bissa village. But they couldn't find a suitable house for me, so that is how i ended up in the nice new houses across town and why I have to bike every day. Living there would have been a different bag of worms. Bissa bissa bissa and little else.

But I can see how time's gonna fly here. It's starting already. But i'm fine - Turtle's fine - and I hope everyone's enjoying the cooler weather of November back at home. I'm jealous.

Hello everyone!

Well school’s been in session for two weeks now. Burkina Faso has the same date for school starting as France does (Oct 1), but here, for various reasons including the timing of the harvest, school doesn’t actually start on that day. That’s a day when people get together, introduce the staff, etc. In the days following the staff have a meeting to discuss the calendar and other administrative things, and the kids will clean up the school grounds and the classrooms. It’s amazing how much dust accumulates in these classrooms over night let alone throughout an entire summer vacation. When classes actually start varies by school, as it does in the States. For me I started last Wednesday. I didn’t know it was going to start till that morning, so I held off and started on Thursday.

I’m teaching the equivalent of two classes of 6th grade life sciences, one class of 7th grade life science, and one class of 6th grade math. There are approximately 75 kids in each of the classes. All the kids have uniforms, which are plain light brown cotton material with a left front chest pocket and above it’s a little black writing saying C.E.G de Bagré, which is the name of the school (College des Enseignements Generals de Bagré). The girls have long skirts and the boys have pants. The combination of uniforms in such a bland color scheme keeps making me think of prison uniforms. But after it wore off I’ve decided I like how they look and having everyone dressed in one color is just something very hard to get used to here where everything seems to be covered in abnormally large amounts of different colors.

Because I bike 5 km to school every day, I can’t just wear anything to school. I have several nice skirts that I’ve had made here but I can only wear on of them since when it comes down to it, it’s pretty hard to bike in a skirt. If it’s long then you can’t move your legs and if it’s too short then you’re going to flash your knees in the wind and that’s the equivalent of flashing your boobs in the States pretty much, or at least I was told.

No one can believe that the Nassara doesn’t have a moto and actually has to bike to school. Some people think it’s funny, some people are just confused, and some people think it’s not fair. The correct answer, of course, is that I’m forbidden to ride a moto by the Peace Corps, and biking is good for me. It’s not that hard of a ride, especially not at 6:30 in the morning, but the ride home around mid day is pretty hard, and sometimes I’ll think it’s starting to rain but it’s just sweat flying off my head onto my arms or legs. When I get home and the sweat dries I have a fine powder of salt all over my arms from the sweat. But most of my students have to make the same bike ride, so it’s not that unreasonable. Supposed to be living at the level of the people I’m serving right?

So then I decided to be on top of things and do my laundry so I hauled out my basins and filled them with water and washed my clothes. If anyone ever tries to tell you that washing clothes in basins by hand is not a sport, do not believe them. But I finished and i was about to hang my clothes up to dry when this bull came by my fence. Daniel was planting a replacement papaya sappling for the one Turtle tore up and he splashed some water at the bull. The bull licked his lips and Daniel laughed and said "he's thirsty!" (well not in english). Next thing we know he comes lumbering in my gate and I go up to him and pet him and he starts frantically licking my hands. My hands are both wet and soapy so I assume that he wants water, not soap. So I give him a bucket of water and he sucks it down. Then he goes back after my hands and then he smells my laundry. I figured he'd smell the soap and back off but that just got him more excited and he stuck his big face into my laundry and started chewing on my clothes. Then he wanted the bar of soap; in fact the poor bull wanted nothing more than to lick and chew my soapy water and laundry. He wasn't enormous but he was still an uncastrated bull, so Daniel, the neighbor's kids and I tried to suggest that he stop chewing my clothes and leave. It took a lot of shoving and stones and clothes that eventually needed to be rewashed.

And then the neighbor’s goat got in my yard and ate my banana tree. Still unknown how said goat gained entrance into my locked and fenced-in courtyard. Here’s turtle pulling the goat by its lead. It’s a fun game for her. This way the goat wants to pull the other way cuz goats are stubborn and if she gets to close to them then they butt her. Here she is "playing" with the goat that ate my tree. The goat seemed very confused.

A bulldozer came through and over the course of three days plowed away all the grass and shrubs around my and my neighbors’ courtyards and on all of the school grounds of the lycee. Now it’s just brown. Everything. I was kind of sad because to my eyes it’s not very beautiful at all now, even though my neighbors can’t keep quiet about how beautiful they think it is, but one of the real motivations for doing it is that where there is no tall grass and shrubs, there will probably be no snakes. And where there are kids there should be no snakes, because snakes can kill kids. Can kill me too, I’d just have more of a chance. So if no grass means no snakes for me and my dog and my friends, then that’s fine by me.

School started off pretty awkwardly. I don’t really see how it could have gone otherwise though. I mean the whole “Hi, you don’t know me, I come from America, I’m a volunteer here, I work for le Corps de la Paix American.” It’ll get you blank stares every time. But since I have no other perspective, maybe I’d get blank stares no matter what. I didn’t really plan out what I wanted to say very well for the first day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I knew what I wanted to accomplish but anything else just felt like scripting it and then I’d feel really dumb in addition to just sounding dumb. I explained that my learning French is a process and that there are some things that I know about the language that they don’t, but there are lot more things that they know that I don’t and could they please be patient and don’t hesitate to point out errors and raise their hands when there are errors; don’t just talk amongst themselves. Saying la monde versus le monde might be hilarious to them but I might not even notice.

I am not used to teaching and getting no response. I mean when you ask if they understand they’ll respond yes – but other than that – try to ask critical thinking questions or even answers to seemingly logical progressions of things and you get mostly nothing. I’m just going to hope it’s the beginning and a consequence of that.

I finally made it out to the rice fields on bike a couple times. Once by myself and once with Daniel and Turtle in my bag. That's where Daniel works everyday since he doesn't go to school and his family has a lot of rice. Here's a picture of the rice fields we visited. This is all possible because of the dam here. They can give water to these enormous fields all year long. The plants were just the most brilliant green and the birds were completely different down there because of the water.

I’ve gone over to the Commader of the Gendarmes’ for dinner three times now. Would have gone four times but my French comprehension is so bad on the phone that I came away from the conversation thinking he was coming to my place so I stayed home instead of going to market but then I found out that they’d been expecting me for dinner. Oops, He gets paid well and I know that but it’s a little puzzling since we eat really well. Like bottles of soda and chicken and salad. And then he gave me thirty eggs and a thing of instant iced tea. I must consult my LCFs about how to know when too many gifts are too much. I know this would be too much for a normal person but I also know he gets paid a good deal more than the average person and having been in France he knows more what I would probably like to eat (chicken not To). No wife to speak of though so just trying to keep my eyes open. From what I’ve heard it’s not a big deal or a problem to date a Burkinabe here but it is a great deal more difficult to back track or stop dating someone. So best not to accidentally lead anyone on by accepting too many gifts. Just need to figure out where the line is.

Well as I’m writing this blog entry I’m being kept awake cuz Turtle is eating chicken bones SO LOUDLY that there is no way I can sleep. If you’d seen my chicken eating before Burkina Faso you’d be blown away by what I eat now. Still absolutely no organs – they still turn my stomach – but as far as your standard pieces of chicken, I eat it all except the cartilage and bone. If Turtle’s not there looking pitiful then I’ll clean the bones right off. Never thought that would happen. Turtle is doing well and growing real fast. She’ll sit and stay and come and even wait to eat till I say OK when she’s calm but when she’s excited I’ll say sit and she’ll just bounce around. By my estimate she’s only 3 and a half months so that’s still pretty good. She’s best friends with the dog next door who will growl and bite every other dog but her even though all she does is bite his ears and tail all the day long. If you'd like to see a cute movie of her playing with the neighbor's mutt (yes I know she's a mutt too but she's just really pretty) then go here: Turtle movie.

But everything's going well. Thank you for your emails and letters and care packages again! I'm going to actually learn how to have a post office box and send letters now so maybe you'll see some coming the other way in a few weeks! Love you all!

School Starts Tomorrow

Went out to sneak up on a big flock of Cattle Egrets today but they startle really easily. Man how much would you pay to have wings like that. All's well here. School starts tomorrow (like I actually start teaching), so wish me luck!

My dog is actually a girl

*BEFORE I START BLABBING I WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE CARE PACKAGES AND PHONECALLS AND THE LETTERS AND EMAILS AND COMMENTS FROM YOU ALL - NO JOKE, IT REALLY KEEPS ME GOING - YOU GUYS ROCK*

So I can sex flies, snakes, crabs, fish and you'd think most mammals. But! By puppy is actually a girl. There was some know-it-all-teenager hanging around my gate and so I went out with the puppy and he looked at it and asked what it was. I assumed "a dog" was not the answer he was looking for, so I said "a boy" and he doubled over laughing. I picked the pup right up and put it's underside in his face and said "a boy" and he said "no that's a girl, nassara". Then he called over about 10 people from the road and they all confirmed: paaga, female. In my defense, a young puppies genitals are pretty strange. I'd asked for a boy and when I got the pup I thought it looked pretty strange for a boy but it looked even stranger to be a girl so I let it go. No, he's a she. So I changed her name. Now she's called Turtle, after the character in Barabara Kinsolver's book The Bean Trees. I also just like turtles. And they are good luck here. Just about every morning she goes out and plays with a herd of donkeys that come through. She loves jumping up on their faces. They're as calm as can be. She probably feels like they're playing back as they dodge her to try to get to the grass.

But now I need to figure out how to not let her have babies. She's still young, maybe three months now, so I've got some time till she needs to be spayed. I spent some time using by best Googling skills to see if anyone had tried this before and had written about it. The best thing I came up with was a woman who had spend 9 years in Ouagadougou and had gotten her cat spayed with success. Unfortunately for me, how she succeeded was by colaborating with friends and flying up a legit vet from Ghana to spay the cat in a hotel room. Cat's fine; I just need an option in Burkina. She was so nice though and told me about a vet that treats domestic animals in Ouagadougou and that despite the fact that the vet is said to be on the up and up, she had a friend who got a cat spayed by her and the cat died during the operation. I don't really understand how unless it was something about the cat that it could die during a spay operation if the vet was on the up and up. But it seems like the best option I have. Having a dog here is kind of different anyway. You have her and you love her and you also understand that between snakes and people that would happily have her for dinner, her life is really just a stretch of good luck. So I'll take a chance on that vet. Other than that, the local vet in Bagré should come over next week and give her her vaccines. I heard the price is 1000 CFA; that's 2 dollars. She's doing well though; she's gone from a clumsy dopey puppy to a very high energy puppy on legs and paws that look to big for her.

I read an amazing book this week. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. If you're not willing to come visit me but you still want to get a good idea about life in rural Africa you should pick up this book. It's fiction, but in so many ways it's not. I kind of feel like Barabara Kingsolver must have been spying on my life here for a while before she sat down and wrote about the culture and people. It's kind of creepy. Like, how does she know that? Aside from all that it's regarded as a damn good book.

The rains are slowing down here now. Instead of raining most days, it just threatens to rain. Makes a big fuss, gusts wind, picks up dust, slams all my doors and blows around the birds but then just quiets down instead of pouring. Here's a picture of the last good rain coming in. I would like you to notice the cows on my future neighbor's front steps. They say that it'll all stop within a couple weeks now and then the grasses will die and they'll burn them all up around the school yard so that people can walk around easier and there won't be any snakes in the grass. The next picture is literally of thirty seconds later and the total drop in visibility when it pours like that. I wonder, are there any clouds during the dry season? What will it really be like to live here when I won't see rain again till next year?

La rentrée scholaire is tomorrow, the day school is supposed to start. But school doesn't really start then and I don't really know when it will. I'll show up tomorrow and hopefully will find out my schedule and then we'll talk about when school can start. It's all based around the harvest and when the teachers are getting to town. School can be very important to people but in the end for subsistence farmers, the harvest will always be more important and one of the most valuable things about having kids is that they can help work around the house and the fields. So if you say school will start tomorrow then no one will show up. In the end starting school late just makes sense. I've started getting a little nervous about teaching. Without a schedule or a starting date it's hard to get nervous about anything but that but I think that preparing for 4 different classes on 4 different things each week is going to be a challenge.

I met a Tiawanese man this week. He works in Bagré along with a few other Tiawanese agriculture engineers. They have a cooperative with Burkina and work on growing rice in Bagré. He took me out in his air conditioned truck and showed me the rice fields. Bagré is enormous. I had no idea. Not in people but in fields. We drove for miles and miles and he showed me the bridges that carry water to fields like they do in Taiwan, he said. He showed me other work they are doing with showing the Burkinabé how to farm fish. We went down to the fish pools and there were just dozens of black kites (see bird page) hanging around picking off fish just a few feet from me. He also took me to his office and let me use the internet for a few minutes. That's right: the internet. In Bagré. At times like this I feel very confused. Simultaneously in a village that is mostly mud huts and tradition you can find AC and the internet. He wants me to teach him French. I don't know how I feel about that. Meeting him was great and it's comforting to know that there is the net close by if I really need it but I also felt kind of appreciative of how I am living here. Living poor is what I mean. The man was doing great things for Bagré but he was not integrating at all. I have no electricity or running water but my porch is full of company every night. But it wasn't part of what he was here for. I felt a little sad that I hadn't elected to go see the rice fields with Daniel on our bikes instead of inside the bubble of a truck.

Well until next time; and that next time might be from Bagré.

Happy 3 1/2 weeks everyone!!

We were told once during training that one thing people who return to America after the Peace Corps often feel that people back home don’t really take that great of an interest in what you did during your service. As you might imagine, and as I am sure of now, this could be a pretty big let down. But in the end it seems pretty inevitable since a job that is so far removed, literally, from America would be hard to ever really relate to. There are exceptions of course but maybe this could all be fixed…

Yes… say for example, we figure out a way to rig it up so that we are all being filmed for a certain amount of time each day, and the film would follow the utterly ridiculous, mind-stretching and often touching things we face everyday, and then it could all be edited and turned into one of those awful reality TV shows where ever one tunes in to see who’s going home next except instead of Survivor IX it would be Peace Corps Burkina Faso 2007, or something. I suppose since we’re supposed to be volunteering here, we wouldn’t get to win a million dollars at the end, but we would get to go back to America, and eat good food, and that’s just about as good. BUT, more importantly, we could better accomplish one of the three goals of the Peace Corps, which is to share the cultural understanding of another country with the dear USA. No I know it would never work, but it’s sure funny to think of. In fact I think of it just about every time something ridiculous happens to me, and every time someone goes home. Speaking of which…

Beth, Katherine, Jamie, Chris, Christine, Alexia, Hope: we miss you and I hope you’re living it up back home.

Jamie: I used your little tube of shaving gel the other day and it was so great. I spent like thirty minutes shaving my legs, only knees on down of course, on my front porch while listening to BBC. It was pretty difficult considering the amount of skin-breakage I have on account of the mosquito bites and other such things. But THANK YOU!

Let’s see, what have I done in the last week and half to keep myself from going crazy out of boredom:

Painted my nails bright pink (WTF?)
Put a Burkina Map on the wall with everyone’s locations (but it keeps falling down and then Neo pooped on it)
Laundry, including 36 pairs of underwear*
Listened to Music
Read a lot of books
Written this Blog entry
Talked to people at home
Slept
Tried to housebreak the puppy
Danced
Made lentil soup
Went birding

*You have to understand that when you live with a host family, you can’t give your underwear to the person washing your clothes because it’s inappropriate. You’re supposed to wash it out in your bucket bath, in your bucket of water that you use to do every other hygienic thing, but somehow this never seemed good enough to me.

I have a puppy, and this is him. A yuur la a Neo. His name is Neo. He has a pretty predictable routine now. He wakes me up at 5, but lets face it, I was practically awake already anyway, then I tell him to chill until at least 5:30, maybe 6:00 if I’m lucky and then we get up and he gets all excited to go outside and then we go outside and he zooms around the yard and then comes back and asks me if I’m going to feed him. I do. Then he bounces around for about 20 more minutes and then it’s his naptime. This pattern repeats throughout the day and he’s still pretty tiny so he takes 6 or 7 naps a day. He is NOT housebroken yet and I fear that this may take a while. In the mean time I’ll be glad I don’t have a carpet.

There are two boys who are becoming my friends. I see them everyday for at least a hour, sometimes 5. I don’t know the little one’s name but the 8 year old is called Yassi and his little brother is 6 I think. They were the first ones who watched me all the time when I arrived and brought lunch to share with me and watch three bulls in front of my yard. I’ve now realized that since these tiny bull-watching children really do have complete control over where these bulls go that the reason there is such a high density of bulls in front of my yard is that the kids want to hang out together and they want to stare at the nassara. Anyway, I let Yassi and his little brother come in because they seem more… kind than most of the other kids. They are also willing to talk to me. They also are looking out for my best interests. For example, while he was in no position to stop it, he watched and then carefully informed me that a certain kid had squeezed through my gate to steal some of my powdered milk that he then ate with his friend. They call me Tantie (Auntie) and give me all kinds of advice from when I need to lock my kitchen to what I should feed the dog to make him big and strong and how to attach nails to my gate so that kids won’t climb over it (see picture). They’re pretty neat.

But I didn’t bring EVERYTHING inside yesterday before I went to the market; I left some dirty dishes and my solar battery charger on my porch. Neo’s pretty red leash that my parents had sent me was draped over the top of the window frame. When I came back the Proviseur told be he’d seen a kid squeezing out of my gate carrying something as he was coming home from the office and Benoit (the teenager who lives with him) was about to chase him down but the kid was too quick. I don’t know why, but the kid took Neo’s leash. Which is sad because what the hell is this kid really going to do with the leash (they don’t use leashes here) and Neo and I had just gone on our first real walk that morning. Turns out a kid, maybe the same one, took some of Benoit’s best clothes as they were hanging out to dry. Well the Proviseur wasn’t happy so he took me down to the gendarmerie (like the police, but different) and because this is a small place, he told the gendarmes who the kid was, where he lived, and within a few minutes, the kid had been fetched and appeared at the station in handcuffs. Well at this point, I felt AWFUL. I looked at the kid and I recognized him, kind of. Mainly I recognized him as being one of the sorrier looking kids around. I mean none of the kids have new clothes here, and why would they. But this kid was wearing a real torn up long T-shirt that was covered in dirt, no shoes, and his face was really dirt streaked. His hair wasn’t growing in very well and his belly was swollen up, pushing out the baggy T-shirt a bit (that generally isn’t because of worms or cancer or starvation or anything, it’s usually a protein deficiency thing, or so I was told).

Burkinabé men, on the whole, are not big people. They are taller or shorter, but on the whole, based on their height, they are not NBA material. Well they must select gendarmes based on their build or something because when I walked in there I saw the highest density of big, built men I’d seen in recent memory. They brought the kid in in cuffs and sent someone to find his parents. They asked us what happened, and the Proviseur talked for me and then they brought him in and started yelling at him. Not screaming, just speaking loudly and authoritatively which to this kid who must be younger than Yassi was terrifying. They asked him if he understood French and he said no and then they said several things to him in Mooré and asked a few questions and the poor kid looked like his eyes were about to start gushing tears any moment. Then the head guy turned to us and said his family name and went on about how you might expect this from that family. At this point I just wished everyone could forget about the leash and I could have left a t-shirt out there for him instead. I know that’s not right but it’s how I felt. They feel very strongly that if they let a kid steal small things then sooner or later he’ll learn to steal big things.

That’s one reason there’s a superstition about giving kids eggs. Eggs are a very good food and not normally given to kids because people feel that if you get a kid in the habit of having good food like that then when he doesn’t have it, he’ll steal it. And there’s a saying that goes something like: Si on vole un oeuf, on volera un boeuf (if one steals an egg, one will steal a cow). Yassi told me I should watch out for these two girls because they stole some of my neighbor’s food growing in his yard. One day they came over and stood outside my fence while I was peeling hardboiled eggs and eating the whites and giving Neo the yolks. The stared at me and then asked for eggs, and I said I didn’t have anymore. They didn’t steal my eggs the next day, but they did come into my yard and scrounge up the scraps still stuck to the shells and eat them, covered in gravel and all. I told them it was their choice.

Being here is definitely getting easier. There is so much so nothing to do that it’s ridiculous. I think I’m going to get used to having nothing to do just in time to have loads to do come la rentrée scholaire in about three weeks. Not sure how much things are going to lag behind this year… I was told there was a meeting scheduled for the 15th but that there was no way that was going to work because everyone was out of town so who knows when the administrative stuff will get worked out so I can know my schedule and when the heck classes actually begin. I’m not that worried; I’d just kinda like to know. I did manage to drag out of my homologue that I will be teaching 6e, 5e and 4e SVT (life science) and 6e math. That adds up to about 14 hours of teaching a week, which isn’t too bad.

On the upside of things, because I’m the VAC (Volunteer Administrative Committee, I think) representative, I get to be in the capital for a meeting on Wednesday and then I heard the big head honcho of all of Peace Corps is stopping by Burkina and would like to meet with the VAC that Friday so I get to spend the better part of a week relaxing and going online and doing nothing in civilization and sucking down chocolate milkshakes and getting reimbursed for it. Thank you to the American government for those chocolate milkshakes. Speaking of food, I had this dream that we were all sent out to our sites but really we all ended up in this overly complex dorm thing and some of us were having trouble moving in because of this torrential rainfall but some of us who were more inclined to cook started cooking up a storm and I stumbled up on TALITHA standing, African-market-style, under a hanger selling fresh chocolate chip cookies and grilled cheese sandwiches. I think I must have stood there for like an hour in the dream eating cookies and sandwiches. She didn’t even have me pay for them! Thank you Talitha! It’s frustrating to be constantly fixated on food back home, yet not wanting to eat hardly anything and also continuing to be disenchanted with the food here.

Like I set out to make rice the other day. Well, let me tell you, this ain’t no instant rice or Uncle Ben’s like at home. You buy the rice and then you have to sort through it. Pick out the gravel. Wash off the dirt, the sand, the hulls that are remaining. Rinse it again, maybe three more times since the water seems to always be cloudy. Cook it. Again, rice is difficult in America for me without a rice cooker, and here without a very controllable stove it’s downright up to chance. Rice is done. Somehow, it’s just not the same, in a way that doesn’t make me want to eat much of it. But I had a half a cup or so with soy sauce and cucumbers and that’ll be most of what I eat for the whole day. I don’t know what’s going on with my appetite. Neo seemed to like it. Yassi and his brother brought over a whole big thing of rice porridge and told me that’s what the feed the dogs with powdered milk at their house and sure enough I sprinkled some powdered milk on the porridge and Neo sucked it down. Milk doesn’t seem to make him sick and he ate so much his sides bulged out. Sometimes they take him out for the afternoon, which unless it’s ridiculously hot, is fine by me.

Wednesday night at about 7 pm I was handed an invitation for a birthday party that was to be held that same night at 9. The Proviseur and Benoit and I went together and checked it out. Well since we are teachers and I am American if someone tells you that something is going to be held at 9 then we assume that it’s going to be held at 9. Not the case here. I think the guy who’s birthday it was showed up a little after 10 along with most of the guests. It’s just understood here that things generally start an hour or two or three after they’re said to. But at the party I met this white guy. I had seen him on a moto the other day and was completely floored and found myself saying Nassara!!! to the people around me and asking if they knew him. They said he was in some kind of agriculture training thing here and he lives here and he’d be here for one more month. He’s French, his name’s Gwenn and all he wanted to do was speak English with me and the man he lives with here, which was fine by me. I think his English may be at the level of my French but it is hard to tell a thing like that. I felt so stupid to be so glad to see a white person, I mean he isn’t an American, but it was still nice. So we’re going to have language sessions now and again for him and his friend to speak English till they leave in a month. Hopefully by then I can get my Moore and Bissa classes going.

On Sunday I went to church! Can you believe it? I got roped into it easily since it is hard to refuse a social occasion here and I guess deep down inside I was curious. Daniel came to get me at about 7 and we left for church, which is just on the other side of the local market. Since we were early and everyone else in this country is late, we stopped at a place across the street to sit and where men were happily drinking calabashes of Dolo (millet wine) at this fine hour of the morning. I tried some, it was ok, maybe better if it were cold. Then the men caught three baby doves out of the tree they were sitting under and we passed them around. I held my tongue.

Church was a run down building (by Burkina standards) with benches filling the room, a simple alter in the front with some nice table clothes draped across and some figurines, fake flowers and a lantern. A doorway in the back of the room gave way to a whole other uncovered area behind this first room. By the time everyone had shown up, it was well past 8:30 and the benches were very full. When I covertly glanced behind me I saw that the other seating area was also packed, with people sitting on mats on the ground. This room that is the church was no bigger than twice my living room at home. I don’t have a particularly big living room. The boy I had come with had seated me next to him and once the room filled up I realized that as with most things here, the church-goers were separated by age and gender. I was in the adult male section. No problem there, it seems that white woman equates with black man here in may situations.

But the service was great, for many reasons. I feel awkward going to church in the US, mainly because I am not religious. There’s a certain amount of uncomfortable I think I will always feel in a church simply because I don’t believe a lot of what most people who come there do. Even if my values coincide with those of a certain religion, I still feel kinda fidgety in church. Fidgety alternating with bored and frustrated. This service was not like that though. For one, most of it was in Mooré, so I didn’t understand hardly a word except for wend (god) and sida (truth) and a few other words that didn’t amount to much. But I still find just sitting and listening to Mooré to be pleasant if not interesting, so that was OK. Secondly, there was African drumming and singing. Now because of the not understanding Mooré thing I can’t tell you about what they were singing but if you had me listen to their music outside of a church context, I would not have guessed it was religion-related. It just sounded like some really great traditional music with big drums and noises I couldn’t make with my mouth if I tried. I’d say about a quarter of the time was spent singing.

On the way back home Daniel took me past someone selling pork and we sat around under a small hangar to wait for it to finish cooking. I narrowly avoided eating pig liver. I had to refuse in two languages about five times before they would eat without me. After a while some pig muscle was done and we took it and headed back to my place. Pig is delicious. Neo got the bones.

Then Yassi and his brother showed up with a bag of uncooked rice, a Maggi tablet (used in practically everything here, a MSG loaded bullion cube I think) and some oil and said it was for me to make Riz Gras. But I don’t know how to make riz gras. They looked at me like I was from Mars. In the states this would be the equivalent of telling someone you didn’t know how to make pasta. They said that they would try to do it if I would just show them where the charcoal and lighter fluid and pan and water and all that was. I said sure and a couple hours later there was riz gras. Well kinda. They’re young kids after all, so it wasn’t perfect. The rice wasn’t really cooked that well and not all the gravel and sand had been picked out. They had also made a remarkably large mess on my porch. But that’s ok. It was cute and touching and Neo liked it.

Daniel hopped on his bike and said he’d be right back. Sure enough he appeared in a few minutes with a chicken under his arm. My brain took a deep breath. “What are you doing with a chicken here,” I asked him. “It’s a cadeau,” he said. And insisted that he prepare it for me. “Ok,” I said. I gave him my Gerber knife and he went around the side of the house and dug a little hole in the ground with the knife. Then he stepped on the wings with one foot and the neck with the other and held the head in his hand while he carefully slit the neck and bled the chicken neatly into the hole. Then he somehow twisted the wings and neck together so that the chicken was self-contained. It twitched and jerked for a couple minutes but that was all. He covered over the hole, handed me back the knife and commenced to plucking the chicken. Neo didn’t care about the chicken so much as he found the feathers fun to play in, and a couple minutes later he emerged with white fluffy feathers stuck to everywhere and coming out of his mouth.

Then we sat together over a bowl cutting up the chicken, which I’ve learned is easier to do with two people. Hold the neck here, cut, ok now hold the wing, cut, ok now hold this, etc. He slit the chest and pulled out the crop and let it dangle and then chopped through the breastbone and then pulled open the abdominal cavity and removed all the organs. He cut off the head entirely and pulled out the trachea and then took the feet and put them through where the trachea used to be, up and out of the chicken’s beak. Then he wrapped the head and feed in the intestines. He discarded the lungs, some major blood vessels, one other part I couldn’t identify, the crop and the trachea. Everything else we put in the bowl and then he washed it all and said “Here you go!” I thought long and hard about how I would prepare it, and I decided on coating it in flour and frying it, like my mom always did, would be the best. I found vegetable oil in town and came home and fried it all up. Ok that’s not true, I discarded the organs and head and feet – I just can’t eat it. I’d have given it to Neo but Yassi and his brother had taken him for the night. When they’d asked me permission I had agreed and then 5 seconds later when I was well past them on my bike did I really realize what they were asking and by then it was too late and Neo was going to have a sleepover with his biggest fans. The next day they told me Neo had cried during the night but that was OK because they gave him some coffee to calm him down. WHAT???? I said. I had to give them a little lecture on dogs and caffeine and not to ever give him that ever again.

Before the afternoon was too far along, Ryenamatu (I have no idea how to actually spell her name) came (she’s Yassi’s big sister) and said that her father had requested that I come down and see the dam. Their father is a big to-do military guy. I asked her if it was far and she said, “Oh no, not far at all.” As an aside, it is almost always a mistake to ask someone if something is far here. It is, I would say, one of the two rules of asking directions here. Rule 1: Burkinabé want to be helpful so they will probably give you directions somewhere even if they don’t actually know exactly where it is, so, you will probably get lost. Rule 2: If you ask someone “Is it far?” the response will almost always be “Oh no, not too far,” and it will almost always be pretty damn far. Like getting down to the hydroelectric plant; pretty far. We were so winded getting there since the road was very hard, even for my snazzy Peace Corps mountain bike. We got there and their father greeted us and I realized that this whole area around me was a pretty high security deal. Daniel and Ryenamatu and I were definitely being checked out by every person we passed to make sure that indeed her father had OKed us to be there.

He took us down into the hydroelectric plant, and it was like going into another world. It was like a reverse culture shock or something. This plant was no small deal. It was huge and nestled down in the center at the base of the dam and inside looked like a completely different country. He gave us the grand tour and it was really a crazy experience, following this huge military guy around with these two kids dressed in traditional clothing around and under and over the whirring of a million different control panels and tanks and valves and motors. He brought us into this dark room through this little door and pointed to this huge thing in the center making an unfathomable amount of noise and asked me if I knew what that was. I looked and I realized that I was standing a couple feet from one of the two enormous turbines. Now I don’t know how dangerous standing that close to that thing actually is, but I felt like I should not have been there. The military pretended to push his daughter into it and she screamed and grabbed my arm. I guess it was scary because it seemed with those kind of huge loud fast-moving machines, if and when something went wrong, it would really go wrong. I couldn’t imagine how this looked to the teenagers who don’t live in a world with jet engines and race cars and furnaces and trains and other big/loud machines. Step outside the plant again and the noise is just a hum and you look around and there’s just miles and miles of breathtaking African landscape. SO peaceful. Then we went up about a billion stairs to the top of the dam itself to see the water feeding into it. I thought I could see the water from where I lived, but that was nothing. The guy explained that the dam itself is 5 km wide and then he pointed to another town off in the distance across the water and said it was 70 km away. That’s a lot of water. It looked not all that different from sitting on East Beach on Watch Hill actually, in that most of what you could see was just water, but you could tell that out there somewhere was more land. This is the Nakembe River.

Then the military gave some directions in Mooré to his daughter about where we were going next which I didn’t understand other than, based on their length, we were probably going somewhere far. We biked along the remainder of the length of the dam and then kept going out a little west of the dam to see what looked like some pretty intense rapids. Now it all made sense. Everyone had been talking about how there is all this rain this year and it’s unprecedented and that they had to open the damn to let some water out. Well, they don’t like actually open the actual damn, but they have these 4 gates that open, kind of like oversized garage doors, to let some water through, and that’s where we were. Normally they have to open the gates for a couple days. This year they have been open for 16 days and still counting. The military pointed to where the rapids were flowing and said the water was flowing to Ghana.

Great rain! you must be thinking. Africa needs rain! Well kind of. Why do they have to open the gates? They open the gates because the acres and acres of rice fields that are feeding Burkina that are irrigated by the run off from the reservoir were being flooded. There’s so much rain that they can’t get the water to decrease fast enough and as a result, a lot of crops are dying. The way the soil here is and the way the rainfall comes all at once and heavily necessitates a very delicate balance between not enough and too much. I’m no expert but I would venture to say that this is climate change in action here. The rains were late this year but then now there is more rain than anyone alive can remember (that’s not just Bagré’s opinion, it’s the case across this latitude of Africa). It gets hotter and dryer in the hot season and wetter with more violent storms in the wet season. People think that global warming just makes things hotter. But it actually creates more intense weather on top of just making it warmer. And getting warmer is no small thing here either. They say that if the temperature goes up just a few degrees in Africa then a lot of the most productive farmland will not be very productive anymore. People here are 80 percent of them subsistence farmers, and that’s not going to be a pretty situation.

But the rains are too heavy across Africa from Senegal in the West to Ethiopia in the East. Northern Ghana has been declared a disaster area. Last I heard on BBC 250,000 people are homeless. Not like there was a little floodwater that got in their basement; homeless like the rain destroyed their homes. And how do you bring aid to people who are cut off in villages by roads that are impassable? The BBC said people are concerned about outbreaks of Cholera and Malaria and Acute Watery Diarrhea. Acute Watery Diarrhea, I thought to myself, so that’s what you call it.

The next day Ryenamatu insisted that we go out to see the new hotel. I assumed that hotel was really just a word they were using to mean something else since there were certainly no hotels here. Well I was kinda wrong. Ryenamatu told me it was kinda far. “Oh boy”, I thought, and loaded up my messenger bag with three litres of water. Well the ride down there was definitely the most beautiful bit of nature I’ve seen here. A thin little dirt path that hugged the coastline of the lake for miles, passing the most beautiful trees and a whole landscape that was just the most vibrant green. And the birds! I could have spent hours and hours down there birding. I stopped Ryenamatu several times to follow some brightly colored bird across a field but without my bird book it was pretty hopeless. We passed tiny little villages of huts, the suburbs of the big village, I guess you could say, and dozens of little creeks where old women with boobs down to their waist and little naked kids were bathing. Finally we came to the hotel.

It wasn’t a hotel like the Econo Lodge, it was more like something I’d expect to find on Cape Cod or the Vinyard or something. There was a big long building that would be the main hall, reception, boutique, restaurant, bar, conference room. Then closer to the water were little buildings, almost what I would describe as a mud huts crossed with cottages. Closer to the water was where a swimming pool was being installed. It wasn’t finished, but I could tell already that this was going to turn into a pretty upscale place, for Burkina’s standards. I mean that’s the case wherever you put something like that; a place where people can go to get away from it all and go fishing in fresh, clean air. Sure there might be schistosomiasis in the water and no reels on the fishing poles but still, this was a nice place. It kind of made me a little said because it reminded me of how people in the States would use nature like this as a form of tourism. But that’s how it is I suppose. Ecotourism, after all, is supporting parks and stuff in the East of Africa, and that, in turn, is keeping the megafauna around at least a little longer.

I came home to find Yassi and his brother on my porch, quietly guarding my hanging laundry. They said a kid came and tried to steal one of my shirts but that he hit him real good with a rock and the kid ran off to his mother. I gave him a high five. They asked if they could take Neo out to play and I said sure just come back by sundown. By sundown no kids or puppy had appeared so I cleaned house a bit, chased a bat out of my living room, and then went off to Yassi’s house to find Neo because I was pretty sure they’d snuck him off for another sleepover. Yassi’s family lives in a nice, large courtyard with good-looking huts and no electricity. Kids were sleeping on the ground and Daniel and I sat down and waited. Sure enough someone handed me a sleeping puppy.

Their father, the military, showed up and we talked for a while. He was born in Ghana and has been with the military for quite a while and explained to me his philosophy on life. He believes that French-speaking countries have a real problem. He says people here don’t want to work, unlike in English speaking places. He believes that in a place where people can’t afford or don’t want to go through years and years of general education, that maybe it would be better to have more technical schools so that people could have more skills. With training then a person has worth and whether their father dies or no matter what happens, they’ll be able to earn a living. So he keeps his military salary for himself and his wife has a restaurant and he tries to keep his kids occupied and learning even during vacation. That’s why the two boys go out and watch the bulls. Even though the family does not raise cattle for a living, it gives them a sense of self or a sense or responsibility, he says. I thanked him for the conversation and then tucked sleeping Neo in my backpack and we went back home. By then it was 9 and since I had to get up in the morning, I headed to bed. Isn’t that a strange phrase? “I have to get up in the morning.” I noticed that the kids had been a little too creative with the scissors I let them borrow that afternoon and had cut 6 uneven lines of fur off Neo’s back and given his whiskers a trim. Nothing too damaging, but now he definitely looks like a mut.

And now I’m here in the capital. Until next time. I love you all.

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.