Bonjour tout le monde. Well, I haven’t been very good about updating my blog, but I doubt that’ll really surprise any of you who know me. (For those of you who don’t know me… I’m a bit of a slacker, especially when it comes to keeping in touch with people.) This’ll be my third substantive post in the span of a year – and also, I suspect, my last. You wouldn’t guess it from the short “Previous Posts” list on the side of the page, but I’ve actually been in Burkina Faso for well over two years now, and I’m down to the last few days. I’m planning on leaving Kongoussi on October 9, at which point I’ll head to Ouaga to spend a few tedious days filling out the mandatory Peace Corps paperwork. October 12 is my official COS (close of service) date. After that, I’m no longer officially Peace Corps volunteer – from then until October 30, when I fly back to America, I’m just some random American bumming around West Africa.

Computers and Caisses

When I arrived at the caisse (credit union) back in October 2005, they owned two computers, and only two or three people regularly used them (or knew how to). Now, two years later, there are at least a dozen computers (including several laptops brought to Burkina by my parents, Abby, and my friend Brian). And despite the fact that only two of the four main branches (and none of our roughly 20 smaller points of service) have electricity, all the accounting for the union is now done electronically. When I arrived, all the savings and credit records were kept by hand. They still are (for logistical purposes as much as anything), but there are redundant computerized copies, allowing them to quickly and easily generate reports and aggregate figures.

The arrival of the digital age at URCBAM (that’s the name of the credit union) has raised the need for technology-related education and training. This is where I come in. Over the past two years, I’ve tried to help the caisse incorporate technology into their operations. This has involved both technical training as well as some longer-term strategic planning. Here are two examples that have kept me busy the past two months:

At the end of August, I led a three-day long training session on Microsoft Excel. The accountants from the four COOPECs (branches – Coopérative d’Epargne et de Crédit, if you really want to know) attended, and got a lot out of the training. All of them already use Excel to some extent, but had only a very basic knowledge of the software or how they could use it. My training helped them not only to master Excel, but also to see different ways in which they could use it in their work. I followed-up on this training by helping two of the accountants redesign their accounting systems to better use Excel. And the training received a lot of positive feedback, so two weeks later, I repeated it for the branch managers and department heads from the main credit union office.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve also been working with the caisse to develop a comprehensive data backup system. While the caisse has eagerly embraced technology over the past two years, they still haven’t yet come to terms with all the implications of this change. For instance, it’s taken several painful and costly events for them to realize that even if you store your data on a computer instead of on paper, it can still be lost. While this probably seems very obvious to you, it took several failed data recovery efforts for the caisse to really learn this lesson. But we’ve now developed a pretty reliable data backup plan – it’s simple (every Friday, everyone is responsible for backing up their computer to an external hard drive, which is then stored in the caisse’s fireproof safe), but it works, and will no doubt save countless hours of redundant work in the future.

Cybercafe, but without the Cyber part. Also, there’s no food.

I think it was more than two years ago, while Giorgio and I were sitting around bored in Minima one day, that we first decided we should start a cybercafé. As we developed the idea over the next few months, it seemed brilliant – Ouahigouya had a huge demand for Internet access, but only two reliable cybercafés (which usually had lines of people waiting to use the computers). We planned to build a cybercafé at a high school in town. This would allow us to take advantage of a subsidized Internet connection rate from the state-owned telecom, and offer a reduced rate or free access to students at the high school. When students weren’t using it, the public would be able to, providing the revenue for the cybercafé to cover its costs.

About three months ago, a German foundation (the Stern Stuart Foundation) agreed to fund the initial costs of the project – buying computers, setting up the Internet connection, etc. Meanwhile, the high school’s APE (like the PTA) constructed a building to use for the cybercafé. About two months ago, we started purchasing all the equipment we needed. Everything was going perfectly.

Internet access in Burkina is terribly expensive. Outside of Ouaga and Bobo (where there are several dial-up providers and, as of a year ago, DSL in the rich neighborhoods), the only access available is through Onatel (originally the state-owned telecom, it’s just been privatized). Dial-up access starts at about $40/month, plus around $2/hour you’re connected. The only high-speed option (aside from satellite) is something called the “Liaison Specialisée”, generally called LS. You may be asking, what exactly is LS? I, too, had the same question and naively decided to ask Onatel, foolishly thinking they might actually know. Despite talking to half a dozen people, no one could really explain to me exactly how it worked. But they did tell me what equipment they would provide if we got an LS connection, what additional equipment we would need to buy, and how much it would all cost. Unfortunately, each of the half dozen people I talked to answered each of these questions differently. After several discussions between Giorgio, me, the principal at the high school, and several people at various levels at the Onatel main office, these questions remained unresolved.

But last week the principal assured us that the price had been worked out, and we started to get something resembling a consensus from Onatel about what equipment we needed. Although the connection wouldn’t be setup for a few weeks (it involves a lot of physical wiring), the principal asked us to go ahead and start setting the cybercafé up – since we’re both leaving in October, this would be our last chance.

I arrived in Ouahigouya last Wednesday, knowing about our Internet problem, but still cautiously optimistic that we’d be able to set everything up to the point where someone would just have to plug our router into the mysterious LS connection when it arrived. But this is Burkina, and things went wrong even before stepping foot into the cybercafé building. First, the high school’s guard (who’s responsible for maintaining all the keys) had lost the cybercafé key. Once we found it, and hiked through the overgrown thorn patch surrounding the building, we discovered that the handle to the door was not properly attached, making the door nearly impossible to open. As we started turning on the computers to begin configuring them… the power went out. Apparently, when the state-owned electric company wired the building, they put in a much weaker connection than we had asked for, leaving us with only enough power to run 2-3 computers at the same time (in a lab of 8 workstations plus a server). Also, the fancy new server we bought (all the other machines were used) spontaneously rebooted every few minutes. And when it rained that day, lots of water leaked into the building. However, after two days and a lot of work, we got things running okay. I pinpointed the server rebooting issue to a bad power supply, which we were able to replace. The electric company just had to flip a switch somewhere, which suddenly started giving us ample power. So now, finally, we have a pretty good cybercafé, except for the lack of Internet access at it.

Minima

Omar and I returned to Minima a few weeks ago (Giorgio was planning to come, too, but, ironically, was struck sick beforehand). Unfortunately, my host father was not in village, and the two older sons in the family were out in the fields. These were the only three people in my host family who spoke anything resembling French, so after I exhausted my thirty-word Mooré vocabulary with my host mother, there wasn’t much left to talk about.

Both Omar and I were struck by the fact that, although much remains the same in Minima, there have been a lot of changes. Omar’s host father built a new house for his family – this one out of concrete instead of mud brick – which, thanks to a complicated battery setup, even has an electric light. Giorgio’s host father now had a cell phone, and my host family now has a motorcycle (two years ago, their only methods of transportation were a bicycle and a donkey). The village had a new school building, and several new teachers. And the road into town is being repaired (not paved, of course, but the giant chasms that make several parts impassable are being filled in), and there’s even regular transport now. Furthermore, there is far more available at the market now than there was two years ago – although there were still only one or two women selling vegetables, they had a much larger selection now. They were selling things like tomatoes and cucumber – and there was even fresh bread available – two years ago, we had to stockpile these items whenever we biked into Gourcy. So although I was disappointed not to be able to see most of my host family, the trip was pretty positive overall.

We’re going to party like it’s 9/10, 9:09

So… what’s left for me now? I’m leaving Kongoussi on October 9, and until then, I’m going to be pretty busy saying goodbye to people. In Burkina, it’s customary to throw a farewell dinner for yourself if you’re leaving town. I’m throwing three of them, each for a very different crowd.

Thursday night is my villageois party, primarily for about 50-60 people I’ve worked with on savings and credit clubs. We’re going to kill and cook a nice lamb, and serve a bunch of rice and sauce with it. Since most of my villageois friends are Muslim, there won’t be any dolo (millet beer) served, just zoom-koom (a fairly bland drink made from millet flour and sugar). Pretty much any conversation at this event (and any farewell speech I might be obliged to give) will be in Mooré (this will keep my speech pretty short), since aside from me, there will probably only be one French speaker present.

Friday night is my caisse party, for about 15-20 people I work with at my credit union. For this party, we’ll go to one of the nicer restaurants in town and feast on grilled chicken, French fries, salad, and probably some rice. The meal will be accompanied by Burkina’s finest beers (both of them), and possibly even a box or two of wine; the conversation will be in French.

Saturday night is my “American dinner”, for people from my English club, English classes, and the students I’ve tutored in English. This’ll be at my house, and I’m going to try to cook some sort of American dish for everyone. I’m planning chili – most of the ingredients are easy to find here, plus it’s something that should be amenable to the Burkinabé palate – but don’t yet know what else I’ll serve with it – the leading candidate is either pasta salad or hot dogs. This meal will be accompanied by Coca-Cola and imported beer (some generic version of Heineken). I’m telling everyone who comes that they have to speak English at this dinner, but I’m sure many of them will revert back to French or Mooré when they’re not speaking to me.

There’s one complicating factor I’ve had to take into effect for all three of these parties. We’re currently in the middle of Ramadan, so just about every Muslim in town (and a lot of Catholics, for some reason) is fasting during the day – no food, not even water, from sunrise until sunset. So all my parties are scheduled to begin right around 6:15 or 6:30 in the evening, the second the sun disappears. On the plus side, no matter how badly I prepare the food for the American dinner, I know it’ll get eaten. And in addition to these parties, most of my other nights will be spent taking individuals out for dinner or a beer to say goodbye.

Although I don’t leave town until Tuesday, this Friday is my last day of work at the caisse. After fête-ing all weekend, Sunday and Monday will be spent packing and tidying up my house a bit. Peace Corps makes us arrange our own transport when we leave our sites (many volunteers end up tossing all their things onto the back of the first pickup truck or lorry to come through town), but there’s a Peace Corps car passing through Kongoussi on Tuesday, which I plan to commandeer.

One down, eighty-four to go…

When I leave Kongoussi, my first destination is Ouagadougou, where I’ll spend a few days filling out my COS (close of service) paperwork. There are several reports I need to submit, documenting what exactly I’ve been doing here for the past two years. Peace Corps has helpfully given me an 85-item checklist of what I need to do before I COS (which happens officially on October 12). Among the items I must check off are such helpful descriptions as “127-C Forms Received”, “Design. Of Travel (MS284B)”, and “Final DOS to IRC”. So that sure sounds like it’ll be a fun couple of days!

A few days after that, probably around the 14th or 15th of October, I’m heading down to Ghana for a week or week and a half with Audrie. I’ll sit on the beach, not have to speak a single word of French, and forget all the silly PC acronyms I’ve been using for the past two years. Then I’ll come back to Burkina for a few days before flying out on October 30. And sometime in there, I’ll probably head back to Ouahigouya to make sure our cybercafé has somehow magically been connected to the Internet.

The Future

No, no, I’m not writing about my own future here. After I arrive back in America at the end of October, I have no idea what’s next for me (aside from tickets to a Packer game on Nov. 11 – if their current streak continues, they should be about 10-0 by that point).

I’ll start with a bit about Kongoussi’s future. After I leave, Kongoussi’s American population will remain steady, and double within two months. Anna, a PCV who lives about 40km from here and is one of my two American neighbors, is extending her PC service for a third year. She’ll spend that third year here in Kongoussi, working with Plan (an American-funded NGO) on some health projects. And I will be replaced by a new SED (small enterprise development) volunteer – the new group of volunteers arrives in Burkina to begin training this week, and my successor will arrive in Kongoussi in December. He/she will also be paired with my credit union, and will hopefully continue a lot of the things I started, both at URCBAM and in the community.

There are several questions I’m dreading hearing when I return home. First, of course, is the generic “So how’s Africa?” to which I’ll probably reply with an equally generic “it’s hot”. I’m also dreading the inevitable questions about what I’m going to do next with my life: work, go back to school, etc. That question has been coming up a lot recently, and I still don’t have an answer. And of course, there’ll be the questions like “Are you glad you spent two years in Burkina.” Yes, I’m definitely glad I spent these two years here. It’s been a fascinating experience in many ways, and has opened my eyes to people and a part of the world about which I previously knew nothing.

Finally, I’m anticipating a lot of questions like “Was it worth it?” or “Did you really make a difference there?” And that’s a difficult question to answer. The easy answer is simply “No” – after all, in the big scheme of things, my impact here has been pretty negligible. And there really isn’t any quantifiable data I can use to say I’ve somehow made a difference here. The best I can manage is some anecdotal evidence – a bunch of people at the caisse have a better understanding of Excel; several of the students in my English club / class passed their Bac (in the Francophone educational system that’s the big test at the end of high school) with high marks in English – scores around 16 or 17 (that’s really good – like an A); etc. But I really can’t say that anyone’s standard of living has been improved because of anything I’ve done, or that because of me, or even Peace Corps in general, poverty is any less of a problem in Burkina. However, that doesn’t really bother me at all. I did what I could do, and am perfectly happy with that.

Moreover, I remain quite optimistic about Burkina’a future (and, by extension, the future of Africa as a whole). Although it will be a long time before the country can escape its crippling poverty, there are definitely continual signs of positive change. One of the most encouraging, in my opinion, is the rapid growth of the cell phone industry. Cell phone service arrived in Kongoussi the same year I did, and within those two years, phones have become nearly ubiquitous here. Even going back to Minima, I was surprised by how many phones the village now had. And until you’ve been here and experienced life in Burkina, it’s hard to really appreciate how significantly cell phones change things. In somewhere like Minima, there is almost no infrastructure – there are no land lines, no Internet connections, no mail service, no connection to the world outside village – before cell phones arrived two or three years ago, you had to bike 45 minutes to Gourcy to use a phone or mail a letter. Now, for example, my host father (who’s a tailor) can call fabric suppliers in Gourcy, Ouahigouya, and Ouagadougou, determine which has the best prices on the products he needs, and have them shipped to Gourcy. In the past, he’d have had to buy bus tickets to both places and spend several days checking with vendors before buying what he needed, spending a lot more time and money in the process.

Burkina is also slowly realizing its economic potential. Unfortunately, this country lacks many natural resources, but they’re learning to make the best with what they do have. Kongoussi’s principal resource is its lake. And market gardening projects, irrigated by the lake, are constantly growing and expanding (I wrote about this a lot in my last blog entry). When I arrived, Kongoussi already had a successful vegetable export industry, supplying green beans to France. In the past two years, they’ve begun exporting to Italy, too, as well as supplying tomatoes to canneries in Ghana. When I arrived, the entire 100km between Kongoussi and Ouaga was unpaved – now, it’s about 2/3 paved, and should be finished within a year, which cut the travel time in half – and make it a lot easier to ship fresh vegetables directly to a refrigerated airplane in Ouaga.

Microfinance is also having an ever-increasing effect on the economy. Microfinance credit unions have extended basic financial services to the 90% of the population who can’t get these services from a traditional bank. And these loans, as small as a few dollars, can be enough to help small entrepreneurs start or expand a business. A $50 loan in November, invested in tomato seeds and fertilizer, can yield $150 in April when the tomatoes are harvested and sent to Ghana. Before microfinance arrived, this sort of small investment was virtually impossible; now, it’s happening everywhere. And that $100 profit may not seem like a lot, but it’s huge to a family living off $400/year – it’s enough to send several kids to school for the year, or enough to buy life-saving malaria medicine, or perhaps enough to invest in some new land, seeds, or fertilizer for next year’s tomato crop.

The key to all of these changes is not increased aid from western countries. Certainly, that sort of aid helps quite a bit, but aid alone will never transform the Burkinabé economy. The cell phone revolution has occurred because of commercial investment – the cell towers weren’t built by USAID, nor did the UN give away free cell phones. Instead, private African companies (well, Onatel was still publicly-held when they began building a cellular infrastructure) built the towers and marketed their services towards the population here. Burkinabé were quick to discover the potential benefits of wireless communication and used their own money to buy phones. Likewise, microfinance institutions like URCBAM are self-sustaining. There’s no western aid agency pumping money into the credit union; rather, the union’s funding comes from the savings and loan interest contributed by its members.

Many of the market gardening projects here in Kongoussi received their initial capital from external donors (including the Friends of Burkina Faso, an American group composed primarily of former Peace Corps Volunteers), and this is undeniably a good use of foreign aid. With a few thousand dollars in capital, these projects are able to put in place the infrastructure and management not only to grow and export vegetables, but also to perform regular maintenance on their equipment, plan for depreciation, and make the project sustainable in the long-run.

I guess there are two main points I want to get across here. First, I think the rest of the world tends to look on Africa as being something of a hopeless, lost cause, doomed to poverty. Although my experience here is limited to just two years and mostly to Burkina Faso, I don’t find the situation at all hopeless. On the contrary, there’s an extraordinary amount of untapped potential here, and things are gradually changing, albeit at a frustratingly slow pace.

Second, we as Americans can certainly help to improve things in places like Burkina, but foreign aid isn’t the only way to do this, as aid money can only do so much. One of the great things about Peace Corps is that, instead of pushing funding, it emphasizes capacity building – several NGOs have given my caisse new computers, but no NGO has ever made the effort to train the caisse’s employees how to use them. Sending money to Africa can certainly help, but it’s equally important to send along the training and education necessary to appropriately use those funds – this is why I’m going to be heading back to Ouahigouya sometime between COSing and going home – to make a few people at the high school on how to manage the network I set up.

And finally, American and European agricultural subsidies continue to cause irreparable damage to the economies of countries like Burkina. As I’ve said, Kongoussi exports a lot of green beans – they’re sent to France and Italy, where they’re marketed under a free trade brand name. However, despite the fact that green beans are produced far cheaper in Kongoussi than in France (even when you factor in transport costs), the demand for Burkinabé beans is severely limited, because French green bean farmers receive generous government subsidies – meaning they’re sold to consumers at a lower price than the imported beans. If the French slowly eliminated their subsidies (and reinvested even a fraction of that money into improving agricultural infrastructure in countries like Burkina), the vegetable export market here would grow dramatically. A far better example is cotton, which is Burkina’s primary export crop, by far. Unfortunately, American subsidies have severely depressed the world cotton market, and in the past few years, Burkina’s cotton industry has begun to dry up – there’s so little profit in it now that many farmers are no longer growing it here. If the United States were to eliminate cotton subsidies, the impact would be far, far, far greater in several west African countries than all the American aid money spent here. (Not to mention eliminating the irony that the United States, while clinging to protectionist policies domestically, has constantly forced free market and free trade practices on countries in Africa and around the world.)

Anyways, that’s the end of my little tirade. Just a few more days left in Kongoussi… see you all soon!

Hello everyone,

It's currently sometime after midnight, and I'm killing time at the Peace Corps office (and enjoying its air-conditioning), waiting for my sister's flight to arrive (she gets in at 2:30am). So I thought I'd take advantage of this opportunity to let you know what I've been up to the past few months.

I continue to keep busy with savings and credit clubs -- I've got about eight of them going, three of which aren't in Kongoussi but in neighboring villages. To give you an example of how these clubs actually benefit their members: one group is involved in market gardening. They have a large crop of onions that they harvested in May. They wanted to use the profits from selling those onions to buy seeds to start a new gardening project (watermelons) in June. But now, with the savings and credit club, they're able to buy the seeds on credit, and save the onions until August or September, when the market price is at least double what it is now.

I've also started teaching English classes. They're twice a week in the evenings, designed for adults who want to improve their English. I regularly have about 6 or 7 students, and they're a pretty fun group. We spend Tuesdays doing grammar and vocab (I've learned way more about English grammar than I ever did before -- mostly how inconsistent it is) and spend Thursdays working with specific texts. We spent three weeks reading a magazine article about genetically modified organisms (at their request), and before that, spent a few weeks on a Roald Dahl short story (Lamb to the Slaughter). One of my students is taking the TOEFL in a few weeks -- I'll be interested to see how he does.

I'm still doing computer training with several friends around town. I had hoped to do another computer camp at the high school this summer, but don't think that'll work, because, oddly enough, I don't think I'll be able to find time for it. I have several computer trainings scheduled at the credit union where I work, mostly training the branch accountants and cashiers on how to use Excel (although I don't quite understand why I'm training people from all the branches, as only two of the four have electricity and thus computers).

And I think our cybercafe in Ouahigouya is finally coming together. We've now secured funding, so sometime in the next month or so we'll buy everything we need in Ouaga and somehow transport it back to Ouahigouya, then set it up and start training the staff.

Things are winding down. With Abby coming, I'm going to be traveling around for the next three weeks. After that is a week-long Peace Corps COS (close of service) conference in Ouaga, and after that I really only have about two months left in Kongoussi. Still not really sure what I'm going to do after that -- I'll keep you posted. (Well, probably not, considering how often I update this blog.)

A la prochaine...

March 21, 2007

Today I’m going to be blogging ‘bout the bourgeoning Bamoise bean business. Kongoussi (and the rest of the province of Bam) is the center of Burkina’s green bean industry, and over the past two months I’ve spent some time seeing the green bean harvest in action, and I find it fairly interesting, so I’m going to write about it here. For those of you who are unimaginative and fail to see the inherent excitement in discussing green bean production and export, you can skip ahead to the more mundane parts of this blog entry, such as the part where my parents and I were nearly charged by a herd of wild elephants. Also, by popular demand, I’m trying to include a few more pictures in this entry to jazz things up a little bit. [I'm also using the "new, improved Blogger" for the first time, which seems to be roughly the same, except that it insists that I speak Italian, which makes it a little more difficult to navigate the site. I would understand if it gave me a French interface - but Italian? As Gob would say, Come On!]

Haricots, Haricots, les Fruits Magiques

As you may recall from a recent, critically-acclaimed cinematic masterpiece about Kongoussi (see my previous entry if you don’t recall this), the city is located on a lake (Lake Bam). Running the entire length of the lake’s shores are small parcels of irrigated farmland. Several crops are grown in these fields – carrots, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, onions. But all of these crops are sold locally – except for green beans, which are this area’s only exported cash crop (not entirely true – I recently learned that we also export some tomatoes to Ghana – but green beans are the only thing we export to Europe). Green beans are big money around here – during the green bean harvest (January – March), they dictate a lot of people’s schedules – I regularly have meetings postponed or cancelled because the people I’m supposed to meet with are busy down at their field, picking beans.

So here’s how the process works. Most of the fields along the lake are owned and operated by small associations of local farmers. For example, an association might have 50 farmers, and each farmer is given 10x50 meters of the association’s land. All of the land is irrigated by a large system of pumps and pipes – in Kongoussi, most of the irrigation system was paid for by the German government. I don’t think any of the irrigation systems in the area were actually paid for by Burkinabé – they’ve all been funded by European or American governments and NGOs. The associations (whose money generally comes from the dues of its members) are usually responsible for the maintenance costs of the irrigation systems – in Kongoussi, this usually means paying the electric company for the power needed to run the pumps; in more remote locations the association buys the gasoline necessary to run the pumps.

During the harvest, which begins in January and tapers off into March, people are constantly in their fields. First, they pick the beans off the plants. After picking the beans comes the more tedious task of quality control – individually inspecting each bean to make sure it doesn’t have any holes in it, or any bugs living in it, and making sure they’re the right size (beans that are too small or too big are the ones that they usually keep for themselves to eat). Since the beans are for export to Europe, all the rules on quality control are dictated by some unseen entity back in France.

There’s a large cooperative of green beans growers based in Kongoussi, called SCO-BAM. Every few days, a refrigerated truck comes up from Ouaga and parks outside the SCO-BAM building. On these days, everyone brings their beans to the cooperative and sells them. The going rate is 300CFA (about 60 cents) for 1 kilo of green beans – which works out to about 25-30 cents per pound. Once the truck is full, it heads back to Ouaga, and the beans are loaded on a plane that night, shipped directly to France, where they’re sold in supermarkets. As of this year, a lot of beans are also being shipped to Italy, where they’re being sold under the fair trade brand “Terra Equa”. Interestingly, Terra Equa’s web site says Burkinabé growers earn 80 euro-cents (about 525CFA or $1.05) per kilo for beans, despite the fact that all the farmers I’ve talked to say they make 300CFA per kilo.

So although 60 cents per kilo may not sound like much, it’s a lot of money around here. Except for a few areas in the south of Burkina, Kongoussi (and the surrounding villages) is the only place in Burkina that exports green beans, and they form a significant part of the local economy. Kongoussi has a population of about 25,000 – the green bean cooperative has about 6,000 members, which can give you some sense of the size of the industry here. At any rate, if you find yourself at a supermarket in France or Italy anytime soon, be sure to buy some green beans!

Traveling with the Parents

Back in January, my parents came to Burkina for two weeks. It was good to see the parents again, and was also fun to be able to be a tourist for a bit and see some parts of Burkina that I wouldn’t have gone to (or been able to afford to visit) on my own.

[First picture: this is where we stayed in Oursi.]

Their trip began with a day in Ouaga, mostly spent exploring the large urban park in the center of town, where Mom and Dad drooled over all the exotic birds. Then we went up to Kongoussi for a day – they got to see a bit of the town, meet a bunch of people. Feeling adventurous (and socially obligated in the situation), they even tried tô, the ground millet dish that, while the staple of the Burkinabé diet, is not exactly a culinary treat (nor is it particularly gentle on an unaccustomed digestive system). They also got a tour of the town – seeing the market, the credit union where I work, etc., and met some friends from my English club (who are always on the prowl for English speakers).

[Second picture: my parents, somewhere in the sand dunes of the Sahel desert. I love the cell phone tower in the background.]

After Kongoussi, our next destination was the Sahel, specifically a small village named Oursi in the very north of Burkina. We stayed at a small campement there, spending the nights inside a Tuareg hut. (The Tuaregs are one of the main ethnic groups that live in the Sahelian parts of Burkina – they are traditionally a nomadic people, so their huts are built of portable straw mats, unlike the more stationary mud-brick huts that are the norm elsewhere in Burkina -- see the first picture) While staying in Oursi, we rented camels and rode them out to the sand dunes, where we then hiked around for awhile. The sand dunes are amazing, though – they have a very Sahara-esque feel. Oursi is also home to an archeological dig (a large part of which was funded by the American government) and museum, which we spent an afternoon exploring. The site was essentially a village, from about the tenth century, which had been destroyed and burned by some unknown invader. It was fascinating to hear the explanations of how they figured various things out about the people who used to live there, and also kind of disturbing how similar their living conditions were to the people who still inhabit the area today. And, of course, Oursi is also a birding hot-spot – home to a large lake, where my parents spent a bunch of time staring off at who-knows-what with their binoculars.

[Third picture: My dad riding a camel. I hope this goes out on their Christmas cards next year.]

The other major destinations we visited were two national parks in the southeast corner of Burkina. The first is called W, and is actually a giant park spanning three countries: Burkina, Benin, and Niger. We stayed at a lodge in the park – right along the border – and used that as a base for animal watching day trips. There were tons of antelope, buffalo, something I’d never heard of called, I believe, a dyker, various baboons and monkeys, hippos, and a whole bunch of other assorted animals – our guide didn’t speak English, which sometimes made it a bit difficult to figure out what the animal off in the distance was that he was pointing to. Every morning, as we ate our breakfast, we watched baboons in a tree across the river eating their breakfast. And at night, we could hear lions making noise off in the distance.

[Fourth picture: My mom and Abga, our guide at W National Park.]

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any elephants at W. So we decided to spend a day going through a neighboring park, Arly, where the odds were much better of seeing some elephants. We arrived at the park about lunchtime, and stopped at the village that’s the entrance to the park. As we sat on a bench outside the guard station eating our lunch, a bunch of kids from the village came and started watching us eat (this is very normal – especially in more rural, remote areas, nothing seems to fascinate kids like sitting around and watching foreigners). Meanwhile, as the kids gazed intently at us, we were busy watching the large baboon who kept inching closer and closer to us. The kids kept asking us to give them our water bottle (which we eventually did), while the baboon was clearly eyeing our food (and our guide eventually tossed him some – so much for not feeding the animals). I found the whole thing very amusing just because for these village kids, seeing a baboon from ten feet away was nothing extraordinary, but seeing white people from ten feet away was. Anyways, after a little while driving around the park, we saw an elephant off in the distance, and got out and took the mandatory pictures. A few hours later, we stumbled onto an entire herd. However, initially we didn’t realize how big the herd was, so our driver stopped almost as soon as we saw them. This proved to be a mistake, as there were

some baby elephants in the herd, and the overprotective alpha male grew suspicious of this large SUV. So this large elephant began to approach us, waving its ears (which apparently is a sign that the elephant senses danger and is preparing to charge), and our guide frantically yelled at our driver to go, which he wisely did.

[Fifth picture: the baboon who came surprisingly close to us to try and steal our lunch. Not pictured: the children who were far more interested in seeing us than the baboon.]

And that, more or less, was my trip with my parents. We also spent a bit of time in Ouaga – found some souvenirs, took advantage of the swimming pool at the embassy, etc. They both seemed to enjoy their time here, and my mom especially seems pretty intent on trying to come back sometime or, save that, at least keeping in touch with some of the people she met here.

Traveling with Brian

Speaking of traveling around Burkina, my friend Brian from Pomona visited recently. His visit began with the obligatory trip to Kongoussi, including a tour of town (including the exciting green bean fields!) and taking tea with a friend of mine.

[Sixth picture: The Cascades]

Our next destination was Boromo, a town that marks the halfway point between Ouaga and Bobo. The city itself is nothing special, but we spent a day visiting a national park just outside of town. The Deux Balé Reserve is one of the best places in Burkina for seeing elephants (and the most easily accessible one – when my parents came, we rented a car and driver to visit the parks – but for Brian the med student and Chris the Peace Corps volunteer, renting a car was a bit out of our price range). We arrived mid-afternoon, and spent about an hour wandering around with a guide looking for some animals, but didn’t really see anything. The next morning we tried again, this time stumbling upon a dead cobra, then a large group of red monkeys running by in the distance, and finally, a herd of about a dozen elephants. Unlike when I’d been with my parents, we were on foot, with no car to jump into, so we tried to keep a reasonable distance between ourselves and the herd, especially given the fact that there were some young-uns in there. But the cool thing at Boromo was that we spent about an hour just following the herd, watching them eat and do whatever else it is that elephants do.

From Boromo, we went southwest towards Banfora. I’d never been to Banfora before, and was amazed by how green everything was down there. Kongoussi hasn’t had rain in about five months at this point, but clearly Banfora has. We borrowed some bikes from a few Peace Corps volunteers down there, and biked about 10km or 15km to the famous Cascades – a large waterfall. The waterfall was pretty cool – it had several different levels, and you could climb around the rocks and really get as close to any part of the waterfall as you wanted. From there, we walked to the Domes – the other big tourist draw in the Banfora area. The Domes are these huge rock formations – like the Cascades, you can just wander around on them, slowly climbing up to the top. The pictures I’m including here hardly do justice, mostly because you don’t get a real appreciation for their size. However, in one of these pictures, if you look closely, you can see a guy riding by on a bike, which should give you some sense of scale.

[Last two pictures: the Domes, near Banfora. The second one has a guy on a bike to the right of the large rock in the middle.]

From Banfora, it was back to Ouaga, where we visited the obligatory Artisan Village and embassy swimming pool, as well as going to Sunday mass at the Catholic cathedral in Ouaga – a place I’d never been before. The architecture of the cathedral was interesting – it was very clearly a cathedral, with large columns, statues of Mary, some buttresses – but it was also very African, with a roof of corrugated metal and a bizarre pink paint job. The cathedral was packed with people (and there were more outside), and yet among the hundreds of people there, we saw maybe half a dozen other white people – one of whom was the priest celebrating the mass.

Other Travels

So in addition to traveling with Brian and with my parents, in February I went and visited three other volunteers (Kara, Anna, and Leslie) that live near me – they’ve all been to Kongoussi before (two of them come pretty regularly), and I finally went and visited their villages (ostensibly, at least with Leslie’s village, to do a training on savings and credit clubs). Seeing their villages certainly gave me an appreciation for Kongoussi (which is definitely not a village), as well as for how different their living situations are from mine. Leslie and Anna are both health volunteers, and I got to help them with baby weighings, which are pretty chaotic – a group of maybe 60 women, all with at least one baby, in a space maybe 20x20 feet, all pushing to the front to try and get their baby weighed. There’s no concept here of forming an orderly line – the chaos gave it an almost refugee-camp feel. My job at both places was to write down the measurements while Leslie and Anna actually weighed the kids and handled all the communication (in Mooré) with the women. And despite the fact that I wasn’t actually handling the babies, a lot of them still managed to pee on me – “yeah, I never wear clean clothes on baby weighing day,” Leslie casually mentioned to me after the fact.

I also spent a weekend in Ouahigouya with Giorgio and David (two volunteers based in Ouahigouya) entertaining a group of three Germans whose foundation has just agreed to fund the cybercafé we’re starting at a high school there. This is exciting news, as we’ve been trying to get this cybercafé started for about a year and a half. I also went down to Ouaga for the end of Fespaco, the biennial African film festival, and managed to catch a few movies, including Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland, although both were disappointingly dubbed into French. (Blood Diamond’s “TIA” became “CCA” in French – Ca C’est l’Afrique.) And I went back to the U.S. for three weeks at the end of November, which was a nice little break from Burkina, as well as a golden opportunity to stock up on Skittles.

And Whatever Else

So this blog entry makes it look like I haven’t really spent any time in Kongoussi in awhile, which is not the case – it’s just that I haven’t blogged anything in several months. In fact, there was even a short period of time when I was suddenly prohibited from traveling – right before Christmas, when the police and military started fighting each other on the streets of Ouaga – which, luckily, blew over quickly. However, nothing terribly exciting has been happening recently in Kongoussi. Since coming back from America, I’ve been on a push to setup some savings and credit clubs – I’ve gotten at least seven new ones started, including one with some men, which is more-or-less unheard of. The hot season has finally started – I think it snuck in while I was traveling with Brian. The temperature is now regularly reaching 45 or 46 (113-115) on my thermometer in the shade during mid-day, and the harmattan winds that have been keeping things cool for the past few months have finally subsided. And I have about two or three solid months of this to look forward to. I’m starting to plan a few final projects before leaving in September. I’d like to do another computer camp at the high school this summer, which I’m starting to formulate the details of. And I’ve had several requests from friends in Kongoussi to teach some sort of English night classes, so I think I’m going to try to get started on that in the coming weeks. I still don’t have any idea what I’m going to do when I’m done with Peace Corps – I’ll leave Kongoussi around the end of September or early October. I’ll probably travel a bit at that point, and try to be home in time for Thanksgiving, and then… well, if you know anyone who’s hiring (or if you have a nice couch that’s going unused…), send me an e-mail.

November 13, 2006

Hello again! Yikes, been awhile since I wrote anything here. I’ve been unusually busy the past few months, and am currently preparing to go home for three weeks for Thanksgiving. So here’s a brief (well, compared to my other posts) update on what I’ve been up to the past few months.

Way back in September, I led a computer camp at the high school in Kongoussi. I had twelve students – most of them were students at the high school, but there were also a few random people from the community who showed up. None of them had ever used a computer before, so we spent a lot of time just going over very basic things (like spending a very frustrating two hours explaining the concept of “Caps Lock”). But by the end of the two weeks, they’d all mastered the basics – they could do a lot of stuff in Word, and could a lot of the little programs that come with Windows, like Media Player and Paint. Most importantly, they’d become comfortable using computers. Like most Burkinabé (and people in general, I suppose) who’ve never used a computer, they were incredibly intimidated by the machines at first, but now would feel comfortable going to a cybercafé or the high school lab again to work on something. The most frustrating part for me was the condition of the computer lab – I suspect that there’s someone in France who sends four computers to this high school every four years. So they had four relatively new, Windows XP machines, four older Windows 98 machines, and a wide array of far older machines. The oldest date I was able to find on a piece of hardware was a black and white monitor from 1986. A new group of Peace Corps trainees arrived in Burkina at the end of September, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with them. I communicated with several of them before they even arrived – Peace Corps gave out my e-mail address to all of them, so I spent much of September answering questions about what they should bring to Burkina. One of them asked me what sorts of things I always had shipped from people back in the U.S., and I told him Skittles – so he brought me a huge bag of Skittles. Several of them also read my blog before arriving, which was a little weird, since they knew an awful lot about me when they got here. One of them told me that after reading about my experiences during training, she had nightmares about coming. Ha ha. Anyways, I spent the week after my computer camp in Ouaga, along with everyone else involved in training the newbies. The training is taking place in Ouahigouya, and every week they have two current volunteers (one health volunteer and one small enterprise development volunteer) there, helping to lead sessions. I somehow got selected to spend two weeks there, including the first week, when I was constantly bombarded with questions. I helped facilitate several training sessions, including one on microfinance in Burkina (I’m currently the only volunteer working directly with a microfinance institution, although four or five of the trainees will eventually be working with credit unions like mine) and one on ICT (information and communication technology). After their first week in Burkina, the trainees spent four days visiting current volunteers, to get a bit of a feel for what we do and how we live. So I had a group of five come and stay with me in Kongoussi. I spent the four days showing them around town – touring the credit union and meeting everyone who works there, seeing the high school and meeting some people there, greeting various big-shots in town (the provincial governor, the mayor, the police chief, etc.), seeing my English club, and so on. Their favorite part was when the leaders of an animal-raising association I’m starting to work with came to my house and presented us with a gift of three live chickens. We took the chickens to a restaurant, where they grilled them in a delicious vinegar, garlic, and onion sauce. I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ouaga recently. I had to spend several days there for my mid-service physical. I’m surprisingly healthy for having spent a year here, with only one minor parasite showing up in one of the copious stool samples I had to submit. On the down side, I had to have a filling, but for some inexplicable reason, visiting a Burkinabé dentist was far less unpleasant than visiting an American one. I also spent a week in Ouaga for our mid-service training, which involved, among other things, a two hour visit and tour of the Ouagadougou landfill (where they do a lot of clever recycling and compost work – although we also got to tour the dump itself, and on a day when the wind was clearly working against us). I also spent a weekend in Ouaga exploring SIAO, a week-long artisan / arts and crafts festival which bills itself as Africa’s largest. And it was pretty cool – I went three days in a row, and never got tired of it. Just about every type of African handicraft imaginable was available there, from wooden elephant carvings to Tuareg jewelry to batik prints to leather goods to cashew liquor (with free samples!). It was especially interesting to see things that came from other countries – you can really appreciate the variation in styles between items from Burkina and those from somewhere like Rwanda or Congo-Brazzaville or Algeria. I’ve always hated haggling for prices, which you have to do to buy anything more expensive than a tomato. But I got pretty good at it during SIAO, and by the end was getting some good deals. Of course, I still managed to spend several hundred dollars (keep in mind that Peace Corps only gives me about $200 a month), but I now have lots of cool gifts for people when I come home. SIAO was also cool just because it’s one of Ouaga’s two big festivals (the other, the FESPACO film festival, is this February), so there was food I’d never seen before in Burkina (cotton candy!), and a very relaxed, party-like atmosphere all weekend. Last weekend, I returned to Minima, my training village, along with Giorgio and Omar, the two remaining volunteers from Minima. I managed to get a flat tire on the ride out, which Giorgio further destroyed while trying to patch, so we flagged down some kids passing by on a donkey-pulled cart, which we rode the last few kilometers into Minima. Everyone in the village was pretty excited to see us, and it was cool to see them again. It was also encouraging to see that a few things in the village had changed for the better – they now have transport twice a week, for instance. And my host family saved up enough money in the past year to buy a moped, so my host father can now get to Gourcy (the closest city) a lot faster than he could on his bike. And that’s it. See? I told you I’d keep this blog entry short. I’m back in Kongoussi now, and I’m heading back to Ouaga in a few days, and then next Monday (a week from today!) I’m flying back to the U.S. for Thanksgiving and to take the Foreign Service Oral Exam. I’ll be there for about three weeks, arriving back in Burkina on Dec. 13. Also, assuming all goes well, there should be two photos with this blog post – one is me at the high school with the computer camp participants. The other is me with my gift chickens.

August 10, 2006

Bonjour tout le monde! Yes, despite the lack of new posts here for the past four months, I am still alive and doing well. July has been busy – I was out of Kongoussi almost the entire month, and although I’m finally back here, have a stream of visitors coming through, keeping me somewhat occupied. So, like several people in Kongoussi, you might be asking, where have I been all month? (Unlike several people in Kongoussi, though, you’re probably not asking what I brought you from those places – at least I hope not.) Abby (my sister – although I imagine most people reading this already know who she is…) came and visited, and we travelled around Burkina a bit and also spent a week in Ghana. And after that, I spent several days up in Djibo, working at a Girls’ Camp with some other Peace Corps Volunteers. So for those of you who enjoy skimming, in this blog entry I’m going to write about Abby’s trip, then Girls’ Camp, and then just some miscellaneous other stuff, like coming back to the U.S. this fall.

Abby flew into Ouaga on the 5th of July. Her flight came in around 8pm or so, and I think she managed to be the last person from her plane to leave the airport, so I spent a fun hour or two sitting outside the Ouagadougou airport. And although she was concerned ahead of time that I wouldn’t be meeting her inside the airport, she did manage to find me. (Despite being the only international airport in this country, Ouagadougou International isn’t exactly O’Hare – it more resembles a Greyhound station than an airport in both size and sketchiness.) From there, we went to our hotel – during these first two nights in Ouaga, we stayed at the Hotel Delwendé, which also bears a striking similarity to a Greyhound station (although I tried to describe it to Abby as "just like the Ritz.") On the plus side, the Delwendé is conveniently located in the center of Ouaga, and has a nice outdoor, second-floor terrace where you can sit and people-watch. After dropping stuff off at the hotel, we walked over to Kwame N’Krumah, probably the nicest street in Burkina Faso and got some food. On the way back to the hotel, Abby asked me if all of Burkina looked this "run down," to which I laughed, since we were walking through the nicest, most developed part of the country – the one neighbourhood where you won’t find mud-brick buildings. We spent the next day bumming around Ouaga – we went by the PC hostel and office, the Ghanaian embassy to pick up my visa (if you ever find yourself in the Ghanaian embassy in Ouagadougou, avoid the woman at the front desk – she’s very bitchy, and in both French and English), and just wandering around centre ville. After I mentioned that there was a swimming pool at the American Embassy, we went and spent the afternoon lounging around the pool.

Following our two nights in Ouaga, we came up to Kongoussi. After dropping stuff off at my house, we went and explored the marché, where Abby bought some pagnes (cool African fabric that’s usually in bright colors), which we took to two tailors I know in town to get made into pants and skirts. Somebody (hint: not me) kept complaining about the heat, so once we made it back to the house around 11am, we (although I wasn’t really the one making the decision) decided not to go out again for several hours, but to sit in front of the fan in my house instead. During the two days in Kongoussi, we did a fair amount – she got a nice tour of town, got to see the caisse’s new building (although, since it was a Friday afternoon, just about everyone had gone home for the weekend already), had some Cokes with Nicolas from my English Club, had a beer with a couple of guys from the caisse (and, as I recall, got a marriage proposal from one of them – the previous day, I had received a marriage proposal from the young woman sharing our cab in Ouaga), and got to see the lake and take some nice photos.

After out short stint in Kongoussi, it was down to Ouaga, to catch a bus for Ghana. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get tickets for the one air-conditioned bus which makes the trek between Ouaga and Kumasi (Ghana’s second biggest city, about five hours north of the coast), which meant we got to make the 20-hour bus ride in a non-A/C bus. (We took the A/C bus a week later when we went back to Ouaga, and I think I actually preferred the non-A/C bus, because it only left one hour late, whereas the A/C one left about five hours late, and the non-A/C one made fewer hour-long stops in random cities throughout Ghana.) July seems to be a popular time for Peace Corps volunteers to be visited by their sisters, and so on our trip to Ghana we were accompanied by another PCV, Tim, and his sister Mary, who was spending the last of her six weeks visiting Tim in Ghana.

The border crossing between Ghana and Burkina is not the most efficient operation. Before the border, you get off the bus, and have to give your passport to some random guy who happens to be standing at the bus door. Then the bus disappears, and after an hour or so, with your concern steadily increasing, you begin trying to find your bus. You then begin to panic, because your see that your bus is starting to leave, but you are neither on the bus nor in possession of your passport. Finally, at the last second, as the bus begins pulling away, you find another random guy who now has your passport for some reason (none of these people have any sort of uniform or nametag to make them seem official), and get it back from him, and then jump on the bus. At least, this was our experience – I’m not sure if this is how it’s supposed to work. And this was just to leave Burkina – the whole process was repeated on the other side of the border. Although at least on the Ghana side, you could inquire in English as to the whereabouts of the passport you haven’t seen in an hour. Coming back to Burkina is an even less pleasant experience – your passport disappears for a good solid two hours, instead of just one. Also, you have to haul all of your luggage off the bus, then stand around for an hour waiting for a Burkinabé douane to come and inspect your bag (one guy searches all the bags, which is frustrating, as you can see his partner just sitting in a chair twenty feet away, enjoying his fan while you bake in the sun). The only thing that makes it worthwhile is the kid selling FanChoco at the border – FanChoco, for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, is a bag of chocolate milk that’s been frozen – it’s sort of like a delicious hybrid between ice cream and a fudgesicle.

Anyways, after leaving Ouaga around nine (we arrived at the station sometime before eight) in the morning, we arrived in Kumasi about three the following morning. We had to make it to Takoradi (another five-hour bus ride away) by that evening, since we had reservations at a place on the coast called Green Turtle Lodge. After checking into a hotel at three in the morning, the four of us decided there would probably be an early morning bus to Takoradi, probably leaving around six or seven. So after a few short hours in the hotel (I took a shower, but didn’t bother trying to sleep), we went to the bus station, where we learned that we could have taken a 4 a.m. bus to Takoradi, and now had to wait for a 10:00 one. So we wandered around Kumasi a bit, got some breakfast, and watched the classic, Oscar-winning Rob Schneider film The Hot Chick, which happened to be showing at the restaurant. (Tragically, we had to leave before seeing the exciting and, I’m sure, thought-provoking conclusion to the film.) So at ten we piled onto another bus, but after the day-long ride the previous day, the five hours to Takoradi seemed pleasantly short. From Takoradi, we then had an hour or so cab ride to Green Turtle Lodge, which included our cabbie ditching is in one random town and handing us over to another cabbie there, for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear to me.

Green Turtle Lodge is an amazing place, and a perfect model of what eco-tourism could and should be. The place is located right on the Atlantic coast, about a mile down the beach from a small fishing village. The accommodations are small huts, designed to blend in with the surroundings – but with slightly nicer amenities, such as a shower, composting latrine, and solar panels on the roof to run the lights in your room. You can lie in bed in your hut, with the door open, and watch the waves crashing on the shore fifty feet in front of you – pretty cool. They also had some great food – lots of fresh fish, and plenty of French fries for Abby. We spent two nights there, and spent our full day lounging around the beach – swimming, Frisbee, walking, etc. All in all, a very relaxing place to stay.

After Green Turtle, we took a bus along the coast to Cape Coast, which is a very picturesque city. For several decades, Cape Coast was the center of the British colonial government, and the whole city if full of old colonial houses and offices – built a hundred years ago, and fairly neglected over the past fifty years, but very colourful and interesting nonetheless. The combination of the coast, the architecture, and the hills all over the city gave it a very pleasant feel, and we spent a lot of time just walking around the city. We also visited the Cape Coast Castle, located right along the coast, which was once a thriving embarkation point during the slave trade days. One of the nice things about the castle was that, unlike castles or historical buildings in Europe, we had free reign of the building, able to go wherever we wanted (there weren’t any roped-off areas or anything), and there weren’t too many tourists, so you could have an entire wing of the castle to yourself. On the downside, though, a door knob came off a door that I was trying to open, and after that, Abby kept blaming me for destroying a World Heritage Site.

Following two nights in Cape Coast, we took a bus (yay! more buses!) back to Kumasi, and spent a day there. We spent most of our day in Kumasi wandering around the market, which was unbelievable. I’ve never seen a market so large or so full of activity – there were so many people that we often didn’t really choose where we went, we just had to go wherever the crowd was going. And we kept doing this for hours, without ever hitting the same part of the market twice. Kumasi’s market also has several DVD vendors, and unlike the guys selling DVDs on the streets in Ouaga, these movies are in English. Also, they’re unbelievably cheap. For a mere 60,000 cédis, that’s about seven dollars, you can buy a DVD that contains nine of last year’s top Oscar winners. Unfortunately, these DVDs are not guaranteed to work (I don’t think my Oscar one worked, but the Harrison Ford collection one, complete with all three Indiana Jones movies, did).

Overall, Ghana was great. The country is far more developed than Burkina. It’s still very poor, but very noticeably wealthier than it’s northern neighbour. Everywhere we went, for instance, most of the children we saw were in uniforms, on their way to or from school. By contrast, in Burkina, there students can’t afford uniforms, and not very many can even go to school – you’re far more likely to see kids herding goats or begging on the street than on their way to or from school. The buildings were nicer, too – not only were they generally made of concrete instead of mud-brick, but the Ghanaians can afford to paint their houses, making villages and cities far more interesting looking than the drab, muddy brown Burkinabé landscapes. And unlike in Burkina, the streets of Ghana aren’t full of faux types trying to sell you something or con you into giving them money. When you walk through downtown Ouaga, you can’t go ten feet without someone yelling, "Mon ami, le blanc…" and shoving their merchandise in your face. This never happened to us in Ghana. While Burkina makes you constantly aware that you stand out, Ghana gives you the illusion of blending in. If I were a typical tourist, I’d be far more comfortable in Ghana than Burkina.

Anyways, after a day in Kumasi, we got back onto a bus for another exciting twenty-some hour long adventure back to Ouaga (the first six or so of those hours were spent in the Kumasi bus station, trying to figure out where the hell our bus was, and trying to guess why it was five hours late). After a night in Ouaga, we went to Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina’s other big city. I’d heard lots of good things about Bobo, but was a bit disappointed – it’s really quite similar to Ouaga, just a bit smaller and with more trees (and thus, more shade). After a day bumming around Bobo, we headed back to Ouaga, in time for Abby to visit the Artisan Village to buy some souvenirs before catching her plane. The Artisan Village is a really interesting place – just about any sort of west African handicraft that you could imagine is available there. And, unlike just about anywhere else in the country that you try to buy artisanal products, you don’t have to haggle over the price (we learned, however, that you can haggle over the prices, but you then have to hide whatever you buy in a purse of backpack so that you don’t have to turn in the non-existent-because-the-transaction-is-under-the-counter receipt when you leave). After that, we did some packing, and then Abby flew out.

After Abby left, instead of going back to Kongoussi, I went to Djibo to help with a Girls’ Camp organized by some volunteers in and around Djibo. Girls’ Camp is sort of what it sounds – a week long summer camp for middle school girls. However, it’s not quite the same as working at Camp Webb. First of all, everyone was speaking French (or Mooré or Fulfuldé). Also, there was a lot more swearing on the part of the volunteers than you hear from most camp counsellors – we could say anything we wanted in English, since we knew the girls wouldn’t understand. The camp was held at a high school – we used two classrooms, one for the sessions and for eating and sleeping. And unfortunately, instead of Stacey’s lasagna, our meals generally consisted of rice and sauce. Also, no matter how high the temperature gets at Camp Webb, I’m pretty it was worse in Djibo. Perhaps the single greatest difference between Girls’ Camp and Camp Webb: in Djibo, we could go out for beer at night, after all the girls were in bed – of course, this was a bit of a problem the night when a storm suddenly moved in, and we had to walk back from the bar to the high school in the middle of the night, in the rain, with sand being whipped into our eyes by the ridiculously strong wind, only to get back and discover that one of our tents had blown away, and then spend thirty minutes wandering around blindly in the rain and wind looking for the tent.

The general point of the camp is to help empower the girls and give them the skills, knowledge, and encouragement they need to advance in life. There were several themes repeated throughout the week, such as "stay in school", "don’t get pregnant until you’re married", and "don’t get AIDS." The activities included things like meeting and questioning successful women in the community, performing skits about the effects of getting AIDS or becoming pregnant as a teenager, formal instruction on how to use a condom, and role-playing what to do if your boyfriend wants to have sex and not use a condom. I thought the sessions were pretty good, but it’s really hard to tell what kind of an impact they actually had on the girls.

After Girls’ Camp, I came back to Kongoussi for a few days, then went back to Djibo to celebrate one year in Burkina with some volunteers up there, and then went to Ouaga to buy some plane tickets. I somehow managed to passably muddle through the Foreign Service written exam, and now I have to take the oral exam, which gives me a good excuse to go home for a bit, and maybe even convince my parents to pay for the ticket. So I’m flying back to the U.S. on November 20, and then leaving O’Hare on December 10, arriving on Burkina on Dec. 12, with a 15-hour layover in Casablanca (Royal Air Maroc recommended getting a guest visa so I can leave the airport and see the city during that time). Royal Air Maroc also doesn’t accept credit cards, which means that when I went to make the reservation, I had to walk around downtown Ouaga with about twice the per-capita GDP of Burkina Faso in my pocket. (Also, for those of you with Visa cards: if you don’t use your card for a year, and then suddenly try to take large sums of money out of several ATMs in Africa, you’ll run into problems.)

I’m (hopefully) going to post two pictures here. One is of Abby and I in downtown Kumasi, Ghana. If you look closely, you’ll see lots of evidence of how Ghana is much more developed than Burkina, such as the fact that we’re on a paved sidewalk (I don’t think Burkina has a single sidewalk), next to a paved road, with cars parked on it. If not for the woman carrying stuff on her head in the background, you might not even guess it was Africa. I let Abby do all the photography while she was here – when she sends me a copy of all her pictures, I’ll try to post some of them. The other picture is from Girls’ Camp. You’ll notice a few people in the picture who don’t quite belong – those are the volunteers in and around Djibo, and also Marily, the country director for Peace Corps Burkina Faso. Also, since the girls look sort of miserable in this photo, please keep in mind that Burkinabé never really smile for photos.

Hello everyone. Sorry I haven't posted anything here in awhile. Abby comes to Burkina tomorrow, and we're going to travel around a bit and spend a week or so in Ghana. After that, I'll try and post something new and exciting here, maybe even with some pictures, since Abby loves taking pictures.

April 2, 2006

Bonjour tout le monde! It’s been awhile, or as they say around here, "Ca fait deux jours." This is a confusing phrase, since no matter how long it’s actually been since you’ve seen someone, they’ll say "ca fait deux jours," much to the confusion of a literal-minded Anglophone, who knows it’s been considerably longer than two days since our last encounter. I even had someone I hadn’t seen for awhile tell me, in English, that it had been two days.

The cybercafé where I’d been teaching classes, the best cybercafé in town – fastest computers, most reliable connection, cheapest, etc. – recently closed down, so I’m going to have to post this entry from a different cybercafé which I’ve started frequenting. Yes, that’s right, as a volunteer in the Peace Corps business program, the first business I worked with closed… but I don’t think it’s my fault. Kongoussi has a huge overabundance of cybercafés (this puts us down to two big ones) and very little demand. I at least managed to bring a few more customers in, which was exponential growth for this place – most days, Oscar (the manager) would be there from about seven in the morning until ten at night, often with no customers the entire time (or, just as often, I would be the only customer that day).

At any rate, assuming all goes well when I upload this post (this’ll be my first post at the new cybercafé), I’ll also be uploading a photo. It’s sort of a "Where’s Waldo" picture, except instead of finding Waldo, you have to try and find me. Hopefully, you won’t have too much trouble. If for some reason you need a hint, I’m the one with glasses…

So this picture is from this morning. The women all live in Loulouko, a small village a few kilometres north of Kongoussi, also situated along Lake Bam. The women recently received a nice donation from the Friends of Burkina Faso, a group of returned Peace Corps volunteers in the U.S., which has enabled them to begin a market gardening project – I think I mentioned it in an earlier post. There’s a huge bit of land in their village – several square kilometres – that, during the rainy season, is completely underwater. During the dry season, however, it’s dried up, and until recently has been unused. Thanks to the money they received from FBF, they’ve bought a pump and a lot of PVC piping, which they’ve used to irrigate the land. So they’re now growing all sorts of vegetables on this parcel of land – mostly onions, but also corn, black eyed peas (benga), some green peppers, and piment (little chilli peppers). There are about 70 women in the group (many of the women weren’t there today, and thus aren’t in the photo, because a child of one of the women had died this morning), and each has a 100 meter by 7 meter parcel that she’s responsible for. Whatever crops they grow will be sold at the market (mostly the market here in Kongoussi). The women are enthusiastic about the project, and stand to make a decent amount of money from it – I think each woman might be able to make between 50,000 and 100,000 CFA each season – that’s $100 to $200, which could easily double the annual household income of many of these families. That’s enough to send a couple of their kids to school or to buy medicine for a sick family member. (While talking to the women in Loulouko, I learned the French word "semence" – the French-English dictionary defines this as "semen", but I think they used it to mean "seed." At least that’s what I hope they meant…)

Anyway, to help make this project a little more sustainable, and to increase the potential benefits from it, I’m going to try to establish some savings and credit groups among the women. I’ve already explained the concept of savings and credit clubs to some people back home – if you’re one of them, feel free to skip the rest of the paragraph, where I’m going to explain them. So… any economist or businessperson will tell you that one of the keys to economic growth and development is access to credit. However, in poor countries like Burkina Faso, rural peasants cannot easily obtain credit – after all, no bank is going to loan money to someone with no income, no education, and no collateral. This makes it virtually impossible for village farmers to expand their economic activities into anything beyond subsistence agriculture, and therefore makes it impossible for them to escape abject poverty. Most rural folks have therefore become dependent on aid from their government and western development agencies as their only possible chance to escape poverty, which creates a dependence which, in many ways, further stagnates any potential growth. Savings and credit clubs, which have become very popular and very successful in developing nations over the past twenty years, attempt to correct this problem. They provide the poor with a way to generate credit among themselves. The basic concept is very simple – you get together a group of 7-10 women. Every week they meet, and each woman kicks in a little money – maybe 100CFA (20 cents). After a few weeks of this, the group has a large enough sum of money in the pot (maybe 5,000 CFA – 10 dollars) to start granting loans to the members of the group. There’s a fixed interest rate – usually 10% – and the loans are generally short-term – maybe one or three months. The groups rely on "social collateral." Before a woman receives a loan, she has to explain to the group why she wants it – so the women only invest in projects where they expect a return. Furthermore, there’s a tremendous social factor to the groups – all the women live in the same village and have known each other their entire lives – and nobody wants the stigma on them of not being able to pay back a loan, and the group won’t accept as a member a woman whose history might make her a bad investment.

So anyways, I presented this idea to the women in Loulouko this morning, and they seemed pretty excited about it. Since they’re going to be drastically increasing their own incomes through the market gardening project, they like the idea of being able to make this money go even further. They also envision using small loans from credit and savings groups to make the market gardening project last – for instance, they can use group loans to buy new wheelbarrows or gardening tools. I’m trying to find a Mooré-speaking woman to come and help the groups get started (since the groups don’t function well with more than 10 people, I’m hoping to setup 3 or 4 of them in Loulouko). There’s a Burkinabé guy who works with an NGO in town, who arranged the FBF funding for this project, who’s been translating for me, which is great, partly because he takes whatever I say in my broken French and turns it into something amusing and entertaining in Mooré. I’ll say something like "Ca me fait content d’être ici" – "I’m happy to be here" – and when he translates this into Mooré, he somehow gets a laugh out of the women. This is great, as I’ve never been a particularly good public speaker – now suddenly whatever I say includes some sort of well-timed and culturally appropriate joke, all with no effort on my part. If only he could translate from English to French with the same effect I’d hire him to follow me around wherever I go.

In other news, I’m now working on generating some long-range financial projections for the bank. Not sure how I got involved in this, as I really don’t know much about "portfolios" and that sort of thing, and certainly not in French. But it means I spend most of my time at the caisse using this needlessly-complex software developed by an IMF-funded group, which requires me to find such obscure statistics as the accumulated depreciation since 2004 on all the office furniture owned by the bank. Not only is this sort of statistic fairly inapplicable in Burkina Faso (I don’t think anything ever depreciates in value here – I’m still regularly served beer in bottles that were proudly manufactured in Haute Volta, a country which has not existed for 20 years), but no one at the caisse has ever tried to generate such an obscure figure, nor is there really any good place to start trying to determine such a number. And yet, unless I enter some sort of value, this silly IMF software won’t tell me how many loans we can expect to distribute in 2009. Frankly, I don’t really see a connection between the two.

Quite unexpectedly, Burkina Faso continues to be hot. I’m beginning to understand why they call this the "hot season." About one p.m. every afternoon, after riding my bike home from work in the hot sun, I try to guess what temperature my thermometer will read – I’m getting pretty good at this game, and by guessing 110, I usually manage to be within about three degrees one way or another. I then go inside, strip to my boxers, point my fan at my bed, and take a nap – this is called the "repos" in Burkina – the three hours in the afternoon when everyone goes home and takes a nap. It’s a fantastic custom, and one which I hope to bring back to the U.S. with me. There was a total solar eclipse here a few days ago – sounds like west Africa was the best place in the world to see it. I didn’t know about it ahead of time, and was fairly confused when I woke up and it was pretty dark outside, despite the sun being out. I just assumed there was a lot of dust in the air again – there’re a lot of days when it seems like it’s cloudy, even if there’s not a cloud in the sky, just because of the sheer amount of dust and sand blowing around.

I’m going to Ouaga next weekend to take the Foreign Service Exam. I don’t expect to pass it, but am interested in seeing what it’s like, and then maybe retaking it next year (with the hope of passing it then). During a training session at the embassy a few weeks ago, we had a session at the embassy, where a Foreign Service Officer told us what it’s like working for the Foreign Service. He made it sound pretty sweet, and now a whole bunch of volunteers are going to take the test. I think it’d be pretty fun to work at an embassy – I wouldn’t mind living somewhere like Ouaga, and pretty much any other city in the world with a U.S. Embassy (well, not Baghdad or Kabul) would be at least a few notches above Ouaga.

Well, that’s about it for now. A bientôt.

Except for a few bits about the weather and various epidemics headed this way (or already here!), this entry is mostly about prostitution. Enjoy!

February 11, 2006

I don’t know about you, but I spent much of my evening in front of a television watching the sporting event of the year. Just about everyone else in Kongoussi was doing the same thing. However, the sporting event we were watching was probably different from what you were watching. I don’t think anyone around here knows that the Olympics are going on right now (I’m not even sure when they start), and it shouldn’t be a big surprise to learn that the Winter Olympics have never been a major attraction here (to the best of my knowledge, Burkina does not yet have a bobsled team). For the past few weeks, Burkina has been entranced with the Coupe d’Afrique - the African Cup of Nations - the continent’s largest soccer tournament. Burkina didn’t qualify for the event, so most people have been cheering for Côte d’Ivoire - Côte d’Ivoire is sort of like Burkina’s big sister, what Burkina could be with a bit more money and an ocean. Also, just about everyone in Burkina has family or friends working in Côte d’Ivoire at the moment (the regular influx of Burkinabé workers is, as I understand it, one of the major reasons for the political instability that has plagued Côte d’Ivoire for the past four years). At any rate, Côte d’Ivoire has a pretty good team, and tonight, the final game of the tournament, pitted Côte d’Ivoire against Egypt. Unfortunately for Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt hosted the tournament, so they had a bit of a homefield advantage. And after 120 point-less minutes, Egypt won the shootout at the end, 3-2.

In other news, I’ve joined an English club. The class is led by a very friendly primary school teacher here in Kongoussi (whose name, unfortunately, I don’t remember at the moment - I’m horrible with names here), who speaks about the best English I’ve heard from any Burkinabé (even better than some of the Burkinabé employed by Peace Corps). We meet every Saturday afternoon, and it’s an interesting experience, for several reasons. First, it helps me learn French - although everyone is supposed to speak English the entire time, there are inevitably some English words that people need translated to French, and the English words they don’t know tend to be the same words I don’t know in French, so we both learn them. But even more importantly, it provides an interesting glimpse into the Burkinabé mindset.

Today, for example, our topic was prostitution. (Last time, we discussed several issues, including poverty, pollution, and women’s emancipation.) Before the meeting, one of the club members had written up a two page document explaining what prostitution is, what causes it, and some possible solutions. About 70% of the document was completely incomprehensible. In some places, I could tell where he had directly translated some sort of French or Burkinabé idiom into English, and others places where he clearly looked a word up in the dictionary and just took the first French equivalent it listed, regardless of what part of speech it was, etc. I think my favourite part, however, was the opening line. Much like any good, clichéd American speech, he wrote that “the dictionary redheaded defines prostitution…” After a few seconds of staring at this sentence confusedly, I realized he must have been using a Larousse dictionary (and perhaps Babelfish or something similar? If so, he’s a pretty high-tech Burkinabé).

Anyway, I found the discussion to be fascinating. Everyone in the club is pretty well-educated - there’s one or two high school students (I think they’re in terminale - the last year of high school), and most of the rest are teachers, who have at least a high school, if not university, education. As soon became clear, however, I was apparently the only one of us with a liberal arts education. The document that the one member had written made a distinction between the “Ghanaian” and “Nigerian” forms of prostitution (both English speaking countries, I noted), and implied that prostitution didn’t really exist in Burkina, except when these loose Ghanaian and Nigerian ventured into Burkina. After awhile, the leader finally convinced everyone to admit that prostitution was not merely a Ghanaian or Nigerian phenomenon, that there were Burkinabé and even Bamoise (first time I’d heard that word - it means someone from Bam, the province of which Kongoussi is the capital) who engaged in prostitution. This admission was a fairly major breakthrough.

We then discussed the sources of prostitution. I made what I thought to be a logical argument that generally prostitution is caused by poverty. Although there was some support for my theory, there was far greater support for the “TV causes prostitution” theory. As best I could understand it, the gist of the argument was that there are more TVs in cities than in rural areas, and there are also more prostitutes in cities than rural areas. Unfortunately, assuming that “causation” and “correlation” had not yet entered their English vocabulary, I chose not to respond to this claim. There was also a general consensus that women who engage in prostitution suffer from some sort of mental illness. The final question, which began as something on the lines of “Think you this day or another it could legalise prostitution?” which we cleaned up to, “Do you think prostitution should be legal?” The general consensus was that prostitution is bad, immoral, shameful, and spreads HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and so yes, of course, it should be illegal. There was one other person (besides myself) who tried to present an argument in favour of legalizing prostitution. His argument consisted of “there are countries in the world where homosexuality is now legal, so why not legalize prostitution?” Someone else mentioned, to appalled horrific gasps, that homosexuality had just become legal in South Africa within the past month. This line of reasoning was quickly shot down. Finally, I gave my two cents, and mostly for the fun of it, argued that Burkina should legalize prostitution. Since it’s impossible to eliminate prostitution as long as there’s poverty, if you legalized prostitution, you could more easily enforce condom usage, and thus minimize the spread of STDs. After making my case, I waited for them to boo me out of the group. Luckily, that didn’t happen, although I think it was primarily because they had no idea what I said - except for two or three members of the group, they all seem to find my American accent impenetrable and incomprehensible.

At any rate, next Saturday is my turn to lead the group. They asked me to bring in some American songs that we can try to understand and interpret. (A few weeks ago we spent the meeting listening to and translating Bob Marley lyrics - they love Bob Marley.) So now I’m trying to go through the handful of cassettes that Mike left me (there’s no way I’m going to bring my iPod and computer speakers to play music for them) to find some songs that have interesting, coherent, and fairly simple lyrics. Unfortunately my choices are a bit limited - I had to rule out both the Bob Dylan tape and the Pearl Jam tape for the sole reason that I can barely understand what they’re saying (as best Abby and I can tell, Eddie Vedder sings one or two words in every song, such as ‘alive,’ ‘betterman,’ or ‘Jeremy spoke’ and then just mumbles his way through the other three to five minutes of the song) - so there’s no way I can expect the group to understand what they’re singing. This leaves me with Paul Simon’s Graceland album, U2’s Achtung Baby, an R.E.M. album, and a Tracy Chapman tape. And I’m having trouble finding any songs with interesting lyrics - after discussing the sources and possible solutions to prostitution this week, it seems like a bit of a step down to discuss “You Can Call Me Al.” And I have to bring three songs.

Anyways, nothing else particularly noteworthy going on. I went to Djibo this week (in the bank’s very nice SUV) for a day for a workshop explaining the bank’s services to rural farmers. It was pretty interesting, since these farmers have really no concept of what credit is, and most of the session was spent explaining credit in the simplest terms possible. The workshop also confused me more than most things in Burkina do, because it allowed me to be confused in three languages, French, Mooré, and Fulfulde, instead of the usual two. And although I managed to follow just about everything in French (the coordonnateur used his simplified, dumbed-down for the peasant-folk French, which I can follow without much difficulty), I was quite happy to discover that although I couldn’t understand anything in Mooré or Fulfulde, I could usually identify which language was being spoken (which is pretty good since, especially with farmers, I sometimes can’t tell if someone is speaking French or Mooré - and then there are the times when people try to impress me by speaking a sentence in English, but I’m not expecting them to speak English, so I get really confused, and look pretty dumb for not being able to recognize my own language).

Winter, such as it exists here, seems to be rapidly coming to an end. Several weeks ago, while in Ouaga, I bought a thermometer. Oddly, although there were several thermometer models, only one of them went up to 50°C (122°F) - the others only went to 40°C (104°F) for some inexplicable reason. With considerable foresight, I spent the extra nickel and bought the 50° one - this turned out to be smart, as I wouldn’t have known what temperature it was all this week had I purchased the 40° one. So far, the highest temperature I’ve recorded with the thermometer on my front porch is 116°F, but everyone assures me that this still isn’t that hot. Perhaps instead of the 50°C thermometer, I should’ve just gone with a meat thermometer. And speaking of meat and poultry, I hear that bird flu has shown up in northern Nigeria, and according to the BBC World Service, experts expect it to spread. Luckily, Niger presents a nice little buffer between Burkina and Nigeria.

February 21, 2006

Not much to write about today, but I think I’m going to try and post the last entry later today, so I figured I should probably write something new and current here. So, let’s see… I’ve heard rumors that the bird flu over in Nigeria has spread to Niger. At the moment, however, bird flu is not the disease Bamoise are concerned about. There’s been a fairly large meningitis outbreak here - as best I can tell, the epicentre is in a village called Nasseré, about 30 or 40km from Kongoussi, but it’s quickly spread throughout the province. This weekend, they were giving shots to people at the market (it was the vignt-et-un, the major market that’s held every three weeks, to which tons of people from all over the province come to Kongoussi. And, according to my neighbour, they’ve started distributing shots at the schools, too. Luckily, Peace Corps gave me a shot for meningitis back when I arrived in Burkina, or at least I’m hoping they did.

I’m trying to get my “formations informatiques” going again at the cybercafé down the road. It now sounds like Oscar, the guy who used to manage the place, is definitely not coming back. But there are still people interested in the classes, and I think I’ve finally convinced the woman who’s now running the place that the classes are a good idea.

It cooled off quite a bit this week. After two weeks of plus-100 temperatures, the Harmatan winds I’ve been hearing about for so long arrived. There was one day last week when it was really windy all day - I’d guess sustained speeds of around 15mph, but with some strong (maybe 40mph?) gusts - enough to knock over the wooden table on my front porch. And since it hasn’t rained in about four months, all the roads are dry and dusty. So with the wind, everything just became a mess - while sitting in my house, I frequently had to take my glasses off and wipe the layer of dust off of them.

In case anyone has been sending things to Ouaga, I haven’t been there in about a month, but am heading down there this Friday. We have in-service training - Peace Corps brilliantly abbreviates this conference to IST, which is the French equivalent of the English acronym STD, thus causing people to look at me weird when they see “IST” sprawled across my calendar for a week - and this from the guy promoting legalizing prostitution!

In this month's episode: Chris travels around Burkina to celebrate the holidays, then tries to finish the etude du milieu in three weeks, instead of the expected three months. Along the way, he leaves a trail of dead animals, ranging from mice to partridges, does a lot of "biking", and investigates the mysterious disappearance of a friend in town. Also, the last few paragraphs are all pretty nerdy, so you might want to skip over them.

Also: I went to Ouaga this weekend and picked up all the Christmas packages -- I've never seen so many Skittles in my life -- what a beautiful sight! Thanks to everyone who sent something.

January 7, 2006

It looks like it’s been about three weeks since I last wrote anything here. I’ve been traveling quite a bit, both for the holidays and for "work", and I’ve also managed to get a few productive things done here in Kongoussi.

Ouahigouya

Ouahigouya is the third largest city in Burkina, with a population pretty close to Green Bay, the third largest city in Wisconsin. (Interestingly, the second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso, has a population close to Wisconsin’s second city, Madison, while Ouagadougou and Milwaukee are both in the neighborhood of a million people. Weird.) It’s also by far the largest city in Burkina Faso to host a Peace Corps Volunteer, Giorgio (who attentive blog readers will remember as one of the two other remaining survivors from Minima). Giorgio wants to create a new cybercafé in Ouahigouya - the city already has a few, but they’re often crowded, and there’s definitely a market for more. So I visited him for a few days before Christmas to see what it would take to set one up.

After several hours talking to various people from the mayor’s office to the high school, we found two interesting things. First, one of the biggest cybercafés in town was run by a local high school. The place was incredibly popular, and students flock there every day between and after classes. Since it’s the cheapest cybercafé in town, students from other high schools go there, too. Furthermore, they’re churning out a decent profit - the monthly cost of the operation, including their 128K ISDN line and two employees, is under $300, while they bring in more than $400, netting at least $100 a month - a pretty good profit for a business around here. The second interesting thing we learned was that there’s another high school in town (with over 2,000 students, the largest high school in northern Burkina), which has a computer lab full of very, very old machines donated by a western development agency. Although decrepit (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Pentium I slowly chugging along with Windows 95), the computers work, and can run a web browser. After talking to the principals of both schools (who happen to be good friends, and also are both English teachers, although for our benefit refused to speak to us in English), it seems like we could turn the old computer lab into a cybercafé. Furthermore, we want to gear it towards the students, offering a reduced rate for students to encourage them. Even if it’s not as successful as the other high school’s cybercafé, it should still be able to sustain itself, and hopefully use whatever profit it generates to buy some new machines before the current ones die completely. And if we can get this up and running, there’s a lot of potential for some computer training and education at the place, too. All in all, it was a very productive and encouraging trip, and I got a delicious five-course meal and a good amount of beer out of the trip.

Christmas in Burkina

Before talking about my Christmas, I want to talk a bit about the holiday season here in Burkina Faso. In theory, everyone in Burkina is either Muslim, Christian, or animist. In reality, just about everyone is a mixture of the three - for instance, a man might go to church on Sunday and then come home to his wives. And it seems like every family has different policies regarding the consumption of alcohol (some Muslims refuse to drink, some hold quite the opposite view; most Protestants don’t drink, but there’s certainly some who still love their Dolo). And there are certain superstitions that just about everyone follows. Although it makes it difficult to categorize people as belonging to one religion or another, it makes for a pretty cool society, devoid of the religious tension you often find in the U.S. (there’s pretty much no proselytizing, either, except by the occasional European or American missionary).

The point of all this is that Christmas is not as big a holiday here as it is in the United States - here, New Years is the big holiday. Aside from the obvious religious reasons for Christmas not being as significant in such a syncretic society, there isn’t the gift-giving tradition that exists in the U.S., for the reason that people don’t really have the money to shower each other with gifts. However, there’s a two-week long period, starting before Christmas and ending a few days after New Years, when school is out, and just about everyone in the country seems to be on vacation (which is why you shouldn’t riding the bus the day after New Years - more about that farther down). In a very politically correct manner, nobody here says "Joyeux Noel" - it’s always "bonne fête".

Although Christmas trees are rare (I’ve seen one or two businesses in Kongoussi that have them - that seems to be about it), there is a cool holiday tradition which I discovered here. In Christian households, a few days before Christmas, the children construct a nativity scene outside the door to their family’s courtyard. Some of these nativity scenes are very crude - a foot-tall manger built out of rocks. Some are pretty complex, five or six feet tall and well constructed (I’m going to try and take some pictures and post them along with this blog entry). The scenes are always painted in white, making them very noticeable, and making town a bit more festive. I was pretty excited when these things started showing up around Dec. 22 or 23, since up until then, I had seen absolutely zero indications that Christmas was coming - it’s hard to feel like Christmas when there’re no Christmas decorations, no Christmas carols, and it’s 90 degrees, sunny, and dusty all the time.

Christmas and New Years

My Christmas, meanwhile, was spent in Ouaga. I spent two nights at the Peace Corps transit house, where about 15 other volunteers were staying - most of them the Girls Education volunteers from my stage (of the 10 people from my stage there, I was the only one not in Girls Education and Empowerment - but they’ve now dubbed me an honorary member). We made a huge Christmas feast, and despite my limited culinary talents, I somehow was made responsible for the main dish, lasagna (I handled the vegetarian one while Natalie made the meat-a-licious one). I was much more excited to be helping with the egg nog, which was quite tasty, albeit a bit heavy on the rum.

This was my first Christmas not spent with the family, which was a bit weird, but I talked to them on the phone for awhile, which was great. Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun, even if not particularly Christmas-y.

I had to come back to Kongoussi the day after Christmas, since my bank brilliantly decided to schedule some important meetings during the week between Christmas and New Years. Not really wanting to make two trips to Ouaga in the course of one week, I decided to go up to Djibo for New Years. The whole Bam-Soum (my province and the province north of me) crew was there - seven volunteers in all. Everyone was pretty tired on New Years Eve (most of them arrived the day before and had pre-partied on Dec. 30 - I was tired from the ridiculously long and pointless meetings at the bank - can you imagine sixteen hours of meetings over two days, which among other things, resulted in a 40-step protocol for buying paper clips? In French?), and we somewhat reluctantly stayed up until midnight and then crashed. The following night, however, we had a more festive evening - making our own tortillas, we decided to have a huge Mexican dinner feast - delicious. I took the bus back to Kongoussi on Jan. 2, as did everyone else in the country, apparently. On the ride to Djibo, there was a dearth of seats, and I was forced to sit on top of a bag of beans or rice that was sitting in the aisle - it was actually pretty comfortable. On the ride back, I got to the bus station early enough to get a seat, but there were a good 20-25 people stuck standing. (The next day, they ran two buses on the route.)

The Following Week

Since I arrived in Kongoussi at the end of October, I’m supposed to have been working on an "étude du milieu" - a background study - of my host organization (the bank, URCBAM) and the community in which I live (Kongoussi). This report is supposed to be completed by the end of the January, and although I’ve had two and a half months to start on it, I didn’t really make much of an effort to start until this week. The research for the étude consists primarily of interviewing people at the bank and around town, and this seems to have been a poor week to choose to start doing these interviews, as most people were out of town or in transit, finishing their Christmas and New Year’s breaks. And this week isn’t going to be the best, mostly because Tabaski, a huge Muslim holiday, is on Tuesday, so people will once again be unavailable - everything will be closed on Tuesday, and all but the most orthodox Muslims will be hungover on Wednesday.

This means that this week has been a bit frustrating and unproductive. I spent a lot of time sitting around at the bank not really doing anything. And I spent a lot of time trying to hunt down some people in town that I want to talk to. For instance, there’s a certain Mr. Harouna who I want to speak to, and three days in a row I went looking for him, only to be told he was "en congé" and that he would return tomorrow.

Luckily, after wasting most of the week, I felt productive yesterday and today. I have two new students for my "formations informatiques" - computer classes - at the cybercafé. They’re both younger, and quicker learners than the gendarme. But the class is a bit frustrating nonetheless - they’ve never touched a keyboard or mouse before, but both want to start e-mailing people. Trying to teach someone how to setup a Yahoo e-mail account when they can barely move and click a mouse is a bit trying at times, and the frustration is compounded by the fact that I only nominally speak the same language they do. Nonetheless, they’ve now got e-mail accounts, have e-mailed each other, and seem pretty happy.

I’ve also done a lot of work on the house over the past two days. I finally cleared out the last of Mike’s stuff - mostly a lot of old medicines and old magazines. The magazines disappear almost the instant I put them outside in the trash heap (within minutes, about half a dozen kids and one old woman were rifling through the stuff I’d tossed, taking almost all of it). The old medicines had to go down the latrine - it’s the only way to keep the kids from taking and eating them. I’ve also done a hell of a lot of dusting and sweeping (I bought a broom!), bought some new shelves, some pagnes to liven the place up a bit (and keep out some dust), and am working on assembling a couch out of some old foam mattresses.

And today I almost got to go rabbit hunting. My next door neighbor enjoys rabbits, and also enjoys hunting them, and invited me with him today. He knows a farmer in a village about 10km from here who does rabbit hunting, and we "biked" over there this afternoon. (On an unrelated note, Peace Corps prohibits volunteers from riding motorcycles like the one my neighbor owns.) Unfortunately, the guy wasn’t around, so we didn’t get to hunt any varmints. But I did get to see a lot of the countryside around here that I haven’t seen before. I got to see the other side of Lake Bam, and was amazed to discover an enormous church on a hillside over there - there’s a Catholic order in town that owns a huge tract of land, containing a school, a convent, and this massive church - I think the place is about the same size as the Catholic cathedral in Green Bay. It seems very out of place here.

January 25, 2006

So, I still haven’t uploaded my last entry, and really have no excuse for that, short of sheer laziness. Granted, I haven’t been frequenting the cybercafe very much recently - two reasons, really. First, I’ve started using the Internet connection at the bank - there are other employees who use it for personal business, why shouldn’t I? However, the more disturbing reason I’ve stopped frequenting the cybercafe is because the guy who runs it has disappeared. So, I know this guy (Oscar) fairly well - I’ve been teaching classes at his cybercafe, and am usually in there every two or three days checking my e-mail. So about two weeks ago, after I’d finished teaching one of my classes, he pulled me aside and asked for money. And not just a little money, but 200,000CFA ($400), which he explained he needed to tide him over until the end of the month. As patiently as I could, I explained that I didn’t have that much money (Peace Corps gives me something like 120,000CFA per month - why he needed 200,000, I don’t understand - seems a bit fishy). He was very apologetic, but I still went home that night kind of pissed - feeling a bit like the guy had been so nice and friendly with me just so he could get some money out of me eventually. At any rate, about two or three days later, he left town, and hasn’t been back since. I’ve asked around a bit, and no one seems to know where he went or when he’s coming back. Huh. I’m hoping that he’s just in Ouaga (his brother is a doctor there, and Oscar might be there trying to hit his brother up for some cash), but I really don’t know.

That’s really the most exciting thing going on. I’ve spent most of my time at the bank over the past week helping them design a new logo (ha! I’m now the resident artist at the place!). And last weekend, I "rode my bike" to Loulouko, a small village a few kilometers north of Kongoussi, along with a guy from an association in town. (In another unrelated note, as of about a week ago, Peace Corps Burkina Faso has a new moto usage policy, which allows volunteers to ride motorcycles / mopeds in some situations.) There’s a women’s group in Loulouko who is asking for funding from the Friends of Burkina Faso, an American group composed primarily of returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Burkina. The women’s group engages in maraîchage - market gardening. They have a huge tract of land, divided into parcels of roughly seven by fifty meters, and each woman in the group gets a parcel of land. The land is about 200 meters from the shores of Lake Bam, and they have a pump which irrigates the land. They’d like FBF to help them expand their operation at Loulouko, and help another group also start a similar setup. They’ve got a pretty good setup going, and the women are really into the work, and it sounds like it generates some much-needed income for them. They’ve asked for my help in, among other things, improving their composting techniques, which I don’t feel entirely qualified to do (my knowledge of compost is limited to my mom’s three large Darth Vader masks in the backyard).

Turns out I have another PCV neighbor. Anna, who lives in a small village about 30km away, recently discovered that, using some back roads, she can bike to my place in under three hours, and it’s closer than Kaya (the major city she’s been going to to stock up on food and other things not available in village). So she’s visited twice in the past month, and will continue to visit pretty often, so that’s cool. That now gives me two Americans within 50km!

I see I wrote about Christmas and New Years last time - I guess I should write about Tabaski now. Tabaski is, theoretically, a Muslim holiday. As best I can tell (I heard a few other, less plausible stories about the origin of the holiday), it commemorates when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac, and at the last minute called the deal off. But Abraham was now in the mood to do some slaughtering, so he killed a sheep instead. (However, I thought that Muslims traditionally traced their lineage to Abraham’s other son, which makes this holiday seem a little odd.) At any rate, the main things everyone does on the holiday are (1) not go to work (yay!), (2) slaughter a sheep, and (3) spend all day traveling around town visiting everyone they know, eating a little sheep along the way, and (depending on what type of Muslim they are) have a few beers. And I took part in all three of these activities - although I personally did not slaughter a sheep, I spent half an hour watching one being slaughtered, and I soon learned what those disgusting white pieces of mutton were that always come on the brochettes here are (here’s a hint - it’s not fat, like I had been hoping). The guy who did the bulk of the butchering offered me the testicles, saying it was the best meat (you wouldn’t think it, but offering someone goat or sheep testicles is a very generous offer - I’ll keep this in mind when Christmas shopping next year), but I politely declined. I also got to eat some pork (the only pork I think I’ve had in Kongoussi, despite the pigs that are always in the street) at the house of a Christian family. What better way to celebrate a Muslim holiday than by eating pork and drinking beer? At any rate, Tabaski is my new favorite Burkinabé holiday, easily beating the historically ambiguous "Independence Day" celebrated in December.

Speaking of slaughtering things, I finally got the mouse that’s been terrorizing my house for weeks. The bastard had the nerve to eat my precious cheese. Also, my neighbor has started bringing me home assorted wild game from his friend the hunter, so over the past two weeks I’ve cooked guinea fowl, a partridge, and a wild rabbit. I wasn’t wild about the rabbit, but the birds were pretty good, one of them making a delicious chicken-salad-like concoction.

And moving on to things that are not dead: every month or so I pull out my iPod to see if it’s still dead. Yesterday, I tried hitting the thing a few times first, and now it works! It even still had all my music on it! Guess I have to cross that off the list of Minima casualties, and perhaps also take Steve Jobs off my hit list. And while we’re talking about billionaire geeks who are no longer on my hit list, I should mention Bill Gates. He seems to be the most famous American in Burkina (everyone here knows Bill Gates and George Bush; the only other Americans they seem to know are Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan). Kind of interesting how different his reputation is here than in the U.S. Everyone here loves him because (1) he’s loaded, and they want to be him, and (2) he gives a lot of money to African aid. And while he may not believe in the concept of free software, everyone in Burkina does, which is why I think every computer in this country is using the same Windows product key - in Burkina, Windows is, more or less, a free product (as is Microsoft Office). I’m now running the French version of Windows (interesting side note for Pomona ITS folks: although the ubiquitous serial used here for Windows XP doesn’t allow you to install SP2, the French version of Windows used everywhere here does accept the Pomona product key, which I sadly still remember). I’m also now using the French version of Office, which is why some spelling mistakes probably creeped in here - not only am I now using the French keyboard layout, but the French version of Word defaults to the Great Britain English dictionary, not the American, so these mysterious "u"s keep showing up in words like labor. Not that I write that word a lot. But you get the idea.

January 27, 2006

Good idea: Taking an entirely oral language like Mooré and also making it a written language.

Bad idea: Using mostly Roman characters for the Mooré alphabet, but also making up two entirely new characters that, as best I can tell, are some sort of hybrid between Roman and Arabic characters.

Easy: Writing Mooré by hand (well, assuming you actually know the language, which I don’t).

Hard: Writing Mooré on a computer. Because some of the characters don’t exist. Even in Unicode, which includes thousands of characters from the Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets. Luckily, the lowercase nu in Times New Roman looks pretty similar to one of the letters (only in Times New Roman, of course, the Arial one is no good, and the character doesn’t exist in most fonts), and the Arabic Noon Ghunna also comes fairly close. Also, the lowercase Cyrillic Pe in Arial comes pretty close to the mysterious E-like character in Mooré.

So I spent most of yesterday creating a poster advertising a new service at the bank (it lets you access your URCBAM account from other banks in cities like Ouahigouya and Ouagadougou, where URCBAM doesn’t have any branches). After making the French copy of the poster, and getting the Mooré translations of the French phrases, I was told that the Mooré one would have to be done by hand. This sounded ridiculous to me - why couldn’t we do the Mooré poster on the computer, I naively asked. I spent the next two hours browsing through fonts in the Windows Character Map, trying to find these bizarre Mooré characters. And although the exact characters don’t seem to exist anywhere, I managed to find characters that were close enough, and the people at the bank thought this was amazing. (Interestingly, the French version of Windows comes with a slightly different set of fonts than the American version, including such fonts as "Akhbar", "Diwani", "Farsi Simple", "Gautami", "Kufi", and "Mudir", all of which contain neither Roman characters nor those two damn Mooré characters.) My next step is going to be creating some macros in Word to insert these characters (I had to copy each character individually from Character Map every time I wanted to use them) so people can start creating Mooré documents here.

Greetings from Kongoussi, and a pre-emptive Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (or, as the giant lights at Espace Watal produly advertise year-round, "Happy Year") to you all. A quick synopsis of what you'll find in this entry. December 12: Independence Day (maybe?) in Burkina; continuing to be hated by other PCVs for having an A/C office; visitors to Kongoussi / rant about Burkinabé restaurants; Lonely Planet Guide to Kongoussi. December 15: Murder; butchery; going postal. If you only have time to read one, I would go with December 15.

December 12, 2005

Happy Fourth of July! That’s right - it’s Independence Day here in Burkina, which for some odd reason, they don’t celebrate on the Fourth of July like we do. Although, in true American fashion, they also don’t actually celebrate the holiday on the day they’re supposed to, waiting instead to celebrate it on some day when they can get off of work. So Independence Day was actually yesterday, but since yesterday was a Sunday, today is the day of celebration and, by extension, no work. Even more confusing, after doing a little research, I have no idea why today is Independence Day. Burkina (then called Haute Volta) gained independence from France on August 5, 1960, and I can’t find any major events in Burkinabé history that have happened on December 11. So maybe I should’ve gone into work today… whoopsie…

In other work news, I got myself a desk at the office. I don’t technically have a desk to myself, but between me, the secretary, and the four branch managers, there are two desks in the office - and the branch managers are usually at the branches, not at the central office where the desk is. So I more or less have my own desk, which is a huge step up from before, when I had to sit in the reception area (which consisted of a wooden bench) next to the teller’s window in the foyer of the bank. Oh, and did I mention, I managed to arrange for my desk to be in the one air-conditioned office in the building? URCBAM (the central office of the bank where I work) is nearly finished with the construction of their new office building, which looks a bit larger and quite a bit nicer (when completed, I think it’ll rival only city hall, the Catholic church, and the fancy new hotel for the title of Most Aesthetically Pleasing Building in Kongoussi). Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my own actual desk in the new building. And more importantly, I hope I get to remain in an air-conditioned office. The patron (CEO-like-guy) of the bank assures me that the style or material or something of the new building will make the whole thing almost as cool as an air-conditioned building (implying that most of the building will not be A/C-ed), but I don’t entirely believe him. From my perspective, people here seem to have a very skewed sense of temperature. Although it’s starting to get to me too - last night, I put on a sweatshirt (the last time I wore anything with long sleeves was the same sweatshirt, on the flight from Paris to Ouaga on August 2), and checked the thermometer - it was a frigid 77 degrees. Brrrrrrr. I think the air-conditioned office at the bank probably maintains a temperature somewhere between 85-90, but it sure feels nice.

I’ve had a bunch of visitors recently - I managed to have four visitors in a one-week span, which was a pretty good record. Rose came up for her site visit (Rose is the SED APCD - essentially my boss at the PC office in Ouaga - and has to visit every Volunteer sometime during their first three months at site). Karen, one of our two medical officers, also made her annual site visit. She brought with her some parmesan cheese (yay!) and a flu shot (less yay!). And Michelle (a Volunteer in some tiny village a little ways outside of Ouaga) came and visited one night, and Kara came down from Bourzanga the next. Allow me a minute to explain how restaurants work here in Burkina: there are usually two or three items available on any given day, and there are only about six dishes total that you ever find at a restaurant (Tô, rice with peanut sauce, rice with tomato sauce, benga, couscous, soup de poulet ou poisson). The chef makes up a big batch sometime early in the day, and they keep serving the same food all day long until it runs out. Thus, if you go to a restaurant too late in the evening, you may have only one item to choose from, or none at all. Kongoussi, luckily, has at least two places I know of where you can get food that’s not the standard Burkina restaurant fare. The problem is that you have to order well in advance, as Michelle and I learned as we tried to find dinner. Espace Watal, probably the best and most popular restaurant in town, has a surprisingly large menu. Of course, you would never know they even had the menu, since they have one written copy of it, and keep it locked in a drawer. They have several varieties of pizza, “coq au vin”, and even cheeseburgers. After several minutes discussing the menu with the cook, we learned that you really needed to order these things about three days ahead of time - the dishes all required food that wasn’t available in Kongoussi (like cheese), and the cook had to order the stuff from Ouaga. The other place in town that has a larger variety of food is a restaurant by the cultural center. The cook there, Janvier, can make quiche, pizza, poulet yassa (a Senegalese dish I’ve never tried), etc. Luckily, he only needs a few hours notice to prepare these dishes. On the downside, he wasn’t in town the day Michelle came to visit. Fortunately, he was back the next day, so Kara and I split a quiche and a pizza. I might try and work with this guy, doing some sort of advertising. There are plenty of people in town (mostly other white folks, but also some Burkinabé) who would be interested in eating these meals - if they knew it was possible to get them. I only know because Mike told me, and it took him a year of asking around to find this stuff out. And speaking of food, I’m putting on a decent amount of weight. I think I’m about back to where I was weight-wise when I arrived in Burkina.

In non-food news, I continue to explore Kongoussi, and am constantly amazed by what I find. A few weeks ago, I decided to try taking a different route to work, bypassing the main road in town. And I found some pretty amazing things on the route. In addition to a very impressive-looking mosque, I found a large cemetery. Many of the graves are above ground - wooden planks with sand and dirt in the middle - they almost look like sandboxes. The graves are marked with hand-painted wooden signs - the first one I inspected up close was for a man who had died within the past week - I didn’t inspect the signs as closely after that. But the most intriguing part of the cemetery is a building located adjacent to it. It has a large sign that says “Maison de Misericorde” [in English: “House of Mercy”]. Right next to that title is a large Israeli flag, and the word “ISRAEL” pained in large blue letters. Directly above this sign are three crosses. The crosses on an Israeli building confuse me a bit, and I’ve never actually seen anyone in or around this building, so I can’t really find out more about the place. On the other side of the cemetery is a large pond - as I pass by every morning (I’ve started taking this route to work regularly), there are always a couple of men down there making mud bricks in the pond. But there’s a peninsula that extends out into the pond, and in the middle of it is a large, natural arch - just like the ones you see in southern Utah. It’s absolutely huge, beautiful, and is just a few blocks from my house. It’s amazing what you find when you take the back route.

December 15, 2005

“En arrivant, nous avons trouvé trois corps.” Upon arriving, we found three bodies. “A côte du corps de CISSE Lama, il y avait quatre étuis de la pistole automatique 38 spéciale.” Next to the body of Mr. Lama Cisse, there were four shells from a .38 automatic pistol. I slowly recounted the scene to the gendarme, pausing every few words as he dictated my description. Tonight was the second night in a row that I’ve recounted the gruesome details of a murder to a gendarme. And I’m pretty sure there’ll be several more of them in the near future - it makes for a pretty fun and interesting evening.

So, as you can see, things are going well here in Burkina. So, to explain… I’ve started teaching some “formations informatiques” - computer training - at the cybercafé near my house. The sessions are one-on-one, and so far I’ve only had one student (although I have another starting next week). He’s some high-up guy from the local gendarmerie (in Burkina, the gendarmerie is the national force that lies somewhere between the police and the military), and he’s never used a computer before. He wants to learn how to do two things - (1) check and send e-mail, and (2) type up criminal reports. And he can now do both, albeit a bit slowly, but he’s progressing pretty well for being an absolute beginner. For our past two sessions, in order to teach him the basics of Word (as well as the basics of using a keyboard and mouse), he’s been bringing in old criminal reports, which I dictate to him and he types. So far, we’ve done two year-old murders, and he’s been quite pleased at the end when he gets to print off a report that he typed up, formatted just like the official reports that go across his desk all the time.

He’s getting a lot out of our sessions, which makes me (and him) happy. But I’m really getting a lot out of these sessions - first, it’s giving me some practice in how to teach “formations informatiques,” which I anticipate leading a lot of over the next two years. Second, it’s great for my French. I’m learning all sorts of vocabulary that I never learned in any French class. For instance, I can now form such sentences as “she discovered the dismembered body after noticing the unusually potent odor coming from the latrine.” I don’t know why Peace Corps (or Madame Rittenhouse, my high school French teacher) never taught us that kind of useful sentence. It’s also helping my pronunciation - as I dictate the reports to him, he’ll correct my pronunciation if it’s bad - I think he’s the first people to actually correct my pronunciation (everyone else just stares at me blankly, oblivious as to what I’m saying), which is incredibly useful. I’m also getting to learn about the criminal justice system here, knowledge which I hope to never need to apply. But if for some reason I ever do, it’s nice to know that I now have a friend at the gendarmerie.

And while my French vocabulary for homicide-related words continues to grow exponentially, I recently discovered that my vocabulary was severely lacking when it comes to words you might use at a barbershop. And as a result of this deficiency, I’m far closer to being bald then I’ve ever been before. Yesterday, after at least five months without a haircut (I don’t know when I last had one, but it was in the U.S., which puts it in at least July), I decided to get it cut. I’ve been putting it off, hoping to find another Volunteer to cut it, but that’s never quite worked out, mostly do to my own forgetfulness. Although there are plenty of barbers in Burkina (I pass at least half a dozen on my way to work every morning), they all know how to do exactly one male haircut - they pull out the electric razor and shave everything off. This wasn’t quite the look I was going for, so when I went to the barber yesterday, I explained (at least I thought I explained this) that I wanted it short, but not completely shaved. Demonstrating with my hands, I said I’d like it maybe 5 centimeters long. Apparently, all he heard was the word “centimeter” and not the number five. So I still have a very, very thin layer of hair. I’m not upset or anything - I kind of like it, actually - it’s much cooler, temperature-wise at least, than before. Also on the plus side, I should be able to get away with going another year before needing to do this again. The only bad part of the experience was after he shaved my beard (I hadn’t shaved in around a month or so), he poured something on my face that I really suspect, from the smell at least, was straight whiskey. Having never used an aftershave in my life, I was amazed at how much it hurt for a second or two.

I recently gained a new appreciation for the U.S. Postal Service. I had several things I needed to mail back to the states, a stack of about 10. I went to the Post Office and, needing stamps, went to the counter and asked to buy stamps for 10 airmail envelopes to the U.S. The clerk nodded, took the letters, counted them three or four times, and then pulled out a piece of paper where he started doing some arithmetic. Then he disappeared into the back room for a few minutes with the envelopes, and then came back and resumed the arithmetic. He continued doing arithmetic / journeying to the back room for several minutes, before finally disappearing in the back room for good. Then someone else - apparently the manager of the post office - came out from the back and invited me into his office, asking what I needed. I explained what I thought was a simple request - 10 stamps - and I even knew how much the stamps should be. Then he started doing some arithmetic, and after a minute or two switched over to a calculator. He told me how much it would cost (I’d figured out the 830x10 some minutes earlier), and I said that was fine. He then opened a safe, from which he pulled out a large folder, which he hunted through looking for the right stamps. Unfortunately, Burkina doesn’t have any one stamp for 830CFA, you need at least four stamps to make that sum - that’s what all the arithmetic was, trying to figure out how many of each denomination of stamp to give me. Even more unfortunate, Burkina doesn’t have self-adhesive stamps, and they certainly don’t have those cool things that USPS has that print some special label in lieu of a stamp. So I spent the next 15 minutes affixing the stamps to my letters. All in all, I probably spent an hour at the Post Office. Even with the ever-present line at the Claremont Post Office, I don’t think I ever spent more than 20 minutes in the building at one time. And now we’ll see if these things actually make it to the U.S…

That’s about all I have to write about today. Not sure when I’ll post this, or when I’ll next post - I’m going to be traveling a bit in the coming days. Next week, I’m going to try taking a bush taxi over to Ouahigouya to meet with some people over there about starting a cybercafé. And within a day or two after coming back to Kongoussi, I’m going to head down to Ouaga for Christmas. In the meantime, if for some reason you’re really desperate for more Peace Corps Burkina Faso blogging action (which I doubt you are), Kara (my nearest neighbor) has a blog at http://inbfbf.blogspot.com, which also has some links to some other Burkina PCV blogs.

These pictures are of my house -- they're explained in more detail below. I hope you all appreciate these pictures -- it took me 45 minutes of swearing at Blogger to get them up here, and I still can't get the last one to show up. Anyways, without further ado...

November 26, 2005

Hello again! Sorry I haven’t posted anything (or even written anything) in awhile - I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been busy, but that hasn’t really been the case. I’m now about one month through my first three months at Kongoussi, during which time I’m not really supposed to do much work - I’m instead supposed to be working on my "etude du milieu" - background study - where I just talk to people and see how things work at my bank and in the community in general. Then, from this etude, I’ll determine what projects I want to work on over the next two years.

By popular request, since this is a pretty long post and I’m sure you’re all much busier than I am, here’s a Cliff’s Notes version of this blog entry - I’m writing this summary in the same order as the rest of the text here, so if you see something here in the Cliff’s Notes that sounds interesting, you should be able to find the expanded version of it pretty easily: I’m working at a credit union here in Kongoussi, and right now am mostly just talking to people there and figuring out what everyone does and how the place functions. I’m also starting to discover some possible secondary projects, including working with a cybercafé here in Kongoussi, a funded project to build an irrigation system for a women’s group north of Kongoussi, and working with other Volunteers in Burkina to setup cybercafés in their towns. My daily schedule is pretty loose here - in addition to maybe an hour or two at the bank each day, I wander around striking up conversations with people, explore the infinite abyss of the market, and try to learn to cook. I’ve also done some work on my house - adding furniture, shelves, and general cleaning. And during my first month in Kongoussi, despite being under "lockdown", have traveled to Djibo (100km north of here), and been to Ouaga twice, including for Thanksgiving. So that’s 5,000 words condensed into 150 words (hooray for Word’s word count) - keep reading for all the details.

I’m not sure where to begin - perhaps I’ll talk a bit about the various places where I’m currently / eventually working. My official primary project is working with the "Union Régionale des Coopératives d’Epargne et de Crédit du BAM" - or URCBAM for short (Bam is both the name of a large lake on which Kongoussi is situated -- the largest natural lake in Burkina -- and the name of the province that Kongoussi is the provincial capital of). It’s a microfinance institution in the form of a credit union. They have four major branches called COOPCEC (Coopérative Communautaire d’Epargne et de Crédit). The largest of these four branches is here in Kongoussi, located right next to the headquarters building (siège) of URCBAM. (Helpful language note: I tend to use the word "caisse" to describe the bank - banks and credit unions are generally called "caisse populaires" around here.) The name of the caisse pretty much says it all - they do two major things: savings and credit. In many ways they function similarly to the way a credit union would work in the United States (or so I imagine, knowing very little about banks in America). The main differences are, I think, the increased level of bureaucracy here involved in taking out a loan and the fact that all the loans here are far, far smaller. I have seen requests for loans for as little as 1,000CFA - two dollars. It seems like the cost of the paper necessary for granting such a loan would make it very unprofitable to grant one of that size. Most of the loans are larger - I think most are probably somewhere between 25,000CFA and 500,000CFA - between $50 and $1,000. The smaller ones usually go to individuals or families, and also sometimes to women’s associations who want to start a new endeavor. The larger loans go to established businesses in town. Eventually, I will (probably) be doing a lot more work with debtors, especially with those unable to repay their loans, but for now I have only a cursory understanding, and so can’t give you any real examples of the types of things people use these loans for. At any rate, there’s a bunch of red tape you have to go through to get a loan - approval by an Agent de Crédit, approval by the Comité de Crédit, and for big loans (3,000,000+ CFA) you need the approval of the coordonnateur (director) of the caisse. The maximum amount they’ll give someone for a loan is 5,000,000CFA -- $10,000 - but I don’t know of any cases where they’ve given out that much. Keep in mind that the average annual household income in this country is around $200-$400 (slightly higher in cities like Kongoussi, but lower in rural areas, where many of the members of the credit union live).

I haven’t spent that much time at URCBAM so far. At this point, I’m mostly just interviewing people there - trying to figure out what everyone does, their basic policies, how things actually get done. And I’ve also managed to fix some more computer problems for them. I’ve also been reading some of their policies and other documents, and recently discovered something interesting. They’re in the middle of a four-year plan, being funded by some outside source (I think it might be some subsidiary of the IMF, but can’t really tell - I need to ask about this), in which they’re making some major improvements. The most visible of these changes is a new building at the headquarters in Kongoussi, as well as new buildings at each of the COOPCECs. The buildings are currently being constructed, and I can’t get a clear answer on when they’ll be done - probably because no one knows - and even if someone did give me a date, I’m sure it wouldn’t be done until several months afterwards - this is what they call Burkinabé time. At any rate, this four-year plan has three major components, one of which is to develop an automated information system for tracking account activity as well as the caisse’s own income and expenses. Mike got them to start putting some stuff in Excel, and I’ll probably continue doing some Excel training, but within a year or two (according to their timeline, this happened several months ago - ha!) they’ll have some sort of comprehensive software package installed. And, the part I just learned, is that they also plan on hiring a full-time IT guy (or, according to their plan, they hired him this past summer). This, of course, has not actually happened yet, but I want to find out a lot more about this - one of the reasons I ended up in Kongoussi was because there was a lot of potential for IT stuff here, so I want to see what the deal is with this automation process.

I’ve also got some other (potential) projects shaping up. The biggest one so far is working with the guy who runs the cybercafé by my house. He really doesn’t know what he’s doing, and I’m trying to work with him and train him (and his brother) how to manage the computers there. When I arrived in Kongoussi at the end of October, a technician from Ouaga had recently been there "fixing" the computers, and as a result, there was only one computer with working Internet access (out of six in the place). The technician couldn’t return to Kongoussi for several weeks, so the cybercafé was running with only one functioning computer. Within thirty seconds, I had all six working again (Janvier - the guy who runs the place - seemed amazed that all you had to do was check the "Share Internet Connection" box). Since then, I’ve been trying to teach him some of the very basics of networking and troubleshooting. He’s also expressed interest in moving his own financial records onto the computer, so I’ll probably start teaching him Excel sometime soon.

I’ve also become sort-of tangentially involved in a funded project. The Friends of Burkina Faso - an organization that, as far as I can tell, is composed entirely of returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Burkina - is considering funding a project in some villages north of Kongoussi. The project consists pretty much of building an irrigation system so that a women’s group can grow vegetables (mostly onions) there a lot easier. The group overseeing the project here has asked the Friends for $4,500 in funding, and the Friends have said that one of the stipulations of receiving this money is to work with the closest Peace Corps Volunteer. I’m not sure what exactly I’m supposed to do here, except perhaps make sure they actually use the money to build the irrigation system.

I’m also looking into at least two projects outside of Kongoussi, working with other volunteers. Giorgio and I plan to create a cybercafé / computer lab in Ouahigouya. Despite being the third largest city in Burkina (probably about 3-4 times the size of Kongoussi), they only have one decent cybercafé (Kongoussi has four), which usually has a line. So we’re going to work with the high school, try and get them a decent computer lab, and then find and train some students on how to run a small computer lab. Giorgio’s been doing a bunch of research over there, and seems to think we can make this work pretty well - I still don’t know enough of the details, but plan on heading over there sometime in the next week or two and learning more. Elizabeth, in Ziniare (another fairly big city, close to Ouaga - although I’ve never been, it’s supposed to be a pretty well-developed and well-funded city - oh, did I mention, the president of Burkina comes from Ziniare?) says that her host organization has a large, unused building that would be perfect for a cybercafé. Her counterpart, in fact, was involved in setting up the first cybercafé in Ziniare, and thinks that creating a new one would be a great way for his organization to get some funding (right now, their only source of income appears to be from the government). Several other volunteers have talked to me about setting up cybercafés, but these two seem like the most promising ones.

So what’s a typical day in Kongoussi like for me? Excellent question. The day begins around 9am or so, whenever I get around to waking up (occasionally, I have things scheduled much earlier in the morning, or if I’m traveling somewhere have to be up by about 6am to get the bus, but these are rare occurrences). I head out to the latrine to bucket-bathe, have a little food, and usually head out into town. If I have something planned at the caisse, I head down that way (it’s on the far south edge of town, about a 15-minute walk, if one walked straight there without stopping, from the centre ville area where I live). Everywhere I go, I stop and talk to people. Part of it is just the culture here - when you pass by someone, you stop, shake their hand, ask them how they’re doing, how’s the family, how’s the work, etc. And sometimes I stop for a few minutes and just shoot the breeze. At any rate, I’m probably at the caisse by 10:30 or 11:00 and then maybe interview someone, maybe help someone with an Excel question, maybe just talk to people a bit. Around noon, it’s sieste time, so the bank closes (although some of the top people and the secretary usually stick around until 1 or so). I often eat lunch at a small kiosque right next to the caisse that makes tasty sandwiches of either meat or fish. A meat sandwich consists of mystery meat (usually goat or lamb, occasionally beef) ground up and served inside a loaf of bread (the main type of bread here is called "pain local" and is kind of like a really, really bad baguette - there’s one place in Kongoussi where you can get a different type of bread, something actually resembling French bread, although the quality at this place is still sort of hit or miss). I think the closest thing to it in the U.S. might be a 50-cent soft-shell taco from DelTaco, but with just the meat part, no cheese or lettuce or seasoning. If I’m not down by the caisse, I often get lunch at the marché, where there are at least a dozen women selling benga. Benga is one of my favorite Burkinabé dishes - it’s nothing more than black-eyed peas and rice mixed together, usually with some piment (hot pepper) added. In Kongoussi, they usually also throw in some spaghetti with the benga, which makes Kongoussi benga way better than the benga anywhere else in this country. The best thing is how cheap it is - marché benga costs 100CFA, about 20 cents. Hamidou’s meat and fish sandwiches at the kiosque by the caisse are 150CFA - 30 cents. Sometimes I feel like splurging for lunch - if I’m by the caisse, I’ll go to Espace Watal, one of the two best restaurants in Kongoussi, and get some frites (French fries), for 400CFA. Or if I’m not down by the caisse, I’ll head to Restaurant du Rond Point and get some ragoût, potato chunks in a tomato sauce - quite tasty.

After lunch, I begin my busy sieste schedule. This usually begins with a visit to Ambience, a buvette in the heart of the city, where I sit and enjoy a nice cold Coke, while either talking to the women who work there (one of them speaks a bit of English! - I think she must be from Ghana) or reading. Afterwards, I often head to the cybercafé next door and either spend some time online or spend some time helping Somé fix his computers. Then I usually head to the marché or supermarché and pick up some food for dinner. There are a number of useful (and more expensive) items that you can’t buy anywhere in Kongoussi except the supermarché, such as cookies, canned corn, canned ravioli, several types of pasta, and Nutella clones. Don’t let the name supermarché fool you - the place is no larger than a small gas station convenience store.

The marché is a large, sprawling maze of small kiosques and stands - visiting the marché is always fascinating - you never quite know what you’ll find - and there’s really no experience like it in the United States. I usually pick up some vegetables for dinner - right now, we have tomatoes, red onions, green onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, yams, manioc (another tuber - despite all these tubers, we don’t have potatoes, although I think we’ll get them in another two months or so), cabbage, eggplant, green eggplant (I don’t think this vegetable exists in the U.S., and with good reason, it’s disgusting), hot peppers, green peppers, and "spinach" - green leaves from some tree - it’s definitely not real spinach. And as of a week ago, we now have carrots in Kongoussi - I was so excited when I first saw them in the market that I stocked up, and have actually had to throw out some carrots. We have a bunch of fruit available too - watermelon is everywhere (you don’t have to buy an entire watermelon, luckily - for 25CFA you can get a slice from one of the watermelon street vendors), guavas, papaya just showed up (like watermelon, you can buy just a slice), some sour fruit called "weda" that’s not very good, bananas (they’re always green here - in Ouaga you can get yellow ones), oranges (like the bananas, they too are green - I think they’re a completely different type of orange than the ones in states - they taste like a hybrid between an orange and a lemon). And there’s things like beans, rice, flour, millet, and sugar that are always available.

Anyways, after the marché, I wander back to my house, and by around 5:30 or 6:00 start on dinner. Burkinabé usually don’t eat dinner until 7:00 or 8:00, but I like to start early so that if my attempt at cooking becomes a disaster (as happened when I attempted refried beans), I still have plenty of time to head out to a restaurant. I’ve managed to prepare several decent dinners for myself - they usually involve some sort of tomato sauce, such as pasta with tomato sauce or a bean chili. When I was in Ouaga a few weeks ago, I picked up some soy sauce, and since then I’ve become very fond of my fried rice. I don’t actually add chicken (I have yet to actually cook with meat), and eggs are surprisingly difficult to find here, given the number of chickens running around everywhere (and the number of roosters cockle-doodle-dooing at 4:30 in the morning). I’ve bought eggs three or four times, and only once were the eggs not spoiled. I’ve been told that this isn’t egg season, although I must admit I’m a bit confused as to how there is an egg season. Anyways, there’s plenty of decent food around, occasionally even in my own kitchen, so I’ve been eating fine, and I think put back on a bit of the weight I lost in Kongoussi. Not that you could tell by looking at me, as I still have that same emaciated figure I’ve always had.

I’m slowly getting to know some people around town. I really like my next door neighbor, Dembele - he’s an English teacher at the high school in town (very convenient to have an English speaker next door), and he’s been helpful helping me get settled in. I’ve spent a bunch of time with Wilfrid and Hannita, a Dutch couple in town working for a German NGO (they’re Dutch, so their native language is Dutch; they work for a German NGO, where they have to speak German with their superiors; they work in a French speaking country, and regularly speak in French here; and they speak to me in fluent English - it’s pretty amazing). I’m also meeting some non-English speakers - my French is slowly improving, but I still have trouble with the really-fluent French speakers (the most-educated people, like those working at the bank). I don’t have too much trouble with the people I just stop and talk to while walking around town, and have managed to have some decent conversations, like one comparing American and Burkinabé politics. And I’m slowly picking up a few words of Mooré - there’s a tailor down the street who tries to teach me a word or two of Mooré every day. And I surprised a woman at the market the other day - she didn’t speak any French, and wanted to tell me the price of her carrots, so she called over a kid and explained the prices - and I understood the prices in Mooré perfectly, and when she asked me if I spoke Mooré (Fo wumbda Mooré?) I could answer "bilfu-bilfu" - a little bit. As always when I try to use Mooré, this got a good laugh. Although people in Kongoussi are pretty used to having nassare (white people) around, they’re not used to meeting one who knows even a word or two of Mooré.

My house is starting to feel a bit more like a home. It’s pretty big, so I kind of feel this need to fill it with things, an urge which I try hard to resist. After spending a week or two cleaning the place out, I added some furniture - a bed, desk, and dresser. I also tried to rearrange the living room a bit, using a large metal canteen as a coffee table with some chairs scattered around it. I’m trying to decorate the walls with some maps that Mike left me, and made a bulletin-board-like-thing using a natte (hard to describe - imagine an oriental rug made out of strands of cheap plastic) and some cardboard, and I’ve started posting pictures newspaper clippings that people have sent me on the board. I made some changes in the kitchen - put a bigger table in there so I have a bit of counter space, turned a curtain-holder thing that wasn’t being used into a spice rack, and put a bunch of nails on the walls to hang up my two frying pans and cutting board. And after seeing Ami’s place in Djibo, I decided to copy her idea of little triangle shelves in the corners of the rooms - they’re small, triangular shelves that just rest on three nails - so simple even I can add them to my house. Or so I thought - most of them have ended up pretty crooked, and not evenly spaced. Oh well.

I’m including a few pictures of the house in this entry (assuming I can manage to upload these pictures…). The first is of the outside of my house. The building I’m in is called a célibatairium, and is considered fonctionnaire housing - the nicest type of housing available, short of being a high-ranking government official or a western NGO worker (Peace Corps doesn’t count). There’s four houses in the building - I’m in the second one from the left - the one with screens over the windows. About where I’m standing to take the picture is where the latrine is. The two-foot-tall mud brick wall right in front of me is the poubelle - where we dump our trash. When I was cleaning Mike’s stuff out, I dumped tons and tons of things in there, and they all disappeared almost instantly - lots of neighborhood kids came and took the stuff. There’s a family down the street that sells these little sesame gateau cakes that are delicious - I buy five of them whenever I walk by - and they always wrap them in paper (plastic bags or any sort of real wrapping would be way too expensive). I was a little surprised one day to discover that the paper they were wrapping the cakes in was some Peace Corps document, no doubt from my trash. This constant looking-through-the-white-guys-trash is also why I can’t throw out all of Mike’s expired medicine that he left here - that all has to go down the latrine. The second picture shows my living room. You’ll see my nice dresser back there, and the chairs sitting around the canteen - this is where I sit and eat when eating at home. The one wooden chair with a cushion is pretty uncomfortable (I actually have three of those chairs total) - the two green ones are pretty nice, though, and great for sitting in and reading. The fan in this picture is the crappy old broken fan - I bought a much nicer one (the new one is great - it has three speeds on it, but I’ve never even turned it past the first one, because that’s powerful enough - this’ll be very nice once the hot season starts). The wood thing in the left foreground is a bookcase. Currently, one and a half shelves are full of books, half of one is full of cooking supplies that don’t fit in the kitchen, and one is full of random crap. The third picture is the other side of my living room. As you can see, I have wooden screen doors (no one in this country has screens except for foreigners) - between the screen doors and the screens on the windows, I don’t get many bugs inside, which is good, since I don’t use my mosquito net (it’s too small for my bed, as seen in the bedroom pictures). The two big blue trash cans are full of water - although it’s possible to get running water in Kongoussi, it’s prohibitively expensive. So every couple of days, I pay a kid 300CFA (60 cents) to fill up the blue bins with water from a pump nearby. The two buckets are very multi-purpose - I use them for bathing in the morning, for washing dishes, and doing my laundry. The big white thing is my water filter - this is the $250 PentaPure system that Peace Corps issues to all Volunteers in the country. The pump water in Kongoussi seems to be fine - I drink frequently when I’m eating out - but I only drink the filtered water when I’m at home. The mattress on the right side of the picture is one of the two foam mattresses I have here, just in case I ever have visitors for a night (so far, I’ve had one - Kara, the PCV in Bourzanga, about 50km north of here and my closest PC neighbor). The fourth picture is my bedroom. I love my bed - it’s a real spring mattress (you can’t buy that sort of thing in Kongoussi - it’s from Ouaga). Peace Corps gave me a settling-in allowance of 100,000CFA ($200), all of which (plus a bit more) I spent on the bed and mattress. But they’re pretty comfy, and I sleep well at night. You can also see my half-assed attempt to rig up the mosquito net - as you can see, it’s way too small for the bed, but I haven’t gotten around to taking it down. The next picture is the other side of the bedroom. This is where my desk is, and where I keep the computer. Theft is always a concern for PCVs (and other foreigners), and so I keep the computer in my bedroom, so that it’s concealed whenever people come over (I’m also very careful not to let anyone in town know I have a computer in my house). On the wall behind the computer is my self-assembled bulletin board, consisting of cardboard strips (from boxes) duct-taped to the back of a natte (the plastic rug-like thing I mentioned earlier - usually nattes are used as prayer mats or as something to sit on outside). And if I manage to upload all six pictures, you’ll see that the sixth is of my kitchen. And if you think this looks like a mess and a little unsanitary, I guarantee you it is far cleaner than (1) any other kitchen in Kongoussi, restaurant or otherwise, from which I’ve eaten food, and (2) the way it was when I moved in. I have a propane stove (similar to camp-stoves you use in the U.S.) that I do my cooking on - there’s a large propane tank behind the table, not visible in the picture. I might make myself a dutch oven so I can do some baking - not sure yet. No fridge, toaster, microwave, or George Foreman grill. So that’s chez moi.

During our first three months at post, while we’re working on our étude du milieu, we’re not supposed to leave our sites - a period of time affectionately called "lockdown" by most Volunteers. In accordance with that policy, I’ve only had three major out-of-town trips during my first month. I went to Ouaga a few weeks ago, officially for a meeting of Volunteers in my region (there are only four of us - me, Kara, Elizabeth in Ziniare, and Michelle, who lives 12km outside of Ouaga - the southwest region has around 30 Volunteers), but mostly to hit up the pool at the embassy, buy a lot of groceries (soy sauce, olive oil, cereal, etc.), and eat a few really nice meals. A week or two after that, I went up to Djibo for a night, and visited Ami (who lives in Djibo) and four other Volunteers (Aerie, Kim, Natalie, Sarah) who live near Djibo and had come in for the day (it was a Wednesday, and they come in every Wednesday, since that’s marché day in Djibo). And then I just got back yesterday from spending Thanksgiving in Ouaga, which was a lot of fun. We had about 25 Volunteers staying at the hostel (Peace Corps runs a "transit house" in Ouaga for Volunteers - the place is ridiculously nice, the only hot shower I’ve found in this country), and cooked our own Thanksgiving dinner. Someone actually found turkey somewhere in Ouaga, but it was really expensive, so we had some (slightly cheaper) prime rib instead. I helped make the mashed potatoes (ther’re potatoes in Ouaga, just not Kongoussi), for which I got several compliments. There was pumpkin pie, cranberries (from a can, of course), some squash and cheese dish that was absolutely delicious, and some fruit salads. It was delicious. And, being an event organized by PCVs, there was also lots of beer. Really, the only thing missing was a football game (one or two diehard Lions fans skipped out on the dinner to go watch the game at the embassy).

Well, I feel like there’s a lot more I could write about, but I’m getting kind of sick of writing - I’ve been at this for about two hours now. So, despite any recent blog posts, I’m still alive and doing pretty well here. And I’m checking my e-mail two or three times a week, so feel free to e-mail me. And, as always, packages and letters are always appreciated. If you’re looking for things to send: Skittles, any non-perishable cheese product (another Volunteer got a box of Velveeta - I didn’t know those things didn’t have to be refrigerated!), books, CDs/DVDs of new music, TV shows (Family Guy season 4, Arrested Development, Daily Show), or movies, and posters, maps, or calendars to decorate my drab-looking concrete walls. My addresses are:

For packages:

Chris Wilson, PCV

s/c Corps de la Paix

01 B.P. 6031

Ouagadougou 01

Burkina Faso

West Africa

Letters and small stuff can be sent directly to Kongoussi:

Chris Wilson

s/c URCBam

B.P. 150

Kongoussi

Burkina Faso

West Africa

And thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has sent packages! That’s it from Kongoussi - hope you all had a good Thanksgiving!

Quick update -- my address has changed. Packages should be sent to the Peace Corps office in Ouagadougou:

Chris Wilson, PCV

s/c Corps de la Paix

01 B.P. 6031

Ouagadougou 01

Burkina Faso

West Africa

Letters and small stuff can be sent directly to Kongoussi:

Chris Wilson

s/c URCBam

B.P. 150

Kongoussi

Burkina Faso

West Africa

And now...

October 22, 2005

I arrived in Kongoussi this morning, my first day as an actual Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s been a pretty good day, hopefully setting a good pace for the next two years. It looks like I haven’t written anything since I arrived in Ouaga - obviously, quite a bit has happened since then. The week in Ouaga was, in general, pretty good - it’s always nice to eat pizza, have a milkshake, and hang out at the Embassy Rec Center swimming pool. My health has improved - I feel almost entirely healthy now - since about the third day in Ouaga, I’ve been eating plenty. My digestive system still clearly has some problems, and I sent a MIF kit (a fecal specimen) to Sylvie on Wednesday - my third in the past week - and still haven’t heard back, but am guessing I’ve got some parasite or something. But I’m feeling fine, and am back to full energy (well, as much energy as I ever have…).

There was a lot of drama in Ouaga, and there’s a lot of tension now between all the new volunteers (and the old ones) and the Peace Corps bureau. The main reason is because the bureau decided to send Esmeralda home - they said she "wasn’t a good match" for Burkina - I think her plane leaves Ouaga today. This pretty much all grew out of the incident with the chief, which I think I described in a previous post, so I won’t explain it again (scroll up if you’re really curious). The jist of it is that she was deemed culturally insensitive for trying to give book-bags to three kids who lived by her who had to walk 20km round-trip each day to go to school. In the end, she managed to resolve the situation just fine, but apparently no one at the bureau quite noticed that. By the middle of this week, after a talk with the country director, she was told she had to write a letter explaining why she wanted to stay. She did this, but apparently they didn’t like the letter, and decided to administratively separate (the PC euphemism for firing someone) her. Everyone was pretty pissed at the decision - we all love Es, and she would make a great volunteer. I’m pretty pissed, too - we Minima folk were pretty close. At any rate, this all went down during the two days before swearing-in, and pretty much destroyed everyone’s morale.

And for those who morale wasn’t destroyed by the bureau screwing over Es, there was plenty of other drama. Two GEE stagiaires nearly got sent home, too, but managed to avoid it. There were also four stagiaires who weren’t allowed to swear-in because their language level wasn’t high enough. So they’re going to spend another week (at least) in Ouaga getting some tutoring.

Swearing-in was yesterday. It took place in the large yard in front of the ambassador’s house. They try to make swearing-in a really big deal. There were television crews from RTB - Burkina’s one television station - and some clips supposedly aired / will air on RTB News. There were also a few big-shot Burkinabé ministers there - I think they were the ministers of Health, Commerce, and Education (the ministers working with the Peace Corps Health, SED, and GEE programs). One of the ministers gave a speech, as did Marily, the Peace Corps country director. There were also eight speeches given by stagiaires, each in a different language (none in English). The one in French was about three minutes, the local language ones were about a minute each. After the assorted speeches, we took the Peace Corps oath. Burkina doesn’t have an ambassador at the moment, so the oath was administered by the Charges d’Affaires at the Embassy - the top U.S. official in the country. The oath is pretty straightforward, but a little weirdly phrased - we swore to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution from all its enemies. After the ceremony, we had to sign a written copy of the oath. And the whole event was followed up by a reception, which featured lots of free beer (yay!) and some good food. After the reception, we had a huge party at L’Axe, a club near the hotel where we all stayed, which went all night long.

I left L’Axe around 2:00 in the morning, and then had to go and pack my bags to come to Kongoussi. I was asleep by about 3:00, and then woke up at 5:30 to start hauling my bags down to the Peace Corps van and begin the drive to Kongoussi. For affectation, Peace Corps drives all of us to our posts, which is really nice, since it means we can buy large items in Ouaga and not have to worry about carrying them (along with all our luggage, bikes, giant water filters, etc.) on public transport. But since there are only a handful of Peace Corps vehicles and 40 people (well, 36 because of the language thing) being affectéd, they stagger the affectations. Unfortunately for me, I got stuck in the first group, leaving at six a.m. this morning. A lot of the people in the southwest get another day or two in Ouaga, then three or four days in Bobo before actually going to their posts - I think I got screwed by the proximity of my site to Ouaga. After dropping off another new volunteer about 60km away, we ended up in Kongoussi around 11:00, and unloaded all my stuff.

After doing a little unpacking and setting up my water filter, I headed out into the city - my first day in Kongoussi as a volunteer, all by myself. (Mike, the Volunteer I’m replacing, is in Ouaga at the moment. He’s coming back to Kongoussi tomorrow, and is, I believe, staying here until Friday, when he’ll leave for good.) The first place I went was a buvette by the Rond Point (a giant roundabout that forms the center of the city) to have a nice cold Coke. While sitting there, I was surprised to have someone come up to me, saying "Mister Chris!" It was the guy who runs the cyber-café at Rond Point - Mike had told him all about me, and he was really excited to have me in town. He sat down with me, had a beer, and we talked for awhile. Throughout the day, I’ve encountered several people who already know me, by name, which is pretty cool, although a bit daunting. I’m looking forward to walking around town some more tomorrow, and just meeting people.

I did a bunch of shopping in Ouaga. The big thing I bought was a real mattress - those are hard to come by here. Most mattresses in this country are nothing more than large pieces of foam - this is the kind of mattress that Mike had in Kongoussi. Several current Volunteers have said it’s worth investing in a good mattress - otherwise you’ll end up with back problems sometime. I don’t yet have a bed frame to put it in - I’m going to visit a carpenter sometime this week and place a huge order - bed, dresser, desk. I also bought some computer speakers, so I can now listen to music or watch movies when I get bored. Having the computer here, although very nice and convenient, is a bit of a liability. I’m going to have to keep the laptop (and the whole desk) in my bedroom, so that it’s not visible from the front door. I don’t plan on telling anybody in Kongoussi (except Mike, of course) that I have this laptop - it’d be pretty foolish to do so. I also bought a lot of food. Marina Market is the nicer of the two real supermarkets in Ouaga - there are only two places to go if you want to buy western things like cereal, Kleenex, or M&Ms. They had a huge sale of two types of cereal - Special K and Frosted Flakes, so I stocked up on those. I don’t think there’s milk in Kongoussi, but milk powder is everywhere. SCIAC (the other of the two grocery stores) had Petit Ecolier, and had some new variety with rice in it marked down to 500CFA - a buck! That’s cheaper than in the U.S. - incredible! And I picked up a few canned fruits and veggies - things not available in Kongoussi - like applesauce and hummus mix (just add garlic!).

I started learning Mooré in Ouaga - I had a couple classes in it. In many ways, it’s a very simply language - verb conjugations, for instance. The vocabulary is a bit trickier, especially since every noun has both a singular and plural form, which often bare little resemblance. And the pronunciation is really difficult. But I’ve picked up enough that I figured out today when one of the women selling benga asked me if I spoke Mooré, and I managed to respond that I knew a tiny bit.

From my e-mails and comments on the blog over the past week or two, I see that several people are sending me packages - thank you, thank you! Unfortunately, I haven’t received any of them yet - even the one that I know was delivered to the Peace Corps bureau last Monday, almost a week ago. The bureau seems to be ridiculously slow at processing packages - no part of Peace Corps epitomizes inefficient bureaucracy the way mail service does. Unfortunately, there’s no real alternative - getting things delivered directly to Kongoussi via Burkinabé poste takes even longer, I’ve been assured. Unfortunately, for the next three months, I’m supposed to remain at my site, working on my etude du milieu - all volunteers are expected to remain at their posts for the first three months. Luckily, there are a few loopholes in the system - you can go to your "regional capital" to stock up on food, money, etc. every now and then. Although Kongoussi is a regional capital, I’ve decided to make Ouaga my real regional capital, and so I’m allowing myself to travel to Ouaga every few weeks. I’ll be going on November 5-6 for a regional VSN (volunteer support network) meeting. My region only consists of 4 volunteers (the southwest region, by contrast, has about 30) - Michelle, who’s 12km outside Ouaga; Elizabeth, who’s about 30km outside Ouaga; myself, about 100km; and Kara, who’s 40km north of me, and comes to Kongoussi when she needs to stock up on things. At any rate, the point of all this is that I should be in Ouaga on Nov. 5, and the first thing I’m going to do there is go to the bureau and check for mail and packages.

Well, that’s it for tonight. Now that I’m in Kongoussi, and am already on good terms with the guy who runs the cyber-café two blocks from my house, I plan on checking my e-mail pretty regularly - probably every day or two - so feel free to e-mail.

October 29, 2005

Well, after one week in Kongoussi, it’s starting to feel a bit like home. It’s been a long week, though - a pretty good introduction to Kongoussi and what my life’s going to be like here.

I arrived in Kongoussi on Saturday (see last entry) and Mike, after taking care of some COS (close of service) business in Ouaga, came up on Sunday. Since then, he’s been saying goodbye to people, packing, and partying. He left yesterday afternoon - although during my site visit a month and a half ago, he was very eager to leave, this past week seemed to be hard on him - he said several times that he didn’t really want to go, or that leaving this place was a lot more difficult for him than he thought it would be. He also told me during site visit that he was one of the least well-integrated Volunteers in this country - but judging from the number of people saying goodbye to him, he certainly made himself at home here.

So, what have I been doing during my first week in Kongoussi? Let’s start with URCBam, the credit union where I’m working. The way Peace Corps works is that every Volunteer is matched up with a host organization, URCBam in my case, and at that host organization, each Volunteer has an official counterpart (homologue in French). My homologue is André Ouederago, the Chef de Credit at the bank (caisse in French - I’m slowly slipping into worse and worse Franglais, so I’m letting you know in advance what French words I’ll probably be using). I’ve mentioned him before, back when I wrote about Counterpart Workshop and Site Visit. The counterpart is a Volunteer’s main contact person for getting settled and integrated. André is a nice guy, and has been one of the more helpful people at the caisse for Mike. Unfortunately, he was out of town all this week, only returning yesterday (just in time to say goodbye to Mike). So a lot of the things that I was supposed to be doing, such as introducing myself to the mayor, préfet, haut commissariat, etc. haven’t happened yet. In general, André’s absence this week hasn’t been a major problem - I’m a fairly independent person, and am able to get by on my own. And Mike was here to help me out with some stuff. But it means I haven’t done any work towards starting my work, specifically the étude du milieu (background study) that I’m supposed to spend the next three months working on.

But I have gotten some important things done. First, I’ve met a bunch of people. And even remember who a few of them are - even the names of a select few! There’s a lot of people who work at the caisse (somewhere around 30 at the HQ and branch in Kongoussi, I think, plus all the people at the other branches, points of service, etc.) I now know and recognize a few of the key ones - the patron (like the CEO), the Chef de Comptabilité, the secretary (who has the A/C office, and just got a second computer in her office, bringing the bank-wide total to 3), and the manager of the Kongoussi COOPSEC ("What’s the COOPSEC?" you’re probably wondering - the bank has a surprisingly complex hierarchy, which I don’t entirely understand - but the COOPSEC is essentially the Kongoussi branch. Well, one of the two.) I’ve also gotten to know the barmaids at Ambience, a buvette in the center of town, about two blocks from my house, where I go daily for a cold Coke. I’ve talked a bunch to Javier, the manager of the cyber-café closest to my house. And I’ve had a few conversations with Dembele, my next door neighbor, who’s an English teacher at the high school here. I’ll probably follow Mike’s lead and volunteer to teach a few classes with him.

I’ve also met a handful of other nessare (white people). There’s one other American in town - she’s a former PCV (she was in southern Burkina around 1998-2000) named Anne. Her husband, also an American, lived in Kongoussi for awhile, and now she’s here for six weeks working at the hospital (she’s a med student back in the States). There’s a large group - nine, I think - of Canadians in town. Most of them are Quebecois, a few rather militantly so. But I had a nice conversation with two native Anglophone members of the group - they’re part of an exchange program, where a group of Burkinabé spent three months living in Canada, and now the Canadians are here in Kongoussi. They were amazed by my knowledge of Canada ("You know where Saskatoon is?" "Sure I do - isn’t that where the Rough Riders play?" "Whoa!") - thanks to my parents for that. And there’s a Dutch couple in town working with an NGO that we went and had drinks with one night - they’re very nice and have an adorable little kid (maybe six months old?). They’ve been in Kongoussi for two years, and had therein Djibo previously, and are driving (!) back to Europe at the end of the year. So, although there are lots of nessare in town at the moment, they’re all going to be gone three months from now. Oh well, I’m sure there’ll be others showing up, and if not, I can always speak English with Dembele.

One of the more exciting things I did this week was buy furniture. I know, it sounds very middle-aged to be excited about furniture shopping. But Mike’s house was pretty much empty - his furniture consisted of a bookshelf, a table, and a few chairs. As of today, I know have a desk, a bed, and a dresser, as well as two small little end-table-like-things with drawers in them. Burkina, sadly, lacks an Ikea, or even anything remotely similar. To buy furniture, you go to a carpenter, describe what you want, give him some money to buy the wood, and wait a few days. I ordered this stuff on Tuesday, and was pretty surprised that it was ready to go today - that was way faster than I was planning. So tonight I get to sleep on a real bed (with the nice mattress I purchased in Ouaga), instead of a piece of foam on the concrete floor (this is how my guests will be sleeping when they visit - good news, Abby!). Getting some furniture in here is finally making the place look a bit more like home, which is important after three months of never sleeping in the same place for more than a week at a time. I still need to get some more furniture - I might get a nice, comfy chair. And I need some stuff for the kitchen - ideally some cabinets, but failing that, at least a spice rack or something, and maybe another table so I can have a bit more counter space. Unfortunately, Peace Corps only gives us 100,000CFA for our settling-in allowance (about $200), and including the mattress (which just about every current volunteer recommended buying, so as to avoid the inevitable foam-mattress back problems), I’ve already spent about 200,000CFA. Plus another 20,000 for the computer speakers, 40,000 for the cell phone - it’s adding up. And I think I need to buy a new fan - the one Mike bought keeps dying. When Peace Corps asks us at IST (in-service training, three months from now) if the settling-in allowance was ample, I’m going to give them an earful. I’m also going to recommend that they should give us money to buy cell phones - just about every new Volunteer bought one, and we all used our own money for them. But given Peace Corps’s emphasis on Volunteer safety and security, I think it’s reasonable for them to buy us phones.

More exciting news: I cooked myself dinner tonight. And, here’s the truly incredible part: it was pretty good. And I was more or less winging it - no recipes or anything. Granted, it was an easy dinner - pasta with tomato sauce and garlic bread. But the sauce was pretty good (I sliced up some tomatoes and put them in, along with some green onions, garlic, basil, and some other spice that I forget now), and the garlic bread was quite tasty, especially the piece that I added some basil to. I overestimated quantities a bit, so I think I’ll be having pasta for a late night snack, and likely also for breakfast. I spent about an hour cleaning the kitchen before cooking (keep in mind that the only thing in the kitchen is a table with some seasonings and a stove - but the whole thing was filthy), after spending most of the afternoon cleaning out the living room. For the moment, all the dishes are sitting in a bucket with soap, but eventually I’ll have to wash them - all in all, although I thought dinner was quite tasty, the whole process of cooking and cleaning is kind of a hassle, and I might be eating out a lot. Kongoussi has several good places to eat - I’ve been to Espace Watal twice this week (both for going-away parties being thrown for Mike), and both times they had big party platters of chicken and frites - delicious. (Mike gave speeches at both the parties, and at the last one - which was with all the people from URCBam - he asked me to get up and give one too - you all know how I am about public speaking, now imagine me trying to give an extemporaneous speech in French, after a beer or two.) And there’s some good food at the market. In the coming weeks, I hope to try out some other restaurants, although everyone assures me that Espace Watal is the best place in town.

One last story before giving up writing for the night. I spent this morning with a woman named Madame Alice, who runs a women’s group in Kongoussi. One of the key things SED Volunteers do is work with women’s groups like this, helping them find new products or services to provide, as well as teaching them how to set up savings and credit clubs. Mike worked with this group, and did a simboula formation with them, which has resulted in them earning around 50,000CFA, with which they’ve purchased school supplies for a bunch of kids. At any rate, I agreed to spend the morning with Alice, going down to the lake to see the land the women have there. So I showed up at 10:00am, and we spent about 45 minutes walking out to the lake. Keep in mind that it was around 100 degrees and we were walking in the sun the whole time. And that she speaks about as much French as I do Mooré, so we couldn’t really converse. By the lake, she drafted a nearby farmer to translate while she explained which land was theirs and what they did with it. And after about 10 minutes at the lake, we walked back to her house, where she served me some dolo (millet beer) and goat-meat soup. All in all, the whole thing was kind of awkward, and I didn’t really get much out of it. But I guess the important thing is that I did something with the women’s group, and I’ve shown that I’m interested in working with them.

October 31, 2005

So, before I write about this morning, I need to explain a little bit about a certain Peace Corps policy. One of the most important rules to which Volunteers are subject is a prohibition on any involvement in political activities in the host country. We’re more than welcome to discuss American politics and criticize our own government if we like. But when it comes to Burkinabé politics, we’re supposed to remain completely neutral. And, I think, this is a very reasonable policy. The presence of Peace Corps in a country is only by the invitation of the host country, and if Volunteers begin to get involved in local politics, especially in opposition to the ruling government, the result could be devastating for Peace Corps. Thus, there are several rules we’re supposed to abide by to maintain our political neutrality here. One of these rules is to avoid any political rallies or protests. Another is, obviously, just to avoid discussing politics. Although I doubt anyone in Burkina Faso reads my blog regularly (or ever), I wouldn’t be surprised if someone from Peace Corps does check it every now and then - the bureau here informed us during stage that Peace Corps Washington has people who search the Internet daily for references to Peace Corps - it sounds very big brother-ish, but if it’s true, then someone from Washington will probably read this. And so, in describing the events of the morning (and the past few days, years, etc.) I’m going to try to do so in a purely historical / journalistic fashion, and not let any of my own thoughts on the matter seep in. You may well be able to guess what I think about some of these things, but in respect for PC policy, I’ll try to remain neutral here.

But before we get to the fun political stuff from today, you’re going to have to endure my story about the power company. Burkina has one, nationalized power company, called Sonabel. It’s a state-run company, and as such, is a largely inefficient bureaucracy. My house has electricity, but when I arrived, the account (logically) was still in Mike’s name. So on Tuesday we went to the Sonabel office to transfer the account from his name to mine. After waiting in line at Sonabel for 20 minutes (at least the waiting room was sort-of air-conditioned), we talked to the cassier, who informed us that we didn’t have the necessary documents to transfer the account. He directed us to the prefet, who could provide us with the documents. So we went to the prefet, who informed us that he could not provide us with the necessary document, but the Haut Commissariat’s office could. So we went to the Haut Commissariat’s office (keep in mind that these are all in separate buildings, although luckily, they’re all in the same area of town). There we learned that although the Haut Commissariat used to be able to provide the document we needed, they no longer could - only the Mayor’s office could do that. Next stop: Hotel de Ville. We were initially relieved to discover that we had finally come to the right place. Unfortunately, the one person at City Hall who could provide the requisite form was a woman named Virginie - you may remember her from some earlier blog posts - she was the woman who managed to take out about 2.5 million CFA in loans from URCBam and never pay the money back. After helping to secure the loan for her, Mike spent much of his service here trying to track her down and get the money back, and then eventually gave up and just tried to avoid her instead. And now she was the only person in town who could give us the document we needed for me to be able to have electricity at my house. At any rate, we found Virginie and explained what we needed. We gave her some paperwork, and she told us to come back around 11:00am (it was around 10:00am at this point, after leaving the house around 8:00am) and she’d have the document we needed. She also told us it would cost 400CFA - Mike gave her a mille to cover it. We left, and came back at 11:00am, only to find that she wasn’t there. We asked someone in her office to come and deliver the document later, which he did, although there was no sign of the 600CFA in change we were supposed to get.

By the time the guy came and delivered the document to us, it was too late to go back to Sonabel. So Wednesday afternoon we went back. We wanted to be there when they opened at 3:00pm (everything closes from noon to three), so we showed up at about 2:45 and waited outside the locked building. At about 3:00, a man came up and put up a sign that had fallen down, politely informing people that, due to a nationwide strike of civil servants, the cassier would not be in today or the next day. Exasperated, we asked the man if the cassier would be there on Friday, and learned that he would not be, as he was taking Friday off. This meant we would not be able to take care of switching the account until Monday (today), at which point Mike would have already left.

So this morning, I left the house at about 9:00 and went to Sonabel to take care of this, as well as to pay Mike’s last electric bill (he left me money to cover it). Of course, today being the last day of the month, everyone else in town was also at Sonabel paying their bill, since payment is due by the end of the month. So I stood in line for an hour, and when I got to the front discovered that due to the crowd of people, I couldn’t do the account transfer today, I could only pay the outstanding bill. So, a week after beginning the quest to switch the account, it still hasn’t happened.

As I left the Sonabel office around 10:30, I decided to head to the supermarché in Centre Ville, near my house, to pick up a cold orange juice. On my way, I small a group of maybe 500 people walking in a big group, carrying several large banners. Assuming (correctly) that it was a political rally, I decided to be a good Peace Corps Volunteer and keep my distance. And now a brief introduction to Burkinabé history and politics. The president of Burkina Faso is a man named Blaise Compaore. He’s been in power since 1987, when his predecessor, the socialist Thomas Sankara, was assassinated. Sankara was unbelievably popular - the anniversary of his death is still a national holiday. Blaise gradually democratized Burkinabé politics, and in 1991 held a national presidential election, which he won. The president serves seven-year terms, and Blaise won again in 1998. And the next election is November 13. Blaise is running for a third term, and has twelve competitors, representing a handful of opposition parties. The election has been a popular topic of discussion, and you can’t go anywhere without seeing a t-shirt, trucker hat, sign, or poster showing their support for Blaise (or, every once in awhile, another candidate). While eating dinner at Espace Watal last week, they had a large TV on, with election coverage. Each candidate was given a few minutes of airtime - they all sat in front of a blue wall, and spoke to their fellow citizens for a few minutes, looking very much like a 1950s American newscaster. And then came Blaise’s time to speak - instead of Blaise in front of a blue wall speaking like the other candidates, his airtime consisted of a lengthy commercial (much longer than the time the other candidates received), featuring the most advanced and professional-looking visual effects I’ve ever seen on RTB (the Burkinabé TV station - yes, they only have one).

At any rate, I wanted my O.J., but also wanted to avoid being seen at the rally, so I followed the rally (which passed right in front of my supermarché) at a safe distance. As I turned the corner on to the main road in town, however, I saw that this small group I was distantly following was part of a much, much larger rally. Centre Ville was packed with people - thousands upon thousands. Depending on who you ask, Kongoussi has between 20,000 and 30,000 residents, and there were easily that many people hovering around Centre Ville. Most were wearing t-shirts or trucker hats saying "Votez Blaise Compaore." Really wanting that cold orange juice (it was probably about 95 degrees), I decided to skirt the outer edges of the throng of people and continue to my supermarché. Just outside the supermarché, I was stopped by a gendarme, wearing his military fatigues and maroon beret. He asked me what was in the backpack I had with me - I showed him it was just some books, notepads, and magazines. He decided I didn’t pose a threat, and let me go in and buy orange juice.

Leaving the supermarché, my next destination was URCBam, where I was supposed to meet with André. However, standing directly between me and URCBam were thousands of Burkinabé, including more police and gendarmes than I’ve ever seen in this country. Also, towering above the crowd, I could see the top of a giant grandstand that had been erected in the middle of the main road through town. Fascinated as I was by all this, I decided once again to be a good Volunteer, and took some small back roads around Centre Ville, avoiding the crowds, and made it to the bank. I met with André, who informed me that Blaise himself was visiting Kongoussi today. Wow, I thought, Kongoussi must be the Burkinabé equivalent of a swing state. After my meeting with André, I got some lunch and a Coke nearby, and around 1:00 started heading back to my place. The crowd was still there. As I got closer, I was stopped by a row of gendarmes who were clearing out the street. About a minute later, a large convoy of about 10 SUVs passed by, one with flags waving on its hood. I assume Blaise was in there - the tinted windows didn’t allow me a good view of the interior. After the convoy passed, the crowd started pouring out of Centre Ville, and the gendarmes allowed me to cross the road.

So that was my morning. I saw the president (sort of, I think) and got stopped by a gendarmes. I found the whole thing fascinating, and would’ve loved to stay and see the rally, see Blaise speak - I doubt I’ll get another chance like that. Oh well.

September 27, 2005 / October 7, 2005

No narrative to write this time – the days in Minima are all roughly the same. I do have some interesting anecdotes, though. I’m actually writing the various anecdotes in this entry on two separate stays in Minima, roughly ten days apart, so I apologize if things are a little disjointed. I’ll begin with perhaps the most intriguing of these assorted stories. There’s a village near hear called Niessega – it’s one of the three villages where SED trainees are doing their homestay during stage. It’s bigger than Minima, but still only what you would call a large village – or so I’ve been told from the trainees staying there – it’s a good 20km bike ride away, and I’m lazy, so I’ve never actually been to the place. In Niessega, there’s a traditional medicine preparer. They’re called “wa-kos” or something like that – the Mooré word is something that sounds very similar to the English word “whacko.” One of these guys sold a man in Niessega a “contre-boule” pill – bulletproof medicine. The man took this medicine, and then told a friend that he’d taken them, and told the friend to shoot him. Sure enough, the friend did just that, killing the man.

Here’s the kicker – when other people in the village heard about this, they were appalled. But not because the guy actually thought they were bulletproof pills, or that he asked his friend to shoot him, or that his friend did. Instead, the people in the village were upset at the medicine man, because he had failed to put the secret ingredient in the pills. Had he done so, the villagers are convinced, the man would have survived. It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Niessega – in addition to this death, they had a woman fall down a well and die, and a kid (about nine years old) got ripped apart and killed by a crocodile. With all the bad things happening in Niessega, it almost makes us happy to be in Minima. Almost.

In another story that further endorses many of the prevailing western stereotypes about Africa, my host family ate a bowl of roaches the other day. After dinner, they brought in a big bowl, full of roaches (and a few crickets), all black and charred. They started eating them – seems to be a favorite dessert of theirs. They offered me one, and I declined. On the one hand, I was fairly proud of myself, as I realized that this was the first time during my two months in Burkina that I’d actually declined food (as opposed to just not eating what was served to me because it was making me throw up…). On the other hand, I was a little worried, because for a few seconds, I actually considered eating one of the bugs. After all, when else am I going to have the chance to eat a baked roach? And how bad could it really be? And wouldn’t that make a great story someday? And then I realized I was contemplating eating a roach and snapped out of it, politely declining.

Speaking of protein, I’m getting a little worried that there’s some sort of disease going around my courtyard. Until today, I’d never seen any dead (or even severely sick-looking) animals in our courtyard. Today, however, there was a young guinea fowl that flapped around a bit before dying, a dead (but otherwise healthy-looking) chicken, and a dead adolescent goat. This has me slightly concerned, and I joked with Omar and Es that I’d probably be the first Burkina Volunteer to get West Nile Virus. But I wonder what the family does with these dead animals – my guess is that they go ahead and eat them – I’m going to be highly cautious of any meat they serve me in the next few days, if they serve me any.

I’m slowly learning about a rather curious Burkinabé custom, called “parenté à plaisanterie” – I think that would translate as something like “relationships of mockery” – the phrase doesn’t really translate – to be fair, the idea behind doesn’t translate very well either. Burkina Faso is composed of about 60 different ethnic groups. The Mossi are the largest of them, accounting for a little over half the population, although the Mossi are big enough that they have sub-ethnic groups, the Yadega being the people around Gourcy and Minima (and, I believe, Kongoussi). Ouagadougou is a Mossi city, traditionally the center of Mossi culture. The Peulhs are in the north, around Djibo, Dori, and Gorom Gorom. (The Peulhs, unlike the Mossi, only have market days once a week – that’s why the famous market at Gorom Gorom is only on Thursdays.) Among these assorted groups, there is a timeless custom, wherein certain groups are expected to mock each other and insult each other, but aren’t allowed to get irritated or offended by these insults. For instance, our LCF this week, Edwige, is Gourmanche (that’s probably not even close to the correct spelling), an ethnic group from the southeastern part of Burkina. Here in Mossi territory, she’ll often laughingly tell villagers that they’re stupid, that they’re her slaves, etc. They smile and nod, and say similar things in return. This sort of back-and-forth is only supposed to take place between certain groups of people. The Mossi, for instance, are allowed to do this with the Peulhs and vice versa, but not with certain other ethnic groups. While we were in Ouaga for the counterpart workshop, the driver of the PC van at one point, learning that someone in the car was posted to Djibo, casually mentioned that the Peulhs were his slaves – something we thought was an odd comment at the time, but now makes a bit more sense. This custom seems to be an old Burkinabé tradition, going back to long before anyone can remember. Although I don’t entirely understand it, they attribute it to being one of the primary reasons why such a diverse amalgamation of peoples are able to peacefully co-exist in one country. Armande understatedly told us that in many African countries that lacked this sort of tradition, such as Rwanda, ethnic tension often arose.

The French language in Burkina Faso is an interesting phenomenon. There are several different variations of French in the country. On one level, there’s the occasional person who’s either from France or educated in France and who speaks Parisian French. These people form a negligible portion of the population. Most educated Burkinabé – like the LCFs responsible for teaching us French, as well as the entire PC training staff – speak what’s generally called fonctionnaire French. It’s what you might also call Burkinabé French – it’s probably as similar to Parisian French as American English is to British English. And then there’s villageois French. This is, evidently, what’s spoken by villagers who lack any secondary education. This is the type of French spoken by all of our host families here in Minima (or the members of those families who have any education – in my family, my host father and the two oldest brothers). This French is often incomprehensible to me, and even our LCFs sometime have trouble understanding it. In addition to the accent and the absence of some key sounds in the French language, speakers of villageois French rarely perform such tedious tasks as conjugating their verbs.

An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed is the disdain speakers of fonctionnaire French seem to have for speakers of villageois French – I’ve noticed it between LCFs and villagers, and in Kongoussi between André (very well educated) and Somé (much less educated). In Burkina, more advanced French inevitably indicates a higher level of education. During the counterpart workshop, Peace Corps had to repeatedly tell our homologues that, even though we might not be able to speak French very well, we were all university educated – an interesting disconnect.

The point of this discussion of French is that we (the stagiaires) have a lot of difficulty understanding what many villagers are saying. In an effort to work on that, part of our training today involved a causerie session. Causerie is the time-honored Burkinabé tradition of shooting the breeze. We got together with about 10 people – half of them fonctionnaires, half of them villagers, and just talked for about an hour and a half. Since Esmeralda has her own private Mooré classes, and Giorgio has been “sick” in Gourcy since the weekend, it was just Omar and I, and mostly they asked us questions about the U.S., which we tried our best to answer.

The question which surprised me the most was when a fonctionnaire (so a university-educated man) asked us who fixed prices in the U.S. Here, the prices on several basic goods are fixed by the government – the floor for demi-baguettes, for instance, is 50CFA. Most other items – at least the more basic foodstuffs and housewares available in villages and larger cities – have fixed prices (although they’re not set by the government – everyone just always charges the same for certain things). You can go to any vegetable vendor anywhere in the country and, even though the prices aren’t written anywhere, you know exactly how much everything costs. When he asked us this question, Omar and I looked at each other, and asked each other how the hell you explained the concept of capitalism or market forces to someone. I explained that there weren’t fixed prices – the prices go up when lots of people want something and go down when nobody is buying something. This, I think, is going to be one of the major challenges we’ll face in Burkina doing small enterprise development – introducing people to very basic economic ideas like market forces. What seems so intuitive to us is completely foreign here. I think what alarmed me most was that the question came from an educated man, who still had no apparent understanding of basic economics – a little disturbing. Granted, I am by no means an economist or anything close to it, but am rapidly learning that I have more than enough knowledge of business and economics to recognize some of the problems here, and hopefully even be able to effectively point these things out to some people here.

And now the latest news on the TDA front. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, a TDA is a trainee-directed activity, homework that we stagiaires have to do every week, usually involving us going out and talking at length to people in the community, which is tricky in Minima, where almost no one speaks French. Last week, I spent awhile talking to my host father about his business, and feel like I have at least a basic understanding of how it works. He’s a tailor. He regularly goes to Ouagadougou and Ouahigouya to buy fabric, and then, using his foot-powered sewing machine, turns that fabric into shirts, pants, and complets (a shirt-pant combination – kind of the traditional Burkinabé equivalent of a suit). He sells these things to people here in Minima – he sometimes sells at the market, and also has some clients come directly to his workshop here at his house. He also travels to several neighboring villages when they have large fêtes – the principal time villagers buy new clothes is for major religious festivals, such as the end of Ramadan – and he makes a decent number of sales at these fêtes. He charges between 100-250CFA for the work he puts into making each article of clothing – so he turns a 1,000CFA piece of fabric into a 1,250CFA shirt. Assuming his only expense is fabric, he believes he’s making 100-250CFA on every shirt. Unfortunately, there are several costs he doesn’t take into effect. Transport to Ouagadougou to buy fabric, for instance, costs between 5,000 and 7,000CFA. I don’t know what he pays for things like thread and buttons, or if he ever has to make repairs or do maintenance on his sewing machine. Regardless, he sees the fabric as his only expense. Taking into account his other expenses, Es (who also interviewed him for our TDA) and I aren’t even sure if he’s even making a profit – if he is, it can’t be more than 100CFA per item. And since it takes him around three hours to make a shirt, that breaks down to 33CFA per hour – around seven cents an hour. Oh, I forgot to mention, very few people can actually afford to pay 1,250CFA for a shirt, so he sells a lot on credit, usually demanding 750CFA up front. And although he mentally keeps track of who owes him money, he doesn’t seem to have any sort of written list. Or bookkeeping of any sort. Es and I suggested that he might want to start keeping some records — “but this is Burkina!” he responded (well, except it was in his villageois French). For this coming week, our TDA is to do a sensibilization for our host family business. (A sensibilization is, as far as I can tell, a uniquely Burkinabé word – it’s sort of like a training / workshop / presentation — for instance, health volunteers do a lot of HIV/AIDS sensibilizations.) I think Es and I are going to do one on the importance of bookkeeping – how he could use records to improve his business. The other one of us will do one on basic record-keeping, which might be difficult, since my host father is functionally illiterate. I really don’t think these sensibilizations will do much good, which is a bit frustrating. If this were Kongoussi, and I could gradually work with someone over a longer period of time and do follow-ups, it might be useful. But trying to teach someone who’s illiterate and has no interest in bookkeeping how and why he should keep records in one afternoon seems a bit ambitious.

This is the sort of frustration that comes up a lot during training. Peace Corps training revolves around the concept of community-based training, generally referred to as CBT, as regulated by the official Peace Corps “everything must be an acronym” policy. This sounds like a really good idea in theory, but is often frustrating in practice. Part of the frustration is because everything is very regulated and rushed – PC tells us what we have to do when, regardless of whether this is what the people in the community need. It’s taken Lars, the volunteer in Ouahigouya, two years to get his association to start keeping records and develop an efficient system – there’s no way to spring this sort of thing on my host father in one day and expect it to stick. It’s also frustrating because one of the key goals of pre-service training is to learn French. But because we’re in a tiny village, we don’t have that many opportunities to communicate in French, and thus to communicate at all, which makes it incredibly difficult to do these activities. It’s especially frustrating for SED volunteers, because none of us are going to be living in villages this small and with such minimal and stagnant economic activity. (Practically all the GEE and Health stagiaires, however, will live in villages this size. Wow that sucks.)

And one last story, to leave you on a sort of sad and depressing note. (You’re probably asking yourself if this can be worse than the bulletproof story.) Since this is our last week in Minima, we’re all trying to find some gifts to give our families. (Don’t ask me what I’m getting my family – so far, I just have a Wisconsin calendar I brought from home – I’m really bad with gifts.) Esmeralda bought some school supplies for her host father’s three young kids. There’s another family (her host father’s brother’s family) which lives in her courtyard. They have three kids who are high school age, and about to start going to high school in Gourcy (they’ll have to do the 10km to and from Gourcy every day). Unfortunately, they can’t go to school unless their father manages to get them some school supplies – he’s currently in Ouaga, doing whatever he can to get the money to get them some notebooks, pens, etc. Es decided to go and buy the three kids a bunch of supplies – notebooks, pens, chalk, erasers, rulers – probably about 3,000CFA ($6) worth of school supplies, enough to last them the year. She also got each of them a backpack (at 2,000CFA apiece). It’s a very thoughtful gift, and something these kids really need – and for an American, the total cost was almost nothing. Here’s the catch: she can’t actually give the items to the kids. Her host father (the chief of the village) won’t let her. He says she can only give gifts to his family; otherwise, she’d have to give gifts to everyone in the village – giving something to just one other family would be poor etiquette. And she can’t just bypass the chief and give the stuff directly to the kids – when you receive a gift here, the culture dictates that you go and show the chief the gift you received. And if the kids received the gift, their family would be put in a very socially awkward place. So she’s got all this stuff, and doesn’t know what to do with it. Unless their father comes back in the next few days, and has miraculously gotten them the supplies they need, these kids won’t be able to go to school – and there’s nothing Es can do about it. It’s a really crappy situation.

One final note. In letters, e-mails, and blog comments, people often say that they enjoy reading the blog but wonder how I’m actually doing – if I’m in good spirits and that sort of thing. And I must admit that, although there are some depressing stories, this place really isn’t too bad. Despite the conditions here, the people have an infectious optimism. And in spite of frustrations with Minima, with Peace Corps, and with the millions of other things beyond my control, I’m still pretty upbeat about things. I’m really excited to go to Kongoussi and to start working on things there. I can envision a lot of different things I’ll be able to do there, and although I know a lot of them won’t pan out, I’m pretty confident that I’ll manage to get at least one or two useful, sustainable, beneficial projects started there. And the thought of that is enough to make Minima tolerable and maintain my optimism. Despite the complaints, overall I’m having a pretty good time. And one way or another, it’s been one hell of an experience, which is exactly what I wanted.

October 16, 2005

It’s been an interesting week. I’m in Ouaga now, and am glad to be out of Minima forever! Last Monday we got some bad news – Kevin, one of the SED stagiaires, was medically separated (that’s the Peace Corps term for kicking someone out and sending them home) for some back problems he’d been having that couldn’t be corrected in Burkina (or Senegal or South Africa, the two regional medevac destinations). We found this out Monday afternoon, and all left Minima and started out for Niessega (Kevin’s village) to say goodbye to him. By the time we got to Gourcy (about halfway through the journey to Niessega), it was dark, and we didn’t want to bike in the dark, especially since Omar and Es didn’t have headlamps (Giorgio and I were prepared). We tried to get a bus down to Niessega, but they refused to take us because it was too short a distance and they didn’t want to deal with the hassle of putting our bikes on and off the bus. So, eventually, we found some guy with a pickup truck, and hired him to drive us and our bikes there – it was a bit sketchy, but it worked.

When we arrived, all the Niessega stagiaires, and two who had come up from Yako, were all sitting around drinking. Kevin had gone back to his house briefly – and he made quite an entrance when he returned – he came flying in on his bike, and had planned on doing a wheelie, but instead went flying over the handlebars. Everyone paused and gasped for a second, and then Kevin laughed and informed us that apparently the brakes on Burkinabé bikes were reversed from those of American bikes. We spent the night in Niessega, and then left at 5:30 the next morning, to give us plenty of time to get back to Minima (although I stopped to eat in Gourcy, and bathed and talked to my host family when I got back to Minima, I was late for class, showing up at 8:30).

The same day we returned to Minima, Tuesday, I spent much of the afternoon at my house, talking to my host father and a neighbor of his. Apparently, one of their neighbors, who isn’t the most mentally sound person in the world, had been missing for several days, and my host father had been among those looking for him. By Thursday, when I left Minima, I don’t know if they’d found him. Anyways, while talking to my father, he offered me some Zoom-Koom, which I accepted. This, I suspect, was where my problems began.

Zoom-Koom means, literally, “flour water.” And that’s exactly what it is: millet flour mixed in water, sometime with a little sugar or some fruit flavor added (not in this case, however). Although it’s not really good, it’s not all that bad either, taste-wise. Unfortunately, the stuff I drank must have been made with well water (and very bad well water, at that – when the stuff separated, the water was a distinctly yellow color). By Tuesday evening, I wasn’t feeling 100%, and wasn’t really hungry – I think it was the first time my family served me corn that I didn’t finish it.

Wednesday was the day of our presentations for our host family businesses. Rose (the SED APCD – the person overseeing my program), Lawson (the SED training director), and Vinny (our cross-cultural training director) all came for the presentations. Sometime mid-morning, while the three of them were at Omar’s house watching his presentation, I was at the school throwing up. By later in the day, when it was time for my presentation, I was feeling much better. My presentation was about the importance of record-keeping. Since my host-father is a tailor, we presented a skit featuring two different tailors, one who kept books and one who didn’t. And then I just discussed some of the ways that bookkeeping could help his business be more efficient. He seemed pretty responsive, and conceded that it really could help his business quite a bit. When I practiced it, the presentation was about five minutes long (plus the skit) – when I actually presented, it was about 30-40 minutes. Vinny translated my French into Mooré, and my host father would make comments in Mooré, which Vinny would translate back into French – thus adding a lot of time. After my presentation, Es gave one for my host father on how to actually keep some records – it’d be interested to go back to Minima in a year and see if he’s made any attempt to start bookkeeping (I would guess not – also, there’s no way I’m going back to Minima in a year).

Wednesday afternoon, with our presentations done, we just sort of sat around – it’s like the end of the semester, when you’ve just finished your exams – a really good feeling. Of course, a less good feeling was recurring in my stomach, and an even worse one in my bowels. Despite having no appetite and eating practically nothing all day, I spent much of Wednesday night frantically running to the latrine. One good note, though: on Wednesday evening I gave my family the gifts I had for them. Inspired by Es, I bought a bunch of school supplies for the kids – notebooks, pens, pencils, rulers, etc. I also gave the kids a Frisbee that my parents sent – the kids loved playing with my Frisbee (often waking me up at 6am to ask if they could use it). And I gave the family a Wisconsin calendar that I’d brought from home, which they seemed to like – I spent a bunch of time going through all the pictures with them and explaining what they were.

We agreed to meet at 7am to bike back to Gourcy. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the road where we agreed to meet, I was feeling ridiculously weak and light-headed (probably from not eating for a day and a half). Instead of biking back to Gourcy, I decided to call Sylvie (the medical officer) and ask her to send a car for me – I think this was a very good idea, as I almost certainly wouldn’t have made it to Gourcy. So after sitting by the side of the road for an hour, a PC van came and took me to Gourcy, where I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the med unit. Mostly I stayed in my room, but every hour or two (even during the night), I went next door to the bathroom – usually due to diarrhea, but occasionally to throw up. By Saturday morning, I was very proud of myself when I managed to drink some orange juice and eat an apple. By Saturday evening, the medicine that Sylvie had given me was clearly not working. Sylvie, I should point out, was in Ouaga most of this time – I would call her, tell her what was going on, and then she would have Mohammed (one of the training staff) give me whatever medicine I needed. So, Saturday evening, Sylvie decided I needed some medicine that only came in suppository form, which I would have to self-administer. Which I did, and that’s got to be one of the more unpleasant things imaginable. I think the medicine was the same one I received the one other time in my life I’ve gotten a suppository, which was when I had mono and was throwing up constantly.

The suppository seemed to do the trick. Although I had no energy Saturday night, I was able to eat a loaf of bread and keep it down, and my trips to the bathroom became far more infrequent. I had to wake up at 6am this morning for the PC van to bring me to Ouaga (everyone else, except for Joelle, who’s on crutches at the moment, had to arrange their own transport here). And I’m feeling much better today – the first thing I did in Ouaga, after checking into the hotel, was to go out and buy some orange juice and bread, which I quickly downed. And I’m looking forward to lunch! So it looks like I’ll be fine – my body seems to have calmed down, so once I get a bit more food in me I’ll be more or less back to normal. Which is good, because now we have a week in Ouaga to have fun, eat well, and prepare for Friday – swearing-in.

For those of you who don't have my address and are interested in sending things (like books, Skittles, Easy Cheese or Cheez Whiz or other cheese products that don't require refrigeration, granola bars, cans or packets of soup, etc.) or letters, my address is:

Chris Wilson, PCT

s/c Corps de la Paix

01 B.P. 6031

Ouagadougou 01

Burkina Faso

Be sure to send all items air mail.

And now, without further ado, here's the latest installment of the news from Burkina:

September 19, 2005

Rural Africa is the last place I thought I’d ever use the skills I’d gained from four years working at Pomona College ITS. And yet, these skills (and some Pomona College licensed software… ssshhh, don’t tell anyone) came in mighty handy the other day. The bank in Kongoussi where I’ll be working for the next two years has two computers at it: one in the secretary’s office (which is perhaps the only place in Kongoussi with air conditioning), and one in the office of the chief of accounting. Unbeknownst to me, on Thursday, the first full day of my five day site visit, a highly paid technician came from Ouaga to Kongoussi to do some work on the secretary’s computer (he upgraded it from Windows 98 to Windows XP, even though it’s a system that can barely handle XP). The next day, I went in to the office with Mike, the volunteer who I’m replacing in Kongoussi. Among other things, he wanted to get some files off the computer (including his Étude du Milieu, some quarterly reports, and several other documents he thought I’d find useful). He was pretty dismayed (and pissed) when he discovered that his entire folder on the computer, which contained a lot of work he’d done over the past two years, was completely gone.

Luckily for me, we had stopped at the cyber café (where I made my last blog post) right before heading to the bank, so I had my USB keychain drive (courtesy of Pomona College ITS) with me. Even more luckily, I still had a copy of GetDataBack, a data recovery program, on that drive (again, courtesy of Pomona College ITS). So I installed GetDataBack, and managed to recover most of Mike’s deleted files. He was quite relieved (as was I, since many of his documents will be very useful to me), and to celebrate, he went to the kiosk next to the bank to buy me a cold Coke. While he was there, he ran into André, my counterpart at the bank, and learned that the highly-paid technician from Ouaga had managed to delete an awful lot of important files off of the secretary’s computer. Mike came back with my Coke, told me that the bank was missing a lot of critical files, and I began looking for them. When the secretary came back from Sieste, we spent about an hour recovering most of the files that the technician had destroyed.

I then found out that not only had the technician lost all these files, but since he’d worked on the computer, their Internet connection no longer worked. I quickly discovered that there was a fairly simple solution to this problem – with the upgrade to Windows XP, the drivers for the modem had been lost, and they didn’t have a copy of any XP-compatible drivers. (In the process, I learned all sorts of valuable French words and phrases. For instance “gérer” means “manage” – as in “Computer Management” or “Device Manager.” This knowledge came in quite useful later in the day, when I met a gérant – a branch manager.) I told the secretary that I could fix their Internet connection, but in order to do so, I’d need to go to a cyber-café in town to download the necessary drivers. The secretary then went to the patron of the bank (the top guy – like a CEO), who gave her cash to give to me to pay for two hours at an Internet café. It actually only took about 20 minutes to download the stuff to my USB drive, after which I went back to the bank, gave the secretary my receipt from the cyber-café, and installed the drivers. After a few additional minor tweaks, the Internet was up and working again. The secretary and André were both pretty amazed, and the secretary laughingly said that they were never having that technician from Ouaga come back.

All in all, I think it was a pretty good experience – the bank has already discovered that I could be pretty valuable to have around, and it means I’ve made a pretty good first impression on them. It also makes them pretty confident in my ICT skills – André has already started telling me some records that they currently keep by hand that he wants me to transfer into Excel. Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this whole episode. One of the key things I need to do over the next two years, perhaps the most important thing, is make sure that any work I begin is sustainable and will carry on after I leave. I’m worried that the bank is beginning to see me as a technician – someone to replace their guy from Ouaga – when I’d much rather they view me as a teacher or trainer. I don’t want to move all their bookkeeping into Excel for them; instead, I want to teach them Excel and help them transfer their records. If I do too much of the work now, or if I’m not careful about what work I do, it’ll all fall apart after I’m gone. Over two years, I can teach them an awful lot, and I hope that that’s what they’re expecting of me.

At any rate, that’s how I spent most of Friday – fixing the secretary’s computer at the bank. And wouldn’t you know it, that meant I got to spend all day in the nice air-conditioned office. I have a hunch that during March, April, and May (the hot season), I’m going to be doing a lot of Excel training with the secretary. Just a hunch.

The rest of my site visit went really well. After spending most of Friday at the caisse, Mike and I went out to dinner at a restaurant about 10 minutes from his house. This restaurant serves the usual Burkinabé cuisine – benga, rice with sauce, couscous, Tô – but the chef actually knows how to make a wide array of non-Burkinabé foods. So if you ask him a day in advance, he can prepare quiche, pizza, a variety of Lebanese foods, and who knows what else. So I had a delicious tomato and onion quiche for dinner – I’m definitely going to be frequenting this restaurant a lot. There’s a Dutch couple who’s lived in Kongoussi for the past two years (and are driving back to the Netherlands in December). We went to their house so I could meet them, but unfortunately they had gone to Ouaga for the weekend. Luckily, on the way back to Mike’s place, we ran into a friend of his, a Burkinabé man named Somé, who had worked for an American named Colin, who had lived in Kongoussi a year earlier, and whose wife is going to be working at the hospital for six weeks sometime in the near future (sorry for this horrible run-on sentence – I think French has warped my brain and ruined my ability to speak English coherently). Somé came back to Mike’s place with us, and we got some beers, and just sat around and talked for awhile.

Saturday was a pretty easy day. We just bummed around most of the day. André and Somé came over for dinner – Mike prepared a delicious chili and rice meal, with coleslaw on the side. After the two of them left, Mike and I watched some Daily Show episodes off my laptop – I had half a dozen of them left from the end of May and early June – he’s a big fan of the show and hasn’t seen it for two years, so he was pretty excited. Speaking of which, if anyone out there (Pomona people, I’m looking at you…) still downloads episodes of the Daily Show, I would be eternally grateful if you burned some episodes to a CD or DVD and mailed them to me. Also, new episodes of Arrested Development. And (this might be a bit of a stretch) Packers game – I’d love to see some Packers games. And since I’ll have electricity at my place in Kongoussi, I’ll be able to watch all these things on my laptop.

Speaking of sending things, several people have been asking if it’s possible to send me things, and if so, what I’d like. First of all, yes, you can ship me things. Be sure to send them air mail – surface mail can take six months to a year to get here, but air mail usually arrives within two to three weeks. What I’d like most is some good American junk food – things like Skittles, Chicken in a Biskit, Cheez-Its, Chewy Chips Ahoy, etc. This stuff (or anything remotely similar) just isn’t available in Burkina. There’s one place in Ouaga (plus the American Embassy) where you can buy M&Ms (although they’re expensive and weird – one M&M is about three times the size of an American M&M), Snickers, and Twix – but that’s about the extent of the American junk food available here. Except for Pringles – you can get Pringles all over the place. My address here is:

Chris Wilson, PCT

s/c Corps de la Paix

01 B.P. 6031

Ouagadougou 01

Burkina Faso

Thanks in advance for any goodies you may be sending!

Minor digression there. I left Kongoussi on Sunday. There’s three buses from Kongoussi to Ouaga every day – the first leaves around 7:30am, the last one leaves at 2:00pm, and the one in between actually originates in Djibo (about 100km up the road) and usually stops in Kongoussi around 9:30am, leaving at 10:00am. We planned on taking the Djibo bus (Mike was coming back to Ouaga for his close of service medical exam – a three day affair), and showed up at the station at 9:30am, only to discover that the bus had already left, more than half an hour early. This was unexpected, since nothing in Burkina is ever even remotely close to being on time, let alone being early. After Mike chewed out the guys working at the station, we left, and came back around 1:00pm, leaving plenty of time to catch the 2:00pm bus. I made it to Ouaga around 5:30pm, just a few minutes before the last bus to Gourcy left. Although I made it onto the Gourcy bus, they did not have room for my bike, which I reluctantly left behind in Ouaga, along with a promise from the bus company that they’d send it up the next day. I arrived in Gourcy around 8:00pm (despite Peace Corps’ do-not-travel-at-night policy – whoops), one of the last to show up. But at least I made it – it’s Monday night now, and Nick, whose future post is somewhere around Dori, in the far northeast corner of Burkina, almost in Niger – has yet to return to Gourcy.

Upon returning to Gourcy and talking to the other stagiaires, I learned that I do, in fact, have one of the sweetest posts in this country. Bobby also works at a bank and has air-conditioning – no one else besides us has that. There are a handful of SED volunteers (maybe six total in our stage) who have electricity at their houses. And I think I win the closest cyber-café award for having one a block from my house, not to mention the Internet at my bank (Mike says we’re not really supposed to use it – but I figure that since I fixed it, they might be sort of lenient with me on this point). Kongoussi also has a huge market, a supermarché, and assorted foodstuffs that many people don’t have any access to, and others need to bike 30km to obtain. I only need to walk two blocks.

It’s also been exciting to hear what other people are going to be doing – and to learn that I might be traveling quite a bit, working with other volunteers. Giorgio is in Ouahigouya, a large city (around 80,000 I think) which has only two cyber-cafes. Kongoussi, with a population of around 25,000, has three of them. So Giorgio has become very interested in setting up an Internet café in Ouahigouya – something I told him I’m more than willing to help with. Our discussion about this got several other volunteers interested in setting up cybercafés near them. Ouahigouya sounds like it really has the demand for a new one (there’s usually a line at the big cyber-café in town) – I suspect that in many of these other locations, the only demand comes from Peace Corps volunteers, and therefore these projects wouldn’t really be sustainable. But I’m definitely going to start researching what’s involved in setting up one of these places – I have tons of questions – such as what does a phone line cost here? Do Burkina’s two ISP’s have regional access numbers? Are there NGOs that will provide you with free computers? Are the versions of Windows on all the cyber-café computers legal, licensed copies?

Although it’s nice to be back in Gourcy and see everyone else, I’m dreading the return to Minima. Not only because I don’t like Minima, but because I really like Kongoussi, and really want to go and start working there. Only a little over a month until I return to Kongoussi, this time for good, and I can’t wait!

September 23, 2005

Today was our second full day back in Minima. Tomorrow (and again on Sunday) we’re going to bike into Gourcy for the day. Although Minima still sucks, it’s becoming more tolerable in some respects. I brought some vegetables and spices back from Gourcy, and asked my family to use these in my food, which they’ve started doing – although I wouldn’t call the food “good”, it’s better than it was before, and I’m able to keep it down. And we’re getting some terrific lunches at Esmeralda’s place – her cook (who’s Ivorian, not Burkinabé) makes a delicious tomato and onion sauce, which makes just about any food taste good.

Speaking of food, I ate a goat head last night. Any vegetarian readers may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph. My host family served it to me last night, and I reluctantly agreed to try some. It still had the skin (and fur) attached, making it very easy to identify the ear I ate. After I’d had some of the ear, my host father gave me another chunk of meat, this one with no skin or fur attached – I suspect it might have been the brain, but can’t really be sure. It actually tasted okay – sort of like lamb, but a little tougher, and with a weaker flavor.

Thanks to everyone who’s sent me mail – just before leaving Gourcy, I finally got the two weeks worth of mail that Peace Corps hadn’t yet delivered to me. This was a really interesting collection of letters, because (1) it contained all sorts of hurricane-related news, and (2) it was the first bunch of mail I’d received that was written after I’d posted to the blog. So people could actually ask me questions about what they’d read. Of course, I’ve since forgotten all those questions, but have been trying to answer any that were posted directly to the blog.

For our current stint in Minima, we have a rather involved TDA (trainee directed activity – a training exercise) to do. We have to learn the ins and outs of the businesses run by our host families, see what works and what doesn’t, and offer them some good business advice. Before leaving Minima in the middle of October, we have to do a presentation on some business topic for our family. In theory, this work is fairly similar to the work we’ll eventually be doing at our posts.

I started on this yesterday with my host father. He’s a tailor, and although both of us know a fair amount of French, it’s very different French, and it’s nearly impossible to communicate with him. So the information I got from him may not be entirely accurate — something could easily have been lost in translation. And I hope that’s the case – if not, the man is just trying to lose money. He mostly makes pants and shirts – to make one shirt, he uses 125cm of fabric, which he buys for 1,000 to 1,250 CFA, depending on the quality of the fabric (there are three different thicknesses of fabric that he uses). He then spends three to four hours (he has a foot-powered sewing machine) turning the fabric into a shirt. I don’t know what he spends on things like thread and buttons. When he’s done, he sells the shirt for 1,500CFA, a profit of no more than 500CFA (about a dollar) for three to four hours of work. Now here’s the kicker: right now, he explained to me, no one has any money (due to a combination of last year’s famine and the fact that it’s currently the wet season, when people are too busy farming to participate in any other economic activities), and so right now he sells these shirts for 750CFA. In other words, for a morning’s work, he ends up losing 250CFA. Appalling, no? This is the way business works here – there’s no record-keeping, no sense of what’s necessary to make a profit, not even a priority placed on actually making a profit. Again, some of the details here may have been lost in translation, but I’m going to spend some time this coming week trying to get more details on how his business works. In Kongoussi, when I have to work with groups or individuals who aren’t able to pay back their debts to the bank, I may well discover similar problems to this.

September 15, 2005

Greetings from Kongoussi! This place is pretty damn cool, and the longer I’m here, the more excited I become about the next two years. But first, here are two stories for you that, hopefully, will give you a bit of a taste of what development work is like here in Burkina, and what challenges I’m going to be facing:

1) When I originally found out (or suspected) I’d be coming to Kongoussi, I found it on a map, and was pleased to discover that one of the three paved roads coming north out of Ouaga went directly to Kongoussi. Thus, I was a bit surprised when the 100km bus ride up here took over three hours because it was along a sandy, dirt road, littered with holes, bumps, and puddles. This lack of concrete didn’t quite meet my definition of paved. After arriving, I found out why the road isn’t paved. Apparently, they’ve been planning on paving the road since the early 1990s. The government tried to get funding from various places, and after awhile the Chinese government (or some Chinese NGO – I’m not sure which) agreed to finance the whole construction. The Burkinabé government then made the brilliant discovery that they could save a lot of money by only changing the maps, instead of actually paving the road. So that’s what they did. On the plus side, there are rumors that they’ll begin paving the road for real in October. And they might actually follow through on it this time, if for no other reason than the fact that there’s a presidential election in November.

2) The current volunteer here in Kongoussi is a guy named Mike. Among the projects he’s worked on here was helping to secure a very large loan (2.5 million CFA, I believe – about $5,000) for a women’s group. The group was supposed to (assuming I have my details right – I might be confusing them with another women’s group) start a savonnerie – a soap making operation. The woman who received the money just pocketed the money, and never made any effort to start the savonnerie. She ignored and blew off both Mike and the bank. After this happened, Mike learned from the bank that this woman had taken out a loan from them before, which she also defaulted on. Needless to say, he was a bit flabbergasted about that, especially the fact that no one at the bank had either (1) thought to inform him of this woman’s credit history, and (2) that they made a second loan to her after she hadn’t been able to pay back the first one. And then yesterday, Mike and I were talking to André (my counterpart at the bank – more about him shortly), and learned that the woman had actually taken out a third loan, too, which (surprise!) she hadn’t paid back. This is the bank that I’m going to be working with.

Anyways, moving on. Although I’ve only seen one other site (Ouahigouya) where a volunteer is posted, I think I must have the sweetest post in this country (the only person I know of who can compete is Steve, who has a similar post to mine, although Giorgio / Lars in Ouahigouya also have things pretty nice). I’m going to talk a bit about Kongoussi first, and then backtrack and talk about the past few days in Ouaga.

Kongoussi is one of the few cities in Burkina that’s actually growing. There are a lot that are shrinking, and most of the rest are pretty stagnant. Wherever you go in Kongoussi, however, there’s construction – and not the kind of mud-brick-building-that-naturally-weathers-away-every-ten-years-so-you-have-to-rebuild-it construction, but concrete buildings. Mike says that if they actually do pave the road, the city is going to explode. And it’s a pretty nice city. The bus ride up here, especially the last third of it, reminded me a lot of southern Utah – the same shade of red sand, and the small, isolated hills and rock formations all over the place – it’s really pretty beautiful. Kongoussi itself is built along the southern end of Lac Bam, the largest natural lake in Burkina. The lake is great, since it means that (1) this place is much less desolate during the dry season than most other areas in the north, and (2) there is a much wider food and vegetable selection here. Green beans are huge here – Kongoussi exports many of their beans to Europe. At the moment, the market has things like tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers that were also available in Gourcy. But it has several things – watermelon, bananas, oranges (which are green, for some reason) – which you can’t find in Gourcy right now, even though Gourcy is about the same latitude as Kongoussi, maybe 70km to the west. I’m no longer at all concerned about being able to find enough to eat in this country – Kongoussi will have plenty. And with Ouaga only a three-hour bus ride away, I can head down there fairly regularly to stock up on the items that aren’t available anywhere else in the country. Kongoussi’s market is pretty big – bigger than Gourcy’s. And although technically the market is every three days, the market area is pretty bustling every day, so it’s never really a problem finding things.

As I said, I’m replacing a volunteer from Mike who’s COSing in November. He’s a nice guy, and has been very helpful getting me oriented, showing me some cool hidden places in Kongoussi (like the guy who makes pizza and quiche, but only for Mike), and answering my endless questions. I’m staying in Mike’s house, and this is where I’ll be staying for my two years here. The house is pretty nice – way, way, way better than my little hut in Minima. First of all, there’s electricity. This means I’ll have to pay an electric bill (Mike’s is about 2,000-3,000 CFA a month – with my computer and other accessories, I’m sure mine’ll be higher), but I’m cool with that. Second, the place is pretty big. The front room is probably about 16x10 feet, with two windows and a door (even a screen door – no one in this country has screen doors, except PCVs, since PC requires screens). There are two smaller rooms off the back – each is probably about 8x10. The whole place is easily about three to four times my place in Minima, which never seemed all that small (probably because it didn’t have anything in it). Also, the roof of this house is nice – it’s metal on top, then some space, and then a wood ceiling – this is a very expensive roofing style (wood is pricey here), but provides the best insulation, as well as reducing the noise when it rains. The roof and windows, combined with the fan, mean that the place is actually fairly cool. With the fan, Mike says it’s usually pretty comfortable inside. During the warm season, when it’s 110-115 degrees during the day, he often sleeps outside at night – the electricity is out between about 2am and 7am, just like in Gourcy, and he says that during the hot season he wakes up the instant the fan goes off.

However, if I get really hot, there’s an air-conditioned room at the bank I’m working at. And, wouldn’t you know it, that happens to be one of the two rooms at the bank with a computer. I have a feeling someone’s going to have a lot of computer problems during the hot season, problems for which that they’ll need help from their friendly computer nerd Peace Corps volunteer. Actually, I don’t think I’ll need to resort to computer sabotage to get into the A/C room – Mike says he often just takes a book in there and reads, and no one asks any questions.

A bit more about the bank. First of all, my official counterpart (every PCV has a designated counterpart) is a guy named André. He’s the Chef des Services Credit at the bank – one of the top guys. The bank has four main branches – one in Kongoussi, one in Djibo, and two in smaller villages nearby – but their headquarters is here in Kongoussi. Mike’s original counterpart when he started here two years ago was one of the branch managers. This was problematic for a number of reasons, which I’ll get to later. After awhile, Mike sort of gave up on his official counterpart and started working more with André, who’s been pretty helpful so far. Since I think some of the work I’ll be doing is going to be fairly different from what Mike did, I’m not sure how much I’ll end up working with André.

When Mike began working with the bank, it was fairly unclear what he was supposed to do. The bank also has communication problems. And Mike’s counterpart, as a manager of one of the branches outside of Kongoussi, was often not around. And when he was, he tended to ignore Mike or not help him out very much. So it took him awhile to find his place and figure out how things worked. Much of the information he’s passed on to me has been in the form of “you should avoid this…” or “be careful about this…” rather than things I should do. In the end, it sounds like he ended up working with people who were failing to make their loan payments, and trying to get to the root of their problem. This is what Rose had in mind for me to do, and it sounds pretty interesting. André, however, has been very excited by the fact that I’m an informaticien – a computer guy. When Mike arrived, they did a little bit of bookkeeping electronically, but it was sort of half-assed, and all done in Word. For some bizarre reason, the university in Ouaga only teaches people how to use Word, not Excel or any spreadsheet software, for accounting. So Mike has taught them some of the basics of Excel, but it sounds like they’d like to learn more. André’s already told me one thing he’d like to get done on the computer – a credit balance sheet, where every time someone takes out a loan or makes a payment, they have to recalculate a whole bunch of things. He’d like to have the computer do all the math for him – that shouldn’t be too hard. Mike’s also been mentioning some other potential ICT projects in Kongoussi, including working at one of the three cybercafés in town – the guy who runs the place apparently has no idea what he’s doing, and every time something breaks, he has to have someone come up from Ouaga to fix it. A little training might be able to go a long ways.

So André seems to think that a lot of the work I’ll be doing at the bank is computer-related, which is fine with me. I’m still interested in doing the credit stuff, and hope I get to. There’s only been one PCV in Burkina who’s focused primarily on ICT – Ryan, who worked with a cybercafé in Dori, but apparently things didn’t work out too well. Ryan’s COSing this year, and no one from last year’s or my stage has done any major ICT stuff. So PC Burkina has yet to have a successful ICT project – I’m hoping to break the mold on that. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic and idealistic now – we’ll see what I think about this in another year or two. But I’m definitely interested in seeing how ICT stuff works in this country, and in trying to work with it here in Kongoussi, and am hopeful that a lot of the work I do here will be in this field.

All in all, Kongoussi is pretty sweet. I’m really looking forward to the end of October, when I’ll actually move in here and start working. The first thing I’m going to do is work on the house. Although it’s a nice house, Mike is not big on furnishing, decorating, or cleaning. Inside the front room of the house, there’s currently a large bookcase, a large table, five chairs, and a fan. The kitchen has one table, which has the stove on it. And the bedroom has a mattress on the floor, and no furniture. Everything is covered in dust / sand / dirt, and there are piles of books, clothes, and assorted other items all over the place. The walls are bare. Mike says he’s going to have the whole place cleaned by one if his women’s groups before he leaves. I’m already starting to visualize where I’m going to put things – I think I’ll try and get a dresser or armoire or something for the bedroom to put clothes in, as well as a small table, and possibly a bed frame or metal cot. The kitchen needs another table – there’s no usable counter space at the moment – and some shelves to store food on. The front room is furnished okay, but needs a bit more pizzazz – I’ll probably try and pick up a rug or mat (or maybe several) for the floor, and some pagnes or something else for the walls. Each room has one fluorescent light – although I’m not a big fan of fluorescent light, I don’t think there’s any good alternative.

I should have plenty of time for this decorating. During my first three months in Kongoussi, so November through January, I’m not supposed to leave the city. I’m sure I will, but I’m supposed to spend the whole time getting to know my way around the community, and working on my etude du milieu – a giant study of the community and my bank. The etude is where I’ll figure out what things are needed most in Kongoussi, and try to figure out what I’ll try and work on over the next two years.

So far, I’ve discovered only two weak points about Kongoussi. First, the lake makes it a bit more humid – than elsewhere in the north. Second, there aren’t many other PCVs around. The only person who Mike regularly sees is Kara, a new education volunteer (she just finished her etude, so she’s been at site for three months) who’s about 40km north of Kongoussi. There are a few other volunteers a little farther out, but it sounds like transport to Kongoussi is tough. There are three volunteers from my stage that are all within about 50km or so. There’s also some up in and around Djibo, due north on the main road. But the lack of nearby volunteers is made up for by the ease of travel (and in Mike’s case, frequency of travel) to Ouaga.

Speaking of Ouaga, here’s a quick narrative of my few days in Ouaga. We arrived on Sunday, and settled in at CACS – it’s a nice hotel over on the east side of the city, the same place we stayed during our first night in Burkina. There’s a brand new, very fast cybercafé just down the street, charging the wonderful price of 300CFA/hour (the cybercafés in Kongoussi range from 1,000 to 2,000 CFA for an hour, and are nowhere near as fast). So we all spent a bit of time over there, and then headed to the Embassy. Actually, we didn’t go to the Embassy itself, but the American Rec Center right next door. The Rec Center is a popular hangout for PCVs and ex-pats. It has a pool, a restaurant, a video library, and a few other amenities. After about two hours in the pool, I went inside and got a chocolate milkshake – delicious. A bunch of us then went inside and watched football. There were a lot of Bears, Redskins, and Steelers fans there, so we kept switching back and forth between the Bears-Redskins game and the Steelers-Titans game. We watched the games on Armed Forces Network, which is an interesting amalgamation of American programming and military propaganda – the commercial breaks during the football game, instead of advertising beer, were reminders of how important it is to follow orders, not rumors, on the front lines. Not what I’m used to. I had a bacon cheeseburger during the game – also delicious. By 8pm, the first round of football games was over. I wanted to stay and watch the Packers-Lions game, but everyone else was ready to leave at that point – from what I hear about the game, I didn’t miss much.

Most of Monday was spent in the Counterpart Workshop. This is when I first met André. The workshop had some useful parts, but a lot of it centered on themes like “the Peace Corps approach to development,” which while useful for the counterparts to hear, was a topic the stagiaires have been over several times. But late Monday afternoon, when we were done, I headed with a group of people to Marina Market. Marina Market is hard to describe. It’s a grocery store, and is the one place in Burkina where you can buy such novelties as parmesan, oregano, olive oil, Frosted Flakes, M&Ms, and a slew of other foods imported from Europe and the U.S. The stuff is expensive – some of it even pricier in Ouaga than it is in America. They also sell some electronics – I spent a bunch of time checking out the three refrigerators they had for sale. The electronics department seems to lie somewhere between a Wal-Mart and a Goodwill. While luxurious by Burkinabé standards, much of the merchandise would be considered fairly low quality in the U.S. A lot of the appliances appeared slightly used, and were no longer in any sort of packaging. Still, the food selection was amazing, and I will definitely be frequenting this place whenever I’m in Ouaga. Marina Market is in the Centre Ville, where all the nicer, more expensive places in the city are. We went to an Italian restaurant. I ordered a pizza for myself, and ate the whole thing (it was about a 12-inch pizza). And then I had ice cream for dessert. Eating non-Burkinabé food was a nice change of pace – worth the exorbitant 5,000CFA I paid for it.

Tuesday was more counterpart workshop. Afterwards, I went back to Centre Ville and looked around a bit more, then went with a few other people, including some COSing volunteers, to a restaurant called the Desert Rose. It wasn’t so much one restaurant, as a bunch of tables outside with assorted vendors nearby. I found a shish-kabob guy, and ended up eating 10 chicken and onion brochettes. They were quite tasty.

Wednesday, I met André at 5:150 in the morning (yuck), and then got to bike all the way across town (probably close to 10km), while André rode his moped in front of me – silly Peace Corps rules prohibit me from riding on his moped. By a little after 6:00am, we were at the STAF bus station, where we sat around for an hour and a half. The bus wasn’t scheduled to leave until 7:30, and I wondered to myself why we had left so early. At the gare, I talked to Ami and Andy – they were heading back to Djibo. Ami’s from my stage; Andy is the guy who’s blog I read before coming (andyburkina.com) who’s COSing in a month and a half. And, apparently, we look a lot alike. So much so that one of the people at CACS came up to me, thinking I was Andy, and started talking about something he had previously had a conversation with Andy about. It took me a minute or two to explain that I, personally, was not Andy. I don’t think the man believed me. At any rate, we were on the road by about 7:30am, and I soon discovered how Burkina had managed to swindle the Chinese, as explained above.

André and I arrived in Kongoussi sometime around 11:00, and Mike met us at the station. I then spent the rest of the day with Mike – getting a tour of Kongoussi, seeing the house, and just asking a lot of questions. Today was fairly similar, except we went to the bank this morning (and again this afternoon), where I got to meet everyone and talk to André a bit about the bank and my etude. Things move on a pretty relaxed schedule here. Yesterday, we told André we’d meet him at the bank at 8:00am. We actually walked in around 8:45am, and then sat around for about an hour (in the air-conditioned room, of course), before going around and making introductions. The introductions lasted maybe 15 minutes, and then we were done – free until our 3:00 meeting with André, when he went over a bit of organizational stuff with me. I have a lot of questions about the bank and how things work – André is making copies of several documents for me, including the Plan d’Affaires and Politiques de Financement et Credit for the bank – Mike cautions me that while these will be useful to see, there’s a huge difference between the way the bank operates on paper and in practice. It sounds like they have a fairly set way of doing things, but that to get funding from NGOs (or a Peace Corps volunteer) they have to make it look like things are run a different way. One of the big reasons the bank likes having a PC volunteer is because having a white person work there is great for business – not the most encouraging bit of information to hear. And although I still don’t know exactly what work I’ll be doing, I am starting to get a feel for the organization – and will get much more of a sense of this during my etude.

On a lighter note, today was the first time I’ve ever been hit by a turkey that was trying to back away from the monkey that was attacking it. While touring Kongoussi, Mike saw a monkey in a tree – not a common sight around here. We went over, and discovered that the thing was pretty hungry, so we bought some peanuts and started feeding it (it was a pet monkey, not a wild one). As we were watching the monkey eat the peanuts (surprisingly entertaining), some wild turkeys came over and started trying to eat the peanuts on the ground. The monkey didn’t like this, and lunged at the turkeys, one of whom ran into me while trying to flee. That’s something that never happened to me in the U.S.

I think I’ve written enough tonight that by this point, no one’s actually bothering to read what I’m writing, so I’m going to call it a night.

Once again, I've been typing up notes every couple of days, hoping to eventually post them to this blog. So here are the latest additions. If you're cramped for time and don't want to wade through all of this, I suggest skipping to the September 10 entry -- this is the day we got our site assignments. I'll be living (as I suspected) in Kongoussi for the next two years. It's Sept. 10 as I write this (and just got the assignment a few hours ago). Tomorrow I head to Ouaga for a few days, and then get to visit my site. Hopefully, I'll be able to update the blog again in a week or so, after seeing my site -- we'll see if that happens. Hopefully, Kongoussi has decent Internet access.

Several other stagiaires are referring people to my blog -- so friends of Omar, Ami, and Giorgio should also check out the September 10 entry, which has some messages from these guys.

I didn’t realize that my post from a few days ago actually posted – the connection died in the middle of posting. But here’s the content from the past two days.

Anyways, without further ado, here we go:

September 9, 2005

Well, the Internet has been down in Gourcy for the past few days, so I haven’t been able to post anything. Hopefully, sometime after site announcements tomorrow, it’ll magically start working, and I can post some stuff about my site.

I’ve found out some more information about the place where I suspect I’ll be posted. First of all, this is still just speculation, of course, but there really isn’t anyone else in SED who has even an inkling of where they’ll end up, so the fact that Rose told me as much as she did during the interview seems to suggest that that’s where I’ll end up. This mysterious site, working with a caisse, is in Kongoussi, a regional capital that’s due north of Ouaga. According to the PCV (Maggie, who’s from Hayward, Wisconsin) who was leading one of our sessions today, it’s a pretty big city – almost as big as Ouahigouya. And tomorrow morning, I’ll find out for sure if this is where I’m going.

Not much excitement over the past few days. I’m still eating as much as I can. There’s a guy in Gourcy, a street vendor, who some PCV discovered makes delicious chicken sandwiches – it’s chicken and onions (and tomatoes if you’re lucky) on a baguette. They’re pricey – 650CFA, but very delicious. These sandwiches have suddenly become very popular among the stagiaires, and most of us had one for lunch. I had two. I also learned that the guy slaughters and uses one chicken for every two sandwiches he makes – which means I ate an entire chicken between the two. And although that filled me up, I kept snacking on dried mangoes all afternoon (although that was partly just to stay awake during the training sessions). And I had spaghetti bolognaise for dinner, and am still snacking on some cookies now (it’s about 10pm). I feel like I should clarify a bit on the food at the hotel – here, spaghetti bolognaise does not refer to the same dish that it would refer to in America. There’s a fairly basic tomato sauce that Burkinabé use in a lot of their food – you most commonly find it as a sauce for rice, but also for pasta. Spaghetti bolognaise simply means that it’s this simple tomato sauce, but with some ground meat added (beef, I think / hope).

I started my Christmas shopping today. As part of our training, the SED stagiaires have to create a store where we well whatever merchandise we want to other stagiaires, volunteers, and PC staff in Gourcy. We can do whatever we want, but have to use locally-available products (i.e., we can’t have someone send us tons of candy from the U.S.), need to make a profit, and shouldn’t undercut any local businesses (we thought about selling bread for 75CFA at the hotel – this is more than the government-fixed rate of 50CFA that all the street vendors sell it for, but less than the 100CFA that the hotel restaurant charges). We’ve come up with at least two major products. One is a “Peace Corps Burkina Faso 2005” t-shirt. Some of the PCVs made shirts a year or two ago, and we were pretty jealous, so we decided to make our own. They’re batiques (a type of wax printing method), and are being made by one of the people who works with Lars in Ouahigouya. We currently have two demos of the shirts, and now we’re going to start taking orders. I’m actually not working on the shirt project, but on our other major project – sort of a purse-like bag, or as I call then, Burkinabé carry-all bags. They’re based on the bags our mosquito nets came in – similar in size and shape to messenger bags. But we’re having a local tailor make them out of local fabrics, and they’re pretty cool – we have two prototypes at the moment, and are taking orders. So if you get something that looks like a messenger bag from me for Christmas (this means you, Abby), you’ll know why.

Ultimate Frisbee has become the game of choice among the stagiaires. Late every afternoon this week – after our training sessions are done but before the sun completely sets – we get together and play a game out in front of the hotel. Yesterday, we had about 12 or 13 people playing, which made for a pretty good game. Today, we only had about 6 people, and it was really hot today, and we were all tired, so we modified the rules a little bit, instituting a no-running policy. It changed the dynamic of the game quite a bit, and some of the locals who watched us found it hilarious the way we would speed-walk all over the place but not run.

We had a couple of guest speakers from the U.S. Embassy in Ouaga come and visit one of our training sessions the other day. They were people who oversee safety and security for Americans in Burkina, and went over some of the emergency procedures and information we need to know. Essentially, they said that Burkina is pretty safe (although there are a few areas to watch out for in Ouaga and Bobo), but that the situation in Cote d’Ivoire has created some problems, mainly by bringing a lot of arms smuggling into the country. Since there aren’t enough police and gendarmes to patrol all the roads coming from the south (keep in mind that there are, at most, a dozen paved roads that run from Burkina to either Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, or Benin), the arms smugglers keep changing which route they use, so you have to be a little careful on any of those southern roads, especially at night. The embassy folks also said that, not including Peace Corps, there are about 400 Americans in this country, mostly missionaries, tourists, and businesspeople (in that order, I believe).Currently, Peace Corps probably has about 120-130 volunteers / trainees in country (although that number will go down in a few weeks when the 2003 stage COS), plus staff, so we’re a pretty sizable part of the American presence here.

We also had an American missionary from the Djibo area (way up north) come and talk to us about appropriate technology. Appropriate technology is sort of hard to explain – I guess it’s helping people make the most of what few resources they have. For instance, the missionary explain how people could use PCV pipe to collect the rain run-off from their roofs and store it in an underground cistern, thus giving them a water supply in their compound. He also explained how to create compost latrines, which sound like they’re a bit more sanitary than standard latrines, but create compost, thus helping everyone’s crops. He gave us a lot of ideas, and many of them are pretty simple. One of the easiest appropriate technology techniques that PCVs uses here are the feu ameliorés (I think I’m really butchering the French here). A lot of the women here, when they cook, will put a marmite (a large pot) on top of three stones, and just shove firewood between the marmite and stones and burn it. This leaves a lot of open space for heat to escape, and therefore wastes a lot of energy. So what we can teach them to do is create a much more solid stove out of clay and dung which keeps a lot more of the heat inside. This dramatically increases the amount of usable heat the women get from their firewood. I don’t think I explained this concept very well. But regardless, as you can imagine in a desert environment like this (the women often have to walk for miles to find firewood), a more efficient stove can make a huge difference.

Anyways, time to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s the big day!

September 10, 2005

Kongoussi! It’s official now – that’s where I’ll be living for the next 2 years. It’s in the north / northwest part of the country, 108km almost due north of Ouagadougou. I’ll be working at URCBAM – Union Régionale des Caisses du BAM. BAM is the name of the province that Kongoussi is in (and the capital of), so this is a regional credit union. According to my short, one paragraph job description, I’ll be working with borrowers who are about to default on their payments, and will also be working with several entrepreneurs in the local market. And I’ll be able to do some ICT work – I think it’ll be primarily teaching people how to use Excel. There aren’t that many other volunteers near me – Giorgio is in Ouahigouya, which is probably about two hours away by transport. Ami is due north of me in Djibo, taking the spot being vacated by Andy Burkina (andyburkina.com). Leslie, a Health trainee, is being stationed in a small village sort of equidistant between Kongoussi, Gourcy, and Ouahigouya. Anna and Buddy, two other Health trainees, are somewhere to the east of me. And there are supposedly one or two current volunteers in the area. I guess I’ll find out eventually.

Site announcements were pretty climactic. They had a giant map of Burkina (probably about 10 feet wide) up on the wall, and one by one they picked people’s names out of a hat, told them where they were posted, and then we had to tape a little picture of ourselves on the map. When I went up, Rose said “Kongoussi” and I knew exactly where it was on the map – everyone else (except Giorgio) had to look around a little bit, since Giorgio and I were the only ones with any inkling of where they might go. Esmeralda is pretty happy – she got Léo, which is what she wanted – it’s a larger city that’s just north of Ghana. Omar is in a “large village” somewhere near Banfora, in the far southwest – he seems to have mixed feelings about his site. But all the rest of us in Minima are pretty happy – everyone in general seems to be pretty happy – there isn’t anyone in SED or Health who seems to already dislike their site (as happened with one or two of the GEE volunteers). The SED and Health folks are spread out all over the country, although there aren’t very many in the north or east.

So I’ll be visiting Kongoussi next week, and will be able to tell you a lot more about it then. I’ve heard varying accounts of its size – somewhere between the size of Yako and Ouahigouya, both of which are larger than Gourcy, and I’d be content in somewhere the size of Gourcy. It’s Mooré-speaking, which is nice, I guess, since I already know a few words of Mooré. Everyone in Minima (except Omar) is going to Mooré-speaking places, so hopefully we’ll be able to get some language training in village.

All in all, I’m pretty happy and excited about my post. We’ll see if I’m still as optimistic and enthusiastic after I visit… I wish I could post a map here, showing everyone where Kongoussi is. Hmm. Oh well.

Since several stagiaires are sending out links to my blog, here are a few messages. From Omar to his friends: “I’m slowly dying and I’ll probably never see you again.” (We’re all laughing at him as he says this.) From Giorgio to his friends: “Omar is slowly dying, and you’ll never see him again.” Note to friends of Omar: please don’t inform his parents of his impending doom. From Ami to her friends: “Hi. All these guys are whining over nothing.” Now Omar is adding: “Ami sucks.” Giorgio says: “I concur.” Giorgio says he’ll soon be accepting orders for custom-made t-shirts made by handicapped artisans. He also wants to tell everyone that he’ll be in Ouahigouya, and will have regular access to Internet after the end of October, once he moves to site. And Omar adds that Giorgio is not intelligent. But Giorgio points out that he was intelligent enough to get Ouahigouya.

August 29, 2005

It’s been several days since I last wrote anything. So, where to begin…

Thursday night (the 25th), the Minima group got to stay in Gourcy for the night. Everyone else had to go back to their villages, but since there was a SED trip to Ouahyigua the next day, and Minima is the only SED village to which you cannot get public transport, we got to spend a bonus night at the hotel in Gourcy – that was a nice surprise. And I had a delicious dinner – the “steak supreme” – a decent size chunk of beef covered in a very tasty onion sauce. At 1800CFA ($3.50), it was ridiculously expensive, but well worth it.

The trip to Ouhayaguia was quite interesting. We spent the morning visiting a groupemment where a bunch of artisans work. The place was run by NAAM, a large NGO that operates in a lot of regional capitals throughout Burkina. At the groupemment, there were artisans doing woodworking, weaving, soap manufacturing, le grillage (fence-making), and fruit drying. We got to see them work and see how they make the things they make – I never realized how much work went into a bar of soap. The soap they made was pretty good stuff – it’s made of shay butter, which, I’m told, is what some of the really nice things at place like Bath and Body Works are made of. Their nicest soaps sold for around a 1,000CFA – I can only imagine what they’d go for at a Bath and Body Works.

Afterwards, we went to (at last!) a cybercafé, where I finally got to post some stuff to my blog, and sent out some e-mails, mostly mass e-mails. I spent an hour at the cybercafé – not long enough, but at least long enough to let people know that I’m still alive.

After lunch, we went and visited the association where Lars works. He’s a PCV who’s been in Burkina for two years – one of us will be replacing him. He works with handicapped artisans – there are about 85 in his association, roughly 20 or so of whom work at the compound we visited. The place is pretty nice – there are several stalls and small buildings where artisans work. There’s a hangar where they have some classes for the artisans, and there’s a store at the front (built as part of Lars’s project) where tourists come and buy things. We spent the afternoon seeing what the artisans do and how they do it. One artisan did leatherwork – for instance, he’d take PVC, put some cardboard on top of it, carve an intricate design out in the cardboard, and then cover the whole thing with leather, producing a nice jewelry box. The jewelry box would then sell in the store for 2,000CFA (less than four dollars). When we asked how many of these he could produce in a day, he said usually two. And I’m not sure how much of that 2,000 goes to cover the cost of the PVC pipe, the leather, and the leather paint.

Another artisan made batique shirts. I don’t entirely understand how batique works – it’s some sort of wax that you use to make designs on shirts. The end result looks pretty similar to an American t-shirt – a group of SED trainees is now working with this artisan to get some “Peace Corps Burkina Faso 2005” t-shirts made up. Another artisan made marmites – large metal pots that are what everyone here uses for cooking. To make one of these pots, he’d begin by finding used metal – mostly empty beer cans – often paying a local kid to go out and find the cans. He then melts the metal. While melting the cans, he creates a mold for the pot out of sand – this is a painstaking process, often taking 15 minutes or so. He then pours the melted metal into the mold, gives it a minute to cool, and destroys the sand mold. Then he starts over – the process seems inefficient, since he has to recreate the mold each time. Lars explained that when he first came to the association and tried to find ways to make the place more efficient, he looked into various ways that this artisan could make the marmites without having to recreate the mold each time. But what he discovered was that the time it took him to create the mold wasn’t really a problem – if he were to cut down that time by having a more permanent mold, he wouldn’t be any more productive, since his real limiting factor is the amount of scrap metal he can get in a given day.

About 4 in the afternoon, we hopped on the bus and started back to Gourcy. A gendarme stopped us at a checkpoint on the road, and road back to Gourcy with us – I’m not quite sure why. From Gourcy, we then had to bike back to Minima, which was a real pain in the ass. We’d brought a lot of stuff with us to Gourcy, and biking 10 kilometers on a muddy, dirt road with 50 pounds on your back is not very fun. Especially when it’s dusk and you really want to get back before sundown.

Nonetheless, on Sunday, our day off, we decided to go back to Gourcy. We hung out with the other stagiaires, got some decent food, and had a cold Coke. I also snagged about a dozen Gatorade packets from the med unit at Gourcy – it’s nice to have some flavor in the water, and really nice to have something like Gatorade as an alternative to the incredibly disgusting ORS (oral rehydration salts) that we’re supposed to take if we have diarrhea, which, of course, we all do. We also met two Belgian girls who were staying in Gourcy for two months, working with an artisans group, doing fairly similar things to what Lars did. They were there on their own – they paid their own way, and were amazed at all the perks that Peace Corps offered, from the airfare to the free anti-malaria pills.

Although I was the first to get sick in Minima, everyone else has had their turn. Omar was in pretty bad shape for a few days, and now Giorgio (after actually eating the food his host family served him last night) has been out of commission all day. Even Armand, our LCF, got sick from the Tô. I’ve been doing much better – since coming back from Gourcy, I’ve been fine. My family’s been feeding me tons of corn (probably about 8 ears a day), which has put a stop to that pesky diarrhea. The past two mornings, for breakfast, there hasn’t been any bread available in Minima. So instead, I’ve gotten beignets – little cakes fried in oil – donuts, essentially. And they get delivered straight to my door – it’s like having Krispy Kreme deliver. Granted, these beignets are nowhere close to Krispy Kremes, but they’re pretty damn good. Especially with a little ChocoNut (generic Nutella) on them. And last night I actually got meat for dinner – I suspect it was pigeon (which, incidentally, I unknowingly ate for lunch on Saturday while visiting the trainees down the road in Douré), but it was pretty good, so I’m not too concerned about what it actually was. And speaking of culinary experiences, my family actually ate a bug last night. After dinner, we were sitting around in my courtyard, and this large bug started jumping around – it looked similar to a grasshopper, but a bit bigger. One of the kids caught it and showed it to me, telling me what the word was for it in Mooré (I, of course, instantly forgot the word). He then disappeared, and a few minutes later returned with the bug, except it was now black and crispy. And then he and two of the other kids ate the thing. Luckily, they didn’t offer me any, but it was still a bit surprising.

Well, there isn’t much news to write about. Next Tuesday we go back to Gourcy, and then we get our site assignments on Saturday the 10th. On the 11th, we go down to Ouaga for a counterpart workshop, and then we get to visit our posts later in the week. We’re all looking forward to site assignments and visits – all the training will be much more worthwhile once we actually know what we’re going to be doing. In the meantime, we’re stuck here in Minima. No one seems to like this place – both ours LCFs (we have a second one this week, named Cépahs, who’s teaching Esmeralda Mooré while the rest of us learn French with Armand) hate this place. Even the fonctionnaire complained about it when we talked to him. Still, for two months, it’s certainly doable. I hope my post is somewhere larger than this, if for no other reason than I would starve after two years in somewhere like Minima. But that seems to be the general mentality among PCVs (both trainees and those who’ve been here for a year or two) – Burkina isn’t somewhere that you’ll fall in love with and never want to leave; but, for two years, it’s not too bad a place.

September 1, 2005

I’m taking another sick day today. It’s about noon right now, and I’m feeling a lot better, so I might try and head into class when it starts again at 2:00. I’m disappointed I was sick today – I was going to skip class anyways to go to a Baptism.

Last night, when I came back home after classes, there was a guy waiting for me who I’d never met before. His name is Kindo Oumarou (a pretty common name), and although he’s originally from Minima, he’s now a fonctionnaire in another village about 10km away. He is somehow (I’m not quite sure on the familial relations) part of the family that lives in the next compound over, the one where Loic lived. Anyways, he was here when I got back, and we talked for a few minutes – he speaks a little English, and was excited to get to speak it. After he left, we had dinner. I then spent the next hour or so teaching my family to count to ten in English while they taught me to count to ten in Mooré – it was pretty fun, and I think helped them to realize how difficult it is for me to learn Mooré, just as it’s difficult for them to learn English. The kids caught on way quicker than my host father (the two oldest boys has already learned to count in English, but had forgotten a lot of it) – my host father would be agonizing his way from one to five, and then one of the younger kids (maybe 6 years old) would just rattle off “one, two three, four, five.”

After the counting, they spent a while explaining that there was going to be a baptism today, and that I was invited to come and see it. It was to start around 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning – whenever everyone showed up. They then asked me to go to the next compound and talk to Kindo Oumarou for a bit – I wasn’t really sure why (and still am not entirely sure why). But I went over there, and spent about an hour talking to him, all in French. His French is so, so, so much easier to understand than my family – in teaching my host father to count (he also tried to read a little bit from one of my books), I was able to see how many sounds in the English language (and in French) he just can’t make, which is one of the reasons I have so much trouble communicating with him. Anyways, I talked with Oumarou about all sorts of things, including a lot of comparisons between the U.S. and Burkina. As a fonctionnaire (he serves as a primary school teacher in his village), Oumarou is university-educated, and yet it still amazes me how little he understands the scope of differences between the U.S. and Burkina. He said, for instance, that 85% of Burkinabé were cultivators, and he’d heard that in the U.S. there were a lot fewer. I said that I had heard the figure of 5% for the U.S. He also asked the perennial question about whether there were a lot more moto-velos in the U.S. than here – here, a motorcycle is what you drive if you’re wealthy – the thought of everyone driving their own car is unheard of. We also talked a bit about religion, and what Islam is like in America – he was worried that Americans thought all Muslims were terrorists. All in all, it was a good talk.

As I was leaving, he insisted that I go and greet the patriarch of the family – Loic’s host father. I did so, and he offered me some gateaux that were being prepared for after the baptism. The gateaux were nothing more than popcorn, but I took a few – they were quite tasty. Unfortunately, I think they might have been what made me sick. Within about five minutes, I was feeling kind of light-headed and getting chills – I kept shaking for much of the walk back to my compound. I was freezing by the time I got back (it was probably about 70 degrees outside), and tried to make myself as warm as possible going to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom, where I nearly threw up, and then this morning went to the latrine and this time did throw up, so I decided that maybe I should stay in bed for awhile. Which is a shame, because I wanted to go to the baptism. And I’m feeling better now, and have even managed to keep down some food. I’ve almost finished my Nalgene bottle of Gatorade – we’re supposed to drink O.R.S. (oral rehydration salts – water with a bunch of salt and sugar added) when we’re sick, but they’re disgusting – I swiped a bunch of Gatorade packets from the med unit in Gourcy last weekend, and they’re a far more tasty, even if slightly less effective, alternative to O.R.S.

On Tuesday, we did our nutritional session, wherein we had to cook a well-balanced meal for ourselves. It was pretty good – we’d stocked up on food in Gourcy. There’s a product here called “Zwan”, which is a Dutch version of Spam – it’s meat in a can, except chicken meat not pork. I cut a block of Zwan into thin slices (like my Dad does with Spam when we go camping) and grilled it along with some onions – it was pretty good. Esmeralda made a pasta salad, combining some macaroni with tomatoes and cucumber. I then tossed some of my Zwan and onion mixture into it, and it was really good. Since it was Esmeralda’s birthday, Giorgio has planned on making a cake (and spent an hour running around Minima looking for some eggs), but instead spent most of the nutritional session talking to Sylvie, the medical officer – in the end, he ended up going to Gourcy, and as of yesterday afternoon, had yet to return. But instead of cake, he made some pancakes (since they could be done in a fraction of the time) – they were ChocoNut (generic Senegalese Nutella) pancakes, and were pretty good. Sylvie also brought some fruit with her – pineapple, apples, and bananas – it was a real feast. Some stagiaires from other nearby villages came, and we ended up with about 15 or 16 people – it was a lot of fun, and to top it off, Omar’s host father managed to find some beer somewhere. It was warm, of course, but really hit the spot. He’s now agreed to bring us beer every afternoon, which is pretty cool.

We currently have two LCFs in Minima. Cephas was scheduled to be our LCF for this 10-day stretch, but he spends his time here teaching Esmeralda Mooré. So Armand moto-velos in from Gourcy every day to teach the other three of us French. Cephas and Armand, who come from Ouaga and Bobo, respectively, hate Minima as much as the rest of us, and Cephas’s birthday is on Saturday, so we’ve decided to go into Gourcy on Saturday and try to spend the night there.

Well, there’s not much else to write about – these days in Minima all seem to be kind of the same. A baptism, nutritional session, or being sick are all nice in a way, just because they break up the monotony a bit.

September 7, 2005

So, it looks like it’s been awhile since I wrote anything here – almost a week. I’m back in Gourcy now – we arrived yesterday – and the exciting news here is that the hotel finally has Internet access. Unfortunately, it only sometimes works, and when it does, is very slow. It’s several computers all sharing a dial-up connection. But hopefully I’ll be able to post this online within the next two or three days.

I continue to lose weight, due to the lack of food in Minima which doesn’t make me vomit. Since coming back to Gourcy, I’ve been filling up. I had a jambon et fromage sandwich when I got here yesterday (it’s like a 12-inch sub sandwich), and then split another one with someone because I was still hungry. At dinner, I felt like Abiel – after a dinner of steak and fries, I started looking around the table for more food. I got some spaghetti bolognaise from someone who didn’t finish hers, found some bread at the table, which I ate, and kept looking for people who weren’t going to finish their food. In Minima, I eat next to nothing; in Gourcy, I pig out. I weighed myself this morning, and am now down to about 128-129, meaning I’ve lost almost 10 pounds (and probably had lost ten pounds before last night). But now I have two weeks away from village, so I should be able to eat a lot. And I’m gradually starting to find food in Minima – we’ve started all eating lunch together at Esmeralda’s house, and she has someone in her family cook for us. The food I get there is by far the best food I’ve had in Minima – we had benga one day (kidney beans and rice – one of my favorite Burkinabé foods), and alicots the next – it’s some sort of vegetable, which by itself isn’t great, but was quite good with the tomato and onion sauce.

There isn’t all that much to write about. The days in Minima are all kind of the same – we have French classes, eat some lunch, play some rummy, drink some warm beer. There isn’t much difference from day to day – we spend most of our time having the same conversations over and over again: I hope I get a good post; Minima sucks; I wish I could eat; etc. Being back in Gourcy with all the SED and Health volunteers is kind of nice because although it’s still kind of the same conversations, you at least get to have them with different people. And when enough of us get together, we can share notes on the few fragments of news we’ve heard – by now, we all know that New Orleans got destroyed, and have heard assorted bits of information about what happened. There’s a stagiaire here from Baton Rouge who called home this weekend. Luckily, her family is okay and their house is still there, but a lot of her extended family and family friends lost their houses, so her parents have about 30 people living with them, and no food available. We’ve heard that there are as many as 10,000 people dead, and all sorts of things about how slow the White House was to react – the majority of our news actually comes from the BBC, who have far better shortwave broadcasts than Voice of America, but which carries a very different bias than most American news outlets. Some of the volunteers who live in bigger cities than Minima (that is, all of them except the four of us) have seen pictures on TV (I, of course, have not seen any pictures). For pictures of this thing to make it on to Burkinabé TV, it has to be pretty bad.

Anyways, if you’re interested in reading some more about what we’re up to in Burkina, there are a few other stagiaires who have blogs. Unfortunately, I only of one who has actually had a chance to post anything (http://www.xanga.com/koldindc -- it’s another SED volunteer), and a couple people have just been referring their friends and family to look at my blog. I haven’t had a chance to see if anyone has posted comments from my post two weeks ago, but I will as soon as I get online again. And if anyone has questions for me, feel free to post them on the blog, and I’ll try and answer them.

I did my second (of two) placement interviews with Rose (the SED APCD) last week – actually, it was the day I was sick, probably about 20 minutes after I finished writing (I was in the middle of a game of Spider when she showed up unexpectedly at my house). It went pretty well – I think she has a specific site in mind for me, and it sounds like a pretty nice site. In my interviews, I’ve told her that I’m pretty flexible, but would really like to work with ICT (information and communication technology), one of the four areas (along with microfinance, agri-business / artisans, and tourism) in which SED works, but the one where (as far as I can tell) the fewest people work. She asked me how I would feel about working in a “structured office environment with some ICT opportunities.” I said that sounded quite good. It sounds like there’s a volunteer who’s COSing soon (close of service – the end of your 2 years) who works at a Caisse Populaire (like a credit union) in a larger city somewhere. It sounds like this volunteer has had some problems, but that the post could be a really nice one. I asked Steve, a volunteer who’s been in Burkina for a year and has perhaps the nicest post (we works at a bank, and has an air-conditioned office) about this mysterious post – he won’t give me too many details, but says it could be a “potentially sweet” post. This is all very nice to hear after seeing where the GEE girls got posted (they got their assignments last weekend) – they’re all in small villages in the north and east – some of them are 30-40km from other volunteers or from their regional capitals. It really makes me glad I’m in SED – although I came here expecting to be in a rural village, I’ve discovered in Minima that I’m not sure I’d make it for two years in somewhere like that. Although the lack of certain amenities kind of sucks, what would really drive me crazy is that there isn’t really anything you can do in somewhere like Minima that relates to business development. There aren’t any businesses to develop, so the work (or lack thereof) would drive me nuts. One way or another, I’ll find out my post this Saturday (along with all the other SED and Health volunteers), and then visit it next week.

Steve Jobs is now officially on my shit list. While in Minima, my iPod crashed, and when I got it working again, all my music was gone. Interestingly, the photos I had on there were still there. However, the next time I went to turn it on, it wouldn’t turn on – it displays the Apple logo for about 10 seconds, and then shows a picture of a folder with an exclamation point on it, and then turns off after about 2 seconds. So, not only did the iPod die, but it took all my music with it. Luckily, I still have some music (about 12GB of the 55GB or so on the iPod) on my laptop. Anyone out there have some pointers on how to get the iPod working again? It’s a 4th-generation, 60GB iPod Photo. Unfortunately, I can’t really research this on my own, since my Internet connection is so flaky and slow.

Anyways, that’s it for now. September 10 is the big day – site assignments – and September 11 I go to Ouaga, where I will (hopefully) be able to get online and let you all know where I’m going to be living for the next two years.

So... I am finally at a cyber cafe. It's very, very slow, and makes me miss Pomona's gigabit connections. Anyways, I've been typing up a lot of notes on my laptop, and am just going to copy and paste all of that here.

Send me some mail! I guarantee that I will send mail back to everyone who sends me something. I don't know when I'll next have Internet -- probably in about three weeks when I'll be in Ouaga for two days.

Here it is:

August 3, 2005

Well, after a day and a half here, I must say, this is a cool country. Well, not cool so much as really damn hot. But you know what I mean. I’m writing at the moment on my laptop, on the bed in my hotel room. There are no sheets on the bed (it’d be too hot to use them anyways), only a mosquito net around it. The room can’t be larger than 8 feet by 8 feet (that includes the bathroom), and is housing both me and Brian, another trainee. Our hotel is in Gourcy, about 130km north of Ouagadougou. It’s a decent sized city - big enough that it has electricity, running water, and a cell phone tower. Anyways, here’s a brief summary of the past few days:

Saturday: This was the day we all arrived in Philadelphia to begin staging. There are a total of 51 in the group - 17 doing Small Enterprise Development (SED) like me, and the others split between Health Outreach and Girls’ Education Empowerment. The weekend in Philadelphia was pretty cushy - we stayed at the Sheraton Society Hill, right by downtown. And Peace Corps gave each of us $160 to spend on food during the weekend, so there was a lot of good eating and drinking.

The staging was a little tedious and boring at times - all the topics discussed were fairly general and not at all specific to Burkina Faso. We discussed general cross-cultural issues, the Peace Corps approach to development, etc. And there were a lot of get-to-know-you activities, the kind that made me feel a little bit like I was at camp.

Sunday: More staging.

Monday: Monday morning began bright and early with a walk over to the federal building in downtown Philadelphia, where we visited the clinic and started our shots. We only received yellow fever, MMR, polio - everything else we’ll get immunized for here in Burkina. After the shots, we went back and killed some time in the hotel lobby, then headed on over to the airport, where we arrived about 5 hours before our flight left. After killing a few hours (and a few more of Uncle Sam’s dollars) at the airport bar, we boarded the plane. Tuesday morning we arrived in Paris and switched to a new plane.

Tuesday: The flight from Paris to Ouagadougou made a stopover in Niamey, Niger. It was a little distressing to arrive at an airport where the only other airport anywhere in sight was a large cargo plane marked “United Nations Humanitarian Air Services.” Around 5:30pm (only an hour late) we finally arrived in Ouaga. The staff from the Peace Corps office were there to meet us, as well as about a dozen or so volunteers (PCVs) already in country. After getting our baggage, going through customs, and all that jazz, we loaded onto some very cramped vans and drove to our hotel. The drive through Ouaga was fascinating - just seeing all the little shops along the road, as well as how crowded the place was. The road was a mess - bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks - all barreling along inches apart, yet somehow managing not to hit each other.

At the hotel, we had dinner right away - it was fried chicken (which didn’t have very much meat on it - mostly bone) and pizza. I have no idea what was on the pizza - I picked off the mushrooms, could recognize the peppers, but had no idea what the remaining items were. Luckily, they had bread - good French bread - and a nice salad, so I managed to get enough to eat. A juicy papaya and a cold Coke at the end really hit the spot.

After a few basic bits of information from the Peace Corps staff, everyone headed up to a sort-of lounge-like area on the roof of the hotel, where we spent several hours enjoying Burkina’s assorted beers (there are, as best I can tell, four types of beer in the country - my favorite so far is called “Flag.”) Several of the PCVs who had been in-country for a year were there, and it was great to talk to them and finally talk to some people who had actually done what we were about to do. In addition to the assorted war stories about various illnesses and such, they had some good stories and were quite reassuring.

The hotel room was pretty hot when I fell asleep, but cooled off overnight. I woke up a few times in the middle of the night, probably due to the very large and loud storm that came through.

Wednesday: After starting the day with a cold shower (there was no hot water - but the cold shower felt really good), I headed down to breakfast in the conference center of our hotel. CACS is one of the nicer hotels in Ouagadougou. Nonetheless, there was an inch of water all across the floor of the dining room. After breakfast, we filled out some assorted paperwork (which seems to be a popular pastime here in Peace Corps…), exchanged some money, and received our allowances for training. My allowance was about 51,000 CFA, roughly $90.

We then loaded into buses, and began the trek to Gourcy. The drive took around 2.5-3 hours, and was our first chance to see any of Burkina outside of Ouaga. When we arrived, there was a group of women from Gourcy waiting for us, singing and dancing a welcoming song. We were then invited to drink some water from a large bowl, as is custom here when you welcome people (our medical officer assured us that the water came from a bottle and was safe to drink). We then walked to a restaurant for lunch - my first authentic Burkinabé meal.

Well, there’s a bunch more to write about for today - my assorted rice meals, playing Frisbee with Inus - but my roommate is going to sleep, so I’m going to finish up for the day and hopefully write some more tomorrow.

August 6, 2005

It’s Saturday night now. A lot of stuff has happened since Wednesday or whenever it was I last wrote anything. So instead of doing a day-by-day summary of the week, I’m just going to try and come up with some interesting anecdotes or something.

Since we arrived in Gourcy, we’ve been busy most of the time with training sessions. Every day, we start at 8:00 am with two 1.5-2 hour long sessions in the morning, a 2 hour break for lunch, then two more sessions, usually finishing between 5:00 and 6:00. Then we usually run around a bit (by 6pm, it’s cooled off enough to run around without dying), and then we head out for dinner and drinks, and try and be back at the hotel by 1:00am, which is when the power goes out in Gourcy. The sessions have been on a wide range of topics. We’ve had several health and safety sessions, some language sessions, and some cross-cultural ones.

Today’s exciting news were the results of the language placement exams and assignments for the 10 weeks of home-stay. The French placement exam was yesterday, and all you had to do was talk to one of the LCF (Language and Culture Facilitator - the people who teach the language classes) for about 10 or 15 minutes. There are 10 different language levels: novice low, novice mid, novice high, intermediate low-high, advanced low-high, and “superior.” In order to be sworn in as a PCV (a full-fledged volunteer, as opposed to a trainee (PCT), which is what we are now), you have to reach intermediate mid level - I tested into intermediate high, which was way higher than I had planned. What’s truly amazing is that in the SED (Small Enterprise Development) program, there are 17 trainees, two of which are native francophones. One of them, who spent the first 10 years of his life in France, also tested as an intermediate high, which means the LCFs think my French is on par with someone who speaks it fluently.

The language placements determine where everyone will live during the home-stay period. I’ll be in a small village called, I think, Minima, which is about 10km from Gourcy. There’ll be four other trainees there - Esmeralda and Loic (the fluent French speakers), and Omar and Giorgio - should be a pretty fun group. The rest of the trainees will be split up in other villages within about a 25km radius of Gourcy. We’ll do most of our language training in the village, and for four days out of every two weeks, we’ll meet in Gourcy during the day with the other SED volunteers (there are two other villages of SED volunteers).

Our village group had our first meeting today. Because we’re the advanced group, we spent about two hours going over some of the major differences between French as it’s spoken in France and as it’s spoken in Burkina. We then spent two hours going over the basics of Mooré, the local language spoken in this part of the country. It sounds like we’re going to spend the next few weeks working on French (mostly for my, Giorgio, and Omar’s sake), and then start learning local languages, which is pretty cool.

I’ve actually been pretty amazed at how well I’ve been doing with the French. It’s been three years since I’ve really spoken it at all, and even then it was pretty crappy - a three year absence seems to have actually improved my linguistic skills for some reason. I’ve struck up some conversations with random folks around Gourcy - everyone here is pretty laid-back, and a lot of them are eager to talk to us and interact with us. Last night, for instance, a big group of us played soccer (or, in my case, mostly just ran away from the soccer ball) for an hour or two before dinner. A couple of local guys played with us, and afterwards Bobby (another PCT) and I started talking to one of them, Idriss. We ended up inviting him to dinner with us, and spent a good hour or two just talking to him - it was pretty cool. I’ve also taught several Burkinabé boys how to throw a Frisbee - I think that so far, the thing I’m happiest I brought with me is that Frisbee - it’s been a great way to meet the locals.

Speaking of packing, my checked baggage ended up being a total of 51 lbs - almost 30 short of the limit, which is pretty impressive given the fact that I’m not at all a light packer. And so far, the only thing I wish I’d brought is a tent. The rooms at the hotel in Gourcy have no air circulation, so I’ve already camped out once (although a storm came through in the middle of the night and nearly blew the tent away, so we ended up abandoning it). A lot of people ended up right around the 80lb. limit, and Giorgio managed almost 200 lbs. (including his carry-on).

The food has been pretty good, and surprisingly plentiful. Granted, we’ve only eaten at restaurants so far, but it’s all been local food. There are a handful of rice dishes - one has a peanut sauce, one a tomato and meat sauce, and one an onion sauce. Couscous is pretty common, usually with similar sauces to the rice ones. There’s pasta - usually spaghetti, with an assortment of suspiciously familiar tasting sauces. There are some non-meat dishes, such as benga (a bean dish) and des haricots verts (green beans). You can also get sautéed potatoes and French fries. I haven’t had any millet-based dishes yet - once I’m in the village, I’ll get plenty of those. All the food has been pretty good - the only meal I haven’t really liked was the food at the hotel in Ouaga the first day. The meals are really cheap - the rice dishes are about 300CFA, which is roughly 60 cents. You can add on a beer or cold Coke for another 500CFA, about a dollar. There’s also lots of French bread (which is quite good) - you can get a baguette in the market for about 50CFA, roughly a dime. Not a bad deal. Breakfast is very French - usually a demi-baguette with some butter or jelly. I’ve started getting the “sandwich à l’Omelette” for breakfast - it’s fried eggs and onions stuffed in a baguette. I really enjoy these, although I’ve heard that most Americans get pretty bad diarrhea from them. While we’re in Gourcy, our daily allowance from Peace Corps is about $7 per day, which is downright luxurious.

Speaking of diarrhea, I’ve remained healthy the whole time I’ve been here. No diarrhea or anything - according to our medical officers, Burkina’s PCVs get more diarrhea than volunteers in any other country. I did get bitten by some Blister Beetles, which left two large blisters on my right arm. We’ve had several trainees been sick in varying degrees, but so far there hasn’t been anything serious. Since arriving in Burkina, I’ve only had two shots (since I already had my hep shots, apparently). And the malaria medication seems to be doing the job just fine. It’s a weekly pill called Lariam, which apparently gives a lot of people some unfortunate side effects. It’s also apparently very bad to take when pregnant, which is why two PCVs (a married couple) had to leave the country very suddenly a few weeks ago.

The SED PCTs leave for the home-stay villages on Thursday. The health volunteers are leaving then too, but the Girls’ Education and Empowerment trainees are leaving this Monday - so we only have one more day with the entire group together. Luckily, that day is a Sunday, our one day off from the non-stop training sessions. I’m planning on heading in to the market and finding some laundry soap and, if I feel really adventurous, doing my laundry. I’ve been told that the way to do laundry is to drop the laundry soap in a bucket, fill it with water, and let your clothes soak for about 15 minutes before rinsing. Speaking of water, there’s plenty of filtered water here - Peace Corps gives every volunteer their own filtration system - it’s a $250 device that can store about 10 liters of water. They’ve also given us about half a dozen additional methods to purify water, including iodine tablets and these portable cups that filter it for you.

The hotel in Gourcy has running water, which is nice, in theory. It only seems to actually work about half the time - I’ve had to bucket bathe on occasion, and sometimes have to fill a bucket and dump it into the toilet basin in order to get the thing to flush. And although the water is always cold, and there’s never much of it, a cold shower feels quite refreshing. Minima (I don’t think that’s the actual name, but it’s something like that), where I’ll be home-staying, is tiny compared to Gourcy, and I doubt I’ll have any amenities there. The acting country director here in Burkina (who’s also the associate director overseeing SED) already knows me as the computer guy, so I think that if there are any SED assignments that involve technology or IT, I’ll be the one to get it. And it sounds like the SED volunteers usually get cushier assignments, working in the larger cities with slightly more amenities.

It’s about 1:00am, so the power will be going out momentarily, so I’m going to wrap this up. All in all, things are going really well - this country is simply amazing, and the other trainees who are here are a really incredible group of people. We’re all pretty excited at the moment, and (with a few exceptions) everyone is very glad to be here doing this. Of course, once we start the home-stays this week, everything’s going to change quite a bit, but I’m looking forward to it. My first week here has far surpassed any expectations I had, and I’m eager to see what’s coming next.

August 7, 2005

Yay! It’s Sunday, our first day off. It’s about 4:30pm right now - I slept in until about 10am today (instead of the usual 7am wakeup), and then took a nice leisurely shower. Sunday and Wednesday are the days when the market is opening Gourcy, so I wandered into the market with a few other trainees. A couple of the female volunteers picked up some pagnyes (I have no idea how the word is spelled - it’s pronounced pah-nya). These are essentially just long strips of fabric, but you can wrap them around yourself and wear it as a skirt or dress - it’s probably the most common thing women wear here. The fabrics are all really cool - they have bright colorful patterns, and eventually I’ll start getting some clothes made out of them.

There aren’t very many fruits or vegetables around here, although since it’s the rainy season, there are more now than there will be in a few months. There are plenty of onions and eggplants, as well as lettuce, tomatoes, and corn. I picked up a few cucumbers - they were quite tasty, and, along with a demi-baguette, made a nice lunch.

There’s one supermarché in town - it’s pretty small, about the size of a small gas station convenience store. But there are a lot of things that aren’t available anywhere else. We went there after the market, and I picked up some Kleenex, laundry soap, and a box of cookies (they’re LU Petit Buerre cookies - not as good as Petit Ecolier, but better than any of the other pre-packaged cookies available here). After the supermarché, we wandered back to the hotel, and have been relaxing here all afternoon. I did some laundry, played some cards, and I think we’re going to play some ultimate Frisbee in a little bit (we’re waiting for the sun to get a little lower first). I think my endeavor into doing laundry is going to be a huge disaster - it seems so simple in theory: you put a little laundry soap in a bucket, fill it with water, wash your clothes, let them sit for a bit, rinse them off, and hang them up to dry. I think I managed to mess up almost every one of those steps, which is why I now have a big bucket of soapy laundry waiting to be hung up on the clothesline (since everyone else did laundry today, the line is pretty packed).

So I think I’ve been writing mostly about what I’ve been doing, and haven’t done much to explain what conditions are actually like here. It’s pretty amazing how poor everyone is. Gourcy has one paved road (it’s the main highway that comes up from Ouaga) - all the other roads are just dirt. The ground here is a very distinct orangeish-brown color, and it’s very sandy. Just walking around, you inevitably end up with orange dust getting all over your clothes, and especially your shoes. And if you walk around at night after it’s rained, you’ll almost certainly step into a giant muddy puddle somewhere.

There’s no real order to the roads - they just kind of wander wherever they want. But what surprises me the most about the roads is that they’re always full of people. In front of many of the houses, women have fires going and are preparing food. Children run around all over the streets, and the major roads always have bicycles, motorcycles, and pedestrians coming and going in all directions. There are assorted animals - goats, chickens, donkeys, dogs - wandering around wherever they please. And, of course, there are droppings from these animals all over. In the center of the city and around the market, there are countless vendors, just sitting in their tiny kiosks, often talking to each other, but usually just sitting and waiting. There’s garbage everywhere - I’ve only seen a handful of trash cans anywhere in the city, and they’re usually empty. Plastic bags, food refuse, cigarette butts, empty bottles - trash piles are everywhere, often with flies swarming around or a goat rummaging through. Along the main road through town there’s a ditch on either side, about a foot wide and maybe two feet deep. In addition to being full of trash, water collects in the ditches, and if hasn’t rained very recently, the water becomes stagnant and gets an eerie green color. The market is even worse, since it’s twice as crowded as the normal roads. There’s a very pungent smell that hangs over the market, and is worst next to the meat market. The meat market is appalling - it’s a concrete building with assorted cuts of meat all over. The building is probably at least 80 degrees, and has flies everywhere. Entrails litter the floor, and the smell is horrible. It’s got to be about the least sanitary thing I’ve ever seen.

I think the worst part about the dirtiness of the city is that there’s nowhere you can go that is even remotely clean. Kids wander around in the streets - walking barefoot across the trash piles or playing with used tires. And in Burkina, when you greet someone on the street, you always shake their hand. Our group of trainees is often the center of attention wherever we go, and little kids love to run up to us, say “Bonjour”, and shake our hands. And you can’t help but wonder when those hands were last washed, and what they’ve touched since then.

When you get away from the center of the city and onto the smaller, outlying roads, it’s much less crowded. Since it’s the rainy season, there are a bunch of green trees and grasses - in a few months, these’ll all be gone, and everything will be that orange-brown color. The houses are small - a typical one might be around 12 by 20 feet. They’re made of stone or clay, with a large opening for a door, and usually another opening for a window. There’s no actual door, no glass windows, rarely even curtains to cover the windows. The roofs are either a large piece of corrugated metal or else a bunch of dead branches tied together. Most houses have large courtyards surrounding them, usually walled in. The courtyards generally have multiple buildings in them. Animals casually wander in and out of the buildings. For instance, at our hotel, we have a conference room, called the hanger. It’s essentially a handful of wooden posts and a piece of corrugated metal on top - this is where we do a bunch of our training. There are several sickly looking chickens that stroll into the hangar throughout our training sessions. There are a lot of boisterous goats, too, and they often wake people up early in the morning.

Although the food is pretty good, you have to be careful eating it. There are often bugs crawling around. Even though I make a habit of always keeping my Nalgene closed except when I’m actually drinking from it, I’ve had to pull bugs out of it several times. You also have to be cautious with vegetables from the market, making sure to bleach or remove the skin (I decided to eat around the skin on my cucumber this afternoon), since they’re rinsed with the water here, which is far from sanitary.

I’ve never been to the third world before, so I don’t have much to compare Burkina’s living conditions to. However, many of the other trainees here have spent a bunch of time in the third world, and find the conditions here worse than most other places they’ve been.

Despite the poverty, the people here are incredibly warm and inviting. Like I said, kids always wander up to you and shake your hand, and a lot of them follow us around and play with us for awhile. During a pick-up game of soccer a few days ago, we had several locals come and join us, and dozens of other sit around and watch. Whenever someone in the group gets lost, they don’t just get directions, they actually get escorted to wherever they want to go. It’s a much slower pace of life than in the U.S., so people don’t mind spending half an hour in the middle of the day just talking with you.

August 10, 2005

It’s Wednesday night - our last night in Gourcy. Tomorrow we leave for our homestay villages. The GEE (Girls’ Education and Empowerment) group left on Monday, SED and Health leave tomorrow. Not too many exciting things have happened since I last wrote - lots of additional training sessions, many of which I only vaguely recall, since I was barely conscious for many of them.

The big news is that two trainees have gone home. One of them has been struggling from the start, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise. But the other one surprised most of us - he was very enthusiastic from the first day, and he was the first to quit. Many of us are worried that this is just the opening of the floodgates, and that several more people are going to go home now - there are another 2 or 3 people who seem to be having a lot of trouble. It sounds like the homestay period might make or break people, since it’s our first time really experiencing what life if like in Burkina. I’m excited for the homestay - my biggest concern is that there won’t be many French speakers in Minima. But in general, I don’t have any major reservations about it.

I sent two letters yesterday - the first ones I’ve sent since I’ve been here. There’s a volunteer who’s been here for about a year and is heading back to the States for a few weeks, and took a giant pile of mail with her. Unfortunately, I don’t think she’s leaving Burkina until the 18th, so I’m not sure when the letters (one for Abby, one for the parents) will arrive.

I went on an unsuccessful alligator hunt today. One of the guys working at the hotel mentioned that there was a swamp about a kilometer away that had a bunch of alligators. So this afternoon, after our training sessions finished, a small group of us headed out towards the swamp with him. It started raining right as we left, and was pouring by the time we were about halfway there - the rain let up and finally stopped by the time we got there (I think it was more like 2 km away). We were all soaked, and actually cold - it was the first time I’ve been cold since leaving the plane in Ouaga - a great feeling! The swamp turned out to be more of a reservoir, and apparently the alligators normally sit next to it, getting some sun. Since it wasn’t sunny, they weren’t out. But we got to see lots of lightning over the reservoir, which was cool.

We did our first site placement interviews the other day. The interviews are with Rose, the SED APCD. It’s a lot of questions like “What do you think your biggest challenge will be during the homestay?” I really hate questions like that. There were also several questions about our hopes, expectations, and fears for our eventual site assignments. I said I was pretty flexible, but would prefer to do ICT (I don’t remember exactly what the acronym is - it’s the computer / tech section). And if ICT doesn’t work out, I asked for the ecotourism project. There are two other sections of SED: microfinance and artisans / agribusiness, neither of which sounds as interesting to me as the first two, but I still think I’d be fine with.

Most trainees hope they’ll be stationed somewhere in the south - there’s more rain down there, and thus a wider selection of food and vegetables. I don’t know much about the south (or the north), and am not particularly picky about where I end up - the north, while hotter, is drier. Lots of people also seem to want to stay closer to the major cities - I’m less concerned about that, but I did ask to be somewhere close to Internet access, enough that I could check my e-mail every few weeks. Gourcy normally has Internet access, but since it’s the rainy season, the lines are washed out, and won’t be up again until it dries off a little bit. Rose is planning a trip for the SED trainees to Ouahiyaga (I’m not sure if I spelled that right - it’s the big city in the northern part of Burkina) - ostensibly, the trip is to visit a volunteer up there, but I think it’s really so we can all get Internet access sometime before going to Ouaga. Sometime in the first week or two of September we find out our site assignments - we then go to Ouaga for two days for a workshop with our counterparts, and then we get to visit our site for a week. At any rate, the point of this is that I should be able to post this online by mid-September at the latest.

I’m still healthy, for some reason. Several more people woke up sick this morning. There haven’t been any major illnesses so far, but lots of minor ones, and I haven’t had any problems. Homestay might fix that, when I’m eating Tô three times a day. Speaking of Tô, I actually tried it for the first time last night. It wasn’t very good. It’s a lot like grits - a white grainy substance with little flavor. But you dip it in sauce, and in this case at least, the sauce wasn’t very good. The benga (beans) last night were pretty good - when there’s enough onion mixed in, it’s not bad. And the pima (these really, really hot peppers) makes just about anything palatable.

We had a session of bike maintenance today - how to fix flat tires, keep our chains well-maintained, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t actually have any bikes. Rose said the bikes were ordered about six months ago, and are currently sitting in a port in Ghana, and will hopefully arrive in about two weeks - “that’s the beauty of Africa.” Minima is about 10km from Gourcy, and has no public transport. Between the lack of bush taxis and our lack of bicycles, I’m not sure how we’ll get back to Gourcy in 10 days. Whatever.

August 12, 2005

I think I learned something today that’s going to be vital to my survival here - if you think you’re having a bad day, find a different barometer to use to measure it. For instance, if diarrhea = good day, then this was probably the best day of my life.

Today was our first full day in Minima. Minima’s a small village about 10km from Gourcy - this is the middle of nowhere. There’s no electricity, no running water, no nothing. There are maybe two dozen compounds in the village (spread out over a distance of maybe 5 sq. km), each housing a different extended family. I’m living with the Gansoré family. They’re incredibly generous and very hospitable. They’re so generous, in fact, that it often makes me uncomfortable. For instance, I never eat the same food as the rest of the family. Last night they served me spaghetti; tonight they gave me des haricots verts (green beans). Neither of them was particularly good - both were drenched in a disgusting cooking oil that seems to be in a lot of the food here - the beans were from a can, and had clearly been sitting in the can for quite some time. With both dinners, they also have me two hard-boiled eggs. I wasn’t able to finish either dinner - I could barely stomach what little I had. And yet, they all eat nothing but tô, a dish made from ground millet - this seems to be the staple here, and as far as I can tell, the only thing they eat this time of year. Thus, I feel horrible when I don’t finish my feast of green beans and hard-boiled eggs, and feel a bit guilty when I sneak back to my room to snag a cookie from my stash. Breakfast this morning consisted of a loaf of bread, and not a particularly good one. My classifications for the quality of bread no longer have anything to do with taste - “bad bread” means that either (1) there were worms or something else living in it, or (2) it’s full of dust or sand and is very gritty. I managed to down a few bites of the breakfast bread - my host father was concerned that I wasn’t eating much, so he prepared a special millet dish for me - for lack of a better name, I’ll call it Cream of Millet. It was essentially the same thing as Cream of Wheat (he even put a brown sugar cube in it), but it was horrible. Lunch was with the other stagiares (trainees) - we’re supposed to find a small restaurant somewhere in our village and eat there together. Unfortunately, Minima doesn’t have any restaurants, so we got bread from the one boulangerie in town - luckily, this was good bread. Also lucky, I had some cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) that I’d picked up in Gourcy before leaving, so I managed a decent lunch.

At the beginning of the day, there were five stagiares staying in Minima. There’s no real order to how the village is laid out - there’s a market in the middle of town, with fields and compounds surrounding it at a distance. The compounds are just far enough apart, and the millet just tall enough (millet plants look a lot like corn plants - the largest ones here are at least six feet tall) that it’s difficult to figure out where you’re going. Luckily, navigation is simplified by the fact that a giant horde of children follows me around wherever I go, all staring at me. My compound is on one side of the village - the next compound over houses Loic, another stagiare. On the other side of town are Omar and Esmeralda (who lives with the village chief), and Giorgio is way out on that side of town (in the suburbs, we say).

The five of us, along with Armand (our LCF - language and culture facilitateur - a Burkinabé hired by Peace Corps to teach us French and how not to make fools of ourselves), were supposed to meet at 8:00am. In typical Burkinabé fashion, Loic and I didn’t show up until about 8:30. We spent the next hour or two walking around and seeing where everyone lived and talking about our first day in Minima. We all had fairly similar experiences - we arrived, and stood / sat around awkwardly for several hours, not knowing what else to do. And the food didn’t sit well with anybody - we all spent much of the day at the assorted WCs around the village (the latrines here are a slab of concrete with a hole in the middle, approx. 8 inches in diameter). Wherever we go, we’re the center of attention. Kids, especially, love to follow us around, watching our every move. It gets to be a bit much after awhile.

The bad news for the day is that Loic left midway through the day. He’s frustrated with several things: first, he’s a fluent French speaker, and is frustrated that he has to sit through French classes with those of us who are nowhere near fluent - I can’t blame him for being upset about that. What frustrates him more is that he can’t really do any of the development work he wants to do here in Minima - and when he arrives at post in three months, he still won’t be able to do any work until he’s been there for three months. He was also pretty unhappy with the conditions here, mostly since they are more primitive than what we’ll probably have at our posts. Combined with the fact that he was feeling pretty sick, these things made him pretty pissed off today. After lunch, the training director came over from Gourcy and talked with us all for awhile, and then with Loic for a bit - and now he’s decided to quit. This makes him the third person that I know of from our group to quit - I suspect there may have been a few in the other villages today, but have no way of knowing. It’s starting to feel more and more like an episode of Survivor.

The good news is that things went well with my family tonight. Aside from the meal, always disastrous, I managed to communicate with them a bit. My host father was worried (and very saddened) about Loic leaving, and I tried my best to assure him that Loic’s problems were with Peace Corps and not the village, and also that I had no intention of leaving before my three months in Minima were over. He seemed reassured, but kept saying “c’est pas bon” when referring to my now-gone neighbor. After dinner, I sat outside in my courtyard for about two hours - most of the family also sat there. They watched me the whole time, sometimes talking among themselves, sometimes asking me questions (the father and oldest two sons speak French, although with a very difficult to understand accent - far more difficult than the accents I’ve heard elsewhere in Burkina). They tried to teach me some Mooré phrases, and inevitably, whenever I tried to say one, the whole family would burst into laughter. I’ve gotten pretty used to that at this point. I did pick up some good phrases, though, and even learned a word or two of Fulfuldé (another language spoken in Burkina). I also taught them some English words, and had to explain that there was no English word for tô, which they found hard to believe.

I feel kind of like what I’ve written tonight has been fairly disjointed and random, and I’m sure it has been. But I’m pretty tired, and I think I’m going to try and get some sleep. It’s hard to write about what’s going on here - it’s so surreal, even after being here for a week and a half, that it’s impossible to write about. Life here is completely unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and it’s so overwhelming that trying to summarize in writing even an hour here pales in comparison to the actual experience.

August 15, 2005

My first sick day in Burkina. What a trip it’s been. My constant diarrhea has shown no signs of improvement (I’m not the only stagiaire here with that problem), and the oil in the food here has gotten so unpalatable that I just can’t eat it anymore. Last night, my family made me spaghetti, drenched in oil as usual. I ate about three bites, and then told them that I thought the oil was making me sick and that I couldn’t eat it any more. Since I was starving (my only other food for the day had been the four loaves of bread I bought at the market), I ate some Tô - although Tô is by no means good, I think it is easily the best food I’ve had in Minima, except the bread.

Somewhere between the oily spaghetti and the Tô (which I ate with my hands from a giant communal bowl, as is custom here), I got pretty damn sick. I woke up at about three this morning, feeling miserable. After 45 minutes of sitting awake in bed contemplating my misery, I got up and ventured to the latrine, where I promptly got rid of all my food from the day before, via both ends of my body. I went back to bed feeling a little better, only to wake up around 7 and do the same thing, except this time with most of my family watching me - and what a sight it must’ve been for them to see the scrawny white guy run across the courtyard in his boxers, heaving the entire way. Again, I felt a lot better at this point, had some water, and decided I would still try and go to school. On my way to the school (it’s about a 5 minute walk), I threw up again - it was just pure water, the few sips I’d had 15 minutes earlier. My host father came and found me and, against his protests, I decided to still try and go to class, if for no other reason than to let Armand (our LCF and link to the PC admin staff) that I was sick. After about 45 minutes in class, I stepped outside and started walking towards the fonctionnaire’s house to use his latrine (the fonctionnaire’s house is the closest latrine to the school, so this is where we go during classes when we need to go). No more than 30 feet outside the school, I threw up again, still pure water coming up. At this point, I decided to head back to my house and back to bed. After getting some sleep, I had a few sips of water and napped some more. Waking up again, I had some more water, then some more sleep, and continued this pattern for several hours. Armand came by during lunch to make sure I was okay, and to see if he should call Sylvie, one of the two PC medical officers (PCMOs) in Burkina - I said no, I was feeling better, and water was starting to stay down. By about 2pm, I’d woken up for good, and started snacking on the crackers I brought with me from Gourcy. I managed to find the BBC on my shortwave, listened to the news for awhile, and it’s not about 4pm. Monday is a bad day to get sick and vomit, since it’s malaria prophylaxis day. Every Monday at lunch I’m supposed to take my Lariam pill - and I’m supposed to take it with food and at least 8 ounces of water. Earlier in the day, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to eat enough food or water to take the pill, or that it wouldn’t stay down. But luckily, that has not been the case - I took the pill about half an hour ago, and have been fine since then. So it looks like I’m going to be fine, and by tomorrow will be as good as new. I have two theories about what made me sick - either (1) it was the oil, although I doubt this a bit, since I had less of it yesterday than the previous few days, or (2) it was the Tô, specifically eating with my hands from the big communal bowl of Tô. One of the major health concerns PC warns you about here is oral-fecal contamination. Since Burkinabé villagers have no real concept of sanitation, this sort of contamination is very common if you eat food with them. In thinking about it now, I also suspect that the water in the Tô sauce wasn’t boiled, so that might also be a culprit. At any rate, I think I’m done with Tô for a little while, and also with any foods that have that damn oil in them - luckily, my family now knows not to put that oil in my food.

The weekend was about as exciting as a weekend in Minima can be. We had Saturday afternoon off from classes, and all of Sunday off. So on Saturday afternoon, we met up with a group of trainees from a nearby village, about 3km away, and ventured with them to Douré, another small village hosting some trainees. Douré is about as exciting as Minima, so we just sat around in one of the stagiaire’s courtyards for most of the afternoon, comparing notes on everyone’s village experiences. Sunday was similar, except that the trainees from a different village came over, and we all hung out in Minima, since it was market day in Minima. After briefly perusing the Minima market, with it’s lack of any fruits, vegetables, or cheese, we lamented the wonderful market in Gourcy, full of mangos and cucumbers. After the market, we spent several hours just sitting around under a shady tree, desperately trying to find something to do, but not really coming up with anything. The one interesting piece of news came from comparing notes on who had left what villages - we now know of at least 6 trainees from our group of 51 that have gone home after less than two weeks in country. We’re guessing there might be another one or two coming soon (or that have already happened and we just don’t know about), and suspect there’ll be a few more ETs (early terminations) in the middle of September, when site assignments are made. I wouldn’t be surprised if our stage ended up with a dropout rate of 20% during training.

On the plus side, I’ve managed to start writing some letters. I finished one yesterday to Abby, and will probably finish one to my parents tonight. Unfortunately, Minima (of course) has no post office, so I won’t actually be able to mail these until we return to Gourcy on Sunday. By the time I mail these, my first two letters might actually have been delivered, since they were sent not via Burkinabé Poste, but via USPS and a volunteer heading back to the States for a few weeks. I still haven’t had any Internet access - I’m hoping that the Internet will be back up and running in Gourcy this weekend when we return, but I doubt it. Rose (the SED APCD - that is, the woman who oversees the small enterprise program in Burkina) is trying to organize a trip to Ouahigaya in two weekends or so - hopefully there is working Internet there somewhere. If not, my first chance to get online might be when we go to Ouaga in mid-September for the counterpart workshop. A month and a half without Internet access is a long time, and quite a bit worse than what I was expecting during training. Oh well, not much I can do about it.

So, changing subjects a bit, Minima is by far the most impoverished place I have ever seen, and I have trouble contemplating how living conditions could ever get worse than this (although I suppose that if I head a little farther north in Burkina or go next door to Niger, I might see just that). There is no infrastructure whatsoever. The roads are all made of dirt and lack any sort of order. There are no utilities, no water, no electricity. The buildings are made of mud brick. The nicer ones (like my room) have roofs made of corrugated metal, the others have some sort of straw or thatch roof. And there is no sanitation anywhere. Goats, chickens, mules, dogs, cats, and people all wander around wherever they please - my first day here, as I moved into my room, my host brother had to forcibly remove some chicks from my room.

Sorry - gotta go. Hopefully I’ll finish this later…

August 17, 2005

I’m now, somewhat unexpectedly, back in Gourcy for the night. After being pretty sick on Monday, I felt a lot better Tuesday morning, but by Tuesday evening was having trouble eating. My family made buit for dinner (it’s millet and water mixed together - kind of like Cream of Wheat, but disgusting, and made with millet) - I had one bite and threw it up. Then they gave me a hard-boiled egg - same thing happened. A little while later, I had some crackers that I’d brought with me from Gourcy, and those stayed down. But about an hour after that, realizing I was getting fairly dehydrated, I made up a batch of ORS - oral rehydration salts. It’s a mixture of sugar and salt that you add to water - very disgusting - but it helps replenish electrolytes or something like that. It’s kind of like a more efficient Gatorade, and is for when you get dehydrated from diarrhea. I made up a batch of this brew, and no sooner had I taken a sip of the stuff then I threw up all over my room, losing the few crackers I’d managed to eat before. After cleaning up the mess for about 20 minutes (luckily, we use bleach as part of the water filtration process, so I had a bottle of bleach to help “sanitize” my floor), I went to sleep, and decided I’d call Sylvie, one of the two PCMOs (medical officers) in Burkina, the next morning. I’ll finish this story later…

August 18, 2005

Continuing my story from yesterday…

So yesterday morning, I went to school and asked Armand if I could use his phone to call Sylvie. I called her and explained what had been going on, and she told me that she would arrange transport to come pick me up and bring me into Gourcy for the day. And, depending on how that went, I might get to go to Ouaga. So, I spent the morning being very hungry and waiting for transport to arrive. Around 10:00 or so, someone arrived at the school on a moped - he was one of the PC training staff from Gourcy - and he gave me a blue pill and said that I wouldn’t be going to Gourcy after all, because the van was currently in Ouaga, not Gourcy. This seemed a bit ridiculous to me (and my fellow stagiaires here), but I took the pill, and by lunchtime was feeling better - I managed to eat a morceau du pain and keep it down. By late in the afternoon, I was feeling fine. It was market day in Minima, so we went to the marché, and I bought and ate some peanuts and a gateau - no problem. I knew I was still a little dehydrated, but was otherwise taking a turn for the better. So I went back to my host family’s compound and prepared myself for dinner.

After I’d been there a few minutes, the Peace Corps van showed up. Inside were a few of the training staff, but neither of the medical officers. I explained that I was feeling a lot better and didn’t think I needed to go to Gourcy, but they said I should play it safe, so I hopped in the van and went back to Gourcy. At Gourcy, I got to stay in the Peace Corps infirmary, which is actually a pretty sweet deal - it has electricity, a bathroom with a shower, and a fan - luxury accommodations, even nicer than the hotel. There were no medical staff in Gourcy, and I didn’t get any additional medicine - I’m not really sure why I went to Gourcy at all. I did weigh myself on the scale at the medical office, though, and discovered that I’d lost seven pounds since going to Minima - dropping from 137 to 130. For me, that’s pretty significant.

The GEE stagiaries were in Gourcy, so I spent the night hanging out with them - it was pretty fun, kind of like a bonus day in the big city for no real reason. I got caught up on the latest PC news - no new ETs (early terminations) - and also learned that there had been a cholera outbreak in Ouaga. And I ate dinner at the hotel restaurant - the riz sauce never tasted so good. This morning I came back to Minima - it’s about one in the afternoon right now, and I’m still feeling fine. I’ve eaten quite a bit in the past 24 hours, and think I’m fully rehydrated now. And now my laptop and iPod are recharged, too - an added bonus.

So, you may be wondering, what exactly do we do here in Minima all day? That’s an excellent question. The day is broken into four periods, just like the training in Gourcy - one block from 8 to 10, one from 10:30 to 12:30, one from 2:00 to 3:30, and one from 4:00 to 5:30. The first of those periods is always French class - these are by far the most useful part of the training. Yesterday, for instance, we went over useful French for going to the market - vocabulary for the assorted items for sale, as well as the vocab and grammar to haggle a price, etc. After that, we usually have either one or two periods of TDAs, trainee-directed activities. These come in three categories: language, cross-cultural, and tech. TDAs are activities designed to make us go out and interact with our community or learn something about it. For instance, one language TDA was to create a family tree for our host family, thus making sure our familial vocabulary is adequate. The technical (meaning SED, Small Enterprise Development) TDAs seem like they could be the most useful ones, but are often difficult or not applicable to Minima. Our TDA yesterday, for instance, required us to go to our village market and see what products and services were available there, what marketing techniques were used, etc. Our market has very few products - no fruit or vegetables, just rice, meat, and the one guy selling peanuts. There is no conception of marketing here - vendors just sit there, waiting for someone to come by and buy something.

For the last period each day, we usually do something fun. We’ve played French Scrabble, some card games, etc. Today, I think we’re going to go visit the GEE girls in Douré. A lot of the time for the TDAs seems to be kind of wasted. Today, we finished the French class at about 10, and then did both our TDAs in about half an hour - we don’t meet up again until 4:00, so right now, Omar, Giorgio, and I are just sitting at the school, killing time. To some extent, I think we have more free time because we’re the advanced French group - if you don’t know any French, it’ll take a lot longer to do some of these activities. I also think they’ll become a little more involved and complex after we’ve been here a bit longer. And, finally, our group, in addition to being the more advanced French group, seems to be the slacker group.

This sure is going to be one hell of a long blog post when I finally get Internet access. The GEE girls went Ouahigouya two days ago, and had Internet access there, although they said it was really slow. Hopefully, SED will be going there in about 10 days, and I’ll finally have Internet access, if only for a few minutes. I feel bad about how little I’ve been able to contact people back home - I had a 90-second conversation with my parents, wherein I couldn’t hear anything they said. And I guess that’s about it at this point - my first round of letters are currently in transit, and I have yet to make it to a post office with my second round. The previous SED stages in Burkina all stayed in much larger cities during training, and had regular Internet access. Everyone in our stage assumed we would too - but I guess we were all wrong.

August 20, 2005

Tonight’s my last night in Minima for a few days. Tomorrow, all the SED and Health volunteers head back to Gourcy for four days - woo-hoo! Real food! Although the food situation in Minima has gotten a bit better - I’ve finally found some food here that I can eat: the hard-boiled guinea fowl eggs are edible (and have protein!), but I’ve become quite fond of grilled corn. More importantly, my family has discovered that I like, and can eat, corn, which is major progress, and just might mean that I’ll make it out of Minima weighing more than 100 pounds. I was thinking tonight about how when you’re young and you don’t finish all your food, someone tells you to think about the starving children in Africa. Now, I can’t eat more than a few bites of my meal, even though I am that starving person in Africa. There’s got to be some irony in there somewhere…

Last night was Armand’s birthday. He’s our LCF (essentially our French teacher) here in Minima, although when we return to Minima in a few days, we’ll have a new LCF -- there are four SED LCFs, and each one spends ten days in Minima. Anyways, for his birthday, another LCF brought over a few bottles of sangria. We went to the village chief’s house (where Esmeralda, one of the stagiaires, is living), got a wonderful feast of grilled corn and benga (beans), and finished off three bottles of sangria - it was great.

There really isn’t that much to write about in Minima - the days are all kind of the same - French class, TDAs, evenings with the host family. The four of us here in Minima joke that we really only have seven topics of conversation, and we just kind of rotate through them. There’s quite a bit of truth to that - since nothing new ever really happens, we just keep talking about the same things over and over. Part of why it’ll be nice to go to Gourcy for a few days is because we’ll be able to catch up with the other trainees and talk to some different people for once.

August 23, 2005

I think this Friday might finally be the big day, the day I get to post all this stuff I’ve written to my blog. We’re supposed to be heading to Ouhayiguya (I still don’t know the right way to spell that city) that day to see Lars, a volunteer who’s been working with handicapped artisans there for two years. And supposedly, we’ll have some free time to hit up the Internet cafes. Exciting!

Speaking of exciting, several good things have happened during the past two days while we’ve been here in Gourcy. First, they brought up all the mail that had arrived at the bureau in Ouaga. I had seven letters, which made me the envy of most everyone else. We got the mail yesterday (August 22), and the latest postmarked item was from August 9 - so I guess it takes about two weeks for mail to get from the U.S. to Ouaga. Once I’m at post, I think I can get a local address, so my mail can come directly to me - stuff that’s sent to Ouaga I can only receive when I go there or when someone from the bureau comes to visit me. But thank you to everyone who sent me a letter - it was great to hear from home. In addition to (hopefully) posting this online on Friday, I have a few letters I’m going to try to send out today or tomorrow. And, hopefully, the letters I sent stateside with Michelle a week and a half ago should be arriving around now.

In other exciting news, we should finally be getting our bikes. I just got fitted for mine, and Rose (the SED APCD and acting country director) says we should have all our bikes by the time we leave Gourcy on Thursday. If we don’t, I don’t know how we’ll get to Ouayiguya - there’s no transport to or from Minima, so if we can’t bike to Gourcy, I don’t know how we’ll get up there, unless PC sends a van for us.

As we suspected, Minima is by far the worst of the three villages where SED trainees are doing their homestay. The middle village, Nisiega (not sure on the spelling of that), is similar to Minima, but has some amenities that we lack. For instance, they have a boutique (small store) and a buvette (kind of like a bar) where they can get cold drinks. There was one day in Minima when I managed to get a warm Coke, but regular cold drinks would be a definite improvement to Minima. One of the volunteers in Nisiega has electricity at her house - that’s a technology that won’t be arriving in Minima for a long time. And the third SED group is staying in Yako, which isn’t a village, but a big city - bigger than Gourcy. They have electricity, and have even visited a cyber-café. There is one technology in Minima that surprised me - cell phones. Cell phones are catching on here, which amazes me, since they’re pretty expensive. Gourcy has a large cell tower, and all the Peace Corps staff, as well as many volunteers, have portables. Supposedly, you can get reception in most big cities, and small villages like Minima which are close to larger cities get service. In Minima, I only know one person with a portable - Omar’s host father. It’s weird to see people living in mud huts with no electricity or running water, chickens and goats running around all over the place, and they have a cell phone.

The health and GEE stagiaires are all in villages pretty similar to Minima. In some ways, we’re lucky, because Minima at least has a market, which most of the non-SED other homestay villages do not have. The villages where health volunteers are staying, however, have clinics, which Minima lacks. Having bikes in Minima will make a world of difference - Gourcy can’t be more than a 45-minute ride from the village, and that means that on weekends, at least, we should be able to get away for a bit. Luckily, most SED volunteers end up posted in places closer in size to Gourcy or Yako than to Minima, which is good news, because two years in Minima would drive me nuts. The complete lack of access to anything is surprisingly difficult to deal with.

In other news, I found out recently that I’m married. Ami, one of the stagiaires in Minima, was getting harassed by some men in her village. So her LCF, whose name is OGM (his real name is about 40 letters, so he just goes by O.G.M) told them she was married so they would leave her alone, which they did. However, they asked for more details, and O.G.M. decided to tell them that her husband lived in Minima, and when they asked what his name was, mine was the first of the Minima stagiaires to pop into her head. Ever since then, I guess her host father has wanted to meet me, and keeps asking if he should invite me to come stay at their house, etc. We went to the marché in Gourcy yesterday, and ran into him there, so I got to meet my (I think this is the correct term) fake-host-father-in-law. Apparently word travels fairly quickly in Burkina. My host father, for the last day or two I was in Minima, kept asking me about my “petit cher”, and I had no idea what he was talking about - I guess he found out I was married before I did. I might try to take advantage of this situation sometime, though - Ami’s host family spoils her - her dad, for instance, went to Ouaga (a 2-3 hour drive) to get her Rice Krispies and fruit juice. So I might see if I can get invited over for a good meal or two sometime. It just might depend on whether or not I can find anything besides corn to eat in Minima.

Speaking of food in Minima, I think we’ve figured out what we’re going to do about our lunches. During our last stint in Minima, we usually bought bread and had that for lunch. Unfortunately, the bread isn’t made in Minima, it’s made in Gourcy, and someone bikes to Minima with a 2-3 day supply of bread and sells it there. So the quality of the bread was not the best, and there were times when it was unavailable, so our lunches would consist of whatever cookies and crackers we’d smuggled to Minima in our luggage. What we’re going to try to do now is hire Esmeralda’s host family to cook lunch for us - Es lives with the village chief, has her own personal chef, and the food she gets is pretty good. The feast of benga (beans), grilled corn, and Sangria that we had for Armand’s birthday was at her place.

When it rains here, it really pours. We had a training session on nutrition about an hour ago, and towards the end of it (at 9:30 in the morning), it suddenly got dark outside, and a really strong wind came out of nowhere. Within a few minutes, there was a really heavy downpour. This is, I suppose, good news, though. There’s been a decent amount of rain recently (August is the high month of the rainy season), which this country desperately needed after last year’s lackluster and locust-plagued rainy season, which really hurt a lot of people in the northern part of the country (and in neighboring countries).

Well, that’s it for now - time for another fun training session.

August 24, 2005

Friday, hopefully, will be the big day when I can finally post this online. Let’s hope so, since I’m sure people are starting to wonder if I just went to Africa and disappeared.

I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch today. Delicious - ham and cheese has never been so good. The restaurant at the hotel here in Gourcy has had it on the menu for three weeks, but today was the first day they actually had it. The whole Minima crowd was pretty excited - we even wrote a little song about it, called Jambon et Fromage.

Hopefully, when I post this online, I’ll also be able to post a few pictures. I have four chosen out that I want to post, and I’ll describe them briefly here. If I don’t actually have a chance to post the pictures, well, sorry, just ignore this paragraph. One of the pictures is of my host family, the Gansoré family. It was dusk when the picture was taken, so it’s a little dark. My host father is crouched down in the back, looking very short - he’s actually a pretty tall guy, probably about 6’2”. The picture was taken in my courtyard - I think I’m standing in the door of my house. Speaking of my house, the second picture is of my luxurious accommodations in Minima. I have a screen door, two screened windows, and a few PCV pipes with screens over them at the top. The house has a corrugated tin roof - far nicer than my fellow stagiaire Omar, who has a thatch roof on his house. In the picture of my house, you can see my laundry hanging out to dry - my host family does my laundry every day. For the first week or so, they wouldn’t wash my boxers, though, and my supply was beginning to run low - it’s customary not to wash other people’s underwear or bras here. However, after several days of subtly leaving boxers on the top of my laundry pile, they started washing them. The third picture is of my compound. My house is in the very back. The big round building in the foreground is a granary, which’ll be full of millet in a few weeks. I had to shrink the photo down to put it online, so it’s pretty hard to see the assorted animals wandering around - there are about a dozen goats, maybe 20 chickens, a dog, a cat, and some guinea fowl in there. The fourth picture is the Minima group. Giorgio, a Greek-Mexican from Tucson, is the one facing away from the camera. Next is Armand, our LCF - he’s a great teacher and a cool guy - he’s lived in Burkina all his life, and when he’s not in Gourcy, lives in Bobo. Next to him is Esmeralda - she was born in Haiti, and is fluent in French - so for the next two weeks, while Armand teaches the three of us French, another LCF will be teachi

Well, this Friday (two days from now) I'm driving down to Milwaukee, and then flying out to Philadelphia Saturday morning for a two-day training and orientation session (including five hours at a clinic). And then on Monday, I fly out! I'm flying from Philadelphia to Paris, then a brief stop somewhere in Africa (in Niger, I think), and then I arrive in Ouagadougou Tuesday evening.

In the meantime, I'm trying to get all sorts of things taken care of here -- stocking up on the things I won't be able to find over there, as well as assorted legal and financial matters. And trying to get in touch with a bunch of people. And trying to spend some time with the family. Pretty busy.

I now know what my address will be, at least for the first three months (until the end of pre-service training, supposedly October 21):

Chris Wilson, PCT

s/c Corps de la Paix

01 B.P. 6031

Ouagadougou 01, Burkina Faso

And the following is a letter from the Burkina Faso country desk which I can give out to friends and family. If anyone is seriously interested in visiting, I have another letter from them with various information about traveling to Burkina (what shots to get, Visa information, etc.) -- let me know if you want a copy of that one.

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Greetings from the Burkina Faso Desk in Washington, D.C. It is with great pleasure that we welcome your family member to the 2005 Burkina Faso summer training program. During the past year we have received many requests from Volunteers and family members alike regarding travel plans, sending money, relaying messages and mail, etc. As we are unable to involve ourselves in the personal arrangements of Volunteers, we would like to offer you advice and assistance in advance by providing specific examples of situations and how we suggest they be handled.

1. Irregular Communication. The mail service in Burkina Faso is not as efficient as the U.S. Postal Service. Thus, it is important to be patient. It can take three to four weeks for mail coming from Burkina Faso to arrive in the U.S. via the Burkinabé postal system. From a Volunteer’s post, mail might take 1-2 months to reach the U.S. Sometimes mail is hand carried to the U.S. by a traveler and mailed through the U.S. postal system. This leg of the trip can take another several weeks as it is also dependent on the frequency of travelers to the U.S.

We suggest that in your first letters, you ask your Volunteer family member to give an estimate of how long it takes for him/her to receive your letters and then try to establish a predictable pattern of how often you will write to each other. Also, try numbering your letters so that the Volunteer knows if he/she has missed one. Postcards should be sent in envelopes―otherwise they may be found on the wall of the local post office!

Volunteers often enjoy telling their “war” stories when they write home. Letters might describe recent illnesses, lack of good food, isolation, etc. While the subject matter is good reading material, it is often misinterpreted on the home front. Please do not assume that if your family member had a malaria attack that he/she has been unattended. There are two medical officers in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Through a short wave radio network, we monitor the health of the Volunteers. In the event of a serious illness, the Volunteer is sent to Ouagadougou and is cared for by our medical staff. If the Volunteer requires medical care that is not available in Burkina Faso, he/she will be medically evacuated to Ghana, South Africa, or to the U.S. Fortunately, these are rare circumstances.

If for some reason your communication pattern is broken and you do not hear from your family member for three months, you should contact the Office of Special Services (OSS) at Peace Corps Washington at 1-800-424-8580, extension 1470. OSS will then contact the Peace Corps country director in Ouagadougou and ask him/her to check up on the Volunteer. Also, in the case of an emergency at home (death in the family, sudden illness, etc.), please do not hesitate to call OSS immediately, so that the Volunteer can be informed.

Telephone Calls. The telephone system in Burkina Faso is relatively good. Service in and out of Ouagadougou to the U.S. is somewhat reliable. In the interior of the country, where most of the Volunteers are located, there are no Peace Corps phones. Sometimes Volunteers plan to be in Ouagadougou on a certain date to receive calls from home. This can usually work, but there are also innumerable factors that can make the best-laid plans fall apart. Please be aware that the Peace Corps staff in Ouagadougou does not have the time to assist in arranging these calls.

E-mail. E-mail access is increasingly available in Burkina Faso, but still lags far behind the level of service available in the U.S. There are internet cafes in the capital and in larger towns, and Volunteers may be able to e-mail periodically. Service is frequently disrupted however, and Volunteers may not have access to it for extended periods. Air “snail” mail remains the best way to communicate, and nothing beats the thrill of a letter in one’s mail box far from home.

Sending packages. Parents and Volunteers like to send and receive care packages through the mail. Unfortunately, sending packages can be a frustrating experience for all involved due to the high incidence of theft and heavy customs taxes. You may want to try to send inexpensive items through the mail, but there is no guarantee that these items will arrive. We do not recommend, however, that costly items be sent through the mail.

It is recommended that packages be sent in padded envelopes if possible, as boxes tend to be taxed more heavily. Custom fees can sometimes range up to $100. For lightweight but important items (e.g. airline tickets), DHL (an express mail service) does operate in Ouagadougou. If you choose to send items through DHL, you must address the package to the Country Director, Peace Corps, c/o U.S. Embassy, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (the phone number for the Peace Corps office in Burkina Faso is 226 50 36 92 00 should DHL need this information). If you send the item to the Country Director, no liability can be assumed. Please call a DHL office nearest you for more information. Their toll free number is 1-800-CALL-DHL or access their website at www.dhl.com.

Sending airplane tickets and/or cash via international mail is not recommended. Trying to send checks is very risky and is discouraged. If your Volunteer family member requests money from you, it is his/her responsibility to arrange receipt of it. Volunteers will be aware of people visiting the U.S. and can request that they call his/her family when they arrive in the U.S. should airline tickets or cash need to be sent back to Burkina Faso.

We have also enclosed some information which may help if you, or any friends, wish to visit your family member in Burkina Faso. We hope this information is helpful to you during the time your family member is serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso. We understand how frustrating it is to communicate with your family member overseas and we appreciate you using this information as a guideline. Please feel free to contact us at the Burkina Faso Desk in Washington, D.C. if you have any further questions. Our phone number is 1-800-424-8580, extension 2329 or 2328 or locally, (202) 692-2329 or 2328, or e-mail astevens@peacecorps.gov or mschiller@peacecorps.gov.

Hello. So, I just formally accepted an invitation from the Peace Corps to serve as a small business development volunteer in Burkina Faso. I'm planning on using this blog to keep everyone updated on what I'm doing. I have no idea how often I'll actually be able to post things, but hope I can at least post once a month. There's another Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso at the moment who's been blogging, and he seems to be able to update his site at least once a month, so hopefully I will be able to do the same.

Staging (pre-orientation in the U.S.) begins on July 30, and I leave for Burkina on August 1. Training lasts until October 21, and then I begin... well, doing whatever it is I'll be doing. And my two years are up on October 21, 2007. Of course, I've already learned to never trust any dates that Peace Corps gives you, so who knows when I'll actually be going where.

Except for a few bits about the weather and various epidemics headed this way (or already here!), this entry is mostly about prostitution. Enjoy!

February 11, 2006

I don’t know about you, but I spent much of my evening in front of a television watching the sporting event of the year. Just about everyone else in Kongoussi was doing the same thing. However, the sporting event we were watching was probably different from what you were watching. I don’t think anyone around here knows that the Olympics are going on right now (I’m not even sure when they start), and it shouldn’t be a big surprise to learn that the Winter Olympics have never been a major attraction here (to the best of my knowledge, Burkina does not yet have a bobsled team). For the past few weeks, Burkina has been entranced with the Coupe d’Afrique - the African Cup of Nations - the continent’s largest soccer tournament. Burkina didn’t qualify for the event, so most people have been cheering for Côte d’Ivoire - Côte d’Ivoire is sort of like Burkina’s big sister, what Burkina could be with a bit more money and an ocean. Also, just about everyone in Burkina has family or friends working in Côte d’Ivoire at the moment (the regular influx of Burkinabé workers is, as I understand it, one of the major reasons for the political instability that has plagued Côte d’Ivoire for the past four years). At any rate, Côte d’Ivoire has a pretty good team, and tonight, the final game of the tournament, pitted Côte d’Ivoire against Egypt. Unfortunately for Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt hosted the tournament, so they had a bit of a homefield advantage. And after 120 point-less minutes, Egypt won the shootout at the end, 3-2.

In other news, I’ve joined an English club. The class is led by a very friendly primary school teacher here in Kongoussi (whose name, unfortunately, I don’t remember at the moment - I’m horrible with names here), who speaks about the best English I’ve heard from any Burkinabé (even better than some of the Burkinabé employed by Peace Corps). We meet every Saturday afternoon, and it’s an interesting experience, for several reasons. First, it helps me learn French - although everyone is supposed to speak English the entire time, there are inevitably some English words that people need translated to French, and the English words they don’t know tend to be the same words I don’t know in French, so we both learn them. But even more importantly, it provides an interesting glimpse into the Burkinabé mindset.

Today, for example, our topic was prostitution. (Last time, we discussed several issues, including poverty, pollution, and women’s emancipation.) Before the meeting, one of the club members had written up a two page document explaining what prostitution is, what causes it, and some possible solutions. About 70% of the document was completely incomprehensible. In some places, I could tell where he had directly translated some sort of French or Burkinabé idiom into English, and others places where he clearly looked a word up in the dictionary and just took the first French equivalent it listed, regardless of what part of speech it was, etc. I think my favourite part, however, was the opening line. Much like any good, clichéd American speech, he wrote that “the dictionary redheaded defines prostitution…” After a few seconds of staring at this sentence confusedly, I realized he must have been using a Larousse dictionary (and perhaps Babelfish or something similar? If so, he’s a pretty high-tech Burkinabé).

Anyway, I found the discussion to be fascinating. Everyone in the club is pretty well-educated - there’s one or two high school students (I think they’re in terminale - the last year of high school), and most of the rest are teachers, who have at least a high school, if not university, education. As soon became clear, however, I was apparently the only one of us with a liberal arts education. The document that the one member had written made a distinction between the “Ghanaian” and “Nigerian” forms of prostitution (both English speaking countries, I noted), and implied that prostitution didn’t really exist in Burkina, except when these loose Ghanaian and Nigerian ventured into Burkina. After awhile, the leader finally convinced everyone to admit that prostitution was not merely a Ghanaian or Nigerian phenomenon, that there were Burkinabé and even Bamoise (first time I’d heard that word - it means someone from Bam, the province of which Kongoussi is the capital) who engaged in prostitution. This admission was a fairly major breakthrough.

We then discussed the sources of prostitution. I made what I thought to be a logical argument that generally prostitution is caused by poverty. Although there was some support for my theory, there was far greater support for the “TV causes prostitution” theory. As best I could understand it, the gist of the argument was that there are more TVs in cities than in rural areas, and there are also more prostitutes in cities than rural areas. Unfortunately, assuming that “causation” and “correlation” had not yet entered their English vocabulary, I chose not to respond to this claim. There was also a general consensus that women who engage in prostitution suffer from some sort of mental illness. The final question, which began as something on the lines of “Think you this day or another it could legalise prostitution?” which we cleaned up to, “Do you think prostitution should be legal?” The general consensus was that prostitution is bad, immoral, shameful, and spreads HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and so yes, of course, it should be illegal. There was one other person (besides myself) who tried to present an argument in favour of legalizing prostitution. His argument consisted of “there are countries in the world where homosexuality is now legal, so why not legalize prostitution?” Someone else mentioned, to appalled horrific gasps, that homosexuality had just become legal in South Africa within the past month. This line of reasoning was quickly shot down. Finally, I gave my two cents, and mostly for the fun of it, argued that Burkina should legalize prostitution. Since it’s impossible to eliminate prostitution as long as there’s poverty, if you legalized prostitution, you could more easily enforce condom usage, and thus minimize the spread of STDs. After making my case, I waited for them to boo me out of the group. Luckily, that didn’t happen, although I think it was primarily because they had no idea what I said - except for two or three members of the group, they all seem to find my American accent impenetrable and incomprehensible.

At any rate, next Saturday is my turn to lead the group. They asked me to bring in some American songs that we can try to understand and interpret. (A few weeks ago we spent the meeting listening to and translating Bob Marley lyrics - they love Bob Marley.) So now I’m trying to go through the handful of cassettes that Mike left me (there’s no way I’m going to bring my iPod and computer speakers to play music for them) to find some songs that have interesting, coherent, and fairly simple lyrics. Unfortunately my choices are a bit limited - I had to rule out both the Bob Dylan tape and the Pearl Jam tape for the sole reason that I can barely understand what they’re saying (as best Abby and I can tell, Eddie Vedder sings one or two words in every song, such as ‘alive,’ ‘betterman,’ or ‘Jeremy spoke’ and then just mumbles his way through the other three to five minutes of the song) - so there’s no way I can expect the group to understand what they’re singing. This leaves me with Paul Simon’s Graceland album, U2’s Achtung Baby, an R.E.M. album, and a Tracy Chapman tape. And I’m having trouble finding any songs with interesting lyrics - after discussing the sources and possible solutions to prostitution this week, it seems like a bit of a step down to discuss “You Can Call Me Al.” And I have to bring three songs.

Anyways, nothing else particularly noteworthy going on. I went to Djibo this week (in the bank’s very nice SUV) for a day for a workshop explaining the bank’s services to rural farmers. It was pretty interesting, since these farmers have really no concept of what credit is, and most of the session was spent explaining credit in the simplest terms possible. The workshop also confused me more than most things in Burkina do, because it allowed me to be confused in three languages, French, Mooré, and Fulfulde, instead of the usual two. And although I managed to follow just about everything in French (the coordonnateur used his simplified, dumbed-down for the peasant-folk French, which I can follow without much difficulty), I was quite happy to discover that although I couldn’t understand anything in Mooré or Fulfulde, I could usually identify which language was being spoken (which is pretty good since, especially with farmers, I sometimes can’t tell if someone is speaking French or Mooré - and then there are the times when people try to impress me by speaking a sentence in English, but I’m not expecting them to speak English, so I get really confused, and look pretty dumb for not being able to recognize my own language).

Winter, such as it exists here, seems to be rapidly coming to an end. Several weeks ago, while in Ouaga, I bought a thermometer. Oddly, although there were several thermometer models, only one of them went up to 50°C (122°F) - the others only went to 40°C (104°F) for some inexplicable reason. With considerable foresight, I spent the extra nickel and bought the 50° one - this turned out to be smart, as I wouldn’t have known what temperature it was all this week had I purchased the 40° one. So far, the highest temperature I’ve recorded with the thermometer on my front porch is 116°F, but everyone assures me that this still isn’t that hot. Perhaps instead of the 50°C thermometer, I should’ve just gone with a meat thermometer. And speaking of meat and poultry, I hear that bird flu has shown up in northern Nigeria, and according to the BBC World Service, experts expect it to spread. Luckily, Niger presents a nice little buffer between Burkina and Nigeria.

February 21, 2006

Not much to write about today, but I think I’m going to try and post the last entry later today, so I figured I should probably write something new and current here. So, let’s see… I’ve heard rumors that the bird flu over in Nigeria has spread to Niger. At the moment, however, bird flu is not the disease Bamoise are concerned about. There’s been a fairly large meningitis outbreak here - as best I can tell, the epicentre is in a village called Nasseré, about 30 or 40km from Kongoussi, but it’s quickly spread throughout the province. This weekend, they were giving shots to people at the market (it was the vignt-et-un, the major market that’s held every three weeks, to which tons of people from all over the province come to Kongoussi. And, according to my neighbour, they’ve started distributing shots at the schools, too. Luckily, Peace Corps gave me a shot for meningitis back when I arrived in Burkina, or at least I’m hoping they did.

I’m trying to get my “formations informatiques” going again at the cybercafé down the road. It now sounds like Oscar, the guy who used to manage the place, is definitely not coming back. But there are still people interested in the classes, and I think I’ve finally convinced the woman who’s now running the place that the classes are a good idea.

It cooled off quite a bit this week. After two weeks of plus-100 temperatures, the Harmatan winds I’ve been hearing about for so long arrived. There was one day last week when it was really windy all day - I’d guess sustained speeds of around 15mph, but with some strong (maybe 40mph?) gusts - enough to knock over the wooden table on my front porch. And since it hasn’t rained in about four months, all the roads are dry and dusty. So with the wind, everything just became a mess - while sitting in my house, I frequently had to take my glasses off and wipe the layer of dust off of them.

In case anyone has been sending things to Ouaga, I haven’t been there in about a month, but am heading down there this Friday. We have in-service training - Peace Corps brilliantly abbreviates this conference to IST, which is the French equivalent of the English acronym STD, thus causing people to look at me weird when they see “IST” sprawled across my calendar for a week - and this from the guy promoting legalizing prostitution!