It's hard to believe, but my service in Burkina is ending next week! A lot has been going on here and I can't begin to explain the last month. It's been crazy and stressful and the best way to deal with stuff that's stressful is to visit giraffes!

The last remaining self sustaining herd of West African giraffes (also know as the Niger or Nigerien giraffe, scientific name: giraffa camelopardalis peralta) is located in south western Niger. This subspecies is currently classified as endangered, but the population is on the rise because of conservation efforts. Another article here.

(heads up: Niger and Nigeria are different countries; Nigeria is directly south of Niger)

View Niger in a larger map (supposedly the blue pin is Niamey and the green Kouré, but from the view on my computer they're off)

Last Wednesday two friends and myself set out for Niamey. The bus ride was uneventful, but hot ... really hot. We arrived at the Sonef bus station in Ouaga at 4:30 am for our 5 am departure. The bus initially looked very nice since it was the air-conditioned model where the windows don't open because it's air-conditioned. Unfortunately, later that morning when it started getting hot we discovered the air-conditioning, and the air fans in general, didn't work. The only ventilation was two roof vents in the front half of the bus... we were sitting in the back. Hottest bus ride ever.

We got into Niamey with no problems, found the Peace Corps Niger office and settled in at their hostel. Niamey observations:

1) there are more cars than motos (Ouaga is exactly opposite)

2) the women cover themselves more (made Burkina's ladies look like harlots in comparison) 3) the taxis function, are clean and there is no haggling over price 4) it seemed hotter, but I could be getting soft with my Ouaga living 5) there were hardly any street vendors; in general people were very respectful and it was a no hassle trip6) (not Niamey) once we crossed the border into Niger the number of largish trees dwindle almost none

OK giraffes... We hired a car to take us out to Kouré the next day. At the giraffe "center" we paid something like a park entrance fee and pick up our guide. Then we drove out to find the giraffes. Our guide climbed a tree to spot them and then we headed off road.

and then ...

We ended up seeing 20 or so giraffes. At first we came on a group of 7 and then we followed them on foot as they joined up with a larger group. They didn't seem concerned about our presence, although they appeared to be asking "what do you want?" a fair bit. Only one spooked and started to run as we approached. The coolest behavior was watching them rub necks. It didn't look like they were fighting even though it was two males, so I'm guessing they were really good friends.

necking behavior

mom and baby

how thin can the neck appear?

I really like the picture above because it nicely demonstrates the giraffe's bizarre gait. They start their movement by moving the front foot and then the back foot of the same side. Which means that they are constantly shifting their weight from side-to-side as seen in this photo.

like cows, they were constantly chewing

With a little help from the giraffe, Jen was almost the same height... almost.

This one with the cockeyed horn is an older female. For inexplicable reasons she was my favorite.

While staying in Ouaga I've started running again. I stopped in Ouahigouya because there's a pack of dogs in my neighborhood that are quite scary and give chase. In fact when I leave Burkina I will take many memories with me as well as an intense fear of strange dogs.

Luckily I have found new motivation to run ... large fruit bats. The bats are located in Bangr-Weoogo Park. The first morning I went running this week I noticed huge dragonflies flying above my head, then the my eyes latched onto dozens of bats. I was really out of shape on that run and barely had enough energy to focus on running. The second morning though I tracked down the nesting trees of the bats. There must be thousands of them in the park. Walking under the trees one is assaulted by intense quantity of noise and the water dropping on your head may not be water. The third morning I ran my camera came along for the ride.

flying around

hanging in the trees

more flying

the bats' tree homes

a bat wing with my foot for size comparison

I've been in Ouaga for the past week organizing lesson plans, scanning my own lessons onto the computer and writing-up reports for Peace Corps. Part of my coming to Ouaga was to take a break after the end of the school year.

Last year a super awesome small enterprise development (SED) volunteer, named Casey, started a project to order computers from the US. He did an incredible amount of work which ultimately let to the arrival of 150 affordable computers from the Seattle company InterConnection in the middle of May. (Computers are expensive here because of customs fees etc.) Before ordering the computers we collected money from organizations and teachers who wanted to buy a computer, some for the first time. In Ouahigouya we ended up ordering 21 desktop computers and 14 laptops for my school, teachers and administration. It was a lot of work, but Peace Corps helped transport the computers to Ouahigouya. Unfortunately the monitors are still in Ouaga for the moment.

Casey and all the computers at the Peace Corps office

Computers ordered by Yamwaya and area teachers

The proviseur (principal) of Yamwaya, me, and the intendant (our money guy).

This morning I just experience my first overt: "Could you change the grade of a student as a favor to {insert name}?" It was a fellow teacher asking me to do it and they took an underhanded approach. They said that Action Social (THE Burkinabé advocacy group for those without a voice) was involved. Yeah right! I think a group that advocates equality would have better things to involve themselves with.

The end of the school year is fast approaching. The grades are almost fixed and finished and tomorrow is full of teacher meetings. Football games are underway, danses have happened and there was even a defilé on Friday evening. The closest thing in the US would be a beauty contest. In this case the girls dressed in traditional clothing and walked down the "run way" carrying traditional objects (bowls of milk, spindles, baskets, calabashes etc.). I was asked by a colleage, Noëlie, to take her place as a judge.

pre-defilé entertainment

the "husband" of the 1st place girl reading the sands

trying my best to judge the following categories: 1) traditional clothing; 2) expression; and 3) beauty and hormony of tradional clothing

Noëli and myself

As of this week I have finished my work as a teacher in Burkina Faso. I've given, graded and handed back my last devoirs (tests) and entered the grades into our computer grading system. The last event of this school year is our conseil (teacher meeting) on June 25th.

Overall I am happy that things are wrapping up here and I'll be coming home soon. At this point though I now understand why some volunteers choose to extend their service a third year. Everything becomes so much easier the second year (except the insane heat!).

Here are some of the events and happenings since my last post in February.

Potato Festival in Titao The Ouahigouya area is known for potatoes. We were literally over flowing with them in March! To celebrate the farmers and the potatoes the city of Titao has a Potato Festival. The festival includes a lot of speeches and stalls upon stalls of potatoes.

Making Soap

This year I did my very best to incorporate experiments and "real worl" applications in my physics/chemistry classes. The most interesting was a soap competition in my 1ère class. In this class we started organic chemistry and the last subject covered is saponification (the reaction for making soap). So I divided my class in half; forming two "teams" of 35 students. The students chose the soap recipe and then I bought the supplies in Ouaga at Faso Chimie (see below). I also made them write lab reports. Unfortunately, quite a few of the cheated by copying each other or plagiarizing books/internet. My last act as a teacher was giving out around 15 zeroes for cheating.

Outside the store - perfume bottles

Chemical storage

dyes

plastic bags filled with buerre de karité (shea butter)

Recipe used:1 kg NaOH 2 liters palm oil; 2 liters shea butter; 2 liters coco oil ~ 200 g sodium carbonate 250 ml sodium silicate perfume

Both groups used the same recipe, but their results were different. The first group didn't stir the soap well enough and as a result there were little white spots of sodium carbonate in the soap.

mixing the soap

pouring the soap in a mold

cutting the soap

On the morning of January 15th I was getting ready to leave for school like any ordinary day. What happened next, however, was not ordinary. It all started when I heard birds making bizarre noises outside my front door. I investigated and caught my fire finches in the act of building a nest in my bike helmet, which was hanging on my handle bars. Not only had the built a nest ... they had laid an EGG!!!! For the most part the nest was composed of dead leaves, sticks, duct tape, etc. (smart birds to use duct tape... except for the whole nest in helmet part!) There was one item though that didn't fit in ... a snake skin! (Sorry no picture, camera battery died)

The fate of the egg: I transferred the "nest" into a calabash and left in on my chair outside. I was worried that the parents of the egg would forsake it, the egg would hatch and I'd be forced watch a helpless baby bird die. Very dramatic. Luckily a big gust of wind blew the calabash over, cracking the egg and saving me from making any decisions at all. The end.

December (cont.): After the parade on the 11th life started getting back to normal. Classes were supposed to start again on the 14th, but there were strikes on both the 14th and 15th in recognition of the murder of a journalist several years ago. I was ready to teach on the 16th, however, the students continued the strike. Everyone was finally at school on the 17th. At this point though, I had given up. So in then end, hardly any teaching was achieved the whole month of December.

On the positive side, one of the teachers I work with took great initiative in converting our grading system to a Microsoft Access program. Now instead of filling out carbon copy report cards and calculating averages by hand, the computer handles everything. Starting up was a little rough. We found several problems and bugs along the way that we managed to iron out with help from the program's author. Yamwaya is now the first lycée in Ouahigouya to have electronic reports cards.

After struggling to try to teach I decided to take a "break" by going to another volunteer's village to watch her group of women tie dye. It wasn't hippy tie dying for sure! The women dye sheets of fabric known as bazin (I'm not sure on spelling), which is a very nice cotton fabric with ornamental designs woven in, but they do their most business dying the old clothes of villagers so that they look new.

getting ready

folding the fabric



dying the fabric



finished product - so pretty!

Vacation: The last week of December, I went to Orodara (in the southwest) for Christmas. A group of us then biked to Banfora. The first night we stopped in Bérégadougou where we were able to take a tour of the SOSUCO sugar factory. This was also my first time trying sugar cane. Wow! It was fantastic. Too bad we only have sugar beets in the lower 48. To be fair, I haven't tried sugar beets; guess I should do that.

Christmas pizza!

road to Banfora





we passed a fire that was very close to the road



sugar cane



sugar factory



trucks loaded with sugar cane



washing the sugar cane



sugar cane field

After Bérégadougou, we biked to Banfora Falls and the Domes, two of the "must see" tourist attractions in Burkina. At the falls we discovered giant mango trees, Rastas selling artwork and of course a series of waterfalls. Then we hiked over to the Domes, rock formations that look a lot like bee hives. Amusingly a group of Burkinabè tourists were there and the ladies of the group (2 of them in fancy dresses) climbed a dome for a photo shoot.

unbelievable mango trees



the falls



the Domes (see the beehive resemblance?)



photo-op



all the lovely ladies

We then biked to another volunteer's village a couple kilometers away. Her village loves her so much, they through a 1 year anniversary party! It was a lot of fun and non-stop dancing was involved. Unfortunately that night I froze sleeping in a tent directly on the ground. I traveled light for this trip which meant no sleeping pad or warm clothes (I did bring socks).

party



dancing



balafon music



I loved the face of the girl in the middle



women do EVERYTHING with babies on their backs - even dancing



cows eating mango trees - So this is why the trees look like mushrooms!

The next morning we completed the bike ride to Banfora, but not before stopping a Lake Tengrela. There we all got into a rickety wooden boat with two guides and went to the far side of the lake to see hippopotami (or hippopotamuses – both are acceptable). Our guide keep knocking the side of the boat with his oar to inform the hippos that we were there and to get them to surface. We saw 5 of them! It was really nerve racking being in a boat just 20 - 30 feet from them and having them look straight at us. Did you know that hippo ears are really, really adorable? There was a woman washing clothes not far away, but the guide said that she was safe. He also mentioned that hippos and cattle are friends, but definitely not hippos and horses. Something about a horse breaking a hippo's heart...

Hippos

The last time I wrote was in November. That means I have a LOT of ground to cover here.

Mid-November: Peace Corps Guinea closed in September and we received 5 transfers. By chance one of them happened to be an alum from the Chemistry Department at UW... small world. I hosted him for a week during which he shadowed me around Ouahigouya. As a bonus having him watch my class allowed me to get a few pictures of me teaching.

This is me teaching my 2nd PC class

December: This was a strange month. First I didn't teach at all because of festivals, holidays and strikes. The first week I was in Ouaga for a VAC (volunteer advisory committee) meeting. Then it was back to Ouahigouya to practice marching for the Dec. 11th independence day parade. The government of Burkina has started celebrating this national holiday each year in a different city. In 2008 their trial run was in Fada and in 2009 Ouahigouya was the lucky city.

For the last 6 months Ouahigouya has been destroying and building, painting and polishing, doing everything possible to get ready for a visit from the President. What was done:

3 new stoplights were added for a grand total of 5! the roads around town were repared(!) meaning fewer jaw jarring potholes. paved roads were extended, especially the one to the President's house north-east of town. Also there's a new road out to Youba and many of the smaller villages around Ouahigouya have received electricity. new paved roads were added. Ouahigouya used to be a "one road" town, now there is an entirely paved loop. For those who know, the road by NEEED was paved, as well as the road Sol Beni was on. Sol Beni and Chaine Avion were destroyed and rebuilt. There's now a legitimate boulangerie. Artwork was added around town, including a lion by the resting place of the Naba Kango, which was actually cleaned and weeded. worst of all... a whole new neighborhood was built in only 6 months. The houses are huge, they have water and electricity (a neighborhood nearby has been waiting for water for years) and would fit in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ.

new neighborhood

people appreciating a new statue



Ouahigouya's red visitor

The big even on December 11th was a parade. All the important people from Ouaga came to Ouahigouya for this event. There are two things people should know about parades in Burkina: 1) they are NOT like parades in the US and 2) the military oversees it and every MUST be perfectly aligned and marching together. The participants in the parade basically march in groups. No floats and no candy.

Last year volunteers marched in Fada, so this year Peace Corps was interested in having us march again. After numerous parade practices and miscommunications a dozen of us marched. There were also 3 JICA volunteers (the Japanese equivalent of Peace Corps) with us. The best part was that we had to wear uniforms. Trust me when I say we fit in and it wasn't awkward at all. I don't think I'll wear it in the US though ... except as pajamas.

Since I was marching I didn't get to see the parade, but I do have photos from Rob, another volunteer (all photos below were taken by him). I did see the president of Burkina Faso as he inspected us marchers from his super dooper jeep. Pretty cool...

lining up to march





a man selling live chickens from his bike



grand stand that the parade passed by



first lady of Burkina - Chantal Compaore



president of Burkina - Blaise Compaore



the parade



Peace Corps volunteers marching

I couldn't believe this picture ... there were cheerleaders!



show of mlitary force



secret military group

Let's see ... the last time I posted something substantially was in September. Since then School has started, the raining season is officially over and time is on fast forward mode.

Classes started October 1st and since my school in a larger town we really did start then. Some schools in smaller villages have just started in November! One reason for this is that many teachers are forced to teach in small villages in the "middle of nowhere". Unlike the US, in Burkina Faso the government decides where teachers will be assigned. Now in order to be a teacher here you must have achieved a certain level of education which usually involves living in larger cities. OK ... now imagine that you've obtained your teaching certificate when the government assigns you to a school a tiny village (with no running water or electricity) 20 km or more from the nearest amenities ... for the foreseeable future, at least two years. Then after that you may be assigned to another small village. You have no (or very little) control over where you will work. I don't think I would be too happy to start teaching school either. Of course, it's necessary to force the teachers into small villages otherwise there would be no teachers at all! So that is one of many educational problems here.

This year I have the same classes as last year: 5ème Math, 2nd and 1ère Physics/Chemistry. So far teaching is going well especially since I've learned a thing or two from last year. My French is so much better than last year (not fantastic) that I'm able to catch more. It's almost as though last year there was a veil between me and the kids. This year everything seems in a bit more focus. Also I'm not fighting sickness which helps immeasurably. I am discovering, however, that teaching the same material from last year is a bit boring. Not to say that I'm bored, it's more like I don't have to think about what I'm going to teach as much.

On to the 9 zeros... I just finished giving my first round of tests the last week of November. Grading tests is not fun, especially when your students cheat. Every time I discover a case my stomach drops and a feel a little sick. The 5ème test went well with only two cheaters and the 2nd PC was much the same only the scores were much lower (it's a universal truth that physics is "hard"). The 1ère PC test was another matter ... While grading the test (a lovely concoction of alkane nomenclature questions) I discovered 9 (!) cheaters. When I handed back the test I made very big example of them. I called them up one-by-one to the front of the class by "les équipes de tricheurs", embarrassing them in front of all their classmates. I know I did the right thing, especially because one of my non-cheating students actually thanked me later on!

Hello! I'm posting this for a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who lives in a village 12km from Ouahigouya (my town). She's very close to having her grant funded and needs only $243 more dollars to fix a school building roof and start a school garden. Please read below and follow her instructions if interested.

If you would like to donate to my project (see below), Please DO IT NOW!!!!! There is some urgency in this project. It is to repair our school building’s roof. During a storm in June (we got a couple bad wind storms this summer), the wind blew off the roof. Since then, the community, having no extra material, was only able to smooth the existing roof out and put rocks on top to weigh it down. But there are holes still in it. Therefore, every time it has rained this summer, water gets into the school and does damage. I spent the summer writing up and submitting the grant in order to get funds to fix the roof. So now all is left is to raise the money…. That is where YOU come in…. please DONATE NOW, if you are able and willingly to donate!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO this is my desperate plea …..

Also, we have to plant the garden within the next month…. SO, this is another reason to raise money quickly!

Of course, every little amount helps… so if you can donate, whatever amount… it would be appreciated. Follow these simple steps: REMEMBER!!!!! EVERY DONATION IS TAX-DEDUCIBLE!!!!!!!!

Step 1: Go to www.peacecorps.gov

Step 2 : Click on DONATE NOW (or under Resources For: Donations)

Step 3: Type in my last name- Spear , in the text box

Step 4: Scroll down and you will see my project (Title: School Improvement Number: #686-121) . To the right you can type in the amount you wish to donate.

Step 5: Fill out the info.

Step 6: SMILE!

Let me know if you have any questions!

"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak

Just finished it on Friday. His prose was so captivating I couldn't put it down.

Since my last post a lot has happened. I ended up returning to Ouaga only 2 days after arriving in Ouahigouya.

A group of volunteers (me included) ended up working with Save the Children – Canada to conduct interviews at the flood victim camps around Ouaga. At the beginning of September Ouaga received a torrential amount of rain causing many mud brick houses to collapse and leaving about 150,000 homeless. News article here. For the last month the government of Burkina has housed the homeless in school buildings scattered around the city. I was assigned to a school named Koubri that was housing 1,011 people, 425 of them children. I was partnered with a Burkinabè and we conducted 6 focus group interviews, mostly in mooré so I was practically useless. I did manage to get the girls talking though so I guess that was something. A quick overview of the situation: not enough food, not enough readily available drinking water and insufficient housing. The kids were very nervous and scared particularly about the housing problem. They are living in a school and the first day of classes was October 1. They knew they would have to move "somewhere else" and had no hope of going to school themselves.

Overall the experience was very educational for me. It was the first time I had observed relief work for displaced victims of a disaster. I can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of aid needed after larger disasters like hurricane Katrina.

I returned to Ouahigouya on Tuesday evening just in time for our Conseil de Rentrée (start of the year teacher meeting) on Wednesday morning. It was a very long meeting, but much better that last year. This time I understood what was going on! My french has definitely improved. Then Thursday was the first day of classes. I was hardly nervous at all compared to last year when speaking and teaching in french seemed like an insurmountable task.

The 1ère PC and 5e Math students were there, so I was able to introduce myself and layout my class rules. Unfortunately my 2nd PC students had taken off since the "first day of classes" here is anything but that. I believe they'll be taking a pop quiz next week in order to get them back into the right mind set for school. Pretty sure they'll be my hardest class discipline-wise.

I'll start teaching on Monday for real, but I may be the only one. Turns out October 5 (Mon.) is Teacher's Day. I guess we celebrate that by not teaching. And we won't teach December 7 – 11 because Burkina's Independence Day is being celebrated on Dec. 11 in Ouahigouya. I'm starting to wonder how much teaching will get done this first trimester.

Last week I was in Ouaga to work on consolidating Peace Corps resources for Physics/Chemistry classes. Overall it was successful and I'm hoping to have lesson plans and exercises posted on our community website in December for new volunteers to use. It's easier to create good lesson plans if you have something to start from.

I left Ouaga Thursaday afternoon after biking in much to hot weather to catch the 1pm STMB bus back to Ouahigouya. Luckily another PCV in my region was working on the P/C lesson plans and caught the same bus. It's nice to travel in pairs here: one to make sure bags and bikes get on the bus and the other to find seats and save them. Our bus was late in arriving so it was essentially mobbed by people trying to get on. STMB is pretty good about this compared to another bus company STAF. Believe-it-or-not, but STMB tries to make people form a LINE to get on. In general this is not and orderly process. Anyway I ended up getting in the line, which was cut by people numerous times, with both our bags, our bike helmets and my backpack. I made it to the door, shoved the bags up the steps (someone even managed to get my into the overhead compartment) and found two seats that would be out of the afternoon sun (very important!). Meanwhile the other PCV was negotiating the placement of our bikes under the bus. I believe he ended up paying someone to get them on since there was no room and stuff had to be taken out and reloaded.

We finally left Ouaga only a little behind schedule. Usually the bus trip takes about 3 hours with STMB. We were making good time until we stopped. Our front right tire was flat. A spare had been loaded in Ouaga so it shouldn't have been a problem except the jack to lift the bus wasn't working. So we ended up waiting for about 2 hours by the side of the road.

Now I've heard horror stories from other volunteers who wait much longer, even overnight, when their bush taxis break down, so I'm not complaining. Actually I'm happy we did break down, since I can now say I have seen a dung beetle! When I was little, we had an Apple IIe computer and I used to play a game called Dung Beetles. The graphics were horrible and it can best be described as similar to Pac-Man. You, as a blob dung beetle had to go through a maze eating all the dung blobs before these other blobs ate you. A truly riveting game. :)

Waiting broke down like this: the women grouped together and sat in the tall grass next to the road, the men formed a separate group and sat in the shade of a tree on burr grass and dirt. As a white female I could have sat with either, but preferred not to. The other PCV and I stood off to the side in between the two groups. During the wait I started looking around and discovered the dung beetle. It was really cute, purple in color with orange wings. Information on dung beetles here and video here.

the dung beetle

beetle with dung ball

beetle rolling dung ball with back legs

Other pictures from the wait:

a herd of animals passing by and another waiting passenger

the bus

reloading the flat tire

As I've mentioned before, Djibo is (so far) my favorite Burkina town. Here are some pictures from my trip to Djibo and Baraboulé at the beginning of September.

At first when I stumbled upon the rocks and sticks hanging from the tree I was confused, but then I put it together - it's a "playground"! The sticks and rope are a swing and rocks are always good fun.

The Djibo library, novels on the left and science/how-to books on the right.



A group of girls (6ème age) that came in for a meeting with two of my fellow volunteers. The came in, said "bonsoir" and started reading right away, a few out loud. I was completely impressed.



Rocks around Baraboulé at sunset. A little too small for climbing. There was a really nice hand crack splitting one of them though... probably need to visit again and try it.



A field - the "rock" is a mileage marker for the next village.



Reason #1 why the north is so cool: camels!



I talked to the owner and was informed that this camel is 4 years old and that they can live to be 40.

Last post beginning of August... You'd think with all the free time I have (classes start again Oct. 1st) I would have been able to write a bit more. The thing is, life seems pretty boring here, at least from my perspective, and I haven't been able to motivate myself to write a "little things" post.

So how have I been keeping busy?

1. Reading: may I recommend "Supreme Conflict" for those of you who love the US Supreme Court. Also McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" for a quick western/horse fix (I'm only half way through).

2. Knitting: one sock and a lacy shawl that could've used another skein.

3. Auditing my lycée's cyber café books from 2007 to the present. I have discovered that my calling in life does not include accounting! The spreadsheets I designed were a mess, but success was achieved.

4. Gardening: my courtyard is BEAUTIFUL. The moringas (arzan tiigas) I planted in April are thriving and I'm training the plants along my porch to block out the sun. There were a couple casualties, I lost a jasmine and a moringa from my second planting.

5. Visiting other villages: Aorema, Tangaye, Bougounam, Baraboulé and my favorite Djibo.

6. Surviving "huge bug September": I've seen gargantuan dragonfly, praying mantis, wasp (who insist that my door is the perfect place to build a nest), and a whip spider in my latrine one night last week (not funny!). Check out the picture and for textbook info go here.

Well I'm back in Burkina after taking a much needed (and heavenly!) vacation to the US. I left right before the rains started and returned to green plants, water and humidity. My moringa trees virtually exploded in size, mushrooms are growing in my courtyard, the roof to my house leaks with northerly storms and the mango season is over (dang it).

My beautiful three moringas (left) in my courtyard.

mushrooms

My neighbors chickens roosting for the night.

I've had all manor of critters to distract and welcome me. The most exciting was discovering I had a mouse in my house one night. Keeping a long story short, the following day, after a thorough cleaning of every inch of the house, I found the mouse in my mosquito screen window box. I closed the window to keep him from going back inside, cut a hole in the screen and chased him out.

The gray little mouse.

escape hole

screen repair

Other members of my welcome committee have included: scorpion #19 carrying a cockroach in it's pincer, bizarre beetles, a millipede, a hedgehog, a tree full of mocking blue colored birds and an endless sky full of bats in Ouaga.

baby hedgehog

the tiny specks in the sky are bats

bats

At them moment I'm in Ouaga for MSC (mid service conference). Hard to believe I've been here a little over a year! One year left to go... School starts in October, so until then it's doing little things to stay busy and sane. It looks like I will have the same classes as last year, thank goodness! Hopefully this year I'll have more time to work on making my lesson plans better, rather than just trying to cover the curriculum.

For the french inclined. I couldn't resist posting the following text that I received two nights ago. This was either a wrong number (most probable), a prank or someone got a hold of my number. These kind of texts are more common here than you'd think. This one is sweet.

"Bjr. Coma cava? Gesper bin. Il fai 2 jur. Jaitai au vilag é jai di Jé pensé a twa. Fo m di si sété drol o bète. :) a plus. Rober"

I just attended the last teacher meeting of the school year. All that remains is a small shindig tonight, but everything is now officially over!

I haven't taken many pictures of my students, mostly because I don't like getting my camera out. (The kids get much too excited.) Here are a couple pictures my 5ème Math class taking their end of school tests.

I must be getting bored or something. Anyway here's a story:

While I was in Ouaga last week, another volunteer and I went on a mission to find "the soap place". To clarify we weren't trying to by soap; "the soap place" sells all the materials one needs to make soap. I had been hearing about this shop since my arrival in Burkina and the part of me that likes to play with chemicals was dying to see it.

Making soap is an income generating activity for many women in village. In fact, I just bought two bottles of homemade liquid soap from my neighbor yesterday. (each bottle costs 100 cfa, ~ 25¢) Some volunteers work with women's groups that communally make things, such as soap, to sell.

These bottles do not contain either Sprite or Fanta, just cleverly colored liquid soap.

Going back to the store, which according to "everyone" is located downtown "not far from Marina Market". That's all the directions we had. So we started at Marina where a lady told us to go down the street two blocks and that we would "smell the soap". We tried that, but with all the faux-types (what we call the really obnoxious street vendors) shadowing and haranguing us we ended up a bit lost.

Rule #1: never appear lost. At this point a guy walking past me opened the zipper of my hip belt backpack pocket. Luckily I had taken everything out of that pocket. [I have a general anti-theft backpack strategy that so far has worked well. (see pictures below)] Needless to say this motivated us to not look lost. A very nice lady at a street boutique gave us excellent directions and we eventually made it to the soap store.

hip belt backpack pocket (what an awkward name!)

To deter thieves take two zippers and...

... weave their cords together. I put everything in the compartments that I can close like this.

The first lady wasn't joking though. You could smell the chemicals from almost half a block away! Outside the door was a table with various jars of perfume oils labeled "fleur mélange", "citrus", "vanille" etc. Almost the Body Shop scented oil collection, almost. Inside the store on the right was a shelf with plastic bags full of powdered dyes hanging all over it. The dyes were sold by 10 g sachets (plastic bags). Hanging next to the dyes were powdered sulfur, aluminum salts and other salts. To the left of the door were huge 55 gallon drums of various bulk chemicals. I noticed potassium hydroxide and bleach, but I'm still really curious about the rest. The chemical smell was completely overpowering.

You could keep going straight through the small "lobby" area to what appeared to be a chemical storeroom. Before that though there was a window where you placed your order. The man there wrote out a ticket/receipt which you then gave to another guy who gathered everything together.

Side story: I touched one of the sachets of blue dye. I knew it was a bad idea, but I couldn't help myself, it was so pretty! The workers were amused and shocked that I had blue dye all over my hands and also that I didn't seem too concerned about it. I made a joke about being a schtroumpf (smurf), but I think it fell flat. One of them took me out front to wash it off. Here was his method:

1. smeared motor oil over the affected area (still not sure what this did, the dye was supposedly water based);

2. rinsed with water;

3. while rinsing he poured bleach over my hands;

4. kept rinsing until the water in the little pot ran out (enough to get most of the base off). Well it worked like a charm and my hands smelled like bleach for the rest of the day!

Woo hoo #1: School is over! Yes things have finally come to an end(ish) for my first year here in Burkina. I contemplated writing an expository post on my first year of teaching, but I just can't bring myself to do it and I don't know why. The time has gone by extremely fast considering that I will have been here a whole year at the beginning of June. Although time almost always goes fast for the overworked and stressed (it hasn't been too stressful here).

School actually ended for me the May 15(ish). There were multiple "grèves syndicats" (union strikes) May 13 – 16, the week I had chosen for my final exams. So I bumped them up to the week before with my last test being on May 8. I handed the tests back and told the kids their grades the following week, entered the grades in the books on May 14 and proctored the national tests (kind of like the CTBS assessment tests) on the 15th. Et voilà! ... I was finished(ish). Technically we still had school last week, but students had gone back to village, teachers went on a mini-vacation and everyone was just too tired to keep going. Our conseils (teacher meetings) are May 25 – 27 and then I guess everything is officially over.

There remains only the big tests, the BEPC (entrance exam for lycée - 2nd cycle) and the BAC, on June 4th and 18th respectively.

Woo hoo #2: I'm coming back to the US for a much needed vacation at the end of June! How I feel about this can be summed up by :o) and >^··^

At the moment I'm sitting on the porch at the Peace Corps house in Ouaga. The sky is blue, there's a nice breeze, a ceiling fan overhead and a productive mango tree nearby. Oh and there's a big yellow and black butterfly.

I finally slept straight through last night and woke up this morning at 8:30! This hasn't happened in months. It's been so hot in Ouahigouya the past couple of months that sleeping well has been impossible. (Think about how hard it is to sleep in the summer when the temperature hits the 90's... without air conditioning.) The temperature in my house has been hovering around 100 °F at night. Most people here sleep outside, but since I'm in a bigger city I don't feel comfortable doing that by myself. So I moved my lit pico (cot) into my living room under my big ceiling fan, which is the solution to and source of my problem.

Why fans are fantastic:

1. In order to stay cool in temperatures higher than your body temp (98.6 °F) you need to sweat.

2. The fan helps evaporate the sweat off your skin thereby cooling you down.

Why fans are sleep reducing:

1. The evaporate your sweat.

2. This means you sweat more.

3. Eventually you've lost so much water you can't swallow, blink or sweat one more drop.

4. You must replenish the fluids lost. For me this means waking up every 1 to 2 hours to drink.

Here are some recent books I've read:

"No god but God" by Reza Aslan- This book is a must read for everyone. Seriously go find it and read it now. The author sketches and narrates an excellent history of Islam from Muhammad to present day.

"Tipping Point" and "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell - My favorite was "Tipping Point", but both are excellent. Interesting ideas made fascinating by good storytelling.

"Mixed Emotions" by Greg Child (Thanks Rachel!) - I've always loved reading Greg Child's articles in climbing magazines. This book is a compilation of his early writing. It was so refreshing to read a good book on alpinism considering how hot it is here!

"Twilight" and "New Moon" by Stephanie Meyer - If you're looking for quick, no-thinking reads look no further than this vampire series. Each took a day to read. The second book was much better than the first, but I'm scared to reach for the third and fourth books. [For a great vampire book though may I recommend "Sunshine" by Robin McKinley.]

Two things finally motivated me to write this blog post Two things finally motivated me to write this blog post. 1) It just hit me that April is over and I didn't post anything for the whole month. 2) I found scorpion number 11 under the food canteen in my kitchen, which I killed by accident. I was really trying to kill a cockroach. I moved the canteen then smacked the roach with my fly swatter. Unfortunately I really pissed off the dust bunny next to the roach because it started to move belligerently! (The "dust bunny" was the scorpion, guess I should wear my glasses around the house more.)

Where to begin... Since my last post was a while ago and so many things have happened I'm taking a bullet point strategy here. At the end of March I did something strange ... I went to Ouaga for FUN! Yes Ouaga is still not a favorite city, but there are perks such as concerts and football games. I saw a very short, but very good, concert given by Bil Aka Kora and the Burkina Faso/Guinea soccer game (which we won 4-2), a 2010 World Cup qualifying match. I discovered that I really miss concerts and soccer games are a lot of fun to watch in person. The next match is June 20: Burkina/Côte d'Ivoire. Should be crazy since they're archrivals. At the last qualifying match in Côte d'Ivoire people were actually killed!

The 3rd trimester started April 1st. This is the shortest trimester being only a month-ish long. We should go until the middle of May, but there's talk of strikes, the kids are tired, I'm tired and the heat is unbearable. (more "heat" discussion later) I'm giving my last tests next week. This is good since I'm practically in "survival mode" right now. For anyone who has hiked back to the car from Longs Peak (Goblins Forest/Longs Peak trail), this feels like the "last-mile-that-never-ends". I'm tired and sweaty and sleep is a beautiful dream. But before the end of school fatigue set in I managed to get in some craziness. The 3rd annual Hard Core Party was in Djibo (gee-bo) on April 11th. What makes a party "hard core"? Well you see April is the hottest month (more in a bit) and Djibo is in the Sahel which means that it's normally hot and sandy. Put the two together and you have the perfect time and venue for a party... if you're hard core. Just to make it more insane another volunteer and I opted not to take the bus to Djibo and biked instead (113 km or ~ 70 mi.) the day before. It was a lot of fun until about noon and then it got very hot and windy. Luckily we made to a village 25 km from Djibo at 1pm and crashed at another volunteer's house until it cooled off. We weren't completely crazy! :) Anyway, I love Djibo! It has a laid back atmosphere, a cool barrage and camels.

Road to Djibo

camel!

It's "Feeling HOT, HOT, HOT" here! My last post mentioned that it was getting hot, now it IS. Let's put it this way 95°F (35°C) is comfortable and kind of pleasant and my house is roughly on average 108°F (42.2°C) during the day. I can't stop sweating! When the sweat does stop that means I really need to restock fluids. Amusingly I've observed a 5 second delay between drinking water and starting to sweat. Weird. Other hot notes: I have one shower temperature – hot, strategically placing toilet paper under your clothes in precisely 3 locations helps keep the sweat from traveling, wrapping yourself in went fabric allows you to get almost 3 hours of sleep and dust + sweat is very uncomfortable. Tuulgo tara mam! ("I'm hot!" or literally "The heat has me!")

Umm it's getting really hot here. Observations:

The BBC says Ouagadougou is 107 °F (41.7 °C) as of 3 pm today.

My house, according to my body thermometer, is a comfortable 98 °F (36.7 °C).I just stood in line to pay my electricity bill and the sweat was literally dripping off me.My skin has a perpetual sheen and riding my bike is refreshing because of the "wind".The heat radiating off the computer I'm typing on is unbearable.

I just took the best vacation of my life. No joke. I spent four days in what's known as Dogon Country in Mali.

Dogon Country is comprised of the Bandiagara Escarpment 200 km long. The Dogon people live on top and at the base of the cliffs. The most striking villages are those in the cliffs themselves which are very reminiscent of Mesa Verde in Colorado. Before the Dogon people came to live around the cliffs another people known as the Tellem lived there. You can still see what looks like tiny houses high in the cliffs. These were actually used by the Tellem to hide their valuables and were not actually lived in. No one really understands why the Tellem left, but they were succeeded by the ancestors of the present day Dogon. These ancient Dogon built the villages in the base of the cliffs, which are uninhabited today.

Getting to Dogon Country from Ouahigouya is "easy". There are bush taxis that leave for Koro, Mali everyday. They don't have a scheduled time for departure, leaving instead when all the seats have been sold. We got to the "station" by the cinema at 6:30 am, but didn't actually leave until close to 9 am. We ended up waiting for two women who had purchased tickets the night before, then we had to go fill up the tires with air, then get gas, then pick-up one more person, etc.

Finally we made our way to the border. On the Burkina side we had to stop and unload at the gendarmerie, customs and border and in Mali at the border and customs for a grand total of 5 stops. To make things interesting the two women we waited for didn't have their IDs so each stop took forever. The authorities wanted the women to pay sums of money for not having their identification and the women tried each time to get out of doing so by saying they had no money (not true). As for us Americans, we had to purchase our visas at the border for 15000 cfa each. This turned out to be very easy with no hassle, not at all what I expected.

Mali border check point with our white bush taxi.

We finally made it to Koro, Mali around 1 pm where we met our guide Oumar. Oumar is the "official" Peace Corps guide for Dogon and now I know why. He's Dogon himself coming from the village of Endé, speaks great english and is super knowledgeable and relaxed. After eating lunch and waiting for the sun to set a bit (3:30 pm) we took off in an old white station wagon to our drop off point where the road became too sandy for the car. Amusingly my door wouldn't stay closed so I ended up holding it shut the whole way. That afternoon we hiked to the village of Nombori and began our hike to Téli (about 30 km).

Camel cart

Quick stop at a village on our route.

We met two thirsty ladies carrying firewood not too far from the start of our hike.

roof sleeping is confortable!

View from Nombori. It felt as though the sand was trying to swallow the valley. Dogon is located in the region known as the Sahel, not far from the Sarhara.

The mound is/was a fetish or god. Sacrifices are poured on top and in the center is the head of an animal or something like that.

vegetable garden

ladder

meeting place

marché area

rock resembling a camel

hand dug well next to fields

upset donkeys - they were eating ants and then something went awry

at the blacksmith - bellows

soccer game

pain de singe (aka baobab fruit)

basket weaving

indigo ladies

indigo ball and fabric before dyeing

door

Téli

mosque

hunter's home - baboon and other skulls

the Hogon's home

Let's talk about problem solving. What do you do if a neighbor is doing something annoying, such as playing their music too loud? Calling the police right away is a little extreme. More likely you'd either put up with it or ask the neighbor to turn it down ... pretty please.

Sometimes it feels like everyone in Burkina plays their music too loud. A lot of people play music on their cell phone, without headphones of course, and they do this on the bus, at the post office, on the street, in the restaurant ... in short everywhere. Then there's the "neighborhood discothèque". It's a virtual boom box competition around my house. Each house trying to dominate the next and thereby creating a cacophony of Bob Marley meets Celine Dion meets Akon meets Burkinabè pop artists meets the drums/singing of a local church down the street. The latest to join the overplayed ranks is UB40's "Red, Red Wine" (originally by Neil Diamond (1968)) and I truly consider this to be a dramatic improvement! Although now I sit on my porch and really crave red, red wine. Confession time, I too have joined my voice (not literally) to the disharmony surrounding me, blaring my music whenever I grade or do laundry. At least my contribution is extremely classy considering all the wonderful music my super awesome boyfriend sent me. Grading is much easier with the blues and laundry is a cinch while listening to comedy.

Now imagine adding to all this background music the sound of goats. Not just any goats, but two of the unhappiest, most miserable goats in all of Burkina Faso. Let's be clear that goats don't politely bleat like sheep. Their wobbly cry/scream is somewhat similar to that of a extremely upset baby. These two particular goats happen to live immediately next to me and they never shut up! Half the time it sounds like they're in mortal peril and the other half like prisoners yelling for their one phone call. Maybe it's because they're penned up when they'd rater be roaming free, slaughtering baby trees at will. I've tried to discover the cause of their distress. I looked over the wall, but their pen is out-of-sight so no luck there. I even did some internet research on goat calls. I found one sight that has a goat call named "Pygmy goat kid calling for its mother" which is similar, but my goats' vocalizations are more forceful by a factor of ten. For your amusment I found a YouTube clip that's pretty darn close, just play it over and over and you'll understand. So here's the dilemma ... do I ask my neighbor to muzzle(?) his goats, do I third party the problem Burkinabè style or do I continue living life to the soundtrack of depressed goats? Yeah it'll be the last one.

On the serious side of things, I have new neighbors as of last month: a veterinarian and his wife and two girls (about 1 and 3 years old). This really is very nice except that my bathroom window literally opens into their courtyard. Meaning I can hear everything going on in their house and I suppose they can hear everything I'm doing as well. Just before writing this post I heard the mom spanking the older girl multiple times. It was horrible! and I know there's absolutely nothing a child that young could have possibly done to deserve even a fraction of what I heard! This is going to be an even bigger problem than the goats...

I didn't really want to come to Ouaga, but in retrospect that was silly. The break from teaching has been wonderful and I've gained new perspective. Being stressed is not healthy. You'd think I would have learned that lesson well from grad school!

I've only been in Ouaga three days. FESPACO is going on and I've manage to watch 2 movies, buy pagnes and get some work done. I wasn't sure what to expect from the African film festival, however based on my limited Seattle film festival experience I think it was fairly normal. People watch movies, directors and actors are present, some are well produced others a bit raw and most very interesting.

The two movies I saw: "Une vie brisée" ("A Broken Life") - directed by Jude Ntsimenkou from Cameroon and "Whatever Lola Wants" - directed by Nabil Ayouch from Morocco. Both were very good and quite different.

"Une vie brisée" told the story of an african man beaten to death by the brother of an arab woman because he had dated her. The movie theater was outdoors. A cross between the Santa Fe opera house (without the padded seats, nice lighting and good speakers) and a drive in movie theater (without motorized vehicles, but with the obnoxious talking people and the scratchy speakers).

"Whatever Lola Wants" was a fantastic movie about belly dancing and yes the title has something to do with the song. :) It is Moroccan, but the story takes place in the US and Egypt. I just found out it was released in Dubai in 2007. The theater for this one was comfortable, your typical American theater with nice seats and air conditioning. In place of a consession stand though was a bar.

This now puts me at having watched 3 movies in Burkina. The first was a dubbed Clint Eastwood film on Chritmas Eve in Ouahigouya. Mostly I remember that one being cold. :)

fashion designers are paid so much. After buying fabric, if you want new clothes you must choose a "model" for the tailor. This is much harder than you'd think!sinks are great ideas. They actually get your hands clean!goats eat everything. It's the only way to survive. It's amazing how they really are everywhere though. Poor baby trees don't have a chance to grow up.multiple choice/optical scan exams are so popular with teachers of large classes.fast food is so popular. When you're tired and hot, the last thing you want is to cook over a fire.mangos are fantastic. It's bizarre, but I haven't met anyone who doesn't like mangos. There are mango addicts and casual mango eaters, but so far no mango haters!

get water from the neighborhood water station using an old 55 gallon methylene chloride drum.love buying strangely patterned, bright pieces of fabric by the "pagne".think of babies tied to the backs of their mothers with pagnes as normal.teach physics.dream about teaching physics in french. I finally had my first dream in french, too bad it wasn't terribly exciting. Just a lesson about force vecteurs.be able to write legibly on a chalkboard.have nice handwriting. My whole life I've been told I need to improve my penmanship. Astonishingly my students like my handwriting. What an ego booster!enjoy eating oatmeal ... all the time.find Jif peanut butter too sweet and a Coke perfectly sweetened (high fructose corn syrup isn't used here and pop/sodas taste great because of it).drink beverages out of plastic bags after tearing them open with my teeth.kill a bug on my cutting board with an onion, remove the carcass and continue chopping a potato.

Last weekend I took a mini vacation to Youba and Aorèma to visit some other volunteers. I really needed a break and some time away from site. I love visiting smaller villages since mine is neither small nor a village. It's almost like taking a hike in the woods, except that the trees here don't exist! The ride to Youba was difficult because we were biking the whole way against the wind. At times it was easier to get off the bike and walk!

Cloud trail over my lycée (before setting out)

The cultivating season doesn't start here for at least another three months, but we saw this man starting already working. Very strange and definitely not easy work! Even though the trip was hard it was definitely worth it! Not far from Aorèma is a very beautiful barrage with caimans! Yes I officially saw my first crocodile(s) in Burkina. :)

Cows leaving the barrage

the barrage

biking down to the water with a group of moutons in the distance

caiman!

caiman on a sandbar in the middle

We tried to get a little bit closer (not too close!), but they spooked readily. As the hot dry season progresses the water becomes less and less. Maybe they're starting to feel the pinch...

Essentially we were walking on the dry barrage floor. It was so crinkly and sounded like walking on brittle ice. If only it were cold enough for ice! Almost better than the large repitiles was the tree in the middle which was covered in birds nests.

birds nests

dried barrage floor

On one end of the barrage were three kids making mud bricks. Ours bikes are in the background.

the mud bricks

Last week I experienced something resembling an epiphany. The Harmattan was particulary fierce after class one day, so much so that I ended up riding home in a choking dust cloud. It was then that I decided to become like a chinchilla.

"[Chincillas] instinctively clean their fur by taking dust baths, in which they roll around in special chinchilla dust made of fine pumice. In the wild their dust is formed from fine ground volcanic rocks. The dust gets into their fur and absorbs oil and dirt. These baths are needed a few times a week. Chinchillas do not bathe in water because the dense fur prevents air-drying, retaining moisture close to the skin, which can cause fungus growth or fur rot. A wet chinchilla must be dried immediately with towels and a no-heat hair dryer. The fur is so thick that it resists parasites such as fleas. The fur also reduces loose dander, making chinchillas hypo-allergenic." source: WikipediaBesides enjoying dust baths chinchillas are crazy cute. Somehow thinking of cute furry rodents makes dealing with all this dust more bearable. That and I've become a huge fan of wearing surgical masks in public. The blue color is really quite fashionable.

You know how sometimes you wake-up from a particularly peaceful afternoon nap with your heart racing because you think it's the next morning and that you've over slept? Thank goodness the panic subsides after checking the clock, but that brief period in between is truly frightening!

It’s time to link together random thoughts, events and pretty pictures in order to make one cohesive blog post. I'll start with the most difficult/frustrating and end with the pretty pictures.

Last week I gave a test in my math class. Not a remarkable event really, except that this time I caught 13 cases of cheating and therefore gave out 13 zeros! For the most part the cheating consisted of students copying the answers from their neighbors. It was easily detected by numbering the tests according to who sat next to whom. The cheating was fairly obvious if two people made the same error and they were sitting next to each other. We'll see what happens next time. Hopefully I scared them!Random pictures of a cute little red bird.It was hot again last week, but luckily the Harmattan blew again and cooled things off. If that was a preview of the hot season I'm a little scared! It's amazing how much of a luxury an air conditioner truly is and how many people on this planet don't have them.

Methods to cool off during the hot season (so I've heard) include not leaving the shade during the hot part of the day, soaking a pagne (basically a sheet) in water and wrapping it around you, living under a fan etc. I'm positive I'll have more details on hot weather survival techniques in the near future.Luckily I just received another weapon in the arsenal against overheating ... indoor plumbing! I now have both a functioning shower and a sink in my bathroom.Yesterday I made an attempt at papaya appreciation. To be honest I hate papayas, but I thought maybe there was a chance that I hadn't ever had a good papaya since there are no papaya trees in the western US. So I bought one, cut it, scooped out the fish egg looking seeds and tasted. It's official, papayas are horrible!! I think their problem is that they really do taste fishy. yuk. On the upside, I've heard papaya trees grow fast, so I popped the gelatinous sac surrounding a handful of the seeds in a twisted attempt to grow them.papayaScary papaya seedsRiding a bike through a herd of cows, sheep and goats is sometimes the highlight of my day.In the run up to coming here whenever I would tell someone that I was going to Burkina Faso they would invariably respond "where's that?". There were two occasions however where the other person actually knew that Burkina was a country in West Africa. What's bizarre though is that both persons commented on how great the strawberries were in Ouagadougou. Strawberries? Well I can now confirm that strawberries really do exist in Ouaga (cold season only) and boy do they taste good!Plant update: 2 out of the 5 "flowers" that I planted died, my benga (bean) bush is prolifically producing thanks to Edward and my strange desert plant is thriving with very pretty flowers.EdwardPraying mantis on benga bush

bizarre desert plant

It's time for a happy post. Yesterday I rode to Zogoré with a few other volunteers from Yatenga province. I thought it would be a small affair, but it turned out to be a full on fête. The volunteer in Zogoré did a fantastic job and obviously put in a lot of time and effort. Festivities included a woman's bike race, dance troops, speechifying, soccer games and the sensibilization that evening. Unfortunately since we had to get back to Ouahigouya the same day we weren't able to stay for the actual sensibilization.

race bikes - brakes not included!

women sitting in school benches waiting for things to begin

"Velo Club de Zogoré"

event security

the little girl up front had just finished tying a baby to her back before I took the picture

gendarme - notice the stick, it was used for crowd control!

dance troop - these guys were really, really good

I really liked watching the drummer in the fedora-like hat (back row left)

Start of the bike race. There was an accident right after this picture. Remember... no brakes.

dance troop #2 (performed while we we waiting for the racers to return)

The finish line

The winner (Erik's pick to win - good job!)

racers finishing - (remember no brakes) people had to grab the bikers to stop them!

J Lo shirt

calabash drummers

kids

bottle cap dancers

the bottle caps were tied to their legs and jingled as they stomped

acrobats (there are three guys here)

on the way to lunch behind a Shakira t-shirt

Obama t-shirt at the Zogoré marché

Start of the bike ride back to Ouahigouya. Zogoré has a beautiful barrage ...

... and was a great place to fix a flat tire. Sissamba sign

Sunset

Life in Burkina is always interesting, but can be really difficult emotionally.

I've been meaning to write about the beggar kids that you find everywhere, but the subject is a bit disheartening. All around Burkina (and from what I've heard and read, all of West Africa) are kids begging with large red tomato paste cans, or any other food receptacle for that matter. They can be found alone or in groups and are in their teens or very young. They beg in the market, on the street and in residential neighborhoods. They are truly everywhere.

These kids are supposed to be begging to learn a life lesson while also learning the Koran from a marabout. In many places the exploitation of these beggar children in running rampant. I'm not sure about the kids in my area, but they are very happy receiving food and rarely ask for money.

I found a nice explanation of the garibous (aka talibés) at Africa Flak. There are a couple of news stories from the AP and IRIN.

Recently the garibous have discovered my house. Nassaras (foreigners) are perceived as being rich whether or not it's true. I made the "mistake" of giving food to them one night. They came back in force and now are calling and pounding on my door sometimes twice a day.

garibous at the bus station in Yako

Well I'm back in Ouaga for another training session. Luckily this time it's only for one day. At the moment it feels like there isn't enough time to teach everything that should be taught. So missing even one day of classes feels like a set back at this point.

The second week of January I was in Ouaga for my IST (in service training). It was a week long and involved catching-up with my fellow SE volunteers, learning about secondary projects and getting sick. Ouaga is (so far) 3 for 3 at getting me sick. I'm officially vowing that it's not going to happen this time, however the odds may not be in my favor. During the bus ride here I ended up sitting next to a woman who was coughing. Argh!

Anyhoo... after IST, with cold in tow, I buckled down to get some teaching accomplished. It seems that I was successful since I'm giving two tests next week.

Then there was that spectacular conformation of American democracy Jan. 20. Believe it or not, but I actually watched the inauguration live(!) on CNN. A big thank you to the inventor of satellite TV! The Burkinabè TV station, RTB, also broadcast the ceremony and many of my colleages watched it.

Then the Harmattan arrived and things became cold and dusty for a couple days. The temperature has since returned to hot and the sky is blue again. Generally the climate is very dry right now, but not as bad as winter in Montana. So far my lips haven't chapped and my hair isn't perpetually accumulating static charge.

mango trees in bloom

little mangoes in waiting

cabbage patch and mango trees

Brrrr! It's officially cold here and very dusty. The Harmattan (in french) truly rolled in yesterday. It was a little windy before, but not like this. There is dust everywhere now. Last night it was bad enough that I wore a dust mask to bed! I'm still working on trying to get good pictures of the dust.

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. Between training and teaching life has been interesting.

The last day of 2008 was wonderful. I made hash browns, did laundry, received the most thoughtful present of my life and then rode out to a nearby village at sunset.

Dinner was a banana honey sandwich, popcorn and Bear Beer (a somewhat sketchy 12% German import). That night I fell asleep under the stars. They were so beautiful and you could actually see all of Orion's shield; personally I think he's really holding a bow, but then again I'm kind of partial to the Archer.

The next morning the volunteer I was staying with organized making pancakes ('just add water mix' sent by her mom, thanks!) for all her neighbors. The "américain gâteau" was a great success.

I can't believe it 2009!

Late addition: Just read this cool Wired article.

One more (couldn't resist): This American is currently surviving with only 3 of the listed items. I'll let you guess which ones. :)

Sunset cow (goats and sheep in background)

The herd kicking up dust

Last 2008 dinner

Last creep crawly of 2008

First creep crawly of 2009

Barrage at sunrise

batter stirring - it's fun!

making zoom koom (tamarind juice, pounded millet, sugar and water)

Sarata the pancake expert and daughter of the local gâteau lady

Sarata and Oumou

... because I just did! Unbelievably, my South Dakotan ballot made it to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and then eventually into my hands. I filled it out this morning and sent it off to Ouaga, where it will be shipped to the US via DHL. How exciting is that?

In other news:

it rained again two nights ago!the kitten Bug/Lemac is thriving (despite getting run over by my bike, being stepped on and dilocating a shoulder climbing the screen door)school is in full swing now, so my free time has evaporatedI went out to the fields Sunday morning with a family to see what harvesting peanuts is like. Analysis: hard, hot, really hot work. It's amazing how hard people work here, I know I couldn't do it!Right now I really wish I could bake a pumpkin pie. Fall here just isn't the same, no pretty orange pumpkins and there's watermelon everywhere. To top it off even the oranges here aren't orange, they're green!

Remarkably Burkina Faso doesn’t have much wildlife (larger than a breadbox) to speak of. When Americans think of Africa the first thing that comes to mind are vast savannahs loaded with elephants, zebras, antelopes, buffalo, hippos, crocodiles ... you know. There really isn’t that much space for wildlife here with all the people. Burkina Faso is about the size of Colorado and has over 12 million inhabitants quite a few of which are spread all over the country practicing subsistence farming. Wildlife?

Animal lover that I am, I’ve been contenting myself with the little things here. Such as domestic animals, cats, insects, reptiles and in the future birds. Burkina has an amazing number of birds and they are beautiful! (Attention all birdwatchers: come to Burkina Faso. It’s in the western part of Africa) The most common tiny birds here are these finch-like red ones. Well the males are red and the females are a less spectacular brown. These little birds make me so happy and they’re always paired up, just like mallard ducks. Just a warning though, my bird post may be awhile off yet. Birds are fast and my camera is not. I’m currently wooing some of the little red ones with bread and water, so we’ll see.

Even though there aren’t many wild animal here (à l’exception des chameaux sauvages), I still keep my eyes open. For example one of the alimentations (kind of like a mom and pop food store) sells packages of “biscuits de pain de singe.” Immediately one thinks that the little biscuits might have monkey in them (singe = monkey). Aha, some trace of a wild animal! Unfortunately “pain de singe” (monkey bread) is only fruit from the baobab tree.

But then something extraordinary occurred on Sunday. I heard knock at my courtyard door, which I typically ignore if it sounds even remotely like it may be a kid. This knock sounded different though and it was associated with some scuffling noises too. So I looked out my window and there was a monkey looking over my courtyard door at me! (Note to future visitors: if you want me to open my door bring a monkey.) One of the students from my lycée, who lives in my neighborhood, brought by his pet(?) monkey, named Boubou, to show me. Still not sure what type of monkey he is, something was lost in the language translation I think. Boubou was the size of a small labrador retriever and had the coolest tail I’ve ever seen. I must admit though that I was very nervous. Give me a moose, an elk or even a bear and I probably would have been less startled.

Boubou

at least I had water to offer since I was about to do laundry

The (and it’s Raining!!) part: the month of October was hyped up to be very hot and dry. Well Mother Nature has had other ideas. Last night it actually rained ALL night! Today feels almost like a fall day in Seattle. For the past couple of days we’ve actually had some nice cloud coverage too, however before that it was a little hot. I don’t have a thermometer so I don’t know how hot. Now that the rainy season is finished (or is it? hmmm) the heat is much more manageable since the air is dry. Very similar to the American Southwest, if only I could find some green chilies...

Yay for monkeys and dry heat!

One week down and not enough time left this school year to cover what needs/should be covered. Is this what teaching always feels like? :)

Well this first week was exactly what I imagined life would be like when I signed up for the Peace Corps. It was rewarding and challenging in so many ways.

The week started off well enough although I was extremely run down and tired. First the kitten and I had worked out a routine of sorts. Whenever I was home I would feed him reconstituted powdered milk from a small Ziploc bag with a hole in the corner (thanks Dad and Bobbie!) He’s also decided that he likes using the Great Outdoors for his bathroom duties. So no worries on his account! Also I still need to find a name for him even though I’m trying hard not to get attached. On the table are: Bug (I call everything bug, probably because of my first car), Lemac (camel backwards – a leading favorite) and Mousse (what all Burkinabè call cats, remember pets don’t really exist here).

With non-existent kitten worries I started teaching on Monday morning (Oct. 6) with an hour each of my two Physics/Chemistry classes. I’ve started with vectors and motion in my 2nd PC class and organic chemistry in my 1ère class. All went well and my courage was strengthened for two hours of 5ème math the next day. Unlike my PC classes, the math class is composed of a lot of younger students. I still don’t have the exact numbers, but “a lot” means there are 80 students in my 5ème class as compared to 60 in my 2nd and maybe about 45 the 1ère class. My first math class went extremely well since I gave the students a “test” (not graded) over material from the previous year. Two fold purpose for this: 1. check the students level of understanding/retention and 2. while they were busy working on the problems I was able to walk around the room and observe them. Most startling though was that not one student complained as I started writing the problems on the board! They just got out their notebooks and started working. It’s really hard to imagine that happening in the US.

Wednesday was math for two hours followed by a one hour break and then two hours of 2nd PC... and it went great. I was really nervous about starting physics right away, but no problems. Even though it’s not my subject, the material is straightforward and at a physics level that evenI can handle while still working on the language I’m teaching in! One of my greatest worries was not being able to ask and answer questions because of my limited french vocab. Last week I found out, much to my relief, that I have nothing to worry about. My french is surprisingly better than I thought and I’m even able to make jokes in class (to be fair they’re probably really, really, really bad jokes). I was also able to change my lesson plans during the lesson to explain or clarify when needed. Even better was when the students challenged my calculations (physics) and I was able to work through it with them to locate the problem: using the calculator incorrectly. (Some errors don’t care about cultural differences – we’re all the same with regards to technology.)

Now we’re on to Thursday. I had four hours of PC that morning starting at 7am. No big surprise, they went well. :) What didn’t go well was my health. Since the beginning of the week I hadn’t been feeling like my perky self, so much so that I called one of our PCMOs (peace corps medical officer). On Wednesday all the test results were in and I had a bacterial infection. Luckily our other PCMO was going to be in my town on Thursday and was bringing my antibiotics along. So after class I went in search of antibiotics. It ended up being perfect timing since that afternoon I started getting the achy fever feeling.

Now it’s Friday, or more specifically 1am Friday morning. I was awakened to the strange sensation of feeling cold. I was extremely confused by being cold since it’s warm enough here I don’t sleep with covers! It’s amazing how lovely a fever chill can be in a warm climate, ignoring all the other symptoms of course. So I stayed awake for an hour justifying to myself that it was alright if I didn’t teach that day. There’s a teacher shortage here and that means no substitute teachers. The dilemma was that if I didn’t teach then no one else was going to. In the end I called in sick and the fever left late in the afternoon.

Basically I spent the weekend recovering and am now 1000% better, perky one might say. And, yes this is what I thought teaching for Peace Corps might be like, and I’m positive that the students are worth it.

So now that I have achieved better health I’ve started running. My house is very close to the edge of town and I’ve found a perfect route through the crop fields. It’s very relaxing (except for the hum of a power plant nearby) and the early morning smells are heavenly.

Here is a recap in pictures of my run this morning. I probably won’t run with my camera again though. Awkward! Not only is holding it difficult, but I already get a lot of attention from my neighbors when I run as is. Adding a shiny camera into the mix wasn’t helpful at all. Also I’m not comfortable with taking pictures of people yet, as you may have noticed. So here are some plant pictures with a few animals thrown in for fun! The start of my route

Everyone is starting to wake up

I almost feel like I'm in "Nature" at this point

Surprisingly not poo!

Just a shy turtle

Fields on both sides

Pumpkin berries - don't know what they are yet, but they remind me of little green pumpkins

There are not a lot of trees, but the ones that exist branch nicely and are fun to look at.

Pod plant

Green beans! They're available in the marché now, very exciting.

Pink flower that resembles the okra flower which is yellow.

Bike tire killers. Before I could come to the cyber today I had to repair two holes in my bike tire caused by these.

Crooked tree

Similar to the corn here, but slightly different. Posted because I like the tassles.

Local "blue" grass with pretty purple seeds

There aren't a lot of flowers so these guys really stand out

I can be happy anywhere tiny blue flowers exist.

The trees have really rough bark

Back to civilization

Thistles?

I’m living in Yatenga province, home of the Mossi kingdom of Yatenga. The Mossi are the most influential ethnic group in Burkina Faso. Exploring Mossi history is going to be fun because it’s so fantastic. The US was founded by Pilgrims and a bunch of white guys at assemblies. They can’t possibly compare to the founder of the Mossi kingdom: a warrior princess named Yennenga! How cool is that? Much more on this in the future. I promise it is very exciting and explains why almost everyone here has the family name Ouédraogo (stallion in Mooré).

Currently I’m involved in preparing lesson plans for my classes. We just had our start of the school year teacher meeting at my lycée and classes will truly start next week. It’s really nice to have a job again.

Also Amy just dropped off my new kitten. Evidently his mother disappeared and his siblings were all killed, poor kitten. I’m struggling to figure out what to do with him. It’s not like home where I could by kitten formula and I have no supply of towels! I just fed the little guy powdered milk and that went alright.

On an equally sad note, my host family's kittens were stolen. No Bruit or Gros anymore.

.

I talked about some of my visitors in a previous post, but after last night I decided a longer discussion (with pictures) was in order.

Not only have I had a plethora of creepy crawly visitors, but seeing as my house is somewhat centrally located it looks like I may end up with quite a few PCVs (peace corps volunteers) visiting. In the past week I’ve had four PCVs stay over. I really don’t mind, but I’ve decided that I need to make the situation more livable for me and my guests. Having to work around people sleeping on my floor will probably get annoying very soon. So to inhibit any developing frustrations I’ve decided to charge 1,000 cfa per night. This way I can save up and purchase another lit pico (cot) for my living room. Everyone wins: my guests get a bed, I get a couch and people are off the floor. The hotels in the area range from 5,000 – 10,000 cfa, making mon chez moi a great deal. Additionally I have no idea what to expect in terms of an electric bill so it might help defray that cost.

Now for more entertaining visitors (see pictures below). With the exception of the scorpion, all were observed in one evening. The scorpion was my first live scorpion ever! Another volunteer, Christina, had spent the night and in the morning we found it trapped in the silver basin. What luck! At least we didn’t have to catch it and thank goodness Christina was there to help me kill it. I don’t think I’m afraid of scorpions, but they look too much like spiders for my taste! They squish readily though, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble killing them in the future. My courtyard is covered in rocks, making excellent hiding places for scorpions and the like. A future home improvement task will be to remove all the rocks. Anyone want to come visit? :)

I had something much better than a scorpion fly into my house last night: a praying mantis! The praying mantis has to be the coolest insect on the planet! It was so calm and relaxed and it almost seemed as though he was watching me (benignly). It swayed back and forth slowly, kind of like chameleons, and I found the movement to be very relaxing. It also cleaned its face/eyeballs in a manner reminiscent of a cat cleaning its whiskers. This guy was so cool I considered changing my blog title to “Fainting Praying Mantis”, except I don’t think they’re that fragile. One other thing I observed: praying mantis are fantastic small insect killers. It set up shop beneath my outdoor light and started munching away.

As for all the other insects, there’s too many to get grossed out. I’ve started thinking of them as snowflakes since each one is unique and intricate. The beetles are really colorful and there are some bugs I can’t even classify. .my first scorpiontoad

red beetle thinking about dying...

... because he fell over a few minutes later. Weird!

black beetle

copper beetle

one of about a million crickets

my super creepy latrine spider - we have an arrangement now: I open my latrine door, he scurries away and I pretend he doesn't exist (except he forgot to scurry away and let me take a picture!)

much bigger than a grasshoper - locust?

pretty moth

boring moth

moth/dragonfly hybrid?

best insect ever!

washing eyeballs

wish I could climb like this...

eating tiny insects

In addition to guests and visitors, I’ve also bee working on arranging my living situation so that it’s more livable. My house is extremely nice by most standards here. Many of my fellow volunteers (and the majority of Burkinabe for that matter!) don’t have the luxury of electricity, fans and the potential for running water. That I have so much is leading to feelings of guilt. Hard to believe, but I’ve already had to call an electrician and a plumber! Definitely not what I thought my Peace Corps experience would be like.

So, to start organizing my house I had to visit a carpenter since there are no IKEAs here. I gave him a list and schematics of all the shelves and tables I wanted built. The price for everything was a quarter of my yearly stipend! I ended up getting one really big bookcase, a table for my kitchen and a latrine cover for a grand total of 60,000 cfa (about $120 dollars).

Burkina Faso is not like the US with tree farms and a sustainable lumber industry. We’re located south of the Sahara Desert and northern Burkina Faso is in the Sahel. Trees are scarce and deforestation is a big problem here due to a need for cooking fuel. Gas is relatively expensive and as a result most Burkinabe still use wood fires to cook! When I arrived here in June the first smell I noticed stepping off the plane was wood smoke and now I understand why.

Water is also regarded as a valuable commodity, very similar to the American southwest actually. Without running water I need to have water brought to me. There’s a pump in my neighborhood where people fill old cooking oil jugs, big metal cans on wheels and anything else that can hold water. I’ve sucked it up and hired a girl to bring me water twice a week and to help out with my laundry. I still don’t have the proper technique down and it takes me twice as long to do it! It feels weird having someone else do my laundry though.

I also put up curtains. It’s amazing how curtains can make an empty room feel like home. I found mine in the marché and they have roses(?) and bonsai trees. What a great combination! .new bookcase - the books aren't on it because the varnish is still drying

kitchen table

very exciting latrine cover

my new water container (thanks Emily!)

curtains

curtain pattern

I now have my teaching schedule! This upcoming year I will be teaching cinquième (roughly 7th or 8th grade) math, seconde and première (high school level) physics/chemistry. It will be 15 hours of teaching instruction each week. All my classes are in the morning, on a couple days they even start at 7am! Good thing I'm a morning person. I'll be finished by noon, just beating the hottest part of the day. It's really nice to know what I'll be teaching. I can now start working on learning the curriculum and lesson planning. Classes will start either October 1st or 2nd depending on the lunar sighting for the end of Ramadan, Eid ul-Fitr.

Ok here’s an exciting post of my new house for the next two years. Actually it’s really my first house ever and much nicer than some of my past apartments! I just moved in Sunday, but have been a bit sick so as of yet I've been sleeping and trying to do small things around the house. So far I’ve been able to sleep (thanks to my super comfy cot), make food and do laundry. What else do I need? Curtains, bookshelves, and little tables. Oh and my plumbing isn’t hooked up, but that’s alright. I have a garbage can that some neighborhood girls are filling with water for me.

I have a nice courtyard with a solid bolting door that the neighborhood kids can’t get into. Instead they’ve decided that banging on the door and yelling “Breejeeet” is the best method for getting me to open it. I can honestly say it isn’t and I’m pretty sure they’re going to get bored.

As for visitors, I’ve met many of my neighbors that live close by. They’re very nice and I’m looking forward to getting to know them better.

I’ve had quite a number of “other” visitors as well. This morning I woke up to a mewling kitten who had gotten trapped in my courtyard, last night there was a frog hopping around my "garbage can water holder" and does anyone know how many species of small insects exist on this planet? I think most of them are hanging out around my lights at night! No snakes yet (drat), but I do have a huge latrine spider. Thank goodness my latrine is brand new, no cockroaches! The hole is also very deep at I’d say 20 – 30 feet. I can’t believe how much I’m thinking about bathrooms since moving here!

the front and only door

yes this is my laudry in my courtyardthe plants below look like squash, but the fruit is a cross between honeydew and cantaloupe

living room

living room

hallway and my water containers

kitchen, kind of like being back in lab...

bedroom

bathroom

outdoor shower (left) and latrine (right), my courtyard door is on the far right

I honestly don’t have too much to write about Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou at this time. After finishing up training in Ouahigouya we all bused down to Ouaga where we were introduced to the Peace Corps office, the volunteer transit house and many delicious restaurants. We were also given the administrative details of life as a PCV. Overall many questions were answered from the logistics standpoint which was beyond satisfying.

As for the city of Ouaga itself, I’m still processing. It was very big and strange especially after living in "little" Ouahigouya for three months. The differences in extreme wealth and poverty were stiking. The air was dirtier and the street vendors more obnoxious. All I can say is that after spending less than a week in Ouaga I was ready to head off to “village”.

shop close to our hotel, very strange name for a buisness

the mosque across from Marina Market

Marina Market

the second floor of Marina Market

my Ouaga food purchases

where our swear in ceremony was held

US embassy emblem

sunset from my hotel room

It's official! Tonight we officially became PCV's (peace corps volunteers). :) Our swear-in ceremony at the US Embassy was wonderful and we all looked fantastic in our new Burkina Faso styles.

the new SE volunteers

the new GEE volunteers