As in, four full days left for me in Kongoussi, and it's finally starting to feel as though reality is lining up with my mind.

Had a big huge party for myself on Saturday night, with all of my neighborhood folk in attendance. Kids of course were the first to show up, before I got down there with the first wave of food, carried on the heads of my lovely wonderful girls from Sainte B's. Tiny legs and arms flailing everywhere in wild dance, with my lil' bro Mathurin (20 or 21 I believe) commanding the DJ post, a stereo and some pretty impressive speakers hooked up to a car battery. He, in fact, was my savior for the night, listening to me gripe about the awkward surprise arrival of some dude, reassuring me that other grown-ups were going to come (three hours later than programed, duh), organizing the food-doling, letting me know when relative Big Shots showed up, and informing me continuously in various ways that since he is the oldest brother presently in Kongoussi, it's his job to make sure everyone knows how much his family cares about me by making sure that everyone is having a good time.

We had a ridiculously huge amount of food and there were some ambitious youth who stayed and blared music (really, really loudly) until literally 7:30 in the morning. I had turned in around 1 for good, and don't know if I ever actually fell asleep. Things were roaring out there still, and I was honestly enjoying being inside and on my bed as people were laughing and dancing and as Mathurin continued to come in to heft more rice into huge bowls and to partition the millet beer as he saw fit (he had a pretty good time). At around 6:30 I came out to enjoy the cloudy early morning sky and to sit in my one remaining intact chair and listen to Red Red Wine (without the rap verse at the end, which makes the song a lot less exciting, if possible) for approximately the trillionth time. Mathu by then was the lone man standing, if you don't count the dude who calls me "mariAM!" continuously every time he sees me, who had left at some point and ventured back in the morning. I'll always remember Mathu sitting peacefully behind the stereo, turning to me with a smile from under sunglasses and a winter hat as I emerged into the daylight. And then we fed lots of children the leftover rice.

I absolutely loved preparing for this party. I loved giving people the opportunity to help me out, as silly as that might sound, and I loved leaning on the different relationships that I've formed. Sister Elisabeth, Robert, Andrea, Claudia and her family, my cuisinaire girls, all of the 15 or 20 girls from my neighborhood who woke me up the morning of with buckets of water on thier heads, anxiously awaiting my sleep to finish so they could get started helping me with things. (It was, of course, six in the morning and I was outside under my mosquito net when I awoke to them looking down on me.)

And now, the real goodbyes commence. I've started with the goodbye warnings...that is, everyone who needs to know I'm leaving on the 12th knows. Today I went around the market in an attempt to say real goodbyes to the market ladies, but they refused and told me to come back later in the week to REALLY say goodbye to them. (I wish my camera wasn't broken...the market is nonexistant in my collection of photos, and my good vegetable-selling friend from way back in the day is one whose face I never want to forget.) My plan is to make Wednesday my final In Town day. Then Thursday is my final At Home day. And then Friday morning...bye bye!

All over the place, I am! A swirling tide of emotions, waves crashing on the beach of my place in the world, with tears of rage and impatience, interminably slow minutes ticking away on the face of my cell phone...and then fleeting full happy moments that I capture with my heart and lock away in a special place forever. Time with the kids of my neighborhood, running around my yard frantically making me a meal with the leaves they've collected cooked over a fire of the wood they've gathered, spiced with all sorts of flavors I've given them money to run off and buy. Time with my favorite nun, surviving the whipping hurricane winds of the year's first storm while sitting in her house eating nõose and drinking beer. The number of days between me and a Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee is not very big, and I've been having pretty much every conceivable reaction to this fact.

New volunteers are in training right now, having arrived early June on the tail end of all of the civil unrest wildness that has defined 2011. There's been a whole lot of questioning on a whole lot of levels whether Konguossi would be getting one replacement volunteer or two, and where that volunteer would be working. Thomas and I have hashed and rehashed our opinions, thinking about things together and apart, pondering the degree to which our insights and ideas will really affect what the Peace Corps ultimately decides (and how much that, in turn, will actually come into play in the next person's experience).

Imagining someone else coming in to live where I've lived for the past two years -- where I've made impressions, both good and bad; where I've in some places succeeded, in some placed failed, and in others haven't even tried -- had been a rollercoaster wave of emotions for me. But it's my town! What if people forget about me? What if they like this new person more than me? What if he or she accomplishes more, is a better volunteer, is more beloved by more people and my legacy, whatever it ends up being, is lost? What if people say negative things about me? If they comment on how much time I spent in Kongoussi instead of my house, if they talk about how few classes I had the year that I taught, about how much printer paper was used up by my lessons?

Along with this have been feelings of entitlement for my site. For my school, that deserves a volunteer after all the obstacle-surmounting they've done with the Peace Corps over the past four years. For Kongoussi in general, which really is a great place to live (and probably a lot more of a relaxing one if you don't have breasts and internal genitalia).

But really, it's been so difficult to imagine What Comes Next. So hard to get out of my own head, to think of myself as the upstanding example of How To Be A Peace Corps Volunteer. How To Live In Kongoussi. How To Do It Right.

I recently had the pleasure of spending several days helping to show the soon-to-be Kongoussi Nasara around his future home. He came to town with his very dynamic counterpart, Madam Diallo, my school's French teacher. He stayed at Thomas's house (soon to be his, unless some drastic change occurs). And I...well, I freaking love him. He is simple in the best, most Burkinabè meaning of the word. He is kind, open, excited to be here, happy about Kongoussi, taking things as they come, going with the flow...the one thing I will, most likely, always insist is a prerequisite to Doing It Right. He's great.

And he's different than me. Of course he is. Everyone is their own person, everyone will approach their Peace Corps service slightly differently...like life. And he'll do things differently than the way I've done them, or that Thomas has done them, or Justin, or Robert, or Talato (bless her), or any of the other volunteers who have hefted their luggage out of the Peace Corps SUV and onto the red dirt of Kongoussi. He came to visit and I could feel Kongoussi as it began to become his town, as the Peace Corps moment started to shift out of my service and into his. And I was so happy to have been there to have this moment of transition with him, and I am so glad that he's happy to be taking on this adventure and this challenge. And I am happy and ready to leave my town, my little African home, to him to trip in it and live in it and laugh in it and learn from it.

A happy exchange. A good way to reach the end.

I'm content, and I'm ready to go.

To all your blog-reading, Burkina-bound folk out there... are you psyched??

Have a good last few days in the States, and a good trip out here!

Things I have done today:

* Ran for the first time in a while (I have a bet to win!)

* Thought my bicycle was irreparably damaged

* ...had it fixed using only gasoline and for less than ten cents

* Sat down to eat yogurt with the benevolent frat boys of Yaourt du Centre Nord behind the marché (and was comped an ice cold sachet of water)

* Stopped in at the tailor to verify my rendez-vous (always a good idea...we pushed it back, but I stoked the fire)

* Biked up the hill to my old internet place to see if it was up and kicking (because this week, unbeknownst to me until my arrival at the post, is Internet Week, whereupon the internet is free for all who want to come learn how to use it and not only is the place hopping but I also don't want to take a computer away from other people)

* Biked back down to the post (and here I am)

I have a few things on my to do list today and I'm going to get 'em all done. I told my students that I'd be willing to have class again for the last time tomorrow for anyone who wants more free time on the comuters, but my principal didn't seem the most thrilled when I told her, so I'm going to have to check with her today to make sure that's ok. I won't be too sad if it's not. I just remembered, as I was giving back final assignments and verifying grades with my students yesterday, that there are a lot of them that I really like, and that a lot of them have really enjoyed my class...especially 5eme and new students. So it wouldn't be too bad to open up the lab for them again. But I wonldn't be surprised if my principal's hesitation is in part an issue of money.

I have a couple of dresses in the works at the tailor's (see above) that I am excited about having for my birthday weekend. I've been wearing the same clothes for a very, very long time...it will be very nice to have some new fabric wrapped around my bod.

I have a little heaviness in my heart due in part to some frustrating stuff that has happened over the past week or so. Depending on how things go this week, I might write about it all here. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

I'm just gonna keep plugging through the week. I have a lot of school wrap-up stuff to do. The final conseil de classe, the end-of-the-year mass and prayer (during which I will give a speech thanking my school for letting me be a part of the community for the past two years), and a final PTA general assembly. Right after that last one, an adventure will begin...a weekend with friends, a birthday in new clothes and a new place, and some galavanting around Banfora and Sindou to see waterfalls and climb weird rock formations. I'm looking forward to it.

Just gotta get the heaviness out of my heart.

What? Only 80 days 'til I land in America?

I know. And I am! I'm trying to, at least. And I am. ...but not in ways that I don't normally enjoy my time here.

Every day is potentially rife with frustration. Bibata doesn't understand why I let Tel borrow my bike to run an errand but I won't let her take it to go halfway into town (I'm getting ready to use my bike myself...and besides, Tel went out to get bread for me and she also gets me water now and then). One of my favorite kid's obnoxious father is beckoning for me to come over to where he is drunkenly not working to support his family under a hangar, and I have to pretend I don't hear him. And no, you idiot fools on the backroads behind Mont Blanc, I am not Talata...she hasn't been here for two years, which goes to show that yeah, you and her really had a solid connection if you don't know that, and by the way, not all white people are the same.

I'm not going to pretend that these things no longer get under my skin, especially when it's approaching high noon and the rain has not come and I'm sweating litres of sweat over whatever it is I am doing and I was woken up at 5am by a rooster who wandered over to my bed and there's no breeze and I haven't had lunch yet. But I am going to continue to see the value in the things that I love.

I love spending time with the nuns at my school and being able to help them out with the work they are doing, whether it's typing tests for Sister Françoise, my principal; helping to translate a grant application into English (and make it sound really super good) for Sister Charlotte, who is trying to get a dining hall built on campus; or being a sounding board for Sister Elisabeth, who lets me follow her around and just talks with me about so many things (including what a dolt the above mentioned drunk and not-working father is).

I also love spending time with my cuisinaire girls, with whom I am always comfortable, who call me tantie or karensamba or Molly, all things I love hearing myself called.

I also love life discussions with Thomas, when we happen to find ourselves somewhere peaceful in town and our conversation happens to build and build and when we talk in tangents and circles and zig zags and whirls.

And I love Claudia, being a part of her life, being welcome in her courtyard even if it's been a while since the last time I visited. And I love Andréa, who always comes over to say good morning, who busts Thomas's ass for not visiting her, who laughs with her whole entire body a hundred times a day.

I don't always love the extent to which the joke animosity between me and Rond Point Tantie sometimes escalates, but I love that I have a place there, and that she's tactful enough to take things down a notch when she sees I'm getting bothered.

I love that even when the power was out and the internet was down, I was able to take out my monthly allowance at the post office here because the guys know me and like me and didn't want me to have to bike into town again.

I love sleeping outside and waking up to the slowly lightening sky.

I'm going to climb my birthday mountain again. I'm going to see my best PCV friends before they leave the country. I'm going to write math problems on my metal door in chalk so that my band of little girls can impress me with their skills. I'm going to take cool bucket baths in the middle of the day. I'm not going to go out of my way to do things I wouldn't do otherwise, just because I am leaving...I'm going to enjoy spending time where and with whom I want to spend it, even though that means I have to put up with the frustrating things too.

Well! That certainly was an interesting little bit of time there, now wasn't it? Travel restrictions, stand fast, lock down, consolidation...us PCVs here in Burkina experienced a whole bunch of all that as our lovely host country went through a bit of turmoil and what could be classified lite civil unrest. (...though is it “civil unrest” when it applied to the military? Military unrest? Well, there was a bunch of that too).

Knock on wood, but it seems like things have simmered down. School is back in session (mostly) all over the country (and in most cases, it has been for almost a month now). Those of you who are invested in my good friend Denise Kinda's educational experience will be happy to know that she is totally continuing to kick butt here...eighth in her class of 51 for the second trimester, and she's also become the class president. WAY TO GO! I will be sending her letter of thanks home soon so that it can be shared with all of you.

So yes, school is in session, the police have stopped shooting their guns into the air during the night (once here in my town), the military has stopped ransacking markets and shops, shop owners and people who sell things at the market have stopped setting fire to government buildings in retaliation, the grossly unfortunate death toll seems to be stopped at six...everything seems to be back to normal.

Have you knocked on wood?

So here I am, officially at the end of my service. For those of you counting, there are exactly 22 weeks left until I am no longer a Peace Corps volunteer as of today...this number, of course, is subject to change. How will I be spending the next 147 days of my life? Well, I've been planning little adventures here and there to give myself things to look forward to, little bits of differentness to break up what are otherwise very routine (and not necessarily very busy) weeks.

For example, last week I decided to hop on a 6:30am bush taxi (old, slow van) to join my neighbor 12k to the south for a delicious breakfast that included the yogurt produced in her village. Man, I love that stuff. There are three distinct varieties of yogurt between my town and her village and my addiction rotates. So anyhow, I woke up with the rising sun, walked on down to the road, and chugged on south past the Center North's beautiful hills to enjoy some yogurt, tea, and bread with cinnamon and sugar as well as some lovely conversation. Was back in my town by 9:00 and enjoyed a whole bunch of walking around until the hazy clouds lifted and it became too scorchingly hot for my delicate white girl skin.

Another thing I did last week was bike out 7k with my village momma Claudia and her youngest daughter (who I honestly do not think I could love any more than I do) to visit the village where she was born and raised. The trip took a little bit of time to get started as it involved some tire pumping and reparation (which involved waiting for the bike mechanic guy to open up his little shop for the day), but we arrived in good health and spent most of the day in a little grove of mango trees. Prisca ran around playing with five of her cousins – making airplanes out of leaves, chasing each other on a too-big bicycle, playing some sort of hopscotch/rock kicking game. I thought a lot about me and my cousin – playing in trees, running around our Auntie's back yard – and was just so tickled by and happy with the universality of childhood. Claudia and I napped in the shade on a tarp spread out over the dirt...you know you're really friends with someone here when you nap together. At least that's been my experience. The whole trip was just so comfortable, so nice...I loved meeting Claudia's father, I loved spending time with her younger brother and his children, I loved being charmed by their puppy, I loved eating mangoes pulled off the tree, I loved (loved!) having Prisca on the back of my bike on the ride there and on the ride back. And it rained that afternoon, as soon as we returned to our houses. Big fresh rain that cooled the air and sent Claudia's other daughter, Rose, mischievously over to my house with the hopes that I would let her in to wait out the storm with me (I did). It was just a lovely day.

What other lovely days will I have in my near future? Well, I am planning a trip to a town called Boromo, which I've heard has elephants for the viewing. If everything works out, I will be taking a little Molly trip down there to see for myself. Sometime in June or July I will be taking two or three weeks to lead sessions with the new training group that's coming in soon (how y'all doing out there, you ready? Yeah?) and in July or August I will be traveling to the loveliest named country on the planet, Mali, whereupon I and my travel companions (hoping to have a few of those) will enjoy some hiking and some meandering down one of the most important rivers in West Africa (and not just because it's one of the only ones, ba dum ching). So those are big adventures.

But small small small is good too. I've got extra classes scheduled for this week (what a good teacher I am). I plan to hike my birthday hill again before leaving my little home here. I plannnnn toooooooo watch a rugby match with my friend Ousmane whenever it being on television corresponds to him watching it. (When my friend Stef was here visiting me, we went over to visit Ousmane and he made us omelets composed of something like 20 eggs, it was unreal and delicious.)

For now, I have a class to teach (actually a test to give, mwahaha) and will probably bike into town after this (after, of course, fixing an inevitable flat tire). Maybe some very routine but not un-delicious town food will be eaten. Yum. Also, I want to walk around the market tomorrow just to say hello to my friends there, and I'd also like to do some future-related research on the internet either this evening or tomorrow morning as well.

One day at a time, all 147 of them that I've got left.

It is possible that months 18ish through...whatever last month was...21?...were the most difficult months of my time here in Burkina. The repetitive comments, sexist "jokes", the calling of "nasara" were all getting old, very old, wearing away my last nerve old. I began countring down in earnest the time I had left before I could go home, determined to stay a full two years until August 25th instead of taking advantage of our option to leave a month earlier. The two-year mark has been symbolically important to me. Two Full Years. But something happened after my Close of Service conference, and I'll tell you what it was. I was hoping that the week spent with volunteer friends, talking about our lives and our activities and our hopes for the immedate future, would inspire me and reignite my motivation for this last chunk of time I have here. ...but it didn't. The morning I left the hotel was a morning without fanfare...everyone was dispersing and I walked through the doors alone, meandering through many hot under-construction roads before finally finding a taximan willing to not ask for a ridiculous fare. Got to the bus station and definitely did NOT make friends with the lady in the ticket booth who not only didn't seem to want to do her job but also didn't seem to want to be polite about it. My patience snapped and I was preeettttyyy American in my response to her reprehensable customer service. Finally I got on the bus and just sat there in indignant upsetness. What the hell? Why are little things like this so hard, that used to be so easy? The bus ride was ok, and I spent my first day back in Kongoussi with Thomas, talking about our weeks and our lives, trying to figure out the logic puzzle of my post Peace Corps travel plans and how they will fit in with the rest of my time here. Not easy to do...I want to work during the coming Peace Corps training this June, I want to visit Mali...but I want to be in my community for a good solid time towards the end. I could try to arrange an internship with a local organiwation for a month or so during cultivation season, or be in the fields with my friends, or run some activities that I've always thought about running...but what about getting home to travel with friends? Or seeing bits of the wolrd on my way back? In bed at my house the following evening, I tossed and turned with manic excitment and a new resolve...the way to fit everything in is to go PAST my August COS date to September...not to COS a month early or even right on time, but to take the offer to stay an extra 30 days. Six more months. Six months! That is its own legitimate chunk of time. I can face these six months as though they are months of their own, not the end of a culmination of 27 of them. Living in Kongoussi is not something I will easily be able to do again. Traveling to neighboring countries is much easier now than it'll probably be for a long while, if ever. I don't know exactly how I did it but I forced a change of attitude, a new mindset. I am more willing to see frustrations as adventures, to detatch from my life here in a way that allows it to become vacation like, not holy-crap-I-need-to-get-through-this like. To enjoy my neighbors, my kids, my town, my life. I'm feeling good these days. I am full of new resolve and new plans. It's gonna be a good six months.

Here I am. COS. Close of Service. In Ouagadougou. Preparing for the end of my Peace Corps stint. Unreal. I am here spending time with my Peace Corps group, enjoying the good company, being reminded of the wonderful connections I've made (and am making) with some extremely interesting, motivated, intelligent, fun Americans.

My good friend Julie is one of those Americans, and she's got a pretty ambitious project going on in her teeny tiny little village down south near Ghana. I have been very lucky in finding people to help me with getting funding for Denise's school year, so I wanted to share this other meaningful project with everyone who reads my blog.

"Each year hundreds of students in this rural district of Burkina Faso are unable to continue with their formal education due to a lack of resources and a dearth of available places in the only secondary school within a 35 kilometer radius. These out-of-school youth then have few options other than following in their parents' footsteps, which means subsistence farming for boys, and marriage and babies for girls. To combat the social and economic problem posed by this growing wave of out-of-school, unskilled, and unemployed youth, the community is creating a vocational school to provide young people with real-world skills and continuing education."

Past the year and a half as a volunteer mark.Today is going to be full of funeral festivities. Got a late start on the day because yesterday was also full of funeral festivities...I was up 'til one in the morning. Whoa, baby. I might be missing the church service this morning but since I sat in on two of 'em last night I don't feel so bad about it.I don't want the experience I end up getting out of my two years here to be "ugh, I survived that, it was hard and look at how tough I am." That really diminishes the value and importance of this place and the people I know. I'm very glad to have opportunities to be a part of life, to celebrate with my friends and neighbors like I did yesterday and will be doing today. It gives a bit of balance to the days when I really DO feel like I'm surviving here and it's hard.I had more eloquent things to say about this but I am a bit sleepy and I have to get ready for the day. Hello, day!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. The completion of an entire marathon begins with one step. Now there may be some of you who have not heard of this goal of mine. That's ok. It's a pretty recent one and I am living far away from most of you readers at the moment, with sketchy access to the internet. But anyhow, marathoning is not the point.

While visiting my dear friend Marita, who threw herself a birthday party for town friends and PCV friends alike, I allowed John to convince me to take a morning run with him. I finished red-faced and sweating (and very impressed with my rugby-playing college self) and absolutely not wanting that to be as difficult as it was, so I decided to let the momentum continue into everyday life here in Kongoussi and have been running every other morning at least and loving it. Looking forward to it.

Unfortunately I did not run this morning...I woke up later than I intended to wake up because of some righteously terrible dreams and lamented that the cool morning weather had already disappeared. ...I was a little bummed on biking over to the internet (where I find myself now) to discover that it really hadn't gotten too hot yet by 8:30. I may try to run this evening to make up for my loss, because I don't intend on trying to squeeze a run in on Wednesday mornings, when I have to be up at the school to teach classes by 7. It's possible...but there's not a whole lot of room for error, so I don't want to count on it.

Anyhow, running is great. I've been starting slow, working the kinks out of my body as I get these particular muscles used to moving again. I take in the landscape as I go, I listen to music with the one side of my earphones that works, I take time for myself to do something good for my body, and it feels great.

Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, socially, sexually...there are many different facets of well-being that can be attended to. I've started relecting on this lately because getting through the days seems to be taking a lot more out of me the second time around. I need to find ways to take care of myself so that I can keep putting a good amount of effort into the things I am doing here. It's not always easy. Having everything I do be self-motivated...it can wear on a person after a while, especially for those tasks that no one really holds you accountable for. Self motivation...perhaps something I should write a little more about here sometime soon.

...it's what gets me up and running.

Thought I could go the entire two-plus years without it happening, but no! Saturday night I was stung by a scorpion, on the ring finger of my left hand. Ouch, baby.

I had been dumping my bucket of dirty kitchen water out into my latrine (sometimes I just dump it over my wall so that the animals can come by and eat the bits of food in there, but it was a little too intense this time around). When I had finished pouring everything into the bottomless abyss, I put my hand against the mud brick wall and PING! A white hot bolt of electric pain surged through my hand. At the same time I heard a weird rattlesnake-like bark-y shriek from whence the pain had come. Looked up and saw not one by TWO big momma scorpions there on the wall. Got my butt out of the bathroom and over to the porch outside of my house where I stood clutching the fingers of my left hand and using the Lord's name in vain. For a good minute or two I was convinced I was never going to stop squeezing my hand ever.

After the pain subsided a little bit (perhaps because it had diffused up into my entire arm), I went on a search for someone brave to come and kill the b@$+@&#s for me. I heard Antoinette in her courtyard, talking up a storm with someone else and figured, hey, 16 year old girls are incredibly brave, aren't they? So I called over to her, but she didn't hear me. A few seconds later, however, two nine-year-old girls came walking by in the dark so I called THEM over instead. "Are you brave?" I asked. "Oui," they replied...but changed their tunes a little bit when I told them their task.

Ok, so I didn't make the nine year olds kill the scorpions for me, but I did have them follow me back into my latrine so that I could be brave. By this time a pretty large crowd had gathered in my courtyard by the light of the moon, mostly kids and teenage girls. Claudia's two nieces did a very thorough inspection of my latrine with my phone flashlight and determined that the scorpions were nowhere to be found. Several people suggested that they had moved into my house. Pretty much everyone asked me if the sting hurt, and then agreed that yes scorpions do hurt, and wanted to look at my finger (which I had let go of by this time, sort of enjoying the throbbing pain in a masochistic way).

Several remedies were suggested to me, one of which included blood letting and Maggi cooking tablets. I refused that one. The best thing woulda been ice, but that was obviously not going to appear from anywhere.

Knowing it wouldn't do me any harm and enjoying having pretty much the entire quartier occupy themselves with me, I allowed myself to be led across the quartier to the house of an old old woman who mixed some powdered leaves with water in her palm and then rubbed it all over my fingers with her leathery hands. Didn't you know scorpions sting? she asked me in Moore. Why did you touch one? It took me a minute to figure out what she was asking me and to explain with a laugh that I just hadn't seen it sitting there.

The kids were crowded around me as I sat on the little wooden stool in the old lady's courtyard, and they moved back to follow me as I got up and thanked her and walked away. At this point, Claudia came out with a long white scarf, which she tied around my upper arm to stop the pain from spreading. "Wend na kof laafi" she said with a smile as she turned to saunter back to her house and I continued on my way.

...and you know kids, so considerate...two crowds of them showed up at my house at 11pm to check on me. I was in my bed, which is pulled up next to my door to catch the nighttime breeze, dressed in very not-public sleep clothes. Never am I even out and about after 8pm, so this 11pm call was super special. The silly full moon with its ability to keep children out all night long. I created quite a ruckus in my telling the rascals to get the h#!% away from my door, to leave me alone, that they are very nice but this is not normal, that I would see them in the morning.

They must have thought I was weird. Why wouldn't someone want to be woken up by a swarm of children in the middle of the night--twice--to ask about an insect sting?

They really are sweet kids.

Cross cultural fun.

The heat is coming! The wind is here! The blinding dusty wind that smacks your face like a blowdrier on full blast! It's nice to feel the change of seasons. For some reason it seems like it's energizing me.

Energied! And it's not too cold to take bucket baths anymore, so I hope to not ever get as gross as I have very recently been! Cold season over? But what about my warm fleece blanket?

I like my village and my kids and my Caludia's family. My schedule is fairly full and weekends feel like weekends. And I'm looking into getting a little boat made for me to take out on the lake here. I think that'll make me happy.

Good almost-February to you.

I just took a bath in the med unit of our bureau in Ouagadougou. I had an offical errand to run in the big city (getting money out for Denise's scholarship...yay!) and had just been thinking about the fact that my last bath was in the States, and sort of lamenting that I wouldn't be able to take another until my return. I'm rul durty, I've been noticing. The cold season makes it very very difficult to bathe and so I have been caked in dirt and kind of smelly.

But then I realized...I could take a bath in Ouaga! So I came in, hopped a taxi, got Denise's scholarship money (yay!), and picked up soap on my way to the bureau.

Before feet:

After bathwater:

I don't know what's grosser...how much dirt came off my body or how much DIDN'T. I did some serious scrubbing!

Fortunately I am a very good Girl Scout and left no trail. If you are the next in the bathroom in the med unit, you will find it clean as can be (with a nice bar of soap for you to use if you'd like as well).

Hello hello! I have myself an internet key plugged into my laptop USB style, and am sitting in the office of the administration building at my school, hoping to be inspired to write a blog entry worth reading. I had a busy morning this morning, and grabbed a sachet (little plastic bag) of baobab fruit juice ("twega" with a super nasally "twe" is how you say it in Moore...I'm not sure how it's actually spelled) and a fish sandwich (super garlicy and oily fish paste spread into a skinny piece of village bread) from some lady street vendors on my way from the high school to my school where I am now. Figured if I had some food in my belly I could come here, get my work done, and then just blah blah blah on the internet 'til the time for my next obligation.

A month has passed since last I've written, and what a full month it's been. To save you all the suspense, I am feeling a lot better about being here than I was before my super-necessary vacation. I think that a break from all of the ridiculous little bits of ...stuff... that I have to put up with every day did my psyche good.

I had a blast spending the days leading up to Christmas and Christmas itself with Thomas and his brother Justin who had come to visit. Christmas in Lioudougou was great...lots of giving candy to kids (very Halloween-like) and me running around like a madwoman making pancakes for everyone and giving them out (pancakes were a hit when I shared 'em a while ago, and they were a hit on Christmas too...not without stress, though. Holidays). The day AFTER Christmas is actually the big party day for the folks of my region here, whereupon people sing and dance from dusk 'til dawn. I was really anticipating to that...I'd been a part of it last year when I lived up in the castle and was looking forward to being there now that I actually live here and know the ladies and gents and teenagers and kids. Unfortunately, my neighbors slightly less than one year old baby died that morning, out of the blue suddenly. Ridiculously terrible, right? No carefree party for our neighborhood this year. Instead, Thomas and Justin and I went over to my friend Claudia's courtyard where we passed the time chatting with her kids and the various young guests that were there while Claudia sat by laughing at particularly funny things or making comments about the chatter she heard. I think that it was nice for her to have a full yard that night...her husband passed away very very recently (did I write about that?) so this Christmas was not, I imagine, the most joyous for her.

I have a deep and true familial love for Claudia and her seven children. I passed along some Christmas presents from my parents to her just the other day. Aren't my mom and dad great, sending over Christmas presents for the family that has been so kind as to adopt me over here in little Lioudougou?

Vacation in Togo was...well, it was quite the adventure getting down there, that's for sure, but it was nice and relaxing after we finally arrived. It relaxed and refreshed me so that I am now able to better face my days. Which is good, because there are a lot of them left here and they are relatively full.

Remember that thing I said about wanting to help out Sister Elisabeth with her classes when she is unable to be there? Well, it's happening! Felicitations to me. I've led her two Tuesday classes twice so far. The first time the girls drew pictures of where they wanted to be in 6 months and in 10 years, and then we talked about short term and long term goals and how to decide upon/plan for them. The week after that we talked about peer pressure and strategies for resisting it, and they role played some situations, including one that had to do with SEX which they were pretty much all really excited to talk about. I feel like I've built a good little foundation and can go in a few different directions with them now...we can talk about decision making and weighing the pros and cons of our choices, figuring out personal values, strategies for communicating our feelings and opinions, sex and all sorts of stuff that goes along with that.

I'm a GEE volunteer! Who knew?

Another thing I've got going on, as always, is computer class. My 5eme girls are currently working on typing personal letters to the people of their choice, and a great number of them are writing to students at my old middle school in the States. Typing skills, English skills, describing yourself skills, asking questions skills, learning that there are other people in the world skills...so many skills. A ridiculous amount of planning, but lots of skills.

Lots and lots of time goes into planning my computer classes. It almost seems like it would be less work if I had class more often because things could carry over easier. I'm in the midst of figuring out when and how to give my 6eme and mixed class kids their first test, and how to grade this letter thing that I'm doing with 5eme. There are also of course the inherent difficulties of being a teacher. ...and the added lovely difficulties of being a teacher here, where critical thinking is not high on the priority list. Unfortunately for my students, I am not going to immediately explain to them how to do something that they've already done before and could figure out if they took a minute to think about it. Unfortunately for me, I get asked how to do things that they've already done before and could figure out if they took a minute to think about it ALL THE TIME.

Teaching here will perhaps be a good thing to have done. It is not always my favorite thing to be doing.

Which leads me to something else I am doing, at least for today. Thomas is in the big ol' capital for a IT Committee meeting this weekend, and I am filling in for him in his two English classes substitute teacher style (a system that, surprising or not, does not exist in Burkina). So I went in this morning and taught the little boogers the days of the week and the months of the year, and harassed them a bunch by making them "stand up," "jump," "turn around," "sing," "sit down," "be quiet" every so often. It was pretty fun, and I've got another of his classes in about an hour. Mostly I'm just happy to help out someone who's always helping me out.

I am continuing to help out with baby weighings and vaccinations Mondays and Fridays at the CSPS (health center), though I doubt anything further will come out of my relationship with the place. It's starting to get too late for new big projects to take place, and no real internal push is happening among the staff there. So that's fine. Aside from the sexual harassment and continuous annoying questions I have to endure from the staff, it's not so bad. I actually have things to do when I'm there and so if I can suffer through the initial arrival part of the morning it ends up working out alright. Except for sometimes. The absolute and total lack of respect that certain CSPS men show for the mothers who sit waiting for their babies to be vaccinated drives me to the edge of my patience. And it's treated like a joke. And the women take it because here there isn't the expectation that your doctors should respect you, should explain things to you, should pay attention to your individual needs. The women come, they sit, they wait for EVER sometimes, and then they are hurried through like animals and told brusquely to go home. I take every opportunity I can to tell them what good mothers they are for bringing their children in, I agree that they have been waiting a long time when one of them tentatively mentions it, I make goofy faces at their babies, I clarify respectfully when they have maybe come in too soon for a certain vaccination and are told without explanation to come back next week.

Some of the CSPS people are really good. They work with the resources they have, and they do their job the best they can. Sometimes though...we seem to forget that the essence of being a "civil servant" is doing a job that is FOR the people. Not just for you.

Ha...so that's that. Still going on with my test typing and proctoring, and I stop in during homework hours from time to time. My Thursday study group has been slow to start back up, but will get rolling again. My cuisinaire girls and I still meet at least once a week to work on writing and reading skills. ...and one of them came back! She had been taken away again by her father, and I don't know where she went or why or how she came back but she's back, and because I feel secure in my place here and comfortable stepping over lines that I tried not to cross initially, I'm gonna ask her all about it. ...and what else. Extra study/typing time for my computer class kids who are struggling will happen soon, next weekend I think. I'm going into Ouaga to take out the money that has been donated to Denise's scholarship fund this weekend (yay!). While I'm there, my boyfriend (yeah I said it) and I are gonna go out on a little date to celebrate the anniversary of one of our several relationship milestones (you can take the girl out of the gay but you can't take the gay out of the girl).

So yes...life's ok. It's not always full of things I necessarily want to be doing, but it's good to have things to do. I'm happy to be at a point where I am thinking about what I will be doing next. I'll save speculations and such of that nature for another day.

I am So I will, after all, have classes tomorrow. Planned out ones with notes and activities and such. Way to go, Miss Responsibility.

As it turns out, it makes more sense to go do Ouaga errands on Thursday rather than tomorrow. My travel partner will have just returned from an 80k round trip bike ride and might like a day to relax...and if I CAN teach my classes, I should.

Soo...I will.

These next few days are weirdly packed...PCV visits, shopping and Christmas prep, classes, Christmas cooking, Ouaga money retrieval, Christmas...making sure I don't miss any of the holiday throwdown that'll be going on.

Now I must go to the post and then brace myself for the walk home, whereupon I will have to get gallons and gallons of water because I am out.

...& then I will sleep like a baby with my new soft warm blanket. Mmm winter.

(From 15 November 2010)

I am sitting in the salle d’informatique with my mixed class of new students, having given them a free day since we had a test last week. After my first four classes this morning I’m feeling kind of lame just sitting here not guiding…the morning kids demanded a lot more attention and help. These guys (gals) (whatever) are content to practice typing or play spider solitaire and they have a combination of smarts, experience, and maturity to be able to figure things out on their own a little more than the younguns do. Also, all of the 5eme students who are normally in the class are not here today because they are calculating grates with their head teacher, so I am left with just seven students.

Tiny!

Sitting here not doing anything teacher-like makes me sort of rethink my initial plan to not have class next week. The 22nd is the last day of classes…and mayhaps one of my only chances to get to Ouaga to sort out some money stuff before going on my all-important vacation at the end of the month. Why introduce brand new stuff the final class before vacation, I asked myself. Isn’t everybody ready to just go home? I figured I just wouldn’t have class, that way kids could get ready to go home and I could go into the big town and run my errands.

Man, that looks kind of bad when written out, especially when you consider that I’m only with these kids for an hour a week each. This is something I would never get away with as a teacher in the States but it is perfectly logical thinking here in Burkina. Obviously the last class means that classes are already over by then. Duh.

But I’ve got some plans for the next trimester, ones that I’m actually going to make work instead of just thinking and talking about. I’ve decided that I want all of my students to have a passing grade in my class. This trimester, about 10 out of about 125 didn’t. This is not abnormal—if anything, it’s an abnormally low number of non-passing kids—and usually students are just expected to work harder and bring their grades up. But I’m going to have an extra class for the students who did not receive passing grades this trimester…not sure yet if I’ll make it mandatory or not. I’m also going to have extra sessions after the first devoir (test) I give to help the students who did not score well on it. I’ll also continue offering review/practice sessions before the devoirs. YOU WILL SUCCEED.

I’ve got another idea, something that I’ve tossed around my own head several times but haven’t really aggressively pursued. Sister Elisabeth has a civics course with each of the four classes, one that often turns into an hour of free time when she is off doing other things (as she is wont to do). I would like to create some discussion topics and goal-building, future-thinking, health-focusing activities to have in my back pocket so I can fill in for her some times when she’s not going to be there. If she gets on board with this idea, it could potentially work out fabulously. She’s not gonna be in class, she gives me a holler, the girls know I’m coming in to lead some stuff with them and then boom, an hour’s passed and life has become a wee bit more empowered.

That’s right. I’m a Girls Education and Empowerment volunteer. That means more than just letting sassy-mouthed Marguerite borrow my bike. Anyone out there want to hold me accountable?

(I just turned around to check on my girls…one of them has written “Bonne Année Miss Molly, I Love You!” in pretty colors in Paint.)

Well, I suppose I should wrap this up and dismiss this class for purely selfish reasons that include wanting to go into town to meet Thomas and his brother for whatever it is we’re going to have. Dinner? Drinks? Polite conversation? Whatever it is I’m looking forward to it because I have yet to meet Thomas’s lil bro and it’ll be, to use one of the most commonly used and drastically oversimplified adjectives in Burkinabè French... intéressant.

I am frustrated by everything.

...for the sake of an optimistic report on my life and not just a one line complaint, I will go ahead and list a few things that rarely upset me. But I will only do this if you take for a given the first statement of this entry, that I am frustrated by everything.

Some things that rarely frustrate me:

Certain kids in my quartier, such as Constantine and Edwige

...umm....

hm...

Being offered yogurt sometimes when I'm up by the nun house

ummmmm....

Ok I really can't think of anything else at the moment, I'll get back to you later.

Today has been a productive, good day.

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure. The lush green field of yestermonth is becoming bare again!

Goats frolicking on headbutting each other off of my wall.Dishes drying in the sun.

Thanksgiving feast!Taking on the key lime pie....it got the best of me.

Housecleaning day. Like the rugby batik on the wall?Dirty, happy sandwich break on a trip to Rambo.Centre ville Kongoussi, marché to the right. Prisca and Rose while Rose studies. My little sisters of my village whom I love. C'est fini! Now, as per usual, I will leave the internet café to put some food in my belly. I'm thinking ragu de pomme de terre or frites and salade. With a big ol' Castle to drink.

(27th November)

The regional director of Peace Corps Africa visited my site; while we were talking about my experiences, he sincerely apologized for my service having been used as an experiment. (…Leslie and Rachel, no doubt the same sentiments apply.) A very appropriate, much appreciated apology, I think.

Because, you know, I’m tired. There are a lot of things about being an étranger for two years as you’re putting all of your energy into living, working, understanding and being a good neighbor that are exhausting. I’m doing so well at living, working, being in Lioudougou…think of how much progress I’d have made by now if I had been there from the beginning. I’ve thought many times, before moving down there and since, that this year in many ways will be a first year all over again, and that it might be worth it to stay a third so that I’ll have two in my new community, in the right place.

But this isn’t my first year, and I’m tired.

And I wouldn’t want to just do the little things I’ve been finding to do all over again next year. I’d want someone to work with to actually do things that are wanted and needed, and if I don’t find someone or something, I don’t think I’m going to want to stick around for another twelve months in the hope that I do. I think I’m ready for some professional growth, something challenging in a way that differs from the sort of hurry up and wait, cast your net wide, drop hints all over the place that you’d like to help out with things without ever actually doing anything, put up with sexual harassment challenges that so permeate life for volunteers here. I could GEE the heck out of somewhere. When I got my invitation in the mail, I would have sworn that this program was designed for me. What did I do in the five years before the Peace Corps that wasn’t Girls’ Education and Empowerment? As it turns out, I was put somewhere where, frankly, my presence wasn’t requested. I was plopped into a place where there wasn’t any community knowledge of or support of my program and told by my half of the equation (i.e., the Peace Corps, and not Kongoussi / Lioudougou), “Ok, go be a GEE volunteer now. Figure it out.”

But what is the role of the outsider in development? What is my role here? I have not ever been down with forcing my ideas on how things should work here, and why should I be? I’m a 24 year old girl, really. No more than a few months’ experience at any one time doing any sort of important work. A (very interesting and appropriate, but) highly theoretical degree (not that the degree itself is theoretical…or so I’ve been assured) from a liberal arts school doesn’t really stand on its own; what it’s done is lead me to this, my first real work slash life experience where I am forced to apply some of the thinking I’ve done. And I think that’s going to end up being a lot of what I get out of this.

If you divorce the Peace Corps from the Peace Corps, it’s pretty alright. I like my town, I like my community, I like living here. I’m figuring out things I can do to help. These days I’m conscious of the kind of citizen I am in my town, inspired by the insights of a PCV neighbor (neighbor!) of mine. Having the chance to live next door to people on the other side of the world who you would otherwise not have the chance to know is something truly amazing. But connecting back to the bureau is stressing me out recently, and I think this is due in large part to the fact that I feel like a nebulous volunteer, someone without a real program for whom none of the objectives and official bureau support has ever really applied. I’ve searched for ways to be involved and things that I could do to help my neighbors and my community, but not necessarily alongside anyone or towards any specific goals. The things that I’ve found to do that are wanted and asked for are things that I’ve had to make up as I go along. Not the way I wanted to do this, really, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

The Peace Corps is a good program for young idealists who are in-tuned enough to know that idealism isn’t enough, who want an important and fulfilling niche in the world but who don’t yet have the experience to find it. I wonder if, at the end of my two years here, I’ll have gotten all that I can get out of being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso. Maybe I’ll be ready to move on, to try another way of living somewhere, to put more tools in my belt.

It’s amazing how much—and how little—can happen in a span of nine months…so who knows.

I read a very good book recently, The Blue Sweater by Jacquiline Novogratz, that’s allowed me to start to articulate a lot of the feelings that I’m having about my time here, and what it means to be effective, and what I want to do with my life. She showed up for her first job in Africa pretty unprepared and learned a lot of important lessons sort of at the expense of herself…not really a bad thing in the long term, but not such a fun feeling in the present. She relates a lot of the advice and guidance she was given along her way, and a lot of it is the sort of advice and guidance I’m starting to seek. After living and working in Africa for a while, deciding what to do next and not being completely ready to leave (even though she’s exhausted by the contradictions and difficulties of pretty much every day of her life), she’s told by someone insightful and smart that being connected to your own home, your own community or culture, can help you in connecting to the wider world. …and I can see that, after over a year of living in Burkina. No matter how much effort and energy I put into living and integrating into my village here, it will never be my home. I can navigate through the culture here (exceptionally well, on a good day), but it isn’t my culture and it’s never 100 percent comfortable. And these are all things to accept if living and working in different parts of the world is what you want to do.

I feel stuck somewhere, in my brain, and I want to break through to some new degree of understanding about myself and about the world that I know is there on the other side. It’s like a heavy fog is obscuring something, and I’ve made progress towards it with books, with discussions, with living here…but nothing’s been quite enough.

I wrote a very thougtful post to post...but left it on my USB key at home.

So, this post isn't really about anything.

I need a vacation and I'm taking one the week after Christmas. None of my fantasy locations (Belgium, Ireland, Manchester CT) are gonna work out so it looks like I'll be sitting on a beach in Togo for a week. The most necessary week ever.

After I am done with the internet I am going to get something breakfast-like in town with my lovely sitemate. Maybe an omlette. Not sure what else I'll be doing today, since my Tuesdays are not really full of solid plans. Just some interaction, I guess. Maybe I'll plan out my end of the trimester (division of school year trimester, not pregnancy trimester) test that I'm going to give my computer classes. It's going to be a hands on test, a typing related thing...something so obvious in America perhaps but pretty much unheard of here, unfaesable usually but at my school it's beyond feasable so it's happening. It does mean a lot more effort on my part, but hey...that's what I'm here for.

To put in lots of effort for everything all of the time.

Did I mention I'm taking a vacation?

Today is the fête de Sainte Elisabeth, and since a person with pretty much that exact same name lives and works at the foyer here, a big ol’ party is going to take place. I was a little late to my evening class with all of my new students because my counterpart wanted to go over the corrections he made on my action plan with me; since this evening class of mine is a ridiculous thing unlike any other class I could possibly have in Burkina, I gave them the option of just playing around on the computers for a little while and then leaving so they could get ready for tonight. Instead of class today, we’re going to have a make-up class next Saturday. So here I am in my salle d’informatique, typing this note to you all while twelve girls play spider solitaire or hearts or type things with Bloc-Notes and Microsoft Word. The rest of them have gone to shower and such.

Today was a pretty good day. I had successful classes this morning and was tired when I got home around eleven, but not in a horribly tired kind of way. I took a relatively delicious nap and then stopped by my friend Claudia’s courtyard to visit. Her and Susan and Irène and Julianne were getting ready to go up to the foyer to say hello to Sister Elisabeth and wish her a good fête, so I hung out for a bit and then accompanied them up. I’m going to stay here for the mass at 6pm and then hang out for the party, which I remember—but not exactly—from last year. Funny how time passes.

So I just looked over to my left to discover one of my students regarding my computer screen and typing exactly what I’m typing in Bloc-Notes. Pretty cute. She moved computers a few minutes ago to sit next to me and I didn’t think anything of it, but I just noticed out of the corner of my eye that she keeps looking my way.

I’m kind of busy these days…I try to prepare really well for my classes and I’m getting a little bit more involved with the health center in my sector.

I’m also LOVING SLEEP. I love bedtime…who who knows me would have ever thought that would ever be true?

I planned for my Wednesday classes. I even printed things out for them in the bureau.

I typed up and printed out an action plan that I've been on the edge of completing for quite some time.

I went to SIAO, the largest commercial arts exposition in Africa that goes down in Ouagadougou every two years. Didn't buy any goods but had a great time wandering around looking at stuff, enjoying the fair-like environment, the people, the food.

I saw Kait and had a great time at her Holiday Throwdown slash Nasara Bye Bye party, at which I also ate an explosively delicious array of foods ranging from potato pancakes with homemade apple sauce to an I-kid-you-not real turkey and spinach salad with cranberries and almods as well as riz gras and scalloped potatos and chocolate mouse and cheesecake brownies...all of you kids worrying about what a skinny minnie you think I've become, fear not! Thousands upon thousands of calories have just been consumed. Forget Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Merlinpeen, Tabaski...that there's some Real American Holiday Tradition.

(It's so nice to see my Peace Corps Volunteer friends but it's not something that happens a lot. I tend to stay in Kongoussi, it's months between contacts with most other volunteers that I know here. And now there are so many new volunteers that I don't really know and that I probably won't get to know very well because I don't come into Ouaga that often and there really isn't a whole lot of Peace Corps representation up where I am. The way it goes.)

Had a pretty good weekend and am excited to go back up to where I live for the Mossi partying that's going to be going down Monday night through 'til Wednesday. Didn't really get this in my life last year, living up in the castle as I did. Animal sacrifices, millet beer, sesame sauce, rice, chicken, dancing, fancy clothes. Can't miss that. I'm going to become an honorary member of Claudia's family (like I am) and help them out with all of their preparation instead of trying to figure out what sort of American element to add on my own. That'll come more towards Christmas, since I've been here and done that already and have a decent idea of what sort of stuff I can contribute that'll be appreciated.

Now...time for one more steak sandwich and then I'm hittin' the road STAF bus style.

It's funny, having personal and serious and heartfelt phone conersations with children gathered around to watch you. You don't understand what I'm saying, do ya kids?

Heartfelt. My heart is feeling lots of things these days.

Our Secondary Education director passed away this week. He was a wonderful man. He was so incredibly integral in getting the ball moving on my move out of the castle and down to my new neighborhood. Without him I might still be up there. And he wasn't even my director. Thoughtful, personable, helpful. Only 40 years old. Rest in peace, Seb.

Sometimes classes go well, and sometimes they don’t.

But I really don’t stress about it.

Because I’m confident of my place at the school and I’m confident in my ability to guide children and teenagers and I am confident in the importance of not only what I am doing but more importantly the methods with which I am doing it. And whether or not they deserve it I have confidence in my girls’ abilities to accept that some days are harder than others and that things don’t always go well and that it’s not the end of the world.

Part of that comes from being in Burkina Faso, where part of the general attitude that one has is that some days, if not most, ARE hard, and things don’t always go well and often don’t go as planned and it never really is the end of the world. So I’ve adopted this attitude concerning many things through the course of my being here, and I assume that the girls, through the courses of their being here, have it going on, too.

I also play by the innocent until proven guilty playbook, assuming that these older-kids/young-adults will be reasonable and respectful and leaving the burden of upholding this trust to them.

One of the most impressionable moments I had as the assistant director of my summer camp the year before coming out to Burkina was being called in to help handle a unit-wide dispute. Girls being disrespectful, making each other cry, not listening to their exasperated counselors…not a fun way for anyone to spend a week in the woods.

I came in one afternoon after lunch—silly Molly, who’d been a counselor they’d hoped to have in their units for as long as any of them had been coming to camp, whose wacky tacky day apparel couldn’t possibly be wackier, who sings all sorts of camp songs with true conviction and dances at all-camps and plays games at the dinner table and reads bedtime stories and is just so well-loved by everyone. I sat down on a picnic table incredibly seriously, and I looked all twenty of those girls in the eyes and told them that I was not happy with them. Quiet. I told them I was hurt by the hurtful things that they were doing to each other, that I was disappointed in them, and that I did not want to ever have to come into their unit and speak with them like this again. …and they were silent. We’re being so bad that Molly’s mad at us? Shame. And they listened as their counselors took back the reins and helped them come up with plans for solving their disputes.

I didn’t need to do much. I didn’t need to struggle over power. My authority was there when I needed to use it, and was a pretty powerful weapon because I didn’t often wield it.

Teaching at my boarding school in Burkina is not the same as working at my summer camp in the woods of New England, but I find myself assuming the same sort of tactic here. The kids like me and I go with it, and I make them laugh and say silly things and have fun with them during class. And I am the adult in charge, but I don’t feel the need to have to state this directly unless the need arises.

It’s more fun when you’re smiling, dancing and singing along…especially when you get to do it up front.

“Tantie” is what the cuisinaire girls often call me. Tantie, a word most normally used by young children to refer to adult women, often generically at the insistence of their parents (As in, “Shake hands with Tantie,” to the wide-eyed, frightened one-year-old gawking at the scary colorless ghost person hovering above them. Me.) It also a word to describe large women, the sort that look like they could hit diva-esque notes. (As in, “I could barely breathe on that three hour bush taxi ride to Ouahigouya, squished in back between two tanties.”) It also serves as a kind of in-between word in my world up here on the boarding school castle, when students and younger girls want to display respect to women who are not necessarily in strict authority positions, such as the teachers and the nuns are. A very large number of the twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-year-old students call the cuisinaire girls (many of whom are sixteen-year-olds themselves) Tantie. A casual, familiar respect. A non-familial “auntie”…pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Marie, my cuisinaire friend who is twenty-two, calls me Tantie, always with a smile twinkling in her wide round eyes. She and the newest addition to the cuisinaire bunch (so recent I’m not even sure of her name yet) had run into me by the gate this evening when I was leaving my final class. It was dark; it had rained for almost an hour an hour before. My silly sandal had broken…the bit that goes between your big toe and all the others (a feeling I have not always been willing to tolerate) had popped out. For the second time. The other one had broken once, too. Both sides had been repaired with some hardcore needle and thread sewn through the plastic. The current broken shoe had also once been repaired through an amateur attempt at melting and welding done by yours truly in a stunning display of fire safety negligence. Every attempt at pushing it back in this time for my rocky walk down the hill and across the muddy path that cuts through the millet field and snakes behind my quartier to my house was thwarted. Rah. So I took off my shoes and was prepared to walk pied nu, like all of the children of this country are accustomed to doing.

But Marie and friend caught me standing on the wet rocks near the gate with sandals in hand. “Tantie! What are you doing? Your feet will hurt! There’s too much mud! Take my shoes! I have another pair. Tomorrow you can give them back to me.” And she bent down to remove her oft-repaired pair of sandals and hand them to me as we stood on the rocky ground. She gave me the shoes off her feet.

How many people would do that?

Regarding the rough time I’ve been having as of late…my daddio suggested (jokingly?) that maybe me washing my hair would help wash some of the blah away. So I figured, what the heck…filled my bucket up extra full the other day and brought some shampoo sheets (weird travel things found at the Transit House and my only current source of hair wash) into my latrine to scrub down nice and thorough-like. And voilà! All better.

Well, it hasn’t been that easy…but things are looking up.

I’ve been having a rough little while lately. Pretty stressed out, unable always to immediately find good ways to calm down or chill out before getting overwhelmed, though I have been trying. Things have been looking up the past couple of days, fortunately…there’s a light at the end of this particular tunnel, perhaps. Today in fact was quite busy and good. I shall describe it to you.

After celebrating a particularly wonderful Sandwich Day yesterday (which consisted of, among other things, eating three delicious sandwiches as well as a not-terrible bar of chocolate, having a delicious and winding conversation about life and love and plans and ideas, and watching several episodes of 30 Rock), I awoke bright and early for a yummy cup of creamy coffee (instant) and a short bike ride through town (necessary). The air had lingering wisps of nighttime cool in it still, and the town was full of activity as many school aged children on bikes and à pied were convening at the various primary schools, collèges and lycées for (what people say is) the first day of classes (but what really amounts to students showing up to empty rooms and waiting around for a while before going home for the day; rinse and repeat for at least a week).

At the homestead I took a bucket bath to rinse some of the grime off of my bod, then put on clean clothes and went up to my school where I got my revised computer class/exam proctoring schedule for the year. All my classes (5 hours, woop) are on Wednesdays, and I am only scheduled to proctor exams on Monday afternoons. What will I be doing the rest of the time? Well let me tell you.

I’m helping out with baby weighing/vaccinations in my sector’s CSPS (health center) on Monday and Friday mornings. The head of the health center is on board with reaching out to local schools to see what kind of health stuff they could use help with, so after school kicks into some real working gear I’m going to be a little bit aggressive with that. For the moment, I show up around 7:30 or 8:00am and help to hang babies on a scale by putting them in a sort of little thin canvas bag with leg holes (adorable) and drop little drops of polio into their mouths (oral vaccination…bye bye polio!). I then hang around and chat with the nurses or sit in on any formations that are going on. I usually put up with some level of harassment and commentary about me not having a husband, and how I should really have a baby, and wouldn’t I like to go home with a baby as a souvenir of my time in Burkina?, and about how I should cook lunch for all of them because I’m a woman and they’re men, and ha ha ha. But I enjoy my time there for the most part (and often have no trouble figuring out when it’s time for me to leave).

Today several people from my quartier were at the CSPS sick with various things—malaria for two, a wild bumpy rash sore thing for one lil’ child—so I visited for a while as well, which I always think must really tire out the sick folks being visited who sit up with great effort from where they were laying on a mat on the ground to shake hands and exchange greetings, but that’s just the way it goes.

One of the patients I visited was the son of a woman who has proclaimed herself to be my adopted mother (actually, her children claimed it for her). This is a family full of wonderful people—from oldest son to youngest daughter, I enjoy being in the company of each, and often spend my evenings in their courtyard talking about the day and preparing tô.

At around 10:30 I headed home where I immediately set to work washing dishes that I had left sitting in my dish basin for way too long. Bleach was involved. After this, riding high on a wave of productivity, I grabbed my bike and two bidons and headed across my little village to get water from the faucet by the boutique. Obnoxious “helpful” comments and suggestions from a teenage girl along the way about where I should be getting my water and how I should be transporting it didn’t do any permanent damage to my cheery outlook on life as I strapped my faucet- (not well-) filled containers to my bike and walked (not rode, as if in this skirt yeah right brat) it home to do laundry.

Laundry laundry laundry in the shade created on my terrace by my house (no hangar yet), then hung up to dry. Lunch came next, spaghetti and cream sauce (onions, garlic, tomato, milk, vache qui rit, flour, water, spicy peppers) and water with lime, sweated off ten pounds while making/eating that. Rest time. Sprawled out on a pagne on a mat on my floor to close my eyes, reopening them every time children’s voices came in through my door to ask me for water. Yeessssssssssss, I will keep you hydrated. Here you go, now go away I am sleeping. …but I didn’t sleep, just read a bit of book and was startled into complete consciousness by gentle rolls of thunder which I thought might translate into rain but didn’t, anyhow it got me going with some stuff-packing, my laptop and notebook and journal into my backpack to bring up to my school to work a little, write a little, and suggest to my directrice that I come in for study hours tonight to discuss how one studies with the newest class of little angels.

So that’s where I am now, sitting in the teacher’s room of my school, business day done, notes for my evening’s discussion on study skills jotted down in my notebook by my side. I have to plan another class for Wednesday but I’ll do that either later tonight or tomorrow. Right now I’m going to go talk to my cuisinaire ladies to give them an update on our cours de soir (another thing I will be doing this year). I think we’ll meet twice a week, probably Tuesday, and Thursday evenings. On Monday evenings, I’ve been coming up to the school to sit with the students during their study hours. I gave a little pep talk/presentation on study methods to the youngest class the other evening during this time. Add to my schedule the fact that I’ll be typing exams secretary-style to help out from time to time, like last year.

All the stuff I’ve got penciled in weekly along with the stuff that’ll come up here and there feels really good when seen on paper. Here’s to a busy, happy year.

A Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho named Thomas Maresco was killed on the third of September. He died as a result of a gunshot wound; the situation is being investigated. He was 24 years old. He is the third Peace Corps Volunteer to die since I accepted my invitation to serve almost three years ago.

I often think about Peace Corps service just becoming normal life after a while, and in a lot of ways it does. Novelty wears off and becomes routine. You wake up and do various things before eventually getting back in bed to start over the next day, just like anywhere else. But there are elements of risk present in our lives here, no matter where here may be. We get in accidents because we are adventurous by nature (why else would we have decided to turn down that desk job and move overseas?) …and because we live in countries with, among other things, no seat belts, speed limits, or regulations about nighttime headlight use. We get targeted because we are foreigners and that means, as much as we often pretend otherwise, that even if the money isn’t in our purse at the moment it’s worth a shot to take it anyway because we’ve got it somewhere. We get sick because it’s 100 degrees in our houses and after a morning of working in a field or a health center or a school dehydration can rob you of energy quicker than you realize, or the mosquitoes don’t care that you forgot to take your malaria pill one time a week ago, or you couldn’t in good faith refuse whatever seemingly innocuous food was offered to you by your sweet and caring neighbor earlier in the day.

One of the most important reasons I decided to join the Peace Corps was to represent my country. I wanted to be a positive example of an American for the world to see, especially during a time when our global reputation could use a little touching up. I wanted to spend two years somewhere and leave in my trail people who would say Ahh, America is made up of some pretty great people. There are days when I lead nothing, teach nothing, develop nothing, do nothing except be a good neighbor and share stories with friends and help cut vegetables and just be a good person.

Life is a fragile thing, and tragic accidents rob people of it everywhere in the world. It’s incredibly sad that the world has lost a smart, talented, interesting, thoughtful, creative, giving soul in Tom…I never met him and probably never would have, but I bet my living allowance that I described him accurately, because these are things I’ve found from my experience that all American Peace Corps Volunteers are.

Today is the last day. The very last day that I can say that I am not, have never been a teacher. Because tomorrow I will be a teacher. I will be standing up in front of a classroom filled with girls, professing knowledge in what I hope is an interesting and creative (but not too ostricizingly and weridly-creative) way. I am prepared but not too prepared. I have a special packet of delicious instant coffee for the morning. Excellent.

This is a picture of a future tree, one of at least five that are now growing in my courtyard. Look out, deforestation!!

It's nice to see a new place. It's been becoming very easy for me to get stuck in my own head lately. The one year mark has come and gone and I've been thinking so much about the past (reflecting on times before Peace Corps, living the past a little too much) and about the future (totally unsure of where I'll be, what I'll be doing, who I'll be with a year from now) that I've sort of come out of the present. I've always known I was going to go to college after high school, and I figured out pretty quickly that I was going to join the Peace Corps after that...I may have even known that in high school as well. So, next up...a big mysterious turn in the road. I guess they all look big and unique and mysterious from this vantage point though. And I do have a bit of a goldfish memory at times...thinking that this thing or this event is huge and new when maybe it's not. Shock and surprise. There are a lot of challenges up ahead, a lot I've got going on. What's next is what's here, what's now.

But it was nice to see a new place and old familiar people. To maybe talk a little too much about what's on my mind and in my heart with one friend, to put into words why speaking Mooré is so important with another friend, to commiserate about having to deal with tiring and annoying comments and suggestions from men on the street with another one.

Arrive back in Ouaga and see my town's name on a bus and smile because I really like it there.

Next Tuesday is my first day as a teacher. Better get prepared...but I don't really know if anything but my first day will prepare me. Only have a few hours of classes each week. I hope I enjoy them. I think that I will.

Gotta find a way to live more calmly, take the pressure off. I'm feeling so un-Burkinabè. Worried, rushed, no time, stressed out that I'm not doing things right, that if I'm somewhere I should be somewhere else. Gotta chill. Just be. I need to find some ways to do that.

Being here can be hard in ways that are kind of unexpected. And when you sit back and think about them, you realize that it's just life, life is what can be hard in ways that are unexpected.

I decided to come down to Bobo Dioulasso for a couple of days. A fellow volunteer's 30th birthday was the excuse...I've never been down here before and don't have a lot going on since school's start is a weekish away.

It's a nice town city. I like the feel.

I just wanted to say hi.

Dear Mom and Dad,

Do you recognize this place pictured below?

It is the path leading from my school down into the village (where I now live). We took this path on our way to visit Ono. Look at all that green! This has been a good, rainy year for the folks of Burkina Faso. All signs point to the rain continuing through the end of this month, which will be good news for crops as well as for weather. I love me some fresh air! And if you were to follow that path and turn right and push your way through some close-growing millet you would soon get to my new house! This is part of my new house, latrine/douche area over to the right there. Three rooms, lots o' space for little me. Let's go in, why dont we? Ah, but upon getting to the doorway, let's look out into my courtyard!

If you look closely you can see a kid in green (camoflauge) getting water from the well. My walls are not very high at the moment!

...and to the right, the entrance to my courtyard, temporary clothesline up above, a little place where I might eventually compost some stuff, the tree that currently provides me with daytime shade... And inside my house?

I should be embarassed that this huge mess of a room is on the internet for all to see, but I took these pictures right as I was heading out to the internet and...it's really not that bad! Got my bed down there, bookshelf, notorious chairs, scattered things...

...and this is where I cook. On the other side of this room is where I keep my get-myself-clean stuff and my water and things. But yes. Voilà chez moi. I must get off the internet and bike back there right now. Bye!

Today, for the very first time ever, I French braided my hair into pigtails. Hair, it turns out, can actually start to get long when you stop cutting it.

I've tried to do this before, quite recently actually, but it hasn't been altogether successful.

This task was made interesting by the fact that I haven't washed my hair in quite some time. Those of you who know me might not be too surprised to discover that I decided a while ago to stop washing my hair just for fun. Just because I thought I might like how it feels and looks. Kind of chunky without all of the social and physical aspects of dreadlocks. Kind of cartoon character hair is how I imagined it.

Well, deciding not to wash your hair for an undefined period of time is one thing when you live in a house with running water that flows like wine and from a particularly useful thing called a shower head, but when you live in a house slightly more removed from this luxury the choice aspect of the decision starts to come from a slightly different angle. The whole process included, it takes me about an hour to get ten and a half gallons of water. I take two 20-liter plastic bidons halfway across my quartier to a faucet where I pay a teeny bit per jug to fill 'em up before attaching them to my bike and walking them back to my home. There is a much closer source of water to my house, a well about ten feet from my courtyard that is literally a hundred feet deep with a cement barrier around it that only goes up to just below my knees. Not only is it incredibly difficult to pull buckets of water up from such a profound depth, it is also incredibly slippery and dangerous near this well. I help the ladies with their buckets from time to time in order to get badass cred, but my nun friend pretty much told that if I didn't fall in and die she'd come down and kill me if she found out I was getting my water from there.

Imagine a large jolly lady in a habit laughing after saying this. My nun friend has an interesting way of getting her points across and a fun sense of humor.

So yes...it takes a lot more effort to get water, and it would currently take a lot more water than normal to really wash my hair, so the choice becomes pretty easy nowadays when I fill up my bath bucket and take it to my little shower space outside.

Someday I'll wash my hair again.

I am incredibly happy in my new house, my real house, my house in a community with kids and neighbors and Burkinabè. I am incredibly happy with my flashlight and my dust and my little moringa tree seeds planted in my courtyard. I am so happy to wander over to Claudia's house at night and eat tô with her and her family, and sit and chat and look up at the stars until I am too tired to keep my eyes open and must walk through the millet and corn and bean fields to my house to go to sleep. I am very excited about working with the health center in my quartier and with my school up on the hill.

Year two is lookin' good.

House!

Today I moved the large majority of my things into my new house. YES! Still have my kitchen stuff and my bed to go...and I need a way to get and store water (and a finished latrine) before I can actually move there for good.

BUT PROGRESS! Real, sweaty, beautiful progress. Yes folks, it's possible.

More later, when I have a working computer with which to compose blog entries before coming to the post.

I'm going to go out for a little bit now with my new American sitemate and two Japanese volunteers who just moved to my town. We will probably drink a beverage or two and talk about life and stuff and then I will go back to my castle for one final night (I hope) and then life will keep on doing this wild thing it does where it keeps going on like a rollercoaster but usually a pretty good one. Thunderbolt.

A nice thing about having a friend fly over to visit is that it allows you to feel even more connected with your life here. At least this was my very recent experience. Showing someone around, introducing them to people, doing things, doing NEW things even. Sitting back eating yogurt at the round point and realizing that I am comfortable. Having a friend there who knows you and has known you when brings out the part of you that maybe sometimes you feel like you keep hidden a little bit. I felt a little bit more like me, a little less hesitant to let out a ridiculous comment or be a little weird. A little more comfortable hanging out, bringing different friends together because hey, I'm showing my friend around, why don't we all go out and eat chicken tonight? I think it had a lot to do with the timing too. A year is a good amount of time to have been here...there's a bunch to look back on and a bunch to look ahead to.

Midservice conference is a time for reflection and planning, for looking behind and looking ahead...and though I thought I knew exactly how everything was going to go, I've got to say I was plesantly surprised. I have a whole lot of new stuff coming up next year and I'm really looking forward to it. I feel encouraged by the process that the GEE program seems to be making, I am blown away by how good a job my fellow stageaires have been doing with the training of the next group of volunteers (the fruits of which are already being made evident to us who are already in the thick of things), and I thought that the whole day was overall pretty short and sweet and great. I'm running off of a high with all of this...our sessions just ended, and after a group photo that reinforced our collective reputation I am feeling very good to be a part of this bunch of people.

I've been at site on and off since the end of the school year, entertaining visitors and traveling and attending formations and such. It's weird to feel so disconnected, but I'm allowing myself to not worry about it because really there's a whole lot of waiting going on back there chez moi and also I'm doing good and important things. Third Goal is being well taken care of, what with my parents' visit last month and my friend's visit currently. All that being said, Ouaga is a sort of taxing place to be after a while, and even though I'm feeling pretty ok about the Peace Corps part of the Peace Corps, I really do prefer to be back at site.

Not too much to update in terms of the things that I'm actually doing. Bet you've gathered that. Not sure if I mentioned it already, but I'm going to be taking on some real responsibilities at my school next year in the form of TEACHING. Yes. That which we as GEE volunteers have in the past been encouraged not to do, I will be doing.

Here's the thing.

When I applied to join the Peace Corps, I very strongly expressed my aversion to being given a teacher assignment for many reasons. Curricula and the standardization of testing, the pressure of coming up with lesson plans, and just the general formal being a teacher parts of being a teacher were things that I was very much not interested. I did not want to go into a community and be put into a position of authority...I wanted to be a community development agent in the more grassroots sense of the term, working with community members to identify problems and solutions.

Turns out, the school where I was placed had already identified their problem: they needed an IT teacher. They already serched out a solution: request one from the Peace Corps. Along the lines communication got screwy and they ended up with me. Oops! They've been happy to have me and as you can tell from most of my posts I am very happy to have been placed where I was...but I haven't had any official place at the school...they're, all in all, doing pretty well.

When the end of the year teacher meeting was held and my counterpart expressed that he could really, really use help in the computer lab, I decided to speak up. I really like my school. I really like my nuns. I really want to be a legitimate part of the community there. It's been a year...and I can do it. So I will.

So...I am embarking on a learning experience, a growing experience. I'm rising to the challenge that has been presented to me. Good things will come from it...I'll have more cred as a teacher. An actual job to do, to identify with, and to build off of. More opportunities to connect with students, to encourage them to succeed, to teach them important things.

And I will live in a house in a neighborhood.

Soon.

Soon.

Waiting...waiting......

I am so close to being in my new house I can taste it. It's right there...RIGHT THERE! It needs screens on the window and a latrine before I can move in. ...and then after that a slightly higher wall around the (my!) courtyard and a door for said enclosure, a hangar to give me some shade, and a change of lock on the door. My nuns have to negotiate a rent price with the owner (a friend's brother) and then I can move in. Easy, right? That should take no time at all, right?

Neither of those two statements has ever seriously been a thought in my head.

This could take days (it will definitely take days). It could take weeks. It could, but for the sake of my sanity and heart rate I hope to Dieu it does not, take months.

So what do I do in the meantime?

Well...I wait.

I went on a little travel forray at the beginning of the month. That was fun and well timed. It was nice to come back. I like it here. I'll feel a little more relaxed when I have a house.

Ok, I'm pretty single minded these days. I could not fall asleep last night because thoughts of my new house, and what I'll need to get, and how I'll move all my things down there, and how I'll go about establishing routines and getting used to my changed environment and negotiating privacy and shopping...so many things to start living about my new life and I really can't do any of them from up in my castle.

Ok, I have some very important gmail chatting to do, so I will leave this at that. More substantial updates later...once there are substantial updates to give.

My belly is full of three and a half hamburgers from Chez Carlos, there are stage friends of mine all around the transit house watching 30 Rock on Bovard's laptop, and MY PARENTS ARE ARRIVING TOMORROW! Here is a 5:30am photo of me and my excitment!

...and that is all!

A little homesick. The more connected I am with internet, telephones, the easier it is for me to feel homesick. Haven't really felt too homesick too often so far.

Parents are in town and people are visiting parents. I need to get out of Ouaga. I decided to stay an extra day to sleep in and rest up but now I've gotta go. I have to get out of here, go back to Kongoussi. The transit house, while cool, is not necessarily a good thing to have. I have lots of thoughts on this subject but I already shared them extensively with a similarly-minded friend this week and to be honest I'm very tired so I don't want to get into them again.

I'm catching the afternoon bus. I'm going to ride up to my home and get there and settle in. I'm stressing out a little. I have a lot on my mind. A lot happens, there's a lot to think about. Work things, life things, future things, interpersonal relationship things...what is going on?

This is going to be a wild month, this December, different from any month I've had here so far. It already has been with this IST training business, and then school is going to be finished for the trimester and all of the girls are going to go home, and Christmas will come and go, and then I am helping a neighbor volunteer with a mini girls camp, and then New Years Eve which I thought I would come back to Ouaga for but thinking about it I'm not sure, I think I might stay in Kongoussi and party with town friends doing whatever they do. And then January, a whole new year, a year full of months to fill with things and to pass into new months. What am I doing? When will I feel settled? It's a crazy thing, living somewhere for six months and never being in a position where you feel settled and calm.

I have a lot of really good things to say about this week, the conversations I had about my life, the fun I had being with my American friends from stage... but now I just gotta get back so I can start re-settling in. I'm hoping this won't actually be a problem or too much of a difficulty. It'll partially depend on what I make of it. Like everything.

So here I am at the internet in lovely ol' Kongoussi again. It's been a while because in all honesty the internet really stresses me out a little. I had sort of planned to write something wonderful ahead of time so that when I finally eventully went online again you would all be guarenteed a substantial Burkina Faso read; however, things did not work out this way, so what you get is what you get...rambling, probably misspelled thoughts as they come into my head and get tapped onto this heavy keyboard.

Today was quite a different and productive day! I've been spending a lot of my time hanging out chez moi up on the hill with the nuns and the students and the cuisinaires. Little by little I'm forming real relationships, having deep conversations, becoming more comfortable with people who are becoming more comfortable with me. It's nice. I've also chilled out a bit about American time and have recently spent some quality moments visiting and being visited by Peace Corps volunteers near and bike-ably far. TODAY was nose my way into important organizations day. Despite a sudden and obnoxious boogary cold that I blame on a combination of lack of sleep (which itself can be blamed on a combination of things, including one particular dog that I am growing to despise) and a classroom full of coughing and sneezing teenagers for whom I was proctoring an exam, I got up and ready at a reasonable hour and bouged myself into Kongoussi. No, this reasonable hour was not 5h, which I have decided is one of my two favorite hours here (17h, or the other 5:00 being the other), but I think my body was very happy for the extra sleep it got.

Anyhow. I biked into town to pay a visit to the office of my school's APE (Association de Parents des Eleves) president. We chatted for a while about his work travelling to the villages surrounding Kongoussi to do education sensibilizations with families, philosophies of development, lots of good stuff. After a bit he took me over to the Action Sociale bureau, which is a social service agency here in Burkina/Kongoussi. I chatted with a bunch of the people who work there and was extended a very warm and very enthusastic welcome to come by again any time. So I will. There are some good conections that can happen between this org and my school je pense. Then my APE President friend and I went to visit a friend of his nearby who works with microfinance and petit enterprises for women...groups of women go to her organization to take out tiny loans which are paid back with minimal interest, and they use this money to start businesses, invest in livestock, quoi quoi quoi. Good stuff.

We went up the road a bit for lunch, where we sat with two other gentlemen and ate and had what was ALMOST an interesting and completely comfortable conversation that did not eventually turn into questions about my marital status and slightly impolite suggestions about how it can be changed. Almost.

I feel like I should have some sort of clever and overarching theme to this entry but I'm not sure that I do. I'm feeling pretty good about life and myself these days though. It's kind of nice to have gone through a couple of relatively crappy experiences in my late adolescence slash early adulthood because I have found here that I am remarkably good at keeping things in perspective. Not that I've been having to face any crappy experiences, really...but I'm totally able to go with the flow in a way that impresses myself. I'm good at this, what I'm doing here. The Peace Corps is good for me and I think I'm going to be good for it, and Burkina Faso is clearly where I was meant to be. I could see myself staying beyond the two years. There's lots of stuff here that's good for my soul.

...ok...I guess I'm going to submit and post a picture of my puppy. Yes, I have a puppy. Sort of. Well, yes I do. He showed up at the Foyer and quickly became the one and only dog that I have ever loved. Mam baaga biiga, my puppy dog, who I call either baaga biiga or puppy dog, which has become his name...PD. Puppy Dog. REGARD:

HOW COULD YOU NOT LOVE THAT DOG? Impossible.

...and for your viewing pleasure, here are a couple of other things:

A view of the sky from my porch as huge clouds rolled in that ended up not unleashing any water onto us...the rainy season is probably over.

Sun shining through the clouds on the road to Kongoussi...I turned on my bike to take this photo of the Kongoussi sign as I was biking away because it looked so beautiful, but ended up getting this quick shot instead of something more artistic due to some people who were hanging out on the side of the road, watching me intently. I like to lay low with displays of wealth and touristic qctivities, especially in and near my town. But look! Pretty road, pretty sky.

Ok, with that I shall leave you because this internet is doing me in. I just dished out monthly internet dues to the lady here though, so I do have a little bit more of an economic incentive to come back.

Tomorrow we leave for Ouagadougou where we will spend a couple of sessions going over last minute important things we need to know in order to be a volunteer in this lovely country of Burkina Faso. There will be some mad dash shopping to furnish our new houses and on TUESDAY we swear in as volunteers. WOAH.

I got a pretty dress made for this fancy little event, and I am really excited about wearing it and being dressed up and enjoying a day full of celebrations and fun. Weirdly, I am heading out the next morning to be dropped off at my site...not a whole lot of time for processing after a 12 week long training full of doing pretty much nothing but that!

I am pretty excited about furnishing my first house! Kind of overwhelmed when I think about it, because there's really not a whole lot of time to make calculated and nuanced decisions while shopping in Ouaga. Fortunately my site has a pretty extensive marche all the time, so I really don't NEED to go too crazy buying things if I decide that I just want to take my time. I really want to make sure that it's comfy and cozy and filled with good vibes and pretty things so that I feel really good about being there.

It's so wild that in four days we'll all be Peace Corps volunteers, all alone in our little houses figuring out what the heck we're going to do to meet people, get integrated into our communities and fill the time. No more daily contact with each other, days filled with similar experiences and stresses. It's time to go out and be big kids now. It's a whole new chapter. Wish me luck, and send me good thoughts on Tuesday!

Today was a hot, sticky, fly-filled day. ...and you know, the heat and even the sweat doesn't usually bother me too much. It'll never stop, so you just sort of get used to it. But some days...man. When Burkinabé greet you with "Il fait chaud, oui?" you know that il does in fact fait chaud. Fortunately the rain has FINALLY come (just today, about two hours ago, as soon as I got into town), which has significantly cooled things off and will finally give all of the farmers in the villages some work to do in the fields...the drought has been pretty scary for a lot of people this "rainy" season. If crops don't grow, there won't be enough food to eat for the next year. Straight up.

Back to today being hot and sticky. Man. Today was just a day for me to feel stressed and irritable. It happens in Africa, too. Here is a petite list of little things that mixed heavily in my soul today. BRACE FOR VENTING:

* hatred of packing and moving, exacerbated by the dense heat that fills my little house and surrounds all of the things that have accumulated and gotten dirty over the past two and a half months along with the good intentions of my host brother who was really trying to help me but really just not

* flies swarming all around my sweaty body when I finally give in and decide to take a bucket bath as an attempt to de-stress a little

* sweating the entire time that I am taking said bucket bath

* CLOGGED RAZOR when all I want to do is shave my dirty sweaty legs -- I find myself wanting to do this more often than you might think I do...I feel like it's a control thing. I may sweat and smell and have muddy feet, but damn it my legs are smooth. Or not.

* listening to a ridiculously repetitive call-in-and-give-your-friends-a-shout-out radio show for a very long time wherein every five seconds some bouncy looped African beat is interrupted by the same exact DJ to listener exchange

RAH.

I've noticed that I'm getting a little freckly on my arms in a way that I don't think I ever have before, and I wonder if these freckles are here to stay. I'm uncomfortable with permanent sudden changes to my body. Also also, this spot on my bottom lip that I thought was a bruise...?? ...turns out that's probably a freckle too. WEIRD. Sometimes people here poke at the freckles on my arms and ask me if they're mosquito bites, which has lead me to realize that the concept of a freckle is very hard to explain to someone who doesn't have them and has never seen them. Sometimes, like hot and sticky today, people here, like my little host sisters, poke at the places on my face where I'm breaking out because of the heat and the sweat and the stress and ask me if THOSE are mosquito bites. And then I decide to bike into town.

Here is a little list of home-things that I miss:

* Noho / Moho culture

* little bars and concert venues

* driving down Hartford Rd to get coffee -- for some reason that stretch of road has popped into my mind a couple of times

Okay...so that's not a whole lot, but really I haven't been too homesick or miss-y. Even about food, though stagaires talk about American food ALL the time. As I type, in fact, I am listening to a Nassara conversation about American food and good beer. Coincidence, but not a very surprising one. These convos don't make me hungry, just a little put off. It's akin to always bringing it back to conversing about being with some good looking celebrity. Sure, ok, Brad Pitt is hot, yes. That's a given, it doesn't really need to be said every day. You're never going to meet him or be with him in any way, so let's talk about something else.

Here is a list of things that I appreciated today:

* standing with my bike in the heat riiight in the middle of the day, having showered and changed and started my trip down the dirt road into town, and feeling GOOD...no flies, no sweat, just warmth and pretty clouds and green and brown fields.

* the smell and feel of tiger balm that I rubbed onto my ouch-ing shoulder

* noticing and enjoying that my hair is longer than it's been in a long time

...ok. So that's all well and good but now I'm stuck in Ouahigouya for a bit because it's rainy which makes biking uncomfortable muddy and long, and I don't really want to be alone but I don't really want to be in a social situation that requires any sort of effort. I just want to sit in a comfortable place with someone or someones and listen to music or read and not feel the need to talk if no talking is happening. You know?

I'ma get myself out of this funk right quick. ...which I hope means by tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll go to bed early tonight. Or something.

I think I'm going to go to ECLA, get a warm coffee, talk about my feelings to anyone I know who happens to be there and wait for this rain to stop.

Hi, this is Molly! I guess it's about time that I write something in my own blog. Unfortunately I have no pictures with which to entertain you all right now, so my tangential rambling will have to suffice. ...but do not fret! There's lots of it. :)

Holy moly it's been almost twelve weeks, right? When did that happen? Next Wednesday I will be spending my final night with my host family...after a couple of nights in Ouahigouya, all of us trainees (yes, all of us...all 32 that came in together at the beginning of June) will head to Ouagadougou to swear in as actual, legit, this-is-what-your-tax-money-is-paying-for Peace Corps Volunteers. Woo!

I'm starting to get a bit nervousexcited, and I'm definitely feeling a bit bittersweet about leaving my host family. Every morning I walk out of the door to my courtyard to a flurry of Moore greetings from tiny children who extend their hands tittering with "ça va!"s and "ne y yibeoogo!"s, excited shouts of "Mariam! Mariam! Aujourd'hui tu va ou??" I greet my host father with smiles nods and "laafi bala"s as he shakes my hand warmly and happily, wishing me a great day and bidding me goodbye until the evening. Then the kids -- five or six of them at least, sometimes even more -- take my bike and my backpack and walk with me past the goats and the cow (or "boeuf", which I love to say) , out of the family's compound and onto the little path that will eventually lead me to wherever training is for the day. The little ones often walk with me for a little while, seemingly making a game out of how long they can maintain control of my bike before I finally give in and tell them I need to start riding. ...to be honest I love every minute of it, even the period of gear-shifting adjustment I must go through every time I finally mount and begin my journey because Ousanni, Safi, Azeta, or whoever it was that commandeered my velo that particular morning clicked through some crazy combination of the 21 speeds. It always throws me off a little since at that point my NesCafe hasn't kicked in yet, but it never fails to make me smile a little, especially since I'm usually still shouting goodbyes to them over my shoulder as its happening.

I ride my bike through the village, greeting pretty much everyone as I head to the school to meet up with the other trainees who live in my village. Unless that day's training is happening either chez us or in the next village, we have a lovely 20 to 45 minute morning bike ride to start our day. It's really pretty nice...it's not too hot before 8am, and it's nice to enjoy some breeze, some exercise and some conversation before getting started with the day's training activities.

I don't hate training (or stage, pronounced French-like, as it's called here in Burkina). "Go with the flow" might be a phrase of mine that's bordering on overuse, but really that's what I'm doing...going with the flow and enjoying things for what they are. So I suppose I can say that I'm enjoying myself...because really I am. That's right. I said it. I'm enjoying stage. ...and not because each day is packed full of useful and pertinent information. Not because there has been value in all of the activities we've had to do. Not because GEE training fits comfortably into a 12 week time frame. Pas de toute. ...but I really like the group of Americans I'm with, I've really enjoyed spending time with the people in my host family, I've had a great experience learning to be comfortable in my little village and in Ouahigouya. I've found value in a lot of the things that we've done and I've also come to realize that the experiences I'm brining to the Peace Corps are going to suit my life here well.

It hasn't quite hit me yet that all of my new friends and I are going to be spread out all over the country, and the people that I've grown accustomed to hanging with, venting with, laughing with, blundering with, and drinking Brakinas with will soon live hundreds of kilometers away from me. What? Peace Corps? I'm going to be getting some mileage out of my cell phone for sure. Who woulda thought that sending text messages in Burkina Faso is as easy as having 30 CFA with which to do it?

Speaking of cell phones, I'd like to point out that receiving both text messages and phone calls on my plan is free, and that www.uniontelecard.com supposedly has a pretty good USA to Burkina deal with its bharatt phone card. ...voila some classy Burkinabé indirect communication skills. :)

Where were we? Ah yes...stage. Training. Every day, training. Four blocks of different stuff, plenty of time for lunch and relaxation in the middle. When us GEEs are in one of the villages we laze around with each other during lunch time, eating some meal prepared for us by one of our host families and talking or listening to music. The day officially ends at 17h15 (c'mon, you know what time that is!) at which point we generally bike back to our host families. Sometimes I visit with one of my other village trainee friends and their families. Sometimes I bike into Ouahigouya to indulge in frozen yogurt in a bag. This by the way is the best stuff ever. The plane ticket to Burkina will be worth every penny as soon as you put some of this in your mouth.

When I get home, I greet everyone I see...generally my oldest host sister, age 17, busts my butt about something or other...it's a sense of humor I've learned to enjoy and play along with. After a little bit of conversation in my host dad's courtyard I enter my little courtyard, shut the door, and get my water ready to take a bucket bath. If it hasn't yet become dark, I don't have to worry too much about cockroaches and gatingargas (that's Moore for HUGE ASS FREAKING HOLY SHIT SPIDERS). Taking a bucket bath is like diving into a pool...once I brace myself for the first cup of water that I dump over my head, it's wonderful. ...and I am clean! ...no more sweat, a negligible amount of dirt, and usually pretty good spirits. I join my momma in her courtyard where I either help fix dinner or just sit around on a mat and look at the sky and talk to her (and her kids...or any kids!) about our days. We eat dinner together, she and I, back in my courtyard outside of my house. Vrai Burkinabé the two of us...voracious appetites, hands mixing rice and sauce. Afterwards, she generally leaves to take care of her kids and her husband. I stay in my courtyard and talk with my oldest host brother and/or whatever members of the Mariam Fan Club happen to be around on that given evening. Sometimes I gather in front of a television that's been brought outside, along with dozens of other family members, to watch African music videos or Burkinabé movies.

Usually I'm in bed by 22h. The days are so long! But you know, I've enjoyed pretty much all of them. I'm here and I dig it. I knew I'd feel good about being in Africa, and I'm confident that this confidence is going to follow me into the next new phase of my life.

...but wish me luck! On August 25th I'll be swearing in. It'll be starting for real. New home. New neighbors. New job. New town. New life.

That's how it goes.

Dental (checkmark!)

Complete. Peace Corps has completed your dental review. There are no dental holds on your account at this time.

Yaaayyyy!!! On an official bureaucratic paperwork level, I have NOTHING LEFT TO DO in order to get my plane ticket!

(...knock on wood)

Nerves are beginning to kick in a little. ...a lot? It's all relative.

I'm mostly having Rahel-related nervousness at this point. ...but we've been talking and talking about all of this upcoming parting business and I think things will be good if we just keep talking things out. Right?

I hope right.

Peace Corps service is 27 months long. When I leave in June, Rahel and I will have been together for 27 months. What does this mean? I don't know.

Oh man oh man oh man.

Also, my birthday will be upon the world when I have been in country for only three days. Anyone who wishes to send me letters of love and encouragement that I can open on my birthday are welcome to do so at any point within the next month.

Speaking of time passing, so much of that has happened since I first thought I wanted to join the Peace Corps. I'm only little...do I still want now what I wanted then? Do I really think I'm prepared for Peace Corps service, or am I only really prepared for the idea of the Peace Corps?

Whew...there go my nerves again. Man, I'm nervous. I haven't really been nervous yet. This is a new thing. I'm glad I'm getting some of it out now so that I can accept it and deal with it and learn how to roll with it. If all of the nervousness that I could potentially feel about moving away for two years was to show up at the same time--on d-day--I would most likely vomit everywhere.

But I'm not vomiting everywhere. So that's good. ...and even if I was, that would be fine. Nerves happen.

I'm reading about it and seeing it throughout my community. Businesses are shutting down, for-rent signs are popping up in store windows...though not a new phenomenon, it seems like a lot more of this is happening than usual. This is not the best time to be working for gratuity, although the amount of business cycling through restaurants is surprisingly high, all news considered. On the surface it doesn't look as though individuals are really being hit too hard...there's still a lot of shopping and spending and buying going on. People seem to be trying very hard to maintain their sense of normalcy and go about their lives without giving in to the reality of this economic situation. Wise, unwise, who knows. We'll find out.

I never doubted that I would be offered a spot in the Peace Corps. I feel as though I had a very strong application, relevant experiences and interests, as well as realistic and open-minded aspirations. Plus, the organization never had a reputation for being altogether too hard to join. If willing to stick it out through an arduous application process was the biggest hurdle to joining, then I could definitely do it.

It seems as though its competitive edge began to increase around the time that my original nomination date of October 08 had passed, but still I took my time for a while in this process. A little frustrated with the amount of roadblocks that had come up medically, I put off a few doctor's appointments and supplementary application materials for the duration of the summer in order to focus on other things in my life. The Peace Corps would always be there, it seemed, waiting for me patiently as I took my time getting things done.

My friend Stef, currently serving in Jamaica, informed me not long after her arrival this past July that the Peace Corps just stopped its long-standing practice of providing all volunteers with a subscription to Newsweek, something that the organization had been doing steadily since 1982. This was my first clue that things were changing. Articles about budget cuts and slashed positions began to surface regularly across the PC community. I stepped up my game in terms of getting things done, got in touch with many staff members in Washington, filled out a bunch of extra paperwork, had a second over-the-phone interview, and finally received my invitation more than a year and a half after I began the application process.

Now is not the easiest time to get invited to join the Peace Corps. The number of volunteer positions has been cut by 400 due to some massive budget cuts, and the number of people whose job prospects are dwindling--especially post college--is on the rise. These factors taken together make for a very competitive application process. At this point, I do not envy those who are waiting to find out if Peace Corps service is going to be in their future.

The Peace Corps application process is a game of patience and flexibility. It can be long, it can be repetitive, it can be invasive and offensive and frustrating. Sometimes you have to be willing to put big life plans on hold. You have to spend time and money to go through the process of being medically and dentally cleared. You have to wait and wait and wait to hear back from Placement Officers and medical staff, never really sure if what you've sent in will (finally) suffice.

I can't imagine going into this process with a decreased amount of confidence. There are very motivated, very dedicated, very prepared, and very qualified people--people like me--applying now who will either not be offered a volunteer position at all or be required to wait a long, long time before they are able to depart. Even knowing this, I feel good about myself and my position. The program to which I have been assigned seems like a perfect fit. The challenges that stand before me are huge and wonderful and I am ready to take them on.

I feel very at peace with the way things worked out for me. Yeah, this was a long time to wait...yes, having to live back at home with the fam after graduating from college is rough on the ego at times...but I got to spend a whole extra school year's worth of time with Rahel and my family and my hometown homies, I got to meet some great new people, I got to get more involved in my local community...I got to be here for my cousin's first baby...I had time to collect lots of music and to read lots of books and to expand my soul and my mind...I had time to get tangled up in the sort of drama that fires my spirit and defines key parts of my life, and I learned from it all.

It's very exciting to know that I'm going into the Peace Corps at a time when the organization needs to prove its strength in the face of everything that seems set to weaken it. I'm sure that magazine subscriptions and volunteer positions aren't the only things that have been cut--there are a lot of adjustments going on in Washington and in PC offices across the world that are disrupting routines and forcing flexibility. Maybe there will be housing shortages or changes in the living allowances per country. Maybe more volunteers will have roommates, stricter regulations about travel, less resources for training. I'm sure that recruiters and Placement Officers are looking even more thoroughly into an applicant's motivation...the coming wave of volunteers needs to be strong. There's a lot going on within the organization right now, and it needs to be held together so that it can get through these tough times .

Life does not follow the easiest course all of the time, and that's OK. It gives you a chance to change your expectations of what it all means, and to choose some pretty exciting battles to fight.

I'm putting together a packing list based on numerous packing suggestions that I've found online. I am trying to internalize very good advice that I am seeing everywhere about packing light and trusting that I will be able to purchase everything that I actually need while I am in country. A white American girl living in a Burkinabe village will be a spectacle no matter what, will be thought of as rich no matter what...is comparably rich no matter what. I'd like to minimize the amount of things that I bring along with me so that I can focus more on integrating into my community and less on having stuff. Easier said than done...but the process of narrowing down and being selective will be beneficial in the end.

That all being said, here's my deal:

The Peace Corps has a baggage limit of 2 checked pieces and 1 carry on. The combined dimensions of the checked pieces (length plus height plus depth) cannot exceed 107 inches, and the carry on can't exceed 45 inches. The checked baggage weight cannot exceed a total of 80 pounds, and there is a maximum weight allowance of 50 pounds per any one bag.

THE LIST

***last updated June 5th***

(Items in purple are things that I have/have specifically decided upon. Items with question marks near them are things that I'm not sure about or have seen a lot on other peoples' packing lists but don't know much about myself yet.)

Clothes

3-4 short sleeved cotton shirts

2-3 tank tops

1-2 nice shirts

1 long sleeved shirt

1 lightweight zip-up long sleeved shirt

1 sweatshirt

1 long skirts

1 pair jeans

2 pairs lightweight capris/long pants

3 underwire bras, 2 sports bras

15ish pairs underwear, 3ish pairs socks

1 lightweight PJ pants, 1 pair PJ shorts

1 belt

1 hat with brim, my blue hair wrap

1 swim suit

1 rain coat

2-3 pairs sunglasses

Chaco's sandals -- 50% off PCV discount

Chaco's sneakers -- 50% off PCV discout

2 pairs Teva's flip flops -- 50% off PCV discount

a few pairs of simple stud earrings, rings

Toiletries -- 3 month supply of what the PC does not provide/specific brands I like

my vitamins

heat wraps, Midol, Insteads

face wash, dr. bronner's liquid soap, 1 bar soap/soap holder, deodorant

1 toothbrush, 1 tube of toothpaste

nail clippers, nail file, tweezers, small mirror

a few Burt's Bees chapstick

some makeup/hair goop, bobby pins, hair cutting scissors

Household Things

can opener, plastic spatula/scraper

10'' lightweight non-stick frying pan

kitchen knife, knife sharpener, 3 cutting board sheets

small insulated lunch box, ziplock bags, plastic storage containers (various sizes)

taco seasoning, spices, powdered drink mixes, hot chocolate powder

1 pillow and pillow case, 1 flat full sheet

small travel sewing kit

Recreational Things

French books (Le Petit Prince, Le Petit Nicolas)

Catch-22, World War Z

Back to the Future DVDs

puzzle, frisbee

pens/pencils, colored pencils, pencil sharpener

paper, scissors, journal

world map

USA map, Africa map -- thank you, Odyssey!

Techy Things

ipod, headphones, ipod speakers

digital camera, funky weird mini tripod thing

shortwave radio

rechargable batteries (AA and AAA) and charger

solar charging backpack (listed below)

super tiny mini laptop (Acer Aspire One), USB card

Other Things

camping mattress (Thermarest)

screen tent (REI bug hut 2)

2 Nalgenes, head lamp, 2 caribeeners

Leatherman wave

duct tape, super glue, thermometer

durable clock with alarm

incense/candles

bike helmet, comfortable bike seat

photo album (personal and public)

TBD gift for host family

...And It's All Going To Fit In

Voltaic converter -- 35% off Peace Corps discount

...which will go in my old EMS backpack

Kelty Trekker 3900 external frame backpack

On June 8th, 2009, I will be leaving the good old US of A for a 27-month Peace Corps stint in Burkina Faso. Since departure day is quickly approaching (sort of), now seems like a good time to test out a little blog action. SO...if you're looking for a little vicarious livin' or if you want to check in to see how I'm doing with this whole process from here on out, there's a place where you can do that. ...and that place is here. Welcome.

First let me say that the waiting game that seems to make up a great deal of the Peace Corps process doesn't end upon invitation. I received my wondeful beautiful invitation packet in the mail early November...seven months before my departure date! Getting invited so early is, on the one hand, really really cool--it has provided ample time for me to significantly increase my digital music collection as well as time to practice getting down with my spiritual self yoga-style, both things that I think will benefit me greatly when I'm on my own over the next couple of years. However, it also means that I've had lots and lots of time to perhaps overly-read up on Burkina Faso, Burkina Faso PCVs and RPCVs, the Peace Corps in general, expats living in Africa, everything. Now that June is getting closer and physical planning and preparation is beginning to feel more reasonable, I'm going to taper off on my reading and research so that I can let go of any expectations that I've built up, and try to find a good balance between having an idea of what's coming my way and being prepared to be unprepared.

Applying to and being invited to serve in the Peace Corps is, was and continues to be a long and grueling test of patience. Never did I think that two years or more would elapse between the time I began filling things out to the time I actually left the country, but that's certainly my story. Even now, I'm all good and invited, yet I still have lots of things to do before the PC people will issue me my plane tickets. Mostly dental things that cost tons of money. I could go on about that, but I really don't even want to talk about it anymore. I've cried out all the tears that I ever care to cry over any dentist anywhere. Just fix my teeth dentist man, I don't care anymore!!

Anyway.

I have a fairly extensive PACKING LIST that I am beginning to create and modify, so expect to see an entry devoted entirely to THAT sometime in the near future. For now, adieu!