Weather Now

As I may have told you, Burkinabè say they have two seasons, the dry season and the rainy season. I would say they really have three, because in the dry season there are the cool months and the very hot months. The rainy season ends in early October and the weather stays pretty warm until the middle or end of November. During December January and February, it is still hot during the day, up to 85 or 90 most days, but it gets cool in the evening and I want to wear a sweater in the morning. It is often 65 in the morning, and sometimes even down close to 60. For me, that is pretty cold, although I know some of you keep your houses that temperature during the winter. For folks who live here anything under 80 degrees is cold. When I find the temperature "refreshing" the folks here are wearing heavy winter jackets and stocking hats. The babies are bundled up in sweaters and knit caps, like this:Then they are wrapped snugly in a blanket. In March it gets really hot and stays hot until the rains begin. Just as we complain about the cold and snow in Cleveland, folks here complain about how hot it is. Instead of being bundled up in knit sweaters and hats, babies and young children often wear no clothes at all. People who have a walled courtyard sleep outside because the house, built of mud brick, holds the heat once it gets heated up during the day. They may sleep on a sleeping mat, like this one another volunteer is sitting on, which is just a thin mat of woven plastic. If they have one, they may throw a mattress on top of it.

Even after the rains begin it can be pretty hot on days when it does not rain. When I say it is hot I mean it is at least 95, and often 100 or more. When it is the hot season, 80 feels very refreshing and people may but on a jacket to keep warm. It is all a matter of your body's thermostat getting readjusted.

Keeping cool when it is hot

When it is hot, life goes on. People complain about the heat, but people continue with their regular routine, and school continues. Those of you who know me well may think I am totally happy to be warm at last, but during the hot season it is actually hotter than I like to be. I have come to appreciate evaporation! I have a heavy cotton shirt Dawn brought me at Christmas, and in the hot dry season it has been my "village air conditioning system." I keep a bucket of water handy to dip it in. Because the air is so dry, the water evaporates fairly well and the result is cooling. There were even times when I had to take it off because I was getting cold. During the rainy season evaporation does not happen so fast, but if I wave a shirt around before I put it on, or when I wear a wet shirt while riding my bicycle, I can get cooled off. When it is hot at night I use the same principle, but with a piece of fabric that I get wet and use kind of like a sheet. I try to keep it just on me so the bed does not get too wet, and it really makes a difference. I wake up several times a night and have to dip it in the water again to get cool enough to go back to sleep.

RAIN!!!

In April it usually rains once or twice, although these rains may not be very heavy. They are referred to as the mango rains because that is the time of year the first variety of mangos gets ripe. Around May 15 people expect the rainy season to begin. This year there was a very heavy rain early in May, followed by another day with a steady drizzle. It was great because that was enough moisture to get the weeds growing again. Because the rains were so light and irregular last year, people cut most fodder and put it up out of reach, to make it last until the rains began. After that heavy rain there was finally something fresh for the animals of eat when they were put out to graze. Here is what the sprouting weeds look like, with a few sheep enjoying some fresh greens.

Superstitious behavior

Since then there has been only one good rain. We see a lot of lightening, and even hear thunder to the north or to the south, but the big rains seem to miss us. When we have had rain, there have been just short bursts of rain, or sprinkles. I find it interesting that, when it looks like rain, my mental processes turn to superstitious kinds of thoughts like, "If I don't expect it will really rain, maybe it will." Or "Last time it looked like rain I started thinking of the song, It's Gonna Rain, Children. We did not get rain that time so I had better think of a different song or it may not rain again." (As some of you know, my life is a song cue. Songs related to things going on in my life just pop into my head.) I know perfectly well that what I think or do will have absolutely NO effect on the weather, but I can't help having thoughts like that. It makes it easier to understand how superstitious beliefs are created when you observe them in yourself.

A funny thing to me is that the weather here comes from the EAST, and not from the west, like it does most of the time in Ohio. I look out my window in the direction the storm will come from when it does come, and I have to remind myself that I am looking to the east and not the west.

When It Rains, It Blows!!!

When there is about to be a big rain storm, the first thing you notice is that the wind starts to blow, a bit a first, but eventually very hard. Because there is virtually no ground cover here the wind picks up lots of dust. There is no glass in any of the windows here in the village so even if you close the shutters, as you do to keep the rain from blowing in too much, the dust still gets through. Usually, but not always, rain follows the blowing dust. It usually rains quite hard for a a while. Then it may slow down, and even stop. After that, it may rain off and on for hours, or it may all be over. Right now people are all hoping there will be a couple more soaking rains, and then rain every 3 or 4 days until September. Last year the rain did not start until June 15 and there were several times when there was a two week gap between the rains. That is the reason the harvest was so bad last year. Try sending some of that Ohio rain over here to west Africa!!!

I spent four days last week at a conference called "Men as Partners." I will begin with a bit of sad news—my camera was stolen just before I left for the conference. The good news is that my friend Daniel took lots of pictures and let me copy them onto my computer, so I will be able to show you a bit about what it was like. Here is a picture of me with Daniel. He was born in Haiti so he grew up speaking French and Creole. He moved to the USA when he was 30 and is now an American citizen, as you have to be to be a Peace Corps volunteer. He has a real advantage here because he is working in his native language when he speaks French. This conference was attended by Peace Corps volunteers and one or two men from each of their villages. The men had to be people the volunteers thought were motivated to work for gender equality. It was really a training of trainers, because the attendees are expect to go back to their homes and use the techniques and information they learned here to work for gender equality.

Even though women have equal rights according to the Burkina Faso constitution, at the village level the life of a woman is not easy. It is traditionally the responsibility of the women and girls of the family to get water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing clothes, to keep the house and courtyard clean, to cut or find the wood for cooking, to cook the meals, to wash the clothes, and so on. Wives do the shopping for food with whatever allowance their husbands give them. When it comes time to eat, men are served first. After the men have had their fill, the older boys eat, and after that the women and children eat what is left. Men do whatever work they do outside the home, but at home they expect to relax and be waited on. When guests arrive, the women get chairs for them and bring them a cup of water while the man of the house chats with the guests. Women are always the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night.

This conference was rather typical of training sessions in Peace Corps. There is a plan for each day, with two 2-hour blocks in the morning, separated by a 30 minute coffee break, lunch, and two afternoon sessions of an hour and a half, with a 15 minute coffee break. The first day was devoted to the topic of gender, the second to violence, the third to health, specifically HIV/AIDS and family planning, and the fourth to engagement. The first day was devoted to separating sex, as a biological fact, from gender roles, which are assigned by society. People thought about what they liked about being a man or a woman and how things would be different if they were of the opposite sex. Different forms of violence were discussed, including physical, psychological and sexual violence. The attendees were well informed about family planning and sexually transmitted diseases. On the final day, for engagement, groups went to 10 different locations in the city and talked to 10 different groups of people about one of the topics we had covered. This gave each man a chance to practice leading or helping to lead a training session on a topic he had just worked on at the conference. Later each community filled out a action plan, explaining one activity they would do when they returned to their homes.

Here is a picture of the room in which the conference was held. You can pick me out by my white hair. The training was intended to show many different ways to convey information, other than the lecture method that is so common here. They usually have some kind of audience participation. Sometimes they ask questions to draw the ideas they want to discuss from the audience. Another frequent tactic is to divide the attendees into small groups with each group discussing a question and writing ideas on "flip chart" paper. Here are some folks engaged in discussion and recording ideas on a flip. This is what the room looks like after a number of groups have presented the flips they wrote out during their discussions. Another activity is called "vote with your feet." One area is designated TRUE and another area is designated FALSE. The group leader reads a statement and you walk to the area that represents your opinion. Here are the people who thought a statement was false.

And here are the folks who thought it was true, with one of the folks explaining why. Because most of the folks who came to the conference were already pretty well educated about the issues most of the differences came over interpreting exactly what was meant by a statement. To show what can happen to a girl who tells a teacher about being raped, we all stood in a big circle, with the "victim" in the center and a number of people holding signs indicating their role or relationship with the girl. She was handed the end of a string that was then passed around to each of the people she was taken to see. Each time she saw a new person who asked her to explain what happened, she was given a sheet with "tell your story" written on it. By the end of the story there was quite a tangle of string, the girl had eight papers saying "tell your story" and she had not yet been taken to anyone who could give her emotional support or counseling. It really made the point that the victim continues to be traumatized by such treatment and we discussed alternative ways to help in such a situation. Another activity that Burkinabè really enjoy is improvisational theater. Groups are given the outline of a skit. People select parts, plan generally how the skit will go, and have a lot of fun. Here is one skit involving a pregnant girl, who is being played by the man in the yellow shirt. People often take parts of the opposite sex, which is another way to make people think about gender roles.All of us like to eat, and here is lunch. I am sitting with my homologue for the conference, the man who is the program director for the radio station in my town. At the end of any Burkinabè conference there are speeches and certificates. Here is one being presented. Notice all the people taking pictures! A certificate is a big deal, especially since each one was signed and stamped by the directrice of the Peace Corps Burkina. And the obligatory group photo, referred to by some as the family picture. After four days people do begin to feel a bit like a family.

One of my projects here was with a women's gardening group. They had a very nice garden that must have been built with the help of some grant years ago. It was surrounded by a very good fence, and there were little cement cannels to carry the water to all the plots, but the pump had not worked for several years. This picture shows the arrangement and maybe you can see the fence in the background. The fence is very important. If you don't have one, animals roaming free will eat your plants as soon as they sprout.

USAID has funds to be used to help communities with water and sanitation projects. These funds are only available to communities through a Peace Corps volunteer. Peace Corps puts the money in the volunteer's account and the volunteer is responsible for seeing that the funds are used for the project and not "boofed," that is, used for other things. There are several requirements for this kind of project. One thing is that the community must make contributions of cash and/or labor and materials that have a value of at least 25% of the total cost of the project. The reason for this is that, if there is not community investment, people tend to see the project as the responsibility of the group giving the money and tend not to accept responsibility for upkeep and repair. A second requirement is that there must be some training involved, so that people learn something. The third thing is that there must be a plan in place to sustain the project after the repair is done. I helped the group write a grant request which was approved. It did take a while to collect the community's share of cash to pay for the pump parts. Finally the pump repairman was able to do the work, with a bit of help from the children of the community. This chain is the thing the pump handle pulls up and down. It attached to the mechanism that lifts the water.

Here it is, after being installed in the pump. Finally, the women were able to pump clean water for drinking and gardening. After there was water, the women started to grow things in the garden Here is an example of one of the plots in which a woman is raising beans. It is a little easier to see the fence here. There are the leaves of the bean plant that people use for sauces..

One of the men from the community, actually the village chief you saw in the pictures of Women's Day, volunteered his services to do training as a part of the community contribution. After some scheduling problems, we finally had a training session for the women of the gardening group. To give you an idea about the cultural difference that I have trouble dealing with, I will tell you a bit about scheduling this meeting and how it finally went.

First of all, the man who was to do the training does not speak French very well, and had trouble understanding my French. I asked my friend, Nadine, who is an English teacher at the Lycée and who also speaks Moore, to act as an interpreter for me when dealing with him. Every time she talked to him he said he would call her back with a date, but, over a period of two months, that did not happen. Many times he did not answer his cell phone, or his wife answered and said he was not at home. We have a time limit in which to file a report about our projects and mine was fast approaching. The directorice of Peace Corps visited my site a couple of weeks before Easter. One of the people I introduced her to was this gentleman. She helped me by saying again how important it was to get this training finished before May 1 and he promised to do it after Easter, at least by the 15th of April. Unfortunately, the Chief of the whole region died just after Easter and there were obligations for the sub-chiefs, like this man, related to this death. I was beginning to think I would have to find a substitute for him. I asked Nadine to see if the women would suggest a couple of days when we could arrange this. The last Tuesday in April Nadine told me that the woman in charge of the gardening group said they thought there might be a meeting on Thursday, but not to tell me because it might not happen. Thank goodness she gave me that warning!

I heard nothing until Thursday morning at 7:00 when she called to tell me they had just informed her that the meeting would be that day at 9:00. They also suggested that I come at 9:30 because that was the "African" meeting time, that is to say, it would not really start until somewhat later than announced. I hoped to talk with her a bit before the meeting so I arrived at 9:00, and, of course, no one was at the meeting site. I went to her home and chatted with her husband while she took a bucket bath and got dressed. Finally, about 9:40 we left her house and started to collect the women from the dolo (homemade African beer) stands. Some of us went to the garden and sat near the "office" building of the group that is in the fenced in area of the garden. There was some discussion of the fact that the shade in this place was not very good, but women continued to collect here, some carrying benches for the folks to sit on. At 10:00 the woman in charge asked me if it was time to start. I told her I was not the one doing the training and we needed the man who would explain about care of the pump, who was not there yet. She said she did not have his phone number, so she used my phone to call him and let him know we were waiting for him. About 10:15 he rolled in on his moto. After one look at where the women were gathered, he said we needed to move to better shade, so the women picked up the benches and carried them down to the other end of the garden. Finally we were all seated and the meeting began. This picture shows only some of the women, and the man who did the training. The plan in the grant application said that the community would open an account at the local savings association and to put into it money from the gardening project and from people getting water from the pump. That way, they will have money to repair the pump the next time it needs attention. Pumps are mechanical things and are sure to break down at some point. Sustainability is what we try to promote in our work. If they follow through on this plan, this project will be sustainable with these community contributions. As part of this meeting the group selected, by acclimation, four of the younger women to be a management committee They will be responsible for seeing that the pump is used as they had been trained to do in this session, and to collect money from those who use the pump to have a fund to make repairs in the future. Here is one concrete thing I was able to help people do during my time here.

Last week was the culminating activity for the school year for the children in the primary schools here in my town. The soccer teams of the various primary schools had been playing against each other in a tournament for several months and on Saturday the finalist played for the championship. On the Thursday before that, however, there were competitions among the schools who wanted to participate in a celebration of Burkinabè culture. There were five categories, "playback" (AKA Karaoke), theater, storytelling, traditional dance and modern dance. Not all schools in the area chose to compete and some competed in only one or two events. Never the less, there were 24 presentations. The event was scheduled to start at 2:00 in the afternoon. I should have known better than to show up at the scheduled time, but I can't get over my American need to be on time. I arrived to find a lot of children standing in the shade outside the courtyard of the Mayor's office, where the event was to take place, but there were only three adults in the courtyard. They knew who I was and laughed, saying that the program would start on African time, that is, later. About 2:30 the kids were admitted to the courtyard, where they tried to find shade to wait in. A water barrel was brought in and a couple of kids were assigned to spread water on the concrete performance area. I am still not sure whether the idea was to clean it off or to cool it off. It must have been really hot from the sun beating down on it. Here is one of the kids spreading water. As an invited guest, I had the privilege of sitting in a chair in the shade of the only tree in the courtyard. I felt sorry for all those kids standing in the sun for hours. The teachers running the show were clearly ready to start by 3:00, but still we waited. It was not until 4:00, two hours after the announced time for the presentations, that the "important" people showed up and things could get underway. This is the same thing that happened at the Women's Day celebration I wrote about before. I really have trouble getting used to it, and I don't know how these folks decide how late to be. They know they are not expected to be on time, but there must be some rule of thumb telling them when they really should arrive.The program began with the "Playback" category. One of the playback/karaoke signers did a song by the Burkinabè artist, Floby, who sang at the Peace Corps 50th Anniversary celebration. The young man is one of the polio victims in town. He is unable to walk, so he did his impression of Floby sitting on his feet and received an enthusiastic round of applause. The stories the kids told the the story competition were generally ones well know to the crowd, sometimes taken from the readers they all used in their classes. The theater presentations were all original, written and planned by the teachers and/or the students themselves. I was a bit surprised by a couple of the themes. In one of them, one of the characters was giving bad information about how you get HIV and the other characters corrected him. In the second one, a father refused to send his daughters to school. One of them went off to Ouaga and later in the play she came home pregnant (with much laughter as the girl came on stage, with a pagne stuffed up under her dress), and finally the man relented, much to the joy of the younger daughter. Here are the mother and father, with the younger daughter in the background.

Unfortunately, by the time the traditional dance section came on, it was getting dark and the pictures are not very good. In this group, you can see they were wearing imitation grass skirts over traditional woven pagnes. There is a lot of hip shaking in traditional and modern dancing here in Burkina. It has always made me think of Hawaiian hula dancing, and with the grass skirts the similarity was even clearer.

Here are the drummers who accompanied one of the dance groups. The young man with the orange shirt is another of the polio victims who gets to school in one of those three wheeled, hand peddled tricycles I have mentioned. His class-mates helped him get on stage and astride the drum, which he played well, and with enthusiasm.I have a bit of video, showing a more authentic version of the "bump" dance I was trying to do in the video clip in my blog about music. The head bumping between the boy and girl is how people here greet good friends they have not seen for a while.

I have tried to upload the video unsuccessfully and will try again when I have a better internet connection. Sorry. Here is a photo of one of the bumps that will be on the video when I get it to load.

Hand Ball

In Burkina Faso the boys play soccer and the girls play a game they call hand ball. It is kind of like ultimate Frisbee in that you try to move the ball down the field but can't move your feet when you are holding the ball. The idea is to throw the ball into the goal, like soccer. The goal is about half the size of a soccer goal, and the field is just the width of a soccer field. Players are not allowed to kick the ball, but the goalie can use both her hands and feet to keep the ball out of the goal.

In this championship handball game, played in the morning. One of the teams was from a regular primary school, and the second was from "the school of the second chance" called Zod-Neere. It offers another chance to students who did not succeed in the regular school program. This is how they have decorated the entrance to their school. Because it is the school of the second chance,, most of the girls were older, and therefore the members of the Zod-Neere team were bigger and much better coordinated than the girls from the other school. The biggest difference, however, was that the Zod-Neere girls worked together, passing the ball between two or three girls who moved down the field together. The girls from the other school seemed never to know where the other members of their team were and often tossed the ball wildly, hoping one of their teammates would catch it. Not surprisingly, Zod-Neere won by a big margin, 9-3. Here is the goalie for the other team stopping the ball. Notice that all the girls play barefooted. Also notice that the playing field is dirt and gravel. Not too comfortable in bare feet.



Soccer

The final game for boys' soccer was in the afternoon. This was the featured event of the day, and there were many chairs set up for important people. This man brought the sound system and played music to entertain the crowd while they were waiting. Actually he was at the cultural performances on Thursday and at the handball tournament in the morning as well. He has a CD player, but most of the music is on his laptop.

In the afternoon we really appreciated him because, like every event important people were supposed to attend, they were very late. This time they were so late that the coordinators of the program actually did not wait for them! I was surprised, because I assumed you always waited. In this case, if they had not started the program, it would have been dark by the time things finished, so they went ahead.

The members of the two teams had been warming up. They were called to come stand in front of the audience and they had to stand there for about a half an hour while several people made speeches. Not a very good way to be ready to play, in my opinion. Here they are, listening to the speech of the inspector of the school district, who is my official supervisor here. Notice the two girls accompanying him, like to women at the women's day celebration.This picture shows what the field is like and how they make the sidelines and mid field line, by digging a small trench and putting a different colored dirt in it. The result is that the field is even less smooth, but that's the way they do it here. Here is one shot of the boys playing. As you can see, they also play bare foot (OUCH!!!)

Neither of the boys' teams appeared to have had coaching like the teams my grandsons play on in America. The players here seemed to have no plays worked out and did not seem to have any idea about where their other team members were. When they had a chance, they tried to kick the ball as high and as far as possible. Because the ball sailed down the field wildly, the people waiting there generally tried to bring it back to earth with a header. This technique did not give them much control over where the ball went and the ball was up in the air a lot more than I have seen it in American games. In other words, the game was pretty much a free for all. The Zod Neere boys won, but the score was only 1-0 due to good work by the golie of the losing team.

What do people wear?

You have seen some of the kinds of clothing Burkinabè wear in some of my pictures. Very few of the things people wear are ready made clothes. T-shirts and women's tight fitting shirts are probably the most common ready-made item, although you can find all sorts of things in the marchés here. Some are new things, but others are used clothing, what my daughter once referred to as Salvation Army rejects. Most of these women, like the one nearest the camera in a tank top, wear a pagne as a skirt.

This brand, Obama Girl, is particularly popular here:



My Friend, the Couturier

In the big cities you can find boutiques that sell ready to wear clothes, but in the village most things are made to order. Most of the people who sew clothing are men, but my friend, Martine, has just opened her own shop and I will use her shop as an example of how the system works. Her shop is one of two rooms in this building someone rents out to her and to a guy who sells gas in whisky bottles. The building is essentially a billboard for one of the cell phone companies, Airtel.

Most things are made on sewing machines that have been converted to work with a foot treadle. They still have their electric motors, but because there is no electricity in many of the tailor shops, human power has to take over. Here is a fancy zig-zag sewing machine, converted to run by foot power. If you want to have something made, first you have to figure out what kind of material you want to use. You visit the marché and look over the wide variety of options. As you can see, most of the fabric is brightly colored with large, elaborate designs. While some patterns are for special occasions, like Women’s Day and Christmas, most have no special connection to any event. As I showed you in an earlier blog, people sometimes select a special pagne pattern for their group to wear to a wedding or a funeral, so other people can see that they are all part of the same group. Everybody uses the same material, but the dresses or shirts or pant suits that are made from it may be quite different.

Once you select your material, you go to a tailor. Most of them are located in small shops near the marché. Here is a picture of Martine's shop open for business, the door and window on the right of this building. It is not near the marché, but it is near her home. That makes it handy for her, and she seems to get enough business to keep her busy even though she is not in the town.

You explain to the tailor what kind of outfit you want, either by pointing to one of the pictures hanging on the wall or by presenting a drawing of what you hope it will look like. After this has been discussed thoroughly and the tailor has made some notes and sketches, he or she takes some basic measurements like arm length, chest, neck and waist with a tape measure, and you leave. Then the amazing thing happens. Without any pattern, the tailor cuts the cloth to make the item you had in mind. He or she may modify or embellish the design, but it usually is similar to what you wanted. There are big differences among tailors in their ability to create your idea. Those in the big city and the better ones in small villages tend to pay more attention to lining up the pattern and planning so that the important part of the pattern, like the logo for Women’s day, is easy to see when you wear the garment, as you see on the sleeve of my Woman’s Day outfit..

Those of you who sew will know how important it is to iron your work as you go along. So, what do you do if you do not have electricity in your shop? You use an old fashioned flat iron, like this, in which you make a small charcoal fire.Many people have fancy designs embroidered on their clothes. They have things embroidered on material that has a complicated pattern, although I prefer to see it on a plain fabric. Here is Martine wearing an outfit she designed herself. She did the basic sewing and then sent the outfit to a person who has a special machine that does the embroidery. Here are Dawn and Annie in dresses Martine made for them while they were here.

Here is a dress Martine made for a little girl who was baptized as a part of her parent's formalization of their marriage.

That is to say, the parents had been together for quite a few years and had three little girls. Now they have accumulated enough money to have a formal wedding in the church. Here you can see the three little girls. The one on the left was baptized after the wedding vows were exchanged, which is what you see happening in the background. There were a couple of people taking pictures as the parents made their vows, so it is a bit hard to see what is going on.sc

Last, but not least, here are the bride and groom at the reception ot the home of his family. Notice they have changed from the European style suit and white gown they wore at the church ceremony to more typical African attire. If you look closely, you can see that both the bride and groom have heavy embroidery on the clothes they are wearing.

AIDS prevention

One of the projects I have been working on here is sex education and HIV/AIDS awareness. In East Africa HIV/AIDS is a huge problem. In some countries on that side of the continent, as many as 40% of the population are infected. Here in West Africa the infection rate is not so high, but it is still about twice as high as in the US. Education about how to avoid HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases is one of the priorities for Peace Corps volunteers everywhere in the world.

I knew I would be doing HIV/AIDS prevention activities when I got my invitation to be a Peace Corps volunteer and I was not sure how comfortable I would be as a sex educator. When I was teaching Introductory Psychology, I used to blush just explaining the ideas of Sigmund Freud! After two years of talking about it, I am quite comfortable discussing it in French. We will see if that transfers to English in America.

One of the projects I have been doing, both this year and last year, is to provide informational sessions outside of the regular school schedule for students in the equivalent of 6th grade, and to all levels of Junior High and High School here in my town. There is a woman who works at the maternity center who helps me with the sessions for the girls and a man from the health service who helps me with sessions for the boys. I tell the students something in my hard to understand French (poor vocabulary and strange American accent) and my friends repeat the ideas in French with a Burkinabè accent that many of the students can understand, and then again in Moore, the local language that children learn at home.

The discussion of sex is pretty much taboo in African culture and it is a hard topic for parents to bring up. I have invited parents to attend the sessions in the primary schools, partly so they will know what we are telling their children, and partly to help them open the conversation with their children at home. Unfortunately, not very many of the parents accepted the invitation.

Almost all of the students in the 6th grade in each primary school did come to the meetings and were very interested. In the junior high and high schools a smaller per cent of the students attended, but those who did come were very interested in the information we had to share and they had many questions. The basics of human biology are not part of the regulars school curriculum until 10thgrade, so many students were glad to learn about their own bodies and how girls get pregnant. Unplanned pregnancy is one of the reasons people cite for there being so many fewer girls in high school than boys. Helping girls understand the risks of early sexual activity is how this fits into Girls Education and Empowerment. But I feel it is also important for the boys to understand the risks and how to protect themselves and their partners if they do decide to be sexually active. It takes two to make a baby!

In keeping with Peace Corps policy, we did discuss abstinence before marriage and fidelity after marriage as the only sure way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy. Given the problem with unplanned pregnancies, however, it was also important to explain the importance of using protection if you do have sexual relations. I did a demonstration about how to use a condom, and showed students that, even though condoms are pretty strong, it is possible to break them. We also stressed the importance of putting used condoms in the latrine so the kids would not play with them and possibly contract HIV that way.

Joining the world fight against AIDS

Another AIDS awareness project I worked on here was suppose to take place on World AIDS Day, December 1. Because of delay in funding for the project I did not get the materials needed until February, and I wanted to do it when another AIDS activity was going on at the school. That activity never materialized so I decided it was time to just do my project. This idea was to get students to think about avoiding HIV/AIDS and to make a pledge to live a safe and healthy life style.

The project consisted of making a mural or sign about AIDS in a public place. To do this I talked to the principal of the school and he thought it was a good idea. We selected one wall of the library building. First we had to paint it white so that the slogan would be easy to read. I started to paint it myself, but boys came along and wanted to help. I ended up sitting in a chair in the shade, supervising. I felt a bit like Tom Sawyer, although I did not charge them for the privilege of helping.The wall did not look so great after one coat, so I invested in a second bucket of paint and another group of boys helped with that. Here is our nice white space on which to write the message.I asked one of the boys who had done a really good job with the white paint if he would help me paint the slogan. We agreed to meet at the school on Saturday morning at 8:00. The Librarian met me there and we got out all the supplies, but my boy did not show up. His friend was there and assured me he was coming, but that his parents had sent him to the market for something but he would be here right away. By 8:45 he had not appeared so I left his friend in charge of the paint and ladder and went to a wedding I had promised to attend. On Sunday I passed the school after church, not expecting to see anything on the wall, but this is what I saw.It is not exactly what I had in mind. I gave the boys a drawing with the bottom half of the wall blank, as a place where students would make a paint hand print to show they had pledged to live a healthy life style, but what was done was done and I was not about to start over. The slogan translates roughly to "The students of this High School say NO to HIV/AIDS

Last Tuesday afternoon, when there were no classes scheduled, we invited the students to take a pledge to live a healthy and safe life style and to protect themselves and their partners from HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. After taking the pledge students could put on a latex glove, put their hands in black paint, and put a hand print of the wall. To facilitate cleanup I bought a box of latex gloves and had students put one of their hand before dipping it in the paint

Here are the two boys who painted the slogan being the first to put their make on it. Here is is, after about 50 students had made their pledge.

After they put their hand print on the wall, they could try to answer a question about HIV/AIDS. The man who is the librarian at the school also works with a group for AIDS prevention and helped me with the question and answer part of the project. If a student just attempted to answer a question, the won a condom. If they gave the correct answer, they won three. I have received many comments about the wall from teachers at the school. I commented it was not exactly what I had in mind, but one teacher said, "It is good the way it is. It is clear that it was made by the students and not something an adult put up." I think he is right. Another commented that it would be a nice way to remember my time here in the town. I think that is the only material thing I have done that will cause people to remember me, except for my project to repair a village pump, which I will tell you about next time.

Closeof Service

Marchseems like a long way from August, when the group with which I joined the PeaceCorps ends its time in Burkina Faso. However we had our Close of Service (COS)conference the last week in March and I don’t think it was a bit too soon. After I attended the conference I understoodthe timing of this event. One reason is that there is a good deal of paper workyou have to do before you can leave the country, and it will be helpful to getdrafts of these reports, or even the actual reports, finished before you are inOuagadougou and there is a plane to catch the next day.

Oneof the things you have to write is a Description of Service (DOS), in which youdescribe all the things you did during your two years here that you would wanta future employer to know about. Thistakes the place of a letter of reference you might want to have to document theexperiences you had while serving in the Peace Corps. It is limited to two to threepages, so you really can’t tell everything, but you can highlight the importantthings.

Anotherthing you write is a final report that goes to a volunteer who follows you atyour site, so that person knows what you were working on and who the people arewho were working with you. You also dothree project write-ups, telling specifically about the three projects youthink others might learn from.

Wealso got an idea about the COS medical exam. They want to check us out and make sure we are not going home with atropical disease that the typical American doctor has never seen and might notrecognize.

Abouttwo thirds of the three day meeting was devoted to helping volunteers thinkabout what they would be doing after they finish their service here. I know a few who already have acceptances tograduate school or law school, but many do not have any clear idea of what theyare going to do when they get home. Someare planning to take a trip to some other countries before returning to the US,but others just want to go home. Many of those who are traveling also do notknow what they are going to do when they get home. That is the reason so much time was devotedto helping them with information about how to get a job.

Ourfacilitator for the meeting was a volunteer in Turkey many years ago and shehas been doing COS conferences in various countries from time to time. She had several excellent presentations thathelped volunteers think about how to present the work they have done here aspart of a resume or CV. I actuallylearned some things about writing resumes and CVs for potential employers thatI did not know. I am going to mention a couple of them here because those ofyou who talk to students who will be job hunting soon might find some ideashere. If you already know more aboutthis than I do, you can skip to the following part.

Resume writing ideasOverthe years I have seen a section in resumes that I always thought was a bitsilly, called “Objective.” Basically what everybody says is that they want toget a job like the one advertised, or a job that will use their talents. That seems redundant with the fact that theyare applying for the job. I was pleasedto hear that the latest thinking about the objectives section is that it is awaste of valuable space in the one page you have when you write your resume.

Ialso learned that there are two different ways in which to present your workhistory. In one, you list your jobschronologically and say what you did there, which is the way I always thoughtyou should do it . In the other you listyou skills and experiences, which I found much easier to read and understand.You also list your employers, but by pulling out the skills you have and thekinds of work you have done, you can save a lot of space and make clear why anemployer might want to hire you.

Anotherinteresting idea was the “elevator speech,” that is, a 30 second speech youwork up in which you say what you have done and the kind of job you are lookingfor. The facilitator had people practice this and many found it difficult todo. It seems like a handy thing to haveon the tip of your tongue when you are job hunting, because you never know whenyou might have a chance to talk briefly with someone who might know about theperfect position for you, if only they knew what you can do and the kind of jobyou would like.

Party TimeBecausethe COS conference is the last time the people in a given group will all betogether, the tradition is to have a party. We were lucky enough to be able to use the conference room at the hotelwhere Peace Corps had us staying so there was no problem with people gettingback to the hotel when they wanted to leave. I had an outfit made from material celebrating the 50thanniversary of Peace Corps. I had thought I would have something made for thefair in the fall, but I did not get the material in time so I decided to use itfor this event. Here is a picture. Thematerial is blue with white print about the anniversary. I had my friend Martine make the pants and“boubou” top. Then she sent it toKoudougou to have it decorated with the embroidery. After I had it made I learned that this partyis traditionally a costume party. Fortunately some people wore costumes and others dressed up. Here is a picture of some of the people inGirls Education and Empowerment section. Unfortunatelysome of the folks were not around when we took this, but you can see that manydressed up in costume, but not all. Notice the sign in the background says "Super Stage," That is because we were such a big group. although we like to think we did a super job.

Thisis my friend Wendy, another older volunteer, who came in costume. She dressed as the guy who stands in the street near the stop light andtries to sell you minutes for your cell phone while you wait for the light tochange. They actually do a briskbusiness. And yes, the Obama shirt was a good choice for this costume. It is a favorite clothing item here.

Moreabout clothing next time…..

Thesoap operas begin…(sorry, no pictures this time)

Awhile ago I wrote about Population Media Center (PMC) and their work using soapoperas to change behavior. This pastweek I had the privilege of observing their training session for the people whowill write the scripts for the two radio soap operas to be broadcast here inBurkina Faso. The 24 participants arepeople who have applied for the position of script writer. Based on theirexperience and credentials, they were chosen as the finalists and this week istheir training in the Sabido methodology that PMC uses to produce these serialdramas to change behavior. After four anda half days learning about the Sabido method they each created a 5 minute radioscript. This was the basis of the final decision about who the writers will be.

Theworkshop was facilitated by Kriss Barker and a number of people who worked onPMC soap operas in other African countries including Mali, Rwanda, and Senegal. Based on how well the writers haveunderstood the method, and how creative they are, PMC will select the four bestwriters who know Djula and the four best writers who know Moore, creating twoteams who will write the two different soap operas. As I have mentioned before, Burkina Faso hasmany different ethnic groups and each group has its own language. People want to preserve their ethnic identityso they speak that language at home and teach it to their children, leaving itto the schools to teach the kids French. Also, people who did not go to schoolor who did not succeed in school often only understand their local language. Thetarget audience for the soap operas is mostly the rural population, who do nothave access to TV and who may not have learned French in school.

Thefirst day introduced the general idea of soap operas to change behavior, butthe biggest part of the day was devoted to a report of the formative researchthat was conducted. The researchers usedseveral methods to get information. Probably the most important was the use of focus groups to find out whatpeople believe about certain issues. In selecting the participants they triedto get representatives of all sectors of society. What the people in the groupssaid was recorded and transcribed so the script writers will be able to lookover what people said and adopt the words and phrases real people used whentalking about the issues. This isimportant because it makes the characters more real and like the folks nextdoor.

Theopinions expressed by the participants in the focus groups were analyzed andbasic attitudes expressed were summarized to give a general picture of howpeople of various ages and both sexes feel about the various topics. Onequestion was, “what is the family?” People said that there is the linearfamily, those related to you by blood, but there is also the extended familythat includes relatives by marriage and distant cousins. Even close friends andneighbors may be considered to be brothers and sisters here and are thus partof the family in this sense. I have noticed this here, where someone willintroduce a good friend as his brother or sister. I sometimes ask later whether that was a“real” brother or sister and often find out it was a close friend, who is likea brother or sister to the person.

Inspite of modernization, traditional views of the roles of men and womenremain. People say that men are the“chief” or head of the family and make all the important decisions for thefamily. The role of women is to obeytheir husbands, have children, and take care of the household. They are alwaysexpected to be submissive. Because of their vulnerability, they need to beprotected by the man. The role of the children is to help with tasks and toobey their parents. Children are considered to be the wealth of the family. Theseattitudes were expressed by both men and women.

Theresearchers also did an analysis of the existing research on some of the majorissues and my favorite finding was the average number of children Burkina Fasowomen have, depending on their education. Women who have no schooling have an average of 6.5 children, womencompleting primary school have an average of 4.9 children, women who finishsecondary school have an average of 3.4 children and women who complete collegehave an average of 2.4 children. Educating women is one of the best ways ofslowing population growth.

TheSabido method uses melodrama as the basic theatrical form. In a melodrama there is a clearly bad person,and a clearly good person. The Sabidomethod adds a transitional character, one who struggles to make a change ofbehavior throughout the series. This person is influenced by the bad person tobehave in a bad way and by the good person to behave in a good way. This is the critical character, the one withwhom you want the listeners to identify and the person whose behavior you wantthem to adopt.

TheSabido method actually creates long running serial dramas rather than soapoperas. While soap operas can run for 20years, the serial dramas have a long but limited run, usually a year and a halfto two years. It has to last long enoughto let listeners see the change in the behavior of the transitional characterover time, and to see that character facing some of the difficulties in makinga change in behavior and how those problems can be overcome. That helps show people how to deal withproblems they are likely to experience if they also try to make a change intheir behavior.

Inthe Sabido method, you start with the theme, or problem you wish toaddress. This leads you to an idea aboutthe behavior you want to change, but you need to do the formative research toconfirm or change your focus. Forexample, a campaign aimed at married women to help them avoid AIDS will dolittle good if they are contracting it from husbands who become infected whileworking in the city or another country. The behavior you have to change is really that of the husbands and notthe wives, so your transitional character has to be a man and the program hasmen as the target audience.

Afteryou are sure of the behavior you want to change, you make a “values” grid,listing the values that would be held by the negative character and the valuesthat would be held by the positive character. Only after you have the valuesclearly in mind do you identify who the three important characters will be andbegin to make a plot line. This is completely backwards from the way mostscript writers approach writing. Theyusually start with a story idea and develop characters after they have thebasic plot. That is the reason for the week long training in this method.

Inreality, each serial drama has three or four different themes that move alongin parallel throughout the series. Sometimes they intersect, but most of thetime each plot line is separate. Each group of characters has to be introducedand the audience has to be hooked on the story before you get to the place inthe story where the behavior of the transitional character starts to change.The audience must recognize the good character as good, the bad character asbad, and find the transitional character to be likeable and realistic. The badcharacter must be really bad, but not despicable. That is, the bad character has to clearlybelieve that his or her behavior is not bad, but completely justified.

Oncethe plan for the show is made and the first few episodes are written, they aretested with audiences to see if people are reacting to the characters in theexpected way. Kriss told about a timewhen the writers had a negative character who was a man who beat his wife andspent a lot of money drinking. Thescript writers thought they had developed a character was clearly bad, but thetest audience thought his behavior was normal. This kind of testing to see thatthe program is working as it should is carried on throughout its production andthe characters and plot may need to be adjusted. That is why these writers will be hired fortwo years, although they might be able to produce scripts for the number ofepisodes needed in less time. They needto make adjustments as the show is broadcast, to be sure it has the greatesteffect possible.

Becausethe writers selected for these jobs will have employment for two years, I amsure the competition will be keen. I waswondering if this competition among the potential writers would result inhostility between them, but as far as I can see folks get along well. I don’tknow who I would hope to get the jobs. Ilike them all. It has been a realpleasure to meet so many bright and talented people all in the same place! Thisis, of course, just a summary of the highlights of the training, but I found itfascinating and was grateful for the chance to see the training done.

Bronze

One of the materials with which Burkinabè artists work is bronze. I checked out what bronze is supposed to be and it seems the term is used for any of a number of combinations of copper with other metals. Originally I think it meant copper and tin, but there are a number of other combinations that are still referred to as bronze. There are several streets in Ouagadougou where you find collections of shops selling things made from bronze, and bronze figures of various types are found in the tourist gift shops around the country.

I had a chance to follow the making of a bronze figure from start to finish. In this example, the artist, Mathias Kaboré, began by softening a lump of bees’ wax over a charcoal fire. Then he formed a model of a little elephant. The next step was to make a mold into which the bronze would be poured. To do this he mixed clay and donkey dung. Then he covered the wax model with the clay mixture. Here is the model after several layers of clay have been added. After the clay has dried for several days, he and some of the other artisans built a small fire and put some molds they had made, including the little elephant, close to the coals. A while later they poured out into a can the wax that had been the model, so it could be used again. This method is called the lost wax method, because you lose the wax before you put the metal into the mold.While the molds were heating, Matthew put some figures that had been cast that did not turn out right, some copper wire, and even an old door handle into a clay pot.This hole is their forge, the place where they melt the metalThey filled the hole part way with charcoal, threw in some embers from the fire, and added the pot. Then they covered all of it with more charcoal.To get it hot, one of the fellows would sit in the shade of a trap and turn an old bicycle wheel. The belt around the wheel goes around a small axel in a fan that blows air into the forge.

They claim the temperature in the forge reaches 1000 degrees Celsius. I didn’t have any way to check the temperature, but it sure was hot.While the various metals were melting together in the forge, they built up a fire over and around the molds. This was to get them hot so that they would not crack when the hot metal was poured into them. Finally the metal was all melted together, and the clay pot was removed from the forge. They used a ladle to skim off the impurities like little pieces of charcoal, and them ladled the hot metal into the molds.After only a short time (about 15 minutes), they broke off the clay to reveal the metal figures.I had to go back another day to see the final step. This consists of scraping off any remaining clay and polishing the figure to a shine with a file as this artisan is doing to a lion he made. Here is the little elephant that emerged from that clay mold, after it was polished.Now let me introduce the men who showed me how this is done, posing with some of their creations. I have listed the e-mail addresses of the two who gave them to me, in case anyone is interested in contacting them.

Mathias Kaboré, KAMAKA46@YAHOO.FR

Paul Zongo

Jean Baptiste Balima Jean.Balima@yahoo.frSoumaida Kièmtoré

Nassirou KièmtoréOther Bronze Methods

There is a slight variation on this theme, if you want to make a lot of things that are very similar. You begin as Mathias did, above, but instead of covering your wax figure with clay, you cover it with plaster of Paris. Then, you cut through the mold to remove the wax figure.

Now you have a mold you can use over and over to make wax figures that you cover with clay, dry, bake out the wax, and fill with bronze, as you saw in my story above. The virtue is that you do not have to model the figure each time.

From Trash to Treasures

I have commented before on the problem of trash here. As I have pointed out, in the old days, anything you didn’t want could be tossed on the ground and, after a few months, it would biodegrade and become dirt. With the introduction of plastic bags, along with plastic and metal containers, trash has become a problem, because these things do not biodegrade. Because of the custom of just throwing trash on the ground or over the wall of your courtyard, and the lack of any organized rubbish disposal, things can get pretty ugly.

One of the big contributors to the trash problem is the plastic bags merchants put things in when you make a purchase. In Bobo there is a women’s organization that uses discarded plastic bags to make things.

First they go out and collect them from the streets and wash them. Then they cut them into narrow strips, twist the plastic so it is quite thin, and then weave it between black threads so it looks like this material the woman is cutting. Then they sew pieces together to create useful things..

Here is their display room where you can see the many types of purses and bags they created from this material. Once when I went there, there was even a jacket made from these recycled bags. I am sorry that I did not take its picture! Many of the things I will show you here and in future blogs about arts and crafts were on display, and being made, at a place in the capital, Ouagadougou, called the Artisan Village. People have workshops here where you can see them making their products, and, of course, buy things. Here is a man making wooden boxes that he will cover with leather from a camel.

The people who make this are originally from the desert regions of Burkina Faso and Mali. Here are just a few of the kinds of boxes they make. Another craft is making things from horns of various animals.I believe these are from cattle.

Toys and other useful objects from Trash

Some of the things we saw used bottle caps to make various items. How would you like earrings made from the bottle caps of your favorite beverage? (Shades of Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter?) Or maybe a wastebasket, lamp or magazine rack decorated with bottle tops? People also use discarded cans to created models of things like motorcycles, bicycles and cameras.

Batik Making

I suspect you have seen batiks, and perhaps have even make them in art classes. Batik wall hangings are very common tourist items and I like them a lot. I have several of them decorating my house as you may have seen in earlier blogs. Here is how you make them. You sketch out the design you want to make and cover most of it with wax. You put the material in dye, and the parts that were not protected with wax pick up the color of the dye. Here are some batiks in the making, drying after being in the red dye.

When your work is dry, you iron out all the wax and cover all but the areas you want to be the next color with a new coat of wax. Here a man is protecting the sky (that he is painting black) in the background from the dye he is going to put the cloth in next. Some things in the picture may get several layers of dye to make a darker color.One of the features of the batik process is that, when you put the material into the dye, the wax tends to crack along the fold lines, resulting in tiny lines in the parts that have been covered with wax throughout the dying, as you can see in this close-up picture. It is one of the signatures of the batik process. After several repetitions of this process, you have the finished product. Here are several examples, shown by their creators.

First, a note about Camp G2LOW

Thanks to all of you who have generously contributed to support the Leo Camp G2LOW. Our camp has reached our fund raising goal, but two of the other camps are still in need of support. If you were thinking about making a contribution, please consider donating to Camp Fafa where the Burkinabè have taken the lead in planning the camp. They do not have as many Peace Corps volunteers helping with fundraising from America. They have same purpose, to give a summer camp experience, leadership training, and education for a healthy life style to Burkinabè youth and any help will be appreciated.

Another musical adventure

Last Sunday my friend Nadine, one of the English teachers at the Lycée, told me that there was to be a musical performance that evening at the one “night club” in my little town, called Point Jeune. It was the same place where the wedding reception was held I told you about in an earlier blog. She invited me to go with her. We arrived at 7:30 for the 8:00 performance, not being sure whether there would be a big crowd or not. There was not. In fact, when we arrived, they told us that the poster advertising the event had been printed wrong and that the concert was to start at 9:00, not 8:00. Rather than go home we went inside to have a Fanta and wait. They had a big sound system blasting popular African dance music. There were 5 or 6 boys about 10-12 years old dancing on the platform that serves as a stage. They were interesting to watch. One of them was particularly good and a man who had also believed the advertisement, and was there early, watched them for a while and then tipped the one boy who was particularly good, asking him to dance some more. One of the basic steps seemed to be shifting weight from toes to heels and back again, while turning the feet, thus moving sideways. Another involved taking a stance with feet wide apart and then moving the knees toward and away from each other. Now that I have described them, I think they are a bit similar to some of the moves in American dances from the 1920s, but definitely with an African twist. Maybe that is where the Charleston came from. The boy who was especially good seemed to know all the selections being played and seemed to have routines worked out for each one, with hand gestures, pointing up or out, or touching the floor, punctuating the dance when there was an appropriate place in the music. The music was blasting so loud that I stuffed kleenx into my ears to protect them a bit. I wish I had thought to take my ear plugs! It seemed that each boy was dancing for himself and paid no attention to what the others were doing.

About 8:30 a rather large group of French people arrived en mass. I recognized a couple of the men as folks I had run into at the Lycée on Thursday. They had been handing out little slips of pink paper on which were a couple of coffins with people in them. I was curious what it was all about so I introduced myself to them and asked them about it. They said they were advertising a movie about AIDS that would be shown at Point Jeune that evening. There would be one in French, followed by the same one in Moore, the local language. I had not realized that they had a group of young people with them. It turned out that the whole reason for the musical performer giving a concert was because this was the group’s last night in Burkina Faso after spending some time here going around the country presenting their AIDS program. The young people immediately took over the platform for dancing and the young local boys were shooed out by the manager. I don’t think they had paid admission and the manager had allowed them to come in to dance until the program got started.

The young French students, who looked to be late high school or early college age, danced in what I expect was a style Americans would recognize. Several times they formed a loose circle and one by one people would go into the middle and do some move of their choice. Others would then imitate that movement or step. For other selections they seemed to know a particular set of movements to go with the song and everybody did the same thing (a bit like line dancing). One song seemed to be something about elephants, and several of the young people waved an arm in front of their faces, like elephant trunks, each time that word came up in the song, and then joined hands in a line and ran in a circle. Eventually the talked to the “disk jockey” who was selecting the music from a computer, and got him to play “It's Time for Africa,” a song you may have heard in the US. They had a whole dance routine worked out that was pretty impressive. The contrast between the “each boy for himself” style of the Burkinabè and the group interaction was interesting. It might be age, but I am inclined to think it is cultural. Or maybe it was because these young people were all friends who had just shared a big adventure and they were having a last fling before going home.

About 9:30 the management folks seemed to be getting ready to present the artist, but, instead, a Burkinabè and two of the boys in the French group took the stage, the Burkinabè with the African instrument called a kora, and the French boys with a violin and a clarinet. It was clear that the man had been working with them to try to find a way they could play together.

After that, the French students took over the microphone, thanking the adults who had been with them on the trip and the manager of Point Jeune, and then they did their “It's Time for Africa” routine again. It was quite good, but the video I made of it did not come out. Not enough light.

After some more adjustment of equipment, the featured performer finally took the stage about 10:15. He played an amplified acoustical guitar and I could remove my improvised ear plugs and actually enjoy the music. He had a great singing voice and played very well, accompanying himself on all his numbers, although he occasionally had the computer guy play some pre-recorded backup tracks. He did one number with the kora player, but otherwise it was a solo act. He sang in French until the French group left, because they had to be in Ouaga by 7 the next morning to get their plane, and then he switched to Moore. I guess the lyrics in Moore were pretty amusing because most of the audience laughed and seemed to be enjoying the songs. While he sung in French and Moore and I could not understand the words, the rhythm and basic style reminded me of 1960’s folk music. He taught a call and response chorus to one of his songs to get the audience involved and encouraged people to sing along or clap with the music. About 11:30 Nadine and I made our exit because I had to be at the Lycée for a 7:00 class. I was sorry they had not started the program a bit earlier because I really enjoyed his performance. All in all it was an interesting evening and a different kind of Burkinabè music than I had heard before.

International Women’s Day

Did you know that March 8 is International Women’s Day? I did not, until I came to Burkina Faso. Here it is a national holiday, with no school and with celebrations all over the country. Last year our local festivities were canceled because of the civil unrest you may have heard about in the news. This year I did get to go to see what happens at a Women’s Day celebration.

Pagnes for the eventFirst I should explain that there is a custom here for people here who want to show that they are “together” at a big event to wear clothes made from the same material. As I have mentioned, you buy cloth in 2 yard lengths of 45 inch material referred to as a pagne. You use the same word to talk about the pattern on the material. For example, here is a picture I took at a funeral I attended where many of the members of the deceased’s family wore clothes made from the same material—all those folks standing together wearing clothes made from the same pagne. I should mention that the woman actually died in January 2010 and the funeral was held in February 2012. That is a normal length of time between the internment and the funeral mass with the dedication of the tomb, which you see here.

Every year there is a theme for Women’s Day. In 2010 it was literacy for women who did not learn to read in school. There are classes here during the dry season where people can learn to read in their local language. People in my region learn to read Moore, and people in other parts of the country are taught to read Djula, Lobi, or one of the many other languages. It is easier to learn to read a language you already know than to learn a new language (French) and how to read at the same time. Here is the pagne for 2010. It was intended to promote literacy training for women. The slogan around the circle would translate “women’s literacy and informal education.”

Last year the theme was maternal health and lowering the maternal mortality rate. Here is the pagne, and the slogan means “give life without dying.”

Here is this year’s pagne, which has the same theme, but has a different design for the pagne.

I had an outfit (skirt and blouse) made from the pagne by my neighbor Martine, Prosper’s wife. She is a seamstress and I will be telling you more about dressmaking here in another blog.

About the Celebration

We arrived about 9:00 AM because that was supposed to be the time the event would start. After living here for nearly two years I was not surprised that they were not ready to start then. I was ushered to a metal chair in a makeshift reviewing area that had shade provided by black plastic drop clothes tied to branches put into holes dug in the ground. I was happy for the shade as the day got hotter. In the front row was someone’s living room furniture, to provide nicer seating for the dignitaries.

About 9:30 the man who ran the sound system got it set up and a group of girls in school uniforms who were going to march in the event arrived. The sound man played typical African dance music, and people hung around the area, but it was clear things were not about to start. At 10:00 the music changed to marching music and I thought the program would start soon. Silly me! After about 10 minutes the music changed back to the dance music. At 11:00 there was a beeping of horns and a motorcade of several cars and a minibus arrived, lead by 15 or 20 motor cycles. At the sound of the horns, people gathered around the area where things would be happening. A group of people got out of the vehicles and walked to the comfortable seating area. Above, you see them settled in their places. You can see that most of the women are in the pagne, but the man in gold, the mayor of the nearest big town, was not.

The Woman's Day Program

With the important people in place, things finally got underway. The master of ceremonies was wearing a shirt of this year's pagne. He greeted everyone in French and explained the program for the day, and then repeated everything in Moore so most folks could understand. They used an umbrella to provide shade for the speakers.

After the welcome and announcement of the program, the parade got underway. There were a couple of groups of young girls, students at the elementary schools. They appeared to have decided to wear pagne skirts made from hand woven traditional cloth and tops made from the red, white, and blue material that is the Burkina Faso Independence Day pagne.

Next came the high school girls wearing their school uniform skirts and blue t-shirts that I think had the name of the school on them.



After them came the women’s groups. Some of the women carried the gifts to present to the dignitaries. Here they are making the presentation, with other members of their group in the background.



This was followed by several speeches. This is the Imam of the town where the celebration was held, giving an opening prayer. Notice the two young women with the blue skirts (also called pagnes).

This is the president of the women’s association, saying her bit. Notice the woman in green holding the recording device in front of them as they were talking. She is one of the broadcasters from my local radio station and I am sure the speeches will be rebroadcast so everyone who was not there can listen to them.

There were several other speakers, and as each speaker rose to talk, two young women dressed in the traditional woven pagnes marched out to the center of the space with them. This thing of having folks, usually beautiful young women, escort the important people is very traditional here. Getting to be an escort is a great honor. To share the responsibility, there were two pairs of women who took turns doing the escorting. Here is the other pair, with the MC.

All four wore the same very fancy hair dos. I took a picture of their hair because I was impressed with how it was fixed.



The big event was a skit illustrating the theme of the year. It was all in Moore, but I could guess what most of it was about from the action. It featured a woman who went to the maternity center for a pre natal checkup. The midwife asked her to bring her husband for a consultation, but he refused to go and told her she could not go there again. When she gave birth at home she had a problem and her mother-in-law helped her get to the maternity center. The problem was too serious for the midwife to handle and they called for an ambulance to take the woman to a hospital. It was too late, and she died. The moral of the story was quite clear.

After a few more speeches I was invited to join the other people who had been seated on chairs and in the shade to have lunch at a nearby school. I thought I would not know anyone there, but I met the secretary at the Lycée, and sat with her. I also saw the principal of the school, the chief of a nearby village with whom I worked to get the village pump repaired, whom you can see below.

I also saw the assistant chief of police,(on the left in the picture) who came to me last year for information on farming and whom I was able to help with some information and tree seeds from Peace Corps. The other officer is the head of the Military Police in my town, who lets me leave my bicycle at the police station near the bus stop when I am traveling to a place where I do not want to have it with me.

There was to be a soccer match in the afternoon, but I decided I had seen the important event for Women’s Day and headed home. I understand that the national celebration was on TV and folks could see the big event from home, if they happened to have a TV set.

Local Dance TroupeWhen I left for Burkina Faso many of you assumed I would end up playing African music and bring back African instruments to play with Mud in Yer Eye when I returned. In my village, the only musical instruments seem to be rhythm instruments. The first week I was here I was invited to a celebration of the success of an onion storage project. A gardening group in my village had built a place to store and preserve onions until a time when there were not so many for sale by others. They were telling other folks about how they did the project and how much more they were able to earn by waiting until there was less supply and more demand. For entertainment they had a dance troupe with male musicians who sang and played drums. The men who danced held and shook a kind of instrument that seemed to represent the dabas with which you cultivate the ground. It consisted of two gourds that had pebbles or shells or something inside to make a rattling sound.

The women danced in a circle, bending at the waist and waving their heads and arms back and forth. This may have represented planting and harvesting, but I am not sure.

Wedding Dances

The next place I heard music and saw dancing was at the church after the wedding of the daughter of my homologue. Here the women again danced in a circle, while a couple of women beat drums in the middle of the group and everyone sang to provide the music.

At the reception for this wedding, in my homologue's courtyard, the music was provided by improvised drums (the big blue barrel and the small blue jerry can) and a pot lid that made a sound a bit like a triangle or symbol.

Again, people danced in a circle, with lots of head, shoulder and hip shaking. Everyone was singing some traditional song while the folks were dancing. The bride, in the purple dress, joined in the dance, although the groom was nowhere to be seen.

At another wedding this girl played the traditional rhythm instrument made of a gourd and shells. Here she is holding it on her head to show off the design for me, but you play it by tossing it up in the air and the shells make a very loud noise when you catch it and the shells hit the gourd. Voices again provided the melody.



Nightclubs

In Bobo we went to a nightclub hoping to hear some traditional music. We did heard songs sung in the local language, but some of the instruments were modern ones, including a keyboard and electric guitars.

You can see a modern drum set in the picture below, behind this guy playing the electronic keyboard, but this group was not using it.



The rhythm was provided by a large gourd this guy played as a drum. He pounded it with his closed fists, or tapped on it with wood pieces attached to his fingers so he could make a variety of sounds.

We finally did find some traditional music, on New Year’s Eve, in Ouaga. We had dinner and heard a band play traditional music using a balaphone, a gourd drum, some stringed instruments and flutes. It looked like the man with the flute had a whole bag of them, like our harmonica players in Mud, one for each key that might be used. Here is a very brief snatch of the music. It took 3 hours for me to upload it!

The best musical encounter, however, was at the music museum on Ouaga. After Elizabeth and I took the half hour guided tour of the 15 or so drums and the balaphone played by a famous musician (no photos allowed), our guide asked if we would like to hear some live music. Here are the musicians who did the drumming.

For one number, this man played the balaphone. The balaphone would be a fun instrument to learn to play, but it would never work with western music. It is tuned to a five tone scale. The interesting thing about the tuning is that every note harmonizes with every other note, at least according to Wikipedia.

The woman in yellow danced to a couple of numbers and then invited us to dance. Elizabeth used my Flip camera and got a bit of me doing the traditional Moore “bump” dance with the woman. I hope the videos plays smoothly for you. Here I can get only about 3 seconds at a time.

Gas Stations

Being a tourist here is not quite like being a tourist in the states. For example, after a visit to my village, we needed to refill the tank with diesel fuel. The one gas station in my village was out of it. We hoped we would be able to get to the next village large enough to have a gas station. We found a place along the way that did have diesel fuel, but the attendant had to pump the gas by hand. I don’t think I have even seen anything like this before.

Speaking of gas, one of the things you see all along the road are “gas stations” that consist of whisky bottles filled with a liter of gas for motor cycles. When I first saw these I thought the contents really were whisky and I was surprised that it would be sold from a stand like this. Our driver said he would not trust the gas from places like this to put in a car, but people with motos use it all the time.

What with all the terrible roads we drove on, I was not too surprised when we got a flat tire. Here there is no AAA to call to come to the rescue and I was glad we had a good spare tire. We had to take time out to look for a replacement. We stopped at several villages along the road before we found a place that had the right sized tire and we were keeping our fingers crossed that we would not end up with another flat before we found one. Luckily this was our only tire disaster.

Another challenge for the traveler is avoiding the animals that may decide to cross the road in front of you. As in the American west and England, the animals have the right of way. Here are a few we had to avoid:

Cattle Pigs

Pentards

I have always been a bit surprised to see signs that say STOP, regardless of the language of the country. This sign, however, takes the cake. Is it a stop sign or a yield sign?



We stayed in a variety of places, with very different levels of accommodation. The most luxurious was the home of the Country Director, where Dawn and her family, and later Elizabeth, were generously given three nights in very comfortable beds, with hot water, fans, and even access to air conditioning, although they did not need it at that time of the year. When we stayed at the Ranch with the elephants, we stayed in these small cottages that do have running water, but it is whatever temperature it happens to be in the water tower.

There we had electricity only between 6 and 10 at night. Elizabeth took this picture of me (with her flash) so you can see how we managed to carry on even when the power went off at 10 or in the morning before the sun came up. I have the cloth over my shoulders because it was quite chilly.



Where Elizabeth and I stayed in Banfora, I was able to access the internet with my cell phone connection from our room, but it was very slow. In the morning I saw the sign at the registration desk saying (in French) there is WIFI here. Elizabeth was happy to get on high speed internet to take care of a few things at JCU.

In Bobo, with the family, we stayed in a very nice small family place that was something like a motel, but not on a main street. There some of the rooms had hot water, but not others. We had one of each kind. As you can imagine, the shower in the room with hot water was used by all of us. The courtyard was beautiful, and a really nice place to hang out and enjoy the lovely setting.

When I was traveling with Elizabeth we stayed at a very nice hotel in Bobo. Here she is, by the swimming pool. It was a bit cool for a dip this time of year, but in the hot season I am sure it would be much appreciated.

While we were traveling in a 4X4, we got much the same treatment as the folks in this bus every time we stopped at a toll booth or near a bus stop. Women spend the day waiting for the next bus or car to stop. They run to the bus, holding up whatever they have to sell: onions, apples, water, bread, eggs, or sweet treats made from sesame seeds and honey. I am surprised many of them are not injured by passing vehicles. I am also surprised that they usually get paid for what they pass through the window.

One of the most eye-catching things they sell are bunches of carrots. They scrape off the skins and keep them moist so they are bright orange and ready to eat.

One final thing I found odd about driving on the two lane highways here is the use of turn signals. Roads, of course, have hills and curves, and some vehicles go faster than others. When a faster one comes up behind a slower one, it is not always clear whether it is safe to pass. On some roads there are lines between the two sides of the road, dashed when it is safe to pass and solid when it is not. People do not always respect these signs, especially when the vehicle ahead is going very slowly. In order to signal a person overtaking you that it is or is not safe to pass you put on your right turn signal if it is safe and your left turn signal if it is not safe. That makes a kind of sense, because if the vehicle ahead of you is signaling a left turn, you would not want to pass. However this has been extended to putting on the left turn signal when you are approaching an oncoming vehicle. At first I thought it was a bit odd, because when you see this, it looks like they are about to turn in front of you. Our driver explained that people do it so that the oncoming drivers know that you have seen them and you are not asleep at the wheel. An interesting custom!

In and around Bobo

Visits this year from my daughter Dawn and her family and from my colleague from John Carroll University, Elizabeth Swenson, gave me a chance to see some tourist sites I would not otherwise have visited.

Koro

I have written about Tiebele, the village of painted houses. Another village that is opened to tourists is the village of Koro, located on a high plateau near Bobo-Dioulasso. This is a picture of the slope up to the village.

This is an example of how you manage to make a foundation for a house on the side of the hill. I guess you just hope there are no earthquakes!

We did see a few people who appear to be living here, although many of the houses seemed to be vacant, like this one.

Our guide told us many of the people live down on the plain most of the year, especially during the growing season, and return to the village only for ceremonies and special events like weddings and funerals. Life can’t be easy here. We passed these women carrying water up the hill as we were leaving. Can you imagine doing this several times a day to have water for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, and bathing?



One of the things they pointed out to us was the place where the men meet to discuss problems. Only men are supposed to enter this area, so here is a picture of my son-in-law, Jay, sitting in the place reserved for men. This structure is very similar to the one Janet and I saw in Mali, in the Dogon county, when I visited her there in 1984.

Here is a view over the rooftops of the village to the plain below. You can see the village is a long way up, which would make it easy to defend

There were fetishes here, similar to those we saw at Tiebele. We were told this one at Koro was put up by someone who was hoping for twins.

The other village tourists can visit is in the heart of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. It is referred to as the Old City and, as with the other places, you can visit it if you pay a mille (about $2) per person, and tip your guide at the end of the visit. The money helps with civic projects, we were told, and it is the way the guides make their living. Unlike Koro, it was clear that there were lots of people living here. This is a typical street in the old city, with women at work.

There were also lots of kids around.

One of the things we were shown was a big fetish site.

Here is a close up of the chicken feathers from someone’s sacrifice here.

This is the place the men of the old city meet to resolve problems. Our guide said they do not turn malefactors over to the city police but discipline them themselves. Penalties can include fines or beatings.

This is the oldest house in the old city, supposed to date from the 11th century. They must refresh the coating pretty often to preserve it.

Because this is a tourist attraction, along the way the guide took us to several places where we could buy souvenirs. At the first place there were a couple of folks playing traditional instruments and singing songs in the local language. Here you could buy instruments, carvings, and CDs of the group that was playing there.

Another stop was at the black smiths’.

They were making figures out of the iron. Nice, light little souvenirs to take home with you. They are only about 5 of 6 inches tall.

We also visited a place that sold bags and purses, and one where people were making figures out of bronze, but I will tell you about that in a future blog on arts and crafts in Burkina Faso.

Another tourist attraction is the grand mosque. Here is a view from the entrance to the old city that is right across the street from it.

When I was traveling with the Garrett-Larsens we took a tour of the mosque. The interior was mostly pillars holding up the roof and I don’t have a good picture of it. There is not a large, open area such as you see in churches, but just corridors between the pillars. We went up on the roof where you could see something of the construction.The pieces of wood sticking out of the walls are both decorative and useful for repainting.

There is a loud speaker that broadcasts the call to prayer five times a day (or more). You can see it toward the top of this spire in the picture below. In my village there is a wake-up call broadcast at 4:30 every morning sofolks can be up and be ready to pray at 5:00. No need for an alarm clock! I can’t understand anything that is said, of course, because it is all in Arabic.

Another thing we liked in Bobo were the decorations in the middle of their traffic circles. This one is in honor of women.

This one lighted up at night, with the top part green. the bottom part red, and a yellow star in the middle, like the Burkina Faso flag. To us, it looked like a Christmas decoration. It looks pretty cool as a crystal pyramid, too.

In Ouaga we visited the national museum, no photos were permitted inside, but here are a couple of the buildings.

We also visited the music museums in Bobo and in Ouaga, but I will tell you more about that in a later blog on music in Burkina Faso.

The Sindou Peaks

With my daughter Dawn and her family I visited an interesting natural area called the Sindou Peaks. These reminded us of Bryce and Zion canyons in the American southwest. The tall rock spires just seem to rise out of the flat plane.



We took a guided walk through part of them. Our guide told us that, in olden times, when there were wars between ethnic groups, one group made their home on the plateau among the rocks because it was easy to defend. Since the end of ethnic rivalries people no longer live here, but the area has been used as the setting for a number of African films, so if the rocks look familiar, you may have seen them on the big screen.



Here is the obligatory group photo, taken by our guide. Our driver, Hamadou, is on the left, and Prosper is hunkered down between me and Jay. Notice how Dawn and Jay stood on a rock to be taller than Jesse? He is now over 6 feet tall.



The climb up was not too bad, because we followed a path that was cut by the movie production company, but getting down was interesting. It would be easy to push people back who were trying to scale the rocks here.



Banfora

One of the things you see around Banfora, in the southwest, are lots of these palm trees. The sap is used to make palm wine. All you have to do is tap the tree, like you tap a maple syrup tree. When you get the sap, you let it sit for a few days and you have a tasty alcoholic beverage. The longer you let it sit, the stronger it gets, I have been told.



Another sight is the sugar cane fields. They are watered with the kind of irrigation system you might see in the US.



When I went back to Banfora with my friend Elizabeth, we invited a married couple, who are volunteers in the area, to come to town for dinner. Their site is about 15 kilometers out of town so we went out to pick them up in our 4X4. It was quite the adventure. The road was very rutted and full of dips and holes. The worst place was where a bridge was deteriorating. It was not safe to cross and, because it is just going over a dry stream bed in this dry season, cars now go off the road, down the bank, and up the other side.

It seemed steeper from the inside of the car, but this looks bad enough! It was even scarier when we took them home after dark.



The Cascades

The next day we went to see another tourist attraction, referred to here as the cascades. With the terrible roads it is surprising anyone goes there, but there were folks waiting near the falls to try to sell us souvenirs and cold drinks. Here are the falls.



I hiked up a trail that goes to the first of three levels. The first part had man-made steps.



In some places, you just scramble up the rocks.



Some government project built these picnic shelters here. I understand groups do sometimes climb the rocks and have picnics here.

The falls are said to be spectacular in the rainy season, but then tourists can’t get there very earily because the roads are even worse than they are now. I was also told the falls were bigger before the sugar company started taking water from the stream above the falls. Here is the view from the first level of the cascade, out across the lower lying lands.



The hippos that live in a lake near Banfora, that I showed in the earlier blog about animals, were not as cooperative when Elizabeth was with me. This is all we saw of them, literally eyes, noses, and ears.

The guide tried to make it up to us by making these necklaces from water lilies he picked.

More on our travels next time….

If you want to know the names of those mystery birds in the last blog, check it out again. I received lots of suggestions and I think they are now all properly labeled.



Tiebele

One of the tourist sites I was able to visit while I was traveling with my friend from John Carroll, Elizabeth Swenson, was a village that is famous for the way folks there paint their houses. Everywhere else in the country traditional houses are made of mud brick, like this one that is currently under construction in my village.

After it is finished, the people will cover the walls with clay to form a protective coating so the mud does not wash away in the rainy season, so it looks like this.

Sometimes people mix concrete with the mud and for concrete blocks, like this.

Either kind of construction can then be covered with mud and concrete mixed together for a longer lasting covering. In either case, the walls as usually left the color of the material with which it was constructed. What makes Tiebele different is the designs the women paint on the houses. The place that is the official tourist site is the compound of the village chief. I have no idea how many people live here, but I would guess over 100. Here is the entry to the compound.

When you walk through the compound you can see that there really are people who live here and it is not just to show to tourists. Actually there are probably not enough tourists who find their way to this town to keep up a place just for show.

Many of the houses are round, like these.

This is the one house that is set up to show tourists. This low rounded door is a defensive measure. Through it you can see another low wall. To get into the house you have to duck down crawl in. Then you have to crawl over the little wall. That would make it hard to surprise people in the house. Someone would be able to club you on the head before you could get in and do any damage to the residents.

In the house we were allowed to visit there were three round rooms. In this one you could cook in the rainy season or when the wind was too strong to cook outside. The gourds hanging on the wall above the place to build a fire would act as cups and bowls to eat out of.

The doors to get from room to room were similar to the one to enter the house, except there was not the extra barrier to crawl over.

Here is the door to another round house. Notice the column by the door with the white stuff on top. That is a fetish, a place where people can make sacrifices if they are asking the powers in the traditional religion to do something, like make it rain, or assure the harvest is good.

No all the houses are round, as you can see in this picture. Notice the snake made of clay that is part of the decoration on the one straight ahead here.

One of the women was making local beer from sorghum. The beer in my village is yellow, but this beer would be red, because of the kind of grain that was used to make it.

The decoration of the walls is a job for the women. They use the feathers of the pentards to do the painting.

All of the designs have some meaning, which our guide explained to us. Some stand for particular animals, and he told us that the mark that looks a bit like a wagon wheel is a beauty mark that you might find as a scar on the cheek of a village woman. Traditionally people here cut babies faces with particular scar patterns which helped identify the ethnic group to which a person belonged. For example, if I see a man with three small lines by his eyes, as with my friend Prosper, I know that that man is a Mossi and will understand Moore.

As our guide said, facial scaring was a kind of identity card in the traditional culture. This kind of scarification is not practiced as much these days as it was in the past. You do sometimes see marks on babies’ faces, but usually it is a simply X on a cheek. A Peace Corps volunteer friend told me that many people believe that if the baby is flawless, the spirits may want the baby and it will die. Putting a scar on the face assures that the baby has a flaw and that may protect it.

BIRDS!!!



While we were at Ranch Nazinga we saw lots of birds. We saw them at many other places as well. Most of these pictures were taken by my grandson, Jesse, who has a great eye for nature and a pretty good camera. I suspect some of you bird watchers will have an idea of what these birds are. I found a couple of them in a bird book and put their names in the captions, but I could be wrong and am open to suggestions. Others are, for the moment, nameless. I will update the names as folks tell me what they really are.

First, here is one of my favorites, because of the bright colors. I think it is a sunbird, although the colors do not match the picture in the little bird book I have here. It also resembles a group of birds called bee catchers.

Sun birdIt was fun to watch it swoop down off the branch, grabbed a bug, and returned to the same perch.

Sunbird in flight

They were quite common at the ranch, as you can see from the tree, below, that is covered with them. Yes, those are birds, not leaves on the branches!

A tree full of sunbirds They have nests in a clay bank, kind of like swallows in the states.

Sun bird homes This is some kind of hornbill, but I don’t know which one.

Here are a couple of African grey hornbills (I think) hanging out together.

This is an African jacana.

African jacana

This amazing bird is a kingfisher. We saw it hang in the air above the lake, almost the way a humming bird can stay in the same place above a flower. Then it suddenly dived straight down into the water and flew off with a fish.

Giant Kingfisher

I think these are cattle egrets. They follow the cows and eat the bugs they stir up.

Cattle egrets

I think this is a Goliath heron

Goliath heronThe coloring here is similar to a red cheeked Cordon-Bleu, but the head is not quite the same. Suggestions?

Cordon-Blue? Maybe..They call this bird a pentard. We call them guinea fowl. I think they have about the ugliest face of any bird I have seen, but they sure are good to eat. You know that this one is domesticated, because of the knob on top of its head. The wild ones look just like it except for the knob.

As everywhere in the world, there is a need for carrion eaters, like the vultures (of whatever their real name might be here). These were at the ranch, but I have also seen them on the road, disposing of road kill.

Vultures?You may have noticed this big pile of straw in the branches of this tree in the middle of the lake in the elephant pictures. It is actually a bird nest. If you look carefully near the bottom of the nest you can see a hole through which the birds enter the nest. We saw a couple of them go in and out. The bird is called a hammerkop.

Hammerkop

Now it's time to play "name that bird." Let me know if you recognize any of them. I will move them to the identified section when I have names for them.

Name that bird 1

Name that bird 2

Name that bird 3

Name that bird 4

Name that bird 5

All suggestions are welcome!

In a previous post I told you about the elephants at Ranch Nazinga There were lots of other animals there and here are a few pictures of them. While we were out riding around we stopped by one of the dams and saw this crocodile lounging on a sand bar.

Crocodile at Ranch NazingaWe did not get up close and personal with this guy like we did with the sacred crocodiles of Sabou, which we visited later in our trip.

Dawn's family and one of the sacred crocodiles of SabouFrom the observatory by the lake we saw a troop of baboons that came down to get a drink and play in the water.Baboons

More baboons We also saw these wild boars (AKA wort hogs).

Wort HogsThere were a number of different kinds of antelope. I only have good pictures of two kinds

Bush buckBush buck baby

Water buck

Water buckThere were also monkeys. There were some that hung out in the trees.

Monkey in tree

Monkey jumping

There were others that came right up to the dining room windows, looking for a hand out, I suppose.

Monkey at the dining roomNot all the animals were big. Here is a kind of lizard I had never seen before, with a blue tail.

Blue tailed lizard

Our final big animal adventure was in the southwest, near Banfora, where we saw hippopotami. At first they just looked like rocks sticking out of the water.Rocks? Then we could see their eyes, noses, and ears.Eyes, ears and nose. Finally one yawned and it was easy to see that it really was a hippo! What can make a hippopotamus yawn?We went out to see them in these little flat bottomed boats. There were five people in this boat. We had eight people in our boat, including the man who did the paddling. I guess we must have been sitting pretty low in the water.

Hippo boatAs you can see below, I am well looked after by folks here. I call it playing the white hair card. It is one of the fringe benefits of having lived a long time!

A little help for an old lady Last, but not least, Camels!

Five wise men?Not wild animals, but they seem to belong with this blog. Reminding me to say a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

As I have told you, my daughter Dawn, her husband Jay, and their two children, Annie and Jesse were with me for Christmas this year. After we left Ranch Nazinga, where we saw all the animals, we went to my village to prepare for the holiday. Things are done a bit differently here than in the US, as you might expect.

Burkina Christmas Customs

While you may see plastic Christmas trees in the big cities where there are lots of foreigners, in the village the only kind of Christmas decoration you find is a crèche that Christian families may build by the gate to their courtyard. These are usually built by the children. Here is an example of one. It probably does not look like a crèche to you, but if you looked inside you would find clay figures of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus.

Crèche Gift giving at Christmas time is not a usual thing. You probably try to have your children have new clothes for Christmas. If you have money to spare, you might buy one gift for each child, but none of the kind of over abundance of presents that you find in many American homes. There is not an exchange of gifts between adults or with friends.

Probably less than half the people in the country are Christian. Most of the others are Muslim, although there are many who follow the traditional religion to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes along with Islam or Christianity. One nice thing about Burkina Faso is the religious tolerance. Actually, acceptance of people regardless of their religion might be a better way to put it. Many families have some people who are Catholic, some who are Protestant and some who are Muslim. Most people celebrate all the holidays of both Christianity and Islam. On the Muslim holidays, the Muslim families prepare a great feast and they are visited by all their friends and neighbors, regardless of religion. In the same way, the Christians prepare a big feast for Christmas and Easter and the Muslims come to share the feast with them. I described Tebaski in a blog last year, when I went with an important Burkinabè man to the feast at his house as well as at the home of his secretary and later at the home of the cabinet minister for who he works. Last year on Christmas day Janet and her family were busy painting my living room and I was not prepared for all the visitors who showed up.

My Christmas

This year I decided to be prepared. On December 24 Dawn and I fired up my Dutch oven and we baked several batches of brownies. In Ouaga we had purchased a number of jars of prepared American style spaghetti sauce and lots of spaghetti. We made Koolaid Pink Lemonade and had some candy Dawn had brought, too.

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we went to the Catholic Church for the Midnight Mass. The church is quite a large one, probably seating about 2000 (with people crowded next to each other on the benches, as they do here). The church was only about half full, but there was still a good crowd. In the processional the priest carried a baby doll to represent Jesus, and placed it in the crèche in front of the alter. As he did so, many of the women let out that yell that is called ululating. There was lots of singing by the two choirs, one that sang in Moore and one that sang in French. This is the choir that sang in Moore.

There were a couple of hymns Dawn recognized, but the only one I knew was the processional, Silent Night. With all the ululating, it was definitely NOT silent in the church! Of course we did not understand a thing that was said, but you didn’t need to understand the language to understand the feeling of celebration. The congregation and the choir moved to the music, dancing in place.

Christmas Baptism

Christmas morning Mass was a time for some babies to be baptized, among them, Prosper and Martine’s baby, Jean Crystosome. Dawn took Jesse’s good camera and we sat up front to get good pictures of the event. Moms and babies were seated in the front row, with dads behind them.

As with weddings, it is the custom for people with cameras to crowd around the principals and take lots of pictures of them. At first Dawn wasn’t sure it would be OK, but when she saw what others were doing, she got in there and got some good pictures. There were about 20 babies being baptized. These were the ones who were not able to be present when most of the new babies for the year were baptized back in November.

Prosper and Martine’s baby was not to happy to have water poured over his head!

There were five people who were celebrating the 25th anniversary of their baptism At the end of the mass they were recognized and lead a dance around the church.

Dawn is the pastor of a small church in Nelson, New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Association of the United Church of Christ (UCC) gave her a clerical stole to present to a church in Burkina Faso. There are not UCC churches here, and we attended the Catholic mass, so it seemed appropriate to give the gift to the church. We told one of my friends she would like to see the priest after the service to give him a gift to the church from some churches in America. Imagine our surprise when, at the end of the mass the reader announced that there was to be a presentation from a church in America. I managed to mumble a few words in French trying to explain, and the priest said, “Thank You!” in English. He seemed to be pleased with the gift and put it on over the other robs he was wearing. Maybe you can make out the word "Holy" that is embroidered on the stole.

After the service the thing to do is to take pictures of your kids by the crèche. Here is Jean Crystosome and his mom and dad. (Notice baby Jesus lying in the traditional woven African material.)

Christmas Visitors

When we returned to the house we prepared for visits from neighbors. We had quite a few people stop by, but not as many as we might have had. They arrived in twos and threes and we were able to serve them on the porch with the few dishes I own.



And that was my Christmas. Hope yours was a good one!

When I left Cleveland, many of you asked what you could do to help me with my work in Peace Corps. Here is a chance for you to do something for some Burkinabè young people. Peace Corps volunteers and Burkinabè men and women are going to be running week long summer camps for girls and for boys in four locations around the country. These camps are based on a model that has been used in other Peace Corps countries to develop leadership among girls. It was originally called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). The name has been change here in Burkina Faso to Camp G2low (Girls and Guys Leading Our World). That is, there will be sessions for guys as well as for girls. It is important to educate boys as well as girls about gender equality, good decision making, and leadership in a patriarchal society such as Burkina’s.

These week long camps will be for boys and for girls in the equivalent of 7th and 8th grade. There will be 4 girls from each of 15 communities attending each of the girls’ camps, and 4 boys from each of those communities attending each of the boys’ camps. That means there will be 60 boys and 60 girls in the camps at each of the four locations, for a total of 480 students attending in all. The communities that send students to the camps will help in selecting the students who will come, will send adult leaders to be part of the adult leadership teams, and will pay for the transportation to and from the camp. The communities where the camps will be held will be donating space and other support for the camps. We hope to raise about $6400 (about $50 per student) in donations for each camp so students can come at no cost to their families.

You can read more about the goals of the camp at http://pcburkina.org/camp-glow. If you are moved to make a donation, or an organization you belong to would like to contribute, go to that web address and click on the bottom picture on the left hand column, for the Leo camp. That is the one where I will be working. (If that camp has already received full funding, feel free to select one of the other camps. I have been told this is unlikely to happen, but one can hope!) The donations can be made by credit card. Your contribution will be sent through Peace Corps directly to the financial officer for the camp, who has to turn in recipes for all expenditures. I hope some of you will be interested in assisting with this project.

Elephants!

My younger daughter, Dawn, and her family were here over the Christmas vacation and we had several interesting adventures. The first one was a visit to a place called Ranch Nazinga, an elephant and wild life preserve. It was started in the 1980s by a Canadian who wanted to try to save the elephants in the wild. He located the preserve in an area elephants sometimes visited and attracted the elephants and other animals by building dams to hold back the water that falls in the rainy season. The dams are built of the rocks and stones you find around there, and the road goes right over the dam. Stone damThe preserve covers 98,000 hectares and there are 11 dams that have created ponds and lakes. To get there we took a nicely paved road south from Ouaga for about two hours and then spent another two hours on dirt roads that got progressively bumpier and more rutted until we reached the ranch. There are one room cottages with showers and toilets and there is electricity between 6 and 10 at night, from a generator. Here is what they look like. cabin at the ranchThere is a dining room/restaurant were you tell them a couple of hours ahead of time what you want to eat from their rather limited menu and they fix it for you. It is a good thing that they have one, because there is nothing else around for miles. Here I am with Dawn after a meal.Jan and Dawn in the dining roomOn the drive into the park we saw several different types of animals including antelope and elephants, but not too close to the road. We arrived at the ranch just at dusk and did not see much there. The next morning we started early with the family perched on top of the 4 X 4 we were using for transportation. I stayed down below with the driver and guide.

Riding on a 4X4We drove around the park for two hours or so and saw several more groups of animals, including a couple of kinds of antelope and more elephants. There was a mother with a very small baby (well, small for an elephant) and two other juveniles. They crossed the road right behind our car and my grandson got this great picture of them.Elephant family After we got back I wondered what we would do for the rest of the day. There is a viewing area by the lake at the ranch and we went down there to see what we could see. Here is what it looks like from across the lake, as you approach the ranch.Observation place Here we are, checking things out from inside the observatory.Observing in the observatoryAbout 11:00 my grand children came running into the observatory and told us there was an elephant right outside. Annie had been reading on the porch and the elephant walked past her, juts about 10 feet from the house. It was heading for the lake and we watched it dust itself off by blowing sand over its back with its trunk, and then go into the lake to get a drink and take a shower. I always thought the cartoons showing elephants with their trunks extended at a 45 degree angle looked a bit odd, but that is actually how they draw water up into their trunks. Here is a series of pictures showing the process:

At about the same time a group of elephants came down to the lake on the shore opposite the observatory. As you can see, we saw LOTS of elephants, compared to last year when all Janet and her family saw was the head of one through the branches of a tree. More about the other animals in my next posting.

Lots of elephants!

Going to School in Burkina Faso,

I have told you that schools here are very different from those in the USA. The first thing to understand is that most of the people here do not speak French at home, but a local language, based on their ethnic group. Where I live most of the people are Mossi, the largest ethic group in the country, with about 40% of the population in this group. They speak Mooré at home so many of the children start in the first year of school knowing no French at all. In other words, in first grade, you not only have to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, you have to learn these things in a new language.

The primary school consists of the first six grades, followed by a nationwide test that you must pass (the CEP) in order to go on to the next level, called collège here. If you do well and get to go to the collège, you are there for is the next four years. This is called the first cycle, and they name these grades in the French style, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième, (that is, 6th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd). After troisième there is another big test, the BPC. If you pass that, you can go on to the Lycée for the second cycle, where the grades are called second, premier and terminal (2nd, 1st, and final). Actually there are many places where the Collège and Lycée are on the same campus and people refer to them together as the Lycée. At the end of this you again have to pass a national test called the BAC. In other words, there are 13 years of school, so it is not surprising that study at the university is only three, rather than four, years for a bachelor’s degree.

Only the first six years of school are a free,public education. Even though they are nominally free, there are school fees you have to pay, as well as school supplies to buy. For this reason families must sometimes chose which children to send to school. If there is a choice between a boy and a girl, traditionally the boy is chosen. The reason for this is that the boys will stay with the parents when they finish school, build a house nearby, and be there to help support them in their old age. When girls get married, they join their husband’s family, so educating them does not seem like a good investment for the parents. In fact, I have been told that when a baby is born, traditionally you ask, not is it a boy or a girl, but is it a member of the family (boy) or a stranger (girl, who will end up in another family). The federal government here has passed a law that all children between 6 and 16 must attend school, and the number of children going to school has increased. In the early grades there are about the same number of girls as boys. Failing a grade, or “redoubling,” used to be quite common. That often lead to students as old a 16 being in the primary school and people decided that was not such a good idea. Now students seldom repeat a grade more than once or twice in elementary school. The result is that many do not pass the CEP test to get their certificate saying they have a basic education so they cannot go on to collège.

There are government supported and private collèges and Lycée. Here in my village there is the Lycée for the department, kind of like a school district, and two private collèges. The reason for the private collèges is that there are a limited number of place in the public school, so not all who have passed the ECP can attend. The lycée takes those with the best scores on the test, and the parents have to pay a fee for the students to attend. Students with lower scores can go to the collèges if they can afford the fee, which is higher than the government support schools, but even there seats are limited and the best students are chosen. If you can’t get into the collège or if you are forced to drop out for some reason, there is the possibility of going to night school. Again there is a cost associated with attending classes.

The classes here are not at all like American schools. I want to show you some pictures of the schools so you can see for yourself what they are like. This is a typical classroom at the Lycée.

Empty ClassroomTypically there are three students at each desk. Here is one full of students:

Students in ClassStudents in this school are in the same seat in the same room all day, every day. The teachers move from room to room. Class sizes are huge by American standards. At the Lycée here, collège classes have between 75 and 85 students in each class. In the upper levels classes are a bit smaller because fewer students qualify, but there are still 40 to 50 students in each classroom.

Blackboards are pieces of wood painted with a special kind of paint. There are no blackboard erasers. Chalk is removed by washing the board with water and a sponge, and the teacher may write on the board when it is still wet, making it kind of hard to read.

Painted Wood BlackboardFor the Lycée, school starts at 7:00 in the morning and goes until noon. There is a three hour lunch break when students and teachers can go home for lunch and a rest during this hottest part of the day. There are classes again from 3:00 to 5:00 three days a week. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are reserved for sports and physical education. At this school there are no Saturday classes, but the schedules may be different in other towns.

The schedule for primary schools is different. Classes officially start at 8:00, but students typically arrive about 7:30 and clean the classrooms and blackboards before the teachers arrive. Classes are from 8 to 12 with a half hour break at 10:00. There are also classes in the afternoon, from 3 to 5. There are no classes on Thursday, but there are classes from 8 to 12 on Saturday.

Because the weather here is never cold (never below 65 degrees) and there is only rain between June and October, school rooms open directly onto a courtyard. Windows do not have glass in them, but are closed with the metal shutters you see in the pictures. In some schools these shutters can not only be opened to let in light, but the whole window can be swung out, to let in as much air as possible. The walls are built of cement blocks or mud bricks. The roof is corrugated sheet metal.

ClassroomsIn this picture of the Lycée campus, if you look carefully, you will see some sheep wandering through the school yard. The trees are a typical part of every school yard. They provide shade, which you appreciate year round. They are also a part of the effort toward reforestation, which I will probably tell you about in a future blog. School Campus, with Sheep In the next picture you can see the usual mode of transportation for students here, old fashioned one speed bicycles. In the big cites, for students from families who have more money, students may ride motorcycles.BicyclesHere is a picture of the outside of the school library.

Library Here is a picture of the inside of the school library.Library InteriorYes, those are the ONLY books in the library. Students can come in to look up information, but you cannot check out books, and there is no town library either.

All quite different from the USA!

Sheep versus Goats

In response to my last blog, my friends who raise sheep commented that the sheep I showed looked more like American goats than sheep, although the tails were certainly sheep like. I thought you might like to see the differences between sheep and goats here, so I took some pictures and asked Prosper about the important characteristics.

As my friends said, the dead give-away is the tail of the animal. The goats have tails that stick up, and sheep have tails that are longer and hang down. Here are a couple of examples.Baby Goat

Baby SheepThe second difference is the ears. Here sheep have ears that hang down, like their tails, and the goats have ears that stick out to the sides, like these:

Goat Ears Stick Out The other big difference is that all the goats have horns, but only the male sheep have horns. Here are a female (no horns) and a male (with horns) sheep, and a female goat with horns.

Female and Male Sheep

Female Goat As you can see above, the goats have thin, slick coats, and most of the sheep short coats, too.This should be no surprise, given the temperature here. Sheep's coats tend to be a little thicker than the goats but not by much. Prosper has this one sheep with longer hair, but this is about as much wool as you are going to see on a sheep here.Long Haired Sheep

Wild Animals?

Another question was about wild animals attacking livestock that are allowed to roam free. In spite of what you see in movies and on television, in West Africa most of the dangerous carnivores have been hunted to extinction, except for a few you might find in the game preserves. I have not heard of any livestock being attacked by wild animals, except for snakes. Prosper did lose a sheep recently to a snake bite.

Because my village is on a major highway, that is to say a two lane paved road, traffic is the greatest danger to roaming animals. Trucks carrying goods between the capital and other cities race by, blasting their horns, day and night. There are also lots of buses, 4X4s, and vans carrying passengers rushing past. If there is a choice between hitting an animal, driving off the road into a ditch or crashing into an oncoming bus or truck, you can bet the animal will lose.

The other major hazard for a farmer trying to raise animals is thieves. Prosper lost a donkey several weeks ago, and we can only assume that it was stolen. On the day Prosper took me to see his plot of land here he hopes to eventually keep his animals, we encountered a man on the road carrying on to a group of people including the boy who lives with Prosper and Martine and helps with the animals. This guy was telling them about a boy who had tried to steal a sheep, which was, in fact, one of Prosper’s. The man was able to stop the boy and he was saying he was going to tell the kid’s parents, because he knew who he was. I could not understand all he was saying, but I am rather sure it was something like, “What is this world coming to, when you can’t trust your neighbors not to steal your animals!”

Trying to grow moringa

I have written before about the value of the moringa trees. While I was in Ouaga this summer, Martine and the children started four trees for me. We (I should really say they) transplanted them into my courtyard, but we knew it was about time to let the animals roam free, so we took some of the mud bricks from my fallen wall and built protection for them. Here you can see the leafy tops poking up through their cages.



Unfortunately, that was not enough! The goats and donkeys love moringa, and, with the other three sides of the wall around by courtyard missing, the goats climbed the bricks and ate the tops off the trees. Here was the first attempt to protect them, with branches with long spines, intended to discourage the animals.

That helped, and they started to sprout new leaves. Unfortunately, the donkeys were not deterred, pushing the spiny branches out of the way to get at the leaves. This weekend Prosper and some of the boys replaced the secco (woven grass mats) that formed the roof of my porch, and put the old secco up on posts to act as kind of fence. I am expecting the animals to eat their way through to get at the trees, but they assure me the animals do not like that kind of grass. We shall see....

Raising Animals

In America, if you are raising livestock, you put a fence around your pasture and turn your sheep or cattle out to graze. Here, in the time between harvesting and planting, you just turn them out in the morning and hope they find their way home at night. I think the way you make coming home more likely is that you give them some grain or other food each evening and they know there will be a treat when they arrive a night. When people start planting, you are supposed to tether your animals in some way when you put them out to graze, and to do it in such a way that they do not eat other people’s crops. If you look closely, you may be able to see the rope holding these sheep to the bush.

There is a person who is responsible for deciding when it is time to tether the animals. This is announced to the villagers by a griot or singer who acts something like a town crier from the old days in Europe. On the day you are supposed to start tying up your animals, he goes around the marché delivering the message. Even then, some people do not respect the message and some people assign one of their children to guard the field from the animals. In the fall, after the harvest, the griot sings out the news again, saying it is now fine to let your animals roam free. If you are late getting in your harvest, too bad for you!

The cycle of planting and harvesting

I now have pictures of the whole cycle of raising grain. First, here are some folks preparing the soil the old way, with dabas, small hand-held hoes.

If you had a good harvest last year, maybe you could buy a mule and a plow to make things easier this year.

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As the millet grows, at first it looks a lot like corn, with the tassel. The tassle is actually the part that turns into grain.

When it is ripe, it is so heavy it makes the stalks bend over.

People cut off the part with the grain, by hand, and then cut down the stalks. When that are finished, you can actually see your neighbors' buildings, that have been hidden behind the grain for several months.

People take the stalks they have cut down to their homes and store them to feed to the animals during the dry season.

Because this looks like it will be an especially bad year, with the lack of rain and poor harvest, people are stocking up as much fodder as they can. They store it on top of structures like you see below. It not only stores the fodder, but provides shade for the animals.

It starts out looking like this:

Than you add as much as you can. Not quite like a barn hay loft, but the same idea

This picture is quite hazy because the farmer was burnign the stubble that was left after the stalks were harvested.

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After the chief of the land gives the word, by way of the griot singing in the market, people can let their animals range free. People with cattle usually have people (African cow boys) walking along with the cows to keep them together and to make sure they do not wander off. I suppose the cattle contribute fertilized in return for what they eat in the fields.

Smaller animals, like sheep, goats, and pigs, are just allowed to roam free. They generally come home at night, but sometimes people have to go out looking for them when it is getting dark. Unfortunately, as I have said before, there are bad people everywhere, and sometimes people will grab a goat or sheep that does not belong to them and take it to market to sell. Chickens and guinea hens wander around freely all year. They are also vulnerable to thieves grabbing them and selling them. Just one more photo. This is another crop a lot of people raise, peanuts. They are eaten raw, boiled, or roasted. I prefer the roasted by far, although I guess they are more work to prepare.

New Arrivals

Lambs

Some of the young folks whose parents follow my blog like pictures of animals. Here are a couple of pictures of baby lambs that have been born to the sheep owned by my friend Prosper. Sheep seem to have lambs any time of year rather than there being a time of year that is lambing season, like spring time in the US. The one with the black face was born back in April and the all white one that prosper is holding was just born in October.

New Baby

These same friends and neighbors, Prosper and Martine, also have a new member of the family. I happened to be working at the Maternity center helping with weighing babies the day he was born so I got this picture of him when he was about three hours old. All of the babies are born missing a lot of their color. Their skin darkens after a week or so. A good thing, too, with the sun they have to live under all their lives!



Here he is again, at two months old, big, and healthy!



Medical checkup

Peace Corps always says the health and safety of the volunteers is their first priority. In keeping with this, all volunteers get a full medical checkup after a year of service, to make sure everything is OK. At the end of August I had my medical exams and all is well. I had my mammogram plus sonogram and, at least from the reading of the Burkinabè Doctor, there is no problem there, thank goodness. I understand they will be sent to the US for a second opinion, however. My TB test was negative, although I was a bit worried they would not be able to read it because the nurse nicked a blood vessel and the area was bruised. All she had to do was run her finger over the place and see that there was no bump to know that there was no reaction. I have gained weight and the doctor is happy, because I lost a lot when I good food poisoning last year. I want to quit gaining, however, so I guess there will be fewer pancakes for breakfast and other goodies for a while.

Dental Checkup

Another standard part of the medical checkup is a dental exam and cleaning. They have a different way to take dental X-rays than my dentist in Cleveland uses. There is a small, flat square thing that is connected to a computer that they put in your mouth. As they zap it with X-rays the information goes to the computer where the dentist can check it out. Another volunteer told me her dentist uses it in the states, but another said her dentist thought the resolution was not a good as with the old bite-wing X-rays. The tooth cleaning session with the dentist was also a bit different. They clean with an electrically driven instrument and water under pressure. I am not sure if it vibrates or rotates, but it was not too bad. Over all I found it a little less painful than the metal pick they use at home, but there were a couple of “shocks” that felt like I must have an exposed nerve at the gum line. The continuous spray of water in the mouth made me gag a few times, too. They did not find any cavities, however.

New Glasses

I did have to get new glasses because the gold plating (or paint?) on the ones I brought from America had worn off and I am allergic to the nickel, like you find in cheap earrings. I think it may have been the sunscreen and bug repellant I always put on every day that removed whatever was covering the underlying metal. In any case I started to get red sore spots on my nose where the frames sometimes touch my face, just like the reaction I get in my ears to cheap ear rings. The visit to the eye Doctor was quite similar to what you might experience in the US, and I did get a new prescription. When I told the optician I wanted trifocals, he said it is not possible. They only make progressive lenses here. Ugh! They give such a limited field of view that I find them really annoying. I learned that there are different qualities of glass that can be used and, if you pay a premium price, you can get a larger field of view. Thank goodness Peace Corps willing to pay for the better ones. With these glasses here is distortion in about half of the lense. If you look through the wrong part of the lenses the world is not just out of focus, but moving as you turn your head. After a few days your brain gets trained not to look there, but I also find it annoying to have to turn my head to keep the print in focus when I am reading. I am looking forward to being able to get trifocals when I get home.

Several people have responded to things in my blogs with interesting information that I would like to share with you. I will also answer a couple of questions people have posed.

Nancy Drew in French

Several people did internet searches and found information about the French translations of the Nancy Drew series. They confirmed my guess that the reason for changing the name is the difficulty in pronouncing Drew, just like the difficulty in pronouncing Larsen. R in the middle of the word here tends to come out as a W.

Apparently this was a very popular series over the years and there is a lot of information about the various translations at http://www.nancydrewworld.com/french.html if you are interested.

Bird on the road

Here is the picture of that bird again. My sister in law identified it and sent me the following information about it:

It is a Red-billed Hornbill. It lives in quite a few places in Africa. They feed by hopping on the ground, searching the surface and probing holes for insects. They follow the paths of game animals in order to hunt for dung beetles. As with most hornbills, the nest is in a hole in a tree. The female inside the nest, helped by the male outside, plasters the entrance with mud and droppings, leaving only a narrow slit. The male brings food which is passed through the slit, and droppings are squirted out. The female leaves when the young are half-grown, when they know to come to the slit for food. The parents reseal the nest until the young are ready to leave.

Quote on the carving in the forest

One friend suggested it was similar to an American Indian proverb:We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. –

My daughter who speaks French better than I do, having lived in Paris for 4 years, said:

I would have read it more in the sense of something that is not our birthright, something that belongs to us and is ours to squander as we will (as an inheritance might be considered to be), but an obligation, something we have to protect for the future generations. I think that contrast between squandering and preserving, rather than the idea that the forbearers didn't think of it, is probably what the saying is about.

Answers to a few questions:

Rain

A friend reported that Cleveland has been having record rain fall this year, with 55 inches so far, compared to an average of 36 inches and asked how much rain falls in Burkina. There is some variation, but the web indicates that the range is 23 to 36 inches. The big difference between here and Cleveland is that here it all falls in the four months of the rainy season, June-September, and there is virtually no rain the rest of the year. I am in an area that is closer to the 23 inches.

Schools

Another question was why the schools are the way they are. I certainly do not know the whole story, but I am sure much of it is because of the poverty of the country. They try to get everybody to send their kids to school, but, in reality, there is not enough room in the existing schools. Why not build more schools? Buildings cost money, even if a community gets together and builds classrooms out of mud bricks. There is still the cost of doors, windows, and roofs.

Another problem is that teachers are paid by the Burkina Faso government, and not the local government, so money to hire more teachers competes with funding roads, water, electricity, and so on. You have to get governments permission to build a new classroom because that will mean a new teacher will be needed.

Because teachers are government employees, the central government decides where they will be assigned, rather than local school districts hiring. That may be why it takes untile the second week of school to get teachers assigned to classrooms.

The Provisor, or principal of the local Lycée or High School was just moved to another town and the new man arrived Monday. I asked him if this was a promotion and he told me that this was about the same size school as where he was Provisor for the past five years, but the government has a policy stating provisors should not stay in one school for more than 5 years. The idea is that if you stay in one place too long you lose your edge for innovation and fall into doing things the way they always have been done. When people move around they bring new ideas with them. There may be something to that, but it must be hard to know you are not going to staying in a place and it might discourage people from taking on long term projects.

Teachers move around, too, but mostly at their request. When you start out you may be placed in a less desirable location. After you have been there for five years, you can request a transfer to a location you prefer. You may or may not get the place you want, but your new place may be closer to where you would like to be.

Village Chief

I was asked about the role of the village chief and his relationship to other government officials there are in small town like the one I live in. Please realize this is just the way I understand the system from talking with folks here and there could be some misconceptions.

The position of village chief is more or less hereditary, although I understand that the oldest son may not want to take on the responsibility or may be living in a big city. In that case the community (somehow) selects the new chief who may be related to the old chief, another son, a brother or nephew, for example. It may be that the village can chose a man from a different family, but I am not sure about that. There is a sub-chief for each small community (or neighborhood), but there is an overall chief for the town, to whom the sub chiefs give homage. There are responsibilities of these chiefs that I probably don’t know about. Someone told me that it can be a problem if the son who would inherit the responsibility has moved to the city. He may not want to return to his village to take on the role, and he may not have been trained in in how to make the appropriate sacrifices and how to conduct the traditional ceremonies.. These folks have no official authority from the government, as I understand it, but they are still held in great respect. For example, the chiefs of the various sectors of Ouagadougou and the head chief were invited, along with government officials, to the swearing in ceremony for Peace Corps. The head chief of Ouaga has the right to say who can use the field where we played games with the students in the English camp last summer. They probably have other responsibilities I know nothing about.

Being homeless in a village

If you are poor in Burkina Faso and live in a village, you can build a house out of the dirt from the ground and make a roof out of the tall grass that grows wild here. Your village chief can designate a plot of land where you can build a house and where you can farm the land. Here is a small house my friend Prosper built on this new farm plot. It will be a house for a caretaker when he gets the place fenced in for his sheep and goats.

If you are just living on a piece of ground the village chief assigned to you, you can plant millet or corn, and, at the end of the growing season, you may have food for the year. If you want a window or door for your house, that would require money. You would need to get someone to loan you seeds to plant, but it is not like being homeless in Cleveland, Ohio. Here you do not need to worry about freezing to death in the winter, and the possibility of growing enough food for a year is there. Of course farming is an iffy business and if there is a bad year for crops, things may not be so great. Most of us would not like to live that way, but at least nobody freezes to death under a bridge here!

Property rights (or lack there of)

Property ownership is just being westernized. If you were that poor person who asked the village chief for land to cultivate and to build on, it would be yours to use only as long as the chief lets you live there. If he decided to grant it to someone else, you would have to move. Now days it is possible for you to get a paper showing you have the right to that land, a title of sorts, but that costs money and requires a degree of sophistication that most village folks do not have. Prosper is a school teacher so he is what we call a functionair here, that is, a civil service employee. He has both the knowledge and resources to get a deed to this little plot of land.

Unfortunately, the traditionally way of dealing with land use is changing. I have heard of a village in Mali where the government decided to give a long term lease on parcel of land to a Chinese group and the people who had been living there for generations had to move out. Their village was destroyed with no compensation for those displaced. There have been articles about this in the New York Times, explaining that this seems to be happening all over Africa. It seems that richer countries that are running out of land see a lot of apparently vacant land in Africa and want to get the use of it to feed their own people. That really leaves the Africans in a bad way. The government gets the money and the people who lived there really become the homeless poor. They have to find a new place to live and the crops that are raised where they used to farm now leave the continent.

Pests

One similarity to Cleveland is that ants like to invade the house, especially if you fail to wipe up sugar spilled on the counter. These ants do not look like the American red ants I see each spring and fall. They are bigger and almost transparent. They also move really fast if you try to squash them. Another type of pest that has an American relative is termites. They are a constant problem in the villages. You may be fine for weeks at a time and then, suddenly, there is termite trail climbing your wall. Here is a picture of one, before I knocked it down.

When you go into any house in the village you are sure to see the signs that people have had visits from these critters. People say, “just spread some Rambo insecticide and they will be finished,” but really it only lasts a few weeks, and they are back again. I had a termite attack on the branches that support my hangar. My friend Prosper was visiting and saw the signs of the termites. He jumped up and started knocking their coating of mud off my support and later on sent his nephew over with a can of used motor oil to coat the base of the posts (see below). That seemed to keep them at bay for a while, but it also lost effectiveness and had to be re-done.

Early in my stay the termites attacked some of my books that were sitting on a little wooden table next to the wall. I am sorry I did not think to take a picture of the attack until I had destroyed it, but it looked like some mud had fallen out of the attic onto the top of several of my books. When I pried it off, the little critters scampered down the tunnels, back out into the yard. Here is a picture of the edge of one of the books they chewed. Fortunately they mostly ate the margin, and not the text, so I can still use it.

Bats

You have already heard about my bat problem, but I wanted to show you a picture of my new bat house. The last time they exterminated the bats, I decided to try giving them an alternative place to live. I had the carpenter construct this bat house but I am not sure if they have decided they like it better than my attic.

There are hundreds of differences between how things are done here and in America. Here are just a few of them:

The Beginning of School

Schools here are supposed to open on October 1, which was a Saturday this year. The primary schools have Thursdays and Sundays off and just a half a day on Saturday, so you might expect teachers to be in the classrooms on October first to welcome the students and get things started. However; on October first many teachers did not even know where they would be teaching or what grade level they would teach. When I was teaching at the university, I knew the courses I would teach and the days and times they would meet almost a year in advance; so this system of assigning people to classes seems very odd to me.

Last year; my neighbor was the director (head teacher) of a small school quite far away from where he lives: He asked to be assigned to a school closer to his home. He found out he would be given a new assignment; but not where or what grade. In fact; he did not even find out the school where would be teaching until a week after classes were supposed to begin! He will be teaching the first level of primary school at a school that is, indeed, a bit closer to home. He has 80 children in his class and, at the moment, no desks or books for the children. The children now sit on the floor, but he assures me that the desks will be coming.

School readiness

Most of the children in my neighbor’s class arrive at school speaking only the local language spoken by their family at home. The only French they are likely to know is “Nassara, pas de cadeau?” (foreigner, no present?). The first term is obviously spent teaching beginning French and many teachers have no choice but to use “the direct method,” that is, speaking only French and teaching the meaning through gestures, acting things out, and so on. Teachers are not assigned to regions based on their maternal language; but by some other criteria, seniority I suspect. My neighbor speaks three of the local languages, so he can use the language the children know in most cases, but the educational philosophy for most schools does not allow bilingualism. There are a few experimental schools in the country that start by using the local language 90% of the time and gradually increasing the amount of French until by the 6th year the local language is used only 10% of the time. Even though, from what I have been told, these schools seem to produce better results, many parents want the traditional French only method: I find this interesting, given that most of the parents cannot speak French and are illiterate. This means that they are unable to prepare their children for school. It is only a handful of children who arrive at school speaking any French or having seen books around the house. Even among the better educated locals, the idea of reading for pleasure is not a concept.

Beautiful Homes

I just got word that my house in University Heights received a “House Beautiful” award this year. This is because University Heights bills itself the City of Beautiful Homes, and because the folks who are taking care of my house for me while I am here have been doing a great job.

This would not be a concept here. If you have a big fancy house in the city, you hind it behind a big wall, with a guard to be sure no one comes in who is not invited. I have; in fact, seen some beautiful homes here, with lush landscaping. But you would never know if from looking at the wall. Here are a couple of examples. You have to use your imagination about what is behind them. I don’t know!

Time and Planning

I know I have talked about the Burkina idea of time before, but it is interesting how this affects planning. Being “on time” in the American way does not happen in the villages. People may not have watches, although have cell phones that show the time. This is not a big help, however, because you have to get your phone battery recharged every few days, and, without electricity in your home, that means you take your phone to a boutique to get it re-charged. Often this involves removing the battery, so you have to re-set the time when you put it back in. Unlike American cell phones, there is not magic signal from the cell phone company that resets your phone to the correct time. You have to rely on others to get the best guess of the actual time.

If you decide you want to have a meeting at 8:00, you tell people to come at 7:00. Of course everybody knows you are going to do this, so they do not bother to come until 8:00 or 8:30. It is a viscous circle, as you can imagine. I am planning my sex education meetings at the primary schools. Last year I was there at 2:45 to get ready for a meeting at 3:00. At 3:15 the director of the school finally came to open up the classroom and get some kids to sweep the floor. We actually started at 3:30 but people kept coming for the next half hour.

Contact information

FYI, my e-mail address: larsen@jcu.edu

I know most of you get my note to say I have posted again and have my e-mail address, but there are a few folks who read this blog who are not on my distribution list. If you would like to be added to the list, send me an e-mail. Do the same if you have questions or comments

Peace Corps is 50 Years Old

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps. As many of you know, it has placed volunteers in 139 countries around the world. For those who are not already familiar with the goals of the Peace Corps I will quote them here:

Peace Corps Goals

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served and

3. To help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans.

The celebration in Burkina Faso

To celebrate this anniversary there were special events throughout 2011, with a big celebration on September 24, around the world. Here in Burkina Faso we had a three day “Peace Corps Fair” in an effort to inform people in Burkina about the work volunteers are doing here. On the first day of the fair there were two special events scheduled, the swearing in of a new group of volunteers and the arrival of a group of people who rode on a bike tour of Burkina Faso to raise money to help volunteers fund small projects at their sites.

We arrived bright and early 6:30 AM or so to set up our displays. It was cloudy and we all hoped it would not rain, but it did. As is often the case here, the rain was preceded by a strong wind, full of dust. The wind continued as the rain fell, and the result was that the tents and tables that had been so carefully set up were just about destroyed. Maybe you can get an idea of the damage in the picture below.

As we ran for the building, many of the carefully prepared poster displays got quite wet, and some escaped from people and blew away in the wind. We waited out the rain and tried to dry off things as best we could. Eventually we all went to the auditorium for the swearing-in ceremony.

There are a few traditional things that happen at these events. One thing they always sdo is to have representatives of the new volunteers, who have been studying local languages for several weeks, say a few (or a lot of) words of greeting in several of the local languages. This volunteer was one of those giving greetings. He is dressed in a traditional chief’s costume because his stage mates had voted him chief of their stage.

Another traditional aspect of the event is cultural entertainment. This time there was a dance troupe and musicians who played the balophone and drums. I am told this particular group dances in the style of a city called Bobo-Dilasi. If you watch the video on http://pcburkina.org/, you get a much better idea of what the dancing was like. (By the way, I am not in the vidio)

Also there are speeches by important people, in this case, the Directorice of the Burkina Faso Peace Corps, the American Ambassador to Burkina, and the Prime Minister of Burkina. The prime minister presented this gift to the Peace Corps to honor this 50th anniversary.

Peace corps presented baskets to the Prime Minister that contained tree seeds, representing the commitment of the Peace Corps to plant 50 trees in each of the 50 towns and villages where volunteers serve, and a million trees over the next 5 years. Trees are an important element in the fight against the desertification of the country.

After a reception honoring the new volunteers and the people who rode through that rain storm to get here by the end of the ceremony, we set up for the fair. Here is what things looked life when the blown over tents were re-erected or replaced with new ones.

The group I work with here, Pengdwendé had a table highlighting some of the projects of the association that I am not involved with, making shea butter, growing onions, and recycling the small plastic bags in which people buy water. Because safe drinking water is not always easy to find, water is packaged in these little plastic bags and sold on the street. When you buy one, you bite off a corner, suck out the water and throw the bag away. You see these bags all over the ground, along with the black plastic bags I wrote about before. These water bags are made from a thicker kind of plastic and they happen to be recyclable. The only problem is collecting them and getting them to a recycling center. Here is a picture of out informational display about the organization surrounded by the folks who worked at the tables.

I was at a table telling about the soap opera project. Pengdwendé has a community radio station in my town and cooperates with five other community radio stations in producing informative radio broadcasts. These six stations agreed to broadcast the soap opera Cesiri Tono, a soap opera aimed at informing people about children’s rights and the tragedy of child trafficking. In the soap opera one of the characters is a boy who is given to child traffickers by his parents because the tell the parents they will give him a good education and they tell the boy he will get a bicycle. He ends up working long hours under very harsh conditions on a cocoa plantation, but is finally saved from this terrible life by one of the other characters. Because it is a melodrama, there are lots of other problems in the story line, including forced (arranged) marriages, violence against women and children, prostitution, and alcohol abuse. As I have mentioned before, this program is in Djula, the trading language of much of West Africa, and was written and produced in Mali, the country where my daughter, Janet, served as a volunteer 1983-1985.

As I may have mentioned before, the exciting news is that Population Media Center, the group that helps countries conduct the research needed, to write, produce and broadcast the program, and do a follow-up evaluation, has received funding to do not just one, but TWO soap operas here. The reason for doing two is that the target audience here are the people of the small villages who probably do not speak or understand much French. Among those people there are a total 14 different languages spoken, which is the reason French is used as the official language and is the language used in schools. There are, whoever, two languages that are spoken more than most of the others, Djula and Moore. Those are the two languages that will be used in these new soap operas.

I guess that is enough about the fair except to say that, in spite of what looked like a total disaster on the morning of the first day, it was a great success, with lots of fun and information for those who visited. It was organized and run by the volunteers, with the support of the professional staff, and it was, in my opinion, an outstanding event.

And the Wall Came a’Tumblin’ down.

While I was in Ouaga at the American Language Center helping with English, I got several text messages and phone calls telling that my wall had fallen down. This wall was just built in November and I had some concerns about it early on. It was built in the local building style, out of mud bricks with a bit of straw (shades of the Israelites in Egypt), and I noticed right away that it was leaning outward rather than being really upright. Furthermore, the mason who built it put one end of it under the roof overhang so as soon as the rain started, that part of the wall washed away. My friends took some rubble from a house that had collapsed and put it along the base of that part of the wall to try to protect it from the rain water flowing past, but that was not enough. But it was not only the wall that had been leaning, but the one on the opposite side of the house that fell, too. They both fell away from the house, so it was not the wind that blew it over, although there was a big wind with that rain storm.

My friend Prosper tried to support the remainder with some big branches.

In spite of that, a couple of weeks later, the rest of that part of the wall fell over.

To top it off, the wall in the back of the house went over, too. This is looking hopeless! They will not be able to do anything about it while it is the rainy season, and I am afraid the bricks will all melt away before it is time to build again. This is not my problem, however. When the Peace Corps sets up a site, there is an agreement that the community will provide housing for the volunteer with a courtyard and a hangar, as well as a private latrine and a private house with at least two rooms. I have it all, except for the wall. I do miss my privacy, but I can live with it for now.

Dutch oven burns up

Here is a picture of my cannary and marmite that I have posted before. To make a Dutch oven, you fill the bottom of the marmite with 3 inches of sand and put it on a burner on the stove and heat it for a couple of hours to get rid of the dirt taste.

I did that and the Dutch oven to baked things pretty well. That is how I made the small cakes, in muffin pans, for the birthday party I wrote about before. It was OK, but it was a bit hard to get things in and out of it. I was also worried I was going to run out of gas. I understand you really get no warning. In the middle of cooking, suddenly the burner just goes off.

I decided I wanted a bigger version that sits on its own gas burner. That way I would have a bigger Dutch oven and I also have an emergency backup gas supply. Here is a picture of the final project.

On the way to getting this, however, I burned up a marmite. A friend who has a similar one told me just to use high heat. No problem. I turned the burner on fairly high to burn out the dirt taste and, after an hour or so I thought I was hearing something funny. When I checked it out, it looked like a leaf had blown in and was sitting on the burner. When I looked more closely I realized it was a part of the bottom of the pot! The bottom melted off and the sand spilled out. I was luck that the burner was not damaged. Here is the pot with the hole in it.

My friend Prosper had bought the marmite and burner at the marché and had brought them home on his moto. When I burned a hole in the bottom of the pot he went back to the marché and got the guy who had sold the pot to him. The merchant agreed to go back to the man who made the pots and to get several from which we would be able to chose our favorite. Prosper’s wife, Martine, tapped and lifted them and picked the one she thought was best. So far she appears to have made the right choice. I have made cakes, cookies, biscuits and even roasted a piece of pork in it. Luckily it did not do any damage to the burner, so a new pot with lower heat seems to have fixed the problem.

Cell phones and my internet connection

As I may have said before, most adults carry cell phones, referred to her as “portables.”

There are several different service providers, but the one I use is Airtel. It used to be Zain, but they were bought out by a Japanese company last spring and the name changed. So did the color of all the little booths all over the country where you can by “unité,” the way you buy minutes (or seconds in this case) of air time in the US. The network here if often overloaded, making reception TERRIBLE!!!! There are often dropped calls, a message that the network is busy, or ZERO bars anywhere. And, if the call goes through, it often has so much static it is hard to hear the other person. It is even worse in Ouagadougou (the capital) than it is in my little village.

My internet connection is with the same company. The only way I can get on line is to get up early in the morning, when no one else is on the network. Then it is sometimes about as fast as being in a cyber café (internet café) in a big city. Sometimes even that connection is slow, but it is certainly better than no connection at all. Several times it has taken be three days to get my blog uploaded and my e-mail notices sent out. I do try to post about once a week, but the net work does not always cooperate.

I do not mean to complain. These stories are just to give you an idea of what it is like here. This is a developing (third world) country, after all, and it is all part of the adventure.

While I was in Ouaga this summer, I went to visit a big park, referred to here as The Forest. There is one entrance located near the transit house where we stay when we are in town, but I have seen other entrances on other roads, and the map shows that it is a pretty large area.Near the entrance we saw this tree, carved with several animals and people. The message on the open book, in French, is something to the effect of, “We did not inherit this from our parents but pass it on to our children.” I think the point is that this park is not something people thought of having in the past but it should be preserved for the future, as the world changes.

Here is a picture of one of the paths through the woods. As you may be able to tell, this place has quite a mixture of different kinds of trees and other plants. There are not any really tall trees, but there are not many really tall trees anywhere in Burkina Faso.

The tree in the foreground here, with the shiny leaves, is called a karaté (sounds like carrot-a) tree. From its nuts you get beurre de karaté, which you all know as shay butter.

Here is one of the few mushrooms I have seen here. I don’t know enough about mushrooms to know if this is good for food, but I sure would not take any chances!

Here is one of the strangest flowers you are likely to see. Sorry, I have no idea of its name.

There were lots of birds flitting about, but most of my attempts to take pictures of them are just pictures of leaves. This guy, however, sat nicely on the road and I was able to enlarge a little corner of my photo so you can see him.

Here are a couple of pictures of what appear to be a lot of birds swarming around this tree. In reality, most of these are big fruit bats. I was surprised to see them out in broad daylight.

This plant has lovely little thorns, as to quite a few of the plants here. If you don’t want to be eaten by the roaming goats, you had better taste pretty bad, or be pretty prickly.

Last, but not least, is this plant that looks like an agave plant. I suspect it is becaquser I understand they were imported to Europe from the southwest by the early explorers. The climate is certainly right for them here!

That's the end of the travelogue for today. Just a final note to tell you I am doing very well. My health has been fine and we just had our mid-service medical checkup, so that is official! My French is improving, although far from good, and I am happy to be here.

FESPACO

Back in February, I was in Ouagadougou when it happened to be the time of the Africa film festival, called FESPACO, that is held in Ouaga every other year. Quite a few of the volunteers came to town that week to see the movies, and a couple of committees conveniently scheduled meetings that weekend. I was there for a meeting of volunteers who were going to be bringing students to a youth leadership conference the following month. We each had to select a piece of the program to do and make plans about how to do it. In any case, the Transit House, where I was staying, was full of volunteers. I had not planned to go to the film festival, but a meeting with my counterpart that I had scheduled for that evening fell through because she was not feeling well, and I tagged along with the crowd. It was a movie called “When China Met Africa” and we had expected it to be mostly in English because it was done by BBC. It was a documentary set in an English speaking African country, but much of the dialogue was in Chinese and the local African language. The English was also a bit hard to understand because of the accent. There were subtitles, but they were in French and I found I could only read about 2/3 of each one as it flashed by. I did get the general drift and it was a bit discouraging. The Chinese were planning to do several projects there that are now on hold because of the world economic crisis. One Chinese farmer immigrated to the country and bought three farms, thinking there would be one for each of his children, but the children are not interested in farming in Africa. A road project and manufacturing project seeing to be going well, however. It was the only show I saw, and I am sure it was not one of the prize winners.

Living in style (for one night)

Kriss Barker, who is a vice president of Population Media Center and who is co-author of the training manual about how write and produce soap operas to change behavior, was in town to make final arrangements with group that will fund the project for a Burkinabè soap opera. Actually, the project is mostly funded, for writing TWO soap operas, one in Moore, and the other in Jula. These are the two local languages most commonly spoken here.

I had talked to her by phone and Skype several times, as well as having a number of e-mail exchanges with her, so when she was in the country we wanted to meet each other face to face. At first she thought she might be able to come out to my village, but that was not going to work out. I had offered to go into Ouaga if that would be better for her, and she asked if I would do so. I decided that, after five weeks in the group living at the transit house, I was entitled to one night at a real hotel, so I asked her to get a reservation for me at the hotel where she was staying. For that one night I paid the equivalent of about half of what I get to live on for a month as a volunteer. That makes me glad that the transit house is a place I can stay for a reasonable price. However I did enjoy my day of luxury. I would have thought I was back in the USA for 24 hours: good European style food, hot water and a bath tub, and real high speed internet.

It was great to meet Kriss, who is quite dynamic and exudes enthusiasm for the project. We had dinner with the man who owns 11 radio stations and a TV station, who had worked with the Peace Corps group when we started trying to find financial support for such a project. He is very enthusiastic about this project, too, but I think the funder Kriss has found wants to use the official national radio for the broadcasts. Maybe they will decide to allow it to be broadcast on community and other commercial stations as well. I think the people in the target audience, folks in poor rural areas, are more likely to listen to local stations than to the official government station, but I don’t know that for a fact. That is one of the things the first phase of the project, which is research about local conditions, will show.

Profiling, Burkina Style

When I came into the hotel in my traveling cloths, with just a back pack, I think they wondered about me. They told me I would have to wait a while for a room to be ready, so I sat down in the lobby and started my knitting. Almost immediately they had a room for me. Maybe it was chance, but I bet they thought I did not fit in with the clientele very well.

When I was leaving to catch the bus back home, I asked the door man if I could get a cab from there to the bus station. No problem, except that the taxi driver wanted three times as much for the cab ride as the standard door-to-door rate for volunteers. I ended up calling one of the approved Peace Corps taxi drivers, who not only took me to the bus station, but also went in with me to be sure I would be able to get on a bus before dark. He would have taken me to another station, at no additional charge, if there had not been a seat available. So here I am, back in my village, with the contrast of rich and poor, European and African, spinning through my head.

Contrasts

In Ouaga the main streets are paved, but there are many side streets, and whole neighborhoods, that have only dirt roads, like we have in my village. It is not surprising to see something like you see in the picture below, a donkey cart driving down one of these paved roads, with cars, motos, and trucks sharing the road with this very traditional means of transporting goods.

You may also see motos load with goods to sell. I actually took this picture just outside of town. This guy is transporting some kind of produce to sell in the capital.

As in the villages, most houses are surrounded by walls, but in the city they tend to be higher, so you can’t see much of what is inside, unless the house has more than one floor. In the more upscale neighborhoods, two or three story houses are not uncommon. Any fancy house has a guardian at the gate. There are a number of companies that supply guardians, each group having a different kind of uniform. Houses gowned by the American government are guarded by people in blue uniforms with a US flag patch. If you are a Peace Corps volunteer living in Ouaga, you are required to live in a place with a guardian. Mixed in among these rather fancy houses you may find people living much as you might in a village, cooking on a wood fire and sleeping on the ground, with animal in the courtyard. It is a land of contrasts.

When we were planning the English Camp activities, the men planning the week related to water said something about protecting the wetlands in Burkina Faso. I, clever woman that I am, said “were are there any wet lands here? Everything dries up in the hot season.” Boy was I wrong!

I had dinner with the Permanent Secretary for Climate Change and Sustainable Development and his wife, whom I know through my son in law, and I asked him about it. He said, "Of course there are wetlands here, and Burkina Faso is a signatory to a UN convention on preserving the wetlands." He said, however, he would defer to his wife, who knows more about the topic. She works for an NGO call International Union for Nature Conservation. I think of a wetland as a swampy area, but according the definition as she explained it to me, it is any land that is covered with water for part of the year. A river qualifies, as does an area that traps and holds water during the rainy season, even though they are dry for much of the year. She and her husband offered to take me on a tour of a wet land area.

We went to a place where a dam has created a big lake that serves as a backup reservoir for Ouagadougou. It is not actually used as a source of water for the city water system, but could supply water to the capital in an emergency. It is what is called a multi-use location. First, so you can get an idea of the size of the place, here is a picture of the over-flow area, the place where the water leaves the lake when the reservoir is full.

Here is a shot across the lake created by the dam, although I can’t show the size of the lake in one picture.

Here is one of the ways this water is used. These guys are filling the big cubes on the back of the truck with water, to take it to Ouaga to use for building.

Another use of the water is growing food. Here is a canal that has been cut from the lake to a place were food is grown. This plant is called oseille. The people use the leaves to make a sauce for tō. It is quite acidic so you add potassium, which is a base, to it to make it taste better.

People also raise other things like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and squash as you see here at this roadside stand.

This man was raising okra, called gumbo here.

Where there is water, there are fish (sometimes). This guy got one, but I don’t think it is a keeper.

I am sure they actually do get good sized fish, sometimes, because we found BIG scales on the beach. Yes, that is a single fish scale around my thumb!

Here is a fish net that was drying near the lake. Maybe that is how they get the big ones.

The dam itself is mostly made of dirt. The side toward the water is protected in some places with rocks set in concrete, like this:

We walked along the top of the dam, and my friends informed me that the folks will be removing and burning the grass growing on the dam. If you let it grow, the roots soften the soil so it washes away. They try to keep it packed down solidly. I always thought the roots would help hold the soil, but that is not the way things are done here.

This is a levy, quite distance from where the water is now, that protects an experimental agricultural station. There different varieties of corn were being tried out in neat little plots, much as they do experimental plantings in the US.

This is, in fact, a permanent wet land. It does not have as much water in it now as it should have by this time of the year because the rains have been late and scarce this year. Crops are way behind where they should be by this time in the growing season and it may be a bad year for farmers here.

During the month of July I was in Ouagadougou, AKA “Ouaga,” learning something about teaching English by working at a summer school for students who want to improve their English. The classes were held at The American Language Center which is somehow related to the American Embassy, although I am not quite clear about how closely they are connected. I spent three days in June at a workshop to get basic instruction in techniques of teaching English as a foreign language. As some of you may remember, I had to take courses in teaching English as a Foreign Language when I thought my Peace Corps assignment was going to be teaching English in Mongolia. The classes here covered some of the same topics, but I really enjoyed seeing video tapes they showed us here of teachers applying some of the methods that we learned about in my classes at Cleveland State.

The English classes for the students ran for four weeks. Each day began with two hours of formal instruction in English, using books written to teach English, but with an emphasis on American English and American culture. Most of the Burkinabè learned British English, and there are some interesting small details that make this clear. For example, is the color gray or grey? Color or coulor? In the USA it is the first spelling but in England, the second.

Most days I was able to sit in on classes at various levels of proficiency to get an idea about how you could teach English at different skill levels. There were 7 classes, with 6 skill levels. The students were between 11 and 19 and were placed based on their proficiency, not their age. The formal teaching was from 8:00 to 10:00. From10:00 to 10:30 was a half hour break, during which the students bought pop, water, and sandwiches from a woman who showed up in the courtyard at that time.From 10:30 to 12:30 the volunteers lead camp type activities, although the teachers were present to help out as needed. We spent a week before the classes started planning what we would do during the camp time. We decided on the theme of Captain Planet, whom some of you may remember from a kids’ cartoon series in the 1990: “Captain Planet, he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero…” He had five helpers, “Planeteers,” with the powers of Earth, wind, fire, water, and heart and the tag line of the theme song is, “The power is yours!” We made the over-all theme of the camp saving the environment, trying to emphasize that everyone can do something about these problems. By combining wind and fire we had the themes of the four weeks. The first week, Earth, we discussed basics of threats to the environment and endangered species, of which 4 of the top 10 live in Burkina Faso. The second week, with wind and fire, we had as a guest speaker the man who represents Burkina Faso at climate change negotiations. The third week, water, focused on the problems of safe drinking water and water for growing food here. The last week, heart, was about volunteerism and what the students could do.

Most of the students there come from fairly well to do families and many know next to nothing about the places where we volunteers live. They could not imagine not having glass in the windows and air conditioning, let alone not having electricity and having to go to the well to draw water. Some students were delivered to the door by drivers but many of them arrived riding Motos. Here is a picture of the student motos lined up in front of the center.

This is me in one of the classes, just to give you an idea that this is a bit mor like an American school than the typical Burkinabè school. The kids mostly go to private schools, so this may be normal for them.

During the first week we had a contest among the students to make a design for the camp t-shirts. On the front we put the slogan for the camp: THE POWER IS YOURS.

The winning design was quite clever, the globe (with Africa at the center, of course) with a very sad face, and smoke stack showing the source of much of the pollution. The artists had added the slogan: THE WORLD IS SUFFERING. STOP THE POLUTION.

One of the activities students enjoyed was making posters, which we did several times. Here are a couple of posters about my favorite complaint, those black plastic bags.

We also had field days a couple of times. Here are some of the students doing a water balloon toss. It was nice to be the looser and get splattered with water when it was so hot out.

Another activity was picking up trash. We gave the kids rubber gloves to protect them from the nasty stuff that is likely to be in ditches here. They loved it!

After five weeks away fromj my site, I was glad to get home again. I will say more about life in Ouaga in a future blog. It is quite different than life in the village, but not like the good old USA!

Rainy season has begun

I think the last time I wrote about the weather I said it had rained a bit, but not enough for people to start planting. What they did do, to get ready for cultivating and planting, was to clean up their fields. When you buy something here, whether it is a pile of tomatoes or loaf of bread, the merchant will put it in a black plastic bag. All winter I have been appalled at the number of these black plastic bags that have been blowing around all over the place. People just drop them on the ground or throw them over their walls as if they were biodegradable and would disappear after a while. The first step in preparing the fields is to go around the field, pick up the bags and burn them. Then, if there are stalks and roots from last year’s crops they are cut out and burned as well.

The next thing is to prepare the soil for the seeds. You can do this the old fashioned way, with dabas, as these ladies are doing here:

A fair number of people in my village have mules and plows, which they can use to cultivate a bit deeper with a lot less human effort. Good neighbors will sometimes loan their plow to friends after they have finished with their field.

After the dirt in the field is loosened, you have plant the seeds. If you look closely in their hands you can see the peanuts these ladies are planting.

After this, you have to wait for the rains. Too much and not enough are both bad.

Donkeys

I mentioned that donkeys are used to pull plows, and showed you a picture of one at work. There seem to be quite a few donkeys around my village. I sometimes hear them braying at night, and often during the day. They seem to be more noisy at some times than at others. I am not sure if it is mothers calling to babies, like the sheep do, or if the noise is a mating call. I had never heard a donkey bray before I came to Burkina Faso, and I don’t know exactly how to describe the sound. First of all, it is not a simple hee-haw like the sound we made as kids. It is incredibly loud and seems like it should be coming from a bigger animal. It almost seems like the poor animal can’t get the sound out without a lot of painful effort.

The donkeys are mostly used to pull two wheeled carts called “charrettes.” The girls who bring me my water use this kind of cart to carry my 200 liters of water. Kids and adults use them to transport the mud bricks used for building and the sand and clay used to make the mud mortar that goes between the bricks. People also use them to haul wood from the bush and things they want to sell at the market. After the kids have delivered the loads, they sometimes have races down the road, standing up in the carts, like charioteers. The donkeys do not have halters or bridles with reins to guide them. The driver carried a switch, cut from some handy tree. If you want to donkey to move to the right, you hit it on the left side, and if you want it to go left, you hit it on the right side. Donkeys are dragged from the court yard by a rope tied to one front leg. They are allowed to wander free after the harvest, but now that things have been planted again, they are staked to the ground with this rope around the leg to some spot far enough away from crops that they can’t get them.

More about black plastic bags

I am happy to report that there are some enterprising ladies in Burkina Faso who have found a use for these ubiquitous black plastic bags. They cut strips from them and weave them into a fabric to make purses and wallets. I wish more people were doing this. It would help clean up the country! Here are some samples, modeled by some of my fellow volunteers:

A Purse

A wallet

A toiletries bag

BAD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

In one of our first meetings with the directorice of the Peace Corps here in Burkina Faso, she reminded us that there are bad people everywhere. Even though most Burkinabè are generous and honest, they have their fair share of criminal types. Volunteers do tend to get a bit romantic about the good qualities of the Burkinabè and to forget the fact that every culture has bad guys. I have encountered two so far, but not face to face, thank goodness. A couple of months ago, after I had locked the gate in the wall of my courtyard for the night, I went to my "office" to check my e-mail. When I returned to my living room, I could not find my cell phone, which I was sure I had left on the table. Someone climbed over the wall and quietly entered the house to take it. Since then I have started to lock my door whenever I am in the house, and I have given up sleeping in the court yard. A friend told me his cell phone was taken from right beside him while he sleept outside. It is kind of a nuisance, but I was lucky that it was just someone snagging that small item, and I was not threatened or hurt.

The second encounter was a couple of weekends ago. I had a skin rash in reaction to an antibiotic I was taking and the Peace Corps doctor asked me to go to the medical center to have the doctor there take a look at it. I rode my bike there and left it in the "parking" while I went into the compound and waited for her to be ready to see me. While I waited, a man entered the courtyard and came over to me. He said something I did not understand and waved his hands by his ears. I thought he was looking for help with pain in his ears, but others have told me that was to indicate that he was deaf and dumb (which he was not). After I saw the doctor I went to get my bike, and it was gone. He had told the kid who was watching the bikes that I had said he should take my bike to town and get something for him. He left his bike there in place of mine, but it turned out he had stolen that one from someone else. The Peace Corps bikes are quite distinctive so the police and gendarmes both thought they might be able to find it, but sofor a couple of weeks there was no luck on that front. From now on I will be locking my bicycle (the original or a replacement) even when I leave it in guarded parking. Sad to say, there are, in fact, bad people everywhere. I am really happy to report that most of the people here seem appalled at the idea that someone would steal it and they have been supportive and have spread the word about it.

<strong>Just when you give up hope</strong>

I was in Ouagadougou for a work related activity I will tell you all about later, and decided while I was there I would pick up a new bicycle to replace the one that was stolen. Because the bike was not locked and I did not have a "parking" receipt, the Peace Corps rules say I am responsible for it and have to pay for a replacement. I would hate to see them try to collect for the poor father of the little boy who was fooled into letting the thief take my bike, so I was happy to pay for it. Well, not really HAPPY, but willing. They gave me a used bicycle and charged me the equivalent of $200 for it, which is a just about half of the value of a new bike like this.

The day after I paid for it, I got a call from the Gendarmes in the big city about 23 kilometers away from my village (I will just call it X for simplicity, because we are not supposed to give out any information about where we live) saying they had found my bicycle. I was going to take a bus to X to retrieve it, but when I found I could get a taxi to take me from the capital to X for about $40, I decided to go that way. I am sure glad I took him up on it. When we got to X we stopped at the Gendarmerie at the edge of town assuming that would be where my bike was. It turns out there are actually three different gendarmeries in town and my bike as at the one on the other side of town. The bus station was half way between them, and if I had taken the bus I would have had a long walk just to learn that the bicycle was at the other place.

When we arrived the bike was sitting there in front of a pile of about 30 bikes. I am not sure if they were all stolen and the owners had not been located, or what. I had asked the bureau to print up an receipt/proof of ownership and with that and my Peace Corps ID there was no problem, We put it in the trunk and headed out. The driver told me he was surprised that there was no charge. He said if it had been his bike they would have demanded payment for their trouble. Go figure.

The front tire was completely flat and the bike was in first gear on each gear shifter, so I expect he rode it that way for a while. The break cable was frayed and the gel seat is also somewhat the worse for wear. Surprisingly, there was a new set of hand grips on the handle bars. I guess he stole them from somebody else. The Peace Corps put on a new tire and break cable and a volunteer who was leaving the country gave me a slightly used seat, so it is almost as good as it was before its adventure.

The Peace Corps safety and security folks talked to the gendarmes and found out that they had been chasing this guy, who had stolen something else. Apparently the tire went flat and he abandoned the bike. He got away, but the gendarmes rescued my bike. Go gendarmes!

Janet D. Larsen, Ph. D,

Professor Emeritus

Department of Psychology

John Carroll University

Peace Corps Volunteer

Burkina Faso, West Africa

Remember the parties you had when you were a kid? Imagine being a girl here in a village in Burkina Faso on your 9th birthday. There is what it would have been like. When you get home from school at 5:30, some of the neighborhood kids are already there, waiting for you. While you go into the house to wash and put on your party clothes, they sit quietly on a bench, waiting (something African kids do amazingly well).

Your best friend goes into the house with you and puts on the clothes you wore to school, because they are prettier than what she was wearing. When you have on your party dress, your adopted “extra grandma,” the Peace Corps Volunteer, takes your picture.

Your mom has brought the tables and adult chairs out onto the porch and put on the nice table cloths. There is a big plate of the kind of shrimp chips we get in Chinese restaurants as appetizers that your mother made. She gets a package of little disks at the boutique and drops them into hot oil. They expand and get crispy as they cook.

After a while your father rides into the courtyard with a bag of things from town. He went to look for candles and something for the adult guests to drink. Your mom and big cousin, who is living with you so she can attend the Lycée, put each candle on a little piece of cardboard to make it stand up and to catch the wax. Your mom puts a big thermal insulated bowl and a couple of metal cooking pots on the table, along with a few plates and silverware for any adult guests who might want to use them, and dinner is ready. You look at the table with your nine candles spread all around and wonder how you are going to blow them out.

Fortunately your mom and dad are joking with you, and they gather them together so you have a chance to blow them all out at once. A few people try to sing “Joyeux Anniversaire” (AKA Happy Birthday to You) but they do not seem to know the tune. You try to blow out the candles, and, success! Maybe your wish will come true.

Your mom spreads a mat on the porch for the kids to eat on and reminds you all that you need to wash your hands. While everyone is running to the water buckets, Mom gets a big bowl of spaghetti ready putting sauce on the top. When everyone is gathered around the bowl, you all dig in, eating only with your right hands, of course. It is hard for you American friend to believe how quiet and cooperative all the kids are. She takes their picture, too.

While you all are eating, the adults are served on plates at the table, and they even get pieces of fish on top of their spaghetti and sauce. Unlike a birthday party for kids in the US, there are no party games, and no favors to take home, although Mom does package up some of the shrimp chips or spaghetti and sauce to send home with some of the kids. There are no presents from your friends and no birthday cake, although your neighbor baked something chocolate, called brownies, in her Dutch Oven. They were yummy! Quite a different experience.

A Mass Baptism

June 1 was Ascension Day, a legal holiday in Burkina Faso. I was informed that there would be a big Mass at the Catholic Church, at which a lot of young people would be baptized. I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate for me to go, but my friend who co-leads the sex education meetings for girls invited me to come. I asked what time and she said 9:00. Remembering all the times I have waited for a hour for a meeting to start I wondered if 9:00 meant 9:00, but like a good American I got there at 8:55. Much to my surprise, it sounded as if things were already in progress. When I parked my bike and headed toward the church one of the ushers (designated by a green sash with a red cross on it) came over to me and directed me to the door to the front of the church. There I was again, in one of the seats for special folks, right up by the altar. There was not room next to my friend, who was a few rows back, so the usher directed me to the bench right behind the nuns. The mass really had not yet started, but the folks were all saying the rosary.

When I looked out over the congregation I was stunned to see how many young people were there to be baptized. You could tell who was in the group by the fact that almost all were wearing clothes made from the same material. The styles were very different. Some of the boys wore just shirts of the pagna, but others had matching pants, long or short, and others had tunics and pants, which that remind me of men’s pajamas. The girls had a wide variety of styles. Some resembled ball gowns, with lots of satin or other material in addition to the pagna material. Some looked like a typical American little girl’s dress, but many were in a traditional African style, with a fitted bodice and pagna, wrap around skirt.

The boys were all seated in the front rows of one section, and the girls in the front rows of another, and across the chancel from where I was sitting the other side was filled with teens and young adults. I tried to count the boys, to get an idea of how many were in the group. They were in the first seven rows of benches, with about 25 boys on each bench. Comparing that to the space taken up by the girls and young adults I guessed between 300 and 500 people to be baptized. Later I was told several “official” numbers that ranged from 425 to 475. In any case, a LOT of people.

The way they managed this was, when it was time to baptize people, three priests and a couple of helpers created three baptizing stations. Each person to be baptized had a piece of paper to hand to the priest, giving their name, much like the cards the students hand to the Dean at graduation at John Carroll. They also carried white candles, unlit. One of the helpers handed the priest a small gourd filled with water. Another positioned the person over a big bowl and the priest tipped water onto the person’s head three times (in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I presume, but did not hear). While people filed by to be baptized the choir sang a series of songs. Even though they sang in the African style that I find hard to listen to for long, I was right next to the choir and could appreciate the harmony and watch the choir director, which was interesting. By the way, the Mass was all in Moore, as were the songs. I couldn’t understand a thing that was said.

After everyone had been baptized, they all filed around again for the priests to make a cross on their foreheads with holy oil. That went a bit faster, but I kept thinking about how tired the poor priests must be getting. I wonder if they needed someone to message their thumbs and wrists after the service! With everyone back in place, the priests and their helpers passed the flame from the big Christ candle to the newly baptized folks until all the candles were lit. There was a short prayer, and everybody blew out the flames. I wondered what an American fire marshal would have thought of so many young folks waving around lighted candles at such close quarters. They newly baptized folks then each held up a crucifix on a cord of some kind. The priest said a blessing (and I noticed that the man sitting next to me had help up his rosary, too). They, in unison, they all put the symbol of their new status around their necks, reminding me of the Masters degree students putting on their hoods at graduation.

Then it was time for the Eucharist, and the newly baptized folks had their first communion, followed by the rest of the congregation. Not exactly like a first communion in The States! After the Mass I visited the homes of a couple of people I knew who had relatives who had been baptized. At each home, food and drinks were served, and music was playing. At one home I visited the neighbor was having a similar party and there was loud music playing at each. Once in the court yard I didn’t notice the competing music, however. I think a lot of folks had several calls to make.

I wondered whether the reason there were so many children being baptized was because the church is relatively new in the town so they had not been baptized as infants. Close, but not quite the right idea. I was told the reason was that infants are only baptized if their parents have been married in the Church. Otherwise, they have to wait until they are old enough to understand things and go through two or three years of preparation before their baptism and first communion. I think those baptized at birth have a different time for their first communion. In any case, it was a stunning number of new members for this church! I understand that these same folks will not have two or three more years of classes before they are confirmed by the Bishop of the region.

A note about the weather

It has continued to be hot, but now it is a bit muggy. Everyone is waiting for the rains to begin. We have had several days when it looked like there might be a storm, and even some strong winds with the smell of rain, but the ground is still bone dry. A neighbor, who is a cultivator, told me that, if it does not rain enough for folks to plant the seeds of some plants, like millet, before June 15, there will not be enough time for the grain to fully develop before the rains end in the fall. The result would be stalks without good grain to provide food for the coming year. This could be a serious problem.

Another wedding

I was invited to another wedding at the Catholic Church. I had met the father of the groom, but no one else in the wedding party. This wedding was on a Saturday at 10 in the morning. When I arrived at the church there were lots of cars and motos, and even a bus. In the front of the church was a small band, consisting of two keyboards, a bass guitar, a drum set and a trombone, playing rather up beat music that sounded like it could be European popular music. There were orange and white balloons at the ends of some of the rows of benches, like you might see flowers or bows at the ends of the pews at an American wedding. There were six or eight men running around with video cameras. I think one was an official videographer and the rest were friends of the bride and groom, but they went around like a swarm of bees, filming every moment. There were at least that many people with cameras clicking away so I kept my camera in my back pack until the reception, when I felt more comfortable taking pictures of these folks I did not know.

There were eight girls in matching pagnes with matching peach colored satin tops with a strip of the pagne material sewed on them diagonally. You can see two of them in the picture below that I snapped at the reception.

The procession started with a boy carrying the crucifix, followed by a flower girl in an orange dress, the girls I described above, and the bride and groom arm in arm, the bride in a flowing white dress and veil like you might see at an American wedding and the groom in suit and tie. Here they are at the reception

They were followed by 10 priests. The processional music was Mendelson’s wedding march, the one that is often played as the recessional music at American weddings. After getting the bride and groom settled in their chairs in the front row, the girls all rushed off the join the choir that was seated in the front four or five rows. Throughout the Mass, the choir, over 50 voices strong, sang many songs that were literally music to my ears. They used beautiful European style singing for some anthems that were probably from the classical repertoire, and enthusiastic and joyful voices on some other numbers that sounded like gospel music. There was not a screeching voice to be heard.

The service was entirely in French, so I could follow most of what was said. The bride read from one of John’s letters and the groom did a reading that, if I understood correctly, was from the writings on one of the Saints, although I did not catch the reference. His reading was accompanied by background music from one of the keyboards. This had clearly been carefully planned and rehearsed. This church is quite large and has a good sound system. Microphones were used throughout so it was easy to hear the bride and groom say their vows. They had either memorized or were reading them, but they did not do the “repeat after the Priest” type. After the Eucharist, the bride and groom said a prayer together, and then the groom ran over to join the choir for the Hallelujah chorus from the Messiah. It was clear he was a popular member of the this choir that had come from Ouagadougo (on that bus I saw) to sing at his wedding. They ended with another song that sounded like it could also have come from the Messiah, and they sang it in English. The main part was “forever and ever” repeated a lot. Then the band broke out in another upbeat tune and the bride and groom lead a line of dancers around the church. All of this lasted about two and a half hours.

There was not the traditional receiving line at the church. People just left the church and headed down the road into town to the reception. The midwife who does the sex ed presentations with me met me there and guided me through proper behavior for this part of the event. We started out walking to town, wheeling my bike. Eventually someone picked her up on a moto, I hopped on my bike, and we joined the long line of cars and motos going to the reception.

There was a head table for the newlyweds and their parents, and another table for special guests, mostly the priests and nuns.

The bridal party and special guests were served from platters onto china dishes, but the rest of the crowd (a couple of hundred, I would guess) were given Styrofoam boxes packed with two kinds of rice and sauce, a very small piece of chicken, lentils, some kind of meatloaf thing that may have been sausage, and, of course, tô and sauce. No silverware, unless you were special, like me. I ended up taking the box with me and passing most of the food on to the family of my community homologue, who had given me the message that I was invited to the wedding.

There was a time for a toast to the newlyweds and remarks from the families. The bride’s father talked for her family, all in Moore, so I have no idea what he was saying. The groom’s brother told a story, in French, that was the story of the romance. It seems that the groom started in school at the “petite seminary” at the center where we had language training, which I wrote about before. When it came time to decide whether to go to the university or “la grande seminary,” he chose to go to the university, where he studied philosophy. The bride was in her last year at the lycée and needed a tutor in philosophy. That is how they met. Even though the groom decided not to be a priest, it was clear that he is very active in the choir at the Ouaga church.

The wedding cake was actually three little cakes, which were put on a stand designed for this purpose. There were crowds of people with cameras around the cake cutting. They did not do the “feed a piece of the cake to your new spouse” ritual you see at American receptions, however. In the picture below you see the cakes and, in the background, a guy eating from ome of the Styrofoam boxes

The choir gathered in front of the bridal party table and sang a couple of numbers to the bride and groom, ending with the “forever and ever” one. That got a big laugh. Then they began the process of presenting the gifts to the bride and groom. The bride and groom stood in front of the table and people filed past to present their gifts. The guy with the microphone announced the name of the donor for each one. They you could congratulate the bride and groom, and one of the attendants gave you a little net sachet with a couple of nuts and a mint, kind of like the table favors you might have at an American wedding. At that point people started to drift away and helpers started taking down the decorations. Party over. All in all, it was very interesting.

As I rode home I passed the house of the groom’s parents, and there was a big party going on there, too. I think it was the party for the neighbors and that the bride and groom would appear there later for the singing and dancing, but I did not stop so I am not sure.

As you can tell from the description, these are relatively well to do people, and the bride and groom have adopted a lot of European culture. It was quite a contrast to the other wedding I described last fall, and was also very different from a Moslem wedding I (sort of) attended recently. More about this in a future blog...

Technology in my town

The Burkinabè need to have copies of all sorts of papers, like identity cards, school completion certificates, and birth certificates, in order to apply for jobs or to be admitted to the next level of school. As a result, there is a market for a copy center, which I was surprised to find here. It is a little one room place with a copy machine, two computers and a printer. It is not an internet café because it does not have a connection to the internet, but you can see that it would like to be, because their sign has “Yahoo” on it. It is only open during the hours when there is electricity in town, 8AM to noon. It may be open in the evening when the power comes back on, but I don’t ride my bicycle in the dark so I have never been there at night.

Power

While there is electricity a few hours a day in the center of town, out where I live there are no electric lines. People who live in this area and can afford them use big batteries, even bigger than car batteries, to run electrical things like CD players and TVs. My neighbor, Prosper, has a solar panel that is hooked up to his battery and whoever is home moves the solar panel around during the day to keep it facing the sun. Other people take their batteries into the part of town that has electricity to get them charged. As I mentioned before, Prosper connects my little battery into the circuit and charges it whenever I let him know I need to have it charged.

I have not yet been invited into a house that has electricity so I do not know whether people with power use other appliances, but I would bet they have fans and refrigerators. I am pretty sure that things like washing machines and dishwashers are unheard of in this town, but I could be wrong about that. Several of the larger boutiques and the small marques that sell drinks have refrigerators, and someone has a freezer because a lady was selling frozen beesap at the marché.

Beesap is a local drink that is made by boiling the leaves of some plant in water, with a lot of sugar and a touch of ginger. It is relatively safe for me to drink it because it is boiled in the process of making it. I just have to hope that they did not decide to dilute it with water from the well if they made it too strong. When I first tasted it, I did not like it all that much, but since then I have had some that was pretty good. Maybe it was just that it was a cold drink on a hot day that made it taste better, but I think there are different versions and that the first one I had was a little heavy on the ginger.

Because there is not electricity all day, the tailors I told about in the clothing blog use old fashioned treadle machines. Some look like they are really old machines like people used to use in the states, but some are more modern, with zig-zag and embroidery options. They appear to have been retro fitted for the foot treadles. A belt from the treadle goes around the motor shaft and runs the machine.

Nancy Drew in French?

I have been trying to study French by reading some young reader type books from our local “lending library” that consists of maybe 150 books in random piles on shelves at the place in town that has a copy machine and a couple of computers. I selected a book called “Alice and the Candlemaker” as my first one to try. It features a teenage girl, old enough to drive, named Alice Roy. Her father, James Roy, is a lawyer and she has two girlfriends who share her adventures, Bess and Marion, and a boyfriend called Ned Nickerson who makes an occasional appearance. My first thought as I began the book was that it seemed a lot like a Nancy Drew book. When I encountered Ned Nickerson, I decided it WAS a Nancy Drew book with a few changes. Then I thought to look at the author and that settled it, Caroline Quine.

Those of you who were Nancy Drew fans when you were younger, help me out here. I am curious about what has been changed and what is the same. In these books Alice lives in River City that is, I think, in some southern state because they drink ice tea with mint. They have a live-in house keeper (named Sarah), because Nancy’s mother is dead. Sound familiar? Let me know by replying to my message that I have posted, or send e-mail to Larsen@jcu.edu.

I am now on the third Alice Roy book, and the reading is getting easier. I try to “read through” words I don’t know and get the meaning from the context, but sometimes I have to do a translation word by word, using the dictionary, because I can’t understand the story if I don’t. I think if I keep on reading books at this level I will learn a few new words, and will get to be better at reading French. They are not as engaging as Harry Potter, but about the same reading level.

Weather

I thought the hot, dry season would last through May, but I was wrong. We have had several showers and the other day there was a big storm, with lots of wind blowing the dust around before the rain. There were big storm clouds with lightning and thunder. It was very dramatic storm with a good downpour of rain. The path in front of my house turned into a little stream. Unfortunately, I have discovered drainage problems with my new wall around the courtyard. I had to wade through about 3 inches of water to get to my gate. My friend Prosper and his friend Basolé saw what had happened and made a drain hole at the base of the wall that pretty much solved the problem. They even found a rock about the right size to close off the hole to keep out snakes, which people worry about here. Since then we have had another big downpour and one night with a gentle rain that lasted for hours. There were only a few puddles n the courtyard. Prosper says he will find some dirt to fill them in because you do not want puddles during the rainy season as mosquito breeding grounds.

When it rains, things cool off temporarily, but it often returns to the 100 degree mark shortly after the rain stops. Other days there may be cloud cover and highs in the low 90s. I am not sure how long these rains will last. I think they will be pretty irregular for a while. People do not start working in the fields for a while yet, and I understand you have to time the planting of your crops so that there is rain consistently when you do plant your seeds. Since the rain has started the weeds growing, however, and there is a carpet of green in each low lying area. The sheep, goats and pigs are happy to have fresh shoots to munch on.

Trees in the dry season

In the fall some of the trees lost their leaves and I had expected most of them, except for the mango, to follow suit. Wrong again. Most of the trees not only kept their leaves, but grew lots of new shoots where folks had cut off branches for building and fire wood. The ones that did lose their leaves started to put out flowers and then seeds in the middle of the hot, dry season. Before the rain began most of the trees had put out leaves again. I don’t know how they can be growing with no rain. I had expected them to be dormant until the rain started. They must have tremendously deep roots to get the water they need to grow like this.

Other odds and ends

Traffic

I live rather close to a major highway. It is a paved, two lane road between two big towns. The locals ride bicycles and motos on it, but I even get off my bicycle to cross it. Most of the traffic consists of busses going between the two towns, bush taxies, big trucks transporting gas, wood for cooking, or other products, and some private cars. You can often stand at the road, look both ways, and see nothing but bike and moto traffic, but when the trucks and busses come, they fly by. The drivers, especially of the busses, love to use their horns, which are loud and may play a tune instead of just beeping. All this is fine if they are letting bikes and motos know they are coming and another vehicle is coming toward them, so get off the road. Most beep at anybody they see on the road. This is not so bad during the day, but it goes on all night, too. I am a good sleeper, but sometimes it takes a while to go to sleep because of the sudden sharp sounds of the horns.

Bicycles

Most of the bicycles here are simple single speed bikes, although you occasionally see a three speed or a 10 speed. It is amazing what people carry on bicycles. You may see baskets of goats with their feet tied together on the way to market, or chickens hanging from the handle bars. More often than not the women have babies on their backs and something balanced on their heads. The men often have huge loads of boxes, bags, or lumber, tied on with stretchy black bands made from old inner tubes. I brought bungee cords with me, but these black bands work much better. You stretch them tight and easily adjust them to any size load. Some people have baskets on the front of their bikes, but I have not been able to get one because my mountain bike has a bigger frame than the local ones and I have not found anyone who knows how to put one on for me.

Bicycles are often used for fetching water in the plastic jerrycans I showed you in a previous blog. A couple of these make a pretty heavy load, and it is not surprising the bicycles break down pretty often. It is rare for me to ride into town without seeing someone replacing the chin that has slipped off their bike. Peddles tend to get broken and fall off, and tires go flat. Because bikes are the main means of transportation here, there are a lot of places to get help if you have a flat tire or just need some air. New peddles and new seats are on display at boutiques all along the road.

Cadeau? Cadeau?

When I am riding my bicycle kids tend to chase me and try to keep up for a while. Some are really good runners. The ones that bother me are the ones who catch hold of the luggage rack on the back of my bike, or my back pack that is strapped to it, and either pull or push. I don’t have great balance, so when they do this, I put on the brakes (which takes them by surprise) and chew them out. Most of the kids along my regular route have figured out that I don’t like it and leave it at yelling “nassara, pas de cadeau,” that is, “foreigner, no present?” I guess tourists sometimes respond to this phrase by giving small coins or candy, but I have a strict policy of “pas de cadeau” because if I start giving things to kids (or adults who often ask the same thing) it will never end. I am not here to give physical gifts, but, hopefully, the gift of knowledge. I also think that this may be the only French phrase kids know. They see a foreigner and figure they will not understand the local language, so yell the only French phrase they know. I am trying to teach them some other things to say, by following “pas de cadeau” with some other French greetings. We shall see if I have made any progress on that front after two years.

Update on my work here

When I asked people why girls do not finish school here, one reason everybody gave was “undesired pregnancy.” I also found that, in the Burkinabè culture, people don’t talk about sex. Because of the cultural taboo, it is hard for parents to talk to their children about sexuality including talking about avoiding unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Even with America’s openness about with sex, I think it is hard for parents to start this kind of discussion.

In January we had two weeks of in-service training. For three days a counterpart of our choice joined us for the discussions. I invited the Inspector for the schools in my area to come and together we decided the problem of unwanted pregnancy would be a good problem to take on. He told me that the school curriculum did not address issues of sexuality until the equivalent of 10th grade, which is much too late for many girls. First of all, only the brightest and most motivated get that far in school. Second, many unwanted pregnancies are among girls in late primary school or early junior high. I thought meetings with mothers and daughters in the last year of primary school, giving some basics to get the conversation started, would be a good place to begin. When I got back to my village I talked to the people at the maternity clinic (where I go twice a week to help weigh babies) and they told me that sage femme (the midwife), was the person to talk to about sex education and AIDS prevention. She was enthusiastic and happy to help.

I needed a local person for several reasons. First of all, my French is only so-so and all I can do in the local language is give greetings and make people laugh at my attempts. Many of the parents have not been to school and do not understand French, so someone to translate ideas into Moore was important. Also, a goal of all our projects is to make them self-sustaining. By having a Burkinabè counterpart work with me on this, my hope is that a sex education program for the schools may continue after I leave, with the schools and the maternity center working out the plan.

One of the things we got at the in-service training was a kit to help with AIDS prevention education, including a flip book of pictures, a supply of male condoms, and a wood model of the male sex organ for demonstrations (thanks to USAID). The pictures are quite graphic and the wood penis is a bit shocking for people who don’t even talk about sex.

I wanted to start with the primary school that is in the center of town. I talked to the Director (principal) of the school and he seemed a bit reluctant, but willing to think about the idea. We decided the thing to do was to have a meeting with the officers of the parent’s associations and see what they thought. After introductions, we began the meeting with me giving the general idea in French. I asked my counterpart to translate that and she took off and did the whole presentation in Moore. I just made a few comments to show how graphic the materials are and to do the condom demonstration. I did not understand most of what she said, but I did get the discussion about the fact that Islam and the Catholic Church agree that people should be abstinent before marriage and disapprove of condoms. I was really glad that on my list of things we would talk about I had put abstinence as the first way to avoid unwanted pregnancy. We all agree that would be best, but the reality of teen pregnancy is pretty clear and if kids are going to break one tenant of your religion (no sex before marriage) isn’t it better for them to break the other (no condom use) and not only avoid unwanted pregnancy but also protect themselves from AIDS?

The bottom line was that the parents decided it would be OK to have this program for the girls, with me and my counterpart, but they thought a man should talk to the boys. We began with the girls and so far have had programs at two primary schools and one junior high school with a total of 145 girls and 24 mothers attending. I should explain that, while I am calling it junior high, it is really the 7th through 10th year of school. On the attendance list for the junior high I asked for ages and they ranged from12 to 22, so it is not like a junior high in the US. The midwife and I have dates to talk at another primary school, the other junior high, and the Lycée, which combines junior high and high school on the same campus. Here are a couple of pictures, one of me talking to the students and one of me and the midwife. After the presentation we have a little question and answer session in which we use the rough sketches you see behind us.

I asked the head of the health service here is he would find a man to work with me, but when I first approached him he had just arrived in town and did not know his staff. A week or so ago I asked him again and he drafted one of the men who works for him who is the equivalent of a practical nurse. I thought he might just do the presentation without me, but he wanted me there, which was fine. We have done one program so far, at a primary school, and it did not seem to bother the boys that I was present. I hope we can get to the boys in all the schools before the summer vacation. In addition to the information on HIV/AIDS, we hope to give the boys the message that they are responsible for any children they father and they should avoid having that burden, but I am not sure they get it. Culturally, it is up to the girl to deal with it if she is having a baby. Maybe the HIV piece will encourage condom use and have some effect on the undesired pregnancy problem. I am sure a soap opera I described before, including these themes, will be much more effective than my little presentation, but something is better than nothing.

People here actually have heard quite a bit about HIV/AIDS and the official figures show a less than 2% incidence. There are people here living with HIV, and even special programs about respecting the rights of people living with HIV. There are special scholarships for children affected by HIV/AIDS because of the loss of one or both parents, or loss of income for the family because of the illness. There have been major educational efforts on radio and TV, and in posters you may see from time to time, to educate people about using protection to stay healthy. There was a program for students in the fall at the Lycée and the junior high schools, allowing them to have a blood test and getting a report about their HIV status. So, they know about it. Will they protect themselves? I can only give them the information and hope it encourages behavior to protect themselves.

How people dress here

Here is a picture of a gardening group who had a celebration of the success of their onion preservation project (in the building behind them). It shows people in many of the kinds of clothing I will describe below.

Clothing for women

As I have mentioned before, the standard clothing for women is a top and matching wrap around skirt that is called a pagne. A pagne is defined as a loin cloth in the French-English dictionary, but here it means a piece of 45 inch material about 2 yards long that you simply wrap around your waist. A good example is the lady in the front row, on the right, with the long sleeved striped t-shirt. I have not got the hang of it and the picture in an earlier blog of me in a pagne is a “cheater” that has strings on each end of the cloth that you can tie to keep it up. Often women keep coins wrapped up in the end they tuck into the waist. When they make change or buy something they essentially start to take off their skirts. Usually they have a couple of pagnes on so it is not a big embarrassment. Tops are either very close fitting, with a zipper up the back, or very loose, to serve as a maternity and nursing top. These are worn by women of all ages and often slip off one shoulder, as in the picture below:

The fabrics are very colorful, with big designs on them. Sometimes the pattern in the cloth is ignored and heavy embroidery designs are sewed around the neck and down the front, as well as on the sleeves and bottom of the pagne. Another kind of decoration is done with bias tape, as on the one I am wearing in the picture. There is another example in the back row, left side, of the first picture.

Shoes

Check out the feet of the women in the photo. The standard foot wear is plain plastic flip-flops. Some are made of leather and have a decoration on the part that goes between the toes, and may have a slight wedgie type heel. Occasionally people go bare footed, but there have been big campaigns to teach people the dangers of hook worms and other parasites you can pick up walking around without shoes when there is animal dung all over the ground, as there is here.

Women’s head wear

Women almost all wear pieces of cloth tied around their heads, as you see in the photos. Often this is a scarf or a piece of the same material the rest of the outfit is made of. The Muslim women may wear another style of scarf that wraps under the chin and covers all the head and shoulders. That is not a sure sign of one’s religion, however, because I have seen Catholic women wear them, too (none in the picture, however).

Clothing for men

There are examples of most of the following in the top photo as well. Men, especially those who are not simply farmers, often wear European style pants, shirts and shoes. Neck ties are not often seen in a village like mine, although you might see them in a big city. My language tutor stopped by the other day with two neck ties and asked me to show him how to tie them. The choir director had decided he wanted the men to be wearing ties for a special occasion and he (and I expect his friends) did not know how to knot them. More traditional clothing for men looks a bit like pajamas—at top and pants made out of the same kind of material as women’s clothes. The tops are somewhat like a caftan, but not so long. There are several men in the back row dressed in these outfits but it is a bit hard to tell because you can’t see their legs. Most men wear flip-flops, even if they have on European style shirts and pants, but some wear European style shoes, too.

Head covering for men

Muslim men wear some kind of head cover, too. Some look a bit like a big Jewish yamaca, but most are more like a pillbox hat. Check out the guy on the extreme right side of the photo. They are sometimes quite fancy, crocheted or covered with embroidery. Men may also wear base ball caps or traditional woven hats that are kind of cone shaped, to keep the sun off in the hot weather. Here is a picture of one, on the head of my language tutor.

School clothes

In primary school the kids wear whatever they have. Some look like they are ready to go to church or a party and others look like they are dressed in rags they picked up off the side of the road. Foot wear is almost always flip-flops.

In the secondary schools, students are supposed to wear uniforms, which may be different for different schools in the big cities. Here they are all kaki so that, if you go to college (middle school) in one of the private schools, your uniforms will still be good when you go to the Lycée (last three years of high school). The shirts for boys and girls are about the same, short sleeved European style shirts. Boys wear pants, and the girls usually wear long, straight skirts, but a few wear pants, like the boys. Here is a picture of some of the girls in my girls’ club. The two on the right are in uniform. The extreme right one is wearing the school t-shirt and typical skirt, and the other is wearing the shirt and pants style uniform. The other two girls have on more European style clothes. Again the overwhelming majority of students wear flip-flops for their foot wear.

Making clothes

By the way, the term pagne can also refer to a measure of cloth. When you go to the marché, you buy on one, two, or three pagne piece of material. Then you take that to your tailor and explain the kind of outfit you want. You may point to a picture on the wall that is similar to what you have in mind, or you can draw a picture. The tailor takes your measurements and, without a pattern, just cuts it out and sews it up. I have found that I sometimes have to go back a couple of times for them to get things right. For example, women do not generally ask for pockets in things and I insist on pockets in skirts and dresses. I also have had to make them change the location of darts in dresses but, in general, they do an amazing job cutting things out “free hand” and sewing them up. It reminds me of the costume makers in the theater whom I have seen do the same thing. Tailors tend to have big seam allowances so it is easy to let things out if they are too tight. Better to make things too big and take them in than to lack material if they are too small.

Eating here

People have asked me what I find to eat here. Actually about half my meals are made from things I buy at the marché or boutique (a tiny store with a few basic supplies). My town has a marché every three days. At the marché I can find peanut butter, and, depending on the season, fresh fruit and vegetables. At the moment there are lots of tomatoes and onions, and also a bit of okra, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers and lettuce, but things in the latter group may or may not be available on any given day. At one point I could get what they call sweet potatoes. They taste just about like American potatoes. The flesh is white, but a bit fibrous. You buy the already cooked and people eat them as a snack. I could make hash browns and mashed potatoes with them. I have not seen any for the last couple of months. There were bananas but they have not been available for quite a while. The only fruit currently available are mangoes. Apparently there are several types of mangoes. The ones in season now are small, about the size of your fist. They start out green on the tree, but turn yellow and are soft when they are ripe. You squish then in their skins, cut off an end, and suck out the juice. Actually, I like to cut them open, squeeze the pulp and juiceinto a bowl, and eat it like apple sauce. It is really sweet and I am beginning to like the taste.

Meat

Another thing I have learned is that, if I get to the guy cooking up goat meat and other animal parts on his grill early enough, I can buy a raw piece of goat leg without the other stuff. I have to cut the meat away from all the ligaments and fat, but when I do that, it is just plain meat and makes a good meal. I sometimes fry up little pieces and put them in a sandwich of local bread. What I usually do is fry up some onions with the meat, and then add water and rice with some American herbs and let it cook until the rice is soft. On market days there is a guy who cooks up a pig, if he can find someone willing to sell him one. I can buy a small sack of just plain pork (no organs, intestines full of blood, or brains) and use that in sandwiches or with couscous or rice.

Cooking

Here are a couple of pictures of my kitchen. First you will notice this used to be a house with running water, but years ago all the plumbing was ripped out. I have a sink, but the water would drain onto the floor if I did not put a bowl under there to catch it. The water for washing dishes and cooking is in the two buckets, one in the sink and one on the floor. I add a capful of bleach to each bucket to kill off any bugs that have escaped the local water treatment efforts. The cloth over each bucket is to keep out the dust.

The stove is a three burner gas stove that is hooked to that blue gas tank under the shelf. You see my two favorite pans, a no-stick frying pan from the US and my one pan with a handle. Next to the stove is the Burkina Faso Peace Corps Cookbook, called “Where There Is No Microwave,” full of helpful hints from past volunteers.

The next picture shows the rest of the kitchen. Except for some herbs and spices, everything was bought here. There is a big can of powdered milk, iodized salt (that you have to search for), a kind of oleo that stays solid at 100 degrees (called Blue Band), oil, and vinegar. On the bottom shelves are the rest of the nested set of pans, none with handles, and some miscellaneous cooking things.

Bread/sandwiches

There are a number of folks who bake “local bread” in what you might call a stone oven, although these are built of the mud bricks you use to build house. I never am sure who will be baking on any given day, but there are a couple of places that usually have bread. Mostly they bake it in these small, long skinny loaves that are just about the right size for one sandwich, but a bit hard to stuff. Here is a picture of a loaf on my small cutting board with a mug, match box, and kitchen tools to show the size.

In addition to the meat sandwiches I have mentioned above I like omelet sandwiches when I can get eggs. At the moment eggs are not available. When there is not much food, the chickens and guinea hens stop laying eggs. Another reminder of home is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The local peanut butter is just plain ground up peanuts. I like to add a bit of salt before I use it for sandwiches. The jelly is something I get when I am in Ouagadougou. There are a couple of stores that cater to Europeans and American and you may be able to find all sorts of French food items there. You never know what they will have in stock, so you can’t go with your heart set on a particular item or you may be disappointed.

Freeze dried food

When I was sick and losing weight last fall the doctor suggested I try to find ways to eat food I am accustomed to. One of the things Janet and family brought to me in their three suitcases full of goodies were the freeze dried back packer’s meals. They are pretty expensive, I guess, but good for a change of pace. Another thing my daughters have sent in care package boxes is something I never even knew existed in the states, past sides. They are some kind of pasta with sauce ingredients all together in a packet. You just add the packet to a couple of cups of water (with powdered milk) and you have a really American tasting meal (actually two meals).

Sweets

There is not much here in the village in the way of sweets. Desert after a meal is not a concept. There are hard candies, but that is about it for sweets. In my food supply boxes from home I get my favorite kind of sweet and salty granola nut bars. I have to ration them so as not to eat the while box at once.

Soft drinks

Coke is here! (Pepsi is not.) While I can by Coke, Fanta, or Sprite with no problem, warm soft drinks are not too refreshing. I can get a cool (not cold) half liter one for about a dollar, but what I drink most is Kool-Aid pink lemonade (again from home). I can buy sugar here and mix up a half a package at a time in the Nalgene bottle you see below, next to my canari (desert cooler).

The canari is a clay pot sitting in a pan of sand. You put water in the pot and it seeps out through the clay. As it evaporates the water in the pot gets cooler than the outside air. It can be as much as 30 degrees cooler than the outside air. A drink that is 70 degrees tastes pretty good when the room temperature is 100!

Next to the canari is they kind of pot the Burkinabè use for cooking all their food. I will be using it to make a Dutch Oven that is explained in “where There Is No Microwave.” I have yet to try it out, but I will tell you about it when I do.

Power where there is no power

When my Burkinabè son saw me studying with LED flashlights at night he told me I needed to get a battery and small florescent light. I knew people sometimes use car batteries for such things, but it seemed to me that, if I bought one, it would be hard to take it to a place to get it charged. He explained that there was a smaller one that would work and that, if I bought one, he would happily charge for me with his solar panel. All I would need to do is let him know when it needed charging and he would send one of his girls over to pick it up in the morning and return it in the evening. We went shopping and got the battery and light, which you can see in the pictures below. The battery also works well for charging my cell phone, which you can see happening on the table.

Beating the heat

Yes, it does get hot here. Most days since the middle of March it has been about 100 degrees in the middle of the day. One of the other things that the battery can run is this little fan. It actually puts out a fair breeze.

If I am really hot and want to get cooled off I use the squirt bottle you see next to it to get my face wet and let the fan evaporate the water. It gets almost cold, which is surprising when it is 100 degrees in the house! Another trick I heard about is getting pagne wet and putting it over you. The first time I tried it I was really surprised how cool this is. If I want to take a nap after lunch, as most Burkinabè do, this is a great way to get comfortable. A small cloth dipped in water and waved in the air for a few seconds is also pretty refreshing on the face.

The best thing, however, is putting a long sleeved blouse in a bucket of water, wring it out and putting it on. I call this trick my village air conditioning system. I dip the long sleeved shirt you see on the chair in water every 20 minutes or so. By the evening my t-shirt or blouse is wet and cool, and I think, this is a pretty comfortable temperature. But if I stop wetting to top layer I am suddenly hot again. I was really worried about getting through the hot season, but for now, these things are making it quite bearable. The heat lasts through May, however, so this is just the beginning.

Sleeping

First of all, here is the bed I normally sleep it. You saw a corner of the mosquito net in the pictures showing water damage before and after painting. The mosquito net was supposed to hang from the pieces of wood you see at each corner of the bed. I felt a bit confined by the thing and decided to suspend it from the ceiling.

I had to get two mattresses for the bed because, with only one, I felt the bed slats. I think of it as a box spring and mattress set without the springs. I do always sleep under the mosquito net even though I have not seen a mosquito in my village since the end of the rainy season. Even though I take anti malaria medication I am told there will be malaria in my system when I leave here. Less is better than more, however, and mosquito bites are itchy.

Sleeping out under the stars

When it is 100 degrees or more in the house at bed time and cooler outdoors, I am glad I bought this screen tent and 4 inch think self inflating sleeping pad. The stripped thing on the sleeping pad is beach towel that I put on there to absorb the sweat. Sometimes in the middle of the night it is cool enough that crawl under it and use it as a light blanket instead.

The Moon

Shortly after I arrived I glanced out one of the windows after dark and the thought “How can there be street lights out there? There is no electricity here!” flashed through my mind. Of course that was just the instant reaction, but I was surprised at how much light there is from a full moon. It is quite possible to walk around outdoors and pretty well see where you are going, although I am not likely to try to ride my bike by moon light.

And stars

When I am sleeping outside and the moon is not up, I can see lots of stars. The constellations, of course, are displaced compared to where I am used to seeing them at home, but the familiar ones are there. (No, I don’t think you can see the Southern Cross from here.) When the moon is full, you can hardly see any stars at all. All of this may not be surprising to those of you who camp out a lot, but as a long time city dweller it is something I had not realized before.

The yard

You will notice that the screen tent is sitting on bare ground. That is the way you keep a tidy courtyard here. You chop out any plants that try to grow there with a daba, a hand held hoe. Then people sweep their courtyards every day, to gather all the trash they have dropped around during the day. I have hired one of the village women to wash my clothes for me and, when she comes, she sweeps the yard, too. That gets up all the leaves and makes it look like a good Burkinabè yard.

More about my house

I told you a bit about my house, but I thought you might be interested in seeing some pictures of the interior. I am not allowed to post pictures of the exterior as a matter of security, but I think the inside is more interesting anyway. First, here is a picture of me in my living room.

There are several things to notice here.

Chairs

The chairs are referred to here as village chairs. They are made of tree branches, goat hide, and metal wire. They are very cheap, the equivalent of about $3.00 each. In normal use, being hauled to and from the courtyard every day, getting caught in the rain, and so on, they may last a few months or a year. I am hoping these will last for my two years here. I found the seats a bit hard for sitting and asked my Burkinabè daughter in law where I could find some cushion stuffing. A couple of days later she showed up with the blue cushion I am sitting on which is a cover over a piece of foam rubber. At Christmas, when my family and we did a run to the big marché, I was able to buy a chunk of foam to use for making cushions. I had some left over pieces of material from dresses I had made for me at the tailor (there will be another blog about clothes) and I used them to make the covers you see behind me and on the other chair.

Table

The little table is lucky to be here. When I had my first termite attack it was sitting in the corner behind were I am sitting. I had lined up my books on it against the wall and thought it was a great idea until I noticed one day that there appeared to be mud on the top of several of them. I looked closer and found that they were termite tunnels. I knocked the tunnels off and put insecticide all over that side of the room. Before I noticed the tunnels the termites had eaten the margin of my Intermediate French Review book, and a track across the top of this table. They only got through the first layer of the plywood so it is still serviceable. On the table is also a copy of that great picture of my family some of you have seen in my office or on the wall in my living room at home. It is a great conversation piece and reminds me of home. The whisky bottle is filled with peanuts and a gift from my Burkinabè daughter in law.

Water storage

Behind me in the picture are the things in which I store water. About every 10 days I get 200 liters of water. The daughter of my community homologue comes with the donkey cart and a 200 liter barrel filled with water from the town water supply. I understand that it has received some treatment and is much safer to drink than water from open wells, but I still treat it. Below is a picture of the things I store water in. There is a big 100 liter garbage can, four jugs that hold about 22 liters each, and a few buckets for what won’t fit in the other containers.

Water treatment

Even though the water is supposed to have been treated I don’t trust it. Here is a picture of my water filter.

You put the water in the top bucket and it slowly drains into the bottom one through a filter. I add Eau de Javel (bleach) to the bottom bucket and the water tastes like it came out of the faucet in Cleveland. Now I also put Eau de Javel in all the water I use to wash dishes and rinse vegetables, etc. I had an attack of giardia back in November and I am pretty sure it was from not putting the bleach in the water I use for dishes and such. I have always soaked vegetables in bleach treated water as soon as I bring them into the house. However if I leave tomatoes on the counter after that, they get dusty. I think I rinsed some off with untreated water and the rest is history. Ugh! Not fun.

Other stuff in the living room

The picture above shows my book case with one of the wall hangings from the handicapped gift shop I mentioned before, and a small drum that is decorative but makes a good sound. I will try to bring it home if the termites don’t get it before I leave. The book case if full of paperbacks from the “library” at the transit house. I am really grateful to have a place where I can get books to occupy my time where there is no work to be done. Every time I visit Ouaga I have a half a dozen books to return and come back with more. On top of the book case are two bronze bookends that my family bought for me at Christmas. They are a boy and a girl reading books. Next to them you see my substitute for a fly swatter. When flies get into the house (every time you open the door) they tend to end up on the screen doors. I have found it very efficient to take that piece of cloth, trap them between it and the screen, and squish them. It is much easier than trying to swat them and saves the screen, I think.

A couple more pictures

Above is another wall hanging from the gift shop I have mentioned,

This last picture shows a piece of hand weaving that I also use as a wall decoration. I actually wore it as a pagna at our in-service training when I first bought it and I think I stretched it out, so it looks like it is hanging crooked. I still like it. Also notice the bicycle in the livingroom. My neighbors would have a fit if I tried to leave it in my courtyard over night. Someone might steal it!

Bicycles

In the Peace Corps all volunteers get bicycles to use for transportation. When my daughter, Janet, was a volunteer in Mali, the country next door to Burkina Faso, she had a moto. A few years ago the Peace Corps decided that motos were a bad idea because so many volunteers were injured in moto accidents. Now you need special permission to even ride as a passenger on a moto, and no one is permitted to drive one. You get approved only for riding on dirt roads and you have to wear a helmet. Riding a moto without a helmet is an automatic ticket home. All of that is fine with me. I was given moto privileges and a helmet, because for one of my projects I need to visit some villages that are far away. With luck I will travel in a car with someone from the association I am working with and will never have to use the moto privileges.

Moto dangers

The other volunteer in our group who is about my age (I think she is about 2 months younger) was riding her bicycle and was hit by a moto. She is still recovering from a fractured ankle. I heard about a teacher at the International School of Ouagadougou who was in a moto accident and seriously injured. He has been in medical care in the US for the past 6 months. The son of the Inspector of schools in my village (essentially the supervisor of all the schools in the school district) was in a moto accident that broke his jaw. He was in the hospital for quite a while with his jaw wired shut. When I come back from a trip to Ouaga and am carrying a back pack full of food items you can only get in the big city, I am grateful that my Burkinabè son rides down on his moto to meet me and help me carry stuff home., but I am also glad I go back home on my bicycle.

PC Bicycles

The bicycles we were given here are wonderful. Here is a picture of mine. They are 24 speed mountain bikes, although I generally keep the left set of gears (with a range of 1-3) set on 2 and use only 1 to 8 with the right set. It is surprising to me how much I change gears when my eye says there is not much difference in the lay of the land. It looks like a pretty flat ride, but sometimes there is a little uphill grade and I shift down to 3 or 4, and then there is a slight downhill grade and I shift up to 8 so I get some effect from peddling. I am getting to know the road from my house into the village and am no longer surprised when I find I want to change gears. Near my house I shift down to 4 or 5 on the way into town, and up to 8 on the way home and “go like the wind.” If it were not for the fact that I change gears all the time I would say the land here is quite flat.

Biking in Ouaga

When I visit the capital city, Ouagadougou, I leave my bicycle in the village and use a “community bike” (an old, reconditioned Peace Corps bike) that is more like the single speed ones the locals have to ride. When I ride around Ouaga I really miss my gears! I should explain that the Peace Corps headquarters and the Transit House, where volunteers can stay when they are in town, are in a quiet residential district where bicycle riding is safe. I do not ride on the busy paved roads such as you saw in my picture of road traffic, although there are lots of Burkinabè who do.

Transit House

The Transit House is a large house in Ouagadougou where volunteers can stay when they are in town. It costs the equivalent of about $7.00 a night to stay there, and there is a kitchen so you can cook meals, as well as hot water in the showers. When I arrived in Burkina Faso a number of people told me I would not want to stay at the Transit House when I was in Ouaga but would want to go to a small hotel nearby. They warned me it was dirty and noisy, with a fraternity house kind of atmosphere. It turns out I really like staying there. First of all, there are several rooms with bunk beds, but most volunteers sleep on mattresses on a big screened in porch. There are ceiling fans and lights so it is the best of all possible sleeping arrangements short of an expensive, fancy hotel with air conditioning. When it gets really hot I may opt for that choice, but for the moment sleeping on that porch is about my favorite thing about visiting the capital. It is true that it can get a bit noisy when all 28 “beds” are occupied, but I am a good sleeper and have not had any trouble sleeping yet. As I have often said, sleeping is one of those things I do really well!

The chance to meet and get to know other volunteers is a thing I also get out of a visit there. All of the volunteers are interesting people, with amazing life stories and skills they are happy to share with you. Many of the younger volunteers do like to take advantage of being away from their sites to do a little partying, but I just say no thanks to invitations to go bar hopping and find other people who also prefer a more quite evening. I even found a volunteer who likes to play cribbage, so I sometimes get my cribbage fix. If I were staying alone at a hotel I would never have the chance to get to know these folks and hear their stories. I also learn about what other volunteers are doing at their sites, learn from them, and get ideas of things I can do.

For example, one of the men, who is about 28, worked for 7 years for a law office doing data crunching and designing ways to present data for court cases. He is an Excel wizard and his job here is with an organization that gives loans to small businesses. Among the other things he does he is showing that organization how to make use of Excel, and he is a terrific resource when I have a question about how to use it with the organization I am working with.

More about babies

I am still going to the maternity center two mornings a week, when I don’t have other things scheduled at the time, to help with weighting the babies. Since January they have changed the routine a bit, and I also understand things a bit better, so here is the story. When a woman comes to the maternity center for pre-natal consultation she gets a little blue book which she brings with her each time. It contains a record of all the consultations before the birth. After the birth there are sections that get filled out about the baby: name, birth date, birth weight, date of polio vaccine, and so on. Babies get the polio vaccine shortly after they are born.

Mothers are supposed to bring the babies in once a month, especially the first, second and third month, in order to get the series of baby shots. I am not sure what all is in the mix, but I expect diphtheria, tetanus, measles, and so on, just as in the states. The problem is that most of the mothers are illiterate and don’t know how to read their appointment date. They also may not have a calendar or know what day it is. This results in mothers showing up too soon for the second or third shot, or, on the other hand, not coming back for 3 or 4 months. On the baby days the mothers arrive with babies on their backs and sit around on wood benches in the waiting area until the staff finally get there and get set up (West Africa International Time, WAIT). There are often mothers there by 8:00 and we often do not get started until 9 or 9:30. Last week the vaccine did not arrive until 10:00.

The baby weighing routine

In theory I could do this alone, but most of the mothers do not speak French and I don’t speak enough Moore to be able to explain things to them, so there is always another woman there with me. The mother comes into the room and hands her book to me or the other woman working there. We check to see if it is time for the baby to be there and, if it is, we find the baby in a record book and find his or her record card. Mother strips off the clothes and puts the baby on the baby scale. In taking the baby off her back and stripping off the clothes, most of the time she holds the baby up in the air by one arm, just the way we were taught NOT to do it for fear of dislocating the baby’s shoulder. At first I found it alarming, and I still cringe when I see it, but the babies seem to do just fine. After we record the weight, we measure the length by having the mother hold the baby’s head at the top of a plastic gizmo that is about 3 feet long. The baby is lying on her back with her mother holding her chin to keep her head at the top of the gizmo, and I grab the poor little thing’s feet and slide a plastic plate up against the soles of her feet. Most of the babies don’t like this too much, although if I am quick we can sometimes measure the length before the baby starts to scream.

Malnutrition

We then check a chart to see how the baby is doing. The options are better that 100%, 85%, 80%, 75% and so on. I think the 100% means how much a child that length should weigh. When you get a baby at less that 75% the nurse I am helping explains to the mother that there is a problem and refers her to the head nurse for a consultation. I assume in really bad cases they refer the family to the center for malnourished children, up the road. On average we see 25 to 45 babies each day, and there are usually two or three who need consultation. Sometimes it is clear as soon as you see the baby on the mother’s back that there is a problem. Other times the baby looks OK until his clothes are off, and then you see the skinny little arms and legs and know the child is not getting proper nutrition.

Kick Polio out of Africa

I mentioned the polio vaccine. It turns out that polio it is still a problem in this country and I believe in all of Africa. In November there was a big campaign to get all kids vaccinated, with the slogan “Kick Polio out of Africa.” There is another one coming up this month. They want to vaccinate every child under 5, and I think there are plenty who do not ever come in for immunizations. The other day I met one of the women from the maternity center and a man from the health service on the road wearing vests with the Kick Polio out of Africa slogan, complete with a soccer player kicking a soccer ball. They were doing a door to door (or courtyard to courtyard) trek around the village, looking for unvaccinated kids.

Evidence of polio

Everywhere I have been in Burkina you see people riding adult sized tricycle-type carts that they peddle by hand. The chain to move the bike is attached to peddles that are in front of the rider as he or she sits in the three wheeled cart. You see people in them on the busy streets and even going down the highway. There are homes for handicapped where people are trained in handicrafts and in my town there is a gift shop that is operated by the handicapped association where they sell their products. When the Pershings were here they bought some of their souvenirs there and I have bought a couple of wall hangings from them to decorate my living room.

Sex Ed for 6th graders

When I started to ask people why girls do not finish high school, one of the common responses was unplanned pregnancy. I have learned that Burkinabè do not talk about sex, even with their spouses. There is no sex education in the schools and the first encounter student have with sexual information is 10th grade biology. That apparently is too late for many girls. In a meeting I had with officers from the parent’s association and the mothers association, one of the suggestions from the mothers was to have a program for mothers and girls about sex and how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. I thought it was a great idea. At our in-service training we received a sex education kit from the Peace Corps. It is designed as an HIV prevention kit, but you can use it to cover any aspect of sexuality. Because of my connections at the maternity center it was easy to find the perfect person to help me with this project. She is a retired mid-wife who has seen too many young girls having babies and is very enthusiastic about this project.

We will first of all explain what menstruation is. Apparently many girls begin to have their periods without having any idea of what is happening to them, and they are terrified. Next we will explain how to avoid unplanned pregnancy. Abstinence, of course is the first method we will discuss, and it is the only sure fire way of course. We will do a demonstration of condoms and how to use them, using a wooden model of the male sex organ, and then explain other forms of contraception. Finally we will talk about HIV infection and how the use of a condom can prevent transmission. My counterpart, the retired mid wife, is fluent in French and in Moore and I expect I will not get to say much, which is fine with me. It is better coming from a Burkinabè than from me! We shall see how it goes. I hope this will become a tradition that continues in these schools after I leave the country.

My House

In the middle of August there was the Peace Corps placement ceremony where I received an envelope to find out where I would be for the next two years. I was somewhat surprised to read that I would have a small two bedroom house with a living room/ kitchen and indoor “shower” in a small town with electricity and running water. When I arrived, I found that was NOT the case at all. In fact I am in a small village next to that small town. There is no electricity or running water in this village but the house is bigger than advertised. It clearly used to have running water because there is a small kitchen with a sink and the stub of a water pipe. The hole in the sink, however, would drain onto the floor if I did not have a big bowl under it. In the indoor bathroom there is a nice shower stall, again with the remains of a water pipe, but no water. From marks on the floor you can see that there used to be a sink and a toilet. In fact the water tank for the toilet is still hanging up on the wall, overheard, as in old fashioned toilets you may have seen in old houses. In addition there are three bedrooms, not two. There is way more space than I need, but I am not complaining. It is good for having company.

One thing the community must do when asking for a volunteer is to agree to provide free housing. Volunteers really don’t have much choice about where they are going to live. There are, however, several Peace Corps regulations about houses provided to the volunteers. They must not have bats, and they must have a private latrine and shower, a hangar or other shady place, and be in a courtyard, surrounded by a wall. Here people live mostly outdoors, so the courtyard is their living room, dining room and kitchen and you need a wall so you are not living “on the street”. As you have read, I had bats. There was a private latrine and shower for my house, but no walled courtyard and no hangar. Gradually all of those things have been corrected so there are no bats and I have a wall and a hangar for shade.

When I first looked at the inside the house I thought it was filthy. After careful examination I discovered that it was not dirty, but that people had scrubbed the walls clean and in the process they had removed the paint. As a result the concrete walls showed through on all the corners where there had been dirty little finger prints. It still looked like there were the marks of dirty hands, but really it was the result of scrubbing dirt off. Furthermore, there were water marks on most of the walls from rain leaking through the roof and down the walls, picking up bat poop on the way. In a word, it was revolting. Here is a picture of what the water damage looked like. It was like this if all of the rooms in the house.

This house has a tin roof with enough room between it and the walls for a kind of ceiling made out of thin pieces of plywood. Every day I would sweep around the edges of the walls and remove bat droppings and dust that had sifted down from the attic in the night. This continued even after the bats were eliminated. When the Pershings came at Christmas they brought a calking gun and a number s tubes of calk. Jonathan sealed the edges of the ceiling in the living room, kitchen and bathroom, and, later on, I did the bedrooms. It is amazing what a difference that has made. The only thing to sweep up now is the dust that blows in through the windows. In addition to calking, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the Pershing family painted the living room and kitchen. What a difference! Here is the "after" picture of the same wall:

This picture also caught the corner of my mosquito net incase you are wondering what that thing is in the right of the picture. I no longer feel like I am living in slum housing. I have continued the painting project and now all the rooms are finished. I have hung a few decorations on the walls of the living area, and it now feels like a home.

Paint

The paint here is interesting. It comes in 30 liter cans, costing about $22 a can. That is a lot more paint than you could get for $22 in the states! It is very thick and cleans up with plain water. It is easy to wipe up drops of paint that get past the drop cloth, even after they are dry. I used a bowl to put paint in and, when the paint dried on it. I thought it would be a total loss. I left it in a bucket of water over night and the paint slid right off. On the other hand, I will not be able to wash the walls or I will wash off the paint, like when the folks cleaned up my house before I arrived. I am trying very hard not to touch the walls!

Checo

I mentioned that I now have a hangar, which, for my house, is a kind of roof over the “front porch” of the house. It is a frame of tree branches covered with checo (pronounced seko), big mats woven of grass. The checo is used for roofing material in traditional houses, covering for the stalls where people sell things at the market, storage bins for grain, and, of course hangars. After the grain is harvested there are tall grasses (6 feet or so tall) that people go out a collect, then weave into these mats. Here is an example of checo used almost like a wall.

The fact that one layer of checo would not keep the rain off is not an issue since there is never rain this time of year. What you want is shade! If you were using it for the roof of a house you would use several layers and it would only leak a little bit. Almost all the houses in my region have tin roofs but the rooms we stayed in when we went to the animal park at Arly had roofs made of 6 or 8 layers of checo.

My hangar

The hangar was built with branches cut right off the tree, not given any time to dry out. Not surprisingly, the weight of the checo has bent the branches a bit and I had trouble opening my front door. Fortunately my Burkinabè son, Prosper, and one of his friends figured out how to correct the problem. First they stuck other branches up on top of those used originally to raise the roof a bit, but after a week of two, the door was hitting the branches again. The current solution has been to add a new prop to hold the whole thing up. It is a forked branch sitting in a can that used to hold dry milk. We shall see how long that works. It is really great to have someone who takes care of me as if I were his mother!