So here is my belated holiday post! Next year I’ll be in America for Christmasand New Year’s!This year I went to Mali for the holiday break. A few days before Xmas, my friend Val came tovisit my village. Her town is just 20ksouth of the capitol, and she commented how much colder village was and howmany more stars are visible at night :) We went for a bike ride around the area, had lunch with my favoriteprofessor’s family and had drinks with the president of the local PTA.

Xmas eve morning we made the trip from my village to Boboand you could definitely tell it was a holiday! The trip took about 2 hours longer than normal… That evening we went to a new bar/grill rightdown the street, watched an xmas movie and went to bed. There were about 20 volunteers there andxmas day we made dinner and watched movies all day (I definitely watched moviesmore than helping with dinner)

The next morning Val and I left at about 6:30 for Mali! We went to Mopti, a city where the Niger and Bani Rivers meet. The bus ride there was about 14 hours, but we had a remarkably uneventful trip up there. Our first morning there we had a tour of the city – saw their markets, a local mosque, the ship builders and just some of the side streets. I know that I can’t really compare Mopti – a tourist city – to my rural village, but I was surprised by the amount of development surprised me. Mopti is between Bamako, the capitol of Mali, and Timbuktu and the city has been a part of the trade route for centuries. We saw some of the big chunks of salt that is mined near Timbuktu as well as lots of smoked fish, all ready to be shipped one way or the other on the rivers.

Salt mined near TimbuktuThat evening we went on a sunset canoe ride around thearea. There were a couple islands rightacross from the city so we got off and walked around a couple of them. We saw fish being smoked (they cover a pileof fish with grass, then light the grass on fire) and the evening nets beingdragged.

The evening catch.The next day we sat around the pool reading with a walkalong the river. The rest of our groupgot in that evening – two other volunteers (from MN!) and their four friendsvisiting from home, one of whom works about two miles from my house.Craziness. Our guide for the hikingportion of the trip also got in that evening, so we figured out the last coupledetails and headed into Dogon Country.

Dogon is an area of south eastern Mali – just north ofBurkina Faso – where the Dogon people lived in villages built into the cliffsof the Bandiagara Escarpment. Our tourstarted on top of the cliffs and ended a couple days later at the bottom. Our guide, Oumar, is Dogon and was both superknowledgeable and super awesome. Hespoke English and you could tell from different phrases he used that he haddefinitely spent time around Americans.

In each village we passed through Oumar would explaindifferent parts of the village and its significance in the culture. Each village had several “town halls” wheremen would go to resolve disputes. Theparties in conflict would go in with several village elders and no one couldcome out until they reached a resolution. And not a strict democratic, 51% say yes 49% say no type conclusion, but aresolution where everyone was in agreement. They would talk around and around the issue, each side trying toconvince the other of their validity. You’ll also notice how that the ceiling is very low on thesebuildings. The reason is so no one canstand up in anger and make any move to hurt another person. A kind of cool concept.

The 'town hall.' It sounds like the US could've used a couple of these this past year...As I said, the Dogon lived in cliff villages: today thevillages have all been rebuilt either above or below the cliff. We were able to see an ancient village,though. Oumar informed us that the Dogonweren’t the ones to build the villages; they moved in after a people called theTele left them. The villages consistedof mostly houses and grain silos.

One of the ancient villages on the cliff.In the last village we visited we were able to see a maskceremony. While these are typically justpreformed for tourists today, traditionally they were done at funerals to guidethe spirits. Each different type of maskrepresented a different person or belief in the traditionally animist culture.

Giant Mask! He was also doing these awesome spins and dips and i thought he was going to fall or take someone out, haha.After our 4 days hiking we made our way back to Mopti, thenback on into Burkina. Our bus ride backwas equally uneventful as the one out, which really is a quite surprising inWest Africa. We got back to Bobo where Iwas able to hang out with some volunteers from Ghana. We ran into them in Dogon, then again inBobo. Also, they were from MN!

Overall, we had a really great week and it was pretty greatway to ring in the New Year. Happy 2012,friends!

Tuina Aubin. He's 15 and a student in my 5e Math class, 3rd in his class overall, and he passed away this week. When I showed up at school Thursday morning, the director was talking to the Bureau des Eleves (student council) and when he was done he came up to me and said that he had some bad news: a student had died.

When the director told me the name, I recognized it, but couldn't put a face with it immediately. And that killed me. I've spent about 4 months with these kids now, and I doubt I could name 10% of that class. I knew what area of the class he sat in, I know that I recognized the name, meaning it was someone who participated, but I couldn't picture his face for the life of me. It wasn't until a couple hours later when all the professors sat around talking about him that I was finally sure I was thinking of the right kid. It just felt like i was doing him some sort of injustice by not even being able remember him.

As to how he died, no really knows at this point. He was sick this last week, he had come in to school Tuesday to get the Medical Notebook (they have the local health clinic sign it to justify their absence from school) and he apparently had some sort of local medicine on his forehead (used for headaches) and he was sweating a lot. So it could have been anything. And apparently the situation escalated over night, and being that my village is at least 2 hours from a hospital, I doubt anyone thought to take him there. Or that it wasn't that serious.

After hearing the news that morning, the school staff and the bureau des eleves went to his family's house to give our condolences. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. As we approached the house we could hear the crying, and then there were about 30 women sitting around under a hanger. The women were all crying: heavy, anguished, pained crying. In this cultural it is not acceptable to cry unless someone has died. Meaning that small frustrations and struggles we often cry over in America are dealt with in silence here. And part of me wonders that because a death is the only time they can cry, let out their frustrations, they take it to another level. Another part of it, in the US mourning families are supposed to maintain some level of control. It's often considered uncouth to be overly distraught in front of others. Here, they don't care that anyone is seeing their grief: their child just died, of course their grieving. That's how they see it, and that's how anyone else sees it, too.

After a couple minutes the person standing in front of me moved a little to the side and I noticed that their was a bundled blanket in the middle of the women under the hangar. It took me about two seconds to realize that it was the body. It was just wrapped in a simple fleece blanket - the same kind every market sells and every home has one or two of - and it was laying on a straw mat. I found out later that my director asked if we could see him, but they declined. I also later learned that the body was washed the next day, and it is at that point that men also join the wake.

When we got back to school the biology teacher just kind of walked slightly away from the rest of the group and simply states "that was too hard." He was the one to ask why only women were there. None of the professors are the same ethnic group as the village, but our secretary is Bwaba, so she explained some of the customs to all of us. As we were sitting around talking the biology teacher once again speaks up, "just this week, I used Aubin as an example of one the good kids we had in 6e last year." The french teacher commented that if there were too many players for soccer, he could always ask Aubin to wait for the next half and Aubin would never make a fuss about it. He was polite, kind and smart.

I've talked to a couple other volunteers about this, and I think that most volunteers experience a student death in their two years here. Pretty sad statistic and I wonder how it compares to a lifetime of teaching in the US. When I was student teaching at DCIS one of the teachers was talking about his motivation for joining the Peace Corps and he said that he did it because he wanted to see dead bodies. Not in some disturbing morbid way, but just that he wanted to live a life closer to edge of life. A little less protection between you and the realities of life and death the world over. And whether or not that is something I was expressly looking for in my service, it's certainly true.

This post is a while in coming, I took this pictures this summer, but I still wanted to share them with you!

Back in about August, I was sitting with my neighbor, Sita, when a woman passed selling bean leaves. As i've said before, leaves of various plants are often mixed into sauces and provide a good portion of the nutrition value to food here. Sita bought the leaves and said she was going to make a special dish with them. She started that afternoon by making corn flour, but a little thicker than the corn flour typically used to make tô. Then she washed the leaves, and pounded them into a very green mush. Mix flour with leaf mush and you've got dinner. She also pounded some fresh peanuts (very different taste than roasted, more of a fresh green bean or pea taste) and added those into the mixture.

The mixture: corn flour, bean leaves, pounded fresh peanuts and water.At this point, Sita ran off to get something from a village elder. She came back with a big bundle of a special kind of sticks that she fitted into the pot over the fire. She poured water over the stick bundle and let it heat up. As the water was heating, Sita started to form the mixture into oblong balls. She placed the balls onto the sticks in the pot, then covered it again.

The balls were cooked by the steam, and they hardened and now had a somewhat meatball like consistency. When done, they are not served on a miniature bun, but instead served covered in oil and salt. (close enough, right?). I had tried something similar during my training, but that was made from bean flour, not corn. The corn flour made this a little lighter, and they were pretty good. They don't have a strong taste at all, meaning that they oil and salt you drizzle on is where most of the flavor is coming from.

Steam cooked to perfection.

I have to admit, any food that is different from the rice, pasta, and tô that i normally eat is a more than welcome treat. And when i don't have to cook it myself, even better :)

So I just finished a (long) weekend in Ouaga, and I hadevery intention of writing two or more blog posts and here we are, less than 12hours before I’m going to leave with nothing written… :)

The school started at the beginning of October, and Icertainly hit the ground running this year. I left for my vacation to Paris not knowing what classes I was teachingor even how many hours. I got back tovillage on a Monday, got my schedule Tuesday and was teaching Wednesday!! Definitely a big change from last year. I remember how stressed and nervous I waslast year, spending the whole month before school started just sitting andworrying about what I was going to do. I’m glad this year wasn’t that difficult.

I am teaching an additional class this year, and I actuallyhave none of the same classes as last year, which means that all the hours andnotes I made in my lesson plans were made in vain, haha. I’m teaching 5e Math (a friend recently askedwhat the “e” means after the number, and it’s the French equivalent the “th” atthe end of 5th), 4e Physics/Chemistry and 3e Math. I had 4e and 3e last year (but the math andp/c were switched) and I was a little nervous about teaching 5e because theyare younger. It turns out that 5e is myfavorite class: they are young enough to still crave teacher attention andreinforcement that older grades pretend they don’t need. 5e is my largest class – 85 students crammedonto about 30 benches in one large smelly room – but it doesn’t really feelthat different. I certainly notice thedifference when it comes to grading tests, but the day to day isn’t thatdifferent. My 4e is only about 40 and my3e is 29. That’s right, 29!! All my friends here are really jealous ofthat one, and honestly I know some American teachers who would be too. Unfortunately, that small class size is dueto the fact that only about 11 out of 56 passed the previous class last year :(The other students were recruited from other areas, which means that theyprobably took 3e last year but didn’t pass the national test and now have torepeat at a new school.

I just graded my first test from my 5e class, and I noticeda HUGE difference between the scores of boys and girls. (Quick background on grading tests here:Tests are always out of 20 pts. Always. 10 out of 20 is passing,and only about 50% of the students are expected to pass. Very different mindset from what we have inthe US. ) The class average for my test was almost exactly 10, prettystandard. But when I averaged the scoresof boys and girls individually, I saw that girls only averaged 8.2 points andboys averaged 11. That seemed to be ahuge difference to me, so I went back and compared them to my 4e math scoresfrom last year and the scores by gender never differed by more than 0.3. And here they differ by almost 3.0!! I know not everyone is a big math nerd outthere, but I assure you, that’s a big deal. I’m not sure how I’m going to address this disparity just yet, but I’mcertainly going to do something. If youhave any ideas, let me know!

The first few weeks back in village were very mellow, justgetting back into the routine of the school year. Then all of a sudden, I was out of villagefor four weekends in a row! I still don’tknow how that happened and traveling that much gets old really fast. I head back to site tomorrow, and I plan onstaying there for at least two weeks straight!

Cold season (aka temps in the 60s) is just starting andnights are already getting nice and chilly. I can sleep with a blanket! Butcold season also means dry season, so there is dust everywhere! I currentlyhave a sinus infection (not fun ever, less fun when in Africa) and I blame thedust. The air is so dry that most Burkinabeput shea butter up their nose to help with the dryness and dust, last year I privatelylaughed at them; this year I’m doing the same thing.

Back at the beginning of September a new group of volunteersstarted their service. I helped withtraining so I’ve been talking to a few and answering questions as they figurethings out for the first time. It is socrazy how much of a difference you feel between your first and secondyear. I’m confident that I asked every questionthey are asking and shared every concern they have right now, but after a yearof living here I’m pretty comfortable. Every day isn’t the challenge it once was. With less than a year until I’m back in thestates, my new worries are the challenges I’m going to face readjusting… :P

Well, the Peace Corps Burkina Faso 50th Anniversary Fair is over and done. It was this last week in Ouaga, and, as you will see in the video, it was a chance for volunteers to showcase their work. There are some really awesome organizations making and doing amazing things. It was the first time I was able to see a lot of the work that I'd heard about from friends and it was just so cool to see everyone in their element. And the Burkinabe Prime Minister and First Lady stopped by to check it out!

So yeah, we're kind of a big deal.

This last weekend Peace Corps Burkina Faso held a 50th anniversary fair held here in Ouagadougou. The fair was an opportunity for volunteers to share what work they've been doing with their communities and to help explain exactly what Peace Corps does. The fair included performances by different groups and activities to try and involve fair-goers in what we were working on. I helped out for a day at the performance booth and was able to get some video of a volunteer teaching a song about hand washing. It is sung to the tune of Feist's 1,2,3,4 and was written by volunteer Halley B. Sorry that you can hear me singing in some parts... :P

FRENCHun, deux, trois, quatre : je me repose sur la nattecinq, six, sept, huit : je me lave avant la nuitet cette soiree, ma mere a preparétô avec bonne sauce, mais avant de manger,ooooh, je lave les mains,ooooh, je lave les mains

un, deux, trois, quatre : brosse les dents avec la pâtecinq, six, sept, huit : je fait bouillir mon eau de puitset mon ami, kando jacqueline,elle fait quelque chose après la latrineooooh, elle lave les mainsooooh, elle lave les mains

on lave les mains, c'est pour eviterles maux de ventre et la diarrheeooooh, nous lavons les mainsooooh, nous lavons les mains

ENGLISH1,2,3,4 I lay on the mat5,6,7,8 I shower before bedand this evening, my mommadetô with good sauce, butbefore eatingooooh, i wash my handsooooh, i wash my hands

1,2,3,4 Brush your teethwith toothpaste5.6.7.8 I boil my wellwaterand my friend, Jacqueline,she does something afterusing the bathroomooooh, she washes her handsooooh, she washes her hands

we wash our hands to avoidstomach aches and diarrheaooooh, we wash our handsooooh, we wash our hands

One of the most common complaints I hear from my friends in Yaho is the problem with water. Yaho doesn't have running water, but did have a water filter and pump system put in by WaterAid. There were about 5-7 places around the village where you could go and get treated water from a spigot/tap/etc for 10FCFA ($0.02) for 25 liters of water. Not a bad system. Of course functionaires (teachers, nurses, etc) will whine that they don't have running water in their houses, but we work with what we have, right? There is a spigot within walking distance for almost everyone and certainly within biking distance for everyone. The water was treated; so less people got sick and they didn't have to haul water out of a well themselves.

Well, about 3 months ago, the filter system broke. And it's going to cost lots of money to fix it... I think that the money collected from every fill-up is supposed to be set aside and then used in case of emergencies such as this, but the problem is bigger than they anticipated. And because no one can come get water, they have no way of making any more money. Needless to say, it's a problem. Women now use open-well water for their cooking, cleaning, drinking or they have to walk/bike a much further distance to get clean water. Open wells are almost everywhere, so they're convenient and most women choose to use them. Unfortunately, because they're open, there are problems with sanitation. Anything can (and does) run into the wells, making the water unsafe to drink. There are two direct-source pumps in the village, one near the center of town and the other over 1km away at the school where I teach. But if you don't have a bike, do you really want to carry 25L of water on your head?

During this last school year, I would just bring my water containers to school and students would bring them home for me. On weekends I would use the WaterAid water. This summer I was already not looking forward to having to get my own water, and once the WaterAid pumps broke, that job became even more of a challenge. There were many (many) days were I would seriously consider if a shower or washing dishes was really necessary if it meant I would have to go get water (for the record, shower is usually worth it, dishes are not). This summer I was also in and out of village a lot, so getting into a routine was difficult. The last time I was in Yaho I did finally seem to get a routine down and thought i would share with you all my typical day's excursion to the pump!

First, I would strap the container to my bike and head off to school. There I would stand and pump water for maybe 5 minutes before strapping it back on. The container is 25L, so about 50lbs when full.

i should probably clean the container...

Every now and then I will run into some kids at the pump who help me get water, but that's pretty rare these days because they're out in the fields. After filling up the jug, lugging it up onto my bike, and strapping it down tight, I bike off. The roads are also really bad right now because the rains wash them out. If it rained that morning or the day before, I sometimes have to walk my bike so I don't get stuck in the mud. I'm getting better at mud biking, but falling with one of those jugs strapped to your bike is less than fun. Not that I would know, of course :)

one of the girls i see everyday biking to school. she offered to hold my bike for the picture and seemed disappointed that i only needed one jug so i wouldn't be back :)

this is where it can get muddy... less than fun.After the bike back i unstrap the jug, lug it into the house and continue to convince myself that showering is worth the effort. I only use about one of the containers a day (25L), which is roughly the same amount of water used in flushing a US toilet twice. During hot season, the amount of water i drink a day and the amount I need to shower is almost the same (5-ish liters).

Luckily, school starts again in a week; meaning that the days of making my students do all sorts of manual labor can start once again :)

BIKE!So I just finished up my stint with the bike tour! It was awesome and hard and fun and sweaty and tiring and great.The first day we biked from Bobo to Bereba, which we thought would only be 106k. Little did we know, it was really about 130k and we were not happy at 1:30 that afternoon when we still hadn't had any lunch. But then we ate and all crankiness went away! Once we got to Bereba, we were greeted by a soccer team who biked into town with us. In town we were greeted by the Chef (chief) du Village, who had the coolest throne/seat ever. It was made from an old car seat welded to metal legs, haha.After greeted all the appropriate people, we went to the village library and played a BINGO-type reading game with some elementary aged students. We went out for a drink with the Chef, ate some great fried chicken and rice with peanut sauce, then I promptly passed out for the night. Sleep well deserved.My first morning! This was before we knew that we'd miscalculated the distance by 20k not in our favor :P

Our uniformed entourage. The next morning we headed to Dedougou, which means we passed the turn to my site!! (My site is about 30k directly north of Bereba, but to get there by roads you have to add about 50k) That day was the toughest for me, mostly because I'd biked 130k the day before. It was hilly again (my first day was also hilly) and after about 100k, my butt was officially kicked. But we finally made it into town where our host had plates of rice and sauce just waiting for us. It was perfect.

That evening we talked with some youth about HIV/AIDS, which was very interesting. The group that came was a group of young men and women who are trained to go around the community and talk about safe sex. I don't think any of them had done that yet, but they had obviously been trained. The group also had condoms that they gave out as part of their campaign. There is a stigma here that if you use condoms you must be infected, so a lot of people are ashamed to use condoms. But through awareness programs like this people are becoming more educated on the topic!

Once again, after the talk and dinner (more chicken!), we all passed out for the night.

YAHOo!

The next day we headed to Tenado, and it was my first day of all dirt road. Luckily, it's dirt road that is about to be paved so it's packed down and pretty smooth, unlike the dirt road by me, which is a mud/gravel pit. Halfway to Tenado we stopped in Tcheriba, a town known for it's pottery. The volunteer there had a huge collection (a tea set, dishes, decorations) that she said ran her $10 total. So i think i need to go back and buy some souvenirs!

In Tcheriba we met with the volunteers counterparts and other association leaders and talked about volunteerism. One of the volunteers on the tour is actually working with the National Volunteer Association here in Burkina, so he was able to add quite a bit to the convo. The NVA might be comparable to Americorps back home.

After lunch, we jumped back on the road to make it to Tenado for dinner. Unfortunately, the road after Tcheriba was not as nice as the morning making the ride much more difficult.

Muddy roads

Biking into TenadoTenado to Koudougou was my shortest day yet, even though we did go the long way around to stop at another volunteer's site, Reo. In Reo we met with a women's association where the volunteer led a Neem Cream making demonstration. Neem Cream is a mosquito repellent lotion made from the leaves a local tree, Neem. First you boil the leaves in water until they turn the water green,then take them out. Next, add shea butter (locally made here, very very cheap and easy to find) and a bar of soap (to help it thicken back up) and keep it on the fire until everything is melted. After it's melted, just let it cool and you've got Neem Cream. Very easy and now that i know the measurements, i hope to make it this fall with my neighbors!

After the demonstration we biked the 15k into Kdg, where we met the mayor before finally getting some lunch at about 5 that evening :P My friend in Kdg had her parents visiting, so I joined them for dinner before once again going to bed early.

The next day was our day off, and let me say: it was much needed. I slept in, walked around in search of my breakfast and simply enjoyed the ceiling fan in my room. That afternoon we hosted a joint meeting of the local English clubs. We watched a movie about American history, answered questions about that as well as questions about American culture in general.

That evening for dinner we were actually not overly exhausted and could even enjoy the meal, haha!

Sunrise coming out of KoudougouMy last full day on the tour was another 100k+ day, once again all dirt road. We actually left that morning when we said we were going to, so we made it into Latodin by a normal lunch time. We ate lunch, met the volunteer's hospital staff and mayor, drank a free beer, then ate dinner and passed out, per usual.The next morning was my last day, and I was hoping to catch a 7am bus in a village 25k away. Needless to say, we left early that morning. We did make it in time for the bus, and i did make it in time for a 10 mtg in the capital! Success!

Overall, I had a great time! I learned so much from each of the volunteers we stopped to visit and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how each of them lived within their communities. I hope to bring some of the new ideas i learned back to my site. The bike tour is still going on for another two-ish weeks, so check out their blog if you're interested in more updates! And of course, you can still donate to the GAD fund :)

View Bike Tour! in a larger map

Here's a map of the route that I will be biking! Check out the previous post for more info!

So what is the Burkina Bike Tour?The Bike Tour was started last year as a fundraiser for our Gender and Development Committee (GAD). The riders in the tour ask their friends and family back home to make a donation to in support of them biking the tour. The money was then used to fund small grants for volunteers and their communities throughout this past year. All the projects that grant money was used for had to help promote the development of women and girls. (This really awesome project was done by my nearest neighbor, a Girls' Empowerment and Education volunteer who lives about 30km from my village! She used grant money to train some middle school girls to act as "health agents," teaching the community about a variety of topics.)

This year, in addition to using the tour as a fundraiser, the GAD committee wanted to use it as an opportunity to spread awareness about Peace Corps Burkina Faso and about individual projects volunteers are working on. I know this year's route was chosen so that they are passing through as many sites as possible. At some of the sites we pass through, through group will help lead a formation (session? sometimes i forget that words i use aren't really english words...) about hand washing, hygiene, malaria, family planning, or anything else that the volunteer wants to put together. In some villages, we will have a welcome festival and simply enjoying spending time spent eating and dancing.

The Bike Tour is going to cover a total of 1800km (about 1120 miles) over 22 days. I will biking 7 days for a total of 572km (355 miles) for an average of 96km/day! I'm super excited, and I tell myself that 100km is not actually that much; most cars can do it in an hour, so I figure I can do it in a day, right? The tour starts on the south-western corner of the country, and I'm starting at the third little dot. I'm ending at the most northern dot, and if you're curious, my village is just north of the 4th dot.

Yes, there are more dots than sites listed. We are just passing through some villages, and spending the night in others.

So now that you know all about the Bike Tour, consider donating to the GAD committee. I mean, what better way to spend some tax-deductible money than on the development of women in one of the poorest countries in the world. And you do get quite a bang for you buck, too. At the current exchange rate: $8 will buy all the needed supplies for a hand washing station (bucket, spigot, and soap); $10 is enough to buy notebooks and pens for girls' camp of 15 girls; and just $2.50 is enough to feed each of those girls breakfast, lunch, AND dinner for that same week long camp. So without starting to sound like one of those infomercials for sponsoring children, even a little bit goes a long way! If you do donate, make sure to mark GAD Gender and Development in the comments box. Here's the website, and the donation box is on the right hand side.

I will hopefully have at least one update on how the tour is going, but I'm not sure what our internet access is going to be like. If not, I will most definitely write all about it once I'm done :) Also, if you have any other questions about the donations or grants, let me know!

Ironic if you think about the fact that Burkina is a French speaking country and Ghana isn't...

So back in June I traveled to Ghana with a few friends, Val, Shannon, Celenia and John. We visited Busua, Akwiida, Cape Coast and Kumasi, spending almost all of our time relaxing on the beach. It wasn’t really hot when we were there, but we actually really enjoyed the nice and cool weather after our weeks of 100+ temps in Burkina. One of the first things we noticed after crossing the border into Ghana was the number of children wearing shoes. Even in a somewhat small village/city. Everyone had shoes, and they were nicer than cheap flip flops!! After a couple more days in country, we started noticing that very few people wore pagne (local fabric) clothes; most people were wearing western style clothing. In Burkina, it is not at all uncommon to see a woman wearing simply a piece of fabric wrapped around as a skirt. Even in the capital city, this is not an uncommon sight. But in Ghana, I think I only saw two women throughout the week who sported the simple pagne skirt. One thing we often talk about amongst volunteers is how buff Burkinabe are, men and women! Every woman in my village has the most muscled arms you can imagine. And every boy over the age of 8 has a well defined six pack. In Ghana this was not the case: we saw almost no well-toned arms, and everyone seemed to be carrying a few more pounds around the waist. I am certain this difference is due to richer diet and a less physical labor required, but it really struck me how obviously healthier Ghanaians looked. After living in Burkina for a year, my perceptions of what is “normal” most definitely have changed: What is normal body size, what is normal to expect in a grocery store, what is a normal level of cleanliness for children, etc. And Ghana once again shook up my ideas of all of these. The grocery stores had so much more to offer!! (it still is nowhere near an American store though). It’s funny, because just before leaving we were talking about the movie Green Zone and how everything in the war-torn city looked nicer than Ouaga :P Because of the big differences we noticed in Ghana, I looked into the gap in income between the two countries. According to CIA World Factbook Ghana’s GDP per capita is $2500 and Burkina’s is $1200 (and the US’s is $47,200). Even more interesting: Ghana’s unemployment rate is 11%, while Burkina’s is 77%!! (US is 9.7%). So it’s one thing to be told I’m living in one of the poorest countries in the world, and it’s another thing all together to think that a country with a per capita GDP of $2500 has it made :P In Burkina, the common mode of transportation is a small motorcycle (called a moto). In big cities there are enough of these to completely fill the streets and cars are rare. In Ghana there were cars everywhere!! Motos were rare and roads were better condition.Anyway, back to vacation-y things. One of the days we were staying in Akwiida, three of us biked to the nearby Cape Three Points. The cape claims to be the closest landmass to the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian (0 degrees for both latitude and longitude), aka the center of the world! One look at a map argues that there are probably closer points, but it is certainly one of the closest on the continent! While the bike ride would have been much more fun on bikes that weren’t really crappy, it was still rather enjoyable (and kind of scary going down some of those hills!)Our second to last day was when we headed to Cape Coast, and I really wish we would have spent another day there. Yes, it was a little more touristy, but it had a lot of cool things to offer that the smaller places we were staying didn’t have. We did get to see the castle in Cape Coast and we noticed that the part of the castle that you only see from the ocean hadn’t been white washed as recently as the street view side :)

Unfortunately, after our relaxing week, we had to spend over 24 hours in transport getting back in to Burkina. Transport was just as awful on the way there, but this time there wasn’t a beach at the end of it :/ Also, I probably gained about 5 lbs that week from eating, drinking, and relaxing to my heart’s content. And I’d do it again in a second :)

So, the second event mentioned in the previous post was the Director’s Cup. It is an annual tournament for the CEG (where I work) student’s that is put on and planned by the director (who is also my counterpart). As mentioned a few posts ago, the other professors were boycotting the tournament. These had caused quite the ruckus at my school earlier in the spring, but by now things had (mostly) calmed down. They still didn’t come to tournament, but I did and I had a good time!The final match was between the 4e and 3e classes (4e=8th grade, 3e=9th grade), which were the two classes I taught this year!! I was Prof. Principale for 4e, which means that I was in charge of calculating their grades and I have to deal with them if there are any discipline issues, so I was cheering for them.

They started by having a few warm up laps, after which one of the 3e boys pulls out a wig and puts in it on! Funniest thing ever. I have to admit, while a small silly prank like that would barely draw attention at home, any show of personality is a big deal here. Students from a young age are punished for doing anything creatively or uniquely, meaning that by the time they get to my level a lot of them don’t even try to stand out any more. This mentality it so opposite the current US position on the subject, which I feel encourages adolescents to be themselves a little more.The game itself wasn’t too interesting, just another soccer game. One exciting moment in the game was when a dog decided wanted he wanted to play, too! He chased the ball up and down the field a few times until they finally paused the came to chase him away. Pretty cute :)(sorry for the poor quality, i had to zoom it in to show the dog!) I forget the final score, but 3e won. They were pretty excited about it.And even more important, 29 out of 42 of my 3e students passed their BEPC! That means they can go on to second cycle or they can get jobs as primary school teachers, nurses, or other medium level government jobs! Doesn’t sound like huge deal at home, but the students who didn’t pass will maybe try again but more likely start the life of a sustenance farmer.

There were two recent (or not so recent) at site, both of which ended with a soccer game. The first event was OSEP, and quite honestly, I can’t remember what the acronym stands for… It is an event at the primary school level, between all the schools in my “district” and the “district” next door. Throughout the previous months all 10 ten schools in my area had a tournament and the champion was now playing against the other district’s champion. The students were all about 5-6th grade level and unfortunately neither of the two Yaho schools won for our district. A week or so earlier I had purchased my OSEP t-shirt, so I was sporting that and jeans in honor of the day.It was my first time wearing jeans in village, and I definitely got some comments about it, haha!That morning there was supposed to be a theater performance by some of the students that I wanted to see. I went to the school roughly the time I was told, and of course they weren’t set up yet. So I went across the street to hang out at the health center until they were ready. After about an hour and a half, they still hadn’t started, so I finally went over to ask. Apparently nobody had arranged for speakers to be brought to the school, so they were going to do the theater pieces later at the soccer match.I sat with the men waiting for a while, but when I realized all the women were over making lunch for everyone, I went to hang out with them. They were almost done when I got there, so I ate with them. They had to bring the food over to the men, so they decided I was at least capable of watching their purses and the boiling spaghetti.That is one thing about living here, in some situations you are treated well above your status (such as being seated with school officials instead of the other profs), and the rest of the time your treated like a child (considered incapable of doing anything actually useful). And unfortunately, by their standards, I am kind of like a child. I don’t have the hand calluses necessary to grab coals or pots off the fire with no protection. I can’t even eat food straight off the fire, it burns my hands. I don’t have the strength to lift 20L pots full of rice or sauce. I also don’t cook the same way they do, so I have to ask how much oil to add (way more than any ever wants to think about), how long to cook the sauce, etc. I’m better left in charge of watching the purses…Anyway. After eating and serving the men, they fed the players for the two soccer teams (all boys) then had some students (all girls) help clean up and bring some more food to the bar for after the match. At the match, all the official-type people were able to say a few words: congratulating the kids, thanking the sponsors, thanking anyone else who’s put in long hours for this, etc. At this point the prefet (the person in charge of all the government employees in the community) asks to say a few words, and goes on to say how they could have made the event better. Not saying that criticism is bad, but this was not the time or place or audience to be sharing specific ideas. And everyone was talking over him anyway, they just wanted to see the kids play!Finally, the students did start playing. They even had officially looking uniforms provided by SEMAFO, a gold mining company that mines just north of Yaho.

During half-time the students preformed a couple theater pieces. There was a dance, a monologue, and a wordless skit. All of the pieces were directed by a friend of mine, Mados.

About half way through the second half, the sky got really dark and the wind started to pick up. It even blew the tent over!! But the students were able to finish the game and our district won!!! The whole village was so excited, it was great :)(Sorry the picture isn't the greatest, as I said, the sky got real crazy just before this!)After the game some people were invited for a little after party, where I helped serve the snacks. There was supposed to be a dance after the that, but it started raining, so it never happened :/ But I had a really fun day helping out with the event and mostly just watching the kids have a fun time!

I’m at a training this week in preparation for the new volunteers coming, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my first impressions of things here. Volunteers often talk about is how quickly you get used to life here and how things quickly lose their novelty or strangeness. But thinking back to my first days (months) in country, there was a lot that I just thought was crazy, that I now found not really that crazy.

For example, when I first got here I was amazed at the number of lizards here! I mean, I’m from Minnesota, not a place really known for any sort of reptiles at all. But here in Burkina (and the majority of Africa, I think) lizards run around like squirrels do in the Midwest. And animals in general are just everywhere here. I’ve written about several incidents involving bulls, but there are also donkeys, chickens, cats, dogs, sheep, goats and pigs everywhere. And they make noise. All. The. Time. But I’m used to it. I can sleep through the roosters’ morning cries, and the donkeys’ random screaming and the goats crying (that really does sound like kids). Just this weekend I saw some horses racing down a street in the capital, which was actually really weird. Though riding in a taxi in the capital city that’s following a donkey cart, that’s not weird at all.

In addition to animals everywhere, there are children everywhere. And they aren’t really supervised… They poop where ever they want. For example, my neighbor kids poop 10 feet from the gate to my courtyard, so often open the door to go out to school and see one of the popping a squat. They used to run away in fear of the white girl, but now they just ignore me and I ignore them. And then a pig or dog comes along and enjoys a nice breakfast. (I’ll let you connect the dots on that one yourself).

Another weird thing that you quickly get used to here is eating food from plastic bags. Instead of “to go” boxes, street vendors and even restaurants will give you your food to go in a black plastic bag. And at first you think it is absolutely bizarre and little gross to be eating your rice or spaghetti out of bag, but you get over it.

You also get over being dirty constantly. You never stop sweating, and it’s so dusty that you will always have a thin (or not so thin) film of dust and sweat on your face and clothing. If by some act of God, you do stop sweating, you have a crust of salt everywhere. Mostly on your neck, it’s rather unpleasant.

Transportation here is also really something you have to see to believe. Most of the transport here is what we call bush-taxis, which are vehicles larger than a mini-van, smaller than a 15 passenger van (would that just make it a van?) But in addition to loading the inside with as many people as possible, the top is loaded up with baggage, motorcycles, bikes, animals, etc. There have been numerous occasions where the height of the stuff on the roof is the same as the height of the car itself. Not a comforting site, but I have yet to see one tip over! One of my first bush-taxi experiences involved a jam-packed van that had 2 bulls and 15 sheep/goats on top. At one point some water was falling off of the roof and everyone was trying to avoid getting hit by it from the window. I thought to myself “why are they being so weird about it, the mist is kind of cooling,” then I realized it was animal pee...

But in addition to all these funny (and somewhat gross) things that I have gotten used to and now consider almost entirely normal, there are some things that I will never get used to. And I think a lot of that has to do with being an outsider in this culture. I will never get used to children (and adults) blatantly staring at me, following me, crying at the sight of me (not so much the adults on that one), and asking me for things. I will never get used to people trying to touch my hair, people calling me fat or telling me I’ve gained weight, no matter how many times they try to explain it’s a compliment…

One last fun story (once again about animals): the other day I was biking home from a little shop in “downtown” Yaho. There is a spot where a bunch of young men/boys hang out, and right as I biked past, one pulled up alongside me and challenged me to a race. Being an awesome biker, I accepted his challenge and we both took off pedaling. Not even 100ft down the road a pig starts to cross the street, so the boy veers to the side to avoid it. At this same time the pig realizes that he is interfering in our race and starts to turn back, but where he turns is right where the boy had swerved! Boy hits pig, sending boy flying over his handle bars. Boy is fine, as is pig. Everyone downtown had been watching our race, and they are now all laughing hysterically at the poor boy, who simply grabbed his bike and turned back in shame. Needless to say, I think I won that race.

I mean maybe it's just a large hill, but let's call it a mountain for simplicity's sake (and because it sounds awesomer).

So there's this mountain by my house. I can see it when I'm coming home from the main part of the village, and I've always wanted to climb it. And after recent events that have led me to realize that a lot of things are out of my control (previous post), I've decided to take the mindset of "why not now" in terms of a lot of things I want to do here before my second year is up. (Side note: I'm less than a week away from my one year mark!) So with this new focus of living in the here and now, I decided that I wanted to climb that mountain. Now.

The morning of my climb (about a month ago), I got up at about 6, packed a backpack with lots of water and some snacks and headed out on my bike. There were paths leading up to the that point for the most part, but occasionally they would suddenly disappear and I would have to walk over rocky parts until I found a path again to continue biking. After biking for an hour or so the incline got much steeper so I locked my bike to a tree and started hiking. After only about another hour I was a the top and saw this:

Then I turned around and looked back toward village. It looked a lot further away than about 2 hours biking/walking. In the first picture there are two cell phone towers just above where I typed Yaho, and the second picture is those towers magnified x100 (approximately).

When I got up there I was just amazed at the beauty of this place. It is so easy to forget that no matter where you live and what you're doing, but in all the craziness that has been happening here lately, I really just needed a reminder of just how wonderful this world is. I mean, just look at how beautiful that is. And that was just a 2 hour bike ride from where I live.

That morning, while on the top of the mountain, I got a text from home saying that one my best friend's dad passed away. It was just a very surreal moment for me. The scenery surrounding me was so beautiful and awe-inspiring it literally made my heart hurt, and now my heart was hurting for my friend's loss. More painful for me was the fact that I wasn't at home, and I couldn't be there for my friend. All this also came during I time when I was trying to live in the here and now and I was doing something I had wanted to do since getting to site, but I suddenly wanted to be not here at all, but at home.

There honestly haven't been too many moments over the past year where I want to be at home, but this was most definitely one of them. While I love the work I'm doing here and the people I'm able to do it with, that doesn't make me miss the people and events at home any less. There have been weddings, holidays, graduations, homecomings (both the event and literally people coming home) and just the spur of the moment gatherings that I've missed over the past year.

But in that same time, I've learned French and some Jula, I've eaten to (and many other things), I've taught math, physics AND chemistry, I haven't had running water or electricity, I've used biking as my main mode of transportation, I planted a (failed) garden, I taught numerous small children to call me by name instead of "white girl" and now I climbed a mountain.

So when times like this come up, when I think to myself that maybe I should just go home and stop missing all these important moments; it helps to remember all the challenges I've overcome and the victories (however small) I've accomplished. And to remember that even if I were home, I can't be there for everything for everyone. Living in the here and now is certainly not easy, and there will always be events that tear you one way or the other. But when I look around at my beautiful surroundings and think that I only have a year left, I hope to make the most of it.

Side note: I tried to make a panoramic of all my photos together, but it didn't work. Instead I layered the pictures one on top of the other and got this sweet looking guy:

So yesterday (May 12th) I was supposed to have a site visit from my boss, Firmin. I had been preparing all week, cleaning my house, clearing out the courtyard, and even having a neighbor help me prepare a meal for my guests. The night before the he was to get here, it rained starting at about 1am. It was still raining that morning when I got ready for school, and I was actually the only professor to show up for classes that day. That’s actually typical for rainy days here in Africa, but it’s been a while since it rained, and I forgot how everything just completely shuts down.

Unfortunately, the rain doesn’t just affect schools. At 1:30pm, about 20 minutes after he was supposed to be here, I get a call from Firmin. He was almost to Yaho, but there was a river between him and me. I had actually worried about that for a minute earlier in the day because there is a place that was often flooded last year during rainy season, but I hadn’t given it too much thought. I was too excited to have a visitor!! So, I have to admit, because of how excited I was to have visitors, it made the sudden change in plans that much more sad. Another volunteer had even come with him to surprise me and see my village. After I got off the phone with them, I honestly was very close to tears. I had put so much time and effort into getting ready and looking forward to the visit. And now, when they were literally 5km from my house, it wasn’t going to happen.

Now, this might seem like an overreaction to a situation that completely out of my control, and I asked myself the same question. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything event I have looked forward in the past two months has been cancelled at the last minute:

The last week of March I was going to take a trip with the couple who went to Wartburg with me, but I was having some tooth problems and spring break was moved up two weeks at the last minute, so it wasn’t going to work out. March 31st there was a goodbye party for the volunteers leaving this summer, but the morning of the 30th there were some violent protests in the capital and the party was now off limits to everyone who wasn’t already there. This was something I was really looking forward too, and the last time I would have probably seen some volunteers. Over Easter, I had planned to visit some friends south of me, but the President of Burkina dissolved the government a few days earlier, so travel was off limits (that wasn’t as intense as it sounds, basically he fired his 29 ministers, rehired 17 of them with 8 new ones to bring the total up to 25). And now I was supposed to get a visit from a friend, but it rained.

Now, every single one of these situations was entirely out of my control. But it got me thinking about just how much control I am able to exercise over my life here versus my life in America.-In America we have a stable government, but also stable electricity and stable internet (you might not think that stable internet is that important in a developing nation, but with more and more of our business world happening online, it is. If the internet is down here in Burkina, I can’t get money out of my bank account. And because I have to travel about 3 hours to even get to the bank, it’s that much more annoying). That stability gives us a daily assurance of what to expect. We know that it is (highly) unlikely that we will see rioters, that our stores will be pillaged, or that we will get to the bank only to be turned away because internet or electricity is down that day.-In America (or at least Minnesota), we have systems in place to deal with inclement weather. It’s so effective that I often complained during high school that our roads were always plowed before the buses had to come through, meaning we wouldn’t get a snow day. We don’t often have plans ruined by a simple rainstorm, or worse; we don’t have our houses collapsed by rainstorms because we are able to build houses with more than mud bricks. (Yes, this did happen in my village. There were two people in the house and they were both killed)

-In America we are able to plan ahead to the next weekend, the month or even the next year with a high degree of certainty that everything will work out. The big events of our lives are often planned months and a year in advance. I know another volunteer here had her wedding scheduled at the end of July, but with the unrest the national exams were changed, and her soon-to-be husband now has tests during their wedding. She had to change the wedding, and most of the Americans that were going to be a part of the service are leaving before the new date.

So here, I’m learning not to plan for more than a week at a time, or I’m just going to get myself excited for something else that might not happen. And especially with all of the unrest that has happened here since February, I am certainly in the mindset of having a plan B, C, D, etc for every plan. Though, since Easter, everything does seem to have calmed down here. I am very thankful for that, but things are still a little behind schedule and I don’t really know exactly when school is over, exactly when I will be working at stage this summer, or exactly when I’ll take my vacation to Ghana. And while occasionally disappointing, I guess I’m learning to be more and more OK with those uncertainties.

My underwear: Well, most of you probably have no interest in my underwear, but it’s a pretty funny story. The other day I was wearing one of my complets (matching shirt and skirt made here). Complets are normally worn pretty tight, especially the skirts. That morning I had class with my 3e class, and was teaching them all about the primary colors of light when there is a knock on the door. I go and look who it is, and it’s one of my students. She quietly says to me that the director needs to see me, then as soon as I step outside she leans in and whispers, “Madame, la fermeture de votre jupe est descendue.” And I was very confused, I thought she was saying something about closing my Jeep. She repeated it, and I realized that she was saying the zipper of my skirt was down!!! (It’s in the back of the skirt) I stepped out of sight of the door, zipped it up and came in and started teaching again. There were only a few giggles when I got back in, so hopefully not everyone knew. By the way, the complet was grey/black and the underwear was bright red floral, so kind of obvious… Another story about animals: The other night I was sitting in my courtyard, eating dinner, when I hear some rustling on the thatched roof. There were a couple times when a neighborhood cat jumped up there, so I thought no big deal. The rustling continued and I didn’t see the cat, so I went for a closer look. I saw a head in a gap between bricks, so I now thought it was a kid messing with my stuff. I yell at him, and he continues to pull at the straw roof. I open the door and there is a giant bull eating my roof!!!! Once again, after recovering from a brief moment of terror (fyi, the bull was scared too, he ran away a few steps), I open the door again, but the bull is now facing me. I decide to just ignore it. After a few minutes, I hear someone yelling and the bull finally ran away. My neighbor come over and chased him off for me :)

So a couple blog posts ago, I commented on the challenges I’d been having with my classes. Well, since we’ve been back from spring break, I really feel like I’m finally in the swing of things! I think part of it was that I enjoy the part of the curriculum we’re covering (and by ‘enjoy’ I mean I actually know what’s going on). But part of it too, is just reaching that point in doing something new where everything clicks. My French is doing good (or at least ok), and I honestly enjoy teaching about the structure of light and how to solve polynomial equations. Since coming back from spring break the students have been more motivated and things in general are going well. I have a better rapport with my students, especially my 3e. There are only about 5 weeks left before they have to take their national exams, and they know it. Unfortunately, just this last week there was a bit of a tiff between the other profs and the students and director. It’s long and complicated, dating back to an event from last year from the yearly soccer tournament. When the tournament started again this year, the crap hit the fan. And even though it really has nothing to do to me, I really can’t help feeling like I’m stuck in the middle. We didn’t hold class Friday because of the disagreement, and I just talked to my director, and they still haven’t had class!! Students here in Burkina have been striking nationwide about some other issues, but it hadn’t spread to Yaho yet. So, I have to admit that I find it amusing that national issues don’t reach here, but a fight over a soccer match is enough to get everyone riled up enough to boycott school! (I honestly don’t know if the students or teachers striking though). So I guess I’ll have an interesting welcome back when I get back to village…

So one night, I was sitting in my courtyard, under my hangar, working on lesson plans for the next day. I hear my neighbor, Sita, laughing and knocking at my door. I open my door, and am terrified by the sight of this:

After recovering, I start laughing and ask what is going. Apparently this is a yearly tradition where kids dress up in leaves and go around asking for money (or food). Kind of like trick or treating. Well, I got out my camera and made them dance for me. (this is second blog in the row that made kids dance for me…) But they loved getting their picture taken, so they didn’t care.Also, I gave them candy and money, so I wasn’t really that surprised when they showed up again the next night. With more kids. I once again made them dance and took pictures. I asked a few people about the tradition of the event, and it the leaves they use are from a specific tree from the bush that the cows like to eat.The kids (boys) who come by are mostly cowherds, meaning that most of them are lucky if there were able to finish elementary school. They take the cows out early in the morning in search of water, and don’t return until the evening. They normally don’t eat during the day and simply carry a water bottle that they fill up at the same watering hole the cows use. When there is more water, they jump in and are swimming as cows wade in and around them. Honestly, these kids look like they having the times of their lives, but when I think about the fact that there is little or nothing in their futures, it does make me kinda sad. I never found out exactly the reason why the kids do this, but I’m glad they did.

My favorite part of this picture is the kid pretending to drink his Sprite. Or maybe the machetes.

The leaf man.

So I really need to apologize to all of you, I’ve been the worst blogger ever lately! But I’ve had limited internet, so I don’t feel too bad about it :PI have few stories, so I’m just going to post them in somewhat chronologically.8 Mars (March 8th, International Women’s Day)8 Mars is also celebrated as a national holiday here, meaning that there is no school and everyone has a party! The women fonctionaire’s group decided to host a festival and invited other women’s groups to party with us. We were at the Eliane’s house, one of the nurses and president of the fonctionaire’s group. We all came over the night before to fry up some fish, then arrived early that morning to start cooking all the food. We made rice and spaghetti, as well as zoom-koom (a drink made from millet flour and flavored with ginger and mint, it’s really good!), ginger juice (very spicy), and bissap (hibiscus tea). I helped with the zoom-koom and generally tried to stay out of the way. The rice and spaghetti were made in generally the same way, cooking the carbs up with some tomatoes, onions, carrots and green peppers mixed in. They added some sort of leaf to the rice and it turned out really good. They were both cooked in giant pots (maybe 50+ liters) over a fire. As we were preparing, the other women’s groups dropped by lots and lots of tô, so there was no way anyone was going to be hungry at this party!After cooking all the food, everyone went home to change into their party clothes and take an afternoon nap. We all came back, ate lunch, and started dancing!! Although my village has no electricity, women need to go to the neighborhood well to get water one bucket at time, and most people cook over a fire; they have rocking sound systems. As we were setting up for the day, these kids came in pushing giant speakers in wheelbarrows. They connected these speakers to a dvd/mp3 player, and powered this all with car batteries. And that, my friends, is how you have a party in Africa. They had the music pumping and we were all dancing around under the mango tree.It was really fun, some of my students came and I made them dance with me. Mostly because they were laughing at me (it was probably the first time they’d ever seen a white person dance, they weren’t doing it to be mean), but either way, I showed them :P

DANCING!

Check out those matching outfits :)

After finishing my last post just hours ago, I have continued to think about some of the more challenging aspects of my life here. The first one that comes to mind is language.

In the US we live in an almost exclusively English speaking world, especially the non-urban areas where i have lived my entire life. For most of us, school is taught in our first and only language. TV is always in the language we understand (you would actually have to pay more to get a channel that wasn't English only), we can flip on the radio and understand everything that is being said or sung.

Here, it is quite the opposite. I am constantly listening to, speaking and even sometimes thinking in 4 languages here. I hope i can say that French is currently first on that list, but there are definitely days where my long standing relationship with English beats out my newly founded, often fledgling, relationship with French. The next two on the list are the local African languages of Bwamu and Jula (sometimes spelled Dioula). Those two languages are barely acquaintances of mine at this point in time, but i'm surrounded by them. While i can clearly identify each of them while being spoken, i can't always tell WHO speaks each. Meaning, that as i'm greeting someone, i'll often start with a greeting in one language, and they with respond in another. And those are the days when i try local language at all...

But it isn't just talking that's a challenge. As i said before, it's all aspects of life that are now in another language. When i turn on the radio, it's French or Jula or even another local language, Moore. When i turn on the TV (one of the profs here has a TV that runs on a car battery charged by solar panels), it's French (in both French and African accents), Moore, or African-accented English. It's not really the lack of comprehension that becomes so frustrating, it's the variety i have to sift through! We live in a monotone (or rather mono-phone) society, and now this sudden explosion of variety of stimulation is coming at me all the time! I rather feel it is something like the overwhelming feeling Peace Corps volunteers often describe their first time at an American grocery store after two years in developing countries, too much variety! And it's not that Americans aren't used stimulation, it's that this is a new kind of stimulation.

And i have to admit, at this point in time, instead of taking all of this stimulation in and becoming some sort of super-lingual awesome person, i do what most Americans do to, i tune it out. When listening to French news broadcasts, i am able to take in information for about 10, maybe 15 minutes before i lose track of what they are talking about. The same happens in conversations as well, unfortunately. After a certain amount of time, or certain number of languages switches, i just can't keep track anymore, and i'm done. Then randomly, they'll ask me my opinion on something, and i'll have no idea what's going on.

(i'll finish this tomorrow, i just wanted to get this much up before going to bed for the night!)

Well, hello old friends. It has most definitely been a while :) I personally think this because i don't really do anything worth writing about, but i'll let you be the judge :P

School: So this trimester i definitely do feel a little more at ease with the French and the content (we're finally done with electrical physics!), but i'm still running into challenges. I don't like to write tests until i've taught the material, meaning that i'm typically giving tests a week later than i should. For example, I am giving a test in each subject this coming week, and then next week they have there cumulative exams. Really, tests a week apart don't really help anyone, but here we are.

Something that has actually really bothered me these past two weeks is how mechanical physics is taught. I'm not going to bore you too much with the details, but it's kind of ass-backwards. In the US we learn that gravity is an acceleration and that falling bodies ('bodies' used in the scientific sense, not a literal human body falling) fall at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s. So their speed increases by about 10 meters every second. Here, they are taught that gravity is simply a proportion between weight and mass (weight=mass*gravity). They never hear the word acceleration, the never learn about any other sort of acceleration, although they do learn about forces (the formula for a force is F=mass*acceleration). So, i can't even teach the formula for what they supposed to be learning. All of this frustration might be coming solely because this is one my favorite parts of physics (and quite honestly, is the basis of everything to come), but when i think about it, i think it's more that i'm being asked to do a job and i'm not doing it well. I know as i'm teaching the students that what i'm saying i don't believe to be true (no, gravity does not equal 10N/kg. that unit doesn't even make sense!) But to do it the 'right way' would take too much time, and we have a lot of other material to cover that doesn't necessarily build on this.When i asked another prof if they ever learn the material more indepth, he said yes, a couple years from now. I then asked him, why bother teaching it the wrong now, only to teach it again later. His response was that the students are just to dumb to learn it now (very typical teacher response by the way, i really should write a blog about attitude toward education here). I know there are probably examples of this in the US curriculum, but i can't think of any at the moment... So, for the benefit of the big picture of the moment, i'll skim through things hope the kids understand the basics. But i won't like it.

Math is going a little better, but not perfect. We are learning vectors right now, which isn't easy for anyone at the debut. I have to admit i did get frustrated with them the other day, because i thought they were doing ok because they didn't have too many questions. But really they didn't have questions because they were too lost to know what to ask. I know that happens to all of us, but it felt like even more of a blow because i thought things were going well in that class compared to physics. And now this week we lost two school days all of a sudden, so we have less time before there last test and final (which, as stated before, are too close together...) So, i guess this is just a lot of the 'end of the term' craziness of trying to get everything done!

So here I am here at the end of my weekend in the capital, in an attempt to get a little work done. For the most part, i really just did some research and gathered resources for ideas of things to do in village. And being on the internet... :P

But one really cool thing that may be starting up: i may be starting a women's group!! I talked with the man who works for WaterAid in my village, and he is super excited to work with the women in the village. The conversation we had was simply amazing. He started by saying that women are the most marginalized group, and when they suffer, the entire family suffers. And he (we) would love to start something like a microcredit (basically a small bank, where people apply for small loans to start money making projects. The original capital can either come from an outside source, or people can each put in a small amount), but he has seen too many situations where money just disappears. So maybe down the road if we have a solid group we can talk about doing that. By the way, his name is Somé and he is Burkinabé. I met his wife earlier this fall when she would come chat with the women at the CSPS, and after i got to know her, i got to know him. He is super motivated and super excited to be doing things in the community, so i really hope that this goes somewhere :)

I also realized that i haven't written about Christmas or New Year's yet! I have to admit, Christmas just felt so non-Christmasy, that it wasn't too difficult for me. Haha, in some ways i feel that when i get back home, i'm not going to realize that two entire years did actually pass. But the holiday was celebrated much like Tabaski and Ramadan were, with lots of food and going to visit your friends to get said food. I went to the house of another prof, and he actually was really sick, so we didn't do a whole lot.

New Year's was a lot of fun, though! I spent the night at the local bar with friends, where we danced and generally hung out. That entire day was kind of cold, meaning that the night was even colder! Most of the guys wore suit jackets, and when i asked if New Years is normally that formal, the said no, it's just cold! (It was probably 55 at the lowest...) But at midnight, everyone goes around and shakes hands with everyone else and does the head touch thing (like the french cheek-to-cheek thing, but with the side of your head instead of your cheek) and wishes everyone else a happy new year. The usually wish longevity, prosperity, success, and health for you as well. And you have to do this hand-shaking/head-touching greeting whenever you see someone for the first time in that year. So i'm still wishing people a happy new year... But that night, after we went around to greet everyone, we sat down and ate at about 12:30. I didn't realize that we wouldn't be eating until after the new year, so i was pretty hungry at this point, haha. And the next day, people celebrated, like Christmas or other days. It was kind of weird, because in the US, you party on the 30th, but then the holiday's pretty much over. Here it was more like Christmas Eve and Christmas, where the real holiday is actually the day after.

Well, i head back to village bright and early tomorrow, but i just wanted to let you know i'm still alive! And Happy New Year to all of you!

World AIDS day is December 1st every year, but this year the school system of Burkina decided to do some activities on November 25th, which you may or may not remember was Thanksgiving this year! So while I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving in any sort of food related way, it was fun to have a day out of the ordinary :)

In French, HIV/AIDS is VIH/SIDA, so almost the same. AIDS is NOT a large problem in Burkina Faso, I believe that the reported number of infected is only around 2%. This is very very small compared to eastern and southern African countries that have as much as 15% of the population infected. Either way, AIDS is taken very seriously, and is more of a starting ground to talk about issues more immediate to the people here, such as STIs/STDs and unwanted pregnancy. I hope I’m not coming off as downplaying the severity of the AIDS pandemic in other parts of the world, or even to those with AIDS here in Burkina, but even without having any information on me, I’m quite confident in saying that both Malaria and malnutrition individually cause more deaths a year than AIDS here in Burkina. So while it is very important that students are informed about what AIDS is and how it is and isn’t spread, a lot of the conversations during the day turned towards unwanted pregnancy which affects many many many of the girls in my classroom.

That morning all the students at school cleaned the school and CSPS grounds. Then two of the nurses from the CSPS came over and gave a lesson on what is AIDS. They talked to the entire school at the same time, and while I think they did a good job, I think it would have gone over much better to divide up age levels, if not age AND gender. There were 11 yr old kids who barely know what kissing is right there next to sexually active 19-20 yr olds who tried insisting that abstinence isn’t possible.

There were the usual misconceptions about how AIDS is and isn’t transmitted, and the one that really seemed to hang them up was mosquitoes. Mosquitoes cannot transfer AIDS/HIV from one person to another, and after how much they talk about malaria here, it was a little hard for students (and teachers) to grasp that they aren’t a problem for AIDS. We also talked for a while about mother/child transmission.

In the US, if a mother with HIV/AIDS were to give birth to a child, I have no doubt that it would be a C-section birth and that the mother would never breastfeed. Now think about rural Africa… The nearest facility capable of performing a C-section is 75km down the dirt road, a trip that normally takes at least 2 hours and cost about half a week’s salary, let alone the medical costs. And if a mother didn’t breastfeed, the child would starve. So, in Africa, they do actually recommend that the mother breastfeed. The transfer rate is so low that the benefits greatly outweigh the risk to the child.

By the end of the lesson by the nurses, the conversation had turned towards abstinence and how to avoid pregnancy. The profs and nurses both strongly encouraged the students to wait, at least until they were done with school, before having sex. I’m not sure how that went over, but we’ll just have to look and see at the end year.

That afternoon we had a soccer match between the 4e and 3e girls, just for a little bit of fun to reward the students for all the work they did that morning. But, when the profs said that it would be for fun, I didn’t realize that it would be for entertainment. When the girls got out there to play, the entire student body just laughed at them. It was obvious that they’ve never received any sort of training in strategy of playing the game, and all followed the ball around like a herd. I was really upset and tried to give the girls some pointers, but as most of you know, my sports knowledge and ability is quite limited… It was just so frustrating to see the girls out there trying their best, and getting laughed at, even when they were doing really well. Just the idea of girls playing sports is funny enough to set them off sometimes. I could (and probably will at some point) write a whole post on just this, but don’t feel quite ready to really elaborate at the moment…

All in all, not your typical Thanksgiving, but a good day, and definitely important message for the students. The next day, I explained what Thanksgiving is to each of my classes, just like I made them explain Tiimbe to me. It was really hard to try and explain a cranberry or pie to my students though :P

So about a month ago was the village fete of Tiimbe. I asked around to neighboring volunteers, and no one else had ever even heard of the fete, so I’m pretty sure that it is just celebrated in Yaho. We did have school that day, so I asked each of my classes, what is Tiimbe, what is the village celebrating, how do you celebrate? Well, the last question listed is much easier to answer than the first two; to celebrate you eat sauce arachide (peanut sauce), traditional dancing, you go out late and drink and dance some more. But the first two questions were a little harder. It sounds like Tiimbe is in celebration of the harvest (although the harvest is most definitely not done yet at that time of year), but also is sort of a new year’s festival. The elders of the village are apparently the only people to really know exactly what is going on.

So after school that day, I changed into my Tiimbe shirt and went to talk with some neighbors. One offered me tô with sauce arachide. But this sauce was not the same sauce that I’d had before, and normally you don’t eat tô with sauce arachide, normally that is for rice. But this sauce was much thicker, it had pate arachide (literally peanut paste, but the same as peanut butter) and leaves and was really really delicious. I really don’t know what kind of leaves they were, and even if I knew the word for them, either in Bwamu or Jula, I wouldn’t know the French word, and we probably don’t even have the same plant in the US, so we can just call them something similar to spinach. So imagine spinach & peanut butter sauce served over a corn product with a Jello consistency, and you’ve got the traditional dish of Tiimbe :P

Also that afternoon there were some women doing traditional dance around the petit marche. And I have to admit, it looked kind of painful… They would dance around a little then whip their heads back to the beat of the music. They tried to get me to try it, and I danced for a bit with them, but as I said, the head whipping just looked painful. The elders/leaders of the community were watching the dancing and giving out prices to the women, but I don’t know how that was decided. I believe the prizes were donated or purchased with the money that was raised from the t-shirts and fabric they sold.

That night, after everyone went back to their houses and ate dinner, they all came back out and went dancing at the ball. There are a couple places you can get a cold drink in village, and one of them has dancing once a week and for all the fetes. So the night of Tiimbe, the obviously had dancing, and because I didn’t have school the next day, I decided I was up for some fun! I convinced my friend Tené to come out with me, and we had a fun time!

Hopefully next year, I can get a head start and try and figure out a little more concretely what the purpose of the fete is, but either way, I’ll be excited to eat more special peanut sauce like that!!

Edit: So, upon posting this, I remembered that I titled it Tiimbe AND Tabaski, but have yet to say anything about Tabaski! It is a Muslim holiday (side note: I’m not sure if I’ve said this, but Muslim in French is Musselman, so it sounds a little like muscle man, and always makes me smile) in celebration of when Abraham was supposed to kill his son, but then didn’t have to. Of course, the Muslim tradition recognizes Ishmael as the son in this story, and the Christians say it’s Isaac. But to celebrate the fete, they eat mutton, because Abraham killed the sheep instead. In village, I celebrated the fete by eating well (note the pattern between all fetes). I went with the other professors to my director’s house, and we had some chicken and riz gras. We just sat and talked for a couple hours then I went home and hung out with my next door neighbors. I’m not sure if it’s always like this, but I felt like Tabaski was more celebrated than Ramadan, but that might just have more to do with how well I know the community at the two different points of time. And this year it was the day after Tiimbe, so it was a pretty good week!

Life here “en brusse” (in the bush), is much closer to the nature, meaning that I am now used to roosters crowing at all times of the day, donkeys braying (also at all times of day, and it’s really really annoying), cows mooing, goats and sheep bleating (which sounds a lot like children), and dogs barking (and fighting) and generally all sorts of noise all the time. Normally, all I really have to deal with is the noise, but in the last couple weeks, I have had a couple interesting run-ins with the wildlife here. The rat: So the other night, I was getting ready for bed. I had already bushed my teeth and was just going to visit the latrine before lying down. It was already dark out (fyi, I was too scared to use my latrine at night for the first few weeks of site), so I had my flashlight ready and gave the usual preparatory flash around the latrine before going in. Normally, there’s nothing there or occasionally I’ll see a lizard scurry up the wall, but not tonight. Tonight, there was a black rat hanging out right next to the hole. I’m sure he was there to eat the crickets and other insects I don’t think about that also live near the hole, and normally I’d thank him for such a task, but I had to pee. I kept my flashlight on him, trying to scare him away, but he couldn’t climb walls like the lizards can… I left, hoping he would leave, but was still there when I came back. It was starting to get late (aka 8:30), so I decided to let him be the bigger man, and I went and took care of my business in the shower area… The bat: This one just happened two nights ago, I was talking to a friend on the phone lying in bed, in the dark, when I started to hear to something scratching against my window screen. I figured it was a large fly or wasp (those flies are louder than you think against the screens!), but when I shined my flashlight from bed, I saw a bat!! I still don’t know how it got into my house, but I suspect he found a way between the sheets of tin that make up my roof. I often see sunlight coming through in the morning, meaning there is a space large enough for a little bat to get in. I wasn’t sure how to encourage him to leave, and didn’t really want to get out of my bed at that point, so I just waited about 20 minutes when I heard him move to the window in the main room. I went out and opened the door, hoping that he would be smart enough to fly out, but that was a no go. I eventually just went to bed, but I could still hear him banging around against the windows. Luckily, he wasn’t there the next morning when I got up, so I will just hope that he doesn’t come back! I’ll maybe also look into sealing up my roof better… The bull: This one actually happened on Thanksgiving Day, which is the same day my village did some activities in honor of World AIDS Day. I was biking between the CSPS and the school, where the kids were cleaning up and I passed someone from school and as I was waving, he started yelling that there was a Taurus coming. I turn around and see that there is a large black bull running towards us!! Everyone else around us is running to hide behind bushes or trees, but I was currently in the middle of the road with nowhere to go. I don’t know about most of you, but I have never had to avoid a rampaging bull before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do. It was running towards me, and I didn’t want to move because I was afraid it would try and chase me, but my friend was yelling at me to ditch my bike and run to the nearest bush. In the end, the bull moved on before I really made a decision, but it was pretty scary for about 5 seconds there (of course it felt longer than that though…). When I got to school, my colleague made fun of protecting my bike, but really I just thought movement would provoke him… Also, I feel I need to point out that there are a lot of cows/bulls here. It is not at all weird to see them, but normally in a herd, walking to get water. So when they started saying, “There’s a bull!” I didn’t really care… But now I know, if a bull is running towards you, hide!

So i'm going to make this really quick, but i just wanted to give you a short update of life here! I have only one week of the trimester left before my In-Service Training (IST) for a week in the capital. I have to give two tests next week, and get them graded before heading off, so it's going to be busy! About as busy as this last week, where i spent a good chunk of time writing said tests!

This weekend was supposed to be the Volunteer Day celebrations, but the were unfortunately canceled because the weekend after is the 50th anniversary of independence here! So there are going to be some pretty big celebrations for that, which i'm looking forward to.

It is finally getting cold here (aka about 65 degrees), and i now have to wear my long sleeve shirt and socks in the morning! I can also finally sleep with a blanket though, so that's nice. But it is a weird feeling to be cold after six months of being hot all the time.

While i'm in the capital, i hope to have a few more detailed stories for you, Tiimbe, the local fete here, World AIDS Day and a few other fun days, so check back after a week or so!!

Miss you all, hope you're all getting ready for the holidays!

So sad news; i had two thoughtful and interesting blog posts all written out and ready to go, and i forget my usb key at home... So you are stuck with my last minute thoughts.

Well, one good story that happened after i wrote the other entries: Toby followed me to school the other day! it was pretty damn cute :) Every morning, i am usually in a hurry to get out the door and to school by 7. I usually let toby out of the courtyard before then because he gets restless and starts scratching at the door. well, that day, for whatever reason, he made it to 7 before he started to bug me. So he followed me out the door and when i took off on my bike, he followed. School is about a km away, and he kept up the whole time! admittedly, i did go a little slower at the end for him, just because i didn't want him to get lost halfway between home and school. At school he explored all around the grounds, walking in and out of my classroom and even following me up and down the aisles! Finally, he curled up and took a nap until it was time to go home.

Like i said, pretty adorable!

So there are a quite a few events coming up; international volunteer day the weekend of dec 4th, Burkina's independence day Dec 11, and my In-service training starting Dec 13th. And the end of the trimester around the 10th. So, i'll finally have some work to do around here, haha! But also, i'll have lots to write about coming up, so check back around then! Miss you all, happy holidays coming up!!

So, I have to admit, that I had a little bit of trouble thinking of what to write for this entry. You’d think that after two weeks of not really talking to anyone back home, I’d be bursting with new and exciting stories of my adventures in Africa. Well, sorry to disappoint, but just like in America, when you start to get into the routine of things, they stop being new and exciting.

I do have a couple stories for you though, so hopefully they will tide you over until something really fun and exciting happens here :)

First, I need to explain that here (and most other non-Western countries) it is perfectly acceptable and normal to refer to people by the color of their skin. Say what you want about political correctness, this simply isn’t done in the States. It is considered rude at best, and in most instances it is much more serious than that. But here, it’s any everyday occurrence. Daily, I’m greeted as Toubabu (the Jula word for white/foreigner), Nasanu (Bwamu), Nasarah (Moore), or simply La Blanche (French). And both people I’ve never met, as well as my friends and co-workers will call me such. My friends and co-workers don’t call me those names directly, but I have heard them refer to me as such to other Burkinabe. Some days I decide it’s worth it to try and ask that people call me by name instead of by the color of my skin, where as other days it simply isn’t worth the effort.

This past week I was sitting and reading at the coffee kiosk outside my house when this man comes up to me and greets me as “Madame Toubabu, Bonjour!” As I knew that I would never see this guy again and because there were other people around who always get a kick out of it when I ask people to use my name and not Toubabu; today was one of those days where I decided it just wasn’t worth it. So I simply responded with my Bonjour and start to open my book again (a little rude not to run to full gambit of salutations, asking about their family, work, health, etc, but I was annoyed). As I do so, the little kid working at the shop says, “her name’s not toubabu, it’s Danielle.” And suddenly, it was the best day ever! This little kid, who laughed along with his parents when I’d said that same thing in the past, was now sticking up for me! It was adorable and really made my week :)

A couple days later, I was at school for the study hall I host for the 3e class. I brought my water jug for the students to fill up and bring to my house after, and asked a group of girls to fill it up for me. As I’m walking away I hear one of the say, “La blanche…” and I yell after them that they can call me Madame, not La Blanche. Students here are expected to show a lot more respect to their teachers than we expect in the states, so that I really did consider unacceptable. The girls laughed and ran away, but I hope that my point was made. The next day, I had study hall with 4e and we were going over English words. One of the girls from the day before asks, “How do you call someone La Blanche in English?” “You don’t,” was my response to that. We then had a discussion about it, and how I understand that it is somewhat acceptable here, it is considered very rude in the US, so hopefully I’ll run into it less in the future. I had the same discussion with some of the functionaire women in the that weekend, so hopefully I will get to the point where at least my friends don't call me Toubabou any longer. But we'll see...

And second week, too, I guess! Well, Monday October 4th, we finally decided to get around to having school :) I met both my classes (I only teach classes in the 4th and 3rd grades, and there is only one class per grade at that level) that day, but spent most of the first day introducing myself and explaining a little about the Peace Corps. Unlike the US, class schedules here aren’t the same every day, meaning that my daily schedule varies as well. At my school, most of the classes take place in the morning, 7-12, we then have the lunch break/sieste from 12-15 and classes again from 15-18. Yes, that’s right, 18 or 6pm. To be honest, most grades don’t have class that late, and if they do it’s only one day a week. I had one afternoon class this week, and you can really tell that the kids are tired. 15 (3pm) is also about the hottest time of day, so to be stuck inside can be brutal. Luckily, most classes fit into the morning.

Friday of the first week, we had a teachers’ meeting where we found out that we were getting another professeur for math and physics/chemistry. With only the 4 original professeurs, we didn’t have enough people to cover all the hours. I feel kind of bad, because if I was able to take a full course load, we wouldn’t have needed the other prof, but I also know the school is really growing, so they would’ve needed someone next year anyway. The new prof took one of my P/C classes, meaning I now only teach 4th Math and 3rd P/C. I definitely feel like I could be doing more, and offered to take an English class, but the other teachers are paid by how many hours they teach, so they want to have full schedules. And I get paid the same regardless, so I feel bad taking classes away from them. But we’ve already talked about having an English club, and I hope to offer a sort of study hall/tutor session for both 3rd and 4th grade, hoping that I can help with math, physics/chemistry and English questions.

I also mentioned to my health center that I have quite a bit of free time and could help out there, but after talking to a health volunteer realized that I could do more giving mini health lessons to my students at the school. The nurses at the health center also mentioned that last year they talked to the school about how to stay healthy and avoid pregnancy. Right now, I think I will try to work that in as a mini lesson at the beginning of some of my study hall times.

Now that school’s started and the professeurs are back in town, I’ve hung out with them a few times in the evenings. We never really do much, just sit and chat, but it’s nice to be able to hang out with people who speak French well, and can even help with translation when I don’t know the French word :)

I also bought a light/battery combo, so I have light in my house now!! It was getting really hard to make dinner with a flashlight, and to be honest, that’s all I’ve really used it for. I will probably have papers to grade at some point coming up, so I know it will be nice then, too

My last blog updates were when I was on a mini-vacation to Bobo, the second largest city. I met up with a bunch of volunteers who are currently taking part in the Peace Corps Burkina Faso Bike Tour, a fund raiser for the Gender and Development committee. They biked just about the entire way around Burkina! I, unfortunately, was not able to join them for any of the actually biking (there are rules about how much you can leave site your first 3 mos), but it was fun to see them and wish them luck!

Other than that, nothing else has really been going on here. Toby is doing well! I attempted to make him some tô (the corn-flour goo that is the staple food source here), but it didn’t turn out so hot. He still eats it though. To the make the tô, I first had to make my own flour, which was interesting. I bought dried corn at the marche a while ago, but finally got around to finding a neighbor to help me.

First, we had to wash the corn, then pilé, or pound, the kernels to remove the skins. (and when I say “we,” I mean mostly my neighbor because I’m actually pretty useless when it comes to manual labor here. I’m pretty sure my neighbor girls who look about 7 are stronger than I am…) After the skin was removed and the kernels were washed again, they had to soak overnight. The next morning I went to the mill where my kernels became flour!

To make tô, I had to boil the water the kernels were washed in (mixed with some lime juice) and add in the flour mixed with more water (so it doesn’t clump). Then stir like crazy until your arm feels like it will fall off, and finally place the goo in a bowl to cool and form. And that’s it. Unfortunately, I waited a couple days in between making the flour and making the tô, so the flour was starting to go bad. When the flour comes back from the mill, it’s moist. All of our flour in the US has been dried, something I didn’t even think of as I just let the flour sit (covered to keep bugs out, which unfortunately kept the moisture in) for a couple days. Like I said though, Toby still eats it and that’s all I’m really asking for :) Also, my neighbor saved the skins from the kernels to feed to her pigs, so I liked that nothing was wasted in the process! As I mentioned, even the same water was used to clean the kernels and to make the tô!

written 9/30

Today was the conseil de classe for my school, which is basically a meeting with all professeurs and administration to discuss the schedule and program for the year. My school is really small, so there were only 8 of us in attendance; the 4 professeurs, the director/5th prof, the econome/surveillant, the president of the APE and the secretary of the APE. The director is the principal, the econome is in charge of all things financial and the surveillant is in charge of discipline. The APE is the parents’ association, but I think it might be better compared to the school board than the PTA. They seem to have quite a bit of power and access to money for the school.

The meeting started with general information and the presentation of me! I hadn’t met one of the professeurs yet, and hadn’t seen the other two since my visit earlier this summer. We then discussed the schedule for the school year, basically what days we are going to end class for each trimester. We also decided who was going to be Professeur Principal for each class. The PP is the prof in charge of calculating the grades for the class. Yes, each prof decides for the grade for the class they teach, but in the BF system all the grades are then averaged to find the student’s Moyen (literally, mean/average, which is used at the end of the year to determine if the student passes for the year). This is no easy task because they don’t have computers at the school here, so it is all done by hand. (I do plan on making an Excel program and sharing it with my fellow teachers). Because of how much work this entails, they do fight over who has to take the bigger classes, this year the director took the biggest class, 5th, which is 109 students.

The next issue on the table was in fact class sizes. I forget if I’ve mentioned this before, but my school is a college, meaning middle school, which has 4 grade levels, 6th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd. This year my school has two 6th grade classes, each at 90, one 5th at 109, 4th has 60 and 3rd has 41. You’ll notice that our retention rate is not that great. But this is also only the 6th year the school has been around, meaning the 3rd grade class is only the 3rd class to start here. A big concern for the school right now is the size of the 6th grade classes and the fact that next year, we are not going to have room for that many in 5th. So, we need to add another 5th grade class. Well, we currently don’t have a room for another class. We also don’t have enough professeurs for another class. We don’t have enough professeurs for the number of classes as it is! As we were discusses this, the director directed his concern for needing another classroom at the president of the APE, asking him if they can have one built by next year. The president seemed to think it was possible, but that still leaves the question of finding at least one more prof… I also know that the village next to ours is currently building a school, so maybe more of our students will go there, but I don’t think we can count on that. Nor do we want tp, it’s a good thing that the schools growing, it means that more students are continuing with school!

We finished the meeting with any personal requests for supplies or possible schedule changes, as well as a request to the APE to get some of the student desks fixed.

After the meeting we all went to the president’s house for some cold beers and delicious chicken! School started Friday, but I don’t have classes Friday, so I start Monday! I realized too late that because it’s hard to get to my village on Sundays, it would have been better to get Monday off than Friday (if I want to go to the capital for the weekend or something). But we’ll see how this goes and if it’s a huge issue I might ask to switch next trimester. It affects everyone else’s schedule though, so I’m kind of kicking myself for forgetting to ask earlier, or rather for asking for the wrong day off…

I have to admit, I am really ready for school to start! This last week, the amount of free time I have here was really getting to me. This past month I’ve felt a little directionless, and while that was nice at first, I’m glad to start feeling like I’m actually doing something here.

So i bought a puppy!! He is adorable and his name is Toby. About three days after i got him i realized the reason i probably thought that was such a good name for a pet was because it rhymes with my sister's cat's name, Coby. He is only about 5 weeks old and was not weened when i got him. He cried for almost the entire first day at my house, including the first night. I ended up letting him sleep with me, which worked for calming him down.

He is doing much better now, although i think he still misses his siblings. He now sleeps on my clothes instead of with me, so that's an improvement. He loves to run around and explore, although occasionally he gets lost.

There have been a few times when i would leave him in my enclosed courtyard only to come home and find him missing! It took me a day or so to realize that he is small enough to fit through the drainage holes in the courtyard and was sneaking out that way, haha! I tried blocking them with some rocks, but he still figured it out, meaning i just had to find some more rocks.

But here are some pictures, and i'm sure there will be more stories to come!

Friends!

So far, my closest friend is most definitely Sita, my neighbor. She is her husband’s second wife and she is pregnant with her second child. Her son, Yacoba, is 4 years old and adorable. He’s a little scared of me, but I’m sure that will go away with time. Sita’s husband and first wife live the courtyard next door as well, the husband owns coffee kiosk, so I spend a lot of time there just hanging out (also my house doesn’t have chairs yet, so if I want to sit and read, I’ll usually do it at the kiosk). The other wife doesn’t speak French, meaning I definitely talk more to Sita, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I forget her name more often than not (like right now…) But she is also really nice, we just aren’t really able to communicate right now. She has 3 or 4 boys as well (there is one I’m not sure if he lives there or just comes to hang out.)

Sita is only 21 years old, and was born and raised here in village. She did not finish school, but has pretty good French in spite of that. She is very social and I think just about everyone in the village knows her. The family is Muslim (note, two wives) meaning they just celebrated the end of Ramadan, which finished last week, and we had a giant fete! For the fete, instead of having all the friends and family over to their house, the women make lots of food, then go around and deliver it to their friends and family. I’m not sure yet if this is how all celebrations are or if this is specific to Ramadan, so I’ll get back to you on that. I have to admit, I because I didn’t know that how things worked, I kept waiting all day for everyone to get there. I was invited to dinner at Sita’s parents house, and also was expected a lot of people to be there, but it was just the family members who lived in that courtyard. At the end of night though, I did get to go out dancing with Sita and some other women! The bar was certainly packed!! I ended up dancing with the moms, mostly because after a couple guys asked me to dance, I realized that I don’t really know who any of my students are yet, and that dancing with them at a club might not be the best way to meet them… I was also exhausted because it was most definitely past my 9pm bedtime, haha! But it was really fun to see so many people from the village together.

Most nights after I eat dinner, I go over to Sita’s and we sit and talk for an hour or so after the sun sets (meaning I can’t do anything in my house) but before I want to go to bed. Even though we don’t understand each other perfectly, it is really nice to have someone to answer all my questions about the village. As I said before, Sita is very social, so I think she enjoys having telling me about the culture and customs as well :)

The second closest friend I have here is another women named Nadine, who works at the CSPS (health center) as a nurse. There are always at least 3 employees at a CSPS, the major, who is the head nurse and in charge of all administrative task (Alexander), the maternity nurse (Nadine), and a third nurse in charge of all the rest (Eliane). Our CSPS also has a health agent (not exactly sure what his role is, but he often seems busy) a grounds keeper (Felix) and a dispensary person (in charge of the pharmacy, Solange). I often go over to the CSPS to chat, and Nadine’s sister Chantal was visiting for the month, so she would often have a little more free time than Nadine to chat with me. Nadine is also unmarried, which is rare for a woman her age, which I think has to be at least 26 if not a year or two older. To become a nurse in Burkina you only have to finish CEG (college d’enseignment generale), which is somewhere between middle school and high school. The next level up is lycee, which is like a mix of high school and jr. college.

Nadine also told me that there is a women’s functionaires group in my village. Functionaires are anyone who works for the government, including nurses and teachers. The group consists of the two nurses mentioned above as well some primary school teachers and all the wives of male functionaires. I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the idea of me joining the group. On one side, I know that all of these women will be able to speak French, which is a little hard to come by here, but on the other, I don’t want to associate only with functionaires when that isn’t the point of my being here in the village. But maybe I can also use the group as a starting point for things I might want to accomplish in the village (even that would be more of a top-down approach, which might not work in all situations). Either way though, as a friend pointed out, I’m sure the get togethers will have great food!!

Well, other than the small groups of friends I’ve mentioned above, I have to admit that I have been somewhat hesitant to get to know people here. I think part of that is that during stage we hear all of the worst case scenarios that have happened to volunteers, so I am probably the most on-guard right now that I will ever be during my service. I think part of it is also that I’m just not an entirely outgoing person unless I first have a reason to be interacting with someone. I know that I need to work on that because if I only befriend people I have a built in reason to interact with, I’m only going to be friends with the 5-6 men who work at the school with me! And as I just get to know people in general I’ll figure out who are the faux-types (literally: false types) and who are actually nice :)

Hello friends!!

Sorry for the delay, but I am finally at site, which means that I don’t have electricity or internet, so I’ve been saving all my good stories for now!!

I arrived at site Monday August 30th, after a slight delay. We (meaning me and another volunteer just to the south of me) were supposed to arrive the Sunday after swear-in, but we got within 3 km of the other site when we discovered there was a river crossing the road. At first we were going to drive around, which was at least 2 hours out of the way, but in the process of doing that we were informed that the other way around was also blocked by a river (there was a lot of rain the night before!). So we spent the night in Bobo, the second largest city in Burkina. We headed out again the next morning with more success :) We dropped her off first, then headed to my village! And I’ve been here ever since, haha.

My thoughts that first day were definitely very mixed. I arrived at site, dropped all my things off in my house and then the driver left. All within probably 15 minutes. It was very surreal. My counterpart and his family weren’t even there because of the change in schedule. I did have a few neighbors I recognized from my visit, but I didn’t remember anyone’s name. I obviously survived that first day, and all the ones following, but it was definitely intimidating.

Since then, I’ve found more of a routine, but I am certainly very ready for school to start. I have a little too much free time right now, which is just such a stark contrast to Stage. Most of my days, I get up at around 6, do dishes from the day before, make breakfast (usually just oatmeal because it’s easy), and do some other chores around the house (laundry, sweep and mop my floor, etc). I prefer to get them done in the morning because it gets hot later in the day and my house doesn’t have the best ventilation. Today for example, I weeded my yard, which was getting a little out of hand and took my about 2 hours! And even though I worked at 6am for at least the last year, I never got myself into a schedule where I was used to getting up that early. But it gets dark here around 6 or 7pm, and there isn’t a whole lot to do, so I go to bed. In the US, I would spend the evening watching TV or on my computer, neither of which are options here. So I’m usually in bed by 9, which is earlier than any enforced bedtime I can ever remember having in my life, haha!

The 15th was the day of rentrer (return) for professors and school administration. That means that my counterpart is back in town, as well as all the other school staff I wasn’t able to meet on my visit because they were on vacation. Yesterday I went and collected the books for the subjects I’m teaching, and I hope to get started with some lessons plans this week. Schools starts October 1st, which seems so late, but this culture is still largely agriculture based, and the harvest hasn’t happened yet here, so we just need to wait. I was talking to a friend last night and he said his school probably won’t start until halfway through October because of the harvest!

Well, I have some more subject specific entries following this, I just wanted to say that I am alive and well! And once school starts, I think I will have more of schedule not only for my personal time, but for when I will able to get to a place with internet access and say hello to all of you!

So yesterday was swear-in day for Peace Corps Burkina Faso!! Our ceremony was held at the new American Embassy in Ouagadougou, which is less than a year old! We are the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to be sworn in at that building, so that was pretty cool :) The First Lady of Burkina Faso was also in attendance, which was a really big honor. The ceremony included speeches from 6 of the stagiaires, each in a different language, as well as speeches by our director, the Charge d’Affair (Burkina doesn’t currently have an ambassador, so the Charge d’Affair is the person in charge of the affairs of the office :P), and the Madame First Lady Chantal Compaore! We all said our oath of office as a group, which while maybe not super exciting, definitely kept the show shorter, because 77 new volunteers is a lot of people!

After the official parts of the ceremony there was a reception inside the embassy with drinks and appetizers. And cake! After that we decided to hit the town by going out to an American style restaurant and dance club!! It was a lot of fun and a great way to spend one of our last night’s together :)

So, today I spent my first full day as an official volunteer doing very official volunteer business, shopping. I get to my site of the first possible day, meaning I really only had today to get everything I need! I bought a stove (which is really just the range part and I’ll have to buy the gas tank separately), buckets for water, a 100L plastic trashcan looking thing which is used to store water, and a large wash basin for washing my clothes and dishes. I never really realized this before when I was living with my host families, but there are a lot of things necessary for getting, storing, and using water!! And I still need to buy plastic bidons, too (which are like gas cans, but used to get water from point A to point B)!

I also went to the large super market here in the capital, which is the closest thing to an American grocery store that you are going to get here in Burkina. (It definitely made me think of and miss Target!!) It was interesting though, because while they definitely had things that I will not be able to find anywhere else in the country, they didn’t have some of the most basic things I was looking for. I guess specialty stores in the US are the same, but it was just weird to go to what I felt like was finally a normal grocery room and not be able to find peanut butter… (which I can find everywhere here, I just wanted to buy one jar of it so I can get the jar filled up at my market). I think the only really exciting things I got at the market were lentils and olive oil and maybe a candy bar (or two) :P

Well, tomorrow (or 8 hours from now) is move in day!! I think I’m ready, and I’m really excited to get started. I will miss all my stagemates a lot, but I just keep thinking of all the amazing stories I am going to hear at our in-service training in December, haha!

During our last week of stage we held a little talent show, and while I didn't have many talents to share, it was a pretty awesome show. Some of you may remember earlier this year I posted a video a had written in preparation for his service in Burkina. Well, after 3 months of training he reworked it a little bit and we now have this gem to add to the collection. I'm sure there are inside jokes that won't be funny to people who didn't spend the last 12 weeks together, but take my word for it, the song is really funny :)

Burkina Faso (remixed)

Well, as I said in my post below, one week from today I will have taken my oath of office (the same oath the president takes, btw) and will be living at my site. I still need to buy everything that I will need in my house, but I also think that I might live without too much the first couple weeks and see what I really need. Also, anything I buy I will have to take with me on the bush taxi from the bigger city nearby to my village. Just imagine trying to move a mattress or a gas tank and a small range for a stove on the roof of 15 passenger van, and you’ve got move in day. I’m actually lucky that I don’t have to take public transit with any of my stuff (like my bike) but instead I get dropped off right at my house by the Peace Corps. The down side of that is that I only have one day to do my shopping before moving, so I will probably have a shopping day once a week for the first month or so until I’m settled.

Our actual swear-in ceremony is next Friday, August 27th, at the US embassy here in Burkina. We were told there would be press there, so you should all look for pictures online next week! I also know that the Peace Corps Facebook page has been putting up pictures from the different swear-ins throughout the summer, so maybe keep an eye out for that. After that, I only have one day before I move to my site, so I’m not sure if I will be able to update or get pictures up before being in my internet- and electricity-less village, so it might be a while until the next update! Also, maybe check out some of the blogs I have linked on the side, because some of them will have a couple more days before move in. Or they will have internet at their sites…

For now, my address stays the same, but I might get a postal box in the nearest big town with one of the other volunteers. I’ll put it up if and when that happens. But the Ouagadougou address I have on the side will be a sure way to get things to me for the next two years.

As I mentioned above, I won’t have electricity at my site, meaning communication might be less frequent. I’ve been spoiled these last few weeks of model school because we had free access to a computer lab, but from here on out I hope to update only once a month or so. I also have a stack of letters I’m sending with a friend going to the US (because it’s cheaper to mail a letter within the states than from here), so hopefully you lucky friends will get those letters within the next couple weeks! I'm sure I will have lots to say as I get settled in at my house and in my village, but you will all just have to wait :) I really can't believe that Stage is finally done, but I'm excited to start this next chapter of service!!

So one week from today I will be living at my house in my new village!! I’m not sure when I will have internet access next, so I wanted to put up a few different thoughts here.

1. Model School: Friday was the Conseil de classe and the closing ceremonies for model school. The conseil de classe is when all of the professeurs get together and talk about how well each of the classes preformed. We listed off the best two boys and girls in each class, and they received prizes at the ceremony. There ceremony itself was pretty fun. Each grade had an opening little song/dance to represent their class, except the songs weren’t actually sung by the students. They were just lip-synced, which the other volunteers said is actually really popular here. So I am definitely looking forward to seeing more of that during my time here, haha! The dancers were really good though, and it was just fun to get to that side of our students. Also, all of us professeurs decided to get matching clothes made (which is actually common here, sometimes schools will have one pattern of fabric that represents the school. Or people attending a wedding together will all get matching clothes made), so check out our sweet uniforms below!!

2. Sabou: Last weekend the Second Ed. Sector was able to take a little field trip to Sabou, where they have sacred crocodiles. The story behind the crocodiles is that the founder of the town was traveling through the bush, when he was overcome by heat exhaustion. A crocodile came up and have him water and saved his life (or something like that). So the crocodiles became sacred, and it is supposed to be good luck if a croc comes into your house if you live in the village. You should just feed it a chicken and send it on its way. The guys who worked there also insisted that they crocs were harmless, that it would be perfectly safe to swim through the lake the live in. None of us were quite brave enough to test that theory, but the workers were certainly fearless as the just walked in, grabbed one by the tail and brought it to land for us to take pictures of… It is definitely the first really touristy thing I’ve done here in Burkina, and it was just really weird to take that little break from trying to fit in (as much as 80 white people can fit in while living together in Africa…) to enjoy something like a vacation :)

3. General health and well being: After about 3 weeks of less than ideal stomach conditions, I have been back to normal for over a week now!! But in our last weeks, there have definitely been more incidents than usual! I fell off my bike into a mud puddle and sliced my hand open (it was actually pretty hilarious, don’t worry), and another girl also fell off her bike and got a pretty nice bruise. A friend got into a bike accident and broke his arm; while another was side-swiped by a moto and hurt her elbow. There have been the regular stomach issues as well within the group, but I just hope that everything settles down on the accidents front when we all get to our sites!! Ironically, the day I fell off my bike was the day of our first aid training, so luckily I knew to clean and bandage my wound :)

4. Language: So, unless I dropped a level on my latest test, I reached the level I needed to before swear-in. I’ve been pretty comfortable with the French since returning to a host family again, but I admittedly still make plenty of mistakes and really just need to work on expanding my vocabulary. I think I understand most of the structural rules, I just can’t think of what I want to say sometimes… When I first got here and heard how much the current volunteers struggled with English, I wished I would be able to get to that point, and now it doesn’t seem like it is that far away. Maybe all my blog posts next year will have to be in French…

5. Host Family: With my new host family there are a lot more kids who live here/hang out in our courtyard. My favorite is a boy named Elise, but there is also Elisabeth, Eli, Toma, Louise, Ines, and Martin. Elise is in about 5th grade, and whenever my roommate or I walk anywhere around the neighborhood, he will accompany us (if not the whole entourage). And even though is only about 10, I definitely feel safer with him. He also gives me gifts, so of course I like him, haha (and I just have to convince myself that he has permission to be giving me all these little trinkets and not that he is stealing them from his mom...) My roommate is much better about spending time with the kids, but we’ve had a few fun nights together. My favorite was the night mom and dad went to church and we stayed home and had a dance party! It started with the girls showing us some dances to local music, but my roommate got out her computer and we were all rocking out to some Black Eyed Peas in no time. I don’t think I will ever forget the kids jumping all around and singing along to “Imma Be.” Rockin like this my job!

It’s hard to believe that I have been gone for about 75 days. Haha, I remember I had a countdown going before I left, and it really doesn’t seem that long ago where I still had 75 days to go! But these 11 weeks or so of training have definitely been challenging, but also really fun. I think more than anything I will be sad to say goodbye to everyone I know in this country, and start the challenges of getting to know my community, my family, for the next two years. I think I’m ready for the challenge, but we’ll just have to wait and see!Also, i just tried to add a couple pictures, but it wouldn't let me. I think they will make it to my website though, so check that out!!

So, one really interesting part of our training is that we get an introduction to how to do development work. There are probably a million things that would fall under the description of ‘development work’ but for my purposes I will relate everything to what the sectors here in Burkina are working with, so that includes education, the education and empowerment of girls, health and small business enterprise as well as bringing change to developing nations in general. So far we have discussed working within the village to find out what they want/need, not imposing on them what we think they need. We also discussed ensuring that any changes we make are not going to harm the community in any way, ensuring that the structure and integrity of the culture are still intact while trying to make any sort of improvements (and I’m using improvement really loosely here). The other day we had a session on Positive Deviance, which is actually a concept that I think everyone is familiar with, but I just didn’t have a name for it before. Positive deviance is looking for a solution to a community or group problem by looking for examples that already exist within the community; looking for those few people who are doing something slightly different and getting different results.

The example that is most relevant for the work I am going to do here is the example of keeping girls in school. The dropout rate is much higher for girls than boys here, mostly because girls are expected to do more at home and a lot of people don’t see the value of giving girls an education. But in each village there are girls going to school. So these girls and their families are our positive deviants. They have the same resources as their neighbors, but they are doing something different that makes is possible for their daughters to stay in school. Maybe they relieve the responsibilities of the girls a little. Maybe they bought a lamp so that when the girls are done with their required chores, they have a way to finish their homework in the dark. (This one really stuck out to me, because my future village doesn’t have electricity, so if the girls have to hurry home to finish chores before the sun sets, how do they do their homework?) So, once I get to village, if I think that I want to try and increase the number girls at school (which I’m sure is something I will work with in some way over the next two years), I hope to be able to meet and talk with families who have daughters and see if any tactics they use could be accessible to the entire community. While there is a huge bridge to gap between saying that is what I should do and actually doing it, I hope to get there eventually. :)

Another thing we talked about with this topic is dividing out good examples from the “True, but Useless” ideas. Like maybe the family that sends their daughter to school is able to afford a maid to do all the chores the daughter would normally have to do. So this family would not count in our context as a positive deviant because they are not working with the same resources as everyone else.

As I said before, this idea is not a completely new concept. The most obvious example I thought of for the US was in the business world: if you have one store that is making more money than all your other stores, of course you are going to look and study that store in depth to figure out what it is exactly they are doing that is so different. But this is just the first time I’ve had this concept explained to me in a concrete way, so I’m pretty excited about it!

Also, the entire concept of having a philosophy to development work is also something I never thought about. (Just like I never really thought about having a teaching philosophy until I started teaching...) I think it was just something I thought looked cool, but never really looking to how it’s done or the idea that it isn’t all done in the same way. I know that we have heard several times the idea to Do No Harm, but I’m not sure if that is a philosophy across the whole of the Peace Corps, or if that is just a phrase that my Country Director really likes to use. So even though I am really tired at the end of the day, and I am really ready to be done with training, I like that our training has been (or has made an effort to be) all encompassing and focus on areas across the board as well as broad/general ideas that will certainly help us in any sort of job we will have after this. I hope to have more insightful thoughts on this topic in the future, right now it is just too new of an idea, I don’t really have any knowledge other than spitting back out what I’ve been told. But I’m excited to learn more!

The same day we had this session on Positive Deviance, we also had a session on potential ideas for working with health education at our sites. I know there is a CSPS (health center) just down the street from me, and I met three of the nurses who worked there (and they were all females!) so I already think that I would like to work with them on a few things.

But this week I gave my first test at model school, and I have to say, grading 60 tests is no fun. I can’t imagine what grading tests for two classes of 100 would be like. But lucky for me, I know my classes won’t be much bigger than 60 at my site. And next week is already our last week of model school! So soon!! This weekend I have another language test, and my goal is to reach two levels up (which is where I have to be before swear-in). Tomorrow we are having a session to practice cooking in Burkina, so I think that should pretty fun! I am still a little sick, but most certainly better than a couple weeks ago! I also chopped my hair off the past weekend, so I’ll have to get some pictures up once soon!!

I hope everyone is having a fun end of summer, I can’t believe you Iowa teachers already start in a couple weeks!

Sorry for the wait, but for your patience; i have two posts!! read the one below as well!!

So for about the past week we have been in our new training city, and I have to say it is definitely not as hot as Ouahigouya was! This last week I even wore my jacket! It also poured for a couple days, which does wonders in bringing down the temperature! I don’t have a thermometer like I did at my host family, so I don’t really know what temp we’re down to, but certainly cooler. I am definitely not looking forward to the hot season next spring, when it won’t rain for about 2+ months. And from what I hear, everyone just gets really crabby. But I’ve got plenty of time to worry about that. :)

We are now in our new host families! We are doubled up, two people to a family, just because they didn’t have very much time to find families. My roommate is Paula, a woman from the Girl’s Empowerment and Education sector, and she’s super nice. We share a room that is a little bigger than my old room, so definitely enough space to live in, but not enough to really unpack anything. But at this point there is only a month left until we swear in, so as much as I want to stop living out a suitcase, I can suck it up for one more month. Our family here has a mom and dad and probably about 8-ish kids who live here, but I know the couple only has 5, and 2 of those are in Ouaga. I think the other kids are nieces and nephews, but who knows. Our dad also introduces everyone as his “petit frère” or little brother, so family is pretty loosely defined here. Our mom doesn’t speak French though, only Mooré, the most common local language in Burkina. So unfortunately, I’m not able to talk much with her. Paula is learning Moore though, so they are able to communicate a little.

This past week was our first week of model school! Because it was the first week, the stagiaires didn’t teach, we just watched the current volunteers or Burkinabe teachers. But we start tomorrow, and I have to say I really am nervous. I am teaching Physics/Chemistry for the 3rd class (which is the last year of college). After 3rd, there is a big test that the students have to pass if they want to continue on to 2nd, so there is more pressure on teachers and students in that class. Most volunteers try not to teach 3rd for that reason, but because I will be the only P/C teacher at my school, there isn’t much choice. So my nervousness stems from a number of the contributing factors here: that I’ll be teaching a subject that I’m not entirely comfortable with, I’ll be teaching French, and there’s more pressure on that class to do well. That last one doesn’t really apply to model school, but it will in a couple months when school starts!

And to top it all off, I am still sick :( I’m starting to feel better, but still need to rush off to the bathroom more frequently than I’d like. So hopefully that doesn’t happen tomorrow at school! But I definitely am getting an appetite back, after a couple of days of not really wanting to eat anything, so that’s good! The hotel we stayed at for a few days before coming to the host families didn’t have toilets, so that was my first time have to deal with being sick and only having a hole in the ground. But my host family has a toilet, so I’m getting spoiled again here :) Talking to other people, it sounds like quite a few have toilets, so maybe this city just has the infrastructure available that other cities don’t.

But I will certainly let you all know how model school goes! Wish me luck!

written around 7/18/10

So last week, I was able to go to my site and see where I am going to be living and working for the next two years!! And I have to say, I loved it! The village is in an area that is a lot greener than what we have seen so far, and there were hills! (I will call them mountains, but they aren’t real mountains…) The parts we’ve seen of Burkina up to this point have been very flat, dry and red. So seeing parts of the country that were hilly, had little lakes and rivers, and very green, definitely won me over :) I realize that we are in the wet season right now, and that I probably won’t have green and lakes the entire year, but to have them at all is pretty sweet.

I saw my house and have some pictures up on photo section down to the right (I’ll put some below as well). It is a small house with 3 rooms, a salon and two bedrooms. I’m not really sure what I’m going to use the second bedroom for yet, maybe the kitchen area, maybe just more of a storage area. I have an outdoor latrine and an outdoor shower area (aka a cement slab with walls around it). None of the houses have electricity or running water, but there are several water pumps throughout the village. I’ll have to take bucket baths for my two years there, but I have to say, when it is really hot, an outdoor shower is really quite nice. I don’t have it now, but there will be a hangar in my courtyard, and I hope to make small garden somewhere. I don’t know if I’ll actually try to grow vegetables, but even just some flowers will spruce the place up.

As for the no electricity part, I may invest in some solar panels. I ate my meals with my counterpart and he had solar panels that he used to charge up car batteries, then would run lights, the TV, radio and satellite dish. He said that each battery lasted about a day, and I think he had 3 or 4 of them. But before I decided to do that, I want to see how common it is. If only the director of the school is able to afford it, I don’t want to make myself a target for theft by getting it, too. My house is also pretty close to the center of town while my director lives right on the edge of town near the school.

The village has two primary schools and the college (middle school) where I will work. A college has grades 6-3, while a lycee has all the grades. Also, the grades here count down instead of up. We also discussed what classes I will probably teach, and it looks like I will be doing more physics/chemistry than math. I will have two classes of P/C and one of math. I almost had a class of biology too, but I talked my way out of it because it was definitely more than what is recommended for your first year.

My village only has market every five days, as opposed to the larger cities where they have market every day. That just means that I will have to be a little more proactive with planning out my meals. There is a mini-market every day, but they really only had a few small ingredients mostly for making sauces.

There is a CSPS, health center, in the village and it’s actually pretty close to my house. There isn’t a police station or a gendarmerie there, but we have both a Prefet and a Mayor. I’m not entirely sure what the equivalents to these things are in America, but there you go.

After the site visit, we all met in the capitol and were able to see the Peace Corps Office and the US Embassy. The Embassy is off in a new part of the city called Ouaga 2000. The building is super new and I think they’ve only been there for a few months. After the visits, we went to the American Rec Center where we all very much enjoyed eating an American lunch!! They even had milkshakes!! And ranch dressing!

We are now in our new training city, and will put in new host families by the end of the week. I’m really excited to be back with host families, and hope that I can actually get settled in for the month or so before we get sworn in! We counted and between all the moves, we will have packed and unpacked our things about 10 times, which is getting a little old :) Another unfortunately side effect of site visit, is that my body had gotten used the food in the bigger cities, and I still haven’t really recovered from something I ate in village. But I realized today that it only hurts when I eat, so I’ll just have to stop doing that :P

Well, here are a couple pictures, but also check the link to the right, I think the new picture I added made it to the album!!

Things have been a little crazy around here the past week or so!! because of some things that had happened in burkina, we were all pulled out of our host families and moved into a hotel. We hope to move to a new city soon, but right now, we are all just rolling with the punches :)

We missed a couple days of classes in the move, meaning site announcement was moved from wednesday to today!! (we were a little nervous that would happen, but two days wasn't the end of the world :P) I have been instructed not share my location on such a public forum, but i can tell you that i will be north of Bobo-Dioulasso (or just Bobo) and south of Degoudou (it is on my facebook, because i have higher controls on who can see my info there, if you're really curious!! or just send me an email and i'll let you know)

I know that i will be the first education volunteer, and i think the first volunteer there at all!! I believe there have been health volunteers in the area before, but not in my city/village. The region i described is part of the cotton bowl of burkina, meaning it is greener than the parts of the country i have seen so far!! I did find out that i will NOT have electricity. that definitely makes a minority in my sector, but i knew it was certainly a possibility. I am certain that i will have more to write on that after i've lived there for a while. But right now, i'm at a hotel with free wi-fi, so that is a little hard to imagine a life without electricity at the moment.

Next week we have our counterpart workshop next week which means that we all get to meet the person from our sites who will be our go-to person for the next two years!! For teachers, our counterpart is typically another teacher at the school or a parent on the PTA (APE in french). After the workshop, i get to go to my site!! For five days next week, i will get to take a bus, a bush-taxi and my bike out to my site. i'll get to see my school, meet all the important people, see my house (hopefully) and get a feel for what the village is like. I will hopefully also get an idea of what subjects are not being taught at my school, which typically translates into what subjects i will teach! I'm super excited to get a little bit of independence and see how things work here when i'm not being chauffeured around in air-conditioned government vehicles. (not that i don't enjoy air-conditioned vehicles!)

Well, that's all i've got for now! i think my next update will be after my site visit, and i'll let you know how everything went! Also, today is the one month mark of landing in burkina, and i can't describe how crazy it seems that i've only been gone a month!! it seems like so much longer (but in a good way!)as always, miss you all and love all the little updates and messages i've gotten. they really mean a lot! :)

Bonjour, toute le monde! I am now into week three!! This weekend the rest of my stage arrived here in Ouahigouya, and wow, there are a lot of them!! My group of secondary ed people came two weeks earlier, and there are only 22 of us, and now we have 57 new friends (whose names we might not know yet…)! But they few I’ve talked to seem as awesome as the rest of our group, so hopefully as they get settled and we actually have a session or two with them, I will get to know some of them better. They won’t be in any of my language or technical sessions, so it will only be once or twice a week where I’ll spend maybe two hours with them.

Sorry for the lame title, but for this little blog post, I wanted to discuss weather. I am amazed at how quickly I’ve gotten used to be in the heat! Every day when I wake up, the little thermometer in our living room says it is 30C, or about 86F. (I’m trying to get my head used to Celsius, but I’ll use Fahrenheit here for you guys :P) Right now, (5:30pm) it is 35C, or about 95F. And I can tell that things are cooling off by this time of day. 95F feels cool!! One of the guys in my group has a watch with a thermometer, and around lunch it is typically over 40C.

This is not the hottest part of the year, either. We are actually in the rainy season right now. “Rainy season” is used pretty loosely though, even now we’re lucky to get rain once a week. And rain is always a good omen. It rained our first night in Ouagadougou, and the next morning everyone was all excited for us, because it’s a really good sign! But the hot season is in March-April, where it will goes days on end at 120F or 50C and doesn’t rain once in those two months. I think they purposely have stage start right after the hot season, so we’ve been here as long as possible before having to experience that :P The cold season coincides with our winter, but I don’t think I’ve heard exactly what ‘cold’ means here. I’ll let you know in a few months.

A note about sleeping in the heat: I have only used a blanket/sheet twice since living with my host family. If you remember, I have a fan, meaning my room is significantly colder than my counterparts without one. But even with my fan, I sweat every night. I don’t have the circle of dried sweat on my sheets that some of my fellow stagiaires talk about, but I noticed that the tank-top I sleep in gets salty from dried sweat. (that is probably an over-share…) I no longer flip my pillow over to get to the cold side, I flip it over to get to the dry side! But it is crazy hot at night. And my room doesn’t get much of a natural breeze because it is about 3 feet from our courtyard wall. I do not look forward to sleeping in the hot season. At all. I have not slept outside yet, but I can guarantee you that without my fan, I think I would have been out there after one night.

Last Friday, I had my first little dust storm! We were sitting outside for class and the wind really picked up and things started to get really hazy. I have some pictures below, so hopefully you can see the difference. After about 10 minutes of dusty, windy stuff, it started to rain!! And the temperature dropped like crazy! We all loved it, I think it was the first time I felt anything close to cool since I got here. But some of the PCVFs (current volunteers who run our training) were practically shivering in the 23C temp (73F). But after the rain stopped, it got back up to 28C (80F-ish) within the hour. But it stayed pretty cool the rest of the weekend (in the lower 30Cs). Today got back up to a normal temp though…

When it was crazy dusty:

10 minutes later in the same courtyard, when it started to rain. A couple exciting things coming up: this Sunday all 79 of the stagiaires are having a 4th of July party!! I’m not sure what that entails right now, but I’m sure it will be awesome.

And even more exciting: next Wednesday I find out my site placement!!!! CRAZY! I have a bit of an idea based on the local language I was assigned, but I’ll keep you all in suspense until I find out, hahaha! People ask if there is somewhere I really want to go, and to be honest, not really. At first, I really wanted to be in the south, but when I asked myself why, the only answer I could come up with was because everyone else seemed to want to go to there (that extra ‘to’ is for you, annakay!). For me, I’m more excited to find out who I will be near. Because everything can be awesome if I’m with good people. So, my plan is to update again after next Wednesday with my site assignment!

Well, I just got back from my first visit to the market (marche). It was crazy busy there and they had just about everything under the sun available. I went with my two host sisters and while I didn’t get anything myself, it was nice to see what they buy and how they buy it. For example, they bought little baggies of both oil and tomato paste. These are very popular ingredients in food here, but most people don’t buy them by the can or bottle because they don’t have anywhere to store what they don’t use. So, they only buy what they need, but have to go to the marche more often. I asked my sisters and they said they go to the marche everyday.

There was also a wider variety of fresh produce than I was expecting. They bought tomatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, and peppers. I also saw a variety of fruit, including mangoes and liane, and guavas. I had never had liane before, but it is a sort of sour fruit that you crack open, then you suck the juice off of the seeds. There isn’t actually a lot that gets eaten, but it was good in an acidic tangy sort of way. (liane is the French word for it, it’s called weda in Moore, and I have no idea what it is in English. I looked it up and it translated from French as “creeper,” but I feel like that isn’t right.)

As for the types of dishes we have here, most of what I’ve eaten is rice based, but the more common local dish is To (pronounced toe). It is essentially just flour and water boiled together until it becomes a sort of flavorless gelatin. My family uses corn flour, but I think millet is more common. It reminds me of gravy that just came out of the refrigerator, but thicker and more Jell-O like. And like I said, flavorless. My family eats it with baobab sauce, which is made out of baobab leaves and okra. (fun fact for you all: baobab, the iconic African tree, isn’t a tree at all. It’s closer to celery than it is to a tree.) Though, I have to admit that it is the only sauce that I don’t like so far, mostly because it has a really slimy texture that I can’t handle.

Other dishes I’ve had: riz sauce d’arachide (rice with peanut sauce)

Couscous avec sauce tomate (delicious)

Spaghetti (instead of cooking the sauce seperately, they make it a little thinner and cook the noodles in the sauce)

Des Haricots (Beans. This was also delicious and pretty close to chili)

Benga (actually a Moore word, but it is beans and rice, I can buy a baggie of it for 100CFA or 20 cents)

Omelette (More of a fried-egg sandwich than an omelette we would think of, but they mix in onions or on special days green pepper and it is awesome !)

Riz sauce vert (Rice and green sauce. I actually haven’t had this yet, but if it’s like baobab sauce, i probs won’t like it)

Riz gras (Fat Rice. I think this is my favorite dish! Like the spaghetti, they make the sauce first, then cook the rice in the oily, tomatoey, flavorful liquid, and make another thicker sauce on the side. It’s things like this that are the reason they warn us we probably won’t lose weight while we’re here.)

A note on meat: There is no specific meat that typically goes with any of these dishes. I’ve had fish in just about everything. And it is just a chunk of the fish that hasn’t been cleaned. So when I see fish in food, I typically pick the skin off, pull the bones out and break it up into smaller chunks in my sauce. When I first found fish in a dish, I was a little nervous, because Burkina is a landlocked country and I was curious where the heck the fish came from and how it was stored, but dried, salted fish is very very common. I even saw it in the market today! They were just entire fish, salted up and very brown. I’ve also had unidentified dark meat a lot of my food at the host family that I think is pigeon. They raise pigeons and I was around one night when they were catching one for dinner. I don’t ask a lot of questions though…

They also have chicken here, but they are definitely not as big as chickens in the US, they have a lot less meat on them. I’ve also seen goats, sheep and even a few cows around town, but as far as I know, I haven’t eaten any of them. Well, actually that’s probably not true, haha. I ordered a hamburger the other day, and while it definitely wasn’t a hamburger like I’m used to, I think it was beef. But as I said, I don’t ask a lot of questions.

While discussing food, I think it is appropriate to discuss water. My host family’s house has running water, at both the faucet in the yard and in their indoor shower. (like I said, I’m getting spoiled here). Even though they have easily accessed running water, I can’t drink it. It is full of amoebas and parasites that my body won’t like. So the Peace Corps provides us with these nifty water filters. There are made out of two buckets, two filters, and a spigot. The water goes in top, through one filter (which I think mostly cleans the water) directly into the second filter (which I think purifies the water. It has those black specks like my filter at home) and then sits in the bottom bucket until I’m ready to use it. But even after the double filter, we still need to add two drops of bleach to every liter of water to ensure that everything is good and dead.

There aren’t too many drinks that are unique to Burkina or even West Africa. Mostly we drink Coke and beer. I think I’ve had Brakina the most. It’s the Burkina national beer. They also have SOB-Bra, Flag, Beaufort, Castel and even the occasional Heineken. The first three listed, along with Brakina are the main choices, and really they all fall about somewhere between a PBR and Old Style. But they’re cold and therefore delicious.

Other than cheap beer, there is one new drink I’ve discovered: bissap. It is brewed from habiscis flowers, but then chilled and mixed with ginger and sometimes other juices. It’s served cold and it’s pretty delicious. My host sisters make and sell bissap frozen in baggies (saches). (Yes, my family owns a freezer. Yes, i am losing friends because of how spoiled i am at my host house. But whenever i bring icewater to class i always share, so i'm not losing too many friends :P) I usually can’t drink the bissap as strong as they make it, but watered down a little, it is awesome!

Well, there is a look at food and drink in Burkina. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to add when I actually have to cook for myself. Or maybe I’ll just continue to buy baggies of benga and never actually cook :)

Bonjour! Well, believe it or not, today was only our second official day as stagieres. (trainees). Last week was week zero, so we are now in week one!

Monday night was my first night with my host family and it went really well! I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but I have to admit the family was more modern than I was anticipating. They have a TV and computer in their living room. And I am one of the more spoiled stagieres, I even have a fan in my bedroom. My host father is the director at a lycee (school) and he is actually Congolais, not Burkinabe. My host mom is Burkinabe though, and I’m pretty sure she is from Ouhigouya. But because my father isn’t from here, he doesn’t speak the local language, meaning French is the common language for the family, so even their daughter speaks it really well, when most five year olds haven’t really started learning French yet. Their daughter’s name is Love and she is adorable by the way. I’ll have to get some pictures up here (I’ll have to start taking some pictures!!) My host father speaks English as well as French, which is really nice, because he is able to correct my French, which I definitely need. I tested lower in French than I had hoped, but even after my first night with the host family, I felt much more confident. We have French for at least 2 sessions a day, 6 days a week. By the end of Stage, I will have about 128 hours of language and I think an additional 15 hours of technical language (the vocabulary needed to teach each of our subjects). I have to reach a certain level in French, and once I reach that point, I will switch over to my local language.

Other than just language, Stage is when we learn everything we need to know for the next two years. We have sessions on medical, security, culture, our technical area as well as language. So far we have learned how to prepare our own blood slides to test for malaria and how to prepare a stool sample to test for parasites (We had to practice the blood slide, but thankfully, not the stool sample :P). We haven’t really started the technical sessions yet, but had an intro where they explained the process.

I can’t really believe that I’ve been gone for less than two weeks at this point, it seems like we’ve been here for about a month, but I’m still getting used to little things. Like being sweaty all the time, having to use a pit latrine (both my host family and where we have classes have a pit latrine, but the one at school has bigger hole, it’s nicer for beginners, haha!), and having to be careful about what I eat. I haven’t had anything I don’t like yet, but we just have to be careful that all the fresh produce we eat has been cleaned properly. So far it’s been a lot of rice, beans and sauce or egg sandwiches.

So, there is a little look at Stage. It will be the hardest part of being a PC volunteer, but I’m still really excited to be here! I’ll explain some of the other areas in detail as we learn more, but for now, I’m just hoping to improve my French!

I hope you are all doing well! Miss you all!

well, i have about 4 minutes left of my internet time, but i just wanted to say i'm alive; i'm in burkina faso and i think i have about the coolest group possible with me!!

it's been a crazy week (only a week!) and tonight we meet our host families; more to come soon!

miss you all!

so for all of you who heard that i was going to burkina faso and thought to yourself "burki-what?," i found this song for you! It is by one my fellow PC volunteers, and he'll actually be in my same training group in june!

A Burkina Faso Song.

Today i picked up a couple of the larger items that I'll need for my time in Burkina! I think REI should pay me for the little shout out I'm giving them here, but these are the 3 things i picked up tonight:

Screen tent. Many of the volunteers choose to sleep outside because the houses sit in the sun all day retain all that heat! Sometimes as much as 90 degrees at night still. Most houses are surrounded by a locked gate, so they are safe from both people and animals :P Because of the risk of malaria from mosquitoes, I will need some sort of protection, and this little tent was definitely the best bargain.

Camping pad. For sleeping outdoors, in my new tent. I originally was looking at a more expensive, but lighter pad (more expensive because of the technology required to make it lighter...) But i realized that i won't often be trekking this around, so the extra cushion would be worth the pound or so more i would carry on the trip there and back. Also, it isn't the name brand, so i got about double the thickness for less money!

My daypack!! I bought the grey/green one pictured, because it was $25 cheaper. It has the exact same features, but was $25-$40 cheaper than comparable packs. I've heard that once i am in burkina (and especially once i move to my permanent site) i won't travel more than a couple days at a time, meaning my large hiking backpack would be too much for a couple outfits and the necessities. I thought about just using my school backpack I've had for a few years, but i was really afraid it just wouldn't hold up. And it doesn't have all the fancy zippers and straps :)

The last item i am really struggling with is the solar charger. There are many options to choose from, and i think my biggest problem is that i don't know exactly what i expect from it. I know i don't expect it to charge my computer (to get one that can charge a laptop makes the cost jump from less than $100 to as much as $600, though you can probably get one close to $300). I think i want one that can charge my phone (which i will purchase in Burkina), my ipod, rechargeable batteries and my camera. I just haven't found one that can do that mix. Or i just don't know enough about all the adapters out there either.

So, if anyone has any sort of insight, please let me know :)

In other exciting news, via facebook i found a couple from minnesota who is going to be in my program!! The woman even works with my dad! We discovered that they even work in the department, just a couple rows away, which is amazing when you consider how many thousands of people work in that building! We might try to meet before we go, but either way it has been fun to talk to people going through the same steps and asking the same questions i have been asking :) And they are from iowa, so we are all familiar with both areas!

well, that's about it for now. i just got back from out little family vacation on tuesday with just a little sunburn... i guess it's just a warm-up for the years to come! I have to admit that my days of staying up late, sleeping in & napping every afternoon to then start the cycle over have not made for an easy re-adjustment to working at 6...

and wish me luck, tomorrow is my first appt with the oral surgeon! time to get these wisdom teeth checked out, eek!

I finally started my blog!! I've spent yesterday and today playing around and making sure it has all the features I want :) Maybe if I'd taken more programming classes I could have designed my own sweet backgrounds, but I'm pretty happy with what I found!

Well, I leave for Burkina in 74 days!! I really cannot believe it is coming that soon, because I feel like I haven't even started preparing. The first week I found out I submitting my passport application (I will get a second, government employee passport. Kind of like a secret agent!), my visa application and emailed my country's Peace Corps desk my resume and another aspiration statement. Up until that point the people working specifically for the Burkina Faso placements and such didn't have any information on me, so I hope I made a decent first impression. The only Peace Corps paperwork I am still waiting on is re-submitting my dental paperwork once I get my wisdom teeth out. So that will be fun. Other than that it is a lot of little things that you wouldn't really think about: renewing credit cards, driver's license, and anything else that will expire before August 2012. I have a lot of loan paper work to get started on as well, which I suspect will be about as much fun as getting my wisdom teeth out, minus the painkillers.

Since I sent out my last mass email stating that I was officially in, I haven't been officially been told any new information, but I've been doing a lot of blog stalking of other volunteers and think i have a pretty good idea of what to expect for training at least. The first 3 months of my 27 month commitment will spent training with the group of volunteer starting the same time as me. At the end of training I will be officially sworn in as a volunteer (PCV), up until that point i'm only a trainee (PCT). I'm guessing the training group will be 15-20 people, but I really won't know until I get there!! We will be training around Ouahigouya (the northern of the two cities marked on the map to the right. The other city is the capital, where I'm guessing I will fly in). Part of training is spent at the PC training center, but for most of it the group is split up to live with host families. The purpose for this is to help us adjust to the culture and language sooner than if we all just stayed together. The host families will not all live in Ouahigouya, some may live in smaller villages outside the city. Once again, I'll find out when I get there!

My placement is officially to teach math at secondary school (anywhere from 7th-12th grade). But I know that all African PCVs do some work with Health Care. I'm not sure exactly what i will do for this yet, i think a lot of that will be determined by the specific needs of the community where i live. Burkina doesn't struggle with HIV/AIDS as much as other countries do, most of the health problems there are malnutrition and dehydration (because of diarrhea from unclean water). The average life expectancy is only about 45, while the US life expectancy is about 75. So as much as Africa needs advanced medical care to treat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, they also just need clean water and food. (I will provided a water filter from the Peace Corps for my water. It is very unlikely that i will have running water at my house, i will most likely have to transport it from a well.) I don't know the specific village/town i will be teaching in yet (and i won't until about halfway through training), but it is unlikely that another volunteer will live in the same village as me. In the village i may live with another host family or i may have my own place. Either way, it's my understanding that i will have my own stand-alone building, probably just a single room. Most of the houses there are set up on compounds, with many buildings inside a locked gate.

Well, i feel like i'm starting to ramble, which is always a good time to stop. If you have any questions, email me! I would, as always, love to hear from all of you too! This next week my family is going on vacation to Florida, so it will be nice to relax a little and see my grandpa before I leave!! We are also going on a short cruise (my first), so that should be pretty fun :) I'm sure I will update several times before i leave, but once i get there, it may only be about once a month or so (i also don't know what my electricity/internet situation will be yet). But like i said before, only 74 days until i leave!! and i know it will fly by!