Le Marché

Something that was hard for me to get used to was the fact that there aren't really stores where I can buy things that I need. There are a few boutiques around town that sell dry goods, but most things require a trip to the marché, the village market. Whereas American stores generally aim to make the shopping experience as impersonal as possible (automated checkout?), everything is about the people here.

Vegetable lady was really excited about me taking a picture with her cabbages

December marks the end of the harvest season in Burkina, meaning that everyone suddenly has a lot of free time and money. (Noting here that that's in comparative terms. The men ALWAYS have a lot of free time and no one ever has that much money.) As such, my village market has gone from a few vendors with moldy onions and bruised tomatoes to overflowing with cabbages, fresh onions, and a multitude of unidentifiable vegetables. 

The marché only happens once every 3 days no matter the season, and you know it's a marché day because starting around 11, people begin to gather and drink dolo, the local beer that tastes vaguely like apple cider vinegar, under the shaded hangars even more than usual. Lately there has also been music playing from boom boxes and even more people gathered. Things get into full swing around noon and run until 4 or 5 in the afternoon, when everyone starts to pack up. The marché falls on a Sunday once every 21 days, hence Sunday marchés are called the vingt-et-un (21) and are an especially big deal. I don't think they sell more/particularly special stuff. People just get more excited about it for some reason.

Produce is sold under the hangar

Fun fact!: The covered area where ladies sell produce was originally built by the French colonists as a slave market. The history teacher told me so. It doesn't seem that most people are aware.

Most of the marché is sprawled around the slave hangar. The grounds are pretty extensive. Most of the structure is just wooden beams that hold up straw shade coverings, and vendors bring in their own tables/chairs/mats/etc. when they arrive each time. On non-marché days, the ground is completely empty except for a few big clay pots that are too heavy and fragile to move around. Watermelons are in season now, so even on non-marché days there will still be women with donkey carts loaded with watermelons anywhere between the size of your fist and the size of...a watermelon sold whole or by the slice.

Zom and Gurumé, 2 marché regulars

It's pretty funny the random things you can find for sale. They seriously have all kinds of stuff. Besides produce, they also have fabric of all styles, ready-to-wear clothes, flashlights and batteries, soap, pots, all kinds of serving ware, plastic mats and buckets and chairs, jewelry, kola nuts, and the list goes on. Seasonality is a big thing; for example, who would think there was a season for calabash bowls. But I never saw them at the marché before, and suddenly they're everywhere. For some reason, only women sell produce, dairy, and grains. Jewelry and fabric is a middle ground, but everything else is sold by men.

Calabash vendor

One of the interesting things to do is to look at is the stands selling medications. A lot of people don't like going to the health clinic when they're sick because of stigmas, worries about cost, and general lack of understanding of health. Instead, they purchase their own medication at the marché. It's as suspect as you would imagine. There are old men selling small bottles of mysterious brown fluids and odd collections of bark, plant roots, and other unidentified objects; the traditional healers. There are also younger men selling boxes of pills that are supposed to remedy colds, malaria, or whatever else your problem is. The amount of fake Viagra that I've seen makes me wonder a little about the state of men's sexual health here, but the names that they put on the boxes just make it a joke.

Another view

There are specific people that always say hi to me whenever I show up. There's the vegetable lady photographed above, for example, who always greets me super enthusiastically when I walk under the hangar. She used to always give me gifts of free vegetables whether or not I bought anything from her, but she doesn't do that anymore. It was a good business strategy though, I guess. There's also the peanut butter lady. I went over to her house once to see how she made it. Seeing how black the peanuts were by the time she finished roasting them explained a lot about the flavor of her peanut butter. She's really nice though. There's also the ginger juice lady; Zenabo, the big loud lady whose daughter is one of my students and looks just like her; Aisseta, the other big loud lady who sells fabric; and some other people who recognize me but whom I don't recognize. Usually I tell people at the marché that my name is Sibdou, but lately more and more strangers have suddenly been calling me Mariko...I don't know what's up with that.

Peanut butter lady

It's kind of hard to explain how the once-every-3-days market is such a hub of village life, since there's nothing like it in the US. It's a time when the women really are able to get out and socialize, and everyone from all ranks of the community bumps shoulders. It's not the same as your Walmart.

"Will not shut up"

Faces of Site: part I

Some of the faces from site.

Ami and President

Ami
Ami is the treasurer of the parents' association at my high school. She is a native of the village, and she's kind of a boss. The picture is from the day that I arrived at site, when she and President were among my welcoming party. They're not married, in case that was confusing from the picture. She, more than anyone else, really helped me to move in and situate myself in the village. She showed me around the market and helped me to negotiate prices with the carpenter for furniture, and she's still my source for all the random things in village that I need but don't know where to buy. For example, where does one acquire empty plastic 20-liter jugs to store water? I still don't know. You just ask Ami and she'll send her kid off, and 10 minutes later she'll come back with it in hand, deal done. Don't worry about paying.

Ami runs a food stand near the market, and I can find her there pretty much anytime. She sells (prepared) rice, pasta, cigarettes, and miscellaneous other food bits such as fried fish or to depending on the day. Unfortunately, I find most of it fairly revolting, but that's okay. I still go there sometimes to sit around with her and her mom and young daughters. And I still bring her with me anytime I want to make a purchase of over $2, because you better bet she'll negotiate a better price for me than anyone else in the village. By which I mean she will yell at the vendors to give me reasonable prices until they are beaten into submission. Nobody messes with Ami.

President
His name is actually Souleymane, but everyone just refers to him by his title, President of the parents' association. As mentioned before, he was one of the first people to help me settle in and to look out for me after my arrival. He used to be a community animator, in which function he helped to educate people against female circumcision. (Almost 100% of the women in village are circumcised, even though it's technically a violation of national law.) Now, he is mostly occupied with his APE (parents' association) duties, and in the meantime he cultivates in the fields and does other off-season activities like construction. He's my go-to person for problems or improvements on my house. My front porch used to turn into a lake after every rainstorm, and without fail he would show up as soon as it was over to sweep it all away. He also arranged for the shade cover to be put up in front of my house, and he used to come over periodically to weed my yard for me. He is now my community counterpart, meaning that I'll work with him for all of my projects that don't directly involve the students at the school.

Katie and Stew

Katie
Katie is the volunteer whose site, at 5 miles away, is the closest to mine, and whose computer I have appropriated. We came to Burkina as part of the same training group, but her work is in the agriculture/small business sector. The fact that we are both white, female, approximately the same height, and both wear glasses is extremely confusing to the people of both our villages. As is the fact that we both sometimes tell them that our name is Sibdou (pronounced Seebidoo). Sibdou means "born on Saturday" because we both moved to our sites on August 25, which was a Saturday, if you didn't catch that. We even have the same bikes. All white people are the same!

She is pictured here holding Stew, the ill-fated baby bunny that someone gave her as a gift. Why someone thought that giving a baby bunny that can't eat solid food as a gift was a good idea remains a mystery. As his name suggests, he was intended for Thanksgiving dinner, but sadly he died of a stroke before he made it to size, but after peeing all over my floor when I bunny-sat him. She is now trying anew to start a bunny farm in her courtyard, but it is unclear whether her 3 bunnies will ever succeed in propagating. Stew II doesn't seem to know head from tail when it comes to the ladies. (Uh, literally.) But enough of that.

Having Katie near my site has been really great. We generally see each other once or twice a week. Like most people, she is a lot more talkative and outgoing than I am, but really, a lot more. Being able to see another American regularly made the very rocky first month of adjustment way easier. She really got me out and talking to people when all I did on my own was hide. Her boyfriend Zach is within a day's bike ride as well, so I also see him pretty frequently, and that made things like Thanksgiving dinner a lot more fun.


More to come!

6 months in country

As of December 6th, it is fully 6 months that I have been in Burkina Faso. I still remember clearly the experience of arriving here, the heat, how horrified I was when I went to the market for the first time (it was probably not a good introduction to Burkinabe markets, in retrospect), and how excited I was when I first saw the stars from a village. But also I have come so far in that time. 6 months later, a lot of things make so much more sense. No wonder my host family didn't understand why I ate lunch at restaurants instead of coming back home every day at noon. No wonder my host sisters used to come into my room and hang out with me even though I wanted to be by myself. No wonder they kept calling me from different phone numbers, which made me really confused when I thought I had already saved their phone number into my contacts. It all falls into place. It's a lifetime of difference.

As of today:

Intestinal parasite incidents - 1

Scorpion stings - 0

Scorpions killed - 3

Shooting stars seen - a lot

Total text messages sent and received - 1513

Total time spent talking on the phone - 52.5 hours

Meals that intentionally involved bugs - 2

Meals that unintentionally involved bugs - don't want to think about it

Rice with sauce chenilles--caterpillar sauce (click to zoom in!)

Remaining questions:
- Are Peace Corps volunteers everywhere this weird, or does Burkina specifically do that to people? (serious question)
- Why are crickets fascinated with my house?
- Do they sell canned pumpkin anywhere in Ouaga?
- How is it possible that I have mosquitoes inside my mosquito net every single night?

I ate it, too.

Useful phrase in Moore: Yaa wooto. That's how it is.

Thanksgiving

I guess I haven't been keeping up with posting. I did upload pictures onto Facebook though! Click here to see them.

For Thanksgiving, the other 2 volunteers from my region and I got together and prepared a big meal. I brought 2 loaves of cornbread and 2 apple cakes to Katie's house, about 5 miles from my site. When I arrived around 11, Zach was busy feathering and gutting the 4 ducks that we had bought, while Katie was scrubbing and chopping a mountain of potatoes. I helped with the chopping, boiling, and mashing of the potatoes, and everything was done by around 2 pm. In the end, our menu included:

• Roasted ducks with stuffing
• Mashed potatoes
• Papaya salad with a sweet chile sauce
• Cornbread
• Rice pudding
• Apple cake

Everything came out really well. A lot better than I was expecting really. And all done under $50, the largest cost being the ducks at a total of about $25. I think about 50 people from Katie's site showed up wanting food, and the president and treasurer from my school's parents' association came over to join us also. Not bad. There are pictures in the Facebook album. We saved a duck and servings of everything else for ourselves, and had a spread for everyone else to share. There's nothing like free food to bring people together.

Flavors that I will forever associate with Africa

• Powdered milk
• Sauteed okra
• Tomato paste
• Toasty peanut butter (by which I mean they burnt the peanuts...but you know, whatever)
• Last but not least, Pepto Bismol.

Yep.

Tabaski

Last Friday, October 26th was the holiday Tabaski. It's a big Muslim holiday commemorating the prophet Abraham demonstrating his obedience to God by agreeing to sacrifice his son at God's command. He blindfolded himself before going to cut his son's throat, but when he took the blindfold off he discovered his son had been saved and replaced by a ram. I got this from Wikipedia, by the way. Sorry if I'm wrong.

The locals celebrate by having a big prayer in an open space in the village around 10 am, which culminates in the sacrifice of a ram by the imam. Then everyone goes back home, and every family kills one ram for each wife. (Polygamy is a big thing here...more on that later.) A third of the meat is saved for the family, a third is given to friends and non-Muslim freeloaders like me, and a third is given to the poor who can't afford their own meat.

About a third of my village's population is Muslim, the rest being either Protestant or Catholic. I asked one of the village vieilles (grandmas, basically) that I sometimes talk to if I could go to the morning prayer with her, so she agreed to take me along. Later in the day, I biked to Kaya, my regional capital, where my school principal had invited me to celebrate with him and his wife.

It was an interesting day I guess. Mostly it was filled with even more awkward moments than usual. Frankly I felt a little let down by the celebrations...I was expecting more partying and abundant/exciting food, but it was actually pretty quiet. The food was not bad, but nothing that exciting.

Procession toward the prayer site

I started the day by meeting up with Alimata, the vieille who agreed to take me along, at 9 am. I didn't have a scarf that I could use to cover my head, so I brought a brightly colored bolt of fabric that clashed horribly with all of my clothes but was the only thing I had, and she helped me tie it on. From the market where we had met up, we made our way slowly to the prayer area, stopping along the way at the houses of their Muslim friends. At one point we saw the village chief sitting in a chair, and he motioned for me to come over to see him. I started walking toward him. Then I remembered I was supposed to take off my shoes when I approached him so I did that. Then I was walking toward him, but there was an old woman also approaching him, but she did so crawling on her elbows and knees. Gah, was I supposed to be doing that to? So I kind of backed up and then did the same thing. Then everyone who could see me started cracking up. So awkward. Then the chief said hi and wished me a happy holiday and excused me. Oh come on. But I asked Alimata later if that was really what I was supposed to do, and she said yes, so whatever.

Around 10 we finally made it to the prayer site. All of the men were up in front, and women and children were further back, separated by an open space. First everyone sang a song, and then everyone went through a series of motions for about 20 minutes that I kind of followed along with. Presumably if you were up in the men's area there was more explanation. But whatever. Then we sat there for awhile. And then the men were still doing something, but suddenly all of the women and children broke off and started chatting and dispersing. Vendors sold sachets of ginger juice and fried dough balls. Huh? Then we left and I went home.

From the women's area, you can see the men in the distance

That afternoon, I biked 30 km to Kaya, my regional capital. I made it in about an hour and 45 minutes, and then headed to the Proviseur's (the principal) house. He has a nice house. I hadn't seen it before. His wife lives there with their 2 year old son, and he goes there to stay with them on the weekends. When I got there, it was just the 3 of them plus 2 of their friends watching a soccer match on the TV...they gave me some food and a Coke (I guess you can't drink at a Muslim holiday party), which was good I guess. Having ice in my beverage kind of blew my mind. The food was reasonably good although not super exciting. 3 other teachers dropped by later, as did some other school-related people I hadn't met before. By 6 pm, it was evident that it was about to start storming, so I left the party to stay at the house of another volunteer. I don't know what I was expecting, but they were just kind of sitting around...and eating, but not that much...Oh well. It was amusing to see the Proviseur's interaction with his son; I hadn't seen men interact with their young children before, and it was pretty cute even though the kid was a little brat.

I don't know how to end this post. Culmination of the weekend: realizing how ridiculously excited I was to be eating meat, first of all, and that was less than half gristle. I guess I've changed.

Biker

I was kind of nervous about biking before I got here. After my parents made me learn how to ride a bike as a 9-year-old so that I would grow up with the basic competencies of a normal person (joke's on you! 23 and still can't drive a car!), I spent the next 12 years determinedly proving the fact that you really can forget how to ride a bike. By my senior year in college, though, things were getting embarrassing. One memorable Ohioan afternoon, I re-learned how to cycle on the kiddie bike of a friend.

That brings us to this past June, when I got here and was told that I would be issued a 21-speed 13" women's mountain bike for all my transportation needs. I knew I could manage it...but I was nervous. We had a 2-hour session before moving in with our host families on basic bike repair and maintenance, which mostly involved teaching us how to take off wheels and repair flats. Then, that was it. They were assuming we already knew how to do things like turn with less than a 20' radius. I was on my own. I had never even shifted gears while riding a bike before.

The first time I rode my bike was when I went home with my host family. Loaded down with a heavy backpack and with my mandolin case thumping on my right knee, desperately trying to follow my host mother through a cloud of dust as she motorcycled down uneven dirt roads, I thought about crying. Kids here learn to bike when they're 3, and I did not want their first impression to be of me falling off of my shiny expensive brand-new bike because of my own incompetence. Thankfully I made it back, barely. Who knows what they thought. Things got dicey by the second day of training when I got my first flat. I didn't even know I had a flat. My host brother had to tell me. I sat there waiting for half an hour with my flat front tire while my host brother went to get my host mother, because he said we were too far from the house to walk back. Eventually, though, we walked back. We were 7 minutes from the house.

What really freaked me out was how self-sufficient I had to be with the whole thing. I got a little repair kit with my bike, which included patches, glue, a bottle of mineral oil, and a bunch of mysterious metal tools that I didn't know how to use. I also got a bike repair and maintenance handbook that I still haven't opened. Was I supposed to figure out how to do this all on my own? I had witnessed flats being fixed, but could I really do it in the heat of the moment? What if something went horribly wrong with my bike but I had no idea because I was clueless about my bike anyway, and then one day it broke and I crashed? After the first time I got a flat and didn't know it, I became really paranoid about getting more flats and not noticing them. I imagined living forever in shame after ruining the rims on my wheels. I was not a competent enough biker to look down at the tires while biking.

Things came slowly. I shifted gears a couple of times over the next month. Not actually that hard. I got to the point where I could take my right hand off the handlebars long enough to wave at people. (Only my right hand though. Couldn't do it with the left hand.) My host brother told me that my tires needed air, so I tried to pump them up. A few weeks later I figured out that I wasn't using the pump right and that's why it was really difficult and the tires weren't actually inflating. I took my back wheel off by myself. After 2 months I heard someone talking about oiling her chain, so I oiled my chain, and suddenly my bike ran so smoothly and quietly. Someone showed me how to tighten my brakes. By the end of training, I sort of felt okay about the whole thing.

Now, I'm on my own, and the bike repair guy isn't there every day to help me anymore. Intimidating. At first. Biking 8 km to my friend's site was one of the longest bike rides I had ever been on, ever. I had to reinflate my own tires when I myself noticed they were getting low. I had to oil the chain when I heard it getting squeaky.

But suddenly, 2 months after getting to site, I realize that I am totally fine with all of it. In fact, I enjoy it. I can now look down and check both my front and back tires while riding my bike, I know immediately when I get a flat, and I can talk on my cell phone using either hand while I ride (er, not that I ever do that). I went from only using the lowest gears to only using the highest gears, and a 30 km bike ride to the regional capital is no big deal. It seems like there was never a time when I couldn't do it all. I still don't fix my own flats, but that's only because the pump is a major pain to use, and why bother anyway when I can pay someone to fix it for me for 50 francs, the equivalent of 10 cents. I enjoy keeping everything clean and taught and running smoothly. Tightening the brakes, adjusting the seat, it's just part of my day. Nothing intimidating about it.

I could go on about the whole thing being a metaphor for getting used to life in a foreign culture, but I'll fast-forward over the cheesy explanations. You can think about it for yourself. At least I never fell off my bike. I will say, though, that my progress with bicycling has grown closely with my integration here, and also my overall sense of self-reliance. I kind of feel like a grown-up who can take care of herself now. And maybe, maybe now that I've gotten to the biking skill level of the average 12-year-old, it will just be another decade or two until I get there with driving.

Names

Last week, I started collecting and grading homework for the first time. That sucked, because I had to grade about 160 papers at a time, and also because it made me realize how many people were falling through the cracks. Anyway, handing papers back was a joke because I had to read everyone's names out, and I just don't know what to do with a first name like Maneguedibkeita. (I'm pretty sure that's what the name was. Students tend to have messy handwriting and I don't have a printed list of all the names in my class, so it's just a guess.) There was a lot of laughing.

Anyway, I discovered some interesting things about names here. Last names I already knew about--about a third of all my students are named Ouedraogo, pronounced Wedraogo, don't forget to roll that r, which means "stallion" and is a common name among the Mossi ethnic group. Similarly, there are several named Sawadogo, which means something about being the person who brings rain. Other common names include Nikiema, Kinda, Sore, Barry, and Sissaogo, among others.

The first names were more interesting. Most notable was the girl named Noaga, which is Moore for "chicken." Why would you name your daughter chicken? Apparently mothers are not supposed to kill any animal while pregnant, because custom says that you should never take and give life at the same time. If a mother kills an animal while pregnant, she has to name her child after that animal or else it will die while it's still a baby. I asked my Moore tutor what happens if the mother kills multiple animals while pregnant (would her kid be named chickenandgoat?) but she didn't seem amused.

There were also a number kids named Larba, Lamoussa, and Sibri/Sibdou. Larba means "born on a Wednesday," Lamoussa Thursday, and Sibri/Sibdou Saturday (male/female versions of the name, respectively; other days of the week don't differentiate between genders). Sometimes I tell people my name is Sibdou because I moved to village on Saturday. But sometimes it confuses them because the other volunteer near my site, Katie, also moved here on a Saturday and tells people she is Sibdou. They mix us up frequently because all white people look alike (granted, we're both the same height and wear glasses, so, I guess that's confusing), but maybe it's better for them if they can just yell Sibdou for either of us and later on pretend they knew who they were talking to.

A sampling of other boys' names includes Moussa, Souleymane (how many Souleymane Ouedraogos are in my village? so many), Ali, Mohamadou, and Iliass. Girls' names include Awa, Rasmata, Alimata, Aminata, and other more familiar names like Mariam, Marie, Lydie, and Edith. But then, there are the names like Maneguedibkeita. Or Rimzinigdou. Or Wendingnolside. What do you do with those names? Do those kids actually go by that name in casual conversation? "Wend" means God, so sometimes it pops up in names meaning things like "God's grace" or "Force of God," etc. I'm convinced they're just there to mess with me though.

What I find amusing is that my school principal refers to other teachers as "Mr. Ouedraogo" and "Mr. Sawadogo." I think there are 4 Mr. Ouedraogos among the teaching staff, and 2 or 3 Mr. Sawadogos. Meanwhile we all have unique first names. He refers to me by my first name. I just don't understand.

Teaching: First Impressions

I just finished my first week of teaching. I am responsible for 2 classes of cinquieme, or seventh-grade, math with over 80 students in each. I teach for 4 hours on Mondays, then 3 hours on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'm done by noon every day. How was it? It was a little nuts. It happened, though. If I thought that the feeling of not knowing what's going on or what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to be was going to end after training, I was mistaken--I think that's just service in Burkina.

On Monday, the school's vice principal took me to the 2 classrooms and introduced me to the classes. I said a little blurb, and then she asked them, "did you understand what she said?" and everyone shouted "no!" Great start. When we left, she said the problem was not me, the problem was that the students were too busy staring at the white person and weren't listening to what I was saying. Hmm. For class, I introduced myself and the weekly plan for the trimester, then had them fill out questionnaires with questions about themselves and about basic math (using negative numbers, fractions, protractors...). I've only gotten through about half the questionnaires as of yet; I'm waiting until I have a beer in my hand for the rest of them. Among the personal questions, the one they had the most trouble with was "list 3 words that describe yourself." About half the students left it blank, a quarter wrote boring things like "studious" and "good student," and a quarter wrote weird things. I liked I am not a delinquent, which I got a couple of times. The best one was the first one I read: "January, February, March." What did she think I was asking for?? Another person wrote "corn, millet, and beans." Another interesting response that I got on the math part, where I told them to write "I don't know" if they didn't know how to do something, was the number of spellings of the phrase "I don't know." In French, it is written je ne sais pas, but I got "je ne sait pas" (understandable), "je n'ai sais pas" ("I don't have know"), and, my favorite, "je ne c'est pas" ("I not it's"). Teaching math in French to students who barely speak French.

Wednesday and Friday we did reviews of adding and subtracting negative numbers and fractions. Teaching such a large class wasn't actually a huge problem. True, it could be hard to tell who was guilty when someone was talking, but it kind of worked. We're early enough in the year that no one's trying to push my limits yet. When I had them solve problems, I once told them to discuss their results with their neighbors, and they stared at me blankly and then sat in silence for 5 minutes. We'll work on it. But...they cooperated, and if they didn't understand my French, they covered it well.

Some things to get used to: sometimes other teachers would walk by my classroom in the middle of my class and come in just to say hi to me, and I was supposed to stop my lesson to ask them how their morning was going--weird. I think doing that is considered polite on their part. Also, on the first day, there were no bells, so every class started about half an hour late. (The school bell is the metal rim from an old car wheel hung off of a tree that an assigned student hits with a stick on the hour.)

Next Monday is our first day of teaching/learning new material. We will see how it goes. In the meantime I am in Ouaga eating cheese and milkshakes.

My house

I got pretty lucky in terms of housing, all things considered. My house here at site is quite small, composed of 2 rooms, the whole thing maybe 20 feet by 10 feet. But it was built new just for me, and the Peace Corps provided me with about $400 to furnish the whole thing (besides my water filter and mosquito net, which were provided, great). It's really cute, and considering how much time I spend here (read: I hide in my house a lot), I feel that to give an accurate impression of my time here, a description of my house is necessary.

As I said, it has 2 rooms, and the walls are made of brick covered with some kind of crumbly cement that everyone uses here for their houses. The roof is made of metal sheeting. It tends to get pretty hot inside the house during the day, but I leave the windows open all the time and sleep with my door propped open, so it's bearable at night. Once we get into hot season, I plan on sleeping outside on my porch like most Burkinabe do. Right now, my porch is just a big block of cement with the wooden framework for a hangar to cover it; in a month or 2, once all the harvests are over, I'll be able to pay to get it covered with the woven straw called secco that they all use. Because of the way that my porch was built, it turned into a giant 1.5"-deep lake every time that it rained, but I have received promises to have it redone during hot season. (All that kind of labor gets done during hot season, apparently, because people aren't busy working in the fields anymore.) Critters are not a big problem. I've killed 2 scorpions in my house so far, and I had a big cricket infestation until I went on a rampage with insecticide. I still see little lizards and geckos around sometimes, but they don't bother me except when they poop all over the walls.

There isn't any electricity or running water in my whole village. To charge the laptop, I purchased a 12V car battery and a power inverter that plugs straight into it. The car battery, despite weighing a good 20+ pounds, appears to be weaker than the computer battery, so I've had to take it to the market to get charged rather often. (There are some boutiques in the market that have solar panels or that run generators during certain hours of the day so that people can charge their car or cell phone batteries for $0.80 or $0.20, respectively.) I also have done silly things such as plugging the power inverter into the battery with the polarity reversed, which broke the inverter, but luckily there was someone in town who was able to fix it for me reasonably cheaply. Lesson learned. For water? There was a 12-year-old girl named Fanta who was coming over to my house between 5:45 and 6 am once every few days to pump water for me, but I think that she's leaving town tomorrow to go to school in another village. There are a smattering of water pumps around the village so that no one is too far away from one, and they are free to use, but you have to hand-crank all the water. Everyone in town uses bidons, which are recycled 20-liter plastic oil jugs that anyone who has ventured into an industrial kitchen is familiar with. I have 2 bidons, which she would strap to the back of my bike and take to the pump about a 5-minute walk away. I use a little less than 1 bidon a day, depending on whether I take 1 or 2 baths, and 2 bidons to do a week's worth of laundry. Extra water is stored in a big plastic trash-can thing reserved for that purpose called a barrick. Now that she's gone, I may recruit a student to do it for me. You only ever see young kids or teenage girls at the pumps; fetching water is considered children's labor. On the plus side, I can make them not come between 5:45 and 6 am anymore.

What else is there to say. The shower area and latrine are off in their own corner of the courtyard. The latrine, not photographed, is just a little hole in the cement, and it goes down pretty deep. Like the porch, the latrine and shower area are paved in cement, but they weren't built that well. They both tend to get flooded with water every time it rains, which leaves behind a heavy residue of sand and gravel once it drains. Maybe they'll get redone too. Neither of them has an actual door, but rather their privacy is protected by their being around a little corner of wall. Since I'm the only one in my courtyard, it's not an issue.

The whole courtyard is surrounded by a solid brick fence about 7 feet tall, with a bright green metal gate in front. It latches from the inside, but opens from the outside as well, though I lock it at night. It affords me a lot of privacy. Sometimes neighborhood kids try to look in my windows or peer in between the cracks of the gate, but few of them have figured out how to open the gate from the outside, and even those who did tend to leave me alone. Each room has 2 windows, all covered in mosquito netting. No one has glass windows here, but instead the use metal shutters that can be closed to keep out prying eyes or harmattan winds.

A lot of other volunteers who are replacing previous volunteers at their sites are moving into their old houses. Some people got lucky and moved in somewhere that was nicely furnished already, while other people were less lucky and got houses that only had a disgusting mattress left behind as furnishing. They all got $200 to furnish their houses. Evidently there was another volunteer at my site a few years ago, but I don't know what happened to her house. At any rate, I'll leave behind something nice for future volunteers.

Now for pictures. Certain friends of mine may accuse me of cleaning up the house before I took pictures to make myself look better, but this is really what it looks like normally. Really, it is. Now I sound like I'm lying.

The view from the front door

I started a postcard wall above the table after I took this picture, so, send me postcards.

Mosquito net doubles as storage for clothes and towels

Front door

Latrine hidden on the far left, and shower to the right of it

My bike! The plastic teakettle is for doing the dishes

Myspace-style picture with the house.

Unrelatedly:

Well hello there.

Picture for Saturday: Calabash head

Sorry to Facebook friends, for whom the picture is old news:

Upon buying a calabash at the market as a thank you present for my host family from training, discovered that it did not fit into my backpack, and tried to find the most efficient method of transporting it back home.

--

Things are going well here. Today officially marks 4 weeks that I have been at site. Classes are scheduled to start on October 1st. I will be teaching 2 classes of 7th grade math for a total of 10 hours a week, and there are 85 students in each class. (That's a pretty reasonable class size here, actually. Whoo.)

I bought a car battery for my house so I could use it to charge my computer. However, keeping the car battery charged has been a big fuss. I have consequently been trying to limit my time on the computer. I hope to buy a solar panel for the battery when I get paid next week, and then it won't be an issue anymore.

Note: I updated my care package wish list, if you're interested.

The Culture Divide

Something that I've found to be interesting when I travel to other countries is how easy it is for me to connect with other young Americans with respect to cultural knowledge. Whether I'm in France, Japan, or Burkina Faso, when I meet other American recent college grads, coming from anywhere in America, there is so much information that we share, even down to the finest details. For example, we can discuss the same episodes of the same TV shows, the same actors, and the same news stories or opinion pieces, and it's like we're picking up from where we left a previous conversation even though we've never met before.

It's especially true when it comes to internet culture. I can start conversations already assuming that references to things that seem like weird bits of niche culture, like Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog or individual xkcd webcomics, will be appreciated. It's weird to think that they're catching references to the same snippets of culture that I consumed with college friends and roommates late at night while clustered around a glowing computer screen in the living room, things that felt so personal and unique to my experience at the time. When you add all that to the fact that the situations in which I meet those people (as Peace Corps math/science education volunteers, on organic farms, youth hostels, etc.) is already pre-selecting them to be like me in a multitude of other ways, it can get really weird how much I share with someone from the opposite side of America who I'm randomly meeting for the first time on the opposite side of the world.

Which leads me to speculate on how true that can be somewhere like Burkina. If you're a young Burkinabe with no TV, internet, movie theaters, or newspapers, can you have that kind of instant connection when you meet another Burkinabe? What would you talk about? The only way that most villageois get any kind of news or other media is over the scratchy, static-filled radio, accessed through their cell phones in the evenings, if that. News broadcasts are enough to communicate basic facts, but could 2 young adults from opposite sides of Burkina really bond over a shared childhood news broadcast the same way that I could share episodes from Gilligan's Island with someone from America? (Actually, in my generation, Gilligan's Island is probably just me...thanks Dad.) They couldn't sing the same Jingle for Goldfish or talk about the same weird Geiko ads, and they couldn't talk about how they always used to ask their parents to buy them Lunchables meals to take to school because they thought they were cool even though they were actually gross.

The only thing I can really think of that somehow makes it across village boundaries is music and celebrities. Pop music in Burkina's center-north is the same as pop music in Burkina's east, south, and west, as well as in most of the neighboring sub-Saharan African countries. And I come across posters of Beyonce and 50-Cent every trip to the market. But still, is it really the same?

Not only are the Burkinabe separated from each other in terms of media, they are also divided by ethnic group and language. There are over 60 languages spoken in Burkina, and while the ethnic groups coexist quite peacefully, the language barrier puts a real damper on conversation. Yes, they learn French in schools, which serves to unite them somewhat. In that vein, I guess another thing they share is the standardized school curriculum, although those parched textbooks are hardly fertile grounds for the roots of friendship. (That came out more poetically than I meant, excuse me.) Even with the French, though, there are few people who make it past 4th or 5th grade here, making their French shaky at best, and it is only the educated that would be able to connect meaningfully with someone coming from elsewhere.

I guess it comes back to the pre-selection of whom one meets. I am a young, liberal, educated American from a large metropolitan area meeting other young, liberal, educated Americans from large metropolitan areas. Maybe I couldn't do the same thing if I met Americans who were not from that same demographic. Maybe 2 Americans from another demographic group, even if it's the same one, could not connect in the same way. They definitely couldn't talk about the same internet memes. In the same way, maybe 2 young educated Burkinabes from metropolitan areas could share cultural knowledge in the same way. It's just that that demographic group represents a much smaller slice of the overall Burkinabe population than it does the American population. Still, I want to know. What would they talk about?

Moving to Site

I have now been living at my site for 9 days. It has been a little rough getting used to, but I'm going to make it. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to post the actual name of my village on the internet...but suffice it to say that I am about 100 km north of Ouagadougou, and a day's biking distance from the nearest large city of Kaya. I live in a tiny new 2-room house painted in blue, yellow, and green, and I am in my own courtyard with a baby mango tree. There is a latrine and shower area in a corner of the courtyard. Setting up the house has been fun. Thus far, I have a table, a low bench, a plastic chair, and a cot, and I just got a bookshelf today, but the paint is still wet so I can't load it up yet. I also have a gas stove and a car battery for charging the laptop that my friend lent me. Hopefully it can also be utilized for fanning and air circulation purposes once we get into hot season in a few months...

Training was good, but toward the end I was really looking forward to heading out to site. I really did not want to have to eat my host family's fish sauce anymore. But now that I'm here, there are a lot of things from training that I miss.

Things that I miss.

• Having (American) friends around all the time.
• My host family looking out for me, making sure I wake up on time, cooking all my meals, holding me to my daily schedule.
• Having stuff scheduled for me to do all the time. NONE of my time here is scheduled and it freaks me out a little bit.
• Knowing where everything in town is.
• Being able to communicate with people, whether in English or in French. Everyone here is rapid-firing Moore at me all the time, what?
• Not having to do dishes. So many dishes.
• Not being sick. I'm okay now, but last week I had some major gastrointestinal issues.
• Knowing who to trust. I feel very vulnerable here socially. There are 2 members of the parents' association that are assigned to look out for me right now, but I can't make them babysit me all the time. But there aren't that many people that I can communicate with in French, and sometimes things get awkward. I have gotten a lot of marriage proposals already.

Chicken outfits. The dresses are actually the same color, but the one on the left  is soaked through because it was pouring. Notice how none of the chickens on the tie have heads. Also notice how all of the fish on the shirt are upside down. Another lovely creation by a Burkinabe tailor.

Reasons for hope:

• Free phone calls among all volunteers.
• People are really excited even when I just do basic greetings in Moore.
• My house is really cute.
• There are 2 volunteers within a day's bike of me, and spending time with both of them has been immensely comforting.
• I feel good about French...whenever I can use it.
• I don't have to eat nasty fish sauce anymore.
• The 2 parents' association members who look out for me are wonderful.
• The internet here is way faster than it was at training. Plus, I now have unlimited monthly access. Wait, there goes my excuse for not posting here.
• Talking with people I might be working with (at the school and health center) makes me really excited about possibilities for work.
• Other teachers that I'll be working with will be back in town in a little over a week, so I'll actually have people to talk to.

September 15 is the day when all of the school staff meets and discusses things, and classes start sometime in October. Until then, floating free, kind of.

Bullet list

I have a bunch of good post ideas, but they're going to have to wait for now. My blog's prose form needs some work. Anyway, here are some more bullet points.

• Today I swore in as a volunteer. Training is officially over. I move to my site on Saturday morning. I am excited, but also a little terrified of being on my own with no structure every day. Only white person in a 6-mile radius! But this means I have a lot more time to do whatever I want. It will be an experience for me.
• My computer died last week on its 5th birthday. Luckily I was able to salvage the data with some help. I'm looking forward to getting a new laptop. (Already in the mail.)
• I was elected to Peace Corps Burkina's Food Security Task Force, PCBF's FSTF. (We create community by using excessive and unnecessary acronyms, apparently.) What does that mean? We'll find out. I really wanted to do it though. I know there is a lot of teaching people about edible plants and better organic agriculture techniques, but there are other fun things too like teaching people how to make tofu. Anyway, I get the travel reimbursed to visit Ouaga once every few months for meetings.
• I'm pretty sure I was going to say more, but I'm really tired and I'm blanking. Anyway, here's a picture from The Day When We Learned How To Plant Trees during training.

Mango-tree-planting bosses.

A day

5:00 am - Cell phone alarm rings. Consider getting up to go running. Don't.
5:40 am - Wake up thinking I've overslept. Realize I haven't. Go back to sleep.
5:42 am - Actually, wake up again to go to the latrine.
6:24 am - For some reason, I always wake up at exactly this time.
6:30 am - Bucket bath. Exciting when my host sister gives me heated water.
6:45 am - Host sisters have a knack for bringing me breakfast right before I have a chance to put clothes on.
7:30 am - Meet another trainee Susan who lives near me, and bike 15 minutes to training. Shoot dirty looks at small children yelling "Nasaara! Comment tu t'appelles!" (White person! What's your name!) every 10 feet.
8 - 12 - Model school: I teach for 1 hour a day. The rest of the time is spent lesson planning or, more likely, procrastinating while sitting around eating fried dough balls and reading The New Yorker.
12:15 pm - Get in line for lunch at Chez Valerie, a stand near the training center with some of the better Burkinabè food I've had here.
1:15 pm - Watch chickens fight over an empty plastic bag, then get freaked out by a butterfly and run away. Contemplate the relative levels of intelligence of flies, chickens, and jellyfish. Ranking does not come out well for chickens. Makes me feel good about myself.
2:00 pm - Afternoon training sessions. They always follow the same formula: a statement of objectives, an overabundance of flip charts, and counting off into groups for practice scenarios.
2:30 pm - Try to stay awake.
2:45 pm - Daydream about food.
5:15 pm - Training over; head back to Chez Valerie with other trainees for cookies and café au lait. Beer or 10-cent whiskey shots a possibility. Feeling good.
6:00 pm - Go back home
6:30 pm - Bucket bath #2
6:45 pm - Sit around listening to the radio with host parents. Don't really listen because the mixture of static and fast French makes it difficult to understand. Nod and agree with whatever they say.
7:15 pm - Dinner
7:45 pm - More half-listening to radio.
8:15 pm - Try to plan lessons, end up procrastinating and reading more on my Kindle.
8:45 pm - Sweat. Alarm clock thermometer says 95 degrees inside my house. Read labels on items in med kit saying not to store above 80 degrees.
9:15 pm - Remember I was supposed to do push-ups tonight. Spend 10 minutes texting other trainees to psych myself up. Do them. Sweat some more.
9:45 pm - Set out running clothes so I'll go running tomorrow. Go to sleep.

Care package items

Suggested care package items, in the order that I thought of them, you know, just in case you wanted to know:

• Protein bars (Clif bars)
• *Sriracha sauce/Thai curry paste/curry powder
• Other herbs/spices (spicy is good, Mexican)
• *Dark chocolate bars (just not in March-June, which is hot season)
• Dutch-process cocoa powder, powdered buttermilk, old-fashioned oats
• Instant miso soup packets
• *Packaged or freeze-dried meats/sausages that don't need refrigeration (forget vegetarianism)
• Hard cheese that doesn't need refrigeration
• *Instant sauce packets (cheese sauce, taco seasoning, whatever seems good), and also soy sauce packets
• Toasted almonds/*walnuts/pecans (but not peanuts)
• Prunes
• Jars of artichoke hearts/whole-grain mustard/stuffed olives (keeping classy)
• Tea bags (Japanese green tea, rooibos, mate, others)
• Issues of The New Yorker, American Scientist (not to be confused with the wider-circulated Scientific American), Harper's Magazine
• Food magazines with pictures
• Pilot G2 pens (black, or any color)
• Bars of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, any scent
• Uh, boxes of See's?

*Priority.

Boy do I sound like a snob. More added as I think of it.
(Note: peanuts, peanut butter, pasta, rice, tomato paste, condensed milk, and honey are plentiful here.)

But what are you doing

It occurs to me that I haven't written much about what I was sent here to do. I am a math education volunteer in Burkina Faso; so what? I only teach a maximum of 10 hours a week, so there's a lot else going on.

Within Burkina, the Peace Corps has 5 main priorities that all volunteers, regardless of sector, are required to work on:

1. Malaria prevention - pretty self-explanatory. Burkina has one of the highest prevalences of malaria of any country in the world, and an estimate says that over 50% of Burkina Faso's yearly deaths are caused by malaria. My host mother got malaria last week. (She's better now.) At the same time, there are people here who think you get malaria from eating unripe mangoes. A lot of people. Also from riding in a bus with the window open. Or from sorcerers. I am here to tell them to use mosquito nets, and to please open the bus windows. (Fact I didn't know before: malaria used to be a problem in the southeastern United States. The government wiped it out with DDT.)

2. Reforestation - I have to oversee the planting of 625 trees per year while I'm here. In comparison, the agriculture/environment sector volunteers are responsible for the planting of 5000 trees per year. Tree cutting for lumber and firewood is an issue. Trees slow down the harmattan winds (those huge dust storms I wrote about before) and do other magical things, like improve soil quality and water retention. Also, people eat tree leaves. Did you know you can eat baobab leaves? The Little Prince had no idea.

3. HIV/AIDS prevention - again, pretty self-explanatory. The HIV rate is actually quite low in Burkina. Wikipedia tells me that Burkina's adult HIV prevalence rate is 1.6%, compared to .6% in the US. Still, there's more to be done.

4. Youth education - well, I'm a teacher. I also have to start youth clubs to teach life skills, plus lead summer camps. There are a lot of possibilities there. Clubs and camps are where I really expect to work on the other 4 goals. Girls' empowerment falls somewhere in here.

5. Hygiene promotion - teaching hand-washing and bleach to prevent diarrhea. (note: diarrhoea is a disgusting-looking word)


Outside of Burkina-specific goals, what you are probably imagining to be my job as a Peace Corps volunteer is really only 1/3 of the overall mission. I am expected to do a good job on the above 5 goals, plus be an effective math teacher, but the other 2/3 of my mission are to share American culture with the Burkinabè and to share Burkina culture with Americans. So sitting around and chatting with people counts for work. As does blogging, right? I feel pretty good about my progress on that last goal already, in that half the time when I told people I was going to Burkina Faso their response was "Is that a country?" Educating people before I even left the States.


I only have 2 and a half weeks of training left. As of this coming Monday, we will have been in country for 2 months. August 23rd is the date that we swear in as volunteers, which is a big deal, I guess. There is a big ceremony and a party afterward, and then on the 24th and 25th we move to our sites.
How is it August already?

Lessons Learned in Model School

I was originally going to write this post about the large amount of uncertainty that has characterized my Peace Corps experience thus far, but I think that doesn’t get at exactly what I am trying to say. What I am trying to get at is more of learning to let go, and learning to deal with weird situations in a not-weird way. There has been a lot of getting over the way I feel about things and just dealing with it. And, you know, it’s okay.

Monday of a week and a half ago, we started doing Model School for 4 hours every morning, 5 days a week. This is where we first get to practice teaching (in French) our respective subjects to real Burkinabe students. I teach math 4 hours a week to 8^th graders, plus last week I taught an hour of English, and next week I’ll teach an hour of Life Skills. (Fun possibilities for that one.) Yesterday we gave our first exam, and we’ll have another one in 2 weeks for the end of Model School. The students are from the local community who wanted to take preparatory summer-school type classes before the real school year starts. My students are all really well-behaved, and they range in ages from around 13 to 20. Here are some broad lessons learned from my end.

First, the aspect of uncertainty. One of the questions that the Peace Corps asked over and over through the application process was something to the effect of "Do you feel comfortable acting in ambiguous or uncertain circumstances?" (It was probably worded better than that, though. I don’t remember.) They weren't joking. Life in Burkina generally involves a lot more sitting around and waiting than most Americans are used to, I think. Especially sitting around and waiting but not being sure what you're waiting for, or whether in fact you’re waiting for anything at all. Just waiting. There are also a lot of times when none of us (the trainees) knows what’s going on or what we’re supposed to be doing, and you would think it would be easy for someone to give us just a little direction, but they don’t. You just have to take a breath and let it go.

The uncertainty has grown to be a part of daily life. With Model School, things have been fairly straightforward for me, but there are also plenty of times when I just have to be ready for anything. I suppose that’s always true of teaching, since the goal is to respond to the needs of your students. But for example, when I went to teach English last week, I had no idea what level of English any of the kids were at, and trying to find any hints in their textbook was rather futile since the textbook was quite useless. (More to come in future posts about education and curricula in the Burkinabe school system. It’s crazy.)

The other aspect has more to do directly with my practice teaching. I have never taught anything before, and although they have given me sufficient training, there are a lot of times when I think to myself that I really have no authority to be bossing a bunch of African kids around. As a student, teachers always seemed like they were a special different kind of being from me. They were supposed to be a lot older, with a lot more education and life experience, and no existence outside of the school grounds. But now I’m teaching, and I’m still just me. If one of them challenged me, could I deal with it? What do I have over them? It would be so easy for me to lose control over the classroom. I’m not even that much older than some of the students. But the realization was that the only sure way to fail would be to let my (maybe-justified) anxiety show. All that I have to do to be a good teacher is to pretend that I’m a good teacher.

I guess the lesson learned from all of these experiences is the importance of stepping back from my emotional state, evaluating objectively whether or not it is productive, and then either going with it or overriding it with something better. I can acknowledge that yes, maybe at any given time I feel angry or confused or terrified, and maybe it’s completely justified, but letting that control me is not going to get me anywhere. I think that that is one of the most useful lessons that I’ve learned thus far here. No choice but to keep pushing forward.

Posting

I feel a little bad for how little I have been posting here. Part of my excuse is the slow internet connection.  I only get internet for an hour or two a couple of times a week, and sometimes I can’t get Blogger to load during that entire time. Another part of my excuse is the fact that so many hours each day are regimented for me, and I don’t have much personal free time where I can do what I want. But I think the biggest thing that’s stopping me from writing is that things are just too different here, and I don’t know how to comment on it in a way that is at all relatable to life in the United States. Looking over the things I’ve written, I’ve been able to get in little pieces of what my life is like here, but I don’t think there’s any amount that I could write that would start to give a real feeling for what it’s like. For me, in spite of the reading I did and pictures I looked at from home, things in Burkina are totally different from how I had imagined, and I can’t really explain why. I knew that there would be no running water or plumbing or electricity and that it would be hot all the time. But the reality is so much more. I don’t mean that it’s worse. Just something about the quality is too different to explain. Even pictures don’t really capture it. Anyway, I’ll keep trying. Just know that there is more behind the words.

Wind and Dust

I can't help feeling that nature is much bigger here than it is at home. Its presence here is so much more forceful. It's in your face. The extremes are so much more extreme.

The landscape for most of north and central Burkina is pretty harsh, with a lot of very open, dry, flat land covered with rust-colored dust. A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of us decided to meet at the training center for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. Around 5 pm, the sky suddenly turned from bright blue with scattered clouds to a weird angry shade of purplish brown. At that point another trainee who lives near me and I decided it was time for us to head home. The wind started to pick up even before we had a chance to get onto our bikes, but we figured we'd better hurry up and get home while it was still light and before it picked up any more.

Dust storms here are a pretty common thing and seem to occur somewhere around once or twice a week. Their frequency doesn't stop them from being completely terrifying and awe-inspiring. The winds are amazingly powerful, and it took all of my effort just to keep my bicycle moving somewhat forward in a somewhat straight line. Looking up toward the sky, I could see plastic bags soar by above the treetops like kites, but moving way too fast. (Littering here is a huge problem, by the way.) My face stung from the blowing dust, and my glasses weren't really enough to protect my eyes, so I had to progress with my head down and eyes squinted. Evidently that's why I'm not supposed to wear contacts here. At one point a plastic bag blew into the gears on my bike and I had to stop to cut it out with a knife. Visibility was similar to medium-thick fog. A trip that usually takes 10 minutes instead took a little short of 20. It felt like something out of a theme park thrill ride. It was a little scary. I had to keep reminding myself...it's only wind and dust. Wind and dust.

The first rain drops were just starting to come down as I pulled up to my host family's courtyard. It was pouring within 10 minutes, with magnificent lightning bolts of all colors shooting across the sky. The rain continued for about an hour, and the lightning went on into the night. I swept out my house at least 5 times that night because I kept discovering new mountains of red dust, which problem was exacerbated by the fact that I had left my windows open while I was out. I took a bucket bath to wash the dust out of my hair in the outdoor shower area amid blinding moments of illumination from the sky. When I woke up the next morning, my eyes were gritty from the bits of dust still left in them.

I love the lightning here. And despite the nuisance they create in terms of cleaning my room here, I love the dust storms too. They are so mighty. Burkina's landscape in this region does not have much to recommend it, but in those times the force of nature is enough to remind me who's really in control here. And on clear nights, the stars are so bright. I have never been able to see so many stars or so much of the Milky Way before. It's a different kind of beauty.

On the Road Again

I am currently in Ouagadougou again, finishing up the counterpart workshop. Each volunteer is assigned a counterpart from our community whose work is related to what we'll be doing in the field. For example, my counterpart is another math teacher at the lycée (high school) where I'll be teaching. He seems very nice. Tomorrow I will travel with him to visit my future site for the first time. I'm in a medium-sized village of about 3000 people in the north-central region of Burkina, and I am SUPER excited to see where I'll be living and working.

I know that I'll be teaching math and or physics/chemistry (they combine the subjects in the Burkina curriculum) to 10th or 11th graders, which is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that many people in 10th or 11th grade here are at least as old as I am. A lot of times students have to drop out of school for lack of money and then they enroll again a few years later, or else they fail and have to repeat grades (very common). Thus, students can be as old as 25 or 30 by the time they graduate from high school. One plus is that while middle school classes often have well over 100 students per class, I hear that there will be fewer than 20 students per class in the high school because of a high attrition rate. Of those students, I think that at most only 1 or 2 tend to be female, so there will be a lot of interesting challenges. I think that seeing my site and taking a tour of the high school will give a lot more perspective and meaning to the rest of training, so we'll see how it goes. There is exciting work to be done.


Anyway, I'll get a tour of my town on Wednesday evening and Thursday, followed by 2 days in the regional capital 30 kilometers away, where I hear that they have good yogurt and ice cream. Then I'll come back to Ouaga for a night before returning to training.

The hotel where we're staying now is blowing my mind a little bit. Sunday was the first time I had used a toilet or taken a regular shower (granted, still without hot water, but who needs hot water when it's hot outside anyway) in over a month. Some things will never be the same.

The Food Situation.

I have internet again!

I have too many things to say. I don't know where to start. For lack of a better starting place, some notes on the food situation in Burkina:

-       The staple food is called to (a.k.a. sagbo in Mooré). It is a whitish paste made out of corn or millet flour and water, kind of similar to polenta but without the butter and cheese, or, the things that make polenta exciting. They cook it in a big pot and then let it cool until solid, and then eat it with sauce. My family usually serves it with 2 sauces that you mix together in your bowl before adding the to. One of them is a reddish oily fish sauce, and the other one they call gumbo. There’s something slimy in it, presumably okra, and they also add in some kind of leaves, maybe baobab leaves? A lot of other trainees hate to. I kind of like it.

-       Another standard food is benga, which is a dish of black-eyed peas, served plain on a plate by itself as a meal. They usually give you palm oil to pour over (for flavor?) or spicy pepper flakes. It’s palatable with the pepper flakes. Sometimes it comes mixed with rice when it’s fancy, or with caramelized onions on top. Whew.

-       Other staples: riz sauce and riz gras. Riz means rice. Riz sauce is usually a safe bet. The sauce has different things in it depending on where you go, but it’s usually a neutral brown color, with different combinations of stewed vegetables and meat. They also eat a lot of spaghetti and macaroni with oily tomato sauce. Also couscous. Also plain flavorless soft white bread in the form of rolls or baguettes, which they fold into thirds and hand to you in a black plastic bag.

-       Lest it sound like there is nothing but starches here, which is only 95% true, there are also cucumbers that you can sometimes get in a salad with a garlicky aioli sauce that is pretty good, and also, separately, all kinds of mystery meat (I don’t ask) in a rich brown sauce that they call soup, but which is too rich and salty to eat by itself. You can also get peanut butter at the market, which they scoop out of huge bowls into little plastic baggies. I think we Americans are the only ones who eat it on sandwiches; the Burkinabè sometimes use it in sauces. Oh, also the yogurt is pretty great. It is plain and lightly sweetened, and sometimes they serve it with millet mixed in. The mangoes and bananas are also excellent. The cheapest mangoes are as little as 5 cents each, and the bananas are a little more. I am slightly allergic to mangoes.

-       My host family gives me hot water and sugar cubes and powdered milk at breakfast. It took me awhile to figure out what I was supposed to do with them. Did they stop at that point before buying me coffee granules? It seems to be the case. (People drink a lot of powdered Nescafe here.) They looked at me weirdly when I brought out tea bags. They looked at me more weirdly for not adding sugar to my tea. Repeated statements of “I don’t add sugar to my tea” led to blank stares, as did my attempts to explain why I don’t eat the plain white bread with mayonnaise on it. Oh well.

Overall, I feel that the pleasure that I get from eating has diminished significantly since my arrival here. I used to get really excited about meal times, but now, it's just eh. I don't mean to sound that negative about it. It's just different. Maybe once I get to site and I start cooking for myself again, I'll feel more ownership over it and I'll enjoy it more. On the plus side, at least I'm not craving cookie dough every night anymore.

Leaving the comfort zone

Today was our last full day in Ouaga, and tomorrow we move in with our host families in a village not too far from here. My arms are full of shots, and I'm preparing myself for a crash course in Mooré tomorrow morning before we leave to meet the families.

Thus far, our stay in Burkina has been entirely limited to the hotel compound. It has high walls so you can't see anything of the outside world, and besides the heat and humidity and Burkinabè Peace Corps staff members who have come to give us prep talks, we may as well have been still in the US. I'm glad that the Peace Corps has slowly eased us into life here; the food has still been pretty American, which I know I will miss greatly by this time next week (or tomorrow), and we mostly only interact with each other.


Today was the first time that we really left and saw a real part of Burkina. This afternoon we walked from the compound to a street market, which was way huger than I would have imagined. The experience was incredibly overwhelming, between the smells and the noise and people staring at us. It was comforting that the current PCV (Peace Corps volunteer) who accompanied us seemed completely relaxed and had no trouble bargaining with the street vendors in French and Mooré, in spite of the conspicuousness of our large group of foreigners. Maybe I'll reach that point in a year...

We'll be living with the host families for the full 3 months of pre-service training, through late August. I know nothing about the family I'll be moving in with, except I asked that they be non-smokers, nor how far from other trainees/the training center I'll be. I am really nervous about meeting them. It sounds like the host families have been pretty well prepped for taking us in and respecting our space. At least one of the host family members is required to be fluent in French, so I will have some mode of communication, but still, there will be many challenges to overcome. We had a presentation today to let us know what to expect, which showed me how well the Peace Corps has prepared this all, but also really freaked me out. I guess this is where the real adventure begins.




Note - I hear that the internet access at our training site is extremely limited, and I also don't know about the availability of a power supply to charge my laptop. So we'll see how frequently I post. I'll keep it up as much as I can anyway, and I would love to hear from you!