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.