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.

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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.