Duck-day

To celebrate Thanksgiving yesterday, I got together with 3 other volunteers (my sitemate Katie, Zach, and Kristen) and had a big meal at my house. I've never seen a turkey within 100 miles of my village, but instead we got ducks, which are really kind of better anyway. My school's parents' association gifted 4 ducks to me as a thank-you for the library and other activities, and we also had mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, popcorn, tofu, ginger cake, coconut macaroons, and pumpkin pie. Somewhere around 20 Burkinabe friends came over in the end. After this, I will never complain about having too small of a kitchen again (that's probably a lie)--we pulled off dinner for 24 people with a grand total of 3 square feet of counter space and 2 gas burners and no refrigerator or separate oven. Take that!

Something I look forward to next Thanksgiving: not starting off with live birds.

Zach prepares to earn his Thanksgiving meal

My pumpkin pie, next to the oven

I was so proud of how this pumpkin pie came out. I didn't think it would come out that well. It did. Thanks Grandma for the boxed pumpkin you sent me.

Plucking and gutting (guess who got to clean this up afterward)

Burkinabes arranged themselves into an audience so that they could awkwardly stare in silence at the Americans

The White People Show

Commissaire, my boutiquier (shop owner) and generally a heavy-hitter in the community

The explanation behind the outfit- the red tank top is made out of a traditional Mossi fabric. The Mossi are the dominant ethnic group in my region. It depicts a bird delivering a letter, and it's supposed to symbolize peace, or something. The wrap on the bottom is traditionally woven and dyed fabric. When Burkinabe women dress up for cultural events, they wear the two together.

When Burkinabes get behind the camera

In my English class on the morning of Thanksgiving, I asked each of my students to write 3 things that they were thankful for. Most of them wrote things like "I am thankful for my boyfriend because he bought me some clothes." or "I am thankful for my wife because she gave me a kiss." (??) One of my personal favorites was "I am thankful for pawpaws and watermelons because I like them."

The girls. (Look in the background, how big my trees are getting!)

Personally, I am thankful for my students, and for all my village friends who have my back. I'd also like to appreciate all of the people at home who have kept in touch with me and encouraged me over the past year and a half. You guys are the best.

Pie?

More portraits

Here are a few more of my more favorite portraits I took of my students and others at my school. 4e is short for quatrième, the equivalent of 7th or 8th grade, and they're my math students. 1ere is short for première, the equivalent of 11th grade, my English students. They all look so vulnerable and innocent in film. (As always, click to enlarge.)

Sophonie (4e) and Larba (1ere)

Mohamoudou (4e)

Adama (4e)

Maxime, Colette, Zakaria, and Felicité (4e)

(I don't know the kid on the left's name, oops) and Adama (4e)

Zabré (teacher in the middle) with 4e students

Patrice (1ere)

Youssouf, my top English student, and Noufou (1ere)

Larba (1ere) - I like this picture because of the awkward hands

Président, Basile, Surveillant, Proviseur, and Jean

Burkina Favorites

It's sometimes easy to get bogged down by the negatives when reflecting on life in Burkina. It's friggin' hot, there are flies everywhere, everything is inconvenient, blah blah blah. In the spirit of Thanksgiving approaching, I would like to take a few moments to appreciate some of my favorite things about Burkina, in no particular order.

My students. I was concerned when I started teaching that I just don't like people enough generally to enjoy/excel at teaching. At the start of the new school year, though, when students came back to my village after scattering to their satellite villages en brousse (in the bush) for the summer, it really made me appreciate how much I've come to care about them. Even for the individuals who were the most disruptive and generally exhausting last year, I was still glad to see them again. I really want to see them do okay. I think that teaching has been a good exercise in sympathy for me; every day each student comes to class with so much obvious personal baggage, and each of them has such a small hope of anything besides extreme poverty in their future. But they still manage to be so radiant, and they try so hard. I really hope I stay in touch with at least a few of them after I leave Burkina; hearing that even one of them has risen beyond their childhood would be such a boost.

Inexplicably attached, except to the ones that whine too much

The sense of community. Integrating into the community was one of the things that freaked me out when I initially arrived at site, but now I appreciate the system more. Everyone is so closed off from strangers in America, but here, I can be assured that pretty much anyone I approach on the street would be happy to put down whatever they're doing to talk to me (unless they're scared of white people, in which case they'll just run away/pretend I'm not there). I've written about it before in other blog posts. I never even talked to my neighbors in America, and it would have been weird if I just knocked on their door one day and tried to hang out with them. But everyone is actually a part of the community here, for better or for worse, and they all know each other and look out for each other. There's comfort in that. Likewise for the sense of community among volunteers.

The sky. Burkina's sky is so much more present and powerful than America's at every turn. At midday, it's violently bright and blue and hot (the verb that Burkinabes use for the sun rays is that they "hit,") but at sunrise and sunset it's suddenly so gentle and pastel and golden. There's this one 15-minute period every day right after the sun sets when the sky turns golden pink, and it gives this special peach-colored glow to everything the light touches. It's hard to describe, but it's a really special moment, where all the mundane objects that blinded me all day suddenly become warm and soft and welcoming. The quality of light was never something that I took a second to think about in America, but there you go. And then at night, when it's clear, there are so many stars. I can sit there and stare at them for hours at a time. There are just so many of them. And the lightning storms! They were everything that I hoped for when I was coming to Africa. How many things can I say that about?

IMDB review of a Burkinabe movie

By "Hot 888 Mama":

I did not learn anything about BF while going to school K-18. However, I once had a computer Mah Jongg game in which the backs of the tiles were the flags of various countries, which is how I first came across the name "Burkina Faso." At the time, I thought this was a cool name for a country, and I still think so. Unfortunately, I don't know what these two words mean, and this movie doesn't tell, either. Worse yet, it is in French, so one has to decipher subtitles to try to understand it. Further, all the characters are black people (making racist comments about white people now and then), and their names are not French (like "Pierre" or "Marie"). They are simply strings of letters impossible to pronounce, and not as short or predictable as even those long names you see in the credits of all the Thai movies out nowadays. For instance, the doctor who bandages Mocktar's leg injury is played by an actor named Ngonn Dingainlemgoto Alram Nguebnan! [...] Watch this if you want to see what life in the 1100s was like.

HILARIOUS. America!! (She's college educated, too!)

Recent goings-on

I'm overdue for a post about the new school year; in the meantime, here are a few recent pictures. The explanation behind the last 3 is that I offered to my 8th-grade math students to take their pictures, an offer that was met with overwhelming enthusiasm. I need to print out $70 worth of photos the next time I go in to Ouaga. Here they are:

Before prayers on Tabaski with Alimata; color matching was unintentional

My favorite of the student portraits

with my posse

with another one of my posses

Unrelatedly, today was a partial solar eclipse over Burkina Faso. There were all kinds of announcements about it over the radio, and the information was wildly misinterpreted in different ways by all my Burkinabe friends who listened to it. Most of them assumed that it would get really dark during the eclipse (it didn't) and that uninformed villagers would think that it was the apocalypse (they didn't). The radio also warned about not looking straight at the sun to avoid harmful rays, which they interpreted to mean that all sunlight during the eclipse would cause blindness and other strange effects. Their advice was to go into my house the whole time and close my shutters. When I drove through Ouaga at noon, there was maybe 1/4 of the normal traffic and street vendors out, and my usual 7-day-a-week bush taxi took the day off. The funny thing is that solar eclipses are, for the most part, really pretty boring. I got to observe it in the shadows, anyway, and someone on the other bush taxi had a pair of special eclipse viewing glasses, so I could observe it directly. It will be the last time I see one of those in awhile. At least it cut back on the traffic.

A final note- we met the fundraising goal for my library last week, meaning that I'll be able to start the project next week. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who helped us out!! Every dollar is a lot of money in Burkina Faso, and my community members and I are really grateful for each of them. (In case you're curious, by the way, I'll get a list of the names of everyone who donated, but I'll never see the amount that any individual donated.) You are all the best, and I am so lucky to have friends and family at home who are so supportive and generous. Thank you!