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.
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| 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?
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