Pastoral scenes from rainy season

Some images from my final rainy season in Burkina.

Beginning of rainy season: huge dust storms precede each rain storm. Later in the season, there's enough moisture in the ground to hold down the dust, but it's quite dramatic in June. That thing that the girl is looking out is a gust of dust-wind. In case you were wondering why I complain about dust and how everything gets dirty all the time, now you see. Photo taken from my bush taxi window on the way out of Ouaga.

Later in rainy season, storm clouds rolling in from the east. Rain always comes from the east. I believe that I had just woken up and was going to go pump water when I saw these clouds coming. So I went back to bed. Photo taken over my courtyard wall.

A village courtyard in rainy season. I took the picture because I was excited by the amount of green in the background. From November to June, the only green thing that one would normally see in this picture is the plastic jug in the foreground. Photo taken in Tanwoko, a neighboring village only accessible from mine by canoe...

River crossing between my village and Tanwoko. This river dries up completely during dry season and you can just walk across. Rainy season has been a pain for my agriculture project because everyone that I'm working with is on the other side of the river. As it is, it costs between 100 and 500 francs to cross it in a canoe (depending on how many other people are in the canoe with you/how high the water level is/how good of a mood the guy on your canoe is in). Burkinabes are terrified of the canoes for some reason, and they always tell stories about canoes tipping over and people drowning. The thing is that the water really doesn't move that fast, and I don't think it's more than 6 or 7 feet deep at its deepest, whereas most of it is about 4 feet deep during peak rainy season.

That said, the canoes are not in terribly good condition. They always have a ton of water in the bottom. This guy was bailing water out of the canoe for the entire 10 minutes it took us to cross the river. Comforting.

Terrified Burkinabes crossing the river.

The donkey seemed more chilled out about the situation than the Burkinabes did. Last time I crossed the river, I saw another canoe with 15 goats in it. This is why I always need to carry a camera with me.

End of rainy season: Ami harvests her beans in early October. She started every morning around 5 am and stopped working by 8 or 9 am when it started to get too hot. I helped her and her 2 kids, and we finished the one field after a week. The rains weren't great this year. The season started late (it wasn't until the beginning of August that it really rained consistently enough for cultivating) and it ended early (rains effectively stopped by mid-September). Millet harvests are not good. Beans did pretty well, though. Also, everyone got really into cultivating sesame this year for some reason.

A solid bean harvest set out to dry in my friend Eric's courtyard. Once the pods are dry and brittle enough, they beat them with a stick to release the beans and then use wind to blow away the pods. If that technique seems like it would leave a lot of rocks and debris in the beans after extraction, well, yes, it does.

That's rainy season in village for you.

Professor Moses

Last March, near the end of the school year, I was told that we were getting 2 new professeurs at our village school. The Burkinabe government is weird like that--rather than sending teachers before the beginning of the school year, they just send them whenever they feel like it, even if it's only a month and a half before the end of the school year. Frankly, I wasn't that excited about it when I first heard. What if the new teachers were lame? I liked the teachers that we already had, and I enjoyed hanging out with them every afternoon into the evening under the neem trees by the teacher lodging at the school. I felt like 2 new teachers thrown into the mix were going to mess up whatever good dynamic we had going. 

I was pleasantly surprised, though. The state sent a new French teacher, Moïse (the Frenchified version of the name Moses) and a new English teacher, Benoît, and they both turned out to be some of the friendliest, most honest and likable people I've met since I've got here. Within a week of their arrival, it was hard to imagine ever having sat under the neem trees without them. Almost every evening, I found them there, a group of teachers chatting and laughing and complaining about misbehaving students, Benoît brewing tea (which is a long and elaborate process the way they do it here), and Moïse at the center, making everyone laugh and letting them know how much he liked them. Once a week or so, he prepared riz sauce arachide (rice with peanut sauce, a traditional burkinabe dish) and he always insisted on giving me a big portion. I never had the heart to tell him that the sauce was too heavy, and I ate it all anyway because he was so eager to share it and take care of me.

Professor Moses near Banfora

I saw Moïse and Benoît a couple of times during the summer, and we kept in regular contact. Moïse was anxious that we should hang out in Ouaga as much as possible before he went to his hometown of Banfora for the month of August. He met my friends Sophia and Athena when they came to visit, as well as several of my volunteer friends, and everyone was immediately charmed. Nobody could help liking him. He always asked for people's email addresses before they left so that he wouldn't risk losing contact with his new friends, even if they were probably never going to be in the same country again. Unlike almost any other male Burkinabe teacher, he was actually cheerful and positive about Burkina Faso, and equally rare, neither he nor Benoît ever tried to hit on me or any of my friends or act weirdly toward us for being women.

The last time I saw Moïse was a week and a half ago, when he was here for the school's administrative meeting to prepare for the October 1st school opening. He was his usual enthusiastic self, and he talked excitedly about all the things that were going to happen this school year. It was already like old times: he was telling me about how he wanted a girlfriend so he could fall in love and get married soon and was asking me to suggest promising candidates, and he kept throwing in random English phrases at the same time to try to improve his language skills. He was also going on about wanting to organize a dance party for the teachers that he was prepared to DJ whenever we were ready. Later, he said that as a teacher, he is only allowed to miss 10 days of school per year for personal reasons, but he told me that he was going to take a few of those days in December just for me so we could get beers in Ouaga one more time and so he could see me off at the airport when I leave. (It sounds like he was coming onto me, but he really wasn't, he was just that kind of person.) The day after the meeting, he went back to Ouaga to hang out with his friends and mother for a last two weeks before he had to come back to my village for the school year.

Fast forward to 8:00 this morning, when I got an odd phone call from Benoît. All he said was, "did you hear?" I said no, what? There was a long silence, which I thought was caused by a reception problem, and then he said that he would call me back, and hung up. It made me worried, but I tried to brush it off. An hour later, Yacouba, the other English teacher who lives next door to me, found me and told me.

Yesterday late morning Moïse went to visit his friend, a guard at a post office, which also functions as a small bank/safety deposit, in Ouaga. They were hanging out outside when a pair of braqueurs (robbers) came and held them up. Evidently the robbers hadn't even bothered to cover their faces, and they shot Moïse and his friend on their way in. Moïse was killed on the spot, and his friend is still in critical condition. The robbers took a little money out of the post office and left, and they still haven't been caught. They weren't even able to get that much money out of the whole operation. (Article in French about it here.)

I am so crushed. Everything about it is so wrong. It still hasn't really hit me that it actually happened, even after hearing about his burial this afternoon. He was only 28. Of all my friends here, he has to have been the most full of life and the most excited for what lay in the future. He only finished his Master's degree last year, and he hadn't even been paid a single franc yet for the teaching career that he just started. I can't even imagine how devastated his family must be. The worst part for me is thinking about how afraid he must have felt in the last moments when he saw the robbers pull up and take aim. And for what? The whole thing is totally meaningless. I can't shake the mental image of him lying bloody on the ground out of my mind. So upsetting.

How are we going to start classes is less than a week without him? He was supposed to come back here in 3 days. I can't imagine a gathering of teachers without him and his Bella ringtone that got stuck in my head all the time.

He's not the first person among my friends and family who has died, but he is the first to go so young and unexpectedly. I was sad about the others, but at least I could comfort myself knowing that it was a relief in its own way for them after having survived long lives/fights with illness. But this is just, nothing. Nothing but a loss, and an empty hole in all his friends' lives.

For some reason, ever since maybe a week or two into our friendship, he started saying to me "but I will miss you when you leave!" I thought that was a weird thing to say to someone who you've only become friends with recently and who you will be around for at least another 8 months (supposedly). He said it all the time though, at least once a week. In the end, though, I guess I was the one who should have been saying it. I wish I could be that kind of person who immediately liked and cared about everyone I met, and who wasn't afraid to tell people all the time how great I genuinely thought they were or how much they mattered to me. But that wasn't me, it was Moïse, and now it's gone forever. I feel so lucky that I got to be friends with him for the few months that we knew each other. I don't believe in afterlives or reincarnation or whatever, but I wish there was some chance to see each other one more time so I could say goodbye and tell him that I'll miss him too.

Saving the soils and more

As most of you know already, I've decided to stay in Burkina for an extra three months so that I'll have time to complete a project that I've started with community members from my village. The Burkinabe that I'm collaborating with the most on the project is a government-trained agricultural trainer named Eric. He approached me last fall asking if I could help him to finance a project that he proposed, and we started to carry out those activities last February.

The main part of the project involves teaching community members about soil preservation techniques. Burkina Faso is a serious subject to the problem of desertification, due in no small part to deforestation and excessive livestock grazing. Those two causes combine to vastly reduce the vegetation that would otherwise hold down the soil and its nutrients in times of wind and flood, leaving us with sand and thin dirt that can barely support the staple crops of corn, millet, sorghum, peanuts, and beans that they grow from June through October.

Most community members are aware that soil quality, and thus crop yields, have gone down over the years, but they only have vague ideas of the cause and they don't know what to do to stop it. Most of them assume that that's just the way that things are, but when you tell them that there are things they can do to stop the trend, they perk up and listen. That's where we come in; Eric helped to form an association of about 30 community members from Mane's satellite villages, and he is teaching them different techniques like compost, rock lines, zai holes, and tree planting to help reverse the effects of soil degradation.

Eric, our painfully skinny trainer, explains the principles of composting

We did a series of training sessions in February through April on those techniques and started 4 tree nurseries to plant over 500 trees. A cool thing was that Eric also came to my science club at the school and gave a talk on tree planting, which inspired one of my students, Larba, to plant his own tree nursery for profit. Larba now has several hundred trees growing in the nursery that he planted in his courtyard, and he told me that he will make over $200 when he sells them to the community members who pre-ordered them in April. Maybe that doesn't sound like that much, but that is a HUGE sum of money for a kid in a village like this. I could have cried, I was so pleased. He is so excited about the money that he'll make from it that he says he'll try to expand the business in the future, and he has also already started to train other people in the community about the care of trees also. If the only thing that I accomplished in my 2.5 years in Burkina was to get someone to start a thriving tree-planting business, I would be happy.

Rock lines and zai holes help to catch water and prevent erosion due to flooding

We got a little under $4000 of grant money from the West African Food Security Partnership (WAFSP), which gives grants to Peace Corps volunteers, to support us with the project. The money will go toward materials like pickaxes and shovels (necessary for digging zai holes), plus benches and tables for the construction of a training center, among other smaller items. The training center will be particularly useful in the future not only for further agricultural trainings that Eric carries out, but also for literacy classes. Eric teaches literacy in Moore in his village, so when the benches and tables aren't in use for agricultural purposes they'll double as a classroom for the community.

The second part of the project involves opening a garden for Eric's association. Most of the grant money is going toward the cost of fencing and gardening supplies, and the garden will be constructed in the next couple of months. Although almost everyone participates in the cultivation of staple crops during the rainy season, few people grow vegetables. Cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers all grow well in this area, and growing those crops is a lucrative dry-season activity. (They're generally watered by hand from well or pump water.) Eric will do training sessions how to manage a garden, and the association will then cooperate to grow vegetables to sell and to improve their own nutrition from November through May.

Seeing how skinny the residents of the targeted villages are, and how many of their babies suffer from acute malnutrition, it's easy to see how needed this project is. I hope that we'll be able to slow the trend of desertification for them at least a little, and maybe with time, those practices will spread to the whole community.

--

Regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa: Luckily, it has remained contained in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia thus far, none of which countries borders Burkina directly. The risk here is still quite low, so please don't worry about me. I refer you to this blog post by a volunteer who got evacuated from Guinea, as well as this Onion article (referenced in the aforementioned blog post).

For those who I haven't talked with about it yet, I'll be closing my service here on December 12th to arrive back in California on December 13th. I'll also be flying to Tanzania with my dad 3 weeks from today to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. So that's what's happening with me.

Pictures

Emmanuel helps paint the border around the map. Standing on the same table, you can see the line of where I was straining to reach with the paintbrush. Oh, the things I could do if I were so tall.

Library books

I'm excited about how many students have been visiting the library. The books that the kids on the left are holding were donations from the NGO Darien Book Aid, who sent us a free box of books, and the picture dictionary on the right was a gift from my friend Pierre. We're off to a good start with the books, and you can see how much more room we have to add. (There are a lot more books off to the left, I promise...)

Finally, a NYT article about Africa by David Brooks that I appreciated. Happy weekend!

The kids are all right

I think that from America, it's easy to over-romanticize poor kids in rural Africa. There's this image of the starving but ever-hopeful child who is probably dirty and crying while gazing deeply into the camera lens. Before I left America, a lot of people commented that at least the students in my classrooms here would all be really polite and respectful to me and really really want to learn everything that I could teach them.

Bahaha. The fact that people are ignoring is that kids will be brats everywhere. The unfortunate reality is that kids here are not on the whole that much better than kids in America; they're just poorer/starving while they're doing it, so you have more sympathy for them. While I don't agree with the helicopter-parent/excessive-protection-from-the-world style of parenting that's prevalent in America, Burkina takes it too far to the opposite extreme. As soon as kids can walk around by themselves, they are no longer their parents' problem; you regularly see 3-year-olds who leave the house in the morning and wander around the village unsupervised all day except maybe at mealtimes (if they have meals...cue the dirty crying child photo). It means that there's nobody to teach kids good manners or morals; when a little kid chases after me trying to hit my bicycle with a stick, the only possible guidance that he or she might get is if a conscientious adult nearby decides to get up to hit them. 

This all means that by the time kids are at middle-school age, there are a lot of serious bandits among them (as they say in Burkina French). They have caused me a lot of grief over the past year, especially when they did things like purposefully break the trees that I planted in half, or when they drew dots of motor oil on my world map for no reason. It's true that teachers have a more respected place in Burkina society than in America, but that doesn't stop kids from being little shits.

Not all hope is lost, though. I want to take a moment to appreciate the good kids in village. I don't know how they got to be like that, if something was different in the way their parents brought them up, or if they were just like that by chance. Something right happened, though. For example, my student Alaye, whose photo showed up in a previous blog post about my world map progress. Alaye is in quatrième, which is like 8th grade. He failed last year (a lot of people in that class failed last year for some reason), so this is the second time he's taking the class. He's not a brilliant math student. Most of the other students who are repeating the grade are getting really good grades this year, but while he always gets passing grades on my tests, they're not much more than passing. 

However, he's such a polite kid that he still stands out from the other 90 students in his class. Anytime you see him in village, he comes to say hi, and he'll try to take anything that you're carrying so he can carry it for you. He pumps water for one of the other teachers for nothing in exchange, just because, and anytime you ask questions in class he will raise his hand and try to answer even if he doesn't get it right. 

Last week I planted a tree nursery at the school to add to the trees I planted last year. I organized it with my science club, which is composed of students I invited based on good grades from last year, so he isn't normally a part of it. I told everyone that they were invited to come to the tree nursery planting, though, whether or not they were a part of the club, so he showed up. Afterward, he signed up for the weekly watering schedule that I set up, and today, when I went to check on the 120 trees (they're sprouting!), I was surprised to see that there was another little nursery of 40 or 50 more pots that someone had made next to ours. I saw him nearby and asked him about it, and he said that it was his, and that he would take care of watering it himself. He was just really excited about having more trees for the school, so he took the initiative himself to plant some more himself. He told me that if he got seeds for more different kinds of trees, he would add them in, too.

I mean, what kid does that? Voluntarily creating daily responsibility for himself, for the benefit of kids who come to the school 5 or 10 years from now? I was so impressed.

Alaye

When I see the bandit kids running around the village throwing rocks and generally being bandits, it gets really discouraging. They can so quickly undo any of the work that I try to do here--by messing up trees or whatever, but also by knocking up the female students and by being bad role models to their successors. Why even try to help them? In those cases, it's important to also keep kids like Alaye in mind, who independently of any kind of external reward still run around trying to save the village for the future. It's kids like that who give hope on the part of them all.

Photo: World Map Progress

I'm proud of how it's coming along. After the break I'll touch some things up (sorry, Indonesia) and work on the borders, and then we'll think of some activity to do with students for writing the country names. Almost there!

Women's Day 2014

Last Saturday was International Women's Day. Unlike last year, there were a bunch of events in my village organized by the mayor's office. Did they promote women in the community? Dubious. Were they entertaining for village residents? Fairly. 

The day started with a women's bicycle race. I wasn't planning on participating because I was worried it would be weird, but at the last second my friend Ami talked me into it, and in the end I was glad that I did. In total 22 women participated. It was only about a kilometer long and the wind was at our backs the whole way, so we went really quickly. It was pretty fun, and most of the village came out to watch it and cheer for everyone, and they seemed really excited that I was participating. I was impressed with how fast some of those women could bike on cheap rickety village bikes. They made it clear that it wasn't a race to win, though, rather it was just a race "to bike together and to have fun," and in the end, everyone got a Women's Day pagne (more on those later).

After the race, people gathered at an elementary school, and village officials gave speeches. They were in Mooré, so I can't comment too much on their content, but they were interspersed with traditional singing and dances. Women do this one dance where they gather in a circle and clap in these kind of complex rhythms, and then two at a time, they go into the middle and kind of twirl around until they bump their hips against each other on the strong beat. I call it the butt-bumping dance. It's kind of scary when the really big women do it...you have to be careful who you bump butts with. Some of the women also did a parade, which I think was supposed to illustrate the different roles that women play in the village.

Following the speeches, the mayor's office provided rice to the population, but the village officials went back to the prefect's house for a special lunch. (The prefect is the government representative for the region.) Naturally, Katie (the volunteer at my neighboring site) and I were invited since we're the official white people. It was ironic...men are supposed to cook and serve for their wives on Women's Day, but it was the prefect's wife who did all the cooking and serving along with one other woman whom they hired to help her. What's more, all the men sat in one corner and immediately made a little circle, and left the women outside in the less-comfortable chairs. Then, the men were served first, and they got the first pick of the special side dishes (tofu kebabs and green beans), which the women didn't get to serve themselves from until the men were done eating. Come oooon. That's not even trying. The prefect's wife didn't even get to sit with everyone else; after she was done serving, she made a plate for herself and went off into a back room to eat.

Katie left after that, and I went to hang out with the tanties (French for aunties). Every year, Burkina comes out with a different pagne (printed fabric) for Women's Day and anyone who can afford it gets a special outfit made out of it. I wasn't a big fan of the pagne for this year, especially the brown color, and then for some reason my tailor chose orange embroidery to go over it. Brown and orange, really? He did a good job tailoring it otherwise, though. Pictures with the tanties below.

The day ended with a men vs. women soccer match. I'm not sure how that promotes women in society, especially since it was the big tanties who were playing, some of them still wearing their new outfits. First of all, of course the men are going to let the women win, so the whole thing is just silly, and then of course the women are going to play badly because it's the only game they'll play, and maybe the only time they'll run, in the entire year. Every time they went to kick the ball and missed, or when they passed the ball to no one, everyone in the audience laughed. They can pretend that they were laughing together with the women, but I found the whole thing uncomfortable. They all wanted me to play, too, but I'm not going to put myself out there so they can laugh at me because, haha, women playing soccer, what a silly idea!

I like that Women's Day is such a big deal in Burkina and that the government makes such an effort to promote it as a holiday. On the other hand, I remember reading once in a college psychology course that an outlier does not change people's preconceived notions nearly as much as something that is only mildly deviant. This one day where everything is supposed to be different is too easily dismissed the second that it's over. The day that I see a village woman getting served lunch at the same time as the mayor and eating from the same table as he does will be worth a hundred March 8ths.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Bicycle races are coming your way, so forget all your duties, oh yeah.

Butt bumping dance

Women's parade

Women's Day outfits with Katie

Celebrating with the tanties (aka the Big Mommas)

Tanties all together. Apparently I'm the only one who's been practicing her photo smile.

Wend na ko-d veere. May God give us next year.

La grosse claire

I mentioned before that learning each other's names isn't high on Burkinabes' list of priorities. Here are some handy tips for how to refer to people when you don't actually know their name:

1. Refer to them by their title. For example: "le président" refers to the president of the parents' association at the high school; it's "madame la tresorière adjoint" for the assistant treasurer of the parents' association. (Wouldn't simply "Ami" be easier than that?) (that's her name) In many cases, you never refer to these people by their name, just by their title. For example, the school principal. I would never think of addressing him by his actual name.

2. Describe them in relation to a mutual acquaintance. For example: "Larba's second wife," or, "the brother of the deputy mayor," or "the younger brother of the guy who runs the boutique that everyone goes to."

3. When the above two options fail, describe them by their appearance. Like, "The white girl who lives in the neighboring village," or, in the case of some of the big aunties, "la grosse claire" (the fat light-skinned woman).

You'd think that it would be easier after awhile to just learn people's names to avoid having to say "le frère du maire adjoint" every time instead of...well, actually, I don't know what his name is. But wouldn't one word be easier than five? I say that, until I realize how many friends I now have whose names I have no idea of. Anyway, when you think of the number of Salamata Ouédraogos, or the number of Harouna Sawadogos, who live in my village, after awhile the vague descriptions like "the light-skinned girl at the back of the second row in 4eA" are more efficient than the names that could describe at least 10 people within a 5-mile radius.

Guest post

A post from my brother Jeremy, on his visit last September:

Arriving in Mariko's village I could see the buildings were mostly constructed of mud bricks and concrete with dirt paths connecting them. The center of town had the most sturdy looking buildings but still very, very rural. We were instantly greeted by some locals who knew Mariko and escorted to her hut. I did my best with the one or two Mooré words I knew which generally generated laughter and smiles, in that order, because I'm sure I was using them incorrectly, if even saying them correctly at all. Mariko told me the effort was the most important part, so I tried my best.

Speaking of greetings, in the village you say hi to just about everyone you pass (very different than back home). My favorite thing was to say hi to the children of the village because I would get one of two reactions, a warm reply and exaggerated hand waving, or (my personal favorite) a dropped jaw and look of shock and horror. There was a strong chance that Mariko or I was the first white person that child ever saw.

One evening we met with a French teacher from the village school and a doctor from the clinic for drinks. Although I understood almost nothing of what they said, the body language and intermittent translations from Mariko yielded a very entertaining evening.

The hardest part of my visit was the evenings. Temperatures didn't seem to care if the sun whet down or not and there wasn't much escape from the heat. No air conditioning, no ceiling fans (no electricity), and no cold drinks except for at the local bar, but the ambient air temp warmed them up rather quickly. Breaking a sweat from lying still is an uncomfortable experience.

A complete surprise to me was how loud the evenings were. The local insects created an orchestra of buzzing that almost made my ears ring, then the donkeys would all bray together, then the chickens would cluck, then the dogs would bark, then the Mosque prayer would start.

If you visit there, bring ear plugs!

Burkina Faso is a very poor country that has received a lot of international aid, but also seems to suffer from a dependency on that aid too. Most development appears to come from outside sources, very little from within. Work that Mariko is doing is "teaching the people to fish" not just providing a handout.

Despite the lack of development the people themselves are very courteous and friendly. When I got home it was very obvious what a surplus of assholes we have around here. Although we have progressed culturally in may ways, I can't help but wonder if we have regressed as people.

Library progress

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a quick update on the status of my school library. It's really coming along, and I think that we'll be ready to open in the next month!

The room

There are a bunch of different components to the project. The first thing that we bought was the solar panels and computer/printer/photocopier setup, which a local electrician installed right away. Use of the electronics has been somewhat frustrating because the school staff members don't really understand how to use them properly or take care of them, but we're getting there.

For the world map that we're painting outside a school building, I was hoping to do that while my mom was visiting in December, but as usual with Burkina, everything took way longer than expected. However, it's finally happening now. We paid a mason to come and make a flat surface for the map with cement, and then we painted it with a white and blue background. I borrowed a projector from the Peace Corps so I could project a map onto the surface and trace it, which was great, except it turns out that the "permanent" markers that we used to trace the countries actually disappeared after 5 days in the sunlight. Whoops. This past week, I've been going over it with black paint, which has been a rather laborious process between trying to decipher where the country borders used to be, and adding in more detail (the projector wasn't quite high enough resolution for the job). I haven't finished with all of the country borders yet, but I'm almost there, and I'm proud of how it looks so far. Students walking by have been really curious about it, and they like to come and stare at the map while I'm working. The number of students who have confused South America with Africa convinces me of how needed it is. Once I've finished marking all the country borders in, we'll paint the individual countries in different colors and label them. I'm open to suggestions for what to paint around the borders behind the map.

My student Alaye posing with the world map

The librarian: we selected the president of the parents' association to be the librarian. He just finished a 2-week training course with the NGO FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries), so this week I hope that he'll be able to help us with sorting books and creating a cataloging system. We also got library membership cards and cards for tracking books from FAVL.

The books: I went to a bookstore and bought about $200 worth of books a few months ago, and we just got a bunch of novels and textbooks delivered this past week. The school also keeps randomly coming out with more and more books that they've had hidden in corners of the school offices for years that are currently unavailable to students, so we'll add them to our collection as well. I'm not sure how many books we have in total now, but I estimate that it must be at least 600. With the library funds, we also bought some didactic materials, including maps of Africa and Burkina, plus soccer balls and posters of things like the human skeletal system for biology teachers. (In the past, the teachers had to draw the entire skeleton on the chalkboard for each class that they taught, and then students copied the diagrams into their notebooks.)

Librarian at work

Other stuff: We got the tables and chairs a couple of weeks ago, and the library building already came with bookshelves in place. Funny thing with the tables and chairs: we ordered them from a carpenter, but he didn't show us any models or anything before he made them. When he delivered them, they looked fine, and it wasn't until the next week when the tables were arranged in the library and I sat at a chair that I realized how low the chairs are compared to the tables. Sitting in a chair, my elbows are pretty much on the same level with my shoulders if I rest them on a table. Burkina...We've also gotten the electricity for the library set up, so there are lights inside, and a light in front of the library so students can sit outside and study at night even when the library is closed.

Like everything in Burkina, the project has had a lot of hiccups, but it's really happening. We're about done with the purchases for now, but I've set aside some money so we can have a nice opening ceremony and invite all the big people in the community when we open. I will keep you updated as we progress!

That's so Burkina

A few snapshots of moments that capture life in Burkina for me:

* On the bush taxi to Ouaga, with Ninja Turtle driving (real name: Rasmané). He has a playlist of music popular in Burkina, including a selection of Akon, Lucky Dube (a South African reggae singer), Bob Marley, Shakira, and a bunch of West African singers who I can't name, that he likes to blast for the whole ride. The volume is loud enough that it sometimes gets quite painful. Notable among his musical choices are some of Lucky Dube's songs that are "dubbed" into French by some guy with a deep voice, who repeats whatever was just said in translation in a deep whisper. The translator starts to take liberties toward the ends of songs, though, and he starts singing along, but not well. When we get into Ouaga, sometimes Ninja Turtle starts singing along with Lucky too, except he doesn't speak English so he doesn't know what the words are, and also he is extremely tone deaf. That does not stop him from belting it out. Only the back of his Bob Marley hat and the gesticulation of his large, grimy hands are visible from behind the driver's seat. It's not easy to understand it son, but I hope you'll make it...

Goofy Smile hands a moto down to Ninja Turtle and 2 other guys who haven't distinguished themselves enough to have secret nicknames yet; photo credit to my mom

* At the village market. Anytime I go around the village, there are sure to be bands of small children wandering around, and what could be more exciting for a little village kid than to see the white person biking by? They like to wave and shout "nasaara!" which is Mooré for "white person." Other things that they like to shout to me are "ça va?" (French for "how are you?", though they generally pronounce it "ça ba" and don't appear to know what it means, since they keep repeating it even after I answer), "bye bye!" (which I think they think is a greeting), and "mam data bombom" ("I want candy"). Some kids last year started saying "nasaara, berebé!", which confused me because it means nothing in English, French or Mooré; one of the other teachers helpfully suggested that I had misheard them and that they were actually saying "fat white person" in Mooré (no thank you). We eventually concluded that they were trying to say "bien reveillé?" meaning "did you wake up well?" (a common part of greetings in the morning; that did not stop the kids from saying it in the afternoon and evening as well). Most recently, they've started saying "nasaara, koumba?" I'm still stumped about that one. Koumbas are the local bitter eggplant. Who knows. Anyway, anytime I go to the market, the toddler children of the female vendors are sure to stare at me. They walk out on wobbly legs and wave at me wide-eyed; as I approach them, their enthusiasm transforms into fright (omg what if she's a ghost??), and they run behind their mothers and start crying. The mothers find this uniformly hilarious, and tell their babies they're going to send them to America with me, which further increases their terror. Never have I caused someone so much fear before. Never have I wielded so much power!

* At school, talking to the English teacher. The English teacher, Yacouba, is vaguely reminiscent of a large frog both in appearance and in voice. He has a tendency to talk very slowly and over-enunciate all of his words in both English and French, which is probably good for his students, and is slightly infuriating when I'm in a hurry. He only speaks to me in English, and even if I try to speak to him in French to make him talk faster, he determinedly forges on in English. Mild social awkwardness on his part is greatly compounded by odd English word choices, whose origin is explained you see the weird phrasings printed in the national textbooks. His earnestness in improving his English and in encouraging his students more than make up for any awkwardness, though, and you have to forgive him. Sometimes when I get bored, I bake cornbread or banana bread, things foreign to the Burkinabe diet, and bring them to share with the teachers. Each time I bring in a loaf, he takes a first bite, then sits thoughtfully for a moment, and then brightens and says "well, it seems to be delicious!"