mam kenga weoogo

(Translation: I went en brousse- uh, into the bush.)

A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of my no-teaching-on-fridays situation (which I created for myself when I set up all the teacher schedules for my school) to hang out with my host moms! And by hang out, I mean go into the bush and help them harvest crops. Because that's how they roll.

I was initially going to just go with them, check it out, then bike back home for lunch, but there was a complication.

Turns out it was a little further and a little more challenging to get there than I had anticipated. So instead of trying to head back alone (they wouldn't have let me anyways- they'd have accompanied me home then would have had to go back again) I just decided to hang out there. Fortunately it was a cloudy day, so my lack of sunscreen only caught up with me mid-afternoon, when I covered myself with a cloth and hid under a tree.

My host... aunt? leading us to the field with her super new baby.

My host dad's second wife holding up what we were harvesting. They're called chouma in moore, pois de terre in french and who knows what in english. Possibly chickpeas? They're pretty delicious. We harvested all day, breaking only for lunch. I could show you a picture of what we ate, but it's not much to look at. Leftover To (millet flour pounded and cooked into a gelatinous solid), put into a bowl of well water and mushed by hand, then eaten/slurped. Delish.

Sleeping baby.

The super fun neighbor lady who came over at the end of the day and helped sort the chouma. This is one basket of many. Side note: I'm a pretty awesome harvester.

We biked home at sunset, and I got to feel awesome when I was greeted with a hero's welcome by all of my family and neighbors. "What? The nassara* went en brousse?" "Yeah, OUR nassara's name is Balguissa**. She went with us and harvested all day. She's a mossi***."


*Nassara = whitey
**Balguissa is my village name. Unfortunately, it's really caught on with my village. It's pronounced bahl-gee-zuh. Soo pretty. (My full name is Balguissa Sankara. Half my village are Ouedraogos, half are Sawadogos, and a couple of people are Sankaras. A really famous revolutionary/president, Thomas Sankara, came from my village. You can look him up.)
***Mossi is the ethnicity in my village. I'm so legit.

before and after: one month later

First, let's start with a photo update. Remember all those beautiful pictures of Tema I put up last time? (Hint: they're in the post below this.) This is what my village has become, one month later.


I suspect this is going to be a long dry season.

villageoise-y

 the hill.

New site, new site!  So exciting.  After getting back from Turkey (amazing, ask me later) I spent a week and a half in Tema, furnishing my house, sewing my fashion show dress (that's another story) and generally hanging the heck out with my host family.  My courtyard is private, but it's surrounded by the courtyards of one big family, and I've been getting to know them one awkward/delightful interaction at a time.

Sylvie, my cherie. She gets me water.

It's pretty much everything I've been wanting.  My ladies speak only moore, so I've been trying really hard to work on mine.  They're so excited with everything I say, and we actually manage to communicate pretty well (hand motions are the most useful things ever invented.)  I've tried my hand at pounding millet (they laughed at me and took away my pounding stick) and grinding flour with a stone (I'm kind of awesome.  They were all very impressed.  Then a six year old girl took my stone and showed me up.)  I get offered red To with green sauce for breakfast, then the kids give me ears of feed corn all morning long that they've grilled themselves. 

 Mural a Spanish dude painted on my school last year.  Quite nice, no?

A group of french people came last week to visit Tema because their town in France has partnered with our village to build school buildings and teacher housing.  They're really nice, and when they came the village threw them a little fete with chicken, goat, spaghetti, and drinks to which I was invited!  So much eating.

 Waiting for the frenchies.

Baobab trees GALORE!

Pretty much all I've done so far has been to greet everyone (Everyone) in my quartier, hang out with my family, explore on my bike, and furnish my house.  It's really chill and fun and I like my neighbors and my principal a lot.  And tomorrow, I go back to get ready for the school year!  It's gonna be good.

team tema!

I'm so excited. So so so. Last weekend I finally went to my future village, Tema, for a quick visit before I move up there permanently. I had heard a few conflicting things about it, and I had become resigned to the idea of it being a sort of larger village than I had hoped for. AND THEN.

I went. It's about a two-three hour trip from Ouaga, first on a paved main road and later on a fairly bad dirt road. You then come to Bokin (everyone always says Tema-Bokin because they're so close.) That's where the bush taxi stops. After that is a five kilometer bike ride to Tema, which wouldn't seem like much except for the HILL OF DEATH that you have to surmount to get there. It's like someone looked at this row of cliffs, decided they wanted to get over it, and built a track straight up. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. Apparently cars are capable of making it over. But my mountain bike tires were spinning under me because they couldn't grip the dirt properly as I tried to go up this hill. I already know this hill will be the bane of my existence this coming year.

Okay. So I made it up the hill. Then, as I gasped what I imagined to be my last breaths, I looked down over... Tema! It's rainy season, so everything's deceptively pretty, but I thought it was just lovely. And teeny. Teeny teeny.

Things that I know about Tema:
Population: 973 (To be fair, that's from last year. My counterpart estimates that they're probably over a thousand by now.) 973 new best friends for Carolyn!!!
Number of quartiers in town: 3. One is the chief's quartier, the traditional king of the whole region. One is the president of the parent's association's quartier (and my quartier!) And the third is for... everyone else, I guess.
Number of teachers at my school: 4. Including the principal and myself.

As I just mentioned, I'm living in the quartier that's composed of the president of the PTA and all of his extended family. They just completed construction on my new house. I have my own courtyard but I'm very close neighbors with everyone, so I'm envisioning lots of family time. (Plus, it doesn't look like they speak a whole lot of french, so I anticipate a sharp acceleration in my Moore learning. Due to necessity.) My house is... quaint? I'm trying to think of adjectives other than teeny, Leslie is helping me. It's two rooms, and I can't accurately judge their size except that they're small. Combined, I estimate that they are smaller than my living room right now. Yeah, definitely. I was dumb and for like the first time ever I left my camera in Bagre, so pictures will be coming in September.

Other things. There are tons of baobab trees in Tema Bokin, which I love. I'm hoping for lots of monkeybread juice, which is made from baobab fruits. I'm also hoping that this juice will be cold, because they just brought ELECTRICITY to Tema! I didn't think I wanted electricity, but then I realized that yes, obviously, I do. They're electrifying my house right now. Fan!
The market is every three days, but it's in Bokin. So all produce will require a 10k bike ride. Ending in that hill. But the market's supposed to be really good.

That's going to have to do for now- I really only spent about three hours there, and one of those hours was biking. Another was hanging out with the chief. I'm sure I'll have plenty to tell after I actually live there for a few weeks, which will start after my vacation to Turkey!! August 25: move out of Bagre. August 27: Turkey vacation. September 13: Move to Tema.

I'm excited.

Le General

There is a person at every school called the "Surveillant General." This man is in charge of discipline at the school, so if you kick a kid out of class you send him to the dreaded Surveillant. Or in our case, Le General.

Le General is this tall, skinny, chain-smoking guy who comes up with the most creative, funniest insults you can imagine. According to him, he used to work as a bush taxi guy in Ghana and later as an elephant poacher. While I would normally call BS on that, he does speak some Ghanaian english and knows an awful lot about the price of elephant tusks. He is also Super nice and tries to teach me Moore every day.

I say all this to preface a couple of anecdotes about Burkina schools. Or maybe just my school. Or maybe just the General.

One day, I was planning to give a test in the afternoon. I had given the test copy to the secretary to type up (on the typewriter) and print out (on the... hm. I just tried to google search what this machine actually is and failed. It's not on wikipedia, at least not under "obselete printing techniques" or "ancient printing methods." My friend just suggested "printing press," but I'm pretty sure that's not right. In any case, it's the machine where you put in the typed sheet with the purple carbon copy, then you turn the crank for however many copies you need. That thing. ...Dictograph? No.) So she had printed out my copies in the morning, then left for the day and locked her office. I showed up in the afternoon to find my students waiting, and no way to get the test. I could have written it on the chalkboard except that the secretary had my original copy too. I walked over to the General's house to see if he had a key. He didn't, but he grapped a set of random keys and we set out for the office. He proceeded to show some unusual expertise in the field of lock-picking. Apparently if you use a similar key and jiggle it a lot and lift the door at exactly the right time, you can pop open the lock, as he then demonstrated. It took about fifteen seconds. On our way back to his house with the copies in hand, he jokingly requested that I not mention this particular skill to anyone.

Another day, maybe even that same week, I was sitting on a bench next to the office during a break between my classes and I heard a loud BANG from somewhere close by. Looking around, I didn't see anything, and assumed it must have been a malfunctioning moto somewhere. Several minutes later, however, who comes striding through the school grounds with a rifle and a dead bird? Le General.

schooooool's out! for! summer!

[Alright MOM, I'll write an update. Although, you know, while I rarely have internet access I almost always have phone access....]

The school year finally ended, after a bonus week of striking just in time to destroy my testing schedule. I don't think I've written about the striking situation that's been going on since... February? There was an entire month without school, then a couple more weeks of strikes close to the end of the third trimester of this year. It wasn't pretty, but we did manage to finish out the school year. All the disturbances had an impact on the national exams- this year's success rate was pretty low. My school's passing rate was something like 35%, which, although pretty normal for rural Burkina, isn't too hot. The typical response of adults in village is "It's the kids' fault, they never study." Although this may be true in some cases, I might venture to say that the MONTH AND A HALF OF STRIKING might also have something to do with it.

One of the lycee kids, Abasse, who has kind of adopted me as his "tantie" (aunt), took the exam this year and totally got a kick out of coming to my house, acting super sad, and telling me that he failed, when actually- fake out!- he passed. After I consoled him by being sympathetic and saying "ca va aller" many times, he relented and told me the truth. Jerk. A few of my favorite students from last year came by to tell me they passed, but there were a lot who didn't get it this year. (There are still options for those who failed- they can retake the school year and try again next year, either at our school or at the bigger school in town or another one elsewhere. If their parents will pay.)

There's still the BAC coming up in a week or so- based on the French system, it's the exam to pass high school/get into university. The amount of studying kids (or adults) put into studying for this exam is unbelievable. There are students who just sleep at the high school now, because they study so late into the night.

As for my summer, I've been in and out of site a lot. There's nothing going on in village, so I've been doing a lot of workshops and trainings in Ouaga and elsewhere. This past month I did a TEFL training (in case I teach english next year), a workshop on how to help run a reading camp a friend's NGO is doing in August, and am now here for a GAD meeting (abbreviations!) It's keeping me busy, but I'm pretty sick of bush taxis at this point.

(The last time, I was basically curled up in my seat because of the rice sacks and chickens under me, the seat was a covered plank of wood, the lady next to me was sleeping on me, as was her baby, I couldn't drown out the Burkinabe rap music with my headphones, and there was a pervasive smell of butchered meat coming from the seat behind me. And the shocking part was that I didn't realize that it was a particularly bad bush taxi experience until I got to Ouaga and realized that my clothes still smelled like goat meat.)

I'm using a friend's computer, having left my power cable in village, so I'll end here. Look out for more updates, with anecdotes on teaching and consolidation parties!

sandtastic

Remember this?

The cattle market, plus the man at the market selling "medicaments"?

Fada is pretty much just the coolest place ever (when it's not being blocked by tanks.) I went again with a couple of good friends who are leaving soon, and the aim of our trip was to have our futures told by a sand reader. It's very traditional, and still popular- apparently many African leaders in the area use it to make important decisions (doesn't that make you feel optimistic? But hey, we did it too....)

We biked over to the sand reader's house in the early evening. He wasn't there yet, so we hung out with his family as the cows and sheep came home and the kids took their baths. Finally when it was dark out the sand reader came home. While the rest of the family watched TV on a small set they brought out in the courtyard, we went over and sat on a mat on the sand. He sat next to the mat and had us take turns asking questions and having our futures read.

One of us would come forward and put our hand on the sand. Then he would draw patterns and lines in the sand, and would interpret what the sand was saying about us. Colette was told that wherever she worked (boutique, auto repair...) she had to be the boss; Bovard was told to sacrifice a medium, white, four-legged sheep; and I was told that I will marry an older man, but I'll only find love if my father prays for a husband for me. (Get on that, would you Dad?)

Overall, I mainly just felt it was one of those cool experiences you should take advantage of when available. It was dark, the courtyard was quiet, the sand reader's cute family was hanging out, and the process of drawing in the sand and interpreting it was super soothing and pleasant. And then we all got to go out, eat fried chicken and analyze everything he'd said.