shopping a la burkina

I went on a pagne shopping spree last weekend, to get some material for household-y things. The green with butterflies is a dress, the blue with yellow flowers I made into cushion covers for my wooden porch chairs, and the orange I think will turn into curtains. I really am turning into a lover of patterns- shocking, for someone who could formerly make a weeks worth of outfits with a palette of only black and grey.

happy hallowe... all saint's day

I have come to the conclusion that it is fall. It's kind of hard to tell here, particularly with the bewildering profusion of watermelons in village this week, but there are indications. First: it's harvest time for my garden! Liz the fabulous did all the work in planting and cultivating everything, and all I had to do was pull things off plants. I got a good little crop of peanuts, and have been slowly working away at the bissap with occasional help from neighborhood children. So, harvesting! Very autumnal, right? Second: I heated water for my bucket bath today. The weather this morning was cold- I got to wear my sweatshirt!- meaning in the 70's. I guess I'm getting habituated, huh? And it hasn't gotten above 90 degrees all day. People were whipping out their parkas and winter hats this morning, and I even got to wear a scarf to school. Okay, a summer scarf, but I had given up my (admittedly ridiculous) tendancy to wear scarves in 90-some-odd degree weather at site, so I'm a happy camper when I feel like I can justify it. Third: October is almost over, and that's the falliest month to me. Although I can't make it to any Halloween parties being thrown by Peace Corps kids I'm planning on celebrating in my own fashion by carving out some gourds and probably weirding out the neighbors.

Oh Turtle.

Okay, this is really sad, and I'm going to talk about it briefly and generally. I mentioned my sick dog once before- and I've avoided mentioning her since, because I kind of knew what was going to have to happen. She got sicker and sicker, and yesterday, finally, I had her put down. This is the extremely abbreviated version- there was much more agonizing involved, emergency texts to my mother to PLEASE CALL ME I NEED DOG ADVICE and hours of impossible conversations in a culture where humane treatment of animals is a luxury at best and the vet's main job is to inspect animals for slaughter. So this has been the hardest part of my service so far, having to make ethical pet decisions (which is a new responsibility for me) in a remote village in Burkina Faso. And about a dog that someone else loved for years before I inherited her, and to whom I felt accountable. But Turtle was a very good dog, and I'm glad I had her, even though it's been rough and I've sort of jumped ahead in cultural adjustment to the stage where the novelty has worn off and I already hit that point of "why can't things just be EASY, everything's so DIFFICULT here."
So that's the end of my dog story. And I still have my fabulous cat Jack who eats lizards and meows like a goat and loves to sleep on my lap.

magicland

Danny, the neighbor kid, took me out (by bike- I decided requesting a donkey cart ride was a little high-maintenance of me) to his family's rice fields. They're beautiful. It's the tail end of the rainy season, so the rice is fully grown and still bright green.



Oh yeah, and since I live in the magical part of Burkina, there are ponds of waterlilies around the rice fields. Obviously.

bonjour madame

I started teaching! I am now Madame Glidden. I think I'm going to really enjoy my classes. The kids are pretty good (it is only the first week, after all,) and I've gotten to do a couple of extremely basic physics demonstrations with a peanut butter jar of water, the bottom half of a coke bottle, and a gutted bic pen. Air! It's all around us.
It turns out that I am in fact only scheduled to teach 9 credits this year. 4eme Physics/Chemistry, which is 4 credit hours a week, and 6eme Math, which is 5 credit hours a week. Initially I was not thrilled about this. I mean, I feel kind of useless and pathetic in comparison to the other teachers, and I also want to be an actual help here. The community is paying for my housing, and I want to sort of earn my keep. But as I've gotten used to the idea I've gotten more and more excited about the time I'll have to do secondary projects.
It seems like it's kind of arbitrary the way the Peace Corps chooses certain people for certain sectors. I was pretty confident I would get a health placement, but they put me in teaching science. And coming here with the Girls' Education and Empowerment volunteers, I was kind of jealous of the freedom they have to meet a specific community's needs, whether it's with girls' clubs, creating community libraries, or pretty much anything they come up with. And the training for us as teachers was kind of limited- we didn't learn very much about working in the health sector or in girls' ed, just how to teach. Which, obviously, is the priority. But we already have certain advantages as teachers- an established role in the community, a connection with students and parents, an open forum in the classroom- which make it a lot easier to empower girls and educate about health. So I'm really hopeful now for the potential to do a lot of cross-sector work, with clubs, working with the health center, or anything my counterpart can think up. I don't know how well I'll be able to make that work, but I think that even if teaching takes up all my mornings, that's still a heck of a lot of time to use for other things.

vaccination monster

Okay, so I got an email last week saying that there was a WHO polio vaccination campaign going on across all West Africa the upcoming weekend, and encouraging volunteers to go to their local health center (CSPS) and see if they could help. So, I did. And the majeur, the head of the CSPS, let me go with him and another worker to do vaccinations in some of the villages in Bagre! I didn't do a whole lot- just tallied the number of kids who got vaccinated and their ages, but I got to wear a super cool “kick polio out of Burkina” shirt (but in french, bien sur) and follow their moto on my bike (does a body good) and make children cry- both because of the vaccine, and because I'm a monster. Which is especially true in the bush, where they've definitely never seen a white person before.
The vaccine is only two drops, taken orally, which is amazingly convenient. And most of these kids have been vaccinated before, in shots they received as babies. But here people tend either to not know about vaccinations, or are reluctant to get their children vaccinated- just like in the US, there's a lot of misinformation about vaccines, and people blame them for any illness the kids get after receiving them. So campaigns like this are often a way to try to catch people who've fallen through the cracks.
Again, I didn't do much, but it was a fun kind of experience, and I got some pictures, and visited some compounds hidden way out in the bush, and hopefully I'll be able to work with the CSPS a lot more in the future. Although, the majeur asked me out afterwards- that complicates things a little. If I can navigate that cordially, then maybe I'll still be able to work with the CSPS in the future.