lists

So, I've been here since last June, which adds up to... what, a year and a half? That means I have nine months left of my original 27 months in the Peace Corps. That's... weird. I don't know if I like that.

Anyways, I've noticed a couple of things lately in village that make me recognize how some of my perceptions have changed since coming here. I'm far from being fully integrated- I still use toilet paper, I can't bike in pagnes, I buy fancy canned foods and lentils when I go to the city- but my outlook on life has definitely changed, and I thought I'd list a few ways in which it has.

Things I no longer notice (Yes, antithetical premise. But I'll try.)

French

Okay, a little. Mainly when people have weirdo accents and talk super fast. But most of the time, I forget if I'm speaking french or english.

Bucket baths

Refreshing, very eco-friendly, does the job.

Latrines

Whatever. Just bring a plastic bag if you need to puke- that hole's a pretty small target.

Biking to school

Hey, maybe I'll pop over to school to talk to the secretary. And maybe again this afternoon, then I can swing by the marche. That adds up to 28km? Well, sure.

Call to prayer

I no longer wake up at 4am to the sound of the scratchy mosque loudspeakers and the early morning animal noises- although I definitely notice if I've been up all night and hear it and realize how little time I have left to try to sleep.

Fetching water

I actually think this is really easy now, because of the faucet they put in near my house. Compared to biking a kilometer to pump one bidon (jug) of water and attaching it to my bike and trying not to fall over on the way home, this is a breeze. It takes me twenty minutes start to finish to get three bidons of water, which lasts me at least 3-4 days (unless I do laundry, which takes a whole jug by itself.)

Garish pagnes

What do you expect? It's a pagne.

Awkwardness

Part of every single interaction of every single day. Embrace it. (Although I'm slightly concerned about remembering how to interact with people when I go back to America. Friends and family, be forewarned.)

Concrete floors

What else would there be?

Requests by strangers to take them to America/trade bikes/marry me/take my clothes or jewelry/teach them english.

I'm a pro. I know now to just say “Sure, no problem” or “Next time” and laugh, and never ever follow through.

Not having internet

I don't even remember what to do on the internet. Is there anything besides email and facebook? Oh right, this blog. Maybe, what, twitter? That's a thing, right?

The heat

Yeah, I notice it, but it's no longer a Thing. It's obviously going to be hot out, but there's nothing to do about it. And I'm much more used to it than I was before. (Hey, right now it's 97 in my house and I'm not even sweating- whoo!)

Seasons

I forgot halloween. And I keep wondering when I'm supposed to start listening to Christmas music. After Thanksgiving, right? Which is... this week?

Things I do notice:

Exciting foods at the market

Lettuce! Bananas! Hey, it's watermelon season again! Wait, is that a sweet potato?? Yes, I'll take twenty.

Airplanes

A small biplane flew over my village the other day, and it took me a full fifteen seconds of wondering where that noise was coming from to consider looking up. There aren't even any jet trails in the sky- my sky is en route to nowhere.

Baby animals

I can't help it- I think it's getting worse. My chicks are so fluffy and cute, my neighbor's puppies play with the baby goats, and baby donkeys are even more adorable than grown up ones. They look like grey, fuzzy My Little Ponies with awkward skinny legs.

Stairs

The Peace Corps office in Ouaga has four floors. And the resource center that the volunteers use is on the top floor. As there are NO other stairs in my life, this now presents a physical challenge of olympic proportions.

(By the way, I also forgot that elevators exist. Can you imagine? You get in a box that takes you up at the push of a button. But that can't really count as something I notice, because I honestly believe that there may be literally no elevators in Burkina Faso. I have never seen one here.)

Short skirts

SO shocking!! Inappropriate! Cover your knees, girl!!! Where are your parents?!

Pagnes I want to buy

That rare subtle or cool print that makes me think, “I could wear that in the states, right?” (The answer should always be: “No, Carolyn, you cannot.” But I still dream....)

Extremely garish pagnes (that I want to buy)

Cell phone pagnes! Roller skates! Chickens! Awesome.

Being called Nasara (whitey/foreigner)

I pretend not to notice to discourage the practice, but it's like if someone calls my name- I always notice. And I never like it.

Caffeine

Tea's okay, fancy the de chine's okay, coke's okay. Coffee will give me a massive migraine and keep me up the entire night.

Laundry

I still hate it.

Dirt on chairs, bush taxi benches, etc.

Because I know I'll have to wash my clothes later if I sit on dirty seats. And I still hate laundry. So I get out my rag and wipe down the seat, like a true Burkinabe.

Sexism

I think I'll always be hyper-sensitive to sexism from now on. It's so terrible here and I get so mad about it that anytime the smallest incident occurs or someone makes an offhand comment, I'm ready for a fight.

can i take it home with me?

Okay, brace yourselves for the most amazing early birthday present ever:

Ka-BAM!



Isn't it beautiful? I'd been talking for ages about getting a sewing machine for myself, due to my enthusiasm for (albeit not necessarily skill with) couture and frustration with tailors in village. I was getting kind of tired of stabbing myself with sewing needles trying to sew by candlelight during power outages. (True story. I really wanted to wear that dress!) And then a (*cough*) friend came to visit and brought me this!! Via bush taxi. Yeah.


Now I just need to figure out how to make it work....

chicka-chicka what

Chicken had babies!! Four made it out of the egg, hopefully they'll last a while.

dirt + water = mud

This is the sad story of my failed bricks. My friend offered to make mud bricks to build a chicken house, so he got the materials and spent two evenings making a million bricks next to my water faucet. They were all done, just needed a couple of days to dry.







Key word is "dry." What are those? Oh, those are rain clouds. Generally something I love with all of my heart, but not so good for mud bricks. It rained that very night, and all my lovely bricks melted. We might try again another time, now that there will absolutely be no rain for at least, what, six months? I guess that's an upside to dry season....

yakooooo

Super-cool mosque in Yako, north of Ouaga.

sap sap

Just a quick update today! School started, and I'm teaching the same classes as last year- 6th grade math and 8th grade physics/chemistry, and this past week was wonderful. I really have a good feeling about this year. I feel like I know what I'm doing, the students are excited (yes, I know it's only the first week, but still) and I'm going to have a lot of fun teaching them. And it feels really good to be back in my village doing actual work again.
I only came into town today to pick up a package (and got two!! Thanks Mom and Grandma Gayle!) so I'll head back soon, but I wanted to thank everyone for your interest in the bike tour- it turned out SO well, raising 4500 dollars (ha, of course this french keyboard doesn't have a dollar sign) for Gender Equality projects. Here's a link to the pictures from the tour! I grace several of them.

("sap sap" means "really quick" in Mooré)

lost boys (but in the disney way)

A gang has formed in my neighborhood. The most awesome gang ever. It's this band of boys, maybe eight, ten years old (with a couple little ones tagging along on foot) who ride their donkeys around my house and the fields nearby. They have races, fall off, get thrown off, spend twenty minutes trying to get a donkey to go the right direction, and generally just have a wonderful time. One day they even made themselves matching shiny green kung-fu headbands for their racing-around activities. I assume they're the boys who are supposed to herd their families' cows around the village, but I'm not sure. Whoever they are, they have a blast.

chow

I have NOT forgotten your request, Whitney, to put up pictures of food textures, as weird as that is. So here's an example? I mean, I took some pictures of a lunch I ordered in a restaurant (mostly because, as you can see, the presentation is SO FANCY!) It's couscous with peanut sauce, which is quite a nice meal here for a lunch place. Usually you get poorly-cooked short-grain rice with a watery sauce, and bonus pebbles thrown in for extra crunch, but this was very tasty.




Sadly, I didn't get to spend as much time in Ouahigouya this summer as I'd hoped, so no pictures of chicken in a bag (even sadder: I didn't get to eat chicken in a bag.) I'll keep trying to remember to take pictures of my food, though, in the seconds before I devour it.

project-ing

This is at my bush taxi station in Tenkodogo- apparently it was done by a Togolese artist. I'm amazed by it every time (I spend a LOT of time at my taxi station), and finally made myself whip my camera out in front of all the taxi guys to take a picture.


Aaaand... the Marlboro man. On the back of a semi truck, with eagles. That's more like it.

roll out

The very few pictures I took of the bike tour. This is everyone leaving me behind in Fada. I was kind of okay with that.

bikestravaganza

Ew. I am extremely gross right now. A hazard of bush taxi travel and really greasy bike chains that come off the gears. I smell like sweat and petrol and my hands are black. Good thing this keyboard is too!
I'm in Tenkodogo after having accidentally done a couple days of the bike tour. I had been planning on doing part of it, and then for a while I wasn't sure I would want to leave site this month, but then things calmed down in Bagré just as the bike tour happened to come through Tenkodogo. Sooo... I came up here on Tuesday, rode with everyone to Koupela (~50km) on Wednesday, then got talked into riding to Fada N'Gourma ("Fada") on Thursday, which was another 80-some km. It was surprisingly not that painful, and the weather was lovely, and I got to eat more chicken than I have in probably the past year. I had a great time and I'm kind of sad I'm not doing more of the tour, but I'm also kind of glad I don't have to get up at 4:30 tomorrow morning. No, really glad. But if you want to follow what my hard-core friends are doing, Rachel is updating the bike tour blog every day! (The link should be a couple of posts down.)
Today I'm planning to do some grocery shopping (eggs, lentils, tuna, bread... the luxuries of my life) and then head back to Bagré to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Happily, this will involve copious amounts of food, since everyone's been fasting for the past month. Bonne fete!!

tenkodogo market

....

Living here, I ususally have an attitude of adventure. This fact is evidenced by the title of this blog, and... every post I've ever written. I think of my time here as exciting and different and very... other. My PC friends and I joke a lot about being in the Peace Corps in Burkina versus "real life" at home, and there's certainly merit to that. There are things about the culture we've grown up in that are so different from here, and since we've only been here a short while and will only be here for a year or two longer, obviously the states seem more normal than Burkina. It's easy to live in a sort of temporary mindset. And the adventure attitude helps me deal with a lot of crazy, frustrating stuff that comes up every day, like the disasters that are bush taxis or the frequency of stomach problems or the unbelievable heat of March and April. It can be an extremely useful tactic.

Unfortunately, things can happen that show you exactly how real-life this experience is. My Proviseur (high school principal) passed away last week, and while I wasn't super-close to him, I'm quite close to his wife, kids, and niece. The family lives next door to me, and has been a sort of surrogate family this past year. They're incredibly lovely and generous people, and this has devastated their lives. (This was totally unexpected- a freak illness. He was 49.) I went back to village to see them when I found out, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. I'm glad I went, though, because they are moving away and may not be there when I go back again tomorrow.

I'm not looking for sympathy for myself- I'm doing fine. And sorry to put up such a bummer of a post. But this is what has been going on with me, and it's a pretty major thing. I don't know exactly how it will change the next year or so of my life, but it absolutely will. In a very practical way, it will change my neighborhood and the people in my life. In a less tangible way, I think I'll be taking this next year somewhat more seriously. Not that I didn't take this past year seriously, just... more so. Or view my time here more soberly? I'm not exactly sure what I mean. But I do have a better understanding now of the "realness" of my time in Burkina. Just like anywhere else, maybe even more so here, life is very real, and it can suck unbelievably.

bike tour

So, you are reading this blog, which means either

a: you like me, at least sometimes
b: you are related to me and feel obligated
c: you are interested in africa and peace corps-style work
d: you were searching for helmeted guinea fowl and ended up here.

If you are one of those for whom either a or c is true, or b and you're feeling particularly obligated today, you may be interested in opportunities to support the work other volunteers and I are doing here in Burkina!

I'm on the Committee for Gender and Development, which is one of the only sources of funding for small-scale volunteer projects that promote gender equality. If you do a girls' camp or a maternal health workshop, there are not a lot of sources of funding available, and volunteers often pay expenses out of their (fairly meager) living allowance. So we fundraise to be able to give this money directly out to volunteers for their projects! And the most recent, most awesome fundraiser that we (okay, Marita) came up with is a bike tour! Volunteers are biking around Burkina- almost 1200 miles total, and we are hoping for sponsors! I am not personally an official biker, but I'll definitely be tagging along for a couple legs of the tour, and not only am I a member of GAD, I'm also a (hopeful) applicant for funding!

It would be awesome if you would help us out, but it's even cool if you just check out the website and see some of the work other volunteers do. Plus, I'm in the GAD family portrait on the main page. And those are my friends in all of the other pictures. Don't take my word for it! duh Duh Duh

http://burkinabiketour.blogspot.com/

chek-chek-chek krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

These birds are the bane of my existence. They are called "pintades" (which I heard for a long time as "pin-tards," for which I feel a little guilty, particularly because I think it's more apt.) They are also known as guinea fowl- helmeted guinea fowl, to be precise- and they are the loudest birds I have ever heard. They belong to my neighbors and roost in a nearby tree and are super fast runners so you can only catch them when it rains and their feathers are wet. I'm used to the donkey noises (I still honestly love donkeys: I think they're hilarious) and I'm used to the call to prayer broadcasted every morning from 4-4:30, but I don't think I'll ever be used to these birds. As my birdwatching book puts it so poetically: "Commonest call a series of hard, raucous notes interspersed with grating rattle chek-chek-chek krrrrrr chek-chek-chek...."


This is the clutch of eggs one of my neighbors' chickens laid in my yard. Mme Ouedraogo came over later and replaced some of the chicken eggs with pintade eggs. This way the chicken will nest on the pintade eggs and grow little pintades (you can guess how thrilled I am about that) which is necessary because they don't raise their own eggs. Which is the reason behind a superstition here: if children eat chicken eggs, they'll grow up to be thieves, because the chicken actually cares about her eggs so it's like they stole them. (True for fetuses too- if a pregnant woman eats chicken eggs, her baby will be a thief. Watch out.) Pintade eggs, on the other hand, are fair game.

picture-LESS-que

Whoooa sorry!! I guess it's been over a month since my last post? Tous mes excuses. The main reason, and the reason why this post is going to be so short, is that my camera has once again given up the ghost. I took a number of pictures, including shots of: the pintades (the birds that make so much noise by my house), local food, even the market, but I need to find the means to get these pictures out of the useless hunk of metal that used to be my camera. And hopefully I can find a new way to take pictures, otherwise this blog will turn into a bad novel instead of the vastly more entertaining picture book that I'm going for.
I am currently sitting under a fan in a high school computer lab, waiting for the rain to stop. (I would not normally want it to stop, ever, except that I happen to be very hungry.) I'm working training again this week which involves observing the trainees teach summer classes at a local high school. I'm quite enjoying helping with training- the trainees are great and I feel useful- but I am definitely excited to get back to Bagré next week. It's been three weeks and it's time to go home.

The rain stopped!! Time to eat some goat brochettes.

baGREAT

Hooray! Bagre's getting pretty again. I got back to site after being gone for almost a month and I had flashbacks to my very first site visit, almost a year ago. (We've been in Burkina over a year now- just feel like I should mark that milestone.)
To fully enjoy the loveliness of my world now I've been doing a lot of biking around; that also may have something to do with the fact that I have nothing to do at site. That may seem weird to folks at home (how can you not have anything to do? You're in the Peace Corps in Africa, shouldn't you be like feeding starving children or something?) Okay, maybe. But my role is as a teacher, and the school year is over, and everybody is out in the fields cultivating all day. I'm hoping to do other projects later in the summer after I get back from being a trainer (be ready: pleas for funding are forthcoming) but right now I am just kind of hanging out and waiting to go up to Ouahigouya. Oh, and watching a lot of World Cup with my neighbors.


End note: There is simply NOT a lot going on in my world right now. And these blog posts are just going to keep getting lamer. I'd be happy to take suggestions- if anyone has a topic they want to hear about I can pretty much talk about anything at length.

artastic

To finish off this round of posts, I just wanted to mention that I've started a little project that I've had as an idea for the past couple of months. I'm attempting to photograph the paintings used in advertising here in Burkina. There are pretty standard ones, as for coiffeurs/coiffeuses (hairdressers) who want to show the kind of work they do. And then there are some that are just unequivocally weird and fabulous, like this one that I think is advertising a tree cutting company? I hope? Not quite sure why rabbits are involved....
I only started a couple of days ago, so prepare yourselves for excitingness to come.

as promised

Pictures from last August (ps, Burkinabe do not think it's cool to smile in pictures.):

Euro, Malika, and Alima

Fatao (he was NOT happy that I was leaving them)

Another post! Aren't you excited.
Last week, while in Ouahigouya, I got to visit my host family!! Euro (Ousmane), Alima, Fatao, and Malika are doing Very well. Malika is getting over malaria (or "pallu" here, which may actually be a number of maladies, but they just call it all malaria) but she's bigger than last year and after a while got used to having me there again. She even smiled at one point! That's quite an unusual occurrence with Burkinabe babies, usually they cry when they see a white person (amazingly entertaining for the mothers and observers, less entertaining for me.) And Fatao is hardly any bigger. I told him how big he was getting (lie), and Alima was like ha, nope, he's the same size. But he's still super cute and awesome. And my host dad is going to take the BAC this June!! He's an elementary school teacher, which only requires that you pass 10th grade and then do teacher training, but the BAC (from the French system) is MUCH harder and a huge accomplishment. I so hope he passes- he's great.

This has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was cool. This is a student of mine who broke his arm, and this is how they splinted it.

summer

Quick post- I'll write more later, probably. No, definitely.
I am back in Burkina after going to Americaland to surprise my friend before her wedding. It was AMAZING: the wedding, seeing people, and eating everything I've been craving for the past year. I think, literally, everything. And then some.
Like I've been telling people, I haven't had any culture shock going and coming back and I think it's just because my mind can't process the idea of both of these incredibly disparate worlds existing. So I was in America mode, and now I'm back in Burkina mode. Maybe there'll be some problems when I go back to village. We'll see.
I just came back from a week of training and session-planning for the new group of volunteers coming this summer, since I'll be one of the trainers (basically for the month of July.) The first round of trainees comes in this week; they're the Secondary Education sector and therefore have two weeks more training than any of the other sectors. Arrival: Wednesday. There have been no new volunteers for an entire year (my group is still the most recent) and I have to say, we're all pretty excited about new people. So... welcome, new trainees!!! Good luck with staging and the first bit of time in country. I promise it'll be okay.

dry season

The following is a demonstration of how skewed my view of the world is right now. I went for a bike ride to my lake the other day and took a few photos. I thought: these are nice, look- there's water! and grass! and animals! What a pretty area! Example:



Then I actually looked at the pictures, and realized that the cows are starving, the grass is mostly mud, and so is the water. You can hardly even see the other shore because of all the dust in the air. So to give myself a little reality check (and to give you all one too, albeit in the other direction) I thought I'd do a little before-and-after photo montage.

my courtyard in October

last week: sandstorm!!


before: trees with leaves


after: not so much


before


after


this one's good- same shot, before...


and... after!


So, as you can see, Burkina in the dry season is... less than picturesque. My world is not super pretty right now. Looking at my pictures from the fall I can't BELIEVE I used to think Burkina was kind of scrubby and sad. I realize now that it was GORGEOUS. Now, on the other hand....

So you can possibly get some sense of my excitement when I tell you that it rained last night!!!! We had a huge windstorm a few days ago that bent all the metal telephone poles to the ground and blew off half the sheet-metal roofs in town, but that only came with a few drops of rain. Last night we got the wind again, but this time it poured for about an hour, then it calmed down into a steady rain until stopping early this morning. It was 78 degrees in my house and I put on a flannel shirt. I am currently wearing my hair down, and there are no signs of prickly heat. I might just survive this hot season.

yup, pretty nice

togo à go-go

Togo!! I went there for our spring break (whoo!) with a group of seven other volunteers, and we spent the entire five days on the beach. It was amazing. Completely un-Peace Corps; we did nothing constructive except teaching the hotel guys how to play beer pong, which is obviously the second goal of the Peace Corps: teaching about American culture. We're putting that in our quarterly reports.
So we swam, and ate, and... yeah, that's about it. Which was perfect. I know I should go sightseeing, and explore, and have adventures, but I'm pretty okay with a legit vacation once in a while with good people in a beautiful place. Pictures to come, maybe next weekend.
And now, back to reality. Or whatever version of reality it is that I live here. School starts again next week, and the trimester is only about six weeks long. That means that I have 54 hours of class left this year, over the course of which I have to write, review for, administer, grade, hand back and do in-class corrections for six tests. Plus actually teach. Teacher challenge!! Not looking forward to all that.

4

Okay, last post! This past Monday was March 8th, International Women's Day! It was a day off of school, and I got to participate in a couple of activities that I surprisingly enjoyed a lot. Surprisingly, because one of them involved me, in front of my entire village, attempting to play football. There was a women vs. men match, and I was recruited. I would have felt super lame if I'd refused, as much as I wanted to sit it out. So I played, and was terrible, obviously, but it was Not a true competitive match, and my skills were possibly on par with those of the other women. We had a couple of men dressed in pagnes (skirts) on our team, and after a while the game devolved into a sort of rugby match with the women throwing the ball into the goal. It was a really fun time and I learned just how awesome the women in my village are (answer: extremely awesome.)
Second event: a women's dinner, with dancing afterwards. And again, me, dancing, in front of many, many people. Not something I would generally attempt. But I think I may be getting over my self-consciousness, or just accepting embarrassment as inevitable, because I did, in fact, dance. And I enjoyed it. As did the other women. P.S. Turns out dance circles are universal- who knew?

Overall, great 8 Mars, and I've certainly felt more integrated into my village because of it- I've gotten many, many, many comments on my football skills and amazing dance moves.

3

I started my girls' club!! It's made up of the girls from my 4eme (8th grade) class, and since there are only twelve (out of almost seventy kids, which is a ridiculous proportion) it's a really good size for a club. And these girls are awesome. The club itself is nothing special- every Saturday morning we drink tea and hang out and draw and paint our nails and maybe practice some english, and I lead an activity on self-esteem or gender roles or whatever else I think they might be interested in. Basically what I love is just talking to them and learning about their lives, what they think about school, what they want to do in the future (I've got several nurses and doctors, a journalist, and a government minister) and it's very illuminating. Last week they got to sharing war stories from the beatings they received in elementary school (it was apparently worst on days when the teacher was drunk.) I told them that in the US a teacher would be put in prison for that, and they thought that was pretty cool. [I know I don't normally write negative things about Burkina on this blog, but that was one of those conversations where I stopped feeling at home here and started feeling a little overwhelmed and depressed about the state of things. Those conversations happen occasionally, and I don't want to dwell on them too much when I'm sharing my experiences with you all, but it is a part of my life.]
But these girls are wonderful and I love spending time with them, and Saturday mornings are quickly becoming the best time of my week.

2

I got to learn how to make pottery! My friend knows a lady who makes clay jars, so I went over to her house one morning and she taught me how to do it. It makes a lot of sense when you see it. There are these rounded basins in the ground, in all different sizes, and you put the clay in a basin and pound it with a smooth rock until it's thin and pottery-like. Then you sort of stand it on end and add more clay in the basin, and pound that out. So eventually you get a jar shape, and you can cut holes in the sides if it's going to be a water dish for chickens or you can add a neck if it's going to be for holding drinking water, then you let it dry before baking it. I made two: one for chickens/my cat, and one for cooling my water.












Because these pots are the most beautiful invention ever, and I'll tell you why. I even taught this in physics, that's how cool it is. The walls of a cannari (I have no idea how to spell it, or even what language it is- it means clay pot) are very porous, so the water that you put inside can evaporate through the walls. And since that process requires energy, it takes the necessary energy in form of heat from the water inside the jar, making the water that remains significantly cooler. So, on a hot afternoon, when all the water in my house is at room temperature (invariably higher than my body temperature) I can drink beautifully cool water from my cannari. And you can call me a nerd for loving this concept, but only after you drink hot water all day every day for a month or two.