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.