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.