Pictures, ETs, mouches, and faux types

This is a picture of my school that I will be teaching at for the next two years. It has only one room for each grade level, and I think only about 4 other teachers besides me.

On a sadder note, trainees from our training group are dropping like flies. Yesterday we lost one of the married couples, which brings our early termination total to a whopping 5. From what I hear, that is the worst it has been in a while.

So there is a serious problem in this country with the amount of flies present at all times. There is no escape from them but the solitude of your mosquito net. At restaurants, the rub down the tables with petroto try to keep them off, but I think that they have built up some type of immunity to it. So we have developed a game to play to not only help control the mouche population but also to keep ourselves intertained. Mouche is the french word for fly, and I have a problem with speaking in franglish. Anyway, the goal of the game is to catch as many flies in the time that we are at the restaurant. You start off with either a glass or a bottle with a little liquid in the bottom, then you catch the fly and swirl it around until it is trapped in the liquid. I know this game, now that it is out on the internet, is going to sweep the nation, and by the time I get home little kids will be playing it in the streets. If only I could patent it in Africa. Dang!

In a related story, I have now taught two days for two full hours total in Model School. It is gone pretty well. Yesterday I had a big problem with kids participating in the lecture, so today I had this speech written out about how if they didnt participate, that the class would never end and so on, but it was like they were a whole new class today. It was actually fun, I mean how much fun can you really have when you are lecturing about pollinisation and fertilization in flowers. A lot, that is how much. Tomorrow we are going to discuss what happens after pollinisation. I dont want to keep you on the edges of your seats, so I will tell you, the flower turns into a fruit.

Wall of pringles anyone? This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. In Ougadougou, there is an Americanized grocery store, were you can find anything you ever dreamed of, such as a wall of pringles. This was not just any wall of pringles, by the way, this wall contained pringles that I had no idea even existed. They had this Greek Cheese and Rosemary flavor and on the was Bacon flavored, and several others.

In Burkina the only type of cheese that you can get is Laughing Cow, which personally I dont really consider cheese, but at this store they have a surplus of cheeses. Moral of the story, this grocery store is awesome and I will frequent it every time I am in Ouaga.

Faux Type - (n) 1. Literally translated as false type.

2. In Burkina, someone who pretends to be your friend with hopes of gaining someting, monetary or otherwise, in the process.

Ouga is full of faux types. We were just walking down the street on our way to eat, and they would follow us the entire way. The would start the conversation by saying something is English like "My american friend", or "Peace Corp friend", and then they would try to sell you something and not leave you alone until you got to your destination. I think one night some guy was trying to sell me pot, but I cant be too sure because a majority of it was in French. He just kept saying things about the police and it being ok, so I just started yelling at him in english to leave me alone, and he finally did. Aparrently the only way to really get them to leave you alone is to confuse them and tell them you dont speak any language they ask you about, and then they get frustrated and leave.

Model School

So model school started this week, and so far I have only had to teach for 30 minutes, but next week that is going to change to me teaching an hour each day. So far I have given a lesson on stems and trunks of trees/plants. It is pretty exciting. On monday I will be giving my hour lecture on the parts of a flower. Model school is making me feel a lot more confident in my teaching/French speaking abilities, but I still have a long way to go.

Speaking of French speaking, I passed my second language test! Everyone passes them, so that is not really the exciting part, the exciting part is that I am no longer a novice low, you can now refer to me as Caleb the Intermediate Low. The class that I am in right now has six people in it and already in the first week I feel like I have increased my vocabulary a lot.

Other than that my life this week has been really quite boring. The cat at my host familys house had two kittens, which kind of freaked me out because the momma cat is the scroniest kitten looking cat I have ever seen. My mom told me to put up a wish list of stuff that I would like people to send me if they felt so inclined, but I dont really have a list. However, if anyone does feel the need to send some tasty treats, an interesting book, or anything you can imagine poor bored Caleb would enjoy in the hot desolate place that is Africa I wont send it back.

I can only fit so many languages in my head!!!

Have you ever asked yourself the question, "Self, I wonder how many languages I can learn at the same time before I go crazy and start to forget english?" Well, ask no more. For me the answer is three. I am currently in the process of learning French, which I will be teaching in, Mooré, which is the local language in the middle of the country, and Gulmancema, which is the local language of the east where I will be living. I fear that by the time I leave Africa I will no longer be able to form a complete sentence in English, and that I will speak some type of bizarre form of frENGLoréCEMA and nobody will know what I am saying.

This past week I went to visit my site in the beautiful, lush green village of Matiakouali. As part of a learning exercise, the Peace Corps had us take public transport for the first time since we have been in country. Leaving Ouahigouya was no problem, because we all left as a group and some members of our group speak fluent French. When I was on my own, however, that is another story. We hung out in Ouaga for two days and I pretty much forgot that I was in Africa. Ouaga is a sizable city, with everything a person who has been in Africa for a month could want. I enjoyed some chili fries at the embassy, and the restaurants around town serve pizza, ice cream, and cheeseburgers. It was awesome! We also stayed in a hotel with a pool, air conditioning, and running water that was conected to something that I think I remember was called a shower in the states. I met my counterpart in Ouaga, another teacher that teaches at my school, and someone must have been reading my diary because he speaks english. After being spoiled by the wonders of Ouaga, I went with my counterpart to go visit the place I will be living for the next two years.

Matiakouali is a pretty nice place from what I saw of it. It took from 7AM to 5PM to get there, via bus and bush taxi, so I didnt have much time to see the sites. I did have time to see my house though. I have a small two room house in a courtyard that the village preacher and his family live in.... I think he was the preacher. I also have pets already. I have two of the tiniest, malnurished kittens I have ever seen, and also I have a family of bats that live in my roof. I havent given the kittens, or bats for that matter, names yet, but soon. Just outside my/my familys courtyard is a huge field full of mango trees. I am so excited for mango season in village. My school is small, and currently has no science teacher, so it looks like I am going to be teaching sixieme, cinqieme, and quatrieme SVT and maybe cinqieme english. As we were touring the school, we ran into some french people who had been living in Matiakouali for a month. Most of them spoke english, so I got to talk to them about the students and the problems they were having and just about the village in general and everything they said was positive. They however left the next day and went back to France.

The next day I went and checked out Fada, my regional capital, and met up with a peace corps voluteer who lived next to Fada. We rode our bikes 20 km to here village and spent the night there so that I could see how a real PCV lived. It was really cool and I learned a lot of stuff about living at a site in country. Then I came back to Ouhigouya and I can now not wait for training to be over.

So my computer just locked up and I thought that I had lost this entire wonderful blog entry, but the wonderful website that is blogger.com saves your blog as you type for people like me. I was trying to post some photos and I think that is what locked it up so that will have to wait for another day.

So apparently I can only post one picture per message, so there will be a few posts for today.

So this was our 4th of July Party. It was quite the spectacle. All of the kids in the village wanted to watch us do everything.

Also apparently I am not the brightest crayon in the box because you can post more than one picture per message you just have to be smarter than the computer to do it.

Novice-Lows Representin`!!! These are the two other members of the novice-low language group. As you can see by the looks on their faces, as usual, we have no idea what is going on. On the left is Marty, and on the right is Chris who is one of the "marrieds" of the group. Today we had a language test so hopefully we will no longer be known as the novice lows. I have my goals set high for some novice-mid action. I have to be at Intermediate-high in two months. We will see if that happens.

On a different note, I have a cold. Who gets a cold in Africa? Everyone else gets E Coli, which dont get me wrong I dont want, but I didnt have to leave America to get a cold. I got colds all the time there.

This post is going to be short so that I can post some pictures. Nothing much to report, I will be taking public transport for the first time tomorrow and I am really excited. Other than that the only other thing was that.... Oh yeah, I hit an old lady in the marché with my bike. No problem though, she got scared and ran off into the crowd, so I just kept going.

Here is a picture of Burkina Faso, and where all of the trainees in my group will be placed. I am the one on the very far right all alone. Sad times.

Peace Corps: The only government agency that works on the 4th

Today I found out where I am going to be spening the next two years of my life. I am going to be living in the town of Matiakoali in the southeast part of the country. The Peace Corps gave me a sheet about it and here is what it says:
You are going to Mahiakoali located on the paved road past Fada, your regional capitol. In beautiful Fada you will find internet, a post office, supermarchés, and excellent restaurants. Keeping you company will be your amazing host family from which the last volunteer was very sad to leave. This year your school, led by a fantastic director, had two sixieme classes and one class each of quatrieme and ciqieme with students numbering 372 total. Enviable conveniences include regular transportation and celtel reception. You will also have two GEE volunteers as neighbors.
I am excited because this means I will be in the southern portion of the country and hopefully there will be some green. I dont know how I feel about living with a host family just due to the fact that I dont really know what that means. I am not sure if that means we just share a courtyard and I have my own house, or if I just have a room like I do now. I guess I will find out when I get there. In my training group I am the furthest one east, and my closest neighbor, from my training group, is about 200ish km from me. Fada, the regional capitol is about 120 km from me, and that is where the internet is so I dont know how often I will have access to that. In the travel book it says something about plains of wildlife, and I am right next to some big wildlife reserves. I am also really close to my dream country of Togo. I want to go to Togo. I guess after I go to Togo I wont be able to say that phrase anymore. That will be sad. We visit our sites next week, so I will be able to see exactly where I am living and see my school and whatnot. I was told by my country director that my school is one of the few with a lab in it, so that means that I will be abl to do some totally sweet science experiments, so if any of you know any cool experiments that a 6th grader learning about vertibrates and flowering plants would like, send them my way.
On another note, you all will be happy to know that the mispronunciation of Stica reins supreme from continent to continent. Not only the mispronunciation, but the exact same pronunciation. It took me a while to decide whether or not I was going to use the same tactic I used in college, just allowing them to mispronounce it, or actually correct them. I have decided that I am going to be known to my students as Monsieur Stica, and to my friends as Caleb Stitsee. Also, my first name does not translate into the French language. It is also hard to pronounce, so I have to introduce myself as Cahlib. If while infront of my language teacher I try to introduce myself by me actual name, he corrects me. Oh well.
I was going to post some pictures, but I went to the cheaper computer lab which apparently also means it is slower.

New blogg

So livejournal is making me mad and confusing me, so I am going to try this one out and see how it works.