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.