Host Family Goodbye

Swear in. I took my final language test yesterday, and I passed on to swear in level. I am now an intermediate high. I dont really have much today to say besides the fact that I leave to the isolation that is my village on Sunday, and cant travel out of my region for 3 months, so I dont know how often I will be able to update/email.

Tuesday was the last night that all of the secondary education volunteers spent with their host families, and I wasnt really sure how mine was going to go. It has been a little weird the last couple of weeks because I still have problems speaking the french. Anyways, it turned out to be really great, and I am going to miss my host family. I bought them some presents at the marchè and some stuff from American, and they ended up getting me a sweet Burkinabè shirt. The weird thing was that they hired a photographer and he took pictures of me handing them a box with my gift in it and them handing me a shirt. For dinner we had probably the best food I have had since I have lived in Ouahigouya, fried chicken. Other stuff happened, but I am really tired right now.

I Hate Couscous!!!!

Couscous.....why? Before I came to Africa, I had no idea what this substance known as couscous was, and I wish that were still the case. I am sure everyone knows what couscous is and I just had a sheltered life in Missouri, but for those of you like me who are couscous illiterate, couscous is a grain that is similar to rice, except for the fact that it is horrible. There are pretty much four foods that are widely available for human consumption in Burkina Faso. The list consists of pasta, rice, to, and couscous ranked in order of awesomeness. Everytime couscous is placed in front of me, according to onlookers, I make a face that describes just how upset at the fact that I am about to eat couscous. About a month ago, we went to a fancy hotel restaurant in Ouahigouya that you had to make reservations at the day before, so I figured it would be pretty fancy, and it was. The first course was salad, which sounds pretty boring, but there isnt a whole lot of salad in the country of Burkina, or at least salad that wont give you some type of tropical disease. In the next courses we got a pizza-ish thing, some type of eggplant, and these fried dough mystery balls, all of which were good. I was thinking to myself, "self, if all of this food has come so far, and we are still waiting for the main course, the main course is going to be awesome!" A huge tray was brought out and on this tray was a huge pile of.......... couscous. Seriously, I mean seriously what kind of a main course is that. Couscous runs rampant in Africa. You can get it anywhere and everywhere, but why at a "nice" restaurant is the main course couscous? I am pretty sure that is all of the ranting that I have about couscous, but be warned.

Model school ended this week, and only 11 out of 39 of my students passed. I have been assured though that that is good in Burkinabé standards. We had a ceremony yesterday where we gave the top three guys and girls of each class prizes of textbooks, notebooks, and other school supplies. Before each class could get their prizes, they had to choose a representative to lip sync a song for the teachers and all of the other students. I thought it was very odd, but apparently it is a natural occurence here. The performers would also dance whilst siging and pull us up out of the audience to dance with them. This is a picture of Julia, another soon to be volunteer, doin a little dance. All in all, it turned out very well. Model school was a useful experience, but I am very glad that it is over.

I took my final language test today. I only have to go up one more level to see if I go to site in a week or spend two weeks in Ouaga boning up on my French. I dont think that I did very well though, but I will find out tomorrow. Swear in is a week from today!

Saving Momma E

First thing is first, today is my brother Zacks birthday, so I would like to tell him to have a Happy Day O' Birth!

Here is just a picture of myself to prove that I am still alive. Yaneth on the left, another trainee, and Sara a volunteer that is going home in a few weeks.

The one thing that I dislike about Africa so far, besides the heat of course, is that there is trash everywhere. Africa, or at least Burkina Faso is without any sort of trash collection program, so trash is everywhere. The common practice is to make a pile of your trash outside of your courtyard on the street and then every now and again set it ablaze. This would be an alright idea if the set it ablaze everytime someone added trash to the pile, because children look at these piles of trash as playgrounds. I have heard from other volunteers that they have stopped throwing out their trash and started throwing it down their latrines. This is a pretty good idea, and I will probably adopt it. When I went on my site visit and was checking out my house, I took a glance down the latrine and saw a lot more trash than feces from the previous volunteer. Currently, however, I have two boxes of trash sitting in my room at my house. I fear, and know that I have let it accumulate far too long to send it down to the depths of the latrine, so I am stuck with it. I am also sad to admit that I have thrown trash on the ground, but not before looking for a trash bin to place it in, only realizing that I was in Africa, and such a place does not exist.

Drinks. When you order a drink here that is not a soda or a beer, it comes in not a bottle or a can, but in a sac. Water, juice, milk, and everything else is drank from a sac. I found this very odd at first, but it is actually quite convenient. You just tear off one of the corners and drink yourself a sac of liquid. Speaking of milk two sentences ago, I found a place in Ouahigouya to buy cold cows milk. It is the best thing ever. I joked with everyone that I was going to have to find myself a skim milk cow somewhere in Africa, and believe me I did look, but this will do just as well.

Teaching should be in my blood in theory. I mean really, my mom is a teacher, one of my grandmothers is a teacher, and practically half of my highschool graduating class are teachers. I think somehow though, I got skipped. I think it is something like to story of my Uncle Larry, who out of a large number of sibblings, eight or something, he is the youngest and only baldish one. When I was younger, I decided that this was due to the fact that all off the hair in the family was used up on the children that came before him. My teaching skills, I believe, have the same problem. All the teaching power was given to my grandma, mom, and friends in highschool, and I was left with little to no skill. Anyway, the moral of this story is that another week of model school is now nearing completion. For Sarah, model school is something similar to summer school in the states that the peace corps uses to train us. I started this week with a new class and new subject. I am teaching Geology, which I dont think I have ever had a class in in my entire life, to 4eme class, which is similar to 8th grade. The kids think it is funny to ask me what words mean in french, and watch me struggle through trying to define it off of the top of my head..... in french. I am not even sure if I know what these words mean in English, let alone French. This happened the first two days, and everyday I went home and wanted to die. Today, however, I went in prepared. I defined everyword that they could try to ask me the definition of and also came up with french synnonymes, and to get them back for making me feel stupid I gave them a pop quiz. After today I feel much better and am excited to give them a test on Monday, then Tuesday is the last day of model school, and hopefully I didnt screw these kids up too much for the real school year.

The Poop Scale

When I came to Africa, I was told that everyone talks about their poop experiences. I doubted this, but come to find out it is true. Poop has become a regular topic of lunch-time discussion. Thus a poop scale has been developed that most of you might find gross, so grandma, if you are reading this you might want to skip this part. I wont go into graphic detail, but everyone knows the difference between a number one and a number two. The offical poop scale has a range from one, being pure liquid (most common), to three, which is when there is nothing coming out. With the help of this scale, one can now just go up to someone and say "Man, I had a 1.3 last night." and everyone will know what that means. I hope that I have enlightened you all. This scale however can only be used in Africa, so dont try this at home. On a side story loosely related to the scale, another trainee.... lets call her Stanley, came here and in the first three weeks did not poop once. That is what we call a number three.

On a happier note, I have gotten so many packages in the past couple weeks, I dont know if I am going to be able to transport it all with me across the country. I have recieved numerous from my partents, and I also have recieved some from Grandma Mary, bro Zack, and the Lawson crew. Thanks for everything. There was one day that I got four packages at once, I think it was pretty much the best day of my life.

I went to a concert last weekend. Thats right, I am in Africa and I went to a concert. It was an interesting experience. The band I think is called Seika Seika, or maybe that is just the name of one of their songs. I am not really sure, but it was cool. It was supposed to start at 4pm, which I thought was very early/hot for a concert to start, but then it actually started at about 7pm, which makes sense in Africa time. Aparently I am told by the other volunteers that if you want to set up a meeting with a Brukinabé, you have to say that the meeting starts an hour before it actually does so that they will make it there on time.

Model school is going better, I guess. I gave both of my classes tests on Wednesday, and I thought they were both relatively easy, but apparently not. The day before in my sixieme class we played Jeopardy to review. It was a lot of fun, but trying to explain the rules of Jeopardy in French is a little difficult. Once they got the hang of it they seemed like they new everything. I had a bag of jolly ranchers in my bag for prizes for the winning team, and that turned out to be a bad idea. I started handing them out, and it was like a bomb went off. Kids were standing on desks screaming that someone stole their piece or that they didnt get a piece, so I just started kind of throwing candy around the room. Then I had probably the stupidest idea in the history of teaching, I thought to myself, I will just give the bag to a kid and he will rip it open and everyone can grab.... wow it sounds even worse when I type it out. So I did, and they all pounced on this kid and people got hurt and it was just a mess. To resolve the situation, I took the candy back and ran away. The next day when they took their tests, it was a different story. The class average out of 20 was a 4.05. I am blamming it on the fact that it is summer and it is not real school. My cinqieme class did a lot better. I think the average was about a 14.