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.