N bua gwani

I recently got back from a trip back to America for my brother's wedding to his lovely new wife Christina Damman, and by recently I mean about a month and a half ago which is recently in Africa time. It was a wonderful wedding and I wish them all the best and would like to thank my parents and grandparents for allowing me the opportunity to come home and be a part of it. I would also like to say that I had limited time when I was home and if I didn't see you or call you it has no bearing on our friendship. This means you Jim Schulte. Now that I am back in Africa and I have started teaching again for my second year, I have been trying to decide whether or not the trip back to America was a good thing for me personally. On one side it was good because it let me know that America is still there after a little over a year and that it probably will still be there in 8 more months when I am finished with my service, but on the other hand it let me know that America is still there, and America is a pretty awesome place where I would like to live one day. But that day can wait 8 more months.

This school year has so far been shaping up pretty well. Two new classrooms are in the process of being built and have been for several months, so we have had to have classes on Saturdays until they are finished. They just got finished this week and we start having classes in them tomorrow. I teach three classes of English and only one of Biology. The English classes are going pretty well, we sing a lot and it took about three days for them to be able to sing the alphabet song. The one class of Biology, however, is the dreaded rock class that I don't even care about. This year however I have divided the class into groups and given them rocks and they are in charge of presenting their rock to the class. So far it has been going really well and I don't know why I didn't do this last year.

Something else that I should have done last year is learn the local language of Gulmantchema. I did try this summer while I was cultivating with my neighbors, but trying to learn and African language by yourself is not the easiest thing to do, and lets face it I am pretty lazy. Well, people in my village have recently started giving me a hard time about not being able to understand or speak to them in the language of the village. Several conversations end with them mentioning how well previous volunteers were able to speak it. I don't think that most of them realize that I had to learn French in three months in order to be able to teach their children and that there is only so much space in my brain for languages, but I am trying. I have started carrying around a little notebook and anytime someone talks about how I don't know what they are saying, I whip out my notebook and say teach me something. It has worked out and filled in some spare time. I can now say, but not spell, I want to sleep (N bua gwani) and 1000 cfa (kobilie).

Since I got back from America I have been in serious need of some beano, if you know what I mean. It was a constant everyday thing, and I will not lie to you my friend, they did not smell like roses regardless of what you have heard. I tried to find the source of this disturbance and wrote it off to the fact that I have lately been eating beans for nearly every meal if not every meal since my neighbors gave my a huge bag since I helped them plant. Then I started to realize that the occurences occured at roughly the same time everyday and roughly about an hour after I took my multivitamin. Upon closer examination I read that in three pills, the daily dose, there is 833% of your daily value of Vitamin C, the cause of the issue. There is also 3333% of your daily value of thiamine. That is 33 days worth of thiamine in one day. Who needs that?

The week after I got back there was a big hubub in my village. Everyone was getting ready for a visit from the Prime Minister of Burkina Faso for international fight the poverty day. It was going to be awesome. The Prime minister in the tiny village of Matiacoali. The big day came and the village turned out in droves. I don't think I had ever seen that many of my village in one spot and they were excited. Ten o'clock rolls around and the Prime Minister is supposed to arrive soon. 11 o'clock rolls around, 11:30 and a fancy car pulls in. Someone gets out, but not the Prime Minister. The ceremony starts without the Prime Minister. A woman goes up to talk but she's not the Prime Minister. Where is the Prime Minister? He decided not to come. A few weeks later the Minister of the Environment is supposed to come and have a meeting with some of the local farmers. He doesn't show up. Last week, there was an announcement throughout the village on Saturday night and in all of the churches Sunday morning that a Minister would be arriving the following day and we should prepare a warm reception for him. He didn't show up. My villagers are more and more upset each time a government official claims to be coming to visit our village and then instead of calling and telling someone, just not showing up.

I have posted a link to a picasa web site that my dad made with some of my pictures.

The End of the Internet

First of all, I know what you are thinking to yourselves. "Two blog entries in the same week." "Is he even doing any work over there?" The answer to both of these questions, and maybe more I hope to have answered by the end of this. I have been staring at a computer screen from 8AM to 6PM for three days now working on typing up lesson plans and creating a virtual database for future volunteers, and I think that in the process of doing this I have reached the end of the internet. Between typing chapters, I have exhausted all of my usual sites including yahoo, facebook, wikipedia......... and that is about it. I go to yahoo to check my email every 5 minutes and am crushed by the fact that 97% of the time there are no new messages. I fail to take into account the time difference factor, and have determined that this is some type of popularity contest that I am on the losing side of. Next up I stop over to facebook and stalk everyone that I have ever known or breifly spoken to, and when I have depleated those reserves I briefly pause and stare blankly at the computer. The I move on to my final option, wikipedia and type in useless searches in hopes of obtaining some type of useful information that will benefit me, if not now, at some future juncture in my life. I know now that it takes 8 minutes for the light of the sun to reach the surface of the earth, and that 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies. After this, I am at a loss. I know there are computer games that I could fill my time with, but I am almost possitive that I played all of those back when I worked at the financial aid office at Mizzou. (#4 in football...what?) Having reached the supposed sad end to my internet universe my mind begins to wander to what else I could currently be doing. If I make my way back to the transit house in Ouaga I will be forced to read the numerous ancient copies of Us and People magazines that tell tales of Britney being crazy and Angelina Jolie getting pregnant. Is this the first time this has happened I ask myself or the second...... or even the third? How many times has Britney gone crazy? Brad and Angie are pregnant again? Why didn't anyone tell me? How did I get so detached from American celebrity gossip? Who are the Jonas brothers, and why should I care? It is sad that I associate my out of touchness with reality with the articles in gossip magazines, but that has been the best gauge that I have found to date. I bet that Us and People magazine have websites with up to the minute news on the lives of everyone. I have found my detour. It seems that what I thought to be the end was merely a road block that I couldn't see past due to the Burkina dust storm blowing by.

Pictures

My Summer in a Nut Shell

My first summer in Burkina has come and gone without me actually realizing it. It seems like just yesterday that I was grading my last test of the year and listening the the pleading demands of several students to add just a couple more points to their grade so that they could pass. According to my students, the fact that I am white means that I should better understand their plight and find pity on them. In the long run the only students that were asking for free points were the students who had not been showing up all year or had been receiving 2 out of 20 on the tests and the majority of my students passed. I am very proud of them. I am also very excited for my next year. Year number 2 will be my redo year. My year to fix everything that went wrong the first year and awesomize everything else.

Summer began with thoughts of insanity and reading of numerous books, but now at the end I have spent most of the time in Ouaga and Ouahigouya helping out with Peace Corps stuff and rocking out in English. I started off in village after school let out with high hopes of my own field of peanuts and endless cultivating opportunities, but after a few weeks it turned out that I would not be in village for a majority of the summer. This also meaning that I would not be able to reap the benefits of my bountiful harvest. Sadly accepting this fact, I was still determined to make the most of my cultivating experience and just help out in my neighbor's fields. My neighbor's were very excited about this, but it took several days of me asking to be taken to their field the following day for them to actually believe that a nasara wanted to work in a field. It ended up being long, hot, sunny, tiring, achy days, but also an awesome time to talk to villager's and practice my local language skills. I was quite the attraction riding my bike through all of the fields, wearing a helmet, and greeting in Gulmanchema. Overall, a good time had by all.

When I wasn't working up a sweat planting beans and corn, I was in Ouahigouya helping to train the new group of volunteers that arrived this year. It was a lot of fun, and an interesting new perspective on the training process, one of the most difficult three months of my life.

Next week, a group of us are going to Togo and Benin for two weeks. We do plan on going to the beach, so I have all of my fellow travelers to not let me throw camera #2 in the ocean, no matter how much I want to. I have pretty much exhausted all of my creative ability this week working on a newsletter for the Peace Corps. Fun end fact, I used to have a dangly mole on my back, but at my mid-service, thats right I said mid-service (15 months in country), the doctor decided that it would be best to cut it off and gave me one stitch to remember it by. I am very worried that this mole may have been the source of my power and that the removal of it could have dire consequences. Not only to me, but to the world as a whole.

Pictures on the way. Hopefully tomorrow when I am at the Peace Corps Office with the fast internet.

Hooray Pictures!!!

My House

This is the French and English teacher at my school, Mr Combary. He is my only English outlet in village and is a lot of fun to talk to. All of the other volunteers say I am starting to look a little emmaciated. All I have to say to that is that it is hot, I sweat out about 3-5 liters of water a day, and all I eat is rice and onions.

The rain has come! This is Adama, one of the girls that lives in my courtyard.

That is all I gots for right now. I will be in Ouaga all next week, and hopefully will find the time, and motivation, to write a blog. Other that that everything is going great here in Burkina. The school year is over, and a majority of my students passed. Everybody wins.

My Own Little Ecosystem

I onced lived in an apartement rent free. This may sound like a good deal to most, but it had its drawbacks. The reason I paid no rent was that I was in charge of cleaning the communal areas, and there was no bedroom for me so I lived in the spider/creature infested basement/garage and slept on a couch. Now dont get me wrong, this was an awesome deal and it ended up being one of the best places I lived. Upon moving in, however, my first task was to make my bedroom, or since there was no bed, my room, well actually since one of the walls was a garage door, it really felt as if I were living in some type of storage shed..... Anyways, I had to make my shed livable so that I would not wake up in the morning so injected with spider venom that I couldn't make it out my garage door. I immediately went to work with my newly purchased vacuum and sucked up all signs of insect, plant, and fungus life forms. On a side note, the Burkina school system teaches there children that mushrooms are a non-flowering plant. This is not that case, but really when will they ever need to know this fact in the future? Maybe during the next Burkina jeopardy tournament. Well, the daunting task took me most of the day, but in the end I was satisfied with my progress and that night slept worry free on my bed-couch. My bug-free zone lasted for a week or so, the I started noticing an obscene amount of roly-polys, or is it roly-polies. Where did the name roly-poly come from? As it turns out, I had upset the fragile ecosystem of the basement. The spiders and their webs were no longer there to catch the roly-polies. Thus the roly-poly men were able to find the roly-poly women of their dreams, fall madly in love, get married, reproduce like crazy, and live a long carefree life together until they became Old Mr. and Mrs. Roly-Poly rocking in their rocking chairs on the front porch of their house looking back on their lives and thinking how nice it is to own land. I am just glad it was only the roly-polies.

Then I moved to Burkina Faso and to the little village of Matiacoali, into my little bug infested hobit house. Having already had this ecosystem disturbance experience in the past, I had learned that spiders are our friends and can be allowed to live to catch flies, malaria carrying mosquitos and what not. Also, since I now had my protective mosquito net to sleep in, I had no worry of "bug attacks'' throughout the night. I embraced my new ecosystem and integrated into it. After integration, I soon realized that it wasn't only the spiders that were helping out. If I killed something such as a centipede or roach, I left it were it met it's untimely end. Then, during the night, the other inhabitants of my house that either live in my walls or in my drop ceiling descend and dispose of the body and evidence by morning. It is like a well oiled machine. I believe it is the ants that are doing the majority of my dirty work, but now they have gotten to an annoying population level and have started to bite me, leaving welts on my skin that last for weeks. I need to introduce the lizards that live in my ceiling into the ecosystem to keep the ants under control, but then I would have a lizard problem. Eventually this wourld turn into an ''I know an old lady that swallowed a fly" type of situation and there would be no end in sight. At the end of the song though, she does end up dying after eating a horse. Kind of an abrupt and traumatizing ending for a childrens song... I should teach that song to my English class. That and "There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza". I can't remember how that on goes though. Something about Liza being foolish and suggesting he fix the bucket in a way that would involve the bucket in the mending process. Silly Liza, but there is a hole in the bucket. It can't possibly live up to its bucketly duties with a hole in it.

Nine Month-aversary

I just celebrated my nine month-aversary of living in Burkina Faso, and I decided what better way to celebrate it than to go to Ouaga for the weekend to the monthly all you can eat breakfast at the international school. I gorged myself on pancakes and orange juice. It was basically the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have been trying, like always, to replay the last month in my mind searching for the interesting stories, but the pickin’s are pretty slim.

The second trimester is over. Already. All that is left for this coming week is the calculation of all of the grades and the statistics, and my fun old job of being the head teacher of the 5eme class. This trimester has been a huge change from the first trimester. One of my best friends (by the way I think that I am dyslexic, but only with ie and ei if that is possible. The words ‘friend’ and ‘weird’ are always a struggle for me.) in village is a 13 year old kid from my 5eme class that lives in the same courtyard as me and does my bidding on a daily basis. When I write it that way he doesn’t really sound like a friend, but more like a servant, but he asks to do it and supposedly likes it. Anyways, throughout the trimester, he slowly began to tell me the school rules that the other teachers had forgotten to inform me of. Apparently there are several reasons that a teacher will take off points from the students overall grade at the end of the trimester. The list that I have heard so far is as follows:

If the student is not in dress code
If the student is late for class
If the student is absent from class
If the student talks in class
If the student has spelling errors on a test regardless of the subject

All of these sound like common sense. It is the same in the states for the most part, but here in Burkina, in my classes the students grades are so bad anyways that the one point I should be taking off from a students grade because he forgot an accent on the last letter of the French name for the fibula, which if you are curious in French is péroné, could be the difference between them passing on to the next level and them being held back. I myself misspell French on a daily basis, and it could have been my fault that I misspelled it on the board in class. The French language is full of silent letters and useless accents in my opinion. Students start learning French in primary school and I can only imagine how difficult it is for them to go through school in their second language. For this reason I have been a little lax on the whole taking off points from grades. I have become, however, very good at threatening to take off points.

While I am not using my time threatening, I am trying to find ways to not get tired of eating rice every day. My parents sent me a bottle of chocolate syrup to put on all of the ice cream that I keep well stocked in my freezer, but I got tired of eating ice cream all the time and needed to come up with something else to put it on. Now I know that you all cant think of a better solution to this dilemma than to add it to rice, so that is what I did. Here is a riddle: What do you get when you mix chocolate syrup and rice? The answer that I was hoping for was something similar to cocoa crispies, but in all actuality all I got was something that tasted like chocolate covered rice. Who would have guessed that? Other failed attempts at delicious have been strawberry rice, raisin rice, and cinnamon rice. All tasted like rice covered with the substance in their respective names.

Back to classes and students, I finally finished the boring horrible 4eme book on geology. I celebration of this fact, and because I had two weeks left in the trimester without a book, I decided to have my class to geology presentations. I was really excited about this idea and told them all I was looking for creativity, and that they could do whatever they wanted to do in front of the class. They could write a song, draw a picture, etc., it was going to be awesome and fun, I thought. The first day of the presentations, however, was anything but awesome, and it didn’t bode well for the rest of the two weeks. I didn’t assign each student a different subject, my first mistake, so the first day all five presentations were on volcanoes. Sounds interesting, but each student had memorized the volcano chapter from the notes and recited for the class and I and then drew the same diagram from the notes of the volcano on the bored. All in all there were 15 carbon copy presentations on the volcano, and 10 carbon copy presentations on metamorphic rocks. I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate geology more than I already did, but after those two weeks I almost set the book on fire.

AHHHHHHHHHHH

So I think that I have been trying to write this blog for approximately four weeks. Really since about Thanksgiving and thing just kept piling on and making me not want to write it even more. Blogging has become the new bain of my existence. It is hard work. But in a nutshell, here is what has happened since last time I have successfully completed my first trimester of teaching in Burkina Faso! I know you are all excited for me, but please hold your applause until the end. Since there are so few teachers at my school, I got roped in to being professor principal for the 5eme class. This means that I have to deal with problems that the students have with the administration (luckily none have come up yet), and calculate the grades at the end of each trimester. This is actually a pretty easy job, it is just very repetitive and time consuming. I did however succeed in this task, and avoided all of the random Burkina holidays in the process. During to last week of school there were two holidays. One was legitimate, but the other was, from what I can understand, a day with no school because several years ago something happened between the president of Burkina and a reporter, and if we would have had school that day all of the students would have striked and thrown rocks at any of the teachers who showed up at school. Luckily, that morning I was stopped by one of the other teachers within site of the school and told not to go. As a precaution they had locked all of the doors of the school so that none of the student could enter.

After all of this hubbub and calculation, I was done and off to the land of wonder that is Burkina’s neighbor, Ghana. This brings my new grand total of countries visited to a whopping 3! There were eleven of ous in the beginning, and we all had our fingers crossed that there would be eleven of us in the end. The trip started off promising enough considering that we showed up for our nice air-conditioned, movied, 20ish hour bus that was scheduled to leave at 7 AM, and it took only untill 11 AM for it to actually start moving. Oh, and it turned ut that the nice air conditioned movied bus was an old, non-air-conditioned, non-movied, non-nice, seats coming off, jagged metal sticking out bus. In the end, we negotiated some free bananas from the bus company, and I am not sure what is written in your book, but in my book it is written that free bananas make everything better. Following this intense banana exchange, banana is a fun word to type... try it out, we were finally on our way to the promise land of Ghana where the people speak English and there is not a whistled kid as far as they eye can see. As we were getting closer to the southern tip of Ghana and the surroundings were getting junglier, I realiwed that Ghana is what I had envisioned when I checked yes to the Africa box on my Peace Corps application. I had two weeks to enjoy it, and many-a-thing happened, but I will just give the exciting ones.

Our bus stopped in Accra, Ghana's capital that smells like the worlds largest toilet, and we quickly continued on to Ada Foah, a village where a friend, Megan, of another volunteer, Christina, is doing sea turtle research. We all stayed there until after Christmas in a huge house that she shares with the other researcher, Andy, and it was able to hold all eleven of us comfortably. I saw my first sea turle, and then we were off to Busua and the Alaskan Beach Resort that was only five dollars a night and right on the beach. Now up until this point, I had been nursing a cold for the entire trip. It got to the point that I couldnt decide whether my lymph nodes in my neck were crazily swollen or I was developing a goiter. However, the magical healing powers of the Alaskan Beach Resort cured me. A few other volunteers and I went on a walk on some treacherous rocks near the ocean, and I of course fell and hurt my ankle, but like a trooper I forged on and about five minutes later I observed some interesting sea life that I wanted to document and I reached in my pocket to retrieve my sweet, water proof, drop proof, awesome Olympus camera I bought only a month before embarking on my PC adventure, and withdrew my hand and sadly found it empty. It turns out that when I had fallen, so had fallen my camera and memories. We went back to see if in addition to it being waterproof, it was also wave resistant and still there, but sadly the ocean had claimed it as its own. Luckily I had just sent home the memory that had most of my pictures on it with Ray, another volunteer, who had just left the country, so I shrugged it off, I mean it was only a camera, and limped on. We all spent a few more days on the beac and then on New Years Eve, the phone that I had been using in Ghana got stolen by a small child. Luckily this was already the end of the trip, so by the time I was fed up with Ghana it was time to go back to Burkina. I was not looking forward to going back to site and speaking French, but I know once I got there it would be OK.

I speant all day on transport and finally made it back to Matiacoali and realized that I had left the key to my house in the floor of the transit house in Ouaga. Never worry, the family in my courtyard was to the rescue zith screw drivers and hammers, and after only about five minutes they had it open. The handle and lock sadly had been destroyed and ripped out of the door, so I am now locking it with the elaborate bike lock, two chair, and belt approach. Back in Matiacoali, I have completed my first week of school, and I am still alive. My book total is now 34, and my food trunk is overflowing due to the 19 packages that I picked up in Ouaga.

This brings me to my next point, the package race. I would first like to just thank everyone for participating. I think that to date I have gotten more packages than anyone else in country, including the volunteers that have already been here for two years. So thank you to: Mimi Cromwell for the Halloween card; Grandma Mary, Jean, and Aunt Sandy for the food and school supplies; Grandma Pat and Papa for the food and ketchup; The Snowdens for the awesome running socks, food, and knife; Matt and Marlene for the biggest pakcage of wonder I have yet to recieve, Amanda Neal and her French class for the French Laffy Taffy, I gave it out to my English class the other day and they went crazy; The Fosters, Michael and Jennifer for the crazy amounts of honey mustard and a cool wind-up lamp for the latrine, and of course the 'rents for the obscene number of packages that they have sent me. I think that is everyone. If I have forgotten someone, it is only due to the fact that 19 packages is a lot to keep track of. That being said I would like to state that everyone who entered The Great Package Race is a winner, but in the end there can be only one. I would like to declaire that the new winner is Matt and Marlene Gile of Columbia Missouri for the largest box of wonder recieved thus far! Congratulations!

I think that is all of the crazy thoughts that I have for the time being. I would have posted some pictures, but.... you know. Hopefully the memory card will find its way to Republic soon and my marm can put some good ones up.