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.

Disclaimer

The post below contains a riskay picture. However it is an everyday occurence in Burkina. I was also going to post some pictures of my house, but my camera is dead. Thanksgiving in Burkina was awesome. We killed a pig, turkey, and several chickens. Killing the pig was a very traumatic experience, but afterwards, it was very tasty.

Thanksgiving in Randomland

I am currently sitting in the wonderful air condition Peace Corps office in Ouaga enjoying an oreo and listening to American music on a friends iPod. In my mind I am in America right now. For Thanksgiving I will be attending a dessert party at the ambassador's house. I am a pretty important person if you didnt know. I have exausted all of my energy on the internet already, so I dont think that I have enough steam to relate the goings on since the last post. In a nutshell, I am still alive and kicking in the rocking city of Matiacoali. Most of my students passed the test and a few of them with actual good grades. I have about two full weeks of teaching left, and then I am done with the first trimester. We are in the works of planning our Christmas in Ghana, but since I will be going to an English speaking country, how bad can it be? I have recently come to terms with one of the problems that I previously thought Burkina had a problem with, the trash problem. The problem, as I saw it, was that there were no dumpsters and no trash collection program, but then I realized that this was not needed. In Burkina, instead of dumpsters, they have goats. If you are inexperienced with the awe inspiring wonder that is the goat, allow me to educate you. Goats eat everything, whether it be food scraps, or like in the cartoons, old tin cans. For this reason, I think that the trash collection program in Burkina is actually better than that of America. There is no need to take the trash out to the dumpster when the "dumpster" has the ability to come to the trash. Burkina has herds and herds of mobile "dumpsters", and I am going to make it my secondary project to improve this program by increasing the number of "dumpsters".

small child

small child

chillin'

me and child

Rachael, neighbor, cookin' some to









My church

Brain Explosion

I feel as if I have been out of touch with the world for so long! I have now officially been teaching for over a month, which leaves only a little over a month until Christmas break. I love the Burkina school system. I seem to have gotten into the swing of the whole teaching thing, but I still find it difficult to look forward to going to school each day. I am sure that will come with time, I am just tired of waiting for everything to get better. It is happening to slow and all at different times. I need to find Burkina Faso's fast forward button, or even better, its easy button. On the plus side, I think that the french language and I have reconcilled our differences. I am still having some trouble with the whole conversation aspect (Burkinabè talk really fast), but in the classroom I pretty much rule.

Surprisingly, my favorite class to teach is English. There isnt really a book for the class, so at first I was really worried, but now it is awesome. I think this is due to the fact that I just so happen to be a fluent genius in the English language. I know all there is to know, unlike in other subjects when I am afraid there is some piece of information that I have forgotten. One of my students came to my house to ask if I had a book with the conjugation of all English verbs, and I happily responded that I did not, and that all of the knowledge was in my head. Outside of class, I am slowly introducing my own English slang to the kids that live in my neighborhood. My greetings with some of them consist of "Yo yo, what up!", and "What up G!". It is awesome. After two years I will have taught them to say all kinds of sweet stuff. It is fabeled that another volunteer, in an undisclosed location, taught kids in his village that curse words were English greetings. I dont plan to do anything like that, but it is funny.

SIDE NOTE: This French keyboard is meking me angry. Why cant keyboards be universal? It just took me forever to find the question mark! It is stupid!

I gave my first tests this week in both of my science classes and my one english class. On the upside, I only played review games in all of my classes, but on the immediate downward slope, I now have about 300 tests to grade. If I had been thinking about this number as I was writting the tests I might have made them a little bit easier for my sake so that the 300 tests wouldnt haunt me in my vivid larium dreams every night. My only hope is that my students in Mati do better on my tests than my students did during model school.

I joined to Peace Corps for many reasons. Contrary to popular belief, these reasons did not include not being able to fart with confidence, sustaining myself on rice and Hardee's ketchup packets alone, or even the daily fixing of a flat tire on my bike because apparently all of Burkina's vegetation has an armor of ever resistant thorns that litter the ground. One of the reasons that I did have, however, was to see if I could survive with out one of my best friends that we all know and love. His friends know him as Sam, but you might knoz him better as Mr. Electricity. I have survived thus far, but I do miss him. Looking around in village, people have found ways to survive without it. Instead of children zoning out in front of the television, they are thoroughly entertained with the rigorous activity of playing with for example, my trash... or really anyones trash for that matter. Whether it be a plastic bag, tin can, or piece of string, they will find a game to play, or a way to annoy me with it. For an hour straight, to my dismay, a kid played with my watch because if a button is held down it beeps once every ten seconds or so. This apparently was the coolest thing in Burkina since those whistles, because he was entertained beyond belief. I have however found a way to put these electrically deprived children to good use. I previously wrote of the fly problem that is plaguing Burkina, and that fact holds true for Maticoali. For a while, I toyed with the notion of finding a carnivorous plant like a venus fly trap that I could place around my house, but then another thought came to my mind. I had recently purchased a fly swatter in Ouaga, but the fly swatter, unlike the plant, required some sort of human intervention "effort" to produce the desired results, and I, being the lazy person that I am, saw this as its immediate failure. Then, as usual, my mind drifted to the topic of child labor, and an idea came to me. It oddly came in the form of some type of math equation, and looked something like this:

constantly present children + 100 cfa fly swatter = game * happy me
Now I know this sounds crazy, but I tried to balance this equation and solve for happy me, and it worked. It was like I was Tom Sawyer, and my fly swatter was my paint brush. I called a few of them into my house, showed them how much fun I was having, and the next thing I knew it was a hit. I probably have a kid once a day come over to play this game. This realization opens the door to numerous possibilities. Next thing on the agenda is turning doing the dishes and writting my lesson plans into a game. Soon, I will have even less to do, if that is possible. It will be excellent... or maybe I should rethink this plan. With absolutely nothing to do, I would go crazier than I already have.

Speaking of free time on my hands, it seems that Harry Potter has taken over my life, and he has brought all of his literary friends with him. To fill my television void, I have taken up the lost art of reading. Perhaps you have heard of this mysterious practice that was used as a form of entertainment before the existance of television. I know it is hard to believe that life even existed before television, but yes it is true. I have become obsessed, and I cant stop. I guess the first step is admitting I have a problem. To track my progress with this addiction, I have added a section to my blog of the books I have read. I am well past merely a social reader and am clearly addicted.

Back to the subject of child labor, a bat flew into my tiny hobbit house and a small child came to my rescue. The bat was flying around, and I, not being a hobbit, had to crawl on the ground so that it didnt fly into my face. I dont think I have ever been in such close proximity with a bat in my life, and this being the day before Halloween, I wasnt going to take any chances. I called a neighbor kid over, who brought along his trusty stick, and I hid in my mosquito net. I figure that if it is resistant to mosquitos, it must also do the same to bats, but I doubt if it protects against undead vampires. I will have to check the label next time. Long story short, no help from the kid, I used my super power, that I thought was only good at killing roaches while I slept, to vanquish the bat, which I can do while awake. (I attempted to use the roach power by the light of day, but with no noticable result.)

After that, Halloween came and went in Africa with little to no excitement the day of. On a side/sad note, thinking back on all of my past Halloweens, it is hard to remember one that I did not spend in the walls of a Missouri Wal-Mart. I have spent my last 6 there. I realize this because the first thing I think of when I think of Halloween is the bucket/shopping cart full o' candy left for the door greeters to hand out to he unfortunate kids that are, like me, forced to spend their halloween in the wonderful world that is Wal-Mart. I zould spend my whole shift digging to the bottom looking for all the good candy and leaving all of the peanut butter flavored taffy for the kids. I gave my soul to Wal-Mart, and the least they can do is give all the good candy to me to fill my soul-less void and not waste it on the children. I dont know if I have ever gotten that sould back since I quit. If not, I am sure it is going to cost an arm and a leg to ship it to Africa.

My favorite thing about Matiacoali is the people. The adults are all very nice and understanding, and when the kids arent asking for candy they are pretty good to. There is a man in the market who speaks French and Morè, and it seems that he has taken it on as his personal mission to teach me Morè. At first I avoided him because he refuses to speak anything but Morè, and I dont know enough to say anything but that I dont speak it. This was really annoying, but I knew I couldnt avoid him for two years, so I started walking by him every now and then and speaking in the few Morè words that I knew, and after a week or so I could understand the conversation. It seems to actually be working, and now I look forward to talking to him. There are so many languages in my head though, that I often get confused and have to take a minute to think about it.

One of the biggest changes that I have seen in myself since beginning this is my food preferences. In the US vegetables were my sworn enemy. I didnt like them, and from what I heard from my allies, potato and corn, the werent all too pleased with me either. Since I have been here, I guess because my body is so deprived of bodily nutrients, I eat any and all vegetables. When I found out the major crop of Burkina was onions, I was horrified. Now, I cant get enough. It makes me question if all of those burgers at Booches in CoMo would have been better, if that is possible, if I had veered from my normal path of only ketchup and mustard.

I am out of time. I hoped to post pictures, but I will try to do that later.