McMorocco

On the 29th of July I officially brought my two years of Peace Corps Service to an end. My last day was complete with stacks of paperwork, and a final ceremonial cutting of my Peace Corps identification card. A few friends and I decided that in order to make our transition back to the USA a little bit easier, we would take a short trip to the second world, Morocco, to help us. The difference between Burkina and Morocco was astounding. In Burkina I spent nearly everyday waking up the the melodic sounds of donkeys and roosters and enjoying meals of rice and onions, but in Morocco, I found a veritable wonderland of silence and culinary delights. I spent a week and a half gorging myself on streetside ice cream vendors and McDonalds cheeseburgers. Thats right McDonalds. It might not sound that exciting, but to someone who hasn't had heavily processed, greasy, preservative filled tastiness in 2 years, it was amazing. The rest of the trip was agreed upon to be ok, but we all just wanted to get back to America.

Two days ago I arrived in America, and it is everything I remember it being and more. Now if you will excuse me, the baseball game is starting and my apple pie is getting cold.

Burkina in the Rearview Mirror

Peace Corps: The hardest job you will ever love.
One of the Peace Corps many tag lines. Over the past two years, I came to question this statement several times. Not so much the hardest job part, imagine yourself sweating in 100 degree heat infront of a class of 131 teenagers trying to pronounce in French some obscure type of mineral that you don't even know the name of in English, or imagine trying to grade 400 odd tests at night with no electricity credling a flashligh on your shoulder whil insects of the night dive bomb your face. So it wasn't really the hardest job part I doubted, as much as it was the love part. Sure, even in America everyone has good days and bad days, and yes my good days numbered way more than my bad, but love? The Peace Corps just sprang that "I love you" on me, and I still wasn't sure if we were at a point in our relationship that I could honestly and meaningfully say it back. But now that we ahve spent two years, make that two years and two months together, I think I might be ready to take that plunge and go all in. I love you Peace Corps, you truly are the hardest job I will ever love. I fear however that I may have proclaimed my love too late. Peace Corps service, at least for me, is one of those things that you dont really come to appreciate until it is over.
Peace Corps: The hardest job you will ever love once you are finished your service and have had time to reflect on the last two years of your life and the good times had during said two years.
That really isn't all that catchy. I guess the original is better, it just takes a little over two years to fully understand its meaning.

OPERATION: Go Insane!

It has been a while, but I am still alive. The lion has disappeared. When the rains started, it moved on to greener pastures, and left my village to defend itself from nothing more than donkeys and chickens. Since the last time, my school threw me a going away party, I took a hiking trip in Dogon Country in Mali, and I celebrated the 4th of July with some waterfalls. Only one month left. Back to village to pack and say my goodbyes. Next stop America.

Pictures

1. Hiking in Mali, found an oaisis

2. My school

3. Ouoba Boureima, treasurer at my school

4. President of the Matiacoali PTA

5. The Principal and all the other teachers at my school

6. MONKEYS! at my neighbors house

7. Hiking in Mali

8. Hiking in Mali

Foreva', eva'?

With exactly two months left to the day of my departure from Burkina Faso, the place I have called home for the past two years, I am faced with a dilema. How do you say good bye to someone forever? The simple response to such a question would be to simply open my mouth and utter the words good bye, but it is not as easy as it sounds. In the past when I was at a transition point in my life where I was moving to a different place or city, the words didn't seem to have as much meaning. Sure I said good bye, but it wasn't really good bye. In the states a good bye is merely an extended see you later. There is always the odd chance that you will see the person again someday. But in this situation, I find it highly unlikely that I will bump into Fatimata Thiombiano walking down the streets of Springfield, Missouri. Then again, who knows what the future has in store. I will just take it one person at a time, one good bye at a time.

On another scarier note, a lion has been terrorizing the villagers about 10 km from my village. It has to date eaten two children, attacked one grown man, and several cows. It is actually a family of eight lions with only one angry old one, so I am told. The latest attack was just yesterday, but they have all been outside of my village and nowhere near where I live. There are people that go out on a weekly basis to find and kill this lion, but have yet to be successfull. This however is not cause for alarm. I am perfectly safe and if this ever did become an issue in my village, Peace Corps would be the first to know and I would be the first to leave. Once they do kill the lion, they are going to bring it back to my village and let me take pictures of it.

Picrues Above:
Dust Storm
Dust Storm
Trees in shower after I threw out all the duds
Corn
School
Teachers

Super White

At first I didn't like being called nasara, or o bopienno, or le blanc or any other number of ways the locals had for saying white person/foreigner. I would introduce myself to everyone, kids and adults alike, so that they would start yelling my name instead of chanting, "white person, white person". I would get angry that they only saw me for my skin color and I was only a random white person without a name of my own. Then I embraced it. I was THE WHITE. I was a superhero whose super power was the ability to glow in the dark, and give out candy faster than a speeding bullet. I would get suspicious if I was told by the kids that there was another foreigner they saw in the market on the way to school. Who did they think they were? Matiacoali is only big enough for one THE WHITE. There is no room for THE WHITES. But in three months, I will move back to America and back to my mild-mannered alter ego. Who will defend the fair village of Matiacoali in my absence from such super villans as The Girl Disempowerer? I will have hung up my white cape in retired as THE WHITE. I, being the third education volunteer in my village, am the last of my kind. I have heard rumors that I will be replaced by a Girls Education and Empowerment volunteer that will work with the primary school. If that is the case, The Girl Disempowerer doesn't stand a chance. I just hope that the villagers of Matiacoali, will not forget me as THE WHITE, THEIR WHITE.

Showering in a Forest

Last week my village received the first rain of the year, the only precipitation since August of last year. These are called the Mango rains and I have been told that they signal when the tiny mangoes are ready to eat. It is believed that if you eat them before the mango rains you will get meningitis. I have tried to convince my friends that there is no way that this is possible, but I was about as successful as the time I tried to convince them that the monkey in the village was a baboon and not a gorilla, this even with visual aids of the two. The same day a huge lizard was killed outside my house and its tongue was ripped out. If you leave the tongue in after you kill it, it comes back to life at night and eats your baby. Who am I to question? So the mango rains came and they came with a vengeance. At first it was a nice rain and I was outside jumping in puddles with kids getting who knows how many water born illnesses, then the wind picked up and branches started falling. I took shelter with my puddle hopping friends in my house and then it started to hail. Everyone, kids and adults alike, where running outside and snatching up pieces of hail and popping them into their mouths with looks of mixed excitement and pleasure as if they were pieces of candy hurled at the earth from above. I suppose I would have done the same thing if I hadn’t been spoiled by America and grown up with ice only w few feet away at any time of the day or night. Oh, another weird village thing, apparently the women are afraid to go the fields by themselves because of the gorilla danger. What gorilla danger you ask? First of all, there are no gorillas in Burkina Faso, but one would assume women would be afraid of angry gorilla attacks. One would be wrong. The women are afraid of a gorilla having its way with them. I am also told that gorilla-human hybrid babies exist from such encounters. Not right now of course, but in the past the friend of the friend of the friend of the sister of my neighbor had a monkey baby. It was all covered with hair and had long monkey fingers but it didn’t survive more than a year. God doesn’t approve of monkman babies, I am told. But again, who am I to question?

With only four months left of my Peace Corps service, I have realized that it is now or never for all of the secondary projects that I have thought about doing over the past two years. I put some of them off for far too long and if I started them now they will never by finished, so I decided to focus on one and go all out. I am going to try to accomplish a massive tree planting in the courtyard of my school and transform it form a barren, rocky redness similar to the surface of Mars to a green, shady oasis inviting to the enlightenment of young minds. Several tasks needed to be accomplished in order to make this vision of green a reality. First, talk to my principal and see if he was onboard with plan oasis. He was all about it, especially when I told him it would be free wince all of the labor would be performed by me and the students. Second… seeds. What kind? Here do I get them? Where do I find my misplaced green thumb? Who can answer all of these questions? My friendly village forester, a.k.a. tree guy, that’s who. I trotted on over to his office, I actually more walked than trotted, and I probably sweat more than walked, it is hot in Africa, but he was not there and I was on a tight schedule to get to Fada, buy my seeds, and get back. When I got to Fada, however, I immediately regretted this decision. Fada is a big place, and I had no I idea where they sold seeds. I reasoned that plants like water so I should head towards the city water hole. It is really a large pond/lake thing in the middle of the city that supplies the city with water. I am sure there is a better word for this in English, but the French virus has infected that part of m brain and I have lost the word. It turns out my hunch was correct, plants do like water and luckily plants come from seeds and that was what I needed, but how many and what kind? I ended up buying an obscene amount of seeds for a similarly obscene amount of money. Equipped with huge sacks of seeds and partial knowledge of what to do with them, I returned to village with high hopes. The next task, fourth maybe, was to find sacks to plant them in and allow them to grow for two months before putting them in the ground. Water in America is sold in plastic bottles, in Burkina, it is sold in half liter plastic bags. Perfect. Also, in Burkina there are no trash cans, so the market is full of discarded and unloved water sacks for my tree planting needs. Perfecter (the fact that they are available, not that there aren’t any trash cans). Also I have dozens of children on spring break, annoying me and willing to do anything for a piece of candy. Perfectest. At the end of the day, I had about 700 water bags and no candy. Long story short, a mixture of sand, dirt, poop, and child sweat, I now have about one square foot to shower in since I put the 150ish trees in my shower, the only place the animals cant get to them. I never asked my principal how many trees he wanted to plant. I hope it is a lot, otherwise the volunteer who replaces me is going to have to shower in a forest.

Cart for ya?

I just finished up my close of service conference this week and we had our going away party last night. One would think that this means I will be coming home soon, and yes one would be correct. I will probably be leaving Burkina Faso around the end of July and then moving back to America and back to the real world full of economic crises and artery clogging fast food around every corner. My return to the real world, however, is forcing me to decide what I want to do with myself. My parents have already told me that my master plan of being a bum living in their basement was not a positive life goal and have encouraged me to either find someone elses basement or find a job. For some unknown reason, I chose the later. Finding a job is something I haven't had to worry about for almost 8 years. After selling my soul to Wal-Mart during high school, it just never came up. I refuse to go back to Wal-Mart. I will not be that 75 year old man that cant control my bodily functions as I recite, "cart for ya?" over and over and over. So I at least know where I will not be looking for a job, but that doesn't really narrow my possibilities. I have been looking into a dual Masters program at John's Hopkins in Nursing and Public Health. Peace Corps volunteers are given priority, who knows what that even means, and financial assistance. All in all it is a three year program starting with a year accelerated program to get my bachelors in nursing. After that I will apply to doctors without borders and come back to Africa for a while. Thus my life in a nutshell. My plan has changed everyday this week and has already changed today, so we will see how I feel tomorrow.

Cliffs we biked by on our safari trip

I am so cool

Children doing tricks for my entertainment

My future wife and my neighbors monkey

Electricital Technological Wonder What?!

I have not been to the internet since Thanksgiving which feels more like two years than only two months. I have enjoyed the last two months, but I fear that I am in the dreaded stage in my Peace Corps service that regardless of the fun and progress I am making in village, the new 2009 calendar that I have recently hung up in my hut haunts my dreams. This is not due to lucid dreams brought on by my malaria pills but to the fact that I can see with the ease of only flipping a few sheets the month of my departure. It is so close I can taste it and have started a countdown to the end. I am also losing my attention span that was already short to begin with. However, life goes on and the end of my Peace Corps service will probably come about before I am even ready to go. I don't know if I will be able to function in America and it will be really hard to say goodbye to all of the Burkinabe friends I have made. I will cross that bridge when it comes.

About a week after Thanksgiving there was the national Idependance Day celebration in Fada, my regional capital, on the 11th of December. The Burkina government invited all of the countries that have volunteers in Burkina Faso to attend and represent their country at a cultural fair and then on the actual day of independance in a parade for the President Blaise Compaore. Pretty exciting stuff, and since I am one of the volunteers near Fada I was one of the 8 chosen to represent America. I basically walked in not knowing what to expect and was amazed in the end. The cultural fair consisted mainly of surrounding countries, Japan, and America. We were then given tables and the fair was on. Every other booth seemed to have brought merchandise, painted calebashes, leather works, food, and we brought a life size cutout of Barack Obama on loan from the embassy, handouts in French of Barack's speech, and cheetos. We also made chilli and grilled cheese, not as American as apple pie and baseball, but we worked with the resources available. The one flaw in our booth is that everything was free. Thus it goes without saying that our booth was the most popular booth at the fair. The mornings would go by like a tidal wave and the afternoons would leave us with nothing but the tables remaining. Barack was also quite popular amongst the visitors with camera phones (from a distance he actually looked quite real). After two days of cultural exchange we were tired, but the fun was just begining. The parade was the next day and we had parade practice. Parades in Burkina are nothing like Parades in America. We were taught to march like soldiers swinging our arms and not smiling. The prospect of throwing candy to eager little children was out of the question. We had uniforms made out of the fabric for the holiday and looked good enough to be seen by the president from about a six foot distance with him standing in the back of a truck surrounded by security driving by. Luckily this is exactly what happened. The president drove by before the parade started to inspect us and we made eye contact. We are now basically best friends, but I will tell that story another time. Long story short, the Americans were the hit of the parade with everyone yelling, "Barack Obama!" as we marched by. Barack Obama indeed.

A few days after that was Christmas and since last year I celebrated my first Christmas in Ghana and threw my camera in the ocean I decided that this year I would spend it in village with my camera securely attached to my wrist. It was a fun time had by all that involved a morning of church singing that I didnt understand, then lots of food, then dancing. It was good but then when I went to bed at about midnight there were drums that went on until about 5am. Not so much good times.

Losing interest in typing this blog so long story short, after that I went on a bike trip through the animal parks near my village with two other volunteers. I did not get eaten by a lion. School started again, got visited by my Peace Corps boss and he brought me some packages out of which I ate two boxes of oreos in two days. Felt sick, but man was it worth it. I am now in Ouaga for a meeting and coming back in three weeks for a softball tournament. Hooray!

NOW PICTURES!!!

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.

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.

School, Solitude, and Sanity

It has been so long since I last blogged that I am having trouble figuring out how to start it. I am sitting in the Peace Corps office in Ougadougou with some other volunteers and sharing stories about our first couple weeks of school so far, and everyone’s experience has been different and interesting. School started officially in the country on the first of October, but for most of the schools it starts a few weeks later because school starts about the same time as the harvest for all of the villages. In Matiacoali, school started on October 2, and surprisingly a majority of the students were there. The education program in Burkina is currently going through some type of reform process and the CEG in Matiacoali is on of the pilot schools testing out the program for the first year. I am still a little fuzzy on the whole idea of this reform process. Unlike in the states there is no taxation in Burkina so the students have to pay each year to attend school. In small villages this is really hard because most of the families don’t have a lot of spare money that they can invest into the education of their children. This means that a lot of the children are uneducated and work with the family instead of attending school. To remedy this problem, because education is very important, is trying to lower that cost of attending school to increase the number of students. This year, at the pilot schools, 6eme the equivalent of 6th grade is free, and 5eme, 4eme, and 3eme, the three levels above are half price. This is awesome, but I am not quite sure why this needs to be tested in pilot schools.

I feel that I am teaching different subjects each week, but I think that it is finally settled that I am teaching 6eme SVT (biology), 5eme English, and 4eme SVT. They are all working out decently well. My 6 class has 131 students and about 14 inches of space between the front desks and the chalkboard. I taught a lot of 6 during model school and I am used to the subject so the 131 students don’t even phase me. My other class of biology is another story. The subject is geology, which I don’t find either particularly interesting or particularly useful. The entire first part of the three part book is about identifying rocks, and what would happen if you put a rock on glass, and is the rock permeable to water, and what happens when the rock is exposed to hear. Who cares? I don’t, and if I don’t find the subject interesting or useful, how am I supposed to expect my students to? Finally English, English books do not exist for levels 6 or 5 classes in Burkina Faso, so I guess that the teachers are just supposed to make up what they learn in the class. I know English, so this should be easy, but it is proving to be more of a challenge than previously expected. I think that in my grammar class in the 6th grade I sailed through with an average of a C, and that is pretty pathetic. All of the grammar is in my brain somehow, but I don’t know how to explain it. I am slowly getting better and I don’t think it will be a problem, but right now it is difficult.

Other stuff has happened, but I am running out of time. So real quick….

I am rocking probably about a solid 1.6 on the poop scale, and by solid I mean semi-solid.

I think that in the package race the parents are winning with sending me books for class and food, Zack is a close second with sending me the best food so far (the chocolate peanut butter and Dairy Queen honey mustard), the grandparents with priceless ketchup, and then friends. What is the deal? I leave the United States for 5 months so far and you forget about your good friend Caleb.
Note: These rankings are not final and can still and will be adjusted for the remainder of my stay in Burkina Faso

I live in perpetual Halloween town in my village. The children believe that I am a never ending supply of sugar and free things that I would be more than happy to give them, but that is just not the case.

I have found several look/act alikes in village. I have found a young version of Seth Snowden, and also a version of Flo from Wal-Mart, only this version is not nice and does not call me by the nickname of “boo”.

Andy McMurtrey would be quite the attraction here as he is currently in the states. With out realizing it I perform with my hands the act that after observing Andy, and after practicing with Ashli for many months, where it sounds like they are farting, and it is pretty much the coolest thing in village. I am dragged by children to their houses to show their families this and they are just amazed. I can only imagine how impressed they would be with that squid and finger thing.

That is pretty much all that I can remember at the moment. I need to start writing these things down as they occur so that I remember them when I finally get to a computer. Also, I have taken lots of pictures in village, but I forgot my jump drive at my house in village, so the next time.