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.