Yaani

I'm officially a month into my service and decided to reward myself with a trip to the capital this weekend. Well that, and it was Austin's birthday. Ouaga seems like a whole other world after being in the South West for so long. Pulling into town I realized how lucky I am to have a site that's nice and green and hilly...nothing against the dusty air of Ouaga..

There is still not much for me to report in terms of work since school hasn't started. Well officially it started on Friday but I'm told the kids and even all the teachers won't really get back for a week or two. Once classes start I will be able to observe classes and start meeting with parents and hopefully get started on a few projects.

I've had a few interesting days in my village since I last posted. One morning on the way to my latrine I was stopped by some guy who wanted water, I gave him a cup of water and then he (a teenage boy) started asking me if I had clothes that I could give him, to which I said I have clothes for myself but not for a boy. Then about 10 minutes later a guy came into my courtyard with a live chicken and asked me if wanted to buy it from him. To that I said, maybe next time. Before I had even sat down to have breakfast a whole crew of kids came to my door to say hi, I taught them handshakes and then they started asking for candy. Not the most relaxing morning I'll have to say, but it was one of those times where I think "only in Africa."

Two weeks ago I had a little excitement...any by that I mean I found two giant scorpions in my house within two days of each other. Luckily they're not poisonous here (so I'm told) but that doesn't make them any less scary in my opinion. Needless to say I was glad to leave my house for a day after that. I'm not sure if I posted about it but a few volunteers organized a bike tour to raise money for different projects in the Gender and Development committee here. They called it "Sur nos velos pour le Faso" and have a blog of the whole trip somewhere on the internet. They stopped through Diebougoug (13 k from me) on on of their last days of the tour, so I headed up to see them. We ended up with about 14 people in a tiny Burkina house for the night. I was glad to not be joining them for 90K of cycling the next morning.

Other than that, not much else has been going on. I had Dagara lessons last week and spent some time with my neighbors. I finished up the Steig Larssen trilogy that Allie and Christina sent me and have moved on to the random books I brought with me. Luckily here in the transit house (a house in Ouaga for all the volunteers to stay when they come) there are tons and tons of books that anyone can take back to their sites to read. I picked up a few that I'm excited to start up when I get back to my village.

A couple people have asked what my house looks like so here are a few pictures. I haven't gotten around to painting all the rooms yet (and the color was a litttttle brighter than I expected), and I still don't have much furniture, but here it is: