June and July

I have no excuse for my lack of posts other than sheer laziness, but I'll attempt a brief rundown of the events of the last 2 months.

Ghana:
The vacation was much much needed as I approached the 1 year mark in country. Kristin, a fellow GEE volunteer and I headed down to the beach for 8 days. After dealing with the most heinous woman in all of West Africa at the Ghanain embassy, we made the 16 hour bus ride, another 5 hour bus ride, and a 1 hour taxi ride to a quiet eco-lodge on the beach. The food was great and the owners were super accomidating – especially after our lack of budgeting skills that left us a little short of the bill (whoops). Despite it being rainy season, we managed to make up for the lack of sun our thighs had seen in the past year.
The next stop was a more touristy beach town – Busua, where we did more tanning, lounging, and eating. I’m told this was one of the stops in Endless Summer, but have yet to confirm it. It was here that I had my first experience with both lobster and swordfish. I personally think that lobster tastes like a big shrimp but A: It’s not the season and B. I, the former vegan, can’t claim to be a seafood connoseur.
Our final stop was Cape Coast, antoher beach town where we stayed only one night. It was here that we had our only encounter with another American the entire trip. Thanks to a broken door handle, a college student drunkenly stumbled into our room in the middle of the night thinking it was his own. I personally thought we were going to be murdered (being completely blind without contacts and it being the middle of the night), meanwhile, Kristin was laughing at the situation. Although the normal reaction to someone screaming bloody murder would be to turn and leave, our new friend responded with “Chill outttt” and proceeded to ask if he could just look and make sure his stuff was not indeed in the room. This all happened at about 3 in the morning and luckily we had to catch a 4AM bus – quite the wake up call. It took a little while before my heart rate returned to a normal pace and I could laugh at the absurdity of it all: me standing on our bed tangled in a mosquito net screaming at the top of my lungs while some drunk college kid, who probably didn’t remember any of it the next morning, stood in the doorway with Kristin finding it funny.

T.O.T.
When we got back to Burkina it was straight into Training of Trainers – where we learned all the things to (and not to) say/do to the new trainees who arrived on June 12th. The training lasted a week was really more for the new Peace Corps staff who teach languages than for the volunteer trainers. It was, however one of those points where I realized how long I’ve been here, and while I wouldn’t say it’s flown, I don’t know that I ever actually pictured myself at the point of training new volunteers at the 1 year mark.

TEFL:
After a few brief days in village during which I cleaned my house and played with my puppy, I went back to Ouaga for a Teaching English as a Foreign Language week-long training. Although I’m not a teacher, I held a club with middle schoolers last year and amd hoping to be able to help our more next year. The formation was…interesting. The man in charge, who was Burkinabè and therefore not a native English speaker, showed lots of 80s movies and had us practicing activities with eachother. It wasn’t entirely futile – I did learn somethings about lesson planning and it was entertaining (however politically incorrect) to watch my friends role play as if they didn’t know how to speak English.

4th of July:
I spent my second 4th of July in Burkina lounging by a hotel pool in Bobo Dioulaso. It was a dady made especially patriotic by the red and blue pagne overalls that Hayley and I had our tailor make us. We didn’t grill hot dogs or set off fire works, but we listened to just about every song mentioning the homeland on about 10 different people’s Ipods.

Village:
After the whirlwind traveling and trainings of the past 2 months, the pace of life back in village seems incredibly slow. School is officially over (even though students and teachers alike stopped coming weeks ago). The rains have started which is bad for my deteriorating house but good for planging, so everyone is out in their fields. Many villagers have small houses out in their fields which can be over 20 kilometers away, so often times they sleep our there. Teachers don’t make the trip in from Diebougou anmore since their houses and families are there. Needless to say it’s quiet around Navielgane. I’ve been using my time to plan for the next school year and certainly catch up on my reading.

A friend of mine pointed out a while ago that while my blog is titled 101 Things to Do with Mud, I haven’t listed any, so I’ll end this already-too-long-post with a few examples:
Bricks: Villagers make mud bricks for the construction of houses, walls, latrines, etc. Unless they’re cemented over in some form or fashion, this doesn’t always stand the tests of rain and time – hence the fact that last rainy season a sizeable portion of my courtyard wall had a little accident.
Cleaning: Sounds counterproductive doesn’t it? Many women use mud to clean pots which sounds crazy – unless you don’t have sponges, in which case the dirt serves as the abrasive surface that removes burned rice residue off of pots.

Happy Mother's Day

I’m back from a long hiatus from posting. If any of you happen to follow the news on Burkina (which I didn't until I lived here), the political situation has been a little tense these days. The basics are this (and I’m going to try and keep this as politically correct as possible): In February a student died while in police custody and students rioted (school strikes, burning buildings etc.) in response to what they believed to be corruption and unnecessary police brutality. School was basically cancelled nationwide off and on for the next month to prevent further incidents. Then unrelated events concerning military officers opposing the sanctioning of fellow officers (on at least two separate occasions) led to military unrest. In addition; an annual scheduled protest of the high cost of living went a little further that usual. Stores were looted throughout the capital. On top of all of this, other military protesting involved officers firing their weapons in the air led to a few casualties by fallen bullets: All of this you can find online at various news sources if you look hard enough.

The president reacted to all of this by completely dissolving his cabinet; re-electing a new prime minister and meeting with the heads of military, police, etc to discuss reforms. He appointed new members to his cabinet, eliminating some superfluous positions along the way. After all of this further protests by worker unions prompted to promise lowering the income tax among other things. I have never enjoyed politics, nor was I really one to follow the news at home, I know I’m leaving out events, but this has basically been the situation as I’ve seen it. Through each of these events we’ve been updated via texts and phone calls. As of now however, everything has calmed down and we’re all back to business as usual…

The most frustrating thing about this situation has not been safety. There has never been a moment when I’ve felt unsafe – maybe unsettled but never unsafe. I live in a village of about 2,000 people – few of whom have ever been further than the 15 K away that it takes to get into the nearest town. Clearly these aren’t revolutionaries making demands of the president – they hardly know why school was cancelled for so long (and I mean that, not to insult their intelligence in any way, but merely to state the facts).

What is difficult about the situation is the mindset that it has put some of the volunteers in. Of course no one is to blame but the nature of the situation is that it changes daily. Unfortunately this has meant interruptions to any work that people might be doing. It has been difficulty to start projects when we don’t know if we are going to get to see them through. Various conferences and meeting were cancelled or rescheduled multiple times – making it difficult to try and plan for the upcoming months and weeks. It is unfortunate that our training group’s service has been so exceptional starting in July with our unexpected move, but I think we all knew coming in that it wouldn’t be the easiest two years of our lives. Luckily; everything has calmed down for the most part for a little over a week now and everyone is starting to get back into somewhat of a normal routine.

On the work front I recently started making liquid soap with several women to sell in our village market. The first group was the AME (PTA for moms) at my primary school. They were eager to do it again, and I have since had success with three other groups who have sold the soap for about 50 cents a bottle in our market. I’m excited that this has been such a success because not only does it encourage good hygiene habits among my villagers, but the women are able to take in a profit upwards of 4,000 CFA (roughly 8 dollars) with each 16 litre batch they produce. That might not sound like a lot, but for a woman with no previous income, it surely makes a difference. This group has been a good resource for me as a link into the community. They have expressed interest in learning how to do other income generating activities that I can teach as well as an eagerness to hold formations in family planning among other things. I’m hoping that the next school year will bring lots of success with them.

Another thing that we’ve finally gotten off the ground is our girl’s soccer team. Hayley is the real expert on the sport, but I’ve been able to run a few drills in the instances that she has had to travel on practice days. Although we’re running out of time before the end of the school year, it has been rewarding to see how excited the girls are to be playing. They seem to have a blast running round; and are surprisingly tough – playing barefoot and frequently taking spills onto the hard dirt field. I think we will have a pretty legitimate team next year.

Since I last posted I also found out that I’m going to be training the new group of trainees that comes in June. It’s hard to believe that in two months I will be at the one year in country mark. That being said it’s about time for a vacation. A trip to Ghana is in the works and I’ll be sure to let you all know if that becomes a reality.

Oh, and I got a puppy! He still needs a name but the white one with the collar is Hayley's and her name is peanut.

8 Mars

Although it was started in the US, International Women's day was something I hardly knew existed, let alone celebrated until I arrived here. On March 8th, there was a regional celebration for the holiday in a neighboring village of Tiankora. My neighbor Hayley and I met another volunteer who did her service there (and is now doing a thrid year in another town) at her old host family's house. We eventually made our way to where the parade was being held and because Jen Used to live there (and sadly because we're white) we got front row seats for the whole event. After a series of admittedly boring speeches (by mostly men) in both French and the village's local languange of LObiri, there was traditional lobi dancing and a prade featuring a collection of women's groups from the surrounding area, and one seemingly random group of men. Afterward there was a reception and whil we had been invited (via Hayley's host family) to eat lunch at the mayor's house, we ended up going back to Jen's family's to eat with them. The daay was rounded off by a soccer game between Tiankora and a friend's village. The teams were both all male, and we didn't stick around to see who won. At the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that this was just another holiday for men during which the women do all he cooking and the men have all the fun (so much so that Hayley dubbed it 8 Mens). Of course I may be a little biased being both a female and a girls empowerment volunteer, but my suspicions were confirmed several weeks later, when sporting my women's day fabric, a male teacher asked what I did for "les hommes" that day to celebrate the holiday. Confusing and completely backwards I know. In talking with some female teachers from my primary school, we deciede we are going to plan a celebration next year that truly honors the women of my village, and not just by 'letting' them cook huge feast for their husbands.

On another completely unrelated not, some of you may have seen Burkina in the news lately (ok only if you're looking really hard). While I'm not really supposed to discuss the politics of the situation. I wanted to let everyone know that my little corner of the country has remained fairly calm. I feel 100% safe and the peace corps has been fairly up front with us concerning the current 'unrest' around the country. As of the posting of this entry, things are calm countrywide. And that's all I have to say about that.