Oh hey Im back!

After a long break from blogging, I've finally got something for you. Tell your friends!

So the biggest news that I have at the moment is that I hit my one year mark in Burkina Faso on June 12th. Big congrats to all the other volunteers who have made it this far. A huge thanks to everyone who has supported me through this. I wouldn't be able to do this without my family and friends. The next 15 months are going to fly by, and I can't wait to see everyone again.

I am currently writing this from a house in Juan les Pins, France. We have been here for over a week now, and it is going to be very difficult to leave. Traveling from Ouaga to Nice went very smoothly, and I got an incredible view of the Atlas Mountains in the morning. There was one unexpected stop in Marrakech. Though at this point I am used to travel taking far longer than expected. Unfortunately, my family had to wait at the airport in Nice for several hours. I arrived to blue skies and warm temperatures. It was a welcome departure from the crippling heat of Ouaga. Everyone was exhausted from traveling the first day so we took it easy. We ate seafood at a restaurant next to the sea, drank Rose, and enjoyed being reunited.

So we've just been enjoying all that The Cote D'azur has to offer, eating lots, drinking a bit too much, and enjoying the pool.

So why haven't I updated in so long?

Truth be told I've been very busy. I am currently looking for a site transfer (goodbye Dori). I've been pulled out of my site indefinitely because of an unspecified security threat. Please do not worry, it is business as usual for the other 100 volunteers currently serving in Burkina Faso. The problem was specific to my region, and I was simply told not to return until they receive further information. Thats all I can really give you for now unfortunately. I've been spending time in Ouagadougou developing training materials for the new group of volunteers who arrived last week. They arrived last week! how exciting is that?

Burkina Faso is currently expanding as a Peace Corps country, so we are receiving a group of around 70 volunteers. This will almost double the current number. Upon my return from beautiful Juan les Pins, I'll be training the new volunteers. This means I'll get to meet and spend time with all the newbies.

As for now the pool is calling my name! A bientot!

Work and such

So I'm currently at our office enjoying some Chuck Brown, James Brown, and P. Funk on Pandora Radio. I'm gathering resources to put on a formation in Dori on the 20th. Heres the basic outline.

1. Educate primary school students on fecal-oral disease transmission, as well as the virtues of latrine use. Many students defecate in a field near the school. This would normally not be problematic, however there are over 200 students and many of them use the same field to play soccer (gross!).

2. Teach proper handwashing techniques, and install a handwashing station next to the latrines at the primary school.

3. Make 15L of liquid soap with local woman, therefore encouraging proper handwashing at home, as well as at school. Soap making can also be used as an income generating activity for local women, allowing them to have money for school supplies for their children.

Following this I'll be heading over to Djibo; to assist Mr. Charles Casler with a girls camp. We don't have specific activities nailed down yet, but theres going to be alot of camp games, and hopefully a little bit of education as well.

Thats about what I'm up to at the moment. And now Pandora is playing Rob Base, and Digital Underground...So I'm going to do a dance.

Just about 10 months...

Crazy to think about it. Time has a funny way of passing here. There are some days that seem to drag on and on, but when I get to the end of the month I look back and say, "Where did march go?"

Work is finally picking up (fingers crossed). I'll be heading to Ouahigouya (wah-ee-goo-ya, say it fast its fun) in a week with Maiga Issoufi, a counterpart of mine, to attend a formation put together by Tufts University. I have visions of young female grad students who are thorougly impressed by my rugged African lifestyle (fat chance). Can't blame a guy for dreaming though.

Congeé (spring break) is over and so things are slowly picking back up. I hope to meet with a director at the High School sometime this week to talk for the umpteenth time abou starting an English club.

We just received some grant money to do work with sanitation and water. I think that Dori is a prime candidate for this kind of project. I hope to collaborate with some Japanese volunteers to do some latrine maitenence and education. I essentially want to teach all the kids at my primary school to use the latrine, and not my front yard. I hope to do a series and educate them on handwashing and basic hygeine as well. To cap it all off I'd like to install a handwashing station complete with hygeine tips and handwashing instructions next to the school. I believe it can be done rather cheaply, and the director of the primary school will probably be on board.

In social news, I just DJ'd a closing of service party with the help of two other volunteers. Despite an hour long power outage, we still managed to rock the rooftop until the early morning hours. We danced, ate, drank some questionable punch, and even managed to raise some money for our Gender and Development committee (GAD). We did this with a date auction. 15 or so of us guys were auctioned off to the highest bidder. I offered to cook dinner and serve it by candlelight, and was content to be sold off to Leslie Otto (who happens to be a picture of beauty and class) for 12500 cfa.

Before the COS party I held "Man Camp" in Dori. Sometimes us Girls Education volunteers need a little male bonding. I constructed a grill in my courtyard and made barbecue sauce. We grilled meat, drank beer, and talked about how to improve the literacy rates of primary school students.

All in all is has been a good month. Now I just need to get through the blinding heat of April and then do some singing in the rain. And you can bet that when the first rains come I WILL be singing.

2010 til...

The ides of March are come

Well not quite, but what a good title eh? I wouldn't want to wait for the 15th just for accuracy's sake. It has been quite some time since I last wrote here, and as usual I'm having some trouble getting started.

How about this weather eh?

The Harmattan is in full effect here in Dori. The Harmattan is a trade wind that blows across West Africa, over miles of hot, sandy desert, and into my living room. It leaves everything covered in a fine dust. This dust carries microbes that give people colds as well. YAY HARMATTAN!

Standing in this wind at noon is comparable to having someone hold a blowdryer in your face, while someone else throws sand at you. If you can find two people crazy enough to do this for you I reccommend it. It is worth the experience.

On the plus side I haven't seen a mosquito in two weeks on account of how dry it is. I drink silly amounts of water, and cover my arms with shea butter (an export of Burkina Faso) to combat dehydration.

I was in Ouagadougou an awful lot during February. First, for a safety and security meeting, and secondly, for an IT committee meeting. In between these two meetings I had one week in Dori of absolutely nothing; and I was climbing the walls of my house. It is hard to get things moving here when you can't be around physically to see them through.

The IT commitee is currently developing a fileserver for volunteers with the hopes of increasing institutional memory. A large problem faced by Peace Corps is inherent in the rate of volunteer turnover. Each 24 months or so we have a completely new group of volunteers, who generally don't have a ton of access to information gathered by the previous volunteers. This leads to each group"reinventing the wheel". Our fileserver will allow volunteers to upload project reports into a searchable database. So when Raymond Pularski from Iowa shows up in Burkina Faso in 2014, he will have access to a wealth of project info. Lucky Raymond.

Eventually we'd like to take the server regional, and combine our resources with those of Ghana, Togo, and Benin. This is a bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but I've got faith that we can get the ball rolling.

We've also updated our public website: http://burkina.ath.cx It is shiny and new now, and much easier to navigate in my opinion. Click on "English" for the public site in English.

Thats all for the moment. I'll try to get another post in in a few weeks, but the porc au four is calling my name down the street.

Happy New Year!

So where to start? So much has happened since the last time I posted. I suppose the beginning is a good place.

I left for Ouaga the 14th of December. I closed my windows, and threw a sheet over my bookshelves in hopes of keeping the dust away. I said goodbye to my neighbors and started the hike to the bus station. Some people on the street thought that I was gone for good, and I had to stop to explain that I would return in January.

The mood at the transit house in Ouaga was great. Volunteers who haven't seen each other for 3 months were reunited. Every time the gate opened there was a "HEY! How are you! It's been so long!". I would compare it to watching people at an airport reunited with their families after a long trip. We all went out to dinner to celebrate the reunion.

Training started the next day. We had four days of it altogether. Training.

The first day we were in the conference room for 11 hours.

I used the lunches to scramble over to the Ghanaian embassy to work out my travel visa.

Training.

Training ended on Friday. We stopped early, perhaps to make up for the more grueling sessions earlier in the week. There was lots of time set aside for things like "group discussion and reflection". We decided unanimously that we could discuss and reflect over beers that evening if we felt so inclined. Several of us did.

Fast forward through 3 days of perfect, perfect, relaxing nothing and I was at the bus station. The bus was air conditioned, and the 24 hour ride was rather uneventful save for a woman who actually shook the back of my seat when I tried to lean back about 18 hours in to the trip. I calmly stated in my best "tired after 18 hours on a bus French" that it was the middle of the night, I had paid for my seat, and would do whatever I damn well please with it. I left out the part about, "if you pulled that on Greyhound...".

We arrived in Accra in the early morning hours, and caught yet another bus to Takoradi (about 6 hours). From there we took a cab (1 hour) to beautiful Busua Beach. I realized that I had forgotten my shorts in Ouaga, so I made some cut offs out of a pair of khakis. The sea welcomed me with open arms.

Our stay in Busua was perfect, save for the fact that it was far too short. Leslie Otto, a fellow volunteer asked me how long I'd like to stay the next time I go. I told her, "Two, maybe three years". The cost of living in Ghana is incredibly low, despite the level of development. Burkina is landlocked, so everything has to be shipped overland in to Ouaga, and then redistributed thereafter. This drives the cost of goods through the roof.

The place was touristy to the point that I really felt I was on vacation. Though not so much that it became tacky. Most other people there were young volunteers from various countries, with the occasional odd German couple riding their tricked out BMW motorcycles across the continent.

We left Busua feeling refreshed, and pushed on. We had planned to take a ferry from the village of Akosombo up Lake Volta, thus cutting the bus trip in half. When we arrived in Akosombo however, we found that the ferry doesn't run during the holidays. We found a cheap, yet clean and very comfortable hostel, and stayed the night.

Akosombo didn't feel like Africa in the least, at least what I've come to know of it. Here we've got a small community situated in a rolling jungle, next to an enormous lake. There were streets with 4 or 5 ranch style houses with driveways, garages, and even lawns. We're not in Kansas anymore.

We rose at around 4am to catch a tro-tro (small bus stuffed full of people) to Kumasi. We arrived in Kumasi just in time to not catch the bus that wasn't leaving for Ouaga that day. Good thing we got up so early. Thankfully we were able to find a bus that departed that evening, saving us a nights stay in Kumasi. We were thoroughly exhausted at this point and slept at the bus station. We did get to explore the market a bit in Kumasi, though we were so tired that elbowing our way through the narrow market streets became a bit much.

We did finally make it back to Ouaga, and without one nervous breakdown (if you ever want a solid travel companion, look no further than the Peace Corps). Though I did find myself getting a bit short with the cab drivers at the bus station. As usual, I was given a ridiculous price (to be fair, my baggage and tan screamed tourist). Eventually we found someone slightly less ridiculous. We were just happy to be done with all the cars, tro-tros, and busses.

I wish I had more photos to post, but I had difficulty charging my camera as Ghana has UK style outlets, and the adapter I have is French. C'est la vie. Go to Busua.

Which leads me on to NYE. A good time was had by all. We bounced around Ouaga, drank a bit much, and ended up at a small kiosk drinking beer and listening to blues music (yes, blues music)until the sun came up.

This has been a monster of a post. I wish everyone health and prosperity in 2010!

Six Months

As of today I have been here in Burkina for 6 months. That's half a year. It seems that it has gone by very quickly, though there have been weeks that have seemed to drag on and on. It's funny how time works that way. Stagé (our initial 3 months training) seemed to last forever, as it was a grueling process. The past 3 months in Dori have flown by though. I'm finally feeling very much at ease in my community.

I was at a Bar with some friends following a day long exposition put on by JICA (Japanese volunteers). Half of Dori seemed to be there. It took me a good 15 minutes to get from my table to the restroom and back because people kept stopping me to say hello. Maybe it was the beer, but something about that made me feel very good. Upon sitting back down, my friend Issouf said to me, "You know everybody here! You are bien integré". I had to laugh at this because Peace Corps really stresses integration in to our communities, though not necessarily our local bars.
Sidenote: I get stopped in the market, on the street, and at restaurants too.

The aforementioned exposition went very well. I showed up at 7am and got my booth set up. I had information on GEE as well as PC in general. Big thanks to Kait Brown for providing me with materials. Many of the attendees were children, though I was able to meet many adults who were more or less in the dark about what PC is and what we do in Burkina and around the world. It was really nice to be able to explain our work to people. What I found most valuable though, was the opportunity to exchange information with the other organizations in attendance. There are so many community organizations here that it is tough to keep them straight. Through talking to people, and exchanging brochures, I now have a catalouge of people with whom I can potentially collaborate. We wrapped things up around 5:30pm. Needless to say I was exhausted. We are in the "cold" season here, though it is still hot between 10-4. Sitting in the heat all day and talking non-stop really wore me out. Though it was really nice to go home knowing that I had put in a full days work; something I haven't done in 3 months.

I'll be leaving tommorow for Ouaga for another round of training. I'll leave tommorow morning and sessions will start on Tuesday morning and run until Friday. Following this I'll have a few days in Ouaga to relax before heading to Ghana for Christmas. I've heard wonderful things about Ghana. All the volunteers who have visited say it is a trip worth taking. We will depart the 22nd by bus. The trip lasts around 20 hours and I'm not looking forward to it, though I will be in good company. Thankfully bus services to Ghana are climatiseé (air conditioned). We have rooms in a small hostel near the beach, and I am really looking forward to spending Christmas by the ocean.

I'm very excited to see everyone from our GEE group in Ouaga tommorow. I've seen many of them since we got to our sites though there is a handful I haven't heard anything from.

Other stuff...

I went to Bobo Dioulasso (2nd largest city in Burkina) for Thanksgiving round 2. It is about 11 hours away from me and located in the south-west. It is beautiful. Bobo has tree lined streets, hills, and plenty of restaurants and night spots, without the chaos of Ouaga. The food was incredible (traditional Thanksgiving fare). We even had pecan pie. WOW. Everyone ate until they were stuffed and then we went out dancing. I paid mille francs cover to get into one of the dingiest clubs I've ever been in. The place was seriously gross, and this is saying alot. My tolerance for grossness is sky-high after 6 months. We all had a great time though, and once we got to dancing we forgot about the smell. We returned to the apartment we had rented to crash out in the early morning hours. The place was very nice. It was well furnished, with tile floors, beds, and two bathrooms. My head had just barely touched the pillow when I hear a very loud FFFSSHHHHHHHHHH!!!! coming from the room next door. Someone had gone into the bathroom to wash up before bed and a pipe burst, spraying extremely hot steam all over the place. The entire bathroom was filled with steam, and you couldn't see 2 feet in front of you. I decided to take action and got low, and searched for the shut off. I came out soaking wet, having obtained nothing except a mildly burned arm. We eventually called the house guard and he stood outside the door, which was still billowing steam. He looked at it for several minutes before giving a shrug that said, "whaddaya gonna do"? He went outside and shut off the water, and everyone calmed down and slept. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't take a hot shower in the morning. I suppose it is only right that the pipe burst, it just wouldn't feel like Burkina without some small mishap.

Much love to the volunteers in the south west and cascades who made it all possible.

So while I thought my Giardia had subsided, I was terribly wrong. Sometime last week I came down with a fever. I also experienced some other not so pleasant symptoms that I'll leave to the imagination.

Like most sequels, this one was far worse than the original. It was the same story as the first, only moreso. It's the classic Hollywood formula: "They liked the killer robot in the first movie, so in the sequel, we'll give them TWO killer robots!" However, this sequel made up for it's lack of originality with more explosions and profanity. After several nights of sprinting to my latrine at some horrible hour I finally gave in and had a kid run to the pharmacy and buy me some anti-biotics. It is incredible how quick my recovery was. For an entire week I was sluggish, feverish, and just plain grumpy; and now I feel like a new person.

I also received several care packages, four to be exact. One of which contained an Italian Salami and a wheel of Fontina Cheese. Does life get any better? I submit that it does not. Big thanks to Mrs. Marocco for that. Also among the care packages were bags of M&Ms, mixed nuts, and Mary Jane candy, which I am now healthy enough to enjoy!

On to Thanksgiving...

I made the 50k trip to Bani in a white windowless van that seemed to exist outside of the time-space continuum. As soon as the back door closed the driver hit the gas, gunned it to 88mph, and had me to Bani in what seemed like an instant. I swear the guy had a flux-capacitor hidden somewhere in there.

Upon arriving in Bani, I found Reneé, a former volunteer, sitting in front of a perfectly delicious looking Turkey (then uncooked), nursing a cut hand. He explained to me that his colleague, James, had bought a Turkey in a village west of Ouagadougou. They put the thing, alive, in Reneés bathroom for the night. Sensing it's imminent demise, the turkey freaked out and trashed the bathroom. Apparently the thing wasn't toilet trained. The next morning, James arrived and strapped the Turkey to his motorcycle for the 4 hour ride to Bani. By the time they arrived, they were more than happy to show it the chopping block.
Reneé, having little (zero) experience in killing turkeys, managed to botch the job. He slightly injured the already cranky turkey, and in the process sliced his thumb open. The turkey wrestled itself free from his bloody grasp and ran to the other edge of the courtyard where it paced, and stared back grimly. Reneé sat down and returned the glare. This looks like a job for...SOMEONE ELSE! Namely some Burkinabé kids. They killed, defeatherd, and gutted they turkey in no time.

We built a sort of oven out of a giant iron pot surrounded by mud brick. We lit charcoal around the base and let it heat up. A bit of salt, vinegar, water, and spices in the bottom of the pot and we were cooking. After several hours the bird was ready. It turned out incredibly well.
I contributed some mashed potatos, and we even had pumpkin pie for dessert. It wasn't easy, but then again, nothing here is. All in all a very satisfying Thanksgiving.