Site Announcement!

These last few days have been really exciting. First, we had our 4th of July party on Friday. It was a lot of fun and we had a lot of good food that reminded me of home. It also reminded me of how much I miss the everyday devices which make cooking at home easy. I think I spent 3 hours chopping and peeling in preparation for the party. We did have a local band, called Laffi Bala (pictured here) which is Mooré for "is it good" I think, and we danced a lot. Towards the end, some local people came by and joined us in the dancing. The only downside was 3 days later over half of our training group was sick, so we are thinking there was something wrong with the food. It tasted great at the time, though. :)

I spent the night in a village called Bogoya F on Saturday to get a taste for village life. It was really nice and really different from how we are living in Ouahigouya. At our host family's house, the tv is normally always on and we can communicate with a hybrid French-English concoction pretty easily. In village, I was lucky to find someone who understands French and English seemed out of the question. This led to a lot more awkward silences, but it was okay. Aside from the huge, man-eating spiders that seemed to occupy Joanna's house, it was really nice.

I bought some fabric this weekend called a pagne. I am not sure if it's because of the pagne or something else, but my mom came out of her room on Sunday all dressed up and said, "Amy, take your picture with me" ( in French, of course). She had me put on my pagne and gave me a wrap for my head and taught me how to sit for pictures. It was really cute and a little surprising. The picture is to the left.







Yesterday was a big day for everyone because they announced where our sites are. The way they do the site announcements is there is a big map of Burkina they put on the wall. Someone will read a small clip about the site and then they will announce who is placed there and that person comes up, finds their site on the map, and places a little cutout of themselves on the map (pictured here). Aaron and I are going to Titao. It's actually close to where we are now in the north. When we flew here a month ago, we met a Peace Corps couple at the Paris airport who were returning to Burkina to finish their service. They were on our flight and we chatted with them for a little bit. Well, it turns out that Aaron and I are taking over that couple's site. Crazy. Everyone says they have a great house so we are excited to visit next week.

We played soccer yesterday against a local girls team. I am pretty out of shape but it was really fun. We ended up tying. I think we are also going to start playing volleyball against a local team. That will be lots of fun.

Mom and Ron, we got your packages yesterday. Thanks so much! It was our first piece of mail and it totally made our day. If anyone feels like sending a letter or a package, feel free. We can always use more peanut butter, granola bars, and mixes (sauce, cookie, drink, anything).