The Burkina Faso Safari Experience

Good Day Folks!

We just returned from a day-long safari in the southeast of BF. What a trip. We put 7-8 people in two jeeps with a couple "guides," some water, and a "gun."

I don't have long, but suffice it to say it was a proper safari, if a little on the unprofessional side.

Everything went fine for a while. We saw antelope and monkeys and warthogs from far off. We stopped at a small lake and saw several hippos in the distance.

Later we stopped along a river and I almost got attacked by a giant lizard. I was carefully watching the water for crocs and moving along the waters edge (a safe distance away from it) and ran right into a 4-foot long lizard than bolted from me.

Eventually we even came across some elephants. Well, a whole heard of elephants, perhaps 60 according to the guide. What do you do when you see a heard of elephants running kids and all? You drive straight at it really fast until you get so close you don't have any room to maneuver. Then, when two elephants turn to you and one starts charging, while you have enough time to drive away, you try to load the gun instead. Then, when the gun doesn't seem to be working, and there are two guides in the back without the steering wheel and throttle, you finally toss the gun back to them, hitting Amy in the head with it, and start fumbling for the wheel again. We almost ran into a tree that would have stopped us for good. Somehow, though, we managed to drive away with about 10 feet to spare.

Turns out the gun was broken and the guides weren't exactly the most experienced. As Jenny said, they're like little kids--except they now have guns and a car.

It was quite a frightening experience, yes, but we're alright. It was also very real. Something to keep in mind: you pay for what you get. Pay for an experienced guide or don't let him get so close.

Check out the photos from the trip by clicking the slide show to the right. They'll tell the rest of the story.

New Pictures

I finally posted some new photos we've taken in the last month or so. Most of them are from Women's Day and the cool park in Ouaga, but no crocodile pics yet. It's been really dusty and hazy the last month, so we're waiting to take outdoor photos.

We've decided to give up taking taxis around Ouaga because dealing with the taxi drivers is just too frustrating most of the time. We've been biking everywhere this week, which isn't too bad as long as you don't mind arriving sweaty. Biking has actually proven to be really helpful for a few reasons: 1. it's nice exercise, 2. it helps me learn my way around the city, and 3. it gives me a chance to practice my French when the cops stop me (like they did twice today) and threaten to take my bike. Luckily, I was able to talk them out of it both times (I'm just a simple village girl who doesn't know her way around the big city).

Anyways, we're heading to the south to see some animals on Monday so we'll post some more pictures soon.

Kittens, airlines, and keeping our cool

We bought our plane tickets for Kilimanjaro. Online ticket purchases from Ouaga hasn't arrived yet for all of the airlines so we had to buy them from the actual airline office here in town. Buying our tickets was really funny. We arrived on transport with the expectation that we would drop off our things and shower before heading to buy the tickets. However, we ended up with a cab driver who was keen to give us the Ouaga city tour, so we ended up just getting out and going straight to the airline since we were in the area.

Let me pause and say we get really dirty on the buses. I've never really figured out how it is that we get so filthy; everyone else seems to manage the journey without looking like they've been rolling in the dirt for the last hour.

So here we are at the office for Ethiopian Airlines: dirty, and sweaty, with all of our dirty bags. This place is immaculate. The people are equally immaculate. I feel certain that we fulfilled any and all of their expectations for loud, messy Americans. They refused to answer any questions while one of us was standing, and they refused to talk above a whisper. This would have been easily understood and appreciated except that we were the only customers in there! At one point, our agent had a question for the guy 2 desks away, easily in talking distance, and he called the guy so that they could whisper to each other over the phone instead. It was great.

We are now getting into the hot season (as everyone in our village loves to remind us). Some tips we've found for staying cool:
1. avoid direct sunlight like the plague; I've taken to using a bizarre series of windy paths in order to stay out of the sun at all times.
2. before bed, take a shower and don't dry off
3. between the hours of 1pm and 4pm, find a nice spot in the shade and try not to move
4. when drinking water, feel free to miss your mouth every time

Other news from the homefront, we have three new kittens. Our last remaining cat from the first group had kittens a few weeks ago. It actually took us a while to confirm that she'd had them. We saw her one night and realized she was skinny again and went on a mad search for the kittens but couldn't find them. Finally the next day we found them in a pile of Aaron's clothes (of course). These kittens are much cuter than the first bunch and I think they have staying power. They're spending the week at Uncle Bernard's while we're on vacation, so maybe he'll decide he wants to keep one.

Also, we want to say hi to the 7th graders from Appleton Village School and the 5th graders from Rio Vista. Thanks so much for your letters. We'll be sure to write back and post some new pictures.

Women's day and other happenings

This last week has felt like a non-stop series of holidays. Sunday was International Women's Day, followed by the Muslim holiday to celebrate Mohammed's birthday on Monday night. This means that we had no class Monday or Tuesday. (Of course, we only found this out Saturday night from our students.) I feel like holidays are really just a chance for us to play dressup. There was a formal parade with lots of speeches in the morning so we got all dressed up in our best Burkinabe costumes. I had to have my girls at the marché help me put my outfit together because I have no idea how to do it. I've taught the my name, but they can't seem to get it right. At first, they were close with "emy" but it gets steadily further from correct and now we're at "emily".

In the afternoon, there was a big soccer game between the village women and old (drunk) village men. I showed up to watch, they invited me to play and I declined so 10 minutes later I was on the field with a jersey on. Thanks to our teamwork, agility, ball skills, 6 goal keepers, and a referee that called every ball in our favor, we won 1-0. It was great.

Women's Day ended with a village-wide dance party. We're still trying to figure out the time-zone differences between our "nassara" time and "west African" time. We were told the morning's parade started at 8, so we showed up at 9 and were still an hour early. The dance party "starts" at 8, so we came 2 hours late, but that was actually 1 1/2 hr early. My new strategy will be for us to wait until we think we're so late, we've completely missed everything and then start getting ready.

The Muslim fête Monday only confirmed our status as too wimpy for Burkina parties. It turns out that the party doesn't start until midnight and ours was held in a village about 3km away. We tried really hard to stay up, but only made it to about 10:30. Next year,..

We've been really busy this last week or two getting our grades together for the end of the trimester and organizing some other projects around town. We're working with the women we brought to the AIDS training to get a monthly HIV/AIDS class started for the patients at the Doctors Without Borders clinic. Also, our hospital has a lot of solar panels, but they aren't being used because they need to replace some of the converters, batteries, etc so they've been using a gas generator. We're hoping to get them to start replacing the parts for the solar panel system instead of continuing to buy expensive gasoline. Our other project is for Earth Day. We've been planning big Earth Day celebration with our school and local forestry office. The plan is to sensibilize some students from each class on topics like desertification, erosion, etc. and then have them present what they learned to their respective classes the next day where each student will plant a tree. The forestry office has agreed to take care of the trees until it's time to transplant them and then we'll move them to a big, open area on the hospital grounds. To start the trees, we plant the seeds in little baggies, so we need a lot of little baggies if every student will be planting a tree. We decided we needed to start early collecting supplies, so we offered our 6e classes a prize for every 10 bags they brought us. They only had two days from 12 to 5pm to bring bags, and I must say that we grossly underestimated the amount of trash readily available in our village. At the end of the second day, we had about 4000 bags. That's a lot of prizes.