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.