We are finally in Ouaga for 5 weeks of English camp. The tree planting is still a work in progress. After my sympathy campaign around town, I had about 20 people planning on meeting me the next morning to dig holes so I was getting really excited that we might be able to get the trees planted after all...wrong. One person came and he left after about an hour. By this point I was into my stubborn "let's just get it done" mode so I started digging myself. Shameful as it is, I actually thought if people in village went by and saw the white girl doing lots of manual labor they would jump in to help. After 3 hours, I had 16 holes out of 240 done, my hands were bleeding, my back was killing me, and nobody had offered to help. Finally, I accepted the fact that I would need to rethink our plans. There was no point trying to do a project where the people weren't investing their time and energy to contribute. Needless to say it was a frustrating day (made even worse by two people congratulating me on how fat I've gotten...thanks!).

A solution for what to do with hundreds of homeless trees finally presented itself when I was trying to forget my sorrows by ordering a bunch of dolo (millet beer) from a friend of ours and venting my frustrations to him. He returned to our house later that night, but in place of the liter of dolo I had requested, he brought a woman. It turns out that she is the president of a women's environmental group that works in all the villages in our province. The group has more than 1000 members spread throughout the province and she agreed to talk with members from each village and find a place for our trees and the labor to dig all the holes and make protective fencing. Things are looking up.

Of course soon after talking with her, she went out of town and I haven't seen her since so we've been talking through calls and text messages but she seems to be getting everything done. The village 3k away, Salle, didn't let us down either. The had all of the holes dug within a week and last Friday I went down to "help" (aka stand around) as their women's group planted 200 trees. Victory at last!

I made up with the Doctors Without Borders director last week too. After she bent the rules to give me a ride back to Titao so I didn't have to take the bus I decided she was no longer my nemesis and we could someday be friends.

Now we are settling in to spend the next month in Ouaga. We got a 1 month membership to the Embassy rec center so that we can use the pool and the gym and have been scouting out all the quiet places around town with free internet that we can use for graduate school research. I think we are going to try and take day trips on the weekends to get a break from Ouaga when possible. Today I am going with some other volunteers to a zoo just outside of town. We actually lucked out getting tickets to the zoo because it is normally quite a process to get in since it is located right next to a presidential palace. My understanding is that if you want to go you have to go to the tourist bureau in Ouaga and get permission to visit the zoo. If you get permission, you go to the zoo (35k away), but not to go in, just to pick up paperwork that you will fill out and return to the tourist bureau. If the paperwork is good, they will give you a pass. Luckily for us, when we dropped by the tourist bureau, the man was really nice and had some extra tickets that he gave us.