It's Raining Moutons Over Here!

We are almost done with our month-long stay in Ouaga. English camp has been fun, but we are excited to get back and see our friends in Titao. Teaching students from Ouaga has definitely been a different experience from teaching students in village. Most of these students are wealthy, or at least their parents are wealthy. They all seem to have nice motos, wear nice clothes, and speak better French than I do. The real shock for me was seeing how little they know about village life in Burkina. Many of them have never been to a village in Burkina...never. For vacation, they fly to France or Cote d'Ivoire or America; it's really unbelievable. Our first week of camp, we talked about the environment and one day I was asking the students what they knew about pollution and I had students answering me with things like "global warming" and "geothermal energy"!! Where do they get this stuff?

Every week at camp we have a song competition between the seven classes. Each class picks a modern American song from a list we compiled and they create a routine and perform at the end of the week. It's been really fun to see how creative they can be while singing Rhianna, Bob Marley, Alicia Keys, and Mariah Carey. I've still got my fingers crossed that a class will pick some of the songs I added (c'mon Jackson 5!).

In other, bigger news, mother nature unleashed her fury on Ouaga yesterday morning. Around 5am it started raining. By 6:30, we realized that the enclosed porch where we were sleeping had become a lake with our mattresses serving as slowly sinking islands. Around 9, the power went out and we were told that because of the extreme flooding around town we shouldn't go out. By the time the rain stopped at 3pm, it had rained 26cm, thousands of homes had been destroyed, and at least three people had been killed. I have never seeen so much rain in such a short period of time and based on the reaction of those around us, neither have most people here. School has been cancelled for the next two days because the classrooms were flooded. Ironically, despite the enormous amounts of water dumped on the city yesterday, there is no running water. There's also no power in most of the city, but that is to be expected since it tends to go out every other day with or without extreme weather (I'm not counting hot as hades as extreme weather).

Hopefully, by the time English camp ends on Sunday we will be given the okay to travel out of Ouaga. I'm excited to see how our trees are doing. I've been told that the women's group finished planting the remaining trees in two other villages around Titao so when we return I'll be riding around visiting everyone and trying to set up sensibilisations on how to use the Moringa leaves. As you can see, I'm trying to get pumped up for a second, and last, year in Burkina. It makes sense that Peace Corps is a two-year program: the first year is spent stumbling around in the dark not sure what you are doing and the second year is when you can actually get some work done, hopefully.