Titao ("Teetow")

We finished our site visit this week to Titao. Our site seems pretty cool and our house is bigger than our old apartment in the States. We have a market where we can get meat, fruit, and veggies all year round and while there's no electricity yet, you can still get cold drinks at some places. Currently, there are 6 cats residing at our house, but we are hoping to get that number down to at most 2 when we return in September. Not that I haven't always wanted to be a crazy cat lady, but I think 6 is a bit much.

Honestly, the most memorable part of our 4 day site visit was the actual travelling. I would compare Burkina transportation to a ride at Disney World. The wait was longer than the ride itself (in our case, the bus was 3 hours late for a 1.5 hour ride), all the little details seem so exaggerated that they are fake (the music was a few notches above enjoyable and seemed to be playing at 1.5 times the normal speed and the old man next to us decided to dedicate all of his time to staring unblinkingly at us), and as with all popular amusement park rides when all is said and done you have to ask yourself if it was worth all the wait and effort.

We actually had an extra element of fun on our ride: since this is the rainy season there were huge puddles in the road. When you combine that with our driver who must have been preparing for the Daytona 500, I felt like Harry Potter on the night bus swerving all over the road.

This week we start 5 weeks of model school, which is a summer school that we put on to give us practice in the classroom and extra lessons for the students. This week I will be observing Burkinabé and PC teachers and on Friday I am teaching a physics class. While I am nervous about teaching to actual students in French, I think it will help the rest of training go by faster.

Aaron and I have been listening to this program in the mornings called Voice of America. Has anyone heard of this show? We find it both funny and a little troublesome that this one program has decided to represent our country to all other countries in the world, especially since most of it's programs are obviously biased propaganda. Our favorite one comes on a few times a week when they highlight international students who are attending "one of America's great universities". They interview the student and talk about how awesome America is and every now and then they will mention what that student is studying or something about their home country. By the time we are done praising America, there normally isn't much time left to discuss what is happening with the election or economy or things like that. But we still listen because it is nice to hear English and we need a good laugh.

Mom and Val and Keith thanks for calling this week. We were so excited to get a call! Jenn we haven't gotten your letter, but we'll keep looking.