I (heart) les Jeux Olympiques

There are some people out there who don’t like the Olympics. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t get along with these people. I love the Olympics, love ‘em. I love the Olympics like the Burkinabé love Celine Dion, and they really love her. Our host family has a Celine Dion dvd and we have watched that thing more than once. The cyber café has a Celine Dion calendar and I have stopped being shocked when I see a bad-ass African guy driving a moto, smoking a cigarette, and sporting a Celine shirt.

The Olympics also serves as a good way to spend some time with the host family. They like to watch t.v. and sleep during the day because it is their summer break and since I can only watch so many Burkina gov’t sponsored soap operas and they keep refusing my offers to go head-to-toe at nap time, there isn’t a lot of interaction on the weekends normally. But now I can watch the Olympics with my fam and we all have fun. This weekend I watched some soccer with our host sister and brother. Quick note about this host brother: he was introduced as a brother but we really aren’t sure who he is. He’s someone between 18 and 30 years old and just showed up one day and he’s been staying here for the last week. Family trees are pretty much impossible to discern here because everyone seems to be a brother or aunt or something when they are introduced. Our host mom has only given birth to one son and yet we have met three host brothers and been told about others (and this isn’t because our dad has multiple wives as is the case in other families).

The Olympics have also given me a pleasant distraction from training on the weekends and now we are almost done! Only one week left. Then we go to Oauga for a couple of days and finally, on Friday, we have our swear-in at the ambassador’s. I am really excited to see the end of training approach, but it will be sad to see everyone dispurse to their various sites. I will definitely miss our weekly training newsletter, the Haut Cinq (that’s “high five” in French). Every week a different group of 3 to 4 people put together a newsletter and it is always lots of fun. The latest one included a choose-your-own-adventure trashy romance haiku.

As part of our Peace Corps commitment to share American culture with others abroad, we’ve been teaching our Burkinabé teachers American cultural staples such as “that’s what she said” (ça c’est ce qu’elle a dit) and “douche bag”. Every now and then they will use it correctly and we feel like we are really making a difference here.

But seriously, I can’t wait to get to our site and get to work. I have so many ideas I want to try and if one or two of them results in maybe a couple of community meetings or a girls club at my school I will be so excited. We went to a talk on female genital mutilization last week that was really interesting. Sadly, it is a big problem here, made worse by the fact that any kind of intimate subject (puberty, sex, etc.) are taboo to discuss here. I am not sure how, or if, we will be able to address this in our community but I would like to try. A lot of what we will do will depend on what the community needs, not what we want them to do, so we will have to wait and see.

Other than that, things are good. Aaron has been pooping blood for the last 6 weeks so he is going to Oauga tomorrow to get some tests done. Poor guy. I had some girls in my class give me a letter today with some pictures of flowers that I’ve taught them and a letter that says they want to be my friend and it has their email address. It is really cute.

I put a few pictures up. There is Aaron sporting his new outfit. The men here have a pretty sweet deal in that their formal outfits can also double as pajamas. Then there is picture of us all dressed up with our family. See if you can pick out which ones we are. Finally, there was this really sweet jumping spider that caught a fly and Aaron got some really good pictures of it.