2010

Happy (belated) New Year! Aaron and I brought in the new year like most 20-somethings with functioning livers: we were sitting on a couch watching "UP" with some other volunteers who were also too tired to party. It seems that New Years is the biggest party of the year in Burkina. I'm not sure if it's because it is the one holiday that Christians and Muslims can celebrate together or if the Burkinabe just like a good countdown, but they definitely love New Year's.

After the new year, the next time you see friends, before anything else, you are supposed to greet each other with a 4-step head tap manuever. While tapping temples, you wish each other good health, happiness, prosperity...the teachers at our school just cut to the chase and we wished each other "everything good". I'm honestly not very good at the head-tapping yet; my efforts to show sincerity have resulted in more than a few head butts and I always run out of stuff to say so then there's an eternal awkward silence while our faces are really close together.

I didn't make any new year's resolutions this year. I normally don't keep them anyway; who needs the disappointment? Speaking of disappointment and failure, after two failed attempts to grow our own garden, we've handed our seeds over to the professionals. Someone in town offered to give us some of his land, prepare the soil, plant the seeds, and water them along with his plants. In other words, there's no way we can mess this up. All we have to do is eat (and as my mom's been telling everyone, that's something we are good at). They also planted us a few rows of potatoes so maybe we can get ourselves a booth at the potato festival.

School is about the same. I try to remind myself that this is our last 6 months of teaching here so we can make the most of it, but the kids don't always make that easy. These days, after particulary dumb questions I find myself just quietly walking away. Our neighbor, David, always has the best examples of these irritating questions. Last week in David's math class, he had just finished working a homework problem on the board when student asked: "Mr if you found the answer was 1/2 but I have 1/5 on my paper, is that okay?" Just walk away.

I did have a bizarre surge of motivation last month and decided to do a song competition between the 4 6e classes. I taught each class The Happy Song and we spent two weeks outside of class rehearsing a preparing routines that Aaron and the other English teachers would judge and decide on a winner. It turns our that in French, or maybe in Moore, The Happy Song translates to "let's go crazy". Rehearsals were about 20% constructive work and 80% madness. I swear the other day there was a kid with both arms out, head tossed back, eyes closed and yelling. Just yelling for no reason. He got a big shock when his yelling was suddenly muffling by the big piece of paper I shoved in his mouth. I think after the initial shock of doing something that doesn't involve copying from the board in silence wore off, practices went better and all the classes ended up doing pretty well. I took a video of each group so if I find myself with decent internet, I'll put it online. Despite the good result, I'm not sure if I have the patience to do it again unless the other teachers want to help out.

The other, bigger, news at school is that we'll be recieving 30 laptops in the next month! Aaron's dad arranged for us to get 30 used laptops that are ready to be used at school. Since our school doesn't have electricity and isn't likely to get it in the next year, the administration is going to rent a house in town where there is power and we can set up a computer lab for teachers, students, and (in the future) paying people from town. There will be a lot of work required in order to train people and make sure they have a good system set up and the computers don't just disappear to the homes and families of various school employees, but this will be a really exciting thing for our school and can help us out a lot. Keith, you're amazing! Thanks so much.

Since we arrived in Titao 17 months ago, and even before, during our site visit, we have been told of a previous volunteer named Tom who was in Titao and taught at our school in 1999. Everyone knows Tom. Everyone loves Tom. He has a small shrine in the school office complete with hand-drawn photos and a poem. Well, brace yourself for this, last weekend we met Tom!! He was in Burkina for a conference (he's still living and working in Africa) and came up to visit Titao for a day. After 10 years, he still speaks better Mooré than I'll ever speak. It was fun to finally see and meet the man himself. I have accepted the fact that Aaron and I will probably never reach the Tom-level of remembrance on our own, so I am thinking of launching a campaign over the next few months where I'll be distributing my own hand-drawn photos of us and sonnets proclaiming our great deeds and incredible good looks throughout the region. Since we are now entering the uncomfortable transition month before the heat arrives, I'm about to have a lot of time on my hands so it would be a good way to fill those long hours spent under a tree, trying to limit any movements.