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.

Barak Obama discounts, homologues, etc.

On Saturday we took another language test to see how we have progressed over the last four weeks. There are three main levels: novice, intermediate, and expert. And each level (at least the first 2) have three subcatagories: low, mid, and high. When we first got in country, I tested in novice-low and now I have moved up to novice-high, which is exciting. Aaron is intermediate-low now. In order to "pass" training and become teachers we have to get to intermediate-mid, so we are getting close.

I met my counterpart (homologue) this week. He is really nice. He speaks English, jackpot! He works as a French and English teacher at the school where I am going to work. We've been doing a lot of U.S. vs Burkinabé culture activities. Monday we played a game that asked questions to see how well we know each other's culture such as "what is starbucks?" (the Burkinabé answer: tv show). One feature of American culture that all Burkinabé seem to be informed about is the upcoming election. Everyone wants to talk about Obama. At our local bakery, we have what we call the "Barak Obama discount". Go in there, make sure the owner knows you are American and that you will be voting for Obama, 15CFA off your baguette. Perhaps this is an abuse, I don't know.

Oh, here's a fun story for those of you who are more scientifically inclined. Friday night we had a big rainstorm. Really big, huge... Now I am not sure if you have seen this in the pictures but we have metal things on our windows that serve as blinds as well as metal screens to keep the bugs out. So Saturday morning, Aaron got up and went to open the blinds and noticed that he was getting a small shock when he touched the metal. Something happened Friday night and now there is a connection between our outside light (which doesn't work now) and our window. This was very difficult to explain to our host family. When we just had them touch the window to see for themselves, the kids totally freaked out and thought they were going to die. I think our host dad is going to call an electrician so hopefully it will get fixed.

Thanks to Ashley's mom and Uncle Dale for your comments and uplifting words. Uncle Dale, we haven't heard of those books but there is supposed to be a big PC library in the capital so we will see if they have any of them.

The Weekend

Hi everyone! I feel like I have a lot to write, so I am breaking it up into parts so that maybe it's easier to read. We had a really fun weekend. Saturday we cooked an American dinner for our family. This was kind of a multi-purpose exercise: we wanted to do something nice for them, teach them (and ourselves) how to prepare food we like with their materials, and have a meal that we really enjoy. So we made hamburgers with caramelized onions on top, garlic mashed potatoes, and sauted some veggies. It was really good (at least to us, I don't know if they really liked it or not).

The whole experience was a typical African business deal. We went to the market Saturday morning to order the beef and we were told "no problem", it will be delivered that afternoon to the center where we have class. By 3pm there was no meat so we got the phone number for the butcher and called and he said he would send the meat right away. Shortly after we got off the phone the butcher's son came to say we weren't getting the meat after all. So we went home (about 1km away) and decided just to do potatoes and veggies. After we got home, we realized that I forgot the milk at the center so I rode back to get it and the butcher's son was back with the meat. So it all worked out. We are learning to adjust to the way things work here. For example, when you go to a restaurant and order food and they say ok, it doesn't mean that they have the food and will make it for you. Sometimes they have run out and just don't like telling you bad news so they wait about 10 minutes before telling you.

Sunday we did laundry and went to the pool. The pool was great! We even ate some pizza, sort of. It was ground beef, cheese, and onion on a pizza crust which is good enough for me.This week we meet our homologues and visit our site. I don't know if I explained the homologue situation so here it goes: we each get a person at our site who is involved in similar work that helps us integrate into the community and answer any language, work, cultural, life, etc. questions we may have. Then we get to visit our site from Thursday to Sunday. Aaron and I have it easy because our site is only 45km away but some people have 2-day journeys to get to site. Also, Jill and Marcus (who we are replacing) have one week left in country so they will be there to show us around. I am really excited.