Women's day and other happenings

This last week has felt like a non-stop series of holidays. Sunday was International Women's Day, followed by the Muslim holiday to celebrate Mohammed's birthday on Monday night. This means that we had no class Monday or Tuesday. (Of course, we only found this out Saturday night from our students.) I feel like holidays are really just a chance for us to play dressup. There was a formal parade with lots of speeches in the morning so we got all dressed up in our best Burkinabe costumes. I had to have my girls at the marché help me put my outfit together because I have no idea how to do it. I've taught the my name, but they can't seem to get it right. At first, they were close with "emy" but it gets steadily further from correct and now we're at "emily".

In the afternoon, there was a big soccer game between the village women and old (drunk) village men. I showed up to watch, they invited me to play and I declined so 10 minutes later I was on the field with a jersey on. Thanks to our teamwork, agility, ball skills, 6 goal keepers, and a referee that called every ball in our favor, we won 1-0. It was great.

Women's Day ended with a village-wide dance party. We're still trying to figure out the time-zone differences between our "nassara" time and "west African" time. We were told the morning's parade started at 8, so we showed up at 9 and were still an hour early. The dance party "starts" at 8, so we came 2 hours late, but that was actually 1 1/2 hr early. My new strategy will be for us to wait until we think we're so late, we've completely missed everything and then start getting ready.

The Muslim fête Monday only confirmed our status as too wimpy for Burkina parties. It turns out that the party doesn't start until midnight and ours was held in a village about 3km away. We tried really hard to stay up, but only made it to about 10:30. Next year,..

We've been really busy this last week or two getting our grades together for the end of the trimester and organizing some other projects around town. We're working with the women we brought to the AIDS training to get a monthly HIV/AIDS class started for the patients at the Doctors Without Borders clinic. Also, our hospital has a lot of solar panels, but they aren't being used because they need to replace some of the converters, batteries, etc so they've been using a gas generator. We're hoping to get them to start replacing the parts for the solar panel system instead of continuing to buy expensive gasoline. Our other project is for Earth Day. We've been planning big Earth Day celebration with our school and local forestry office. The plan is to sensibilize some students from each class on topics like desertification, erosion, etc. and then have them present what they learned to their respective classes the next day where each student will plant a tree. The forestry office has agreed to take care of the trees until it's time to transplant them and then we'll move them to a big, open area on the hospital grounds. To start the trees, we plant the seeds in little baggies, so we need a lot of little baggies if every student will be planting a tree. We decided we needed to start early collecting supplies, so we offered our 6e classes a prize for every 10 bags they brought us. They only had two days from 12 to 5pm to bring bags, and I must say that we grossly underestimated the amount of trash readily available in our village. At the end of the second day, we had about 4000 bags. That's a lot of prizes.

HIV/AIDS Training

Phew, busy week. Last weekend we had our school's New Year's party (better late than never, right). It was kind of bizarre in that it was a party to celebrate the new year (in February) but it was focussed on wishing our proviseur a happy new year and was referred to as his party. But we had a good time: chicken, beer, and speeches. What else can you ask for?

Monday morning we got the permission for the other teachers to come to Djibo with us for the AIDS training. The training has been really interesting so far. First off, it is being done in three languages which slows things down considerably. There are 11 volunteers and 42 Burkinabe participating. Most of it is being run by local members of a group called Actione Sociale so we are just playing a supporting role. In an effort to feel important, we have endowed ourselves with specific job titles. I am the chef des salutations. I have decided that this means I greet everyone and make sure everyone's happy.

Actually, the only unhappy campers I have encountered have been the teachers that I brought. We've found it to be a lot different when you talk money with fonctionaires (civil servants) and the villagois (regular villagers). It seems that somewhere in the transition between social classes a concept of greed is developed that we don't see as often with villagers. For example, when we first told the teachers about the conference their only questions were: will it be in English? and how will we be reimbursed? This second question came with many follow-up inquiries and seemed to be the deciding factor for them. And once here, the attitudes towards money hasn't changed. They are given plenty of money for the three days here but told me they don't want to use their motos to get to the sessions tomorrow morning if they aren't given gas money as well. It is a little frustrating. However, that being said, I have found that they have been some of the best participants of the group, asking really good questions and staying really involved.

Overall, I think the training was good. One of our translators cried at the end and the group from Titao seemed interested in organising something in our village. We had our fair share of unexpected hang-ups but it all worked out in the end. My favorite example of this is with the hotel rooms. Some of the hotel rooms we booked were rented out to other people before we arrived. Our friend, Emilie, brought a man from her village to the conference and he was a little upset when he was told the first night that he would have to share a bed (not just a room, a bed) with another man because there were no more rooms. The next day they had sorted out the trouble and had a room ready for him. So he calls Emilie over and tells her that he doesn't want to be moved to a room by himself because he gets along really well with this other guy and they are friends. Meanwhile, the other guy is talking to the volunteer from his village about how sad he is that his new friend will be moving to his own room. They shared a bed all week.

We finally got our new camera last week. It was truly a group effort as it had to change hands 5 times before we finally saw it - good work team. We are really excited, so be ready for lots of new pictures over the next few months.

Lessons in Communication

It's hard to believe we are almost through February. I will definitely miss those 3 weeks of cooler (not cold, but cooler) weather. The good news about this time of year is that there are all kinds of fruits and vegetables in the marché now. Mangos have proven to be one of those fruits that you can't eat and still look dignified (at least I can't). I've more or less given up and instead am working on a permanent mango-stash.

The girls club is still going - more or less. Out of the original 70 or so we have about 25 that come for a 2-hr meeting every Friday. I use the term "meeting" very loosely. We mostly just play soccer. I had high hopes of doing 1 hr of soccer and 1 hr of group discussion on setting goals last week. (I even had a cheesey little tie-in to how the players on the soccer field need a goal to work towards.) But we were having some problems of respect with some girls interrupting me, not listening, etc. so I ended the meeting the way any overly dramatic teenage girl would: I stormed out. They have since apologized to me and since I don't think either of us handled it well, we're going to try again next week.

Now that the heat is returning we've started sleeping outside again; this means the rat hunt is back on. Even as I write this, every few minutes I hear the pitter patter of Aaron's feet racing around the house with a shovel. And I'm pretty sure our one remaining cat is pregnant because we were lazy procrastinaters and didn't get her fixed.

Aaron and I double-teamed our 3 6eme classes this week and talked to them about study skills and effective ways to prepare for a test. We talked quite a bit about the importance of understanding concepts versus just memorizing their notebooks word-for-word. I get a lot of crazy answers on tests because students tried to memorize sentences with words they don't understand: "You can avoid malaria because of invertebrates." We'll have to see on the next test if any of it got through.

We are heading to Djibo (a town about 60km away) for a 3-day seminar on HIV/AIDS and how to do AIDS sensibilisations in village. It is really a training for people from our village and not us so that they can be the ones giving the seminars in village when we return. Aaron is bringing two women from the hospital and I have asked some of the other female teachers to come. I gave them about a 4 week warning before the training, which put us right on schedule to find out whether or not they were coming the morning we are supposed to leave. They have to have permission from the school to miss three days of class which requires a written letter from Peace Corps to our regional school director. This isn't a big deal, except nobody was willing to break the news to me so they sat on that information for 3 weeks and didn't let me know until I finally asked our proviseur what the holdup was. I'm sure it will all work out somehow.

Just as a side note, I recently finished a book called "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". I've heard great reviews of this book and had been wanting to read it for a while. But, as I told Jason, it turned out the be the worst book I ever enjoyed reading. The plot was interesting, but the writing was so intolerable I couldn't stand it. I would gladly take James Joyce and a punch to the gut over reading some of those chapters again.

Val and Keith, we finally got your package last week. Our mailman likes to toy with our emotions. This is his favorite game (and we fall for it every time): it's 4:59 pm on a Friday, the post closes in 1 minute and though mail has come today, the packages aren't ready to be picked up until tomorrow. I'm riding my bike home when the postman waves me down and tells me I have a package. He says if I go grab the slip from my box, I can pick it up tonight: what luck! So I run for the box, fumble a little with the key because I am so excited, grab the slip and start heading for the main office door. Somewhere in the 45 seconds it took me to grab my slip, he has closed the door and locked it. The post office is closed. And no, nobody can pick up packages after hours. Sometimes I hate that guy.