How Do I Reach These Kids!

ςa fait deux jours! It's been two days! This is what we say in Burkina when you haven't seen or spoken to people in a while. I would say it's a helpful piece of colloquial knowledge if you plan on visiting the region and can help you avoid many awkward conversations where you respond, "no, it's been 3 weeks", followed by a weird silence.

The closing ceremony for English camp went well. We were told it started at 4, so we arrived at 3:30, just in time to hear that it didn't start until 6:30. The extra time was helpful, though, because they wanted one of the volunteers to give a small speech in French to the 200 or so students and parents present and that volunteer ending up being me. I think only those who witnessed me cringe and shake my way through freshman-year speech class can fully understand what a big step this was for me. Did my hands shake? You bet. But overall, it went well and I was somehow infinitely less nervous than during that first 5 min pick-your-topic practice speech from freshman year.

Unfortunately, our trip to Ouaga ended on somewhat of a bad note. We had a lot of heavy books and things to bring back, so we opted to take a cab instead of riding our bikes to the bus station. There was already a man in the backseat of the cab so I sat up front and Aaron sat in the back with one of our bags since our bikes had filled the trunk. The driver was acting weird and kept asking Aaron to move his bags so that he could see and the man in the back was coughing a lot and leaning over Aaron and out the window. At one point, we pulled over to the side and the cab stopped so the driver asked Aaron and the other man to get out and push, saying we were pretty much out of gas. Honestly, we didn't think much of this since we've experienced much worse things in Burkinabé cabs. Finally, after we'd driven a little further, the driver said that his car couldn't make it and pulled over to the side and started throwing our bikes on the side of the road. He told us the ride was free, he was out of gas, and pointed in the direction of the gare (bus station).

It took Aaron about 15 seconds to realize that his wallet was gone from the zippered pocket in his pants and by then the car (which suddenly had lots of dispensible gas) was gone. Interesting to note that although those jerks robbed us and dumped us on the side of the road, the driver actually pointed us in the right direction to the gare. That's service! After about 20 minutes of riding around with our heavy bags, we found the gare, hopped on the bus, and tried not to talk about what just happened.

School is in full swing now. Aaron and I are both teaching more hours this year. Aaron has three 6e math classes again as well as 1 5e math class. I'm teaching 3 6e English classes and 1 6e biology. We were told that, despite our requests to teach older students, the administration prefers to have us teach the younger kids because we motivate them to continue. While this is nice for the ego, we're fully aware that they're just making stuff up because Burkinabé teachers don't want to teach the younger kids. Can you blame them? This year, each of the four 6e classes have over 100 students and their French is poor to nonexistent. That is why M. and Mme Rose aren't taking any lip this year. We were told that classes started Oct. 1, so we began teaching Oct. 1 and our classes are silent. The other teachers at our school are funny. For the first 4 or 5 days, they came to school during their class times, but instead of going to class, they sat in the teacher's lounge and talked about how it was impossible to cover all of the material. When their allotted class time was over, they went home.

I'm always surprised at what an emotional rollercoaster teaching can be for me. There are some days when I walk out of class feeling like the queen of secondary education: I can teach these kids anything. Other days, I am overcome with flashbacks from Stand and Deliver, "how do I reach these kids?!" Overall, I think this year will go much better than last year for both of us.

I think by this point Americans have grown accustomed to the wide array of get-rich-quick reality shows that have inundated our culture. Some are interesting, but I feel most are rapidly speeding past "gone too far" territory. (i.e. recent story of couple who faked their child's disappearance in a hot air balloon with the hopes that it would result in a lucrative reality show deal). Well, our country is not alone, nor- I think- are we the worst: last week in Sudan they held a Koran quiz competition. Nothing wrong with seeing which of your neighbors knows their Koran the best, until you realize that the big winners receive AK47s!!! For the runners up, there are hand grinades, other small arms, and computer parts. Pretty scary.

Along those same lines, every year there is a prize awarded to an African ex-leader in recognition of good governance called the Ibrahim Prize. This is the biggest prize in the world: $5 million plus $200,000 every year for the rest of your life. This year, the committee announced that there will be no recipient. This is a sad commentary on the state of African politics and unfortunately overshadows many of the good things happening on the continent. But I believe that the Ibrahim foundation is correct in one aspect: most of the improvements and developments we see cannot be attributed to specific leaders, but are the results of the people coming together to improve their country.

One final note, I recently read the short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Hemmingway. Before reading this, I had heard two comments on it: 1. "that really made me want to climb Kilimanjaro" and 2. "isn't that the one about abortion?". Now let's look at the story: there is a couple who is on a safari-type trip in Tanzania. When the story picks up, and for the ensuing 26 pages the man is dying from gangrene on his leg. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that reading about how one little thorn in Tanzania can wreak such havoc on the body didn't leave me with any burning desire climb Kili. And perhaps I am too dense for the embedded gangrene-aborted fetus symbolism, but I didn't catch anything about abortion. Up next on the list is F. Scott Fitzgerald; I hear it has aliens!

Doing Things Differently This Time Around

Upon arriving back in Titao after 5 weeks in Ouaga, we decided that this was a good time to make a fresh start. There are a few things that we've chosen to do a little differently for our second and final year in Burkina. On the right you can see one of our more personal projects: bringing back the thumbs-up!

First, the grass. Thanks to our enclosed courtyard that doesn't permit the stray animal to enter and an abundant rainy season, our yard was somewhat jungle-esque when we returned. The grass was up to my waist and I had to hack a way to the latrine. However, much to the dismay of our neighbors, we have decided not to have someone dig it all up like we did last year. Instead, we've been inviting boys to come by with their cows and donkeys to graze (and hopefully leave behind some fertilizer for the soil). This is mutually beneficial because while the cows get free food, we get free help sweeping the porch and doing the dishes.

Second, laundry. Last year we did our own laundry. I'm not sure why. I believe that there was some unspoken desire to get the notch on our belts and the supposed bragging rights which we felt went along with this torment. Thankfully, we have seen the light and this foolishness is now over. To be honest, I hate doing my own clothes; it makes my fingers bleed, takes lots of water and time, and I'm not even very good at it. Saturdays are essentially a new holiday for us. We wake up Saturday morning with a depressing pile of dirty clothes; then, the laundry fairy from across the street sweeps in and all the dirty clothes disappear; a few hours later we have a pile of impressively clean clothes waiting for us. It's amazing! We now have more free time to go visit the town barrage (picture on the right) or grill some chicken (picture below).

Third, school. We're trying to have more say in what subjects or hours we teach this year. At first, this looked really promising: I was told by our principal that it should be no problem for me to teach English and Aaron could take the upper level physics courses, as requested. However, during our visits to school over the past few weeks things have began to look bleak because we are missing a lot of teachers and the school might be forced to put us in the classes and subjects that are more critical. A few days ago when I went to visit, the censur was simply shaking his head and saying "we have no other teachers for biology, english, history, or physics" (this pretty much leaves Aaron, myself, and the P.E. teacher). Classes are supposed to began next Thursday, but since we aren't planning on learning what classes we teach until Wednesday, I think we'll put off the first day until Monday.

Finally, tree planting projects. Our Moringa projects have been semi-successful thus far. The 200 trees planted in Salla, a village 3km away, are doing really well and we even did a sensibilization last weekend with the women's group that planted them. Continuing our tradition in cultural sensitivity, we brought informational booklets on moringa for each illiterate woman in the group and planned to do a cooking demonstration with moringa leaves for our grand finale, forgetting that we are in the last days of Ramadhan (on the right, some of the women getting fresh leaves from the trees). The women didn't seem to mind and we all chowed down village-style by using our hands to dip out some moringa leaf and cous-cous mush, rolling it into a ball in our hands before popping it in the mouth...yum. The other 400 trees are still AWOL. The President of the women's group told me they were planted in two neighboring villages, the man from our forestry service says there were planted at a women's center in town where they are now dying, and someone else from town says they are still at the tree nursery. I've managed to cancel out the latter, but I can't seem to find this elusive tree-murdering women's center or get in touch with the woman to find out what villages she went to visit. I feel like a much less-interesting Sherlock Holmes hot on the trail. Despite these difficulties, everyone we've been working with is really enthusiastic about planting more next year so we are looking forward to planting more next spring.

It's Raining Moutons Over Here!

We are almost done with our month-long stay in Ouaga. English camp has been fun, but we are excited to get back and see our friends in Titao. Teaching students from Ouaga has definitely been a different experience from teaching students in village. Most of these students are wealthy, or at least their parents are wealthy. They all seem to have nice motos, wear nice clothes, and speak better French than I do. The real shock for me was seeing how little they know about village life in Burkina. Many of them have never been to a village in Burkina...never. For vacation, they fly to France or Cote d'Ivoire or America; it's really unbelievable. Our first week of camp, we talked about the environment and one day I was asking the students what they knew about pollution and I had students answering me with things like "global warming" and "geothermal energy"!! Where do they get this stuff?

Every week at camp we have a song competition between the seven classes. Each class picks a modern American song from a list we compiled and they create a routine and perform at the end of the week. It's been really fun to see how creative they can be while singing Rhianna, Bob Marley, Alicia Keys, and Mariah Carey. I've still got my fingers crossed that a class will pick some of the songs I added (c'mon Jackson 5!).

In other, bigger news, mother nature unleashed her fury on Ouaga yesterday morning. Around 5am it started raining. By 6:30, we realized that the enclosed porch where we were sleeping had become a lake with our mattresses serving as slowly sinking islands. Around 9, the power went out and we were told that because of the extreme flooding around town we shouldn't go out. By the time the rain stopped at 3pm, it had rained 26cm, thousands of homes had been destroyed, and at least three people had been killed. I have never seeen so much rain in such a short period of time and based on the reaction of those around us, neither have most people here. School has been cancelled for the next two days because the classrooms were flooded. Ironically, despite the enormous amounts of water dumped on the city yesterday, there is no running water. There's also no power in most of the city, but that is to be expected since it tends to go out every other day with or without extreme weather (I'm not counting hot as hades as extreme weather).

Hopefully, by the time English camp ends on Sunday we will be given the okay to travel out of Ouaga. I'm excited to see how our trees are doing. I've been told that the women's group finished planting the remaining trees in two other villages around Titao so when we return I'll be riding around visiting everyone and trying to set up sensibilisations on how to use the Moringa leaves. As you can see, I'm trying to get pumped up for a second, and last, year in Burkina. It makes sense that Peace Corps is a two-year program: the first year is spent stumbling around in the dark not sure what you are doing and the second year is when you can actually get some work done, hopefully.