47 days down, 53 to go

Hi everybody!

We’re leaving for the villages on Tuesday and we’ll be out of internet access until November 16^th.  I’m going to be living in a village with one other girl from the group.  The two of us are going to be volunteering in the library, working with the kids in the village, and making photo books for the village libraries.  Almost all of the books in the libraries are from France and aren’t very relatable to the kids in the village.  And, for the most part, there aren’t many West African children’s books anyway.  So while we’re there, we’re making books that have to do with village life and West African culture – books that are much closer to the lives of kids in the village. 

On Saturday our group helped out at a free medical clinic about an hour outside of Ouaga.  Our primary care doctor here in the city is a Belgian man who works with the richer class and then uses money he gets from them to hold these free medical clinics around and outside of the Ouagadougou area.  From about 8am to about 4pm we processed around 300 children.  Each child had a urine test, an eye exam, and was measured and weighed before they saw a doctor, got medications, etc.  Our group manned the urine test station and accompanied each child around, giving them the eye test (which was a little hard to explain in French and especially hard to explain when they only spoke Morre), having them pee in a cup, and measuring their height and weight.  A lot of the kids also had plugged ears full of ear wax mixed with dirt, small bugs, etc.  Some volunteers who had some training used a syringe filled with water to remove the crap from the kids’ ears.   I helped out by holding the bowl for the water that came out of the kids’ ears – brown water filled with chunks of who-knows-what.

Our French literature class is still as hard as ever!  We had a midterm exam earlier last week, which in theory wasn’t that hard but our professor graded it extremely harshly – not giving any points for a question if a verb was off and other nit-picky things like that.  When I got my exam back I realized that he had taken an additional 20 points off my final score, and it took a great amount of convincing by our TA Louise to get him to admit his math mistake and change my score!  The class has gotten a little bit better though than it was at the beginning.  We discussed the Mossi fables (the Mossi are the dominant ethnic group in Burkina Faso) in the beginning and have moved on to reading excerpts from famous French African post-colonial works. 

We’re all busy today buying last minute things and packing all our stuff up for the village.  I’m getting really excited but a little nervous for our village stay – no indoor plumbing or electricity for over three weeks!

Talk to you all in about a month!

Caroline

39 days down, 61 to go

Hi all!

So we’ve been back in the city for about two weeks now and in only one more week we’re heading back to the villages for our long stay!  Life here has started to seem normal, which in itself is kind of weird.  One day last week a friend and I were walking in our neighborhood.  Usually on walks around the neighborhood it is normal to be stared at and to have the little kids yell “nassara!” – which means foreigner – and run up to shake your hand.  On this walk, however, my friend and I were walking down the side of the road when a tour bus drove by filled with white people, which is an extremely weird sight here.  All of a sudden, we were the ones doing the staring, instead of observing like tourists!  In that moment I felt a little bit like an insider and a part of the neighborhood (an extremely rare occasion, seeing as I stick out like a sore thumb as a white American).  Other random things, such as having soda can labels written in Arabic or having an armed guard outside an ATM, now seem normal.  Also, everyone in our group has started to get the hang of taking taxis here, which I wrote about a little bit before.  Taxi drivers aren’t with companies and while our group sometimes catches taxis on the large goudron (paved road) by our house, it is sometimes simpler and safer to call a taxi driver directly.  Lucien, who is the taxi driver that found my cell phone and accidentally talked to my parents, is now a friend of everyone in the group.  He knows all of our names and is very kind and protective of us.  One night this week we all went bowling – which was an experience in itself.  It seemed as if a miniature sized bowling alley had been shipped straight from the US, new bowling shoes, funky bowling paintings on the walls, automated pins, electronic scoring, etc!  Anyway, after Lucien dropped us off none of us were quite sure where the bowling alley was and we started walking down the wrong street.  He started calling after us telling us not to walk down that street.  Even after we insisted that the bowling place was really close he insisted that he follow us in his taxi until we got to the place.  Of course we headed in the wrong direction, walking for about two blocks down a not so nice street when we finally realized it must be the other way.  Lucien stuck with us, and because our group of 9 couldn’t all fit in the car, he turned it off and we all pushed it down the street, I’m sure we were all quite the sight!  In the end we found the bowling alley and Lucien saved the day!

After visiting the village of Bereba, Ouagadougou makes much more sense and I can now appreciate it for what it is – a much bigger, more urbanized village.  There are a number of large paved roads in the city, especially in the down-town area, but the neighborhoods have dirt roads.  Sometimes people in the neighborhood try to keep the dust down and even out the road by dumping rocks and broken tiles onto the dirt, paving the roads with what they have.  Animals wander around the streets and green areas in the neighborhood and garbage here is collected by a donkey pulled cart (when it’s not burned in the middle of the street, which is one of the most disgusting smells ever).  While there are some more developed parts of the city, many people who live in Ouagadougou live in very simple and small houses similar to those found in the village.

Our neighborhood is one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city but you still see a bunch of kids running around with distended bellies and dirty, falling apart clothes.  Our next door neighbor is a very nice woman named Germaine.  Her husband is French and stays with their two kids in France as they go to school.  We also live really close to a small neighborhood mosque.  We can hear the call to prayer from our house and our classroom (in a four story! technical college two blocks away from our house) as it marks the beginnings of our meals and our classes.  All of our classes are two hours long and we can have anywhere from one to four classes in a day.  Usually, class begins at 8 am.  We always get a break at 10 am where, back at our house, Absetta, Bibatta, and Sallimata set out fruit, tea, and Nescafe (which is NOT coffee).  We usually have bananas (which are smaller and sweeter here), papaya, pineapple, and apples.  I tried guava for the first time a couple of days ago! During the mid-afternoon everyone pretty much takes it easy if we’re not in class.  The few times I ventured out to walk in the heat I came back with my face literally tomato red, not from sunburn but from the heat.  The dry season has technically started here even though it rained last night.  Many people are saying this is the longest rainy season they have ever seen!  It does, however, supposedly cool off later in October – here’s hoping!

(two days later)

Our group visited the sacred crocodile lakes yesterday in a village not far outside of Ouagadougou.  Our two guides carried thin sticks for protection and three small chickens we bought to have fed to the crocodiles.  (The guides use the squawks of the terrified chickens to attract the crocodiles.)  Stopping on the side of the road by a small pond it didn’t seem like there were any crocodiles around at first, until our guide shook the chickens a little bit (they hold them  by their feet) and all of a sudden a massive crocodile came out of the water.   Almost everyone in the group, including myself, each had a turn to sit on the back of the crocodile!  Walking further along, we reached the edge of a bigger lake.  One of the guides attached our last chicken to the end of his stick and started to swing the poor chicken out above the water.  All of a sudden you could see a crocodile start to swim towards the edge of the water.  The thing came out onto the shore.  Our guide tempted the crocodile with the chicken, placing it above its nose and moving it away every time the crocodile attempted the eat it, eventually getting the croc to stand on its hind legs as it jumped for the chicken!

As for one more story – When out in the neighborhood taking pictures for our photography class, our group ran into a group of women studying Arabic and the Koran.  They had a chalkboard, chairs, and benches set up outside.  There were older women and younger women, and some even had their young daughters with them too.  It was really cool to see and I got some good pictures too!

Talk to you all later!

Caroline

39 days down, 61 to go

Hi all!

So we’ve been back in the city for about two weeks now and in only one more week we’re heading back to the villages for our long stay!  Life here has started to seem normal, which in itself is kind of weird.  One day last week a friend and I were walking in our neighborhood.  Usually on walks around the neighborhood it is normal to be stared at and to have the little kids yell “nassara!” – which means foreigner – and run up to shake your hand.  On this walk, however, my friend and I were walking down the side of the road when a tour bus drove by filled with white people, which is an extremely weird sight here.  All of a sudden, we were the ones doing the staring, instead of observing like tourists!  In that moment I felt a little bit like an insider and a part of the neighborhood (an extremely rare occasion, seeing as I stick out like a sore thumb as a white American).  Other random things, such as having soda can labels written in Arabic or having an armed guard outside an ATM, now seem normal.  Also, everyone in our group has started to get the hang of taking taxis here, which I wrote about a little bit before.  Taxi drivers aren’t with companies and while our group sometimes catches taxis on the large goudron (paved road) by our house, it is sometimes simpler and safer to call a taxi driver directly.  Lucien, who is the taxi driver that found my cell phone and accidentally talked to my parents, is now a friend of everyone in the group.  He knows all of our names and is very kind and protective of us.  One night this week we all went bowling – which was an experience in itself.  It seemed as if a miniature sized bowling alley had been shipped straight from the US, new bowling shoes, funky bowling paintings on the walls, automated pins, electronic scoring, etc!  Anyway, after Lucien dropped us off none of us were quite sure where the bowling alley was and we started walking down the wrong street.  He started calling after us telling us not to walk down that street.  Even after we insisted that the bowling place was really close he insisted that he follow us in his taxi until we got to the place.  Of course we headed in the wrong direction, walking for about two blocks down a not so nice street when we finally realized it must be the other way.  Lucien stuck with us, and because our group of 9 couldn’t all fit in the car, he turned it off and we all pushed it down the street, I’m sure we were all quite the sight!  In the end we found the bowling alley and Lucien saved the day!

After visiting the village of Bereba, Ouagadougou makes much more sense and I can now appreciate it for what it is – a much bigger, more urbanized village.  There are a number of large paved roads in the city, especially in the down-town area, but the neighborhoods have dirt roads.  Sometimes people in the neighborhood try to keep the dust down and even out the road by dumping rocks and broken tiles onto the dirt, paving the roads with what they have.  Animals wander around the streets and green areas in the neighborhood and garbage here is collected by a donkey pulled cart (when it’s not burned in the middle of the street, which is one of the most disgusting smells ever).  While there are some more developed parts of the city, many people who live in Ouagadougou live in very simple and small houses similar to those found in the village.

Our neighborhood is one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city but you still see a bunch of kids running around with distended bellies and dirty, falling apart clothes.  Our next door neighbor is a very nice woman named Germaine.  Her husband is French and stays with their two kids in France as they go to school.  We also live really close to a small neighborhood mosque.  We can hear the call to prayer from our house and our classroom (in a four story! technical college two blocks away from our house) as it marks the beginnings of our meals and our classes.  All of our classes are two hours long and we can have anywhere from one to four classes in a day.  Usually, class begins at 8 am.  We always get a break at 10 am where, back at our house, Absetta, Bibatta, and Sallimata set out fruit, tea, and Nescafe (which is NOT coffee).  We usually have bananas (which are smaller and sweeter here), papaya, pineapple, and apples.  I tried guava for the first time a couple of days ago! During the mid-afternoon everyone pretty much takes it easy if we’re not in class.  The few times I ventured out to walk in the heat I came back with my face literally tomato red, not from sunburn but from the heat.  The dry season has technically started here even though it rained last night.  Many people are saying this is the longest rainy season they have ever seen!  It does, however, supposedly cool off later in October – here’s hoping!

(two days later)

Our group visited the sacred crocodile lakes yesterday in a village not far outside of Ouagadougou.  Our two guides carried thin sticks for protection and three small chickens we bought to have fed to the crocodiles.  (The guides use the squawks of the terrified chickens to attract the crocodiles.)  Stopping on the side of the road by a small pond it didn’t seem like there were any crocodiles around at first, until our guide shook the chickens a little bit (they hold them  by their feet) and all of a sudden a massive crocodile came out of the water.   Almost everyone in the group, including myself, each had a turn to sit on the back of the crocodile!  Walking further along, we reached the edge of a bigger lake.  One of the guides attached our last chicken to the end of his stick and started to swing the poor chicken out above the water.  All of a sudden you could see a crocodile start to swim towards the edge of the water.  The thing came out onto the shore.  Our guide tempted the crocodile with the chicken, placing it above its nose and moving it away every time the crocodile attempted the eat it, eventually getting the croc to stand on its hind legs as it jumped for the chicken!

As for one more story – When out in the neighborhood taking pictures for our photography class, our group ran into a group of women studying Arabic and the Koran.  They had a chalkboard, chairs, and benches set up outside.  There were older women and younger women, and some even had their young daughters with them too.  It was really cool to see and I got some good pictures too!

Talk to you all later!

Caroline

30 days down, 70 to go

We’ve been back from the villages for about a week now and I’m finally getting a chance to post this, sorry it took me so long!  (Internet here is very slow and inconvenient.)  Our week in the village was quite an experience to say the least.  On Friday morning we all piled into the blue van and drove for about five hours until we got to Hounde, which is a large town in the south of the country.  The road from Hounde to Bereba (the village where we stayed) is unpaved and that morning there had been a big rainstorm so huge portions of the road were flooded and very muddy.  We got pretty badly stuck in the mud but we were able to get out with the help of some guys who were driving by on a tractor.

            In the village I lived in a small house with two other girls.  We had a common room and each of us had our own room with a bed.  We had a couple of roosters who liked to wander around our front yard as well as a donkey who never left.  We also had a couple of mice, lizards, and even a bat who liked to hang out inside our house during the night!  In the village there are animals everywhere you look – goats, sheep, donkeys, pigs, and bulls are always wandering around of being herded by a young child.  For the first couple of days, we walked around the village with a guide.  Ousman (my guide) taught us a few words in dioulla, which is the local language, and had us practice greetings with everyone we met.  The village, which is fairly small, is actually pretty compact and people live in close proximity to one another. 

            FAVL, which is the nonprofit associated with my program, runs reading camps at all of its libraries and each day a couple of us drove up to Dimikwy to help out with the program.  We sat with kids and helped them read books in French, which most of them sadly struggled with.  At the end, however, we were informed that we would have to tell the campers an American story or read them a book.  Another girl and I picked up a French copy of Sleeping Beauty to read aloud to the kids.  While one might not think that Sleeping Beauty would have any difficult vocabulary, let me tell you – it did!  It was definitely a humbling experience!

            Each village has a griot, a person who tells stories and plays the balafon (like a xylophone) and the tam-tams (drums).  One night we visited the village griot (who is also the weaver) and listened to the music and danced with the kids – who are all much better dancers than anyone in our group!  Each village can also have a masque dancer, which is a traditional dancer who performs at celebrations like weddings or for village events.  On our last day the masque dancer of Bereba performed for us.  He had a large wooden headdress with a big beak that covered his entire head and was wearing an outfit covered with long strands of fiber that swished back and forth as he danced.  Within the first minute of the dance he jumped over to where I was sitting and practically landed in my lap!  While the dance was a little unnerving as you never knew who he was going to be bothering next, it was definitely fun to watch!  Practically all of the kids in the village gathered around our seating area to watch and many adults soon gathered around too. 

            We also went on an ox cart ride to visit a farmer’s fields, visited the mosque of the village, sat down and had a visit with the chef de terre (the chief of the village), and went to a village dance.  Some people in the village have scars that form patterns of lines all around their face.  This tradition, which is not only present in Burkina Faso but all over West Africa, is quickly dying out.  The practice originated when tribes would capture and enslave people and the scars were used as identification to signify your birthplace and tribe.  As one last random tidbit, Obama shirts are everywhere you turn in Bereba.  I probably saw Barack Obama’s face more times in that one week than I did all during the 2008 campaign!  :)

Talk to you all later!

Caroline