digging and planting, cooking and feasting... and malevolent tree munching goats

16 September

I am beginning to sense the start of the school year approaching; my help has been requested for introducing newly recruited students into the computer database! An arduous task to say the least - there are at least 250 of them. Alain and I are also preparing to reformat all the computers in the lab, reinstall windows and some software, and get them up and running with different usernames for admin, teachers and students. At the same time I am still (!) trying to settle into my house.

I don’t like knowing that several unfinished projects are going on at the same time. I much prefer to focus on one goal and finish it before moving on to the next, otherwise while I’m working on one thing, I can’t stop thinking about the other stuff that still needs to be taken care of. It’s been tough slowly furnishing my house, an ongoing project, while taking on other tasks in the computer lab. I really wish I could go home and finish setting up my new place so that I know that it’s done, it’s the way I want it, and I can focus my attention on whatever is going on in the lab. However, it doesn’t work that way in Burkina! I’m waiting on things that locals are providing so I have to move at their pace. Living here does a number on your level of patience and if you can’t learn to have lots of it, good luck staying around. I’m still working on dealing with that overwhelming feeling of having so much stuff to do, even though none of it is really urgent (except those new students).

The computer database by the way is one of very few in the country, I imagine. We have a Microsoft Access© database and user interface that was written by a volunteer from another NGO specifically for us, while having adjustable parameters for any establishment that would like to introduce it. It’s new and I hope to spread the word of its existence; it could be the foundation of a nationally used system. That’s what’s so cool about being an IT volunteer in Burkina right now; the fact that what we are doing could and probably will determine the way that IT is introduced into the national system of education.

19 September

I’m happy to announce that I have moved into my new house and christened my kitchen. Melissa and I cooked steak! It was chewy like leather but fantastic in every other regard. Also had green beans and rice with scallions. The one thing I’m missing is extra seats for guests. We ate on the floor; it was very just-moved-in-esque. I spent the night in my new bed, which I might have to move to the spare room due to the heat. My room has two walls that face the setting sun so the walls tend to soak up and radiate the heat. The spare room only has one wall that faces the setting sun at an angle and was noticeable cooler than my bedroom. Even with the fan going all night it was very warm for the first couple hours. I’m strongly considering moving my bedroom into the spare room...

So remember my neighbor who is helping me with stuff around the house and corralling other kids when they get rowdy? Well, he has taken his job a bit too seriously and is more like a bouncer at my gate. He is selective as to who gets let in and who doesn’t, who gets kicked out, who’s allowed to rough-house and who has to sit and be quiet…And this morning there were like 12 kids in my courtyard at the crack of dawn (5ish I think) talking very loudly and fighting over who gets to water the new trees I just planted. I was not happy to have been woken up so early especially after a rough night of sleep and by kids who just wanted to sit around and talk and watch me go about my daily tasks. That’s basically what they come over to do. They sit, or stand at the window, and watch me do whatever I’m doing. If I’m cleaning dishes outside then one might help rinse, and then they might all carry in the dishes to be dried, but apart from that they are usually crowding around and just watching. They also talk a lot between themselves and scream and cry and fight and anything else that typical children tend to do.



At the beginning I didn’t really set any ground rules, because they were pretty tame as it was and I didn’t want to be the Grinch from next door who hates kids, because I don’t. However, they have quickly taken advantage of my lax attitude concerning their presence and have been very rowdy, aggregating in large numbers, and trying to storm into my house. I had to put my foot down and give them a warning concerning their obnoxious behavior. Unfortunately it didn’t settle in and I ended kicking them all out. I told them not to come back before tonight but a couple snuck back in (pretty obviously too) within a half hour. It’s a tough game to play because I don’t mind them hanging around when I’m also just hanging around, but when I’m busy doing things it gets on my nerves to have kids running around screaming. I also think as time goes on they will be less fascinated with whatever I’m doing.

I mentioned planting trees - I took some seedlings from my counterpart’s house of some papaya trees that he grew from seeds of a papaya he happened to specifically enjoy. I also got a couple Moringa trees from the nursery and planted those too. If you don’t know what those are, visit www.treesforlife.org, and read up about an amazingly nutritional tree. I mistakenly planted them in the early morning instead of the early evening and they got so crispified by the sun that I thought that the little papaya seedlings wouldn’t make it another day, but lo and behold they lost some leaves but new ones are itchin to see the light of day and I think I should have 6 papaya trees and 4 moringa trees in no time!

The next project for my house is going to be to dig a “lost well” which is basically a huge hole in the ground to avoid stagnant water. I’m going to put one below my faucet, and maybe a second one just outside the courtyard with a hole in the wall so that I can throw used dish or clothes washing waters out the hole and it will drain away. So once you have your giant hole in the ground, you start to fill it with the densest medium and moving to less dense mediums closer to the surface. That means the bottom layer is just sand, and then you move up to pebbles through to large stones. The water drains down fast around the large stones and then starts to get soaked up as it gets deeper into the more densely packed pebbles and sand, and then into the ground all around the area. I have a bad feeling the ground deeper than about a foot contains lots of very hard rock, because when digging up holes for my new trees I encountered such barriers. It might be easier to go deeper with a larger hole…we shall see.

The computer formatting is going as planned, and soon we should be loading images of our model computer onto the others, thus completing our clean up of the lab facilities. It’s easier to get a routine down now that I live at home and can start forming habits. The fact that I don’t have a fridge puts a damper on my kitchen activities because it means I have to go buy everything I need right before lunch and/or dinner. For vegetables its not a big deal because no less than one block from my house is the petit marché. The problem is going to be finding adequate supplies of cow sheep or pig. The main butchery is in the grand marché but that’s so far into town that I don’t feel like making select trips just for that. If I’m at the lycée it would be feasible, but once it starts getting really hot I am going to want to avoid as much biking during the hours of 9 to 3pm as I can.

24 September

Finished imaging computers, finished fixing another computer, and finally have no more required work in my computer lab. I am now free to spend my days as I choose. Julia came to visit the past two days and she just went back to site today. I have been cooking a lot recently with all the visitiors! Garrett also came to visit before Julia got here. That makes 5 guests in my first month at site! Julia was impressed so I guess I should be too. I’m happy everyone came through, it was really fun.

With all these house guests I’ve also been cooking a bunch. Testing out my kitchen and pushing the limits. I’ve realized I have way too little table space. I find myself putting bowls and cutting boards all over the place, and most often on top of something that was already occupying table space. So the next mission is to get another table of some kind. It will have to wait until I get paid again though, because I am currently pushing the extremes of being broke. I have several other things I’d like to do but it all has to wait for the next pay period. The menu so far has been deluxe avocado and vegetable sandwiches, scrambled eggs with toast, oatmeal with jam, eggplant and green pepper tomato sauce with garlic bread, a curry pineapple cabbage peanut rice dish that didn’t turn out as I had planned but was good anyway, spicy pork spinach and bean soup (the beans here are actually black-eyed-peas) and this morning I had banana and apricot jam crepes with Julia before she took off. The feasting has been fabulous to say the least.

I’ve also heard that one of my friends from stage has travelled around visiting other people at site and I’m jealous! So I’m going to try go visit some people at the end of this week.

About my house and neighbors: I forgot to close my courtyard door one night and goats barged in at 5:30am and ate my moringa trees that I planted… I was furious, especially after being woken up by the church bells which ring way more than they should at 6am every day. They don’t even tell you that it’s 6 am, they just ring for like 5 whole minutes, its horrible. I was told that the moringa will recover though, so I am anxiously awaiting the first leaves that bud out of the goat munched stems. They left the papaya trees and the peanut plants alone however, and they are both doing very well. I dug my lost well and have managed to fill in the small rocks and half of the medium sized rocks. Still getting more mediums, then need to get more larges and I already have extra large rocks. They neighborhood kids have also been pushing the limits so I had to lay down a heavier law. One of them broke a clay pot that was in my courtyard while he was messing around with my faucet. They also come way too often and play around too much outside. I have been told by more experienced volunteers and by my older neighbors that I should stop letting them in at all, but I’m willing to compromise. I also have a lock now on my gate so the kids can’t come mess around in my yard when I’m gone. They use it like a playground even though there is more than enough space outside my yard to play in… They do water my plants for me and I gave them a crepe with jam this morning which went over really well.

Oh and I also found a butcher who is willing to deliver meat to my house, or even the restaurant near by where I could even store it in a fridge. Alain has a fridge too and I figure I would ask him first if I could rent space in it to put meat that I buy. I also realized that the selection at the marché at 8am and at 3pm are significantly different. The vegetables I saw in the morning were gloriously fresh looking - the eggplants were fluorescent purple, the scallions were thick, long and unwilted, the cabbage was bright green and not dirty, the tomatoes were unbruised, etc. I decided that I have to go earlier in the day and buy for cooking later instead of buying right before I want to cook.

I've read entries from blogs of other volunteers from my stage and the common thread is extreme boredom. I feel bad that they are all so bored! I live in a pretty big town and have to prepare my computer lab for school meaning that there has always been things to do. Moving in was a long battle, dealing with all the computers and people who come to use them took up most of my days, and otherwise I have been meeting just about everyone in town. I now know about 4 or 5 groups of men who always hang out at their preferred spots. One group drinks tea right near my house and i pass them everyday. I have hung out and drank tea with them, as well as the group that sits outside a fresh-juice maquis, the ones from the marche who help me find stuff, and people I have met through Alain and teachers at school. I have been so unbored I am actually looking forward to the next couple of days when I won't have anything to do and I can open a book and just chill out. So far cooking has been my outlet, and I want to set up some sort of exercise routine. I do a decent amount of bike riding but I'd like to spice it up with something different.


Recently I have seen a variety of weird and astonishing things:

A car on a donkey cart being pulled by people (no donkey in site) I have seen a cow on a cart being pulled by a person too.

5 people on one moto - driver, two little kids standing between his legs, and a woman and a child on back. They also had several large bags.

A guy on a moto carrying a roll of metal fencing on his lap hanging off the front of his moto like a multi pronged jousting pole. If he had an accident he would be impaled more than once is what I was thinking.

A guy on a moto with a giant rusted metal pole on his shoulder. It had to be at least 5 meters long and hung several meters behind and in front of his moto as he cruised down the middle of the street.

A piglet and a lamb cuddling at a bar late at night. They were the only animals out at the time.

A guy who walks around selling really nice boxers and dress-socks.

A woman carrying a huge basket of coconuts on her head while talking on her mobile phone with one hand and holding and breast-feeding her baby with the other hand.


…more to come
That’s all for now, sorry I still don’t have pictures; when they do get online there will be a whole bunch to look through so the wait is worth it.

You are visiting this page from:

---

---