The bus...or a Mercedes Benz

KOUDOUGOU

This week was counterpart workshop and site visit. On Monday we were introduced to our counterparts and started the three day workshop. My CP’s name is Alain and he’s originally from Bobo, in the south. He lives in Koudougou now, and is a Physics teacher as well as the person who runs the IT room. I am basically going to take over his IT job so that he can spend his time teaching Physics and editing a workbook of Physics and Chemistry exercises that he put together and plans to sell. I’ll be teaching professors as well as a couple classes. The details haven’t been organized yet and we’ll get to that when I come back in September after training in Ouahigouya.

Counterpart workshop was long and painful. A lot of the information we were going over had already been covered with us trainees at pervious training sessions. It ended up being a competition between counterparts over how well they each knew whatever subject we were going over. Everyone was one-upping one another and trying to prove they were worthy. The AIDS-HIV workshop was probably the worst. We spent two full hours “brainstorming” and writing notes on the board about methods of transmission and other typical topics, which was all a repeat for us, and seemed to be redundant for the CP’s as well. It was horribly boring and we voiced our opinions on the evaluation sheets at the end.

We did have some interesting sessions where we discussed site specific information such as our future work situations, our houses, and what our villages/towns/cities had to offer. We also covered aspects such as professionalism in the workplace, avoiding being too familiar with students, and classroom management.

Thursday morning was the day of departure, and I was lucky enough to be with a counterpart who drove his Mercedes to workshop! I met up with him at 6am with the rest of the trainees and CP’s who were taking the bus, packed my bike into his trunk, and hopped in the front seat for a comfortable 2.5hr ride down to Koudougou. The ride took us out of town and through what is basically the bush. Trees, grass, bushes, and red dirt and rocks is what make up the view, and every once and a while you drive through a “village” where you can pick out concessions through the trees. They consist of mud brick walls surrounding several mud brick huts with thatch roofs. Sometimes you see people; sometimes on bikes, some on motos, but most are cultivating in the fields. The fields are not the structured, straight lined and regular looking fields that you see elsewhere, but rather oddly shaped patches of hand-tilled soil with lines of planted crops. Most of it is millet or corn, and they are hand-sown, hand-fertilized and completely cared for by hand. It is amazing to see people of every age breaking their backs as they sprinkle palm-fulls of fertilizer on each plant. It is evident that there is a huge amount of work put into farming, and its tough thinking that if there is a really bad storm, the evidence of their hard work would be wiped away and life would suddenly become tougher than it already is.

Along with the farmers, kids and adolescents are often (every couple kilometers) on the side of the road selling fresh eggs, fruits or peanuts. As you drive by they walk dangerously close to the edge of the right lane and hold out whatever they are trying to sell, hoping that the passing vehicle stops and spends some money. A lot of time, the eggs and fruits were collected in the wild and do not even come from domesticated animals or planted trees. You are basically paying for the effort of going out to find fallen fruits or wild guinea-fowl nests.

Arriving in Koudougou, the city reminded me of Ouahigouya, with several intersecting paved roads and dirt roads branching off. We toured the market, which is about the same size as in OHG, and drove to the Lycee Provincial where I will be teaching. Alain showed me the classrooms and the IT room where I will be spending most of my time. It is nicely equipped with 10 Pentium 4 computers, a projector and is permanently on a 128K ADSL internet connection. That in itself is something to be proud of, as most schools don’t even have a computer room. So far the professors are the principle users of the room, but Alain expects that it will get way more use after I start teaching classes. We met some teachers, the school director and some of his students. Everyone was welcoming and looked forward to my return in September.

We met up with the president of the PTA, who was in charge of organizing my housing situation, and he took me to see my future home. It is basically ready, needing only a new paint job, and to fix the holes in the porch roof where it leaks during storms. I will be living on the corner of a block in a 3 room house with porch, indoor shower (pipes still need to be run into the house from the tap outside), and a kitchen (located in a small one room shack separate from the house but connected by the porch). I have a fairly large courtyard off the side of the house which is being de-herbed (basically they’re ripping up all the weeds and plants that are growing to prevent mosquitoes and so that I can plant whatever I want there once I move in). I plan on having a vegetable and fruit garden, and everyone here I have talked to about it have told me it is definitely feasible and I was introduced to a teacher who takes care of all the greenery at the Lycee. As I mentioned, I have running water just outside my front door in the garden, and the electricity is being installed currently.

I have to admit, having a 3 room house with running water in the courtyard and electricity is not what I expected coming to Africa with PC, but as an IT volunteer, it is part of the package. We have to be in bigger cities where the schools are well equipped, hence the nicer living arrangements. It isn’t exactly what I wanted either, but I guess you can’t complain when most of the population still lives in mud brick houses in the bush. It just means that I will have to visit my fellow trainees in their villages around Burkina as much as I can to get a well rounded experience.

I spent my 3 days in Koudougou hanging out with my counterpart and his friends. He showed me around a lot, and introduced me to many people I will be getting to know once I come back for good. He is a really nice guy and seems to know a lot of people, including some important and good-to-know kind of people. He is single and has quite the bachelor pad. It has been a good visit to site, although very different from what the majority of trainees are probably currently experiencing - I cant wait to hear about the others’ site visits. Especially those who struggle with French!

There is currently a huge thunderstorm going on and with the electricity cuts and lightning I am going to unplug so as not to fry my laptop. Tomorrow I will spend the day in the IT room taking full advantage of the free internet connection updating my computer and antivirus as well as downloading some software and whatever else I can get up to before I go back to paying for crappy internet café connections.

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