where do i begin?

After trying to write chronological blog posts covering the last week like I did when I was in the army, I decided to sum everything up under topic headings. It should give you an idea of what it’s like being here. There are definitely some things I have already become accustomed to and won’t remember to include here, but they might crop up during other entries. Internet access is unbelievably slow, so pictures and videos will be few and far between. Also, it is not polite to take pictures of people without asking their permission first, and busting out the digicam is also an attention attracting operation so be patient for pictures with Burkinabé.

Food
Before coming to Africa I was warned about the food. It ranged from “you’re probably going to be served boiled goat head and it will be a delicacy. As a guest you’re going to have to eat it or make up some excuse about your religion not allowing you to eat it - and then go hungry” or “you’re going to have to eat some locally available starch product and nothing else…for every meal of every day…”
So far it has been far from either of those expectations. PC makes sure that we are well informed on what to eat and where and how, and our host families are specifically trained on hygiene and dietary norms in order to better accommodate and prevent us from getting sick (at least not too early into training). I have been pleasantly surprised with the variety of food we have managed to find in town, and that I have been served at home.
RICE - in restaurants and at home rice is the staple carbohydrate (besides tô). There are three typical rice dishes in the restaurants
1. riz graz -rice is cooked in a sauce, kind of reminds me of fried rice in the look and texture but not the taste
2. riz sauce - tomato based sauce with onions, garlic, sometimes other veges like cabbage or these okra type things and most of the time some meat - usually sheep or goat, rarely chicken
3. riz sauce arrachide -arrachide is another word for peanut and the sauce is peanut paste based. Same additions as the tomato based sauce.
TO (pronounced “toe”) - flour made from millet is mixed with water and brought to a boil. I’m not sure the rest of the process but the result resembles mashed potato Jell-O. It’s white, gelatinous, and comes out in a pot as a solid block of…millet flour water stuff. It’s mixed with a sauce and is the primary food eaten around here. In village, some trainees get this and nothing else.
COUSCOUS - sometimes available in restaurants and would come with either of the two sauces mentioned above for the rice dishes.
SPAGHETTI - sometimes like a Bolognese but don’t expect much meat, and sometimes with a very basic onion, goat/sheep and bouillon sauce
BEANS - the bean dish here is beans and rice cooked together and it comes with… you guessed it! A SAUCE! The sauce has regularly been oil and chicken gizzards. Yum!
CHICKEN - you can buy grilled chicken by the …chicken. It’s expensive to buy a whole chicken or any large quantity of meat, but sometimes it has to be done!
STEAK - some restaurants will offer a steak. I have no idea if its beef or goat or sheep but it looked damn good. Also very expensive in relation to other meals.
FRIES - some places do fries too. Steak and fries is a great way to enjoy your Sunday midday meal.
BROCHETTES - your average shish-kabob of goat/sheep meat with some sort of baste/sauce and some dipping mustard/hot sauce - not as expensive as a steak but very tasty.
SALADS & SANDWICHES - the salads are sketchy due to the difference in hygiene standards, and the sandwiches are really weak. That said, it’s amazing to see that much GREEN on your plate and they are great for changing it up from the regular high carbohydrate diet. In fact I found some sautéed minced goat meat sandwiches that I combine with the vegetable sandwich to make… a typical American sandwich. Tasty.
PEANUTS - on the street stands where you can buy fruits they also sell peanuts. Roasted, boiled, sugar coated. Great for snacking and filling up after unsatisfying meals.

Now at home, mom makes a variety of dishes and they are much better than the restaurant quality ones we get for lunch. She beefs up the vege and meat content and the sauce is nice’n’thick. I have only had wonderful dinners at home, including one riz graz dish that had some fried fish and lots of veges, and a salad that was basically raw onions, cucumber, carrots and avocado - very refreshing. I almost always get a mango for desert, which brings me to my next food item - fruits.
BANANAS - smaller than the ones you see in the states, but the flavor is amazing. They taste so naturally sweet and delicious.
MANGO - Probably my favorite food item here. They come in several varieties and sizes and each one is heaven on earth. So much tastier than the ones we get in the states, and if you avoid the treated ones, naturally ripened and just absolutely exquisite.

Family
My host family is great. They have a car, a moto, a moving satellite that picks up hundreds of channels, electricity in the house as well as in my room, and a tap with running water in our courtyard and so are quite well off. The sibling situation is complicated - I have two brothers and three sisters but the youngest daughter is actually mom’s sister’s child, and the other two I believe are another of mom’s sisters’ kids. Although they all live here with my parents (who are the biological parents of the two boys) I still can’t tell or figure out who the parents of the girls are. In any case they have Christian names (except for the youngest two) and several African names. I’m going to refrain from spelling out their names for reasons of privacy. J is 17 and the oldest boy. He is going to start his last year of high school (Terminale) in September, and studies Chemistry, Physics and Math. M is 14 and the oldest girl. I don’t know if she goes to school or not but she helps around the house and does a lot of the cooking/cleaning. C is the second boy, is13 and is in 6ieme (6ieme, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Terminale). I tend to play with him the most - he loves soccer and also enjoys ultimate Frisbee (they hosted a volunteer last year who taught them how to play and left them with a frisbee). He is also very competitive and hates losing. A is 9 and is the next to youngest girl. She loves laughing and has one of those great laughs that makes me want to laugh even though I have no idea what they’re saying. The youngest but not least is R - she is about 18 months old but is the most intelligent, well behaved and enjoyable infant I have ever met. Unlike other infants around here she did not cry the first time she saw a white person, on the contrary she tends to follow me like a shadow. She often imitates people, like me for example, but also learns from observation quite quickly. I can get her to make funny faces at me and she can make noises that sound like peoples names. She got my name down pretty quickly. She also likes to help me wash my clothes and she even started sweeping my room once out of no where. She likes to throw the Frisbee and scribble on my journal. She also likes to dance and it’s pretty damn cute. My parents are great too. Mom I think likes the fact that I’m interested in learning about the food and cooking, and she really wants me to teach her how to better use word and excel as well as how to use PowerPoint. Dad is cool too, he watches a lot of TV, loves soccer, but doesn’t talk much otherwise. In fact they all watch a lot of TV. It reminds me a LOT of the states. Prison Break, Lost, French quiz shows, comedies and African soap operas are the preferred choices. We also have a dog named Chance and a cat named Mosh.

My room
Since it is on my mind, I will describe my accommodations while at host family. My room is at the front of the courtyard a little apart from the house. It is basically a brick oven. It has a sheet metal roof, a metal and screen door, and a screen window with shutters which is about 4 square feet in size. There is a huge tree in front the window and it prevents any air from circulating into my room. Between the lack of a cross breeze and the brick nature of the walls, it really is an oven. The first night I slept inside it was 41degrees C inside my room. Since then I have slept outside except for the night it rained, and my room dropped to 28C. I have a cot with my mosquito net, a trunk provided by PC, a water filter, and the rest of my junk. There is very little extra floor space. When I put my bike inside at night there is just enough room to move around.

School
So the next 10 weeks is all about school. We are kind of in school, we’re learning about Burkina schools and we’re going to be teaching in model school. We are starting to get into lesson planning and have already done 5 minute intros to mock lessons we came up with. We’re going to do the same 5 minute intro lessons in French too. Then we get into full hour lesson planning and continue from there. At some point we will be teaching mock classes in a model school with real students who are on summer break. We also have language class which takes up the majority of our classes. Right now everyone is learning French regardless of their level - I want to focus on learning a local language already but since the language I learn depends on my site and we don’t get sites until a month into training there isn’t really any point in starting one yet. It is unfortunate because I find myself quite bored in French class. We are grouped by level of proficiency but my oral French seems to exceed that of those with great theoretical French knowledge and as our lessons are mostly oral I don’t get much out of the lessons.
We also have tech sessions where we group by teaching subject - so us IT trainees get together and discuss the huge challenge we have ahead of us considering the lack of any IT curriculum to date. The ministry of education wants us to come up with the curriculum as I’ve heard. In any case, its really cool that we get to start from scratch and whatever we do will set the foundation for future programs, curriculums and work done by IT volunteers; maybe even the future and success of Burkina’s IT program. The four of us are really excited to be the first IT volunteers here.

Money
The price of living here is loooow! Even though “la vie chere” or expensive life hit here a couple months ago, it is still cheap compared to anywhere else I have lived. The exchange rate is something like 400cfa = 1$ . To give you an idea of prices here’s a list of things I buy.

Mango - 50-150 cfa
Banana - 50 cfa each
Peanuts (a handful) - 25 cfa (some even have a roasted sugar coating)
Rice dishes with sauce - 200-500cfa depending on restaurant
Steak and fries - 1000cfa
A whole roasted chicken - 2000cfa
Flip flops - 150 cfa for the cheapest ones you can find
Nutella (250g jar) - 2000cfa
Soft drinks (0.5L) - 500cfa!!! Too expensive!
Bissap (0.5L hibiscus ice tea with aromas) - 150cfa
Peanut paste (ie natural peanut butter) - 150cfa for a sachet (about 150ml I’d say)

And that’s considered a bit expensive here because of expensive life syndrome.

One thing I could mention that I don’t quite understand is that getting change is always a hassle. It’s as if isn’t enough small change circulating, and there are only big bills. Sometimes you pay for something with a big bill and you see the vendor go talk to several other people looking for change. It’s quite bizarre, and it leads us to horde our change.

Local Language
In town here the local language is Mooré. We have had a couple quick classes so that we know how to greet people and some other random phrases. I also got my host siblings to translate some things I wanted to know how to say. Out of town there are already other ethnic groups who speak languages like Fulfulde and Jula (excuse the spelling). Depending on where my site is I could learn any of those three languages, or even a couple others which are also possibilities. For now, I know some Mooré and the locals love hearing the trainees greet them in Mooré. It goes something like this:
Ne y zaabre.
Zaabre kibaré?
Laafi. Y zak ramba?
Laafi.
Y tooma kibaré?
Laafi. La yamba?

Basically the greetings always cover the same questions, and are answered the same - all is well, regardless of whether or not all is well. After the greetings are completed you can get into the details of whether or not all is well.
Good evening.
Any news of the evening?
All is well. How is your family?
All is well.
How is the work?
All is well, and you?

And then the questions are reciprocated to the one who asked them first. Once the family and work and evenings are well and there is no news but good news, you can start your real conversation. For now, it has been can I buy two mangos some bananas and a bag of peanuts, in French of course. In Mooré it would be something like Mam …. Most people speak French but sometimes only a little bit. Today for example I tried to explain I wanted their meat sandwich and their salad sandwich combined into one sandwich. I ended up getting a half sandwich of each kind. Communication barriers are a common Peace Corps Trainee problem.

Sachets and trash
I was amused to find out that you can buy lots of things in “sachets” or basically small sealed plastic bags. “Clean” water can be bought in sachets, and there are several companies that package water. They are often sold out of coolers and so are actually cold, compared to the filtered water we make/drink that is often luke warm to very warm, and bleachy in taste. Unfortunately some are not treated that well and once we get to used to local water, we still run the risk of getting sick by drinking the sachet water. You can also get Dégé which is yogurt with millet, kind of like cream of wheat bits with yoghurt. It is also cold and very tasty. Bissap and Zoomkoom also come in sachets and are frozen or cold (bissap is the hibiscus ice tea and zoomkoom is a sweet drink made from millet flour and water). Unfortunately the sachets litter the street like the black plastic bags. Speaking of waste and trash, I failed to mention before that trash disposal here doesn’t exist in any organized fashion. Trash is dumped on the street where you stand. At home, we have a barrel in which trash will be burned systematically. On the street it is sometimes burned, but more commonly ends up all over the place. The trees and bushes are thoroughly decorated with small black plastic bags which are given with anything you buy whether it’s at the marché or at a boutique. The quantity of trash that you see in town and even way out into the bush is disgusting. Several dozens of kilometers out of town there are still back trash bags in the trees. It’s almost like modern art, and you stop noticing all the black color between the leaves. Honestly the first time I saw it on the way out of town was mind blowing. As for many things, the pictures do it justice.


Illness
AIDS, malaria, yellow fever and dysentery are just a couple of the long list of possible diseases we can catch while in West Africa. Most of them are preventable, and most are also not life-threatening. There are amoebas, parasites, bacteria and viruses to watch for. We take mefloquin against malaria and have had multiple vaccines. Most of the preventative measures involve food - proper cleaning and preparation techniques, as well as cleaning ones hands before eating. The most common problem is diarrhea!! It’s a symptom and not a disease, but it can be devastating. It can be caused by many things including change in diet, spicy or greasy food and of course bacteria, viruses, parasites and amoebas. Typically though, the causes are not very harmful and the bouts do not last too long. Of course if it persists and is a bad case, the problem should be investigated so as to prevent any real damage from being caused. Most of the time you can’t do anything about it besides re-hydrating and eating the BannanaRiceApplesauceToast diet. Towards the end of the first week at least half the trainees had caught the “itis”, and by the end of this week, everyone had at least one episode. A couple had some bad fevers and spent nights in the infirmary, and some have had the itis for several days straight, but no causalities so far. Our GI tracts need to adapt to the new bugs we encounter and to the change in diet and eventually the system will return to normal. In case you’re wondering I had several days of the itis. No worries, shit happens =)

The wildlife
I have not yet had any bad experiences with wildlife. The village people would say otherwise. In town goats, chickens and dogs roam the streets eating trash and whatever else they can find. Apparently they are all intelligent enough to find their way home at night and hence don’t have collars and are not always tied up. The goats we saw at school like to eat paper. I wondered if anyone had ever used that as an excuse - goat ate my homework - because it’s actually valid. They were chomping on newspaper and other random bits of paper.

In village however, night time is hell with all the animals. The one night I spent in village the animals were really tranquil because of the storm on the horizon. Although I did get to hear all of the available noises and get annoyed with them, apparently it was nothing like most nights when goats and sheep “bah” and make some sort of grumbling sigh, the chickens cluck, the roosters crow, the guinea fowl or whatever they are make a noise that sounds like a squeaky bike wheel, and the cows moo. And it doesn’t stop. The village people looked like hell the first time they came back from village just because the animals prevented them from getting good sleep.

Insects so far haven’t been too bad, although the rainy season hasn’t quite arrived in full force yet. Mosquitos are only bad around dusk, haven’t seen any scorpions or large spiders, the grasshoppers or locust can be enormous but no swarms, there are some weird flying things that come out after it rains and buzz around for a while before losing their wings and courting one another - weird mating ritual. Flies are probably the worse it has gotten. They come out of no where and all of a sudden the mango you just bit into has 20 flies on it. And they don’t go away. Any open fruit or fruit left overs will be swiftly attacked by flies in large numbers. Also seen some huge millipedes, cockroaches, and hornets.

Lizards doing push-ups! There are a lot of geckos/lizards roaming, and when they stop it looks like they are doing push-ups. I don’t quite understand the behavior yet, but they lower and raise their upper bodies by bending their front two legs. Then they’ll around again and go through the same process. They do it alone and they do to one another when they are facing off. It’s quite amusing.

The king
As part of our arrival in Ouahagouya where we are completing our 3 months of training, we had to present ourselves to the reigning chief/king of the area. We brought him some kola nuts and a chicken. I can’t remember exactly what each was to represent but they were appropriate gifts for the king. We waited in an audience room where his throne was atop a carpeted pedestal. He came entered through a door connecting the throne room with his home and we all stood up. He moved slowly and had a servant who sat next to him on the rug. Our training coordinator kneeled in front of him at an angle, making sure to look mostly away from the king as a sign of respect. He spoke softly and slowly to the floor next to the king before his majesty responded in an even softer voice. Our coordinator would then repeat the exchanges to the rest of us seated in the throne room. We then presented him with the gifts and had the opportunity of taking pictures with him. He was very glad overall that the Peace Corps was here and for the work we would be doing over the next two years. Other PC groups had passed through his throne room before so it wasn’t the first time he had welcomed us into his region and offered his support. However, it was the first time he presented a PC training group with a present! And so through the same door he had entered by, the servant brought out a goat. We named him 4th of July and are eating him next week !! It was an interesting experience, following old traditions which still held cultural and actual protective value. In the case we have a problem in town, we are sure to have the king’s support and protection.

Bike
Around here there are few cars. Instead there are hundreds of motos and bikes. The motos consist of mopeds, scooters, small geared motorbikes without clutches and few regular motorbikes. The bikes the peace corps gave us definitely stand out in a crowd. They are nice Trek mountain bikes with front suspension and 21 gears. The bikes around here tend to be rusty, squeaky and a bit bent out of shape. Popping tires is a big deal too. There is a lot of hidden junk in the dirt and I’ve already fixed 3 popped inner tubes in 2 weeks. Traffic circulation here takes some getting used to as well. There are basically no rules on the road (at least none that I’ve picked up on yet), although MOST people stop at STOP signs and at the one red light in town. On the concrete, where the two sides of the road are not necessarily distinct but at least large enough for traffic in both directions, it is a little less hectic (but only a little). On the dirt roads (only a couple main roads that aren’t dirt) you just try to stick to one side of the road, even though in some areas there are either huge holes, ruts or other obstacles which force you to maneuver the same small path as opposing traffic. Intersections are especially dangerous because the priority is ranked by size of vehicle as opposed to direction or flow of traffic. Pedestrians usually yield to bikes who yield to motos who yield to cars and trucks. The key word is usually. If the vehicle is coming fast, you probably want to get out of the way regardless of what vehicle it may be, and you’re going to want to look both ways several times before crossing an intersection. I won’t even get into the night time driving which is deadly as peace corps bikes are the only ones with lights, and a lot of the moto lights are so dim they act merely as warnings that a motorized vehicle is coming as opposed to actually lighting up the way ahead.

Your average day in training and leading into random tangents
So an average day in my first week starts around 5:45am when the sun comes up. I don’t get up until 6:45 when I take my first bucket bath of the day, but as I sleep outside as often as possible, the sun wakes you up. My family also gets up with the sun to start cleaning, cooking and whatever else I don’t see when I’m trying to hide from the early morning sun. After my bucket bath I sit down to eat breakfast with my dad and/or mom. It is either bread (French baguette style) with butter, or scrambled eggs with onions. Tea and coffee are also available. Once I eat, brush my teeth and leave for class I sometimes buy some fruit or peanuts to snack on. We have two hours of class starting at 8am, a 30 minute break, 2 more hours of class and then 1.5 hrs for lunch. Language classes are held all over the place in the community - at beer gardens which are just enclosed areas with shady seating during the day, at some host family’s homes, at the schools in the area, or at the ECLA center where we have our tech classes and some lesson planning classes. In the afternoon we have two 1.5 hrs blocks with a 15 minute break in between and we are out by 5:15 pm. I ride home and either do some homework, read, or hang out with my host siblings. We have played several games of ultimate Frisbee with some of their friends, as well as some soccer with a bunch of local kids. Once it gets dark and I’m no longer sweating just sitting in a chair, I take another bucket bath and continue getting work done for school before we eat dinner. If I don’t have anything to do I’ll watch TV with the family, or play a game with the kids, or work on my Mooré.
I spent one evening learning how to wash my clothes, and another fixing my bike. The clothes washing is pretty self explanatory - we have a huge bowl that you dump some laundry detergent and water from the tap in our courtyard before soaking your clothes. Then you do some hand scrubbing, focusing on the dirtiest areas, and then transfer to clean water. Then you dump the washing water out, dump in the clothes and new water back into the big bowl, add some more clean water, and rinse. You soak them one more time in clean water and then ring out and hang up to dry. Voila. One thing to note is that under-garments are hung up out of sight so as not to frighten visitors. That goes for everyone.

Dinner involves me and mom at the table outside on the porch (facing the TV of course). We eat together and the kids eat separately at the side. It is common here for kids to eat separate of women separate of men. As a guest I fit into the “adults” category and because my family is fairly modern, the dad would eat with us too if he was home earlier. He eats later when he gets home. I am quite privileged as a guest and being funded by the Peace Corps. I eat whatever the parents are eating which is usually a nice dish. The kids get much less of the sauce or extra part of the dish, and a lot more plain rice/couscous. I also get spoiled with deserts. The best demonstration of gender roles and age as an indication of status are during meal preparation, consumption, and cleaning up afterwards. The guest and parents get the best of whatever is prepared. The older girls help mom prepare and do all the serving and cleaning up afterwards. The oldest boy doesn’t have to do much whereas all the younger kids clean the house and the dishes. It is also the responsibility of the older kids to make sure the younger kids get a fair share of food. The more they eat the less the younger kids get. Quantity in our family is never an issue, but variety and quality of what the kids receive can vary. Not all the families work the same way, and I’ve even heard other trainees say that their parents call their kids the servants and insist that the trainees tell the servants what they need!! It’s not quite how it works in the US.

It makes me think of eating habits in the US and I just want to mention how grateful I am for having the quantity, quality, and variety of food we get in the States. It blows my mind to think of the amount of food that gets wasted in the US, and how much it is taken for granted. Americans expect food to be available. Whether it is in a restaurant, at the grocery store or at home in the fridge or pantry, it is always there and readily available, not to mention the choices we have. I can’t get too far into the seasonal and regional variability of the foods here yet because I don’t know that much, but I do know that imported food is rare and expensive. The mangoes won’t be available all year round, certain areas get tons of potatoes and very few vegetables, while others get lots of vegetables but only rice.

All I can say right now is be extremely grateful with everything you have (not only food) because the situation in developed countries is not the same as it is in a lot of the rest of the world. Today for example someone didn’t quite finish their sandwich at lunch and left like 3 or 4 bites. As is common here, the kids selling stuff hang around at meal times trying to sell their wares. As soon as we stood up from the table one of them ran over and snatched the bits of sandwich left on the plate and ran off almost swallowing them whole. It came out of no where but looking back at it, that boy was probably watching us all eat full meals with drinks while he was waiting for the next handout or left over food he could grab.

If you hadn’t noticed, it is really hot here. I mean REALLY hot. We’re finally moving into rainy season (it dumped last night for the first time) and things cool down for a while before the sun bakes the rain away and it reaches 100+F again. Until about 9am the temperature is quite tolerable, but between 11 and 3pm it is so hot that you can just be sitting and still sweat more than you would doing intense cardiovascular exercise anywhere else its not 90+F. I average about 5 liters of water a day, depending on how much I’m riding around on my bike and how much other liquid I consume. Again it reminds me to be grateful I have ready access to water. A lot of people don’t have a tap in their courtyard and have to wheel around huge oil drums to be filled at taps maintained by someone who charges to fill up your drum. Water is another thing I have become very grateful for. DON’T TAKE YOUR WATER FOR GRANTED!!! I use 10-12 liters of water for each of my bucket baths, drink 3-7 liters, and use about 1 liter for tooth brushing and face washing EACH DAY. I would say I use about 30 liters of day if you include the water you use in the latrine and required for the food I consume as well. I don’t know the quantity of water an average American uses, but I know its way more than 30 liters a day. Just imagine how much water you can save by turning off the tap when you brush your teeth, turning off the shower when you scrub with soap, use more water efficient toilets, etc etc etc….Some things to think about...

Now that I’ve mentioned the latrine I should probably go into that! It’s what you would expect. A hole in the ground. Around here they have concrete floors, and the hole is smaller than a soccer ball. It opens up into a giant pit. Some of course are not new and can fill up. Way too close to the top for comfort (watch out for the splash effect). Toilet paper is available in stores but is expensive and not used by locals. The left hand is where its at! Not only is your left hand more gentle than 4 ply TP, it is more eco-friendly! The latrine comes with a plastic teapot with water to use. I won’t go into details but put together your left hand + water in a teapot + a hole in the ground and you have your toilet experience. And you’re probably thinking that left hands here are, well, yeah. If you have soap, you can wash your hands after, if you don’t, you rinse your hands. Before meals you wash your hands, but in between everyone basically has dirty left hands. This is one reason that food preparation is such a big deal. Everything that goes near your mouth has to be super cleaned otherwise it risks having passed through someone’s rinsed left hand. It’s also the reason that you don’t eat with your left hand here, and excuse yourself if you have to do something with your left hand because the right is occupied.

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