Well I finally had to say goodbye to Ouagadougou on the 4th. I had a great time hanging out at the restaurants and clubs on Kwame N'Kruma Avenue with a big group of PCVs until my 3 am flight. Stephanie, Leslie, and I went to the airport early only to wait around until 6:30 am when the flight finally boarded. At the Casablanca airport we took a train to the city and were in a different world. For example, there was a train. And tall buildings and well-dressed Moroccans and tourists from all over Europe and the US. It didn't look [View Full Entry]

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After the awful bus from Cotonou dropped me off in Fada, I met up with PCVs Beth and Aisha. We happened to be in Fada on the night of a Floby concert, what luck! (Floby is a popular Burkinabe singer.) The next morning we joined PCV Courtney on a bus to Niamey. There was a big fiasco in which the bus company sold us tickets and then didn’t want to let us get on the bus, but we managed to get some spots standing in the aisle. It was about an eight hour trip including a long stop at the border. [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Cotonou and got dropped off at the main market during rush hour. Then followed the most terrifying moto taxi ride of my life. The driver weaved between cars that I thought were going to hit each other, at one point I actually put my hand on the hood of a car I thought was going to hit us. I could see, though, that if he hadn’t driven like a maniac we would never have gotten anywhere, traffic was hardly moving. We met up with some Benin PCVs at their bureau who pointed us to an affordable hotel and [View Full Entry]

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Our first stop in Benin was Grand Popo, a small beach town not far from the Togo border. Grand Popo has lots of hotels but seems to lack tourists this time of year. I think we were the only ones staying at the beautiful Auberge de Grand Popo; they were so desperate for our business that they invented a 25% Peace Corps discount. The Auberge has a beautiful beach with thatch shade huts and a swimming pool. It also has a beautiful outdoor restaurant that we couldn’t afford, but we found some great seafood in town. There are several kinds of [View Full Entry]

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PCV Meghann and I left Ouaga on the 14th and traveled to Dapaong in northern Togo. We arrived in early afternoon and went to the PC house. We were welcomed by Kyan, a volunteer from my stage in Guinea who had transferred to Togo. The three of us borrowed bikes to explore the city. Kyan made a point to get us some wagash, a locally-made fried cheese served with rice and spicy sauce. It was delicious and we wondered why we couldn’t find the same thing on the Burkina side of the border. We visited Dapaong’s celebrated weavers, a co-op of [View Full Entry]

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Now that school is out, Radhika and I decided to take a trip to Oursi, a village in the Sahel region in northern Burkina Faso. This would be the place we tried to go last summer, when we caught a ride on top of a truck and then got stranded in the middle of the desert overnight because the road was flooded out. This time we brought bikes so we wouldn’t have to rely on slow, rickety trucks for transport. We took a bus from Ouaga to Dori in the morning then hid from the sun for a few hours, ready [View Full Entry]

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I spent my last few days in the village wandering to my favorite places, saying goodbye, and handing out gifts. People loved the soaps, lotions, and flashlights from the US (thanks, mom!) as well as all of the little things from my house that won’t be making the trip home. The village fonctionnaires gave me lots of nice souvenir fabric and the villagers presented me with gifts, too: mountains of peanuts, mangoes, guinea fowl eggs, a really nice carved wooden stool. They showered me with benedictions and well wishes for my family, friends, and all of the American people. I took [View Full Entry]

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As the school year wrapped up in Satiri, the oldest students were preparing for national exams while the others were preparing for vacation. I finished my 3ieme curriculum early so I could spend a few weeks doing only exercises for the exam. At this point, the majority of my students stopped coming to class. They either felt sufficiently prepared for the BEPC or had given up hope of passing it. My school took three days to give a full practice exam. The students had hour-and-a-half written exams in math, physics/chemistry, biology, English, history/geography, and several exams in French [View Full Entry]

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The month of April was hot. Very hot every day. There were a few nights when the wind picked up and it seemed to want to rain, but we got nothing but dust storms. When I lay down to sleep at 11 pm, outside of course, the temperature is often around 94 degrees and there is no breeze. Ugh. The artificial lake that was dug in Satiri last year is long dried up. It is now a field of dry, cracked clay. We had to add another length of rope to the well bucket in order to reach the water’s [View Full Entry]

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This week is spring break, and the plan was to travel to Niamey, Niger to visit Geoffrey and Christine, former Guinea PCVs. I left Ouaga on Sunday with Dr. Jen (former Guinea PCV now in Burkina), Kyan (former Guinea PCV now in Togo), and Katie (Kyan’s friend from the States, making her way to Tanzania to do a fellowship). It took about 6 hours by bus to get to the border. Kyan fought the crowd so she could be one of the first people on the bus and get a window seat. Control of a window is key on these [View Full Entry]

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