Blogs from Ouagadougou, Centre, Burkina Faso, Africa - page 6

As February is getting to an end, the winds started blowing!! I thought the winds were on when Dee was here, but I was surely mistaken. Tornadoes of dust form sometimes in the middle of the street and the wind blows so hard that it makes my moped move sometimes. What is weird though, is that it only blows during the day and at night, it's calm. I suspect the sun and the heat have something to do with that. I'm sure my dear Stacey would have some weather scientific reason for this! ahah At least the nights are still cool for now, but the heat will come and the sweat will be pouring out of the pores! I dont want this to happen, at all even. The weather was so nice this past little while. ... read more

Shawn and I spent our Christmas in Burkina Faso - We gave up our hopes of going to Timbuktu because of time constraints and settled on a place with an equally exotic sounding name. Ouagadougou (pronounced Wagga-doogoo) was our new Christmas Destination. We noticed the difference as soon as we crossed the border. The French speaking immigration man joked with us as he chain smoked cigarettes. An empty shot glass sat beside him on his desk - we attributed his friendliness to the beverage. We later found out the glass was for incredibly strong green tea from China made by adding a cup of sugar and mixing continuously for three minutes. You will frequently see a couple of men sitting in the street nursing a teapot that sits on hot charcoal. You drink the tea ... read more

So, yeah I have bad news. I hurt myself the other day. To make the story short, I was putting up Christmas lights on top of the wall surrounding my yard. This wall has little peaks on top of it, meant to hurt any thiefs. The chair I was on broke and thus while I fell, those peaks totally disfigured 2 fingers. It's only on the floor that I realized I was hurt when I noticed the blood pissing from my hand. I put really thigh bandages around my hand and Djeneba drove me to the clinic I work at. It wasnt pretty. They did more than 10 stiches on my hand with the only needle they had available, a round maternity needle, when the nurse would have wished he had triangular needles. I got lucky ... read more

I am really sorry for not having written in so long. Really a lot has been going on and it was simply too much to talk about that I was never motivated to sit down and write it all. And now it is even more and obviously I will have to just stick with the most important things. Basically, Africa's reality has been hitting me hard. I realized a lot of things in the last couple of weeks and it makes me understand a lot more about this planet, this country and development. I realized that Burkina is a big lie and really corruption is HUGE. Everyone lies to everyone. It's really rare that you have real friendships, even the Burkina people say that it is also hard for them to know. With what I have ... read more

Hey everyone! Sorry I never actually came back on internet the other day. my plans all changed suddenly. My friend Sara, also from the University, came to visit this weekend. It was good times. It's nice to be talking to someone who totally understand you. We covered a lot of topics and surprisingly have been through about the same. So again; that was good. We chilled and talk until 1 in the morning the next day; we went out with one of her friends and his cousin. The cousin totally flirted with me and now I'm stucked with him cause for sure he lives in the capital city. He's been calling me 3 times. Didnt answer the 1st 2 times and the last one I couldnt see who it was so I answered and obviously got ... read more