And the Oscar goes to...

I just uploaded my Burkina video to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1Pb7hlIWw

USA, Here I Come

November 13, 2006

Hello again! Yikes, been awhile since I wrote anything here. I’ve been unusually busy the past few months, and am currently preparing to go home for three weeks for Thanksgiving. So here’s a brief (well, compared to my other posts) update on what I’ve been up to the past few months.

Way back in September, I led a computer camp at the high school in Kongoussi. I had twelve students – most of them were students at the high school, but there were also a few random people from the community who showed up. None of them had ever used a computer before, so we spent a lot of time just going over very basic things (like spending a very frustrating two hours explaining the concept of “Caps Lock”). But by the end of the two weeks, they’d all mastered the basics – they could do a lot of stuff in Word, and could a lot of the little programs that come with Windows, like Media Player and Paint. Most importantly, they’d become comfortable using computers. Like most Burkinabé (and people in general, I suppose) who’ve never used a computer, they were incredibly intimidated by the machines at first, but now would feel comfortable going to a cybercafé or the high school lab again to work on something. The most frustrating part for me was the condition of the computer lab – I suspect that there’s someone in France who sends four computers to this high school every four years. So they had four relatively new, Windows XP machines, four older Windows 98 machines, and a wide array of far older machines. The oldest date I was able to find on a piece of hardware was a black and white monitor from 1986.

A new group of Peace Corps trainees arrived in Burkina at the end of September, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with them. I communicated with several of them before they even arrived – Peace Corps gave out my e-mail address to all of them, so I spent much of September answering questions about what they should bring to Burkina. One of them asked me what sorts of things I always had shipped from people back in the U.S., and I told him Skittles – so he brought me a huge bag of Skittles. Several of them also read my blog before arriving, which was a little weird, since they knew an awful lot about me when they got here. One of them told me that after reading about my experiences during training, she had nightmares about coming. Ha ha.

Anyways, I spent the week after my computer camp in Ouaga, along with everyone else involved in training the newbies. The training is taking place in Ouahigouya, and every week they have two current volunteers (one health volunteer and one small enterprise development volunteer) there, helping to lead sessions. I somehow got selected to spend two weeks there, including the first week, when I was constantly bombarded with questions. I helped facilitate several training sessions, including one on microfinance in Burkina (I’m currently the only volunteer working directly with a microfinance institution, although four or five of the trainees will eventually be working with credit unions like mine) and one on ICT (information and communication technology).

After their first week in Burkina, the trainees spent four days visiting current volunteers, to get a bit of a feel for what we do and how we live. So I had a group of five come and stay with me in Kongoussi. I spent the four days showing them around town – touring the credit union and meeting everyone who works there, seeing the high school and meeting some people there, greeting various big-shots in town (the provincial governor, the mayor, the police chief, etc.), seeing my English club, and so on. Their favorite part was when the leaders of an animal-raising association I’m starting to work with came to my house and presented us with a gift of three live chickens. We took the chickens to a restaurant, where they grilled them in a delicious vinegar, garlic, and onion sauce.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ouaga recently. I had to spend several days there for my mid-service physical. I’m surprisingly healthy for having spent a year here, with only one minor parasite showing up in one of the copious stool samples I had to submit. On the down side, I had to have a filling, but for some inexplicable reason, visiting a Burkinabé dentist was far less unpleasant than visiting an American one. I also spent a week in Ouaga for our mid-service training, which involved, among other things, a two hour visit and tour of the Ouagadougou landfill (where they do a lot of clever recycling and compost work – although we also got to tour the dump itself, and on a day when the wind was clearly working against us).

I also spent a weekend in Ouaga exploring SIAO, a week-long artisan / arts and crafts festival which bills itself as Africa’s largest. And it was pretty cool – I went three days in a row, and never got tired of it. Just about every type of African handicraft imaginable was available there, from wooden elephant carvings to Tuareg jewelry to batik prints to leather goods to cashew liquor (with free samples!). It was especially interesting to see things that came from other countries – you can really appreciate the variation in styles between items from Burkina and those from somewhere like Rwanda or Congo-Brazzaville or Algeria. I’ve always hated haggling for prices, which you have to do to buy anything more expensive than a tomato. But I got pretty good at it during SIAO, and by the end was getting some good deals. Of course, I still managed to spend several hundred dollars (keep in mind that Peace Corps only gives me about $200 a month), but I now have lots of cool gifts for people when I come home. SIAO was also cool just because it’s one of Ouaga’s two big festivals (the other, the FESPACO film festival, is this February), so there was food I’d never seen before in Burkina (cotton candy!), and a very relaxed, party-like atmosphere all weekend.

Last weekend, I returned to Minima, my training village, along with Giorgio and Omar, the two remaining volunteers from Minima. I managed to get a flat tire on the ride out, which Giorgio further destroyed while trying to patch, so we flagged down some kids passing by on a donkey-pulled cart, which we rode the last few kilometers into Minima. Everyone in the village was pretty excited to see us, and it was cool to see them again. It was also encouraging to see that a few things in the village had changed for the better – they now have transport twice a week, for instance. And my host family saved up enough money in the past year to buy a moped, so my host father can now get to Gourcy (the closest city) a lot faster than he could on his bike.

And that’s it. See? I told you I’d keep this blog entry short. I’m back in Kongoussi now, and I’m heading back to Ouaga in a few days, and then next Monday (a week from today!) I’m flying back to the U.S. for Thanksgiving and to take the Foreign Service Oral Exam. I’ll be there for about three weeks, arriving back in Burkina on Dec. 13. Also, assuming all goes well, there should be two photos with this blog post – one is me at the high school with the computer camp participants. The other is me with my gift chickens.