April 12th
I try so hard to be
calm in my dealings with people here. To be culturally appropriate.
To not reveal how confusing and frustrating it can be. Today I didn't
completely lose my composure, but it was a struggle. The long and
short of it is that I had a meeting with the director of the high
school to get permission to paint a mural about the fight against
HIV/AIDS on one of their walls, timed to coincide with a talk on the
subject by the Major. I got the money for the paint as part of a
grant that was done by CHAT, our PCV health committee, that supplied
money for murals all across the country, easily involving over half
of the volunteers in Burkina. It was for World AIDS Day, back in
December, but due to delays in getting the money most of us are doing
it now. Each volunteer got a detailed budget, a list of things the
community could donate to make up their contribution, a sample mural,
ideas for activities that you could do in conjunction with your
mural, etc.
The director agreed
to at least let me do the mural and I think we'll work out the
frustrations over the next few days. Mostly I think it's a difference
in Burkinabe vs. American humor – they find some things very funny
that we take to be downright rude. If I had more time and another
location to put the mural I would strongly consider it, but it's
almost the end of the school year, I'm leaving on vacation in a
month, and since this mural is a part of a grant from many volunteers
meaning that we need to hurry up and finish so we can submit the
completion report. I'm not the last person to do my mural, but I
don't want to be the one holding up the process.
We're still
deciding where to put the mural, and what it will say – right now
he'd like me to paint “Lycee Departemental Yardego Ouedraogo de
Kossouka s'engage contre le VIH/SIDA” which is a lot to fit on the
wall where he seems to want me to paint. I'm going to try and get him
to move it, mostly because the wall he wants doesn't even start until
10 feet off the ground, and I'm much rather not be up on a ladder
quite that high! We'll see, I'll make some sketches and I'll talk to
him again on Monday.
On the other hand,
the malaria sensibilizations at the primary schools yesterday and
this morning went really well! Yesterday with Rosalie and Kimdaogo
was, as always, a delight – the students were really getting into
it and we asked them lots of questions to make sure they were getting
the facts correct (you can't get malaria from eating green mangoes
even though they ripen at the same time of year when people get
malaria, etc). This morning 4 of my 6 ASCs couldn't make it, so I
ended up doing most of the talking with Boureima translating (the two
that were left aren't very talkative and I finally gave up on
prodding them to speak and just did it myself). I thought it went
really well – I like doing the lessons for the younger kids because
even when they mix up the information they're just so eager and
earnest about it, and they love when we call them up to act things
out, in this case the girl who sleeps outside and gets malaria from a
mosquito bite but goes to the CSPS for medicine and then sleeps under
her mosquito net so she stays healthy. I found out that April 25th
is World Malaria Day (maybe it's just a Peace Corps thing), so the
timing of these sensibilizations is unexpectedly quite appropriate. 3
more to go!
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