Questions?

If you have questions, you should email me and I'll answer them on here! About Burkina, about living in my village, about the food, about anything I've put on here – if you have a question leave me a comment or send me an email - I'll be getting back to internet again in about a week and a half.

Up/Down, "A Prayer For Owen Meany"

14 January – Kossouka, 4:39pm

I debated about posting this entry for fear of worrying my family, but this is part of my life too and I really want to share that with you. Don't worry – we expected that it would be like this sometimes, and things always do get better. :)

“It will get hard but remember life's like a jump rope – up, down, up, down, up, down” - Blue October

I was talking to Emily today about how being a new PCV must be somewhat similar to being bi-polar – one minute you're on top of the world, two minutes later you're holding back tears, then you go to the marche and some days it's so odd and amusing that you're laughing out loud while other days you're so frustrated you want to forget about your groceries and go home. Sometimes I feel like things are finally evening out into a general positive trend, and then I have another day that sends the pendulum back into it's familiar swing. Yesterday was that day for me. I woke up with text messages from two friends, which made me smile and feel really cheerful, and then I even managed to have somewhat of a conversation with they guys at the coffee stand. Yay for language wins!

So then I went to the CSPS for baby weighing – Thursdays are always good days because I actually have something useful to do. I admit, my frustration and humiliation were all my own fault, but for some reason I felt it so much more poignantly than I believe I rationally should have. Last week I talked with David about how they determine if a child is malnourished and suggested that perhaps I could set aside the booklets of children I suspected of being malnourished or in danger of becoming malnourished soon based on their weight change patterns. He seemed to agree that this was a good idea, so this week even though I wasn't working with David I went ahead and set aside a couple of booklets. Next thing I know, the midwife is telling me that women are getting upset and I should stop mixing up the booklets. I protested that I wasn't – all the booklets that I'd recorded a weight for went into the pile she had been taking them from, except for these few which were ones I thought we should test for malnutrition. She said that the malnourished ones already had numbers, so I didn't need to set them aside. I explained again (in my bad French) that these were the ones that didn't have numbers but who I thought might be malnourished and I thought we could get their height at the end.

While I guess I could live with her telling me to stop doing that, her laughing at this was what really hurt the most. It made perfect sense in my mind – I actually look at the weights and the trends while they are just checking to write it in the record book and to see what vaccinations the kid needs. But clearly she didn't, so I put the “mixed up” booklets under the pile so that when she flipped it they would be the first women of the next group to be called for vaccinations. I continued to feel silly and a bit humiliated and just wanted the morning to be over but there were tons of women who had come and the piles of booklets just kept appearing. I had a mix up when someone weighed her baby when I hadn't called her name, then causing the woman whose name I'd actually called to try and weigh her baby after I'd called another name. I couldn't understand what she was telling me and repeated the new name, and the midwife yelled at her in Moore to wait until her name was called. So then I get to the booklet of the woman who'd cut in line and she says her baby's already been weighed. Now we have to figure out who she had taken the place of, then find and correct both booklets. Small, silly, not too hard to fix (except for the language issue) – it was just another little thing that didn't need to go wrong and even so, shouldn't have upset me in the least, but did.

I was pretty ready for things to be over at this point, and then there was the baby that they did measure for malnutrition. On weighing days they only do the ones that are the most obvious and this was no exception. It was the thinnest child I've ever seen, and every week we seem to have at least one “skeletal” child. Skin streatched taut over cheek-bones, eyes sunken into hollow sockets, a drying line of drool from one corner of his mouth, his head flopping onto his shoulder. So dehydrated and skinny that the skin on his stomach had wrinkles and stayed tented when you pulled it away. I've seen them before and didn't feel all that affected (to the point that I was concerned about my inability to feel emotion towards the situation) but this one just broke my heart. I think what got me was that he was too weak to make any noise – all the kids get mad as hell when we put them on the board to be measured but he just flopped there, mouth hanging open in a tiny silent scream, limbs lying jumbled and not resisting as we straightened them. Even getting vaccinated provoked just a slight opening of his mouth, again without noise.

After this, I honestly wanted to go home and forget going to the market. But I was out of vegetables and since that's pretty much all I live on right now I knew I needed to go if I wanted to eat for the next three days. So I went. I smiled at the gallette (millet pancake) lady and chatted with my vegetable guys who give me extra of everything in exchange for overcharging me (really, I wish they'd just give me the amount I want at a fair price – who can eat 8 patates in the 3 days until the next market?). I even bought a radio and my usual samsa (bean-flour beignets with spicy salt powder) for lunch, and there were bananas and apples from the lady who sells peanut butter. I was smiling, I laughed at the typical language confusion that accompanies me on market days when I try to interact with people in my 10 sentences of Moore and their 10 sentences of French.

I returned home and made my plans for dinner – soy-ginger vegetables over rice – and sat reading my book while enjoying my lunch of gallettes, samsa, and frozen bisap (sweet hibiscus tea). It was like the morning had never happened – how can my feelings over the course of just a morning be so disjointed that I can go from almost crying to laughing? I feel like I live in a series of moments, cut off from one another, with a selectively forgetful memory that allows me to feel such intense feelings but stops them from flowing into one another – it's up or down, but it's rarely in between, or changing from one to the other, or neutral.

After the repose I intended to go back to the CSPS but ended up at my major's house looking at photos and charging my computer (for the first time since getting to site). It was chill and rather nice, actually, to just hang out with someone. I didn't want to overstay my welcome so I made up an excuse of some food being ready at home to cook and left as it was getting dark, and spent the evening eating my rather tasty creation while reading and trying to find the news on my radio.

I just finished “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving today – Dad was right, I did enjoy it. I can't exactly say why, it was just a really well written and engaging story, with references to places I knew, places I could imagine, and characters I found very believable. I think it would be easy to get confused in a book like this that jumps back and forth between time periods in the narrative but somehow the author managed to come to the final scene from before it happened and after it happened and it all fell into place – you got bits and pieces of what was coming, but they didn't all fit together until right at the very end. Plus there are references to a cousin who joins the Peace Corps and goes to Nicaragua to teach forestry in order to escape the draft, which was kind of amusing and fun and reminded me of Mr. Nelson's story of almost joining the Peace Corps. From what I've read it seems like the Peace Corps of the 60s and the Peace Corps of today bear very little resemblance to each other, but I like to think the spirit of the founding ideal remains the same.

Life In General - Reading, Cleaning, Action Plan For The Next Two Years

10 January – Kossouka, 1:21pm

I've been reading an almost ridiculous amount. I usually leave my house by 8:30 or 9 am, come back for the repose when the CSPS closes between 12 and 3pm, and then go back to the CSPS until the sun sets around 6pm. This leaves me an incredible amount of free time – I read, I play sudoku, I learn new versions of solitaire, I cook, I clean my house, I make shopping lists, I listen to music, I nap, I study French or make lists of words in Moore. Honestly, it's nice. I wish I had my college text-books – I feel like I could learn so much more here without the stress of having to memorize anything for a text, of just learning for the sake of learning.

My next big challenge is finding more people in the village who speak French, or someone who can translate for me. I want to start asking questions about how people perceive health, what concerns them, what they want to learn about, what they already know but don't put into practice and why. The problem is that the people I can easily ask – the people who speak French to me – are almost all from other places. Governmental workers are affectated to a village where they're needed, never to their home village, so all of the CSPS staff and school teachers and people working at the mayor and prefet's offices are out. I want to ask my CoGes staff, but I feel like they're so involved in the health care system that they would tend to be the exception in their health beliefs rather than the rule for the general people of the village. Perhaps they could act as facilitators and translators, introducing me to people they know? At some point we'll actually have a CoGes meeting and I'll be able to come up with a good plan with them as to who can help me with what.

I did get my first notion of a project that is desired! Moussa, the English teacher, said he'd really like it if I could come to the school and do sensibilizations on family planning and contraception because they have a pretty big problem with teen pregnancy. I know I have a lot more to learn about it before just charging in and giving a condom demonstration, but it's nice to at least have one concrete identifiable thing that someone besides me has identified as a priority.

I've also started to really enjoy cooking for myself – it's been challenging to come up with different meals with the same basic ingredients. If you have any recipes that use: tomatoes, onions, garlic, spaghetti/macaroni, rice, lentils, oil, peanut butter, sugar, sweetened condensed milk, sweet potatoes, tomato paste, flour, soy sauce, fake cheese (Laughing Cow), peanuts, instant coffee, tea, margarine, and occasionally green peppers, limes, eggplants, please send them along! So far I've made tortillas (veggie fajitas, quesadillas with tomatoes, with spiced sauteed onions), rice (with steamed veggies, with peanut sauce, with salt and pepper, with lemon-pepper tuna, cooked with chicken bouillon, with curry powder), spaghetti (with tomato paste and cooked vegetable sauce, with stewed tomato/onion/ garlic/eggplant/green pepper/cumin sauce, with olive oil/basil/diced tomatoes), macaroni (with the same as above, with cheese and diced green peppers), green peppers braised in tomatoes and cumin then stuffed with the cooked tomatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, fried sweet potatoes, tomato soup with veggies, soup mixes with lentils and/or oatmeal (when I still had oatmeal), black-eyed peas (they take much too long to cook, even after soaking for 24 hours), canned chickpeas (with spices, with rice), and sandwiches (cheese and tomato, peanut butter and banana, peanut butter and jelly, cinnamon-sugar and butter).

I haven't made much in the way of desserts, but my chocolate rice pudding was quite delicious and I think next I'm going to try and make cookies to give to my CSPS staff. Actually, now that I've written all that down I'm pretty impressed with how much I've done! Besides being an unwilling almost-vegetarian, I'm clearly not going to starve and I haven't had to resort to rice twice a day like some volunteers. I'm actually kind of bad at cooking rice without it either being soggy or burned – I got so used to using my rice maker that now I have to re-learn how to properly make it in a pot. I'm going to be very sad indeed when tomatoes and onions are out of season since right now they're the base of most of my sauces, along with either cumin or basil and parsley. There's always tomato paste, but it's just not as tasty.

I've also finally figured out the lazy way to do laundry. It still takes a ridiculous amount of time, but less water and less effort – instead of soaping up and scrubbing each article of clothing multiple times, then wringing and rinsing multiple times, I can follow the directions on the back of the soap packet and just let them soak in soapy water for 15 minutes, quickly scrub them once, and then rinse. Huzzah! Oddly I don't really miss having a lot of the conveniences of the US. While a microwave would be nice, I've gotten used to either figuring out another way to heat something or just going without heating it. A washing machine would be easier, but I feel really accomplished when I finish all of my laundry by hand and can watch it flapping away on the clothes lines that criss-cross my courtyard. I would be happy to have a Swiffer, but all those disposable cleaning clothes would be a pain here since all of my garbage goes into a little pile in the corner of my courtyard that I set on fire from time to time, thus ensuring that I will give myself lung cancer from inhaling burning plastic while simultaneously killing the environment along with all of my neighbors. Plus, what would I be saving time to do? I already have too much time! I was struck by a sentence in The Tao of Pooh, talking about how we work so hard to be able to afford things to save us time so that we can work more. While I think my sudden abundance of time has less to do with a lack of modern conveniences and more to do with a lack of regular working hours, the implication of causation isn't entirely inappropriate.

It's interesting to watch a country going through growing pains. A lot of the things people tell me are comparisons between Burkina and the US/Europe, appropriate not only because I'm from the US but also because Burkina and much of West Africa is in the process of becoming more Westernized, trying to navigate between notions of tradition and progress, of what is appropriate, what is modern, what is both. There's definitely a lot of understandably conflicting feelings – they want electricity, but don't want television shows that constantly show them all the things they don't have. They want to be modern and respected on the international stage, but don't want to lose traditional systems of power like the chief and the chief de terre. They believe that to be modern entails being educated and having to move away from their family compound to find a job, but they also want to hold onto the unity and power structure of the large family courtyard. There's a pride in “progress” that has happened so far, but also sometimes an almost accusatory tone towards me (representing all the new concepts of modern/progress/globalization) and a sadness for all the things that are changing. Now the chief doesn't pass down his power to his first son because his first son is the one most likely to be educated and employed by the government in another village. Progress, one that people agree is important and good, but at the price of something old that was also agreed to be important and good.

The People I Know

10 January – Kossouka, 1:21pm

So it's been a tiny bit of time since I last typed anything, mostly because there is somehow too much and yet not enough time to do anything here, and also because I didn't yet have anyway to re-charge my computer. Now that I've asked Sylvie if I can use her electricity, problem solved. Also, being here affords me a lot of time to ponder things so then you get blog entries like this – just warning you in advance.

Life here seems to be all about contradictions. You feel like you're settling in, you feel like you know no one. You feel like there's absolutely nothing for you to do, you feel like there are tons of areas that you could address in your work. You feel like all you do is repose and laze around, but at the end of the day there's still things you wanted to do that remain undone. You feel like you can be understood, you feel like no one is speaking your language (literally and figuratively). You feel all alone in the world, then you have a good conversation with someone and feel like you have a friend. You feel like no time has passed at all, you feel like time is racing by and you still have so much you were supposed to have accomplished by now!

All of these are true, sometimes at the same time. I've become a huge fan of the common phrase here “ca va aller” - it's going to go, it'll happen, it'll work out, just give it time. I've been told it is sometimes applied to situations when PCVs are frustrated and certain that it will not go but I think it does a good job of describing the common mentality here, which I kind of like. While there are sometimes when you do need to take active steps to make something go, it won't just happen on it's own, in general I tend to think that if it's going to work, it's going to work. Maybe not on my time frame, but eventually if I'm persistent and it's possible, it'll happen. Ca va aller.

What about the people I'm meeting? I've met a pretty good range of people despite feeling like I haven't. There are the old ladies at the maternity who sit and talk in Moore – I understand when they're talking about me and Lauren and how eventually I'll know Moore like she did. There's the guy who I first thought was overly friendly until I stopped and talked to him for a while and found out that he helped to build my house, was good friends with Lauren, and his wife volunteers at the CSPS. There's Moussa, the English teacher at the middle school who I can actually have semi-deep conversations with since I can use a mixture of French/English to get across concepts like “home vs. house” or how the American media portrays Africa. There's my CSPS staff – some seem indifferent, some are more friendly. I feel closest to my major – she's the person I stop and chat with the most and we're relatively close in age, or David who is very receptive to all of my questions about how the CSPS runs or makes decisions.

There's the student I met at the water pump who declared himself my “petit African” despite my protests that he couldn't be my boyfriend. I thought that was the end of things even though we exchanged phone numbers, but the next weekend he was back from school and upset that I hadn't called. We talked for another hour and I thought I had convinced him that we aren't going to get married, but he's still talking about how in 5 years I can call him and tell him I'm ready to be married and he'll be there. He seems oddly serious about this – I don't know if I should be flattered or what.

There's the guy at the Malaria conference who seemed to be flirting with me until he invited me to call him when I come to Seguenegua to meet his wife and 6 month old daughter. There's all of my stage friends – I haven't kept in touch with the vast majority, but after an accidental phone call from someone I realized that I could probably call up any of them and chat for a good long while. There's the woman who makes galettes (millet pancakes) at the market who I stop and chat with every market day, and the three guys I buy vegetables from, and the woman who sells bananas and peanut butter. There's Collette, the woman who volunteers at the CSPS and helps with the WFP distribution every week, who encourages me to talk to the women who show up but I always stay silent because I can't say anything in Moore to them besides “Hello” and “Thank you”.

There's Fatou, the mother of Carine, who came to my house for coffee one day after she insisted on helping me pump my water but who didn't pick up her food rations last week. There's the man who I see at the water tap filling up the big wheeled water barrel to bring water to the CSPS staff, who will fill my bidon if I show up while he's there. There's Aissa, the girl with the red beads in her braids who was coming to greet me every day but who I haven't seen in a while, perhaps because I'm not home as often as I was at first. There's the adjoint mayor, Francois, who just seems like a really nice guy and who I'd like to go visit just for the hell of it. The prefet reminds me of Uncle Steve for some reason – he's very tall and carries himself in a friendly but powerful way. There's the lady who sometimes helps Collette who reminds me of Aunt Sally for reasons I still can't figure out.

I guess I do know a lot of people, considering. Pretty cool!

Happy New Year and Happy Birth Day!

1 January – Kossouka, 12:41pm

Where to begin? I guess I'll start with yesterday. I started the day off with a triumphant moment – I went and found bread for breakfast! Trust me, little things like this count a lot when it's kind of intimidating to step outside of your gate. I figured that the two big mud-brick domes behind my house were ovens, so surely someone was selling bread in the mornings. Lo and behold, there's kind of a cafe back there, tucked into the edges of the market area and they gave me a quick and friendly Moore lesson in how to ask for bread (mam data buri-ye or buri-yi if I want two). The bread was warm, the people were friendly, and I had to stop myself from doing a little jig as I returned to my house.

I talked to a couple of friends and was excited to hear about their holiday plans, but was a little uncertain as to what I was going to do myself. My CSPS staff had all left for Ouaga and I wasn't really looking forward to celebrating the new year myself. But lucky for me, my major came back that morning from her training trip (since it was right before her vacation time she'd been gone almost the entire time I'd been here). I ended up wandering over to her house from the CSPS as the sun was starting to set, and essentially invited myself to her party by sitting down and helping with food prep with a bunch of other women in her courtyard. When I went back to my house to grab a jacket I asked if it was ok for me to stay for dinner and she was really enthusiastic that I should come back, so after that I relaxed a bit.

Things I re/learned about Burkina cooking:

-chickens are not cooked whole, they are disjointed and cooked in pieces, always. Thankfully this time we threw away the feet, innards, and heads! I love functionares.

-carrots are grated into mush, not strips

-you cannot eat the seeds of tomatoes or cucumbers – these are thrown away and people are very surprised if I tell them that Americans leave them in

-cutting takes place in ones hands, not on a cutting board.

-can openers do not exist – you pierce the lid of tins with a knife, working your way around. This perhaps explains why there are no sharp knives in Burkina.

-salad dressing consists of half of a large jar of mayo mixed with spices and whisked with oil. I think I now have the recipe to fatten all of the malnourished children in record time.

-we were all puzzled at our host family thank you ceremony that we were told to make up plates to serve to the important guests when we'd assumed it was a serve-yourself affair. But really, that's apparently how it works. One of Sylvie's friends made plates for each of us – men first, me next, the rest of the women after – and set it at our feet one at a time. Sylvie also got a drink for each of us, opened each one, and then went around to pour each one into a glass. The plates were washed and the second course was served the same way.

Aside from those little factoids, the story continues. We were preping food for quite a while, and I was really thirsty and cold, so I went home for some water and my jacket. I returned and it was getting pretty late at this point. While we waited we ate some french fries and cravettes, and Sylvie arranged the salads (carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, canned peas, raw onions, canned ham, and the dressing) on large platters, and brought out one platter of fried potato chunks and one of french fried patates (kind of a sweet yam/potato) to be covered and wait for the arrival of people. It was 11pm before people arrived, looking very fancy. The women were dressed in an odd fusion of American and African – a long skirt in a modern fabric and cut, pin-striped jeans that clung tightly, tank tops and heeled shoes. Sylvie's son somehow managed to dance around (naked) for a couple of hours, generally getting into things and being a pest but still amusing, especially because no one seemed to find it odd at all that he was naked even though everyone kept saying it was cold.

My suspicions about the functionare housing were correct – it's much nicer. Her house is raised above the courtyard on a cement foundation, with a separate living room, kitchen, and I believe (from what I glimpsed down the hallway) an indoor bathroom and at least one bedroom. She has her TV next to a car battery but clearly has wired electricity from somewhere – I didn't hear a generator so perhaps a solar panel. She has a beautiful new laptop and someone brought in and hooked up a huge speaker system for us to play music and dance. It was very impressive to say the least!

We sat and watched TV and I felt out of place in my nice but ordinary day-to-day clothing. Sylvie reappeared just 20 minutes before midnight, her hair down and styled, wearing a very modern knee length skirt and fitted jacket – I actually didn't recognize her she looked so different. I also really want to copy her outfit – it would be perfect business wear in the US but in a fun fabric! Drinks were poured while we watched some karate-type movie (think Hero or House of Flying Daggers) and at midnight we prompted someone into saying a few words in honor of the new year. We clinked glasses, Sylvie went and formally greeted each of us (cheek kisses for the women, forehead taps for the men), and we ate.

After dinner most of the men left and the rest of us started dancing. They seemed very amused with my American dancing, but I just kept at it – they don't know if I look ridiculous or not by American standards so why care? I'm sure I looked just as silly attempting to copy their dancing, but it was a lot of fun to try something new. The music was kind of a modern twist on traditional Burkinabe music and I found it a little of hard to dance to simply because it was a bit lower energy than most “dance” music and each song tended to just have a single arc that it repeated over and over for about 6 minutes, which is much too long for my attention span. Still, it was fun dancing and being with a bunch of people and when I went to bed at 2 am I could still hear people partying outside my window.

I woke up this morning around 8am, pure luxury! I went to get bread again, ate my breakfast and went to the CSPS where I saw Sylvie. She asked if I wanted to come help with a delivery. Eyes wide I said “yes please!” and followed her into the birthing room, where I've never been before. I tried to introduce myself to the mother in Moore and asked in French if it was ok for me to be there. She just stared at me, not in a particularly friendly manner, but neither Sylvie nor the old woman standing in the room moved to translate. Sylvie parked me in a chair at the mother's head, which was fine with me. The mother was so skinny I could hardly believe that she was having a child – lying on her back with her long, skinny thighs pointing into the air, hands gripping tightly to her boney ankles, breathing heavily through each contraction but otherwise silent. I guess that whole thing about not crying in front of anyone translates into not showing pain as well.

The birth proceeded fairly quickly after that and seemed to be very matter-of-fact – both women had clearly done this before. The baby was cleaned and weighed, then handed to the old woman (I'm assuming she's an accoucheuse villigoise – a village midwife trained to assist the CSPS staff) and the mother followed them to the recovery room on shaky legs a few minutes later. Sylvie cleaned and sterilized the room and the instruments, and that was that. It was incredible and an honor to be present at this woman's birth, the first of the new year, and I do hope that I get to see more births in my time here. Maybe next time I'll actually know the words in Moore to offer a bit of comfort and support!

Actually, That's The Dust

29 December – Kossouka, 5:57pm

I'm sitting in my chair outside, reading my latest book. It's good, and I've been so caught up that when I suddenly look up I realize that it's misty. I stand on the small ledge around my patio for a better look over my courtyard walls. The mountains in the distance are gone, and even the Zain cell tower is a bit fuzzy. The sun should be almost set now, dropping us into the long shadows and growing duskiness of twilight, but this mistiness diffuses the light, making it somehow brighter than it should be but in a slightly ominous way. This isn't the friendly mist of Scotland afternoons, with the watery sun breaking through every now and again to smile on your face. This is a gray, darkening mist, the perfect background to the beginning of a tale of monsters or armies or deadly diseases. The air is cool, tempting me to put my button-down back on over my camisole, but I resist on principle. At least the wind that scoured us this morning has died down, although I'm sure that my face, neck, wrists, and feet are covered in a fine layer of dust that won't be revealed until I shower.

The Simple Life - I'm Going To Become A Crazy Cat Lady

28 December – Kossouka, 9:20pm

I'm listening to AFI – Sing The Sorrow. It reminds me of Kay, and high school, and of babysitting for my neighbors across the street where I felt mildly rebellious and guilty for listening to my devil rock music after the kids went to sleep while their stereo played the Christian radio station. Going from the incredible structure of stage to village life has been a shock even after demyst and feeling surprised at the slower pace of things. But that really seems to be what it's like au village. You wake up. You make breakfast. You might go do something at the CSPS. You go home to repose for 3 hours while the CSPS is closed. You go back out until the sun is going down at 6pm and then your evening is your own. Part of me wishes I could go take part in the nightlife I hear outside my courtyard, even if it's just my neighbors watching TV too loud, although I suspect a semi-public screening of something or other. Some nights there's music and I miss going out and dancing with my friends in Denver. There's a solid comfort in my new routine - I go home when it gets dark, make dinner, and sit and read and drink my tea. But it also feels very...old-ladyish. :p Just wait until I get my kitten!