So this is an attempted panorama shot of my house, latrine, and surrounding farm land. It is simple, but cozy, and is slowly transforming into a nice little home that is going to be hot as the dickens when hot season rolls around. And that little latrine is built like a sweat house and I won't be surprised if I start seeing visions whilst doing the doo during the heated months ahead.
Ok so you guys almost got a sweet update post around the beginning of September, but as is the norm in my life these days things did not go smoothly. It seems only fair due to the fact that the circumstances that brought me within reach of internet where also a series of unsmooth Burkina-esque events. My site, which I believe I have explained in previous bloggery is highly remote and visiting a bank is a two day venture. I go through the necessary protocol to gain clearance to be away from my site overnight and am all ready to visit one of the big bad Burkina banks which are run remarkably like a DMV. (That means exactly like a DMV). I wake up early Monday morning to meet my community homologue so that we can set out on bike for the neighboring town where I will be able to catch a bus to a bigger town. An hour later I arrive in a considerably muddier state than I would have desired due to the large pond-ish things I had to ride through and I am able to buy passage on a large bus to my regional capital. A few hours later I pull up, get off, and happily bike over to the bank filled with the prospect of withdrawing my monthly salary and buying all sorts of wonderful necessities that they don't have in my village such as vegetables and boxed wine. I get to the bank, but the doors are locked. A little worried I turn and see a gaurd, surely they wouldn't have a gaurd if the bank was closed right? Well I cruise on over to him and ask if the bank is open, to which he nonchalantly replies, "oh its not done yet". Sweet. Well I had brought my American debit card for just such an emergency and then asked him, "well how about that ATM?" To which he casually responds "oh that's out of money". Yes. Awesome. Instead of asking the obvious question of why the hell he was guarding a bank with no money in it I regrouped and asked where the next nearest bank was and it was not near at all. At this point I am in a bit of a pickle because the reason I am visiting the bank is because I have next to no money and visiting one more town will deplete what little I have so instead of following the direction of my friend the gaurd I call my higher ups and request clearance to go to the capital, this is granted and I flag down a bush taxi (more on these later) and make my way to Ouaga with my final vestiges of cash and am able to withdraw my handsome peace corps salary and buy all of my happy necessities whilst also binging on a windfall of internet. I was unable to post your fun update because apparently internet in the bureau shuts off at midnight which lost my progress and though I love you all dearly there was just no way I was relaying that on my phone back at the transit house (hotel thingy for peace corps volunteers). Overall it was a happy occasion but the amount of traveling that I had to do in a 48 hour period to make it possible was exhausting even to a seasoned commuter such as myself (ferry reference, go O'Dea) and I'm not sure how frequently I shall be making the trip. In the meantime I thank you all for your continued patience with my absence from the airwaves and shall inundate you all with gifts of milk and honey upon my return to interwebs. (Milk and honey=pictures, no honey to be had here because apparently that attracts genies). Well to you all, stay curious and enjoy America.
Go Hawks.
This post was written 9/10/2014
So what do I actually do out here in Burkina Faso? Up until this point I have provided you with brief forays into my existence during training, my small adventures around the country, and elaborate narratives of the small battles that I have waged with the charming wildlife, but this all leaves you rather poorly informed as to what is my larger purpose here and I hope to clear that up a little in this post because I am sure that this question is just eating at each and every one of you.
Well to start with I was affectated to my site on the 22nd of August and school didn't start until the 1st of October so what did Ryan do for a little over a month? Well in short, whatever he damn well pleased. I was the first volunteer in a rather remote site with rudimentary French, little to no local language (Moore for me), and an empty house. When I first got into site my first priority was to figure out how to get food and water on a regular basis, meet my community counterpart, and try and get my face out in the community. As I have mentioned I had no furniture so I was cooking off of my floor, living out of my suitcase/bag/floor, and sleeping on a cot. I tried to explain my list of items that I would like to get made to my community counterpart (Christof) which included kitchen table, dresser, stand to place my water filter on, bookshelf, in short those pieces of furniture which I believed would make the quickest improvements to my quality of life. I jokingly added after this that maybe later we could add pull-up and dip bars to my courtyard after this is all done. Well Christof had no idea what I was talking about because there is no direct translation of pull-up and dip bars so I then spent a solid chunk of time explaining to him what they were and unfortunately I think he took the length of my explanation as an indication of my perceived importance of these apparati and I awoke early the next morning to find that Christof was waiting at my courtyard door ready to bike out to our neighboring village and order those work out things and that he took the day off working in the fields to do this with me. Well rather than risk offending him by refusing in my broken French I agreed to go and little did I know the ramifications of this quest. I was embarking upon my saga of the workout bars that in its abbreviated version took 30 days to finally complete and condemned my to an additional 30 days of furniture-less life and cooking off of my floor. I won't include all the wonderful details here, because while amusing they detract from my initial purpose of this post, which was expound upon my life over a two month period and that which I have written concerning the work out bars saga should give a suitable idea of the quality of my home life.
Now my day to day life was filled with a limited cocktail of activities. I couldn't simply just go out and mingle with my village, well I guess I could have, but I didn't want to. My village speaks predominantly local language and I am the first volunteer here and I was convinced there where better uses of my time than to walk around the village and have people point and gabble away in a language I don't know. In addition to this I am the first white person to live in this village so for many people this is either confusing, terrifying, or simply not understood at all. So to ease my village into the concept of having a white person living in their village for two years I read and worked underneath a tree outside of my courtyard every single day. This did a lot of good because it conveys the idea that I am here and I continue to be here and it gave people the opportunity to come and great me in their own time, after the shock of me had worn off. Every morning I would work on my French and then the afternoons I would read for fun, read first aid books, practice knots, read philosophy, write, and brainstorm ideas for future research or projects. It requires a careful blend of just about everything in order to maintain a sense of purpose in a life bereft of modern comforts and the type of purpose that we have grown accustomed to throughout our life. You start to go a little crazy living in almost complete solitude and anytime you try to go out without your counterpart the children cry and run from you and the general population simply stares at you, but time has a way of improving these things. We have a Market Day every three days so I spent those afternoons at Christof's bar which allowed me to meet more people and improve my Moore, and also cement a really fun friendship with Christof and many of his brothers who have become my go to friends in village. My village has a strong following of all three major Burkina religions so I went to a Catholic Mass, Protestant Service, and visited the Mosque to show my commitment to all the different groups as well as to give a little speech at the end to explain who I was, why there was a white person living behind the health clinic, and what I hoped to do throughout my time in Kogho and Christof or whoever I had attended with would translate into Moore for me.
After a little over of a month of this the school year kind of started. The official start day is October 1st, but I soon found out that the first day all you do is roll call, the second day you just have meetings with the teachers, and the third day you kind of show up and do nothing before going home. It isn't until the fourth day that you actually start teaching, which is a slight adjustment from the norm in the United States. Throughout this time I'm a little nervous because I came in as a Science teacher and had suddenly been gifted two math classes because of a teacher shortage at the school and so I had the happy priveldge of learning as much as I could about the Burkinabe math system in four days in order to teach my two classes. I had about three weeks of normal school which were progressing nicely, my French was getting much better due to the plentiful time in which I had to practice while standing in front of classes ranging from 70-93 students, and I was now friends with the other teachers. Then we had the series of strikes and protests and military coups which came as a result of the standing President of 27 years attempting to modify the constitution and stay in office. As I'm sure many of you know this didn't work out terribly well for him as he eventually fled the country with an armed escort and it didn't do me much good either. I lost about 2.5 weeks of class time and in addition the Peace Corps placed all volunteers on a Standfast Security stance which prevented us from traveling outside of our site so any hopes that I had had of advancing my secondary projects or buying groceries were also placed on hold until the country became both safer and calmer. Living in a village, I didn't really feel the effects in a tangible way because we are so far removed from the slightly more progressive big city life. If it wasn't for the fact that I was getting status updates from the Peace Corps and my School was closed I may not have even known there were riots in the capital. I live in a small farming town and while some of the population were glad that the president fled this all occurred during the height of the harvest and most people remembered that those crops weren't going to harvest themselves, so life went on as usual.
Now we begin to catch up to the present where my life has adopted an uncharacteristically busy mein. I still have to give two tests in each of my classes because this is the nationally required minimum, but I only have three weeks to do it. Writing and grading 163 tests isn't as fun as some of you might think and on top of this I barely have time to cover another units worth of material before giving the second test, but the Peace Corps always reminds us to be flexible and I guess it isn't every year that a President of 27 years gets chased out of the country that you're serving in while the military takes control of the government and the international community gets ready to place sanctions of the country. With that in mind I persevere, knowing that in a few short weeks I should be back in the Capital for a training during which I can catch up on secondary work, eat tasty food, and use a real shower rather than my passably adequate bucket.
Hopefully this gives everyone an idea of what your favorite volunteer has been up to and eventually I can return to posts concerning my secondary projects as well as plethora of amusing anecdotes that inevitably pop up in the life of a Burkina volunteer.
Written (11/12/14)
So I do promise to eventually let everyone know what I am actually doing over here service-wise eventually, but I find it much more fun to type stories about the adventures of my day to day rather than the boring minutia of my duties as a service volunteer. So continuing in that vain, let's talk about the spider that I just battled. Up until this point I was under the impression that this country was slowly but surely curing me of my fear of that which creeps and crawls. I scoff at cocroaches, I kill many winged insects with my bare hands, and ruthlessly hunt down the crickets that find their way into my home in the wee hours of the morning to wake me up with their incessant chirping. I took all of this in stride seeing it as my inescapable lot in life and I really believed that I was no longer scared, until Mr. Camel Spider decided to remind me of his presence in this country. I was standing in my courtyard chatting on the phone with a fellow volunteer in the evening, minding my own business. I finished that call and was walking towards my door when I decided to stop on watch my two pet roosters settling in for the night. They always fight for their sleeping spot and it takes very little to amuse Ryan these days, but then as I watched them settle down I saw a massive something scurrying around on my courtyard wall at a speed that only creepy crawly things are capable of. Good things just don't move like that. Remember the sun has set at this point so my visibility past the range of my lamp is pretty low. I really hoped it was just a large harmless insect, which do in fact exist and I have watched Eustace (that's my rooster's name) eat them anytime they are foolish enough to wander into his presence, but my foreboding grew when I saw this thing spend a lot of time right in front of Eustace's face and he made no attempt to eat it. I take a step forward and am confronted with this dense spider. I use dense because that just seems to be the most adequate adjective. It was about the size of my fist and all of its spidery parts where just thick, dense as it were. Its thick weird legs that came out of its body in a not inherently spidery way, and its thick thorax with its thick pinching biting mouth. Well I took one look at this thing and I realized I was in big trouble, it was making as if to burrow into my wall, which I absolutely couldn't allow because then I would never sleep again. I quickly retrieve my trusting insect killing spray, many a time has this spray saved me when a clean attack was impossible and might have resulted in their escape. Well I rush back and it's still on my wall, I prepare to dodge it's inevitable death throes and let it have it with my death spray. Well not only does this spray not seem to have any sort of deadly affect on the little devil spawn, it also really pisses him off. So much so, in fact, that it decided to leap off of the wall right at my lowered face. Well I let out this noise of sheer terror (Jeremy, if your reading this it was the same noise that you made when that brown recluse almost got your hand) and leapt out of the way. I was terrified, but also knew that I couldn't let this pissed off spider escape me so I proceeded to chase it around my courtyard while continuing to hit it with this death spray, it had to work eventually right? Well I never got to find out because about five seconds into my ridiculous looking chase scene my can of spray ran out at so the wrong time. So now I am chasing this thing around trying desperately to prevent its escape and to herd it near my pile of flip-flops so that I could acquire a weapon to finish this beast. I finally manage to make it change its course to my terrace with flip-flops and I immiedietly grab the nearest one and slap the dickens out of this massive and enraged spider. It bounces into the air with the force of my slap and it sits motionless on the concrete, I pause, and then assure myself that it must be dead, but it seems reasonably intact..well that works out for me, now I can snag a sweet photo of this bad boy that should accurately convey the terror that I had to deal with. Feeling that the danger was past I gave it a little nudge with my weapon and it immiedietly began crawling up the flip-flop towards my hand faster than I would have ever imagined for a zombie spider. I give out another Jeremy noise and launch my flip-flop into the wall and turn to quickly grab another one for round two. I look over and two of the spider's legs are trapped under the flip flop and it is spasming around trying to get free so I only have seconds before it's on the move again. This time there is no mercy in me, I destroy that thing with my other flip-flop. He gets like 6 solid slaps before I am content that he is dead. At this point I hear someone knock at my door so I cruise over to open it up and it's my neighbor's daughter holding my escaped chicken (I also have a pet chicken) and I thank her for returning it once again and then figured I would practice my French a little in conversation so I'm like "I just killed this massive spider, it was terrifying" and she gives me this quizzical look and I assume she might not know the word for spider in French yet (she is one of my students and people in Burkina don't learn French until grade school so if they're younger they typically only know their local language or some hybrid of the two) so I beckon her into the courtyard and direct the light of my lamp onto the awful remains of my battle. At this time her face brightens and she says "oh you said [insert Moore word for spider], those aren't scary" she then proceeds to just barehand this carcass and chuck it out into the bush. "Why would you be afraid of that?" she adds as she moozies on out of my courtyard laughing. Rather embarrassing wrap up to my battle, but Burkina was in no mood to let me feel too comfortable out here. I told it that I was over my fear of bugs and it went "oh wait lemme send you this really chill spider". So now I have the full awareness that I will get to deal with these little devils out here and for the first time in my life I am considering getting a cat, not from any sense of affection. If it allows me to throw it at large spiders it can sleep in my courtyard, win-win. My next update should be a more encompassing idea of what life as a volunteer in my village is like, thank you all once again and stay curious.
Written 9/23/14
