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)
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