Everything seems to take on adventure like qualities when you're working out in West Africa which is why y'all are getting a blog post with an extremely boring sounding title. For the past two weeks my headmaster has been telling me I have a meeting, never really explaining what the meeting was. I'd walk by his office and hear "Ah! Monsuier Kennedy! Comment ca va? Le matinee? Et le famille? Bon, Bon". We'd have this conversation a couple times a day just changing matinee our for soiree at the appropriate times and each time he'd follow up by telling me about this meeting. The first time it was just that I had a meeting. Ok, what is the meeting about. Oh it's your meeting. Got it, what's it about. ....it's yours. Ok, nevermind, my meeting, got it. Next day "Ah! Monsueir Kennedy!" Now the meeting has been changed from 9:00 to 15:00 on Tuesday, not a problem, I'm rarely doing anything anyways. Ok now the meeting is at 12:00? That's fine, I'll be here anyways. So this first Tuesday I arrive at his office at 12:00 and nobody is there. I just go home. The next day he doesn't say anything about this meeting that never happened and at this point I have really lost interest in this meeting anyways so I have decided that it probably just dissappeared. I go along with this for another week and then another professor was like "oh Ryan, how was that meeting?" "Oh it dissappeared" "ha ha, silly professor". At this point I know questions are pointless here, if you were meant to know something you would, if not then just keep yourself busy staying alive, it is Market day after all, gotta go get myself some nice freshly butchered goat and make sure this butcher isn't just trying to sell me some goat that happened to drop dead that morning. Well I get back to school nice and early morning and Mr. Headmaster is back, "AH! Monsueir Kennedy!" Ok so this meeting reappeared, its the next morning at 9:00, got it, expectations low. I'm packing up at the end of the day and someone walks into the Proffesor's lounge. Meetings at 15:00, ok. So finally we arrive at Tuesday afternoon and it's 15:35 and this meeting is about to start off and I finally find out what this is. I look out the window and I see a group of important looking villagers walking towards me. "Hey Professor Bamogo, who are those guys?" "Oh that's the village committee for the volunteer [me] we're having a meeting today to evaluate your work in the community, didn't you know?". Ahhhhh, ok, super glad that I prepared something for this. Well now we're really at the meat of the story, but I like to think that this prologue does a nice job of expounding on some of the nitty gritty of life out in Burkina. Things don't run smoothly, there aren't crisp schedules, and if there are you should ignore them. You rarely have all the information and if you do then you were lied to. Life goes by the seat of your pants and you have to be ready for anything at anytime. For instance with no prep you might be asked to give a presentation in your second language to explain what direction you would like to take your work over the next two years so that someone can translate it into your third language so that this committee apparently created for you can than debate your ideas in your third language before their questions come back to you again in your second language. Its like that game we all played as kids where you have to sit in a circle and whisper a message you've been given into your neighbors and they in turn whisper it to their neighbor until that final kid stands up and says the final message and everyone laughs because it wasn't even remotely close to the first message. That's kind of how communicating works out here. We rely a lot on implicit understanding in our language and while you spend time talking to people in your first language who shared the same cultural experience as you it tends not to be noticed, but you tend to notice it more and more when you start speaking in a second language. Ideas mean different things out here and no matter how hard you study you can never understand all the subtle nuances of the language, especially in a country where most people speak at least three languages. Well rest easy everyone, I made it though the meeting, and believe it our not everyone was pretty excited about my plans. I'm hoping to help the farmers organize so as to more effeciently sell there sesame seeds that they grow in excess out here and since everyone has oodles of sesame here my committee was pretty jazzed. I now have to travel to the capital to print out some documents and by-laws for this group and also verify that this is even a feasible plan, but hey this is Burkina, those problems are in the future. For the here and now its job well done and life as usual, problems in the future can just stay there.
In other notes, GO HAWKS!!
had to follow that game on gamecast on a phone that is like a 2001 blackberry knock off with barely 2G internet capabilities so it was an experience. Special thanks to the lil brother for game time analysis via text
