Waiting on Rain

I thought what might be an interesting addition to my running country commentary would be posts on the general climate of village life in addition to my recounting of the many and varied of adventures that is my life.  I hope that these occasional add ins might give a better flavor for what life feels like rather than just what happens.

Growing up in a State like Washington you can kind of forget that a simple reality of life can mean different things in different places depending on its distribution and quantity. Realty, rain, lots of it.  In Washington it rains about 13 months out of the year and the other 3 months it rains.  You can enjoy the calming nature of constant drizzle, curse the constant sogginess of all things, deal with emotional lows onset by 6 months of no sky, or happily anticipate that one day in the summer when you can head on down to the beach and parade that pasty white collection of skin that is your winter body, briefly surfacing after months of hibernation beneath your ample collection of flannel. "Oh hello ladies, just keeping it real."  But out here it's life, its massive, unpredictable, uncaring, and all powerful.  In a tiny little subsistence farming village all things circulate around rain.  When its raining you talk about rain and you work for your years food and then it stops and you sit around and talk about rain whilst doing nothing.  Talking with the farmers you start to tap in to their vast store of self taught empirical knowledge about the rain.  From the number of layers on an onion to how hot it "feels" over a period of days they can tell you how much rain there's going to be, if the season will be good, and where the rain will come from.  The month of June passed us by with almost no rain at all.  Having decided to plant and cultivate my own field this year I often find myself at the bar with the other farmers asking questions of when I should be starting the different planting phases.

"After the third big rain, we start to prepare the fields".

Well apparently we normally get our third rain before the start of June and my village thins to a paltry 100 or so people as everyone rushes out to the fields to pick up the next phase in their cyclical existence.  Well it's near the end of June and we have only had two, everyone simply sits and waits, there is nothing else to do, no other work to be had, everything is building up to this moment.  The trees have responded to the climate change and have started to give fruit again, grass is begininning to sprout back out after months of dormancy, children wander around looking for their families free ranging donkeys to get ready to plow.  The typical village day consists of climbing trees to throw down handfuls of tiny grapes and talking of small things.  Despite the utter necessity of the rain to my village, nobody overtly shows stress or worry, oh they say things that might indicate worry, but there is no sign of it.  It takes too much energy to worry over that which you cannot control and in their minds that includes most every aspect of their life.  I sit in the bar and pepper them with questions.

"Will it be a bad rainy season? What happens if we miss the planting window? Will harvest be later?"

to which I'm met with the response

"Ryan, you think to much of things far away. It is better to think of things close to you, then you can make them the best you can. Do not be in a hurry to farm, the farming will come whether you are in a hurry or not"

So we wait.  Which is all we can really do, there is no ecological advantage to pushing against life, pushing outside the box, because all you're pushing on is nature and while history has shown that Humans are great at pushing against to nature to negative ends, when it comes to willing more rain, we are utterly helpless.  You take what life brings to you and simply do the best you can with it.  The culture doesn't reinforce innovation, it reinforces waiting and being safe because those who take risks when dealing with rain tend to lose.  What also stems from this is the beautifully supportive extended family structures which serve as an insurance policy against uncontrollable setbacks, but it also leaves you with a population head shy of innovation which makes the early stages of any agriculture project such a critical time because you have to make sure have enough early success to push them past the critical mass of implantation if you want to make it past that cultural safety net of security before innovation, but I digest.  (word jokes).

Back to painting my village picture.

The rains come.  It was an exciting day, I awoke one morning to see these dark clouds blotting out the southwest horizon and I knew they rains were coming.  The whole village was buzzing, last minute preparations, herding of animals, tying down of materials, rushing to get indoors before that wall comes, and come it does.  Two straight hours of unrelenting oratory and then calm, no sound.  Then the farmers emerge, the tools of the trade tossed over their shoulders, all thoughts of the lateness of the rain washed away and they begin making their way back out to the farms to scratch out another year, that was just like the last year, and will be just like the years to come in this calmingly consistent world of theirs.

PS there are photos to go with this post, but the camera that has those photos is off on the other side of the country right now so you shall get them later, I super promise.

PPS......go Hawks.

Observations on behaviour

One of the plethora of awesome things that I endeavor to get into whilst en brousse is "ponder time".  Its fun, just try to actively take in all that's been happening to you and look for patterns, nuance, riddles, or moments and behaviours that can be applied to larger ideas.  Well thanks to a little punk known by "Arnol" (he is the youth who fell asleep while petting my dog featured in my Instagram post recently) I've stumbled across an interesting observation on behavior.  Arnol visits my courtyard from time to time and he has the look of being much better cared for than the typical village youth due to the fact that he is a functionaire's child and with that package also comes a modicum of French which permits me to converse with his 5 year old self.  Well despite the fact that he is a functionaire child he still mingles with all the village children as they wander about village bringing the ruckus and doing whatever it is that they do to fill their days.  One of these practices is scouring the village with stones and slingshots in search one of the local species of lizards.  The village children collect these dead guys up and then scoot off to someone's cook fire and proceed to feast on the lizards.  Arnol never really sticks around for the cooking and feasting parts of this activity because he doesn't really have to, he gets reasonably well fed at home so he remains blissfully unaware of the true purpose of the lizard hunts, simply understanding it to be a fun game.  Well during my time in village I  have yet to discover any nefarious practices of these lizard brethren.  In fact, I encourage their existence in my courtyard because they gleefully eat the ample ant population that flocks to my garden beds.  I keep an open door policy on my courtyard during the day for the local kids because I'm usually tinkering with some sort of DIY drip irrigation system or planting new growing bags and they love to watch and help.  Often times they go into exports of delight at the sight of all my delicious edible lizards and I must quickly calm them down before they start hauling off stones all over the place in their efforts to kill them and I'd rather just share my bag of beans with them rather than watch them wreak havoc on what had previously been a perfectly orderly courtyard. Sometimes its just me and Arnol in the courtyard and I might be explaining how often to water the different plants when I see a hard look settle in his eye and following his line of site a see a harmless lizard slurping up ants on my wall.  He then informs me "je vais le tuer" and I ask him why he is going to kill it.  "Je dois le touer", oh now he must kill it.  Are you going to eat it? Blank look, shakes head "no".  Well why do you have to kill it, Arnol? Still doesn't know, "c'est comme ca".  Oh that's just how it is? Well Arnol, you cannot kill the lizard today.  It intrigues me as to why Arnol truly feels that he has to kill this lizard seeing that I have found no necessitated motive to kill this speedy lil beasties.  For instance we readily kill mice, they ruin food.  We hack snakes to pieces with machetes, they're poisonous.  I've seen an entire village flock together to beat a rabid dog to death with rocks before it could bite someone, but in a culture where they simply sho away large spiders rather than kill them since they are in fact harmless I can't quite piece together a motive for Arnol's bloodlust.  Every time it happens the best Arnol can come up with is that that is just how it is and I find that to be an interesting perspective.  It's an accidental glance into the possible origin and propagation of some of the more perplexing human behaviors found in the world today.  Behaviors that may have arisen to solve some ecological or adaptive need that have become so tightly woven into a cultural fabric that they are no longer understood or questioned in much the same way that Arnol so cheerfully aped the behaviors of his youthful village cohorts without bothering to ask why when they could have easily told him, they were hungry.  These types of practices are often times the results of bigger systematic pressures rather than the cause of general problems and trying to fix them as a problem in and of itself is like trying to fix a leak simply by wiping up the water on the ground.  When enacting policy or working to adjust human behavior on a grander scale it would behoove us to search carefully the sources before leaping to solutions.  Arnol's rate of lizard murder would be much more drastically affected, for instance, by creating a more food secure environment in village rather than enacting a ban on lizards killings.  It also wouldn't hurt, in our own daily lives, to ask ourselves what behaviors we have become comfortable with simply because that is how it is, we might just be surprised.

A day in the life

I decided to write this post in a kind of first person narrative to try to express the kind of working conditions that are necessitated out here.  It's also a hell of a lot longer than my typical posts so, you know, if that bothers you then probably don't read it.  In grass roots development you can't come in all business, calling meetings, professional settings, schedules, dates, plans, info packets.  You just kind of exist as one of the "buddies" and you just work when you can, mess around most of the time, and usually do the two at the same time if you really want to get something done.  Out here I've found my niche among a group of guys highlighted by the one and only Christophe Sawadogo! He's my community homologue and one of my best friends in village.  He's the owner of one of our villages four bars and he also serves on a number of village committees which makes him a very well placed individual for moving projects along because he knows all of the right people.  I never ask him to meet with me officially because that would be boring so I usually hangout at his bar every third day for the Market and any evening that I feel like mossying on over there.  This being the case I am also well accepted amongst Christoph's family (Seven brothers, it's a blast) and all of the bar's regulars which includes people from simple farmer/masons to tailors or even the occasion local Chief.  The local Chiefs are huge for establishing myself in village because Mossi culture is extremely hierarchacal so being in with them places me in very high local social groups and they are well placed for condoning my projects or giving favors.  I usually spend my time here being a goofball and would you believe it? My village is full of people just as ridiculous as myself and by making a scene whenever I go out in public they tend to gravitate towards me on their own.  I make exagerated salutations to market vendors, shout about how delicious their food is in local lang, we use funny voices while we greet each other at the bar, add exagerated dance moves to express just how content we truly are, and buy each other tasty snacks and beers.  So this is my office, my place of work, the think tank where my project ideas are injected into the community and the place where I wait for people to come back with questions at which point I am always happy to divulge agriculture factoids and make plans to go to their house and install some tree or compost pit.  One afternoon I was there on a market day to talk to Christophe about choosing a location for a moringa plantation and the next step in our Farmer's Co-Op and it went down something like this.

*All quotes have been changed from Moore to facilitate you the reader's better understanding*

It's creeping up on 14:00 so it's about time to head to the bar, I lock up the house, put my solar lamps out, and promise Manchu that if she promises not to dig up Dad's new plants she can have some tasty fish when I get back.  She agrees.  I grab my helmet from the hook and unnecessarily bike the 30 seconds to Christoph's place of work.  I pull around the corner, and there are all the guys, posted up in their local made reclining chairs under the hangar.  I power slide my bike to stop in their midst while dismounting and throw a fist in front of my mouth in the manner one might if they had just seen something entirely too ridiculous and they are going "damnnnnnnnnnn".  I shout out in Moore
"Whuddup!!! The Nassara has arrived!"
They all respond entusiastically "Whuddup!! Our Nassara!!!"
I then toss my helmet on my bike and go to each person and perform greetings following the general format

Me. "Yo how are things??"
Dude.  "No problems!"
Me.  "And work?"
Dude.  "Very nice"
Me.  "VERY NICE! How's the sun?"
Dude.  "Damn, it's hot"
Me. "Super hot"
Dude. "How's your dog?!"
Me.  "She's on form! She's just back home working out"

and so on and so on.

After I've hit everybody, danced with one of the masons, dapped Bidari a few times, and told Francois that if he hits anyone today I'm going to have to kick him out, they offer me a chair in the high traffic area and I flop into it next to Christophe.  Can't talk about work yet, that would be lame, we just exchange news, how's my work at the school going, how's my dog (again), what do I need at the market? Let's go get it!
*Insert market wandering and bartering*
I've got all my goodies and we're walking past the snack stand where two of the brother's wives work (Since I have become one of the brothers they are also my wives so I can technically give them any work related command and if anything where to happen to a brother I would be part of the support group that helps her out with raising the kids, families exist here like tiny interconnected support villages inside of a larger yet still small interconnected village) and one shouts out,
"Nassara! How are you?"
"I'm so good! Wait, I'm TOO good"
*laughter*
"Come and eat one of my snacks! (tasty fried bread with salt and chili powder)"
*shouting* "What?! For me?! Very Nice!! (kind of Borat-esque)"
*Ryan noms a tasty snack*
Now the other vendor starts laughing to,
"Wait, Nassara, eat one of my snacks!!"
"No way?! You are too kind"
*Noms second snack, more laughing"
now we have a small crowd because I have been making a scene of this and everybody loves watching the white guy do stuff, now another vendor comes out of the crowd,
"Nassara! Eat my snack too!!"
Ryan noms more snacks*
I thank everyone, shout a benediction to everyone, and make my way to the bar.  Once back I toss my purchases in the back room and ask Christophe if he wants to talk about projects? Sure does, we swoop two chairs a little more removed from the action and he orders two beers.  We start talking about little stuff, I list off some of the stuff we will need to do, never everything all at once because we will just forget, usually one or two important bullet points like "So before the rains we are going to have to clear that land" or "I'm about to start negotiating our Sesame Seed deal, what kind of price are you shooting for" and then leave it there.  And these bullets don't get delivered in quick succession, or even all at once such as is the case today.
I open with a mention of our moringa plantation, someone bumbles in so we have to do all the greetings, ask for news, share some, he's gone.  Little pause, moringa again, land.  Then in the middle of my sentence Christoph shouts
"Ryan look!!! Its my pet rat!!" (so this guy went out in a tiny village where rats are all over the place destroying stuff and pooping in houses and somehow buys a domestic rat that has burrowed into the wall of his bar and he feeds it snacks from time to time)
Well the distraction has been raised, you can't ignore it, just go with it until the conversation flows back to agriculture
"Ah it's your rat!!" I bust out laughing, laugh every time I see that thing, too ridiculous not too.
Francois comes running into the room
"Where's the rat! *Jokingly* I'm gonna kill it!"
Christoph "No! don't kill it!! Ryan!! Don't let him kill my rat!!"
Me: "Francois not the rat!! I told you no hitting today, that goes double for killing rats!"
Francois: "No I want to kill it! Its a rat!"
Christoph: "No no no! Save the rat!!"
Me: "Don't worry, the rats safe"
Francois: "No it's not, because I'm about to kill it"
Me: "Francois"
Francois: "Yes?"
Me: :"No rat killing"
Francois: "Ok Ok fine"
Christoph: "ha ha! that's right, can't kill my rat!"
At this point Francois laughs and leaves and Christoph thanks me again for saving his rat and we finish our beers and sit for a bit.  After a few minutes I turn to him
"so...moringa?"

We're back on track, nail out the important details, and I head back home to make dinner.  Next morning Christoph swings by my house to let me know that they will get the land cleared by the end of April and gives me an asking price for the Sesame.  See? Everything worked out great.  The trick out here is figuring out that there is no real delineation between work and leisure time like there is in the states, your life is your work so you are always working.  Problem is, if you treat your life like work you might crack, I find it more enjoyable to treat my life like leisure that gets work done and it's been working out great so far.  Until next time my ravid readers!

Go Ner's
Go Hawks

What's he been doing?

Yes what have I been doing, the question I am sure gives you all sleepless nights, and for this I am truly sorry.  I can only hope that this latest update makes up for the appalling deficit of Ryan that you are all experiencing.
Well with the end of the school year starting to creep up my secondary projects are starting to take form and a lot of my time.  For those of you who don't know because for the life of me I can't remember if I've already explained this.  Volunteers are given their primary assignment such as Education for me or possibly Health, Economic development, Agriculture, etc.  After this primary assignment the volunteer is allowed to branch out into whatever sector they want for their secondary projects depending on the needs and interests of their community.  These projects typically don't start right away because it takes time to get to know your community, meet people, discuss their take on their needs and then start proposing ideas to them to see what they would be interested in doing because it will be them who have to continue the project after I have finished my service.  Also as I have mentioned before I have taken a strong interest in food security since arriving here and that has been strongly due to both my interest in general health as well as the relative food insecurity found in my village.  We are small, 14 km from the nearest body of water, and 65 km from the nearest paved road so there isn't a rapid exchange of goods between us and larger cities and the poorer farmers survive mostly on what they were able to grow during the rainy season from June to October.  In addition to this nutrition practices aren't the greatest which leaves groups such as pregnant women and newly borns highly susceptible to malnutrition. 
The first project my community jumped at was my suggestion that we try to find a way to cut out the intermediaries in their trade of sesame seeds.  Everyone here grows sesame seeds, but nobody knows what to do with them.  They're grown here as a cash crop, but nobody has the means to transform them into oil or any edible form so their two alternatives have been to sell their sesame in small quantities to the neighboring village which undercuts them well below market value, or to simply walk around eating raw sesame seeds and trying to invite the white guy to come eat raw sesame seeds with them.  Well they've done both of these in excess so naturally they were thrilled when I told them there might be another option.  We've moved forward on creating a sesame co-op of local farmers with an elected bureau and recognition from the mayor's office.  This gives us the ability to pool resources and hopefully find a larger buyer in a bigger city.  We've had our first few rounds of meetings and its been going great so far, we won't actually have to sell anything until the end of the harvest which is in October so we have until then to make sure that everything has been organized and put into place so that we can move quickly after the harvest.  This being Burkina everything could still go terribly wrong, but then again everything could still go terribly right.
Next up are my two projects more on the agricultural end of food security.  I've always enjoyed gardening in the states and now I enjoy gardening in Burkina.  It's a completely different challenge with all different gardening and composting techniques and more of a budget and resource constraint than one would experience in the states, but it has been fun these last six or so months learning all that I can about gardening, composting, and tree planting here in Burkina from a variety of interesting sources.  In my own courtyard I have a small vegetable garden, a steadily growing collection of trees, and a small composting pit, while outside I have a larger pit for developing animal manure. How does this relate to the community?  Well currently I am organizing two projects, one with the Health Clinic (CSPS) and one with the High School (Lycee) that I work at.  At the CSPS we are going to start a Moringa forest that the clinic can use to create a high nutrition powder to give to women who have recently given birth to help counter malnutritient during the first three months.  The forest will also give the clinic the oppurtunity to give out a small sapling at the same time as the initial distribution of powder so that the women can plant their own tree and have a replenishing stock of Moringa.  Moringa is a tropical drought resistant tree well suited to sandy soils and absolutely packed with nutrients.  You can use just about every part of the tree, but we will just be focusing on the leaves at first.  If you are super duper interested in more info on this kickass tree feel free to google that bad boy and bask in its nutritious glory.  In addition to the Moringa Forest, we are in the process of setting up a school garden to help improve our current hot lunch program which is currently a repeating cycle of beans, spaghetti, rice, beans spaghetti, rice, and so on.  The vegetables would give the kids a much needed nutritian boost and we could use the garden in compound with some of our science courses which include a plant anatomy section as well as a study of soil structure (taught by yours truly).  Both of these projects will hopefully be funded by a grant from a West African Food Secuitry organiziation which is why these projects are time consuming, writing and processing grants are never the easiest of things and when you add my current living conditions into the mix you can see my difficulties.  Like the sesame co-op, nothing has gone wrong yet, but we still have plenty of time.
And last, but not least our school administration is hoping to add solar power to one of our classrooms to give the students someplace to study after the sun has set.  Some students come from families that have enough money to have an extra flashlight that the student can use to study, but this is usually the male students who get the flashlight while the girls are left in the dark.  So over the past weekend I've been biking all over the place with my counterparts to meet some electriciens and battery people to calculate costs and find materials to make this happen.  This too will be written in the form of a grant and we're hoping to have it installed by the beginning of next school year.

I hope to keep you all updated of the different projects progress reports, but as with all things in my life these days keep the expectations low and you will never be disappointed. Until next time!

One of those "I'm out here" moments

So as all my dedicated readers know I have recently returned to my village after two weeks of training with the peace corps for work on our secondary projects at site. Our second week of training we were joined by our professional counterparts from village which are normally another teacher at the high school we work at and together we learn about possible secondary projects and then have to opportunity to brainstorm an idea that seems suitable for our site in particular and then draft how to go about doing it. In our meeting we drafted a plan to create a school run garden to improve the diet of the students and work against food insecurity in the village, but that wasn't my "I'm out here" moment.  That happened about a week after returning to site. Its 6:00 pm so the sun has set and me and my professional counterpart are at my community counterparts bar sitting around an unstable little table built from roof tin and sitting in handmade reclining chairs built from sticks and string and we're sitting there drinking a lukewarm beer and explaining our plans to involve the village in our project in two different languages by the light of a single solar bulb. Halfway through this conversation I couldn't help but think "Ryan, how the hell did you get here?" I'm in a small rural village in Burkina Faso where everyone now knows me, people stop on the road to shake my hand, students swing by the house to greet me or ask if they can bring me water, and I'm out in the pitch black conducting meetings on how to improve the quality of life in the village. It takes time for these kinds of moments to sink in,  but it's moments like these that remind me that this is probably the most bizarre job that I will ever have the opportunity of working.
Go Hawks
Written 12/20/14

Getting my tradition on

So finally managed to watch the majority of a traditional celebration out in village.  The reason it has been difficult hasn't been because I haven't been allowed to watch these glimpses into the traditional pulse of African life, its because most of my friends in village always forget that this is all stuff that I have never seen before.  Oh wait...you have never watched a village chief dressed as an animist mascot dancing around a sacrificial altar whilst people capture evil spirits? Weird...oh wait you wanted to see that?? Ya that was yesterday.  That exchange has probably happened five or six times until finally I managed to make friends with the chief himself and he invited me to come watch the ceremony so now nobody was allowed to forget to take me because it would be slightly obvious if the only white person for about 50 km wasn't at the ceremony.  So I finally get to go and got myself a front row seat too.  There was a circular stone altar with a pillar coming out of the middle upon which was place some sort of dark object covered in feathers, your guess is as good as mine.  There were also men dressed in traditional garb slowly shuffling around in circles around this altar. They performed some sort of dance, occasionally shrieked, and were referred to as "baagas" which I haven't exactly figured out.  I know baaga is the local word for malady, if there is an accent over the first a.  But baaga without an accent is a dog. So I decided to pretend they were some sort of spirit.  At times during the dance men would come out of the crowd and grab a baaga and slowly drag him to the altar while he shook his head and resisted and at other times they would all shriek and the chief would get up and join them.  He was dressed in some sort of vulture/bird costume and they would all dance while somebody else would get a bowl filled with dolo (local alcohol) and climb up unto the altar and anoint the things that were unidentifiable on the altar by slowly pouring the dolo out.  This whole time everyone is extremely stoked that I am there and where even more excited that I was filming the event.  They would ask for pictures with the chief and double check over and over again that I was getting this all on camera.  They seem to have all forgotten that they have forgotten to bring me to one of these events about five times and their forgetfulness has been replaced by an eagerness to share this celebration with me.  They did slip up at the end and forgot to take me to the sacrifice, because of course, who hasn't seen a sacrifice?  But I got the gist explained to me.  The take a rooster and slit its throat and throw it to the ground where it starts flapping around and generally creating a hullabaloo.  If said rooster falls onto his back this is a good sign, and all shall be good for the next three years until the next celebration. If however he dies instantly upon hitting the ground, or he falls on his front/side, then this is bad and something bad will happen before the end of three years.  Most of the younger population regard this as little more than an activity that shows pride in culture, but the older or more traditional villagers take these ceremonies as a very serious business and I am told that after the first chicken fell on his side all of the old people where very discouraged and immediately left the celebration. I believe that they are currently trying to figure out a plan to get another village to do a sacrifice for them in order to counter the the bad omens of our poorly omened sacrifice.  So I will let know how our omen loophole works out.  Until the next time my faithful followers, stay curious.

Staff meetings

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