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

The man behind the internet

So, internet.

As some of you know and probably more of you did not know I have gotten my hands on an unusually extended supply of internet out here and I figured that I might as well let you know why.  All the volunteers in my training group have been gathered in the capital for our in-service training (IST).  We have now all finished our first three months of service working on our primary assignment which is teaching and now it is time to start turning our attention to secondary projects which can be education based or can wander into the realm of economic development or health.  We have been through a variety of sessions on health projects, food security, youth development, gender equality, and science camps that are available for us as well as what organizations to work with and how to write and process grants so as to finance our more ambitious projects.  In my final two years in the states I developed a passion for food ethics which translates very well into food security and living in an impoverished village where there isn't really a food supply and the main population all survive by subsistence farming has peaked my interest in food security.  I have spent the last three months in site reading up on food security and examining how it works into developmental economics, cultural psychology, and even primary health care and I'm pretty excited to see what can be achieved by furthering my efforts in this direction.  I was elected by my training group along with another volunteer to work on the volunteer run food security task force committee which opens me up to a lot of amazing resources and will give me a great opportunity to run with some of my ideas considering food implementation and its uses in economic development.  What really encourages me is that in the long term food security really helps a country develop itself on its own.  Many of the people you interact with here have the drive and desire to take the steps to better themselves and their country without foreign handouts and oftentimes its simply to role of the volunteer to help them turn that final corner while standing in the background.

I'll be back in Ouaga next week so throughout this week I will try to write a few funny stories for you guys because life out here is never short of them.  Thanks for reading my brief dialogue on development and hopefully its increased level of boring-ness does not scare you away from returning to my blog.

My new home!

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.

The post that should have been

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

An informative update on the life of Ryan Kennedy

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)