Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Happy Mid-Service!

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been here over a year! But there have been a few instances recently when it has been very obvious that not only is my life incredibly different over here but that I am so used to it I don’t always notice when things are “amiss” by American standards. This change stood out exceptionally when I spent a day with my fellow PCV and her parents who were visiting from the States. Things that we thought were nice or even luxurious – a private car that didn’t break down where you weren’t sitting on top of someone or getting tetanus from the rusty spring poking your butt or a hotel that had a real toilet and air conditioning – they found to be severely subpar. Another thing they kept saying was how difficult, sad, and downright miserable life is here, not just for PCV’s but especially for Burkinabe. With one week in country, I can see that mindset. However, I can safely say that my life is not miserable (no matter how much PCV’s like to complain amongst ourselves). Sure some days I am hot and trying without success to make something work but most days are fine.

I have also noticed that my good days here are almost impossible to convey to people back home. So I’ll try but I don’t know how this will come across. If my bike hasn’t broken and given me problems and a mouse hasn’t tortured me all night with his presence in my house and the kids listen to me and realize I’ll be nicer to them when they don’t harass me and I’m not compared to another volunteer (too much) and I am amused by my neighbor’s curiosity (read: nosiness) instead of irritated by it and I say the right ridiculous things to get people to laugh and have a conversation…these things make a good day. It’s so many little things not going wrong that leave me with a feeling that I live here and the next year will be fine and not overwhelming and I’ll actually like it. See? That hardly sounds like a good day when put into words, even to me! But I feel great about myself and life at the end of them.

So let’s see, life in village. My closest PCV neighbor and I threw a Halloween party. It was going to be really fun (candy, cookies, mask decorating, dancing, bobbing for aubergines…) but massive amounts of kids came who I had never met and it got kind of crazy and we had to end the party after only a few activities.

I found some wonderful books that are in Jula (one of my local languages) and are photos of people in West Africa doing daily things – market day, making certain foods, making dolo (locally made millet beer). They are great! I read them to the kids and they love them. At the end of the book about making dolo, it says “But attention! Dolo is not for children!” Yes, this seems obvious to not give children alcohol but here it is not so obvious and can lead to some crazy things. Which segues nicely into my next anecdote…

My neighbors are a great family, with polite, healthy kids and a clean courtyard . Often, the ten or thirteen year old will watch their baby sister, Pascaline, who is 2. One day, the three of them came over after school. Pascaline likes me and was happy to see me, but she was acting crazy. She ran around in circles then fall over, then giggle and get back up and run around until she fell over or ran into me. “Pascaline!” I exclaimed, “What is wrong with you?!”
“Oh,” replied her sister, “Can’t you smell it? She drank too much dolo!”
“What? Who the heck would give her dolo?” I demanded.
“Well, we were in school, our parents were in the fields, so we left her with the old people.”
(I should also note that most old people in my village spend all day long drinking dolo)
While I certainly do NOT approve of this, what could I do but laugh at the adorable baby stumbling around? Of course I said that dolo is bad for children.
“We know!” they said. “Attention!” they used their quoting voices, “Dolo is not for children!”
The next few days, I would hear kids randomly saying “Attention! Dolo is not for children!”

I will end this by stating how funny sounding the words ‘forty-four’ and ‘bottle’ are. I never noticed until I said them around a Burkinabe who cracked up, making me laugh, until we ended up on the floor laughing at how weird these words sounded as we repeated them over and over. Seriously. Just say them.

Peace out!

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Ramblings of a Village Dweller

So if I were someone who followed this blog , I’d be annoyed at me for not posting in forever . So sorry, mom! Things here get more and more normal to me all the time so it is hard for me to remember things that are funny or interesting to non-PCVs. Things are going well in general; rainy season is great because it is no longer regularly over 100°F but that also means everyone is in the fields working and even the people who don't work in the fields (teachers, nurses, etc.) are convinced that doing any kind of project is impossible. That includes even thinking about maybe planning a project. As I enjoy planning, this is pretty irritating. But I just keep bothering people and hopefully in a month or two when it is no longer rainy season, people will be ready for all the things I'm bringing up.

Since there is no school kids are getting crazier and crazier. In fact, right at this very moment, a bunch of kids are just standing staring at me and my computer activities. Hooray. I will be very pleased next month when school starts.

I did do one little PC-esque thing. I made Neem Cream with my friend. Neem is one of many seemingly magical trees that Burkina has that has so many cool functions. The leaves of Neem trees can be used as a natural pesticide and when you boil them and add shea butter (shea trees are another super abundant tree here) and soap you get a natural, very inexpensive mosquito repellent! Which means reduced chances of getting malaria if you use it. So I helped my friend make it (read: gave her the recipe) and all of her neighbors love it. So now she is going to make more and try to sell it (income generating activity AND fighting malaria. BAM!)

Earlier this week was Ramadan. I celebrated the way people celebrate every holiday here: went to my friend's house and ate as much food as I could take. Which is not enough for them. They try to feed me SO MUCH and here is the thing I do not understand: why does village food taste like bitter dirt water? What is the secret ingredient that leads to it not just tasting blah but actively tasting bad??? I do not understand it. I just am thankful I can eat pretty much anything no matter the taste.
Speaking of which, last month was caterpillar month! Caterpillars were EVERYWHERE and guess what Burkinabe do with them. If you guessed eat them, you are correct. And since they are only prolific for one month all year they are quite a delicacy. So of course everyone wanted to give me some. Here's the thing, though. When they are fried well and you don't think about what you are eating, they are pretty good! I wouldn't eat them if people didn't give them to me and I certainly won't ask for them but if there is a bowl in front of me, I'll munch away and won't even be trying to calculate the minimun I have to eat so they will not force me to eat more.

And finally, a story about being villageoise (or I guess villagey in English) and also language mix ups. My friend's sister came to village to visit her one day. This sister lives in Ouaga and was very western by Burkina standards. She teaches English there so naturally everyone thought we should be friends. I felt silly in my fish pagne dress next to this lady in her collered shirt and pencil skirt and heels (WHY would you where these things in village?!) but she was nice and spoke English surprisingly well. At one point she said she didn't love her husband because he sh@t on her. WHAT?! I figured it was some poorly translated expression to say he was a jerk to her and went along with it. She kept bringint up over and over again how he sh@t on her throughout the day. Finally, she said something and from the context it suddenly clicked. "Wait," I said. "Are you saying he CHEATED on you?" "Yes, he sh@t on me," she responded. I explained that she was mispronouncing it and also explained what she was actually saying. Oh, Burkina...

Anyways, I guess that's it for now. I will try to update much sooner next time.

Peace out!!

Monday, May 30, 2011

Obviously. Clearly. Indubitably.

A few weeks ago, my friend asked me if my camera could take video. When I said that it could, he asked if I could film a wedding for him. I agreed (though what a villager with no electricity or computer or television will do with a wedding video, I have no idea).
Since people here are SO wonderful at sharing information with me (not!) I didn't find out that it was actually HIS wedding until the day before. I also didn't find out that it was in a different village until the day before. "Don't worry," they told me. "It's not far at all, only 3 km." Okay, 3 km, I can handle that. Except I think they really meant 6 or 7. In the 2PM heat of the day. In the bush (which means I'm biking through sand and bushes and ditches and such). I arrived exhausted but ready to film. I was led to a huge tree where a group had gathered-all the men on one end and the women on the other. Obviously I sat with the women, who all got a kick out of talking at me in Gouin and watching me cluelessly stare at them in response. People continued to chat as a group of men in the middle of the semi-circle talked amongst themselves. Phones were answered when they rang, children ran around, the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen and I figured that, like everything else here, things were going to start far later than planned. After a while, people got up and prayed (it was a Muslim wedding) and a woman instructed me to follow her.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To eat," she responded. That's weird...eating before the wedding?
Another friend came up to me who knew I was going to be filming the wedding and said "Did you film it? You got all of it? I want to see what you got!"
"What?!" I cried. "What do you mean?!"
"The ceremony," he responded, with a tone that I expected to be followed up with a drawn out "DUH!"
"Um...well...people were running around and talking and there was no bride or groom or anything and I didn't know it even happened!" I blurted out.
He just stared at me for a minute.
"The guy gave the mother of the bride a pagne and then someone gave 500CFA. Then the dad got 1000CFA and then they..." he continued on about this convoluted ceremony that apparently took place as if to say "Really, Lindsy. How could you be so daft as to NOT realize that the ceremony was taking place right in front of your face?!"

Silly me.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Ça fait deux jours!

That is African French colloquial for “It’s been a while!” (though I don’t know why, since it literally means “That makes 2 days”)
Let’s see…what’s new? I just had an in-service training, which did have some boring moments but was overall surprisingly interesting. I am excited to go back and use what I learned (and the new “supplies” I got…including LOTS of condoms and model reproductive organs on which to use them!)
And, of course, it is always fun to see other volunteers. I am pretty sure a secret requirement to join the Peace Corps is that you have to be a RIDICULOUS dancer. I fit right in…
We are actually just ridiculous in general. We speak in Franglais all the time (with a little local lang thrown in) and often don’t even know/remember how to say things in English or sometimes we don’t even know how to say things in French. (Like Jii Tige. It means the person who guards/runs/takes money at the public water pump. But tige really has no direct translation. It can mean manager or caretaker or person-in-charge-of or…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You just need to know it in context) I’m sure we confuse locals all the time. We are CLEARLY foreigners (nasaras or tubabus, depending on what region we’re in) but we speak local languages and we act like we have never seen a real building or electricity or televisions or toilets or eaten anything besides rice and sauce in our lives. VERY villagois (villager) but VERY foreign at the same time. Confusing.
Because no one can understand us (most of the time…) we talk as loud as we want about pretty inappropriate things in public. Anything from how annoying the person right next to us is to bodily functions of any kind (when your bodily functions are this weird, you can’t help but share them with others who can relate) are frequent topics of conversations and on the rare occasion someone near us speaks English BigBig (here, thanks to the direct translation from local languages to French and then to the little bit of English they learn, people say they speak English “small-small”) we are rather embarrassed. Also, we all are concerned about what will happen when we are back in the U.S. and basically everyone speaks English and knows what we are saying…I’ll know my true friends when I return because they’ll be the ones who will go out in public with me.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

You might be a PCV in Burkina if...

-you find yourself saying "It's only 90 degrees" and you aren't being sarcastic
-you save Kraft Mac&Cheese for special occasions
-it only takes you a couple weeks to read the unabridged edition of War and Peace
-you think places with toilets are fancy
-you are a local computer genius due to your ability to create an email account
-you share your house with lizards, spiders, bats, mice, or scorpions (or some combination of these things)
-your favorite "mixed drink" comes in Crystal Light packets
-you've graduated college but are receiving an allowance instead of a salary
-instead of mastering French and a local language in addition to English, you actually can't speak any language properly anymore
-you epitomize the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention"
-you regularly receive and send packages via the bus system
-your neighbors are convinced that all you have to do to get them into the U.S.A. is
make a call to the embassy (and can not be persuaded otherwise)
-you prefer to sleep outside in a tent instead of inside in your bed
-you aren't suprised by the things people carry on the back of their motos (matresses, chickens, pigs, cows...their wife who is in labor)
-it takes an hour to walk 1km because you have to stop every few feet and greet everyone you see

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

A...Compliment..?

My neighbor came up to me the other day. "Hey, Lindsy," he said. "How's it going? You know...Village life is proving to be good for you - you are getting fatter already!"
Um...Thank you?

Wild Goose Chase

Animals here walk around however they please. Goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens wonder all around the village. I recently asked someone how they know which animal is theirs, explaining the idea of fences and such in the U.S. I was informed that they mark their animals so they know which is theirs. After reflecting for a moment, I asked, "What about when you want to find your animal? How do you know where it is?" "Oh," he replied,
"You just have to go around village looking for it. It takes a few days sometimes."

Important Work

Another night girls were over listening to music with me and the song "Business Time" by Flight of the Concords came on. I wasn't paying too much attention but at the chorus, the girls tried singing it. It surprised me and I started laughing. They now ask for the song by name and I help them with the words. Cultural exchange at its finest...

Organization

Most days at the CSPS, they ask me what the date is. I always have to look at my watch because I find it nearly impossible to keep track of the days here. Villagers will come in with an appointment scheduled and if they are there on the wrong day, the nurses act annoyed. This blows my mind how they honestly expect people who are spending their days cultivating or doing some other kind of work that requires no calendar to keep track of the days. Especially when they have to ask me what day it is on a regular basis.

My Medical Expertise

I have recently been learing how to fill out charts while the nurses conduct the checkup. Even though I am very slow and need lots of repetition and help, I feel a little bit useful. In addition, I am allowed anywhere in the CSPS including consultations and such. However, this gives people the false impression that I am in some way knowledgeable about medical things. I even had someone come to my house and ask what their medicine was for and how they were supposed to take it because they forgot. I actually have no idea.

Burkinabe Conversation

At first, I thought people thought I was really stupid. I had filled out a baby's chart and the
woman I was working with said "The baby gained weight. Look he was 5kg now he is 5.5. And look he got taller too. He used to be 62cm and now he is 64cm. He got bigger."
Another day, people were talking in Jula and I was trying to understand. I caught on that they were talking about the price of couscous. About 5 minutes later, I assumed they had moved on to a different subject.
However, you have to admit that the price of couscous is truly facsinating stuff. They think so too because they were still talking about it.
Many conversations follow this pattern where someone says something very clear and repeats it multiple times. It is an art.

Dance Party

A few girls were over at my house one eventing and I had my iPod playing. Rodrigo y Gabriella came on and we broke out into a dance party that mostly consisted of them copying my crazy moves.Then Pirates of the Caribbean came on. I attempted to explain that I used to pretend to conduct to this music with my friends but it was pretty impossible to explain an orchestra and the personwho leads them...so now they think that waving hands around to music is a dance move that Americans really like.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Let's do the Time Warp Again...

Life here is so weird. I am definitely still enjoying village, but when I get to the end of a day and attempt to write about what I did that day in my journal or a letter, I realize I didn't do much. My days consist of going to the CSPS and hanging out in the morning then hanging out and studying Jula or something in the afternoon. Sometimes (especially on Christmas and New Years but other days as well) I just go to someone's house and sit awkwardly in their courtyard while they cook or try to feed me fish sauce or something...then I leave. I am pretty certain I will be a master of awkward situations at the end of this-I won't even know when something is awkward.
Also it is crazy to believe I have been here 3 months. I can't decide if it feels like a lifetime ago or only a couple weeks since I got to Burkina. My days generally feel very long (not in a bad way just long) but my weeks go by very quickly.
If there are details about my weirdly fun, crazy, boring daily life you want to know about definitely ask!

On a side note, I made Christmas letters for a lot of people. However, this was right as my thumb became giant and painful and they did not get sent. I tried to send them today but there was an issue at the post office. Just a heads up-many of you will be getting Christmas letters in July or something...