Hello Mother, Hello Father…

Ah, summer camp. Days full of team building exercises, trust games, canoeing, exploring, playing capture the flag, ghost stories by the bon fire…

Okay, that’s not exactly what summer camp was like in my village. At the end of June, I did a day camp with a small group of kids who just finished elementary school. They ranged in age from 12 to 15 and were a mix of boys and girls. We started off every day with an ice-breaker. One great thing about working in Burkina is that EVERYTHING you do is new. These kids had never ever done a human knot or any of those other typical ice-breaker/team-building activities. It is a brand new experience for them. Following the ice-breaker was a game of soccer. Then it was time to get serious. The rest of the day was filled with sessions that followed a variety of themes. There were health lessons about malaria, HIV, nutrition, etc. There were life-skills sessions about decision making, being assertive, and making goals. We had basic English lessons and a study skills session. One hour was set aside for our “Panel of Professionals” which ended up being one self-made business man from town encouraging the students to work hard and not allow challenges to stop them from achieving their goals.

The camp ended at lunch time, except one day the girls came back after lunch to do a puberty/reproductive health talk and the boys came back the next day. The girls were very shy even without the boys but the boys were so much fun. They asked a LOT of good questions both during the session and using our anonymous questions box. There were so many great questions about all sorts of puberty/reproductive health/girl-boy things but my favorite? “How do I get a girl to fall in love with me?” Adorable.
A few other volunteers came down to help me with the camp and it was very fun having them in my village for a while. And they were VERY helpful with the camp (special shout out to Doug for doing an amazing job leading the boy’s reproductive health session as well as ice-breakers all week!).

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This past week, I also helped out at our regional Camp G2LOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World). 121 middle school students from all over the western part of Burkina came to Dedougou to participate. This camp was an all-day sleep over camp for 5 days. While we did many sessions similar to the ones in my village camp, it felt more camp-like for a variety of reasons. First of all, we all had our own teams of students. All the meals were together, when there weren’t sessions we could hang out, etc. We had a fire one night and started to make s’mores until it began pouring rain and forcing us to finish the s’mores inside. All in all, it was a very fun and exhausting week.

Parental Advisory Warning: May Contain Explicit Content

I’ve lived the past year and a half without electricity or running water. I’ve chopped the head off of a snake in my house, dealt with mice, bats, scorpions, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies in my home. I’ve had several infections, been dehydrated, had ring-worm twice, and gotten amoebas. I’ve been in a fight with a taxi driver, on a bus that caught fire, and had countless other transport failures. I’ve been sexually harassed, am openly mocked regularly in at least 4 languages, and deal with out of control children who have no supervision. I eat strange unidentifiable foods on a regular basis. And with all of these crazy experiences, do you want to know what reoccurring concern I have about my parent’s upcoming visit?

That I will drop the F-bomb in front of my mother.

Yes, somewhere during this past year and a half (probably partially due to many of the above-mentioned things) I have developed a very bad habit of saying words you’d never want your grandma to hear you say. I have found that this happens to many volunteers, not just me. I believe its cause to be two-fold. First of all, as volunteers in a new country, we have a variety of new stresses to deal with. With all of these stresses, I have found a surprising release in saying words I previously found distasteful. Second of all, no one for miles and miles can understand me when I speak English. Whatever I say in English has essentially no meaning to anyone except me. I can get stress out using foul language and I’m not offending anyone or corrupting impressionable young children. Now, thanks to these two factors, I have a new very un-ladylike habit.

Over the next few months, I plan on trying to break this habit so when I return to the States, I have other ways of expressing myself. But can I break this habit in the three weeks before my parents arrive? I’ll do my best, but I can’t make any promises, mom!