8 Mars - International Women's Day

March 8th is International Women’s Day and a recognized holiday in Burkina Faso. My village throws a big party to celebrate. Mostly I think they just want to throw a party but I still appreciate the effort they put into it. This year’s 8 Mars was essentially the same as last year and this gave me a great opportunity to see just how far I’ve come in the past year.

To start off, there was a women’s bike race. Last year, I knew there was a bike race in the morning but crazily enough, I didn't get the program informing me what time everything started and I missed it. This year, I asked around and of course there was not an actual time it was to start so I wandered over to the road and chilled out there chatting with some friends while we waited for it to start.

Then while we had a crowd gathered after the race, my counterpart put together a presentation to talk about the hygiene things we learned about at a latrine workshop we attended together. He essentially planned the thing himself and it might sound cheesy but I was so proud. It really is a PCV's dream to become unnecessary in a good way. I watched my counterparts do everything themselves while I stood on the sidelines.

Later in the afternoon, there was a men's soccer game and then a women's soccer game. I almost played in it - if they had asked me again I would have said yes but since they didn't, I was content to watch women run around ridiculously in their nice clothes and absolutely NOT follow the rules of soccer.

Me wearing the pattern my villagers picked out for the holiday holding a baby wearing Burkina Faso's national pattern for the holiday

After the game, there was a little dancing. It was a taste of what was to come later that night. Then we ate massive amounts of rice. After dinner, everyone grabbed a piece of ground to set up camp. People actually were setting up camp and taking naps before a night of all night dancing. And once the dancing did start, my crazy villagers really did dance all night long. I got different reports ranging from 3 to 6 in the morning but in either case, they went crazy. (I went home by midnight, being the old lady I am). The dancing was done to balafones which is like a wooden xylophone and drums. The popular dance move in my village is to walk around in a circle and our circle got HUGE! Every time I looked around there were more people dancing. It took up at least half of the soccer field! All in all, it was a very fun day - one of my best in village to date. It made it even better to see how different it was from last year. The activities were identical to those of last year but this year instead of being overwhelmed all day long I enjoyed it all.