Site Visit!!

written around 7/18/10
So last week, I was able to go to my site and see where I am going to be living and working for the next two years!! And I have to say, I loved it! The village is in an area that is a lot greener than what we have seen so far, and there were hills! (I will call them mountains, but they aren’t real mountains…) The parts we’ve seen of Burkina up to this point have been very flat, dry and red. So seeing parts of the country that were hilly, had little lakes and rivers, and very green, definitely won me over :) I realize that we are in the wet season right now, and that I probably won’t have green and lakes the entire year, but to have them at all is pretty sweet.
I saw my house and have some pictures up on photo section down to the right (I’ll put some below as well). It is a small house with 3 rooms, a salon and two bedrooms. I’m not really sure what I’m going to use the second bedroom for yet, maybe the kitchen area, maybe just more of a storage area. I have an outdoor latrine and an outdoor shower area (aka a cement slab with walls around it). None of the houses have electricity or running water, but there are several water pumps throughout the village. I’ll have to take bucket baths for my two years there, but I have to say, when it is really hot, an outdoor shower is really quite nice. I don’t have it now, but there will be a hangar in my courtyard, and I hope to make small garden somewhere. I don’t know if I’ll actually try to grow vegetables, but even just some flowers will spruce the place up.
As for the no electricity part, I may invest in some solar panels. I ate my meals with my counterpart and he had solar panels that he used to charge up car batteries, then would run lights, the TV, radio and satellite dish. He said that each battery lasted about a day, and I think he had 3 or 4 of them. But before I decided to do that, I want to see how common it is. If only the director of the school is able to afford it, I don’t want to make myself a target for theft by getting it, too. My house is also pretty close to the center of town while my director lives right on the edge of town near the school.
The village has two primary schools and the college (middle school) where I will work. A college has grades 6-3, while a lycee has all the grades. Also, the grades here count down instead of up. We also discussed what classes I will probably teach, and it looks like I will be doing more physics/chemistry than math. I will have two classes of P/C and one of math. I almost had a class of biology too, but I talked my way out of it because it was definitely more than what is recommended for your first year.
My village only has market every five days, as opposed to the larger cities where they have market every day. That just means that I will have to be a little more proactive with planning out my meals. There is a mini-market every day, but they really only had a few small ingredients mostly for making sauces.
There is a CSPS, health center, in the village and it’s actually pretty close to my house. There isn’t a police station or a gendarmerie there, but we have both a Prefet and a Mayor. I’m not entirely sure what the equivalents to these things are in America, but there you go.
After the site visit, we all met in the capitol and were able to see the Peace Corps Office and the US Embassy. The Embassy is off in a new part of the city called Ouaga 2000. The building is super new and I think they’ve only been there for a few months. After the visits, we went to the American Rec Center where we all very much enjoyed eating an American lunch!! They even had milkshakes!! And ranch dressing!
We are now in our new training city, and will put in new host families by the end of the week. I’m really excited to be back with host families, and hope that I can actually get settled in for the month or so before we get sworn in! We counted and between all the moves, we will have packed and unpacked our things about 10 times, which is getting a little old :) Another unfortunately side effect of site visit, is that my body had gotten used the food in the bigger cities, and I still haven’t really recovered from something I ate in village. But I realized today that it only hurts when I eat, so I’ll just have to stop doing that :P
Well, here are a couple pictures, but also check the link to the right, I think the new picture I added made it to the album!!