T-minus 8 hours!

So yesterday was swear-in day for Peace Corps Burkina Faso!! Our ceremony was held at the new American Embassy in Ouagadougou, which is less than a year old! We are the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to be sworn in at that building, so that was pretty cool :) The First Lady of Burkina Faso was also in attendance, which was a really big honor. The ceremony included speeches from 6 of the stagiaires, each in a different language, as well as speeches by our director, the Charge d’Affair (Burkina doesn’t currently have an ambassador, so the Charge d’Affair is the person in charge of the affairs of the office :P), and the Madame First Lady Chantal Compaore! We all said our oath of office as a group, which while maybe not super exciting, definitely kept the show shorter, because 77 new volunteers is a lot of people!

After the official parts of the ceremony there was a reception inside the embassy with drinks and appetizers. And cake! After that we decided to hit the town by going out to an American style restaurant and dance club!! It was a lot of fun and a great way to spend one of our last night’s together :)

So, today I spent my first full day as an official volunteer doing very official volunteer business, shopping. I get to my site of the first possible day, meaning I really only had today to get everything I need! I bought a stove (which is really just the range part and I’ll have to buy the gas tank separately), buckets for water, a 100L plastic trashcan looking thing which is used to store water, and a large wash basin for washing my clothes and dishes. I never really realized this before when I was living with my host families, but there are a lot of things necessary for getting, storing, and using water!! And I still need to buy plastic bidons, too (which are like gas cans, but used to get water from point A to point B)!

I also went to the large super market here in the capital, which is the closest thing to an American grocery store that you are going to get here in Burkina. (It definitely made me think of and miss Target!!) It was interesting though, because while they definitely had things that I will not be able to find anywhere else in the country, they didn’t have some of the most basic things I was looking for. I guess specialty stores in the US are the same, but it was just weird to go to what I felt like was finally a normal grocery room and not be able to find peanut butter… (which I can find everywhere here, I just wanted to buy one jar of it so I can get the jar filled up at my market). I think the only really exciting things I got at the market were lentils and olive oil and maybe a candy bar (or two) :P

Well, tomorrow (or 8 hours from now) is move in day!! I think I’m ready, and I’m really excited to get started. I will miss all my stagemates a lot, but I just keep thinking of all the amazing stories I am going to hear at our in-service training in December, haha!

Burkina Faso song (remixed)

During our last week of stage we held a little talent show, and while I didn't have many talents to share, it was a pretty awesome show. Some of you may remember earlier this year I posted a video a had written in preparation for his service in Burkina. Well, after 3 months of training he reworked it a little bit and we now have this gem to add to the collection. I'm sure there are inside jokes that won't be funny to people who didn't spend the last 12 weeks together, but take my word for it, the song is really funny :)

Burkina Faso (remixed)

What’s next…

Well, as I said in my post below, one week from today I will have taken my oath of office (the same oath the president takes, btw) and will be living at my site. I still need to buy everything that I will need in my house, but I also think that I might live without too much the first couple weeks and see what I really need. Also, anything I buy I will have to take with me on the bush taxi from the bigger city nearby to my village. Just imagine trying to move a mattress or a gas tank and a small range for a stove on the roof of 15 passenger van, and you’ve got move in day. I’m actually lucky that I don’t have to take public transit with any of my stuff (like my bike) but instead I get dropped off right at my house by the Peace Corps. The down side of that is that I only have one day to do my shopping before moving, so I will probably have a shopping day once a week for the first month or so until I’m settled.

Our actual swear-in ceremony is next Friday, August 27th, at the US embassy here in Burkina. We were told there would be press there, so you should all look for pictures online next week! I also know that the Peace Corps Facebook page has been putting up pictures from the different swear-ins throughout the summer, so maybe keep an eye out for that. After that, I only have one day before I move to my site, so I’m not sure if I will be able to update or get pictures up before being in my internet- and electricity-less village, so it might be a while until the next update! Also, maybe check out some of the blogs I have linked on the side, because some of them will have a couple more days before move in. Or they will have internet at their sites…

For now, my address stays the same, but I might get a postal box in the nearest big town with one of the other volunteers. I’ll put it up if and when that happens. But the Ouagadougou address I have on the side will be a sure way to get things to me for the next two years.

As I mentioned above, I won’t have electricity at my site, meaning communication might be less frequent. I’ve been spoiled these last few weeks of model school because we had free access to a computer lab, but from here on out I hope to update only once a month or so. I also have a stack of letters I’m sending with a friend going to the US (because it’s cheaper to mail a letter within the states than from here), so hopefully you lucky friends will get those letters within the next couple weeks! I'm sure I will have lots to say as I get settled in at my house and in my village, but you will all just have to wait :) I really can't believe that Stage is finally done, but I'm excited to start this next chapter of service!!

Final thoughts on Stage!

So one week from today I will be living at my house in my new village!! I’m not sure when I will have internet access next, so I wanted to put up a few different thoughts here.

1. Model School: Friday was the Conseil de classe and the closing ceremonies for model school. The conseil de classe is when all of the professeurs get together and talk about how well each of the classes preformed. We listed off the best two boys and girls in each class, and they received prizes at the ceremony. There ceremony itself was pretty fun. Each grade had an opening little song/dance to represent their class, except the songs weren’t actually sung by the students. They were just lip-synced, which the other volunteers said is actually really popular here. So I am definitely looking forward to seeing more of that during my time here, haha! The dancers were really good though, and it was just fun to get to that side of our students. Also, all of us professeurs decided to get matching clothes made (which is actually common here, sometimes schools will have one pattern of fabric that represents the school. Or people attending a wedding together will all get matching clothes made), so check out our sweet uniforms below!!

2. Sabou: Last weekend the Second Ed. Sector was able to take a little field trip to Sabou, where they have sacred crocodiles. The story behind the crocodiles is that the founder of the town was traveling through the bush, when he was overcome by heat exhaustion. A crocodile came up and have him water and saved his life (or something like that). So the crocodiles became sacred, and it is supposed to be good luck if a croc comes into your house if you live in the village. You should just feed it a chicken and send it on its way. The guys who worked there also insisted that they crocs were harmless, that it would be perfectly safe to swim through the lake the live in. None of us were quite brave enough to test that theory, but the workers were certainly fearless as the just walked in, grabbed one by the tail and brought it to land for us to take pictures of… It is definitely the first really touristy thing I’ve done here in Burkina, and it was just really weird to take that little break from trying to fit in (as much as 80 white people can fit in while living together in Africa…) to enjoy something like a vacation :)

3. General health and well being: After about 3 weeks of less than ideal stomach conditions, I have been back to normal for over a week now!! But in our last weeks, there have definitely been more incidents than usual! I fell off my bike into a mud puddle and sliced my hand open (it was actually pretty hilarious, don’t worry), and another girl also fell off her bike and got a pretty nice bruise. A friend got into a bike accident and broke his arm; while another was side-swiped by a moto and hurt her elbow. There have been the regular stomach issues as well within the group, but I just hope that everything settles down on the accidents front when we all get to our sites!! Ironically, the day I fell off my bike was the day of our first aid training, so luckily I knew to clean and bandage my wound :)

4. Language: So, unless I dropped a level on my latest test, I reached the level I needed to before swear-in. I’ve been pretty comfortable with the French since returning to a host family again, but I admittedly still make plenty of mistakes and really just need to work on expanding my vocabulary. I think I understand most of the structural rules, I just can’t think of what I want to say sometimes… When I first got here and heard how much the current volunteers struggled with English, I wished I would be able to get to that point, and now it doesn’t seem like it is that far away. Maybe all my blog posts next year will have to be in French…

5. Host Family: With my new host family there are a lot more kids who live here/hang out in our courtyard. My favorite is a boy named Elise, but there is also Elisabeth, Eli, Toma, Louise, Ines, and Martin. Elise is in about 5th grade, and whenever my roommate or I walk anywhere around the neighborhood, he will accompany us (if not the whole entourage). And even though is only about 10, I definitely feel safer with him. He also gives me gifts, so of course I like him, haha (and I just have to convince myself that he has permission to be giving me all these little trinkets and not that he is stealing them from his mom...) My roommate is much better about spending time with the kids, but we’ve had a few fun nights together. My favorite was the night mom and dad went to church and we stayed home and had a dance party! It started with the girls showing us some dances to local music, but my roommate got out her computer and we were all rocking out to some Black Eyed Peas in no time. I don’t think I will ever forget the kids jumping all around and singing along to “Imma Be.” Rockin like this my job!

It’s hard to believe that I have been gone for about 75 days. Haha, I remember I had a countdown going before I left, and it really doesn’t seem that long ago where I still had 75 days to go! But these 11 weeks or so of training have definitely been challenging, but also really fun. I think more than anything I will be sad to say goodbye to everyone I know in this country, and start the challenges of getting to know my community, my family, for the next two years. I think I’m ready for the challenge, but we’ll just have to wait and see!

Also, i just tried to add a couple pictures, but it wouldn't let me. I think they will make it to my website though, so check that out!!

Positive Deviance

So, one really interesting part of our training is that we get an introduction to how to do development work. There are probably a million things that would fall under the description of ‘development work’ but for my purposes I will relate everything to what the sectors here in Burkina are working with, so that includes education, the education and empowerment of girls, health and small business enterprise as well as bringing change to developing nations in general. So far we have discussed working within the village to find out what they want/need, not imposing on them what we think they need. We also discussed ensuring that any changes we make are not going to harm the community in any way, ensuring that the structure and integrity of the culture are still intact while trying to make any sort of improvements (and I’m using improvement really loosely here). The other day we had a session on Positive Deviance, which is actually a concept that I think everyone is familiar with, but I just didn’t have a name for it before. Positive deviance is looking for a solution to a community or group problem by looking for examples that already exist within the community; looking for those few people who are doing something slightly different and getting different results.

The example that is most relevant for the work I am going to do here is the example of keeping girls in school. The dropout rate is much higher for girls than boys here, mostly because girls are expected to do more at home and a lot of people don’t see the value of giving girls an education. But in each village there are girls going to school. So these girls and their families are our positive deviants. They have the same resources as their neighbors, but they are doing something different that makes is possible for their daughters to stay in school. Maybe they relieve the responsibilities of the girls a little. Maybe they bought a lamp so that when the girls are done with their required chores, they have a way to finish their homework in the dark. (This one really stuck out to me, because my future village doesn’t have electricity, so if the girls have to hurry home to finish chores before the sun sets, how do they do their homework?) So, once I get to village, if I think that I want to try and increase the number girls at school (which I’m sure is something I will work with in some way over the next two years), I hope to be able to meet and talk with families who have daughters and see if any tactics they use could be accessible to the entire community. While there is a huge bridge to gap between saying that is what I should do and actually doing it, I hope to get there eventually. :)

Another thing we talked about with this topic is dividing out good examples from the “True, but Useless” ideas. Like maybe the family that sends their daughter to school is able to afford a maid to do all the chores the daughter would normally have to do. So this family would not count in our context as a positive deviant because they are not working with the same resources as everyone else.

As I said before, this idea is not a completely new concept. The most obvious example I thought of for the US was in the business world: if you have one store that is making more money than all your other stores, of course you are going to look and study that store in depth to figure out what it is exactly they are doing that is so different. But this is just the first time I’ve had this concept explained to me in a concrete way, so I’m pretty excited about it!

Also, the entire concept of having a philosophy to development work is also something I never thought about. (Just like I never really thought about having a teaching philosophy until I started teaching...) I think it was just something I thought looked cool, but never really looking to how it’s done or the idea that it isn’t all done in the same way. I know that we have heard several times the idea to Do No Harm, but I’m not sure if that is a philosophy across the whole of the Peace Corps, or if that is just a phrase that my Country Director really likes to use. So even though I am really tired at the end of the day, and I am really ready to be done with training, I like that our training has been (or has made an effort to be) all encompassing and focus on areas across the board as well as broad/general ideas that will certainly help us in any sort of job we will have after this. I hope to have more insightful thoughts on this topic in the future, right now it is just too new of an idea, I don’t really have any knowledge other than spitting back out what I’ve been told. But I’m excited to learn more!
Also, they gave us the website of the organization that came up with the exact model/definition of positive deviance the Peace Corps uses. I'm not really sure what's included in the website, but if your interested, check it out!
www.positivedeviance.org

The same day we had this session on Positive Deviance, we also had a session on potential ideas for working with health education at our sites. I know there is a CSPS (health center) just down the street from me, and I met three of the nurses who worked there (and they were all females!) so I already think that I would like to work with them on a few things.

But this week I gave my first test at model school, and I have to say, grading 60 tests is no fun. I can’t imagine what grading tests for two classes of 100 would be like. But lucky for me, I know my classes won’t be much bigger than 60 at my site. And next week is already our last week of model school! So soon!! This weekend I have another language test, and my goal is to reach two levels up (which is where I have to be before swear-in). Tomorrow we are having a session to practice cooking in Burkina, so I think that should pretty fun! I am still a little sick, but most certainly better than a couple weeks ago! I also chopped my hair off the past weekend, so I’ll have to get some pictures up once soon!!

I hope everyone is having a fun end of summer, I can’t believe you Iowa teachers already start in a couple weeks!