You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

Ne windiga! (Good afternoon!)

Response: Windig kibare (How is your afternoon?)

Response: Laafi bala (It has been peaceful)

So for my second blog post in Ouagadougou for training I am going to talk more about my wonderful home! Recently, home has been extremely dry and very hot during the day. Everything has become brown and all of the crops have been harvested, which means that the landscape has changed drastically. Luckily, we have just started 'winter' so it is cool at night. I am not sure how people deal with their hot season here, I think everything must just stop.

When I left Silmidougou people had just finished the harvest and were starting to do some construction on houses and making bricks. It has been very interesting to watch, but I am certain all the houses get rebuilt every few years since their bricks are never cooked so the rain tears them down. Everyone in the community seems to be extremely pleased with how the harvest came out this year and said that this is extremely rare (I thought there was no rain, I was very, very concerned for the community's ability to feed itself this year – silly me).

My housing situation has been great. I have my two houses and I have gotten some repairs done so it is starting to be very comfortable! I am hoping soon I can paint the walls and that will add a whole new layer of fun! As of right now I have the lyrics of Amazing Grace making a full tour of my wall – look up the whole thing, I only know the first verse, it goes on forever! I also have quite a few 'friends'. I have mice, lizards, carpenter bees and termites in my house. Luckily the termites seem to be leaving which is a relief since they were starting to have an extreme effect on my sleeping since they can fall into my mosquito net. I would wake up literally covered in dead termites – it is a gross way to wake up. It has been great but it sure is a change in living conditions! I guess the house pets will be much better than the heat my friends in metal roofed houses will be in during hot season!

One thing that has been cracking me up in village (and everywhere in my region) recently has been that all the kids here yell 'bye, bye' when I come up to them. At first I was impressed they knew how to say goodbye but now I know that they believe it is a salutation, so now I start singing 'you say goodbye and I say hello'. Maybe one day I will try to teach them the difference between hello (and teach them the word) and bye, bye, but as of right now it is a great source of entertainment for me.

Tabaski was wonderful. I spent the morning in village, Asseta took me to pray and then hung out for some of the festivities. Sadly, unlike my Tabaski story in Dakar (look for the blog post about it if you want to hear about that wild experience) where my host family was able to kill a goat for each family member, including the children, my entire community in Silmidougou killed roughly three goats. Everyone was still so excited and everyone looked beautiful but it was harsh reminder of the poverty that is a part of my community.

Thanksgiving ended up being a lot of fun. Zach and Mariko came up to celebrate and help with cooking. I had invited a few of my close friends in village to come 'fete' with us, of course this quickly meant that everybody in my community wanted to be invited and so I quickly realized that there had to be quite a bit of food! I bought four dollars worth of potatoes (which was WAY too much for 50 people – if that tells you anything about how cheap food is here), four ducks, six papayas from Omar, two dollars worth of rice, and four dollars worth of bread. Everything I can find in village to make mashed potatoes, stuffing, papaya salad, rice pudding and roasted duck! I had fifty people arrive and eat lots of food. There were kids everywhere and the only thing that upset people was that I didn't have local beer ready for them (it was a market day so I just told them that if they wanted to drink they could use their money and drink all they wanted, but they could eat all they wanted at my house). It was a lot of fun and a lot of food. I sure missed the family dinner at the Segelhorst's but it came close, since we were smiling, laughing and drinking wine (from a box, so not quite the same, but close)! I am so thankful to have a wonderful community and a great job here in Burkina while also having such a loving family (and loving friends) just on the other side of the ocean.

Bunny Drama

On a different note, I just realized that I may not have brought up my bunny situation recently. So you all knew about baby Stew. One day Zach came down from Kaya with fencing so that I could keep him outside. The next morning I went into my kitchen and found him with a stroke – he couldn't move an entire side of his body. After a few hours he was looking a bit better and was moving a bit. That evening I went into my courtyard and found him dead. Luckily, Zach was around and gave him to Remi (the son of my neighbor, the former Peace Corps counterpart). The next morning Remi walked into my courtyard with the box Zach had given him (that last time I had seen it, held a dead bunny). I was so grossed out because I thought there was a day old bunny in the box! Thankfully Remi had eatten it the night before so there was no problem. I also sent around some 'funny' notes to friends and family about the death of Stew. Here are a few of the best: Stew woke up floppy, by noon was hoppy, then was dead.

Since I was bitter about putting up this fencing in my courtyard, I asked Zach to bring me down a starter pair to start my own bunny farm! Smart decision right? After about a month of my new pair I had my bunny expert, Norm (an education volunteer from my swearing in class), come for a visit and tell me what to fix. His directions were simple: get a male, right now you have two females. After he left I felt somewhat defeated since I had now been feeding bunnies for two full months with no bunny meat! Zach, kindly brought me an actual male rabbit (that is now named Stew). He started building a big bunny hole that was at least five feet deep – that was as far as my stick could follow, but it was likely even larger – but from what I could tell was not getting it on with the ladies to produce offspring (if you want those details I will email you, not appropriate to write about that on this). A few days before Thanksgiving, Zach decided that these bunnies needed to start having babies and he was going to help that happen, I finally agreed that if he didn't think the females were pregnant he could help Stew catch them and get him in at least the right direction for some baby making. He picked up Big Mama
(the one we thought was the male in the first round) and realized that she was extremely pregnant. A few days later Big Mama was going wild because the hole had collapsed (which at this moment we think means that her babies were lost in the destruction because she has still not had babies. I'm now pretty at peace that I will NEVER have baby bunnies. Someday, I hope the news on the bunny front will be better...

So I am going to talk really quickly about some of my favorite people in my community that I see often and make my life at site so much better!

Asseta – is my aunt in village. She has been through the equivalent of 5^th grade but speaks more French than any other woman in my village. She runs a boutique and a food stand. Her husband buys gold from the miners in the region and sells it in Ouaga. Her two biological daughters are 'bandits' that are always having fun and getting into trouble. Her eldest daughter is starting 1^st grade (the first year of school), however the teacher left the school so she won't be going to school this year. I am hoping to partner with the school so the kids do not have to repeat after paying for the school year! Asseta also has taken in kids from our village and neighboring villages. These are kids that are working for their school fees or young women whose husbands have left them (one of them just had her baby on Monday – cannot wait to see that girl!!). Asseta has been really good about making sure I get fed and that if I need anything she finds someone to help.

Madi – he works full time at his dad's boutique. He had just 5^th grade but his dad said that he is not allowed to go to school anymore. It kills me to see such a smart boy working 15 hour days instead of going to school. He sometimes acts like he is my older brother and takes good care of me. One day, he saw me walking down the street trying to hold seven guavas and a bunch of other things from the market and he ran out of his boutique and put all of my things in a plastic bag. He charges my phone for free – which I really appreciate – and sells pasta and tomato sauce! I am really hoping that I can do some one-on-one studying so that he can keep using his brain. He also has a puppy named Bubby (almost all dogs in Burkina are named Bubby) who I play with. He thinks I am pretty silly but I think he appreciates it.