The Holiday Season

Ne windiga! (Good afternoon!)

Windig kibare (How is your afternoon?)

Response: Laafi bala (It has been peaceful)

Y zaka ramba?

Response: Laafi (In health)

To those of you I have not communicated with since my last post, I hope the holidays were wonderful and that you are all doing well. Happy 2013!!

I have been overwhelmed with work and life in the past few months which has been terrific! I am busy almost everyday now. I work at the health clinic five mornings a week and have a critical thinking club that meets during the lunch break everyday. I am going running in the morning as well! By the afternoon comes around I am exhausted and happy to just hang out with people in my market.

Hamadou on the alphabet wall!

My new interest has been in early childhood education and critical thinking projects that can go along with that. This is all thanks to Mom sending me a Highlights magazine that is the most loved magazine known to mankind. It is very well-worn but I just received another package from Mom so I have my fingers crossed that there are some new ones in there!

Karim and Asseta having some fun drawing

I've also been collecting stories so that we can translate them into a variety of languages and then are some other people that will illustrating them. The stories though are always incredibly morbid. So far I have collected four from some teenage girls I know. Here is an example of one (it is the most extreme in how depressing it is, but I love it).

The Dangerous Family

By Ramata Ouedraogo, the daughter of Amado and Zenabo Ouedraogo, 15 years old, in 6eme

This is Ramata while she is at work

One morning, a man and a woman went into the wilderness to go look for honey. They left their children at the house. After a bit of time in the wilderness, they found a beehive. They decided that they did not have enough time to take the honey from the hive. So they took the entire beehive and headed home. When they arrived at their house, they gave the house key to the kids and told them, “lock us in the house and throw away the key.” The man and the woman went inside and the kids locked the door with the key and threw it away. After a few minutes, the children heard noises from inside the house. They started laughing because they thought that their parents were happy after eating so much honey. The children were wrong. Actually, the parents had opened up the beehive inside the house. The bees had come out of their hive and attacked the man and the woman. Eventually, the children realized that their parents were trying to get their attention. The children searched everywhere for the key but could not find it. The parents died in the house with the bees.

So now on to happier things, the holiday season!

Christmas was wonderful and spent in Silmidougou. With three pounds of pork tenderloin for four dollars on Christmas Eve we ate well and celebrated the holidays. On Christmas, my Uncle Boureima (who is Muslim) gave Zach and me a chicken. So Zach got to kill and gut a chicken while I washed dishes. It was a pretty quiet day, but it ended up being a three day long celebration with one day of every Christian in my village being very drunk. It was a lot of fun, but I really did miss Christmas with the family – my first one without Mom, Dad and Luke - so that was a little sad (guess I have officially left the nest).

A Merry Christmas meal!!!

Zach doing a great job cooking the pork!

New Years was a fun event in Kaya. I was with Zach and Jason where we ate some great chili from home (thanks Mom!) and drank an assortment of liquors. Thanks to those two boys, I stayed up until midnight, the villageois in me is unwilling to be up after sundown.

I then had a bunch of Peace Corps visits to my site. The first was to help Zach move out of his site and so I am now fostering his two cats (it looks like he will be PC/Burkina's first nursery school volunteer and still be in our region). The second was a very nice visit from my PC Medical Officer, Jean-Luc, who knows Mom and Dad well from when we lived in Tanzania so it was fun to catch up with him. Along with Jean-Luc came Dr. Barry Simon the director of PC Health Services from Washington, DC. We had a nice lunch in Kaya and got to show off my site. The third visit was from Siaka, the man that ran our cross-cultural and language sessions in PST, came for just an hour but it was not to chat with him and him to also get to see my village.

One of my foster kitties, her name is Probot

In case you have not heard, Burkina is going to the World Cup! I watched all the games in village and was the only girl in the crowd. I brought my Burkina flag to each game. Second in Africa!!

The chief's brother and me ready for the Africa Cup final!

The last holiday that has taken place is the biggest and most exciting: naaba fete! This holiday in celebration of my chief and all the former chiefs took place for over a week. He had all of the large government officials come to village, there were dance-offs, competing dance parties until 6am, animal sacrifices, traditional dancers, a man on stilts, and all kinds of fun things! It was a great time for me since I got to dress up a bit and gave one of my rabbits to the chief. He gave me two thumbs up, which for the regal man he is, was quite awesome! I really enjoyed it and I will hopefully be adding some more photos on facebook soon if you want to check them out!

Zach, my chief, and me

The traditional dancers

The last note for this post is a bunny update! I left you all hanging on a terribly sad note last time so I think it is good to give you some new information. I got back from in-service training to find myself with three new baby bunnies, two that are white and one that is almost all black. They are now almost as large as the adults! While this was a big plus there have been some failures since then. The first being that after another litter came to life, a few dogs broke in and ate my male and the new litter. I later found one of the new babies still alive but his leg is broken – I think more because he has an abusive mother than dogs attacking him. I then gave my white female to my chief as a present for his party, which was a big win. The next day, Zach got to kill his first bunny when I realized just how terrible this mother was being (she pulls out her babies' hairs and steals their food). While Zach was cleaning her up I gave myself a pedicure (thanks Grandma for the stones!) and sang, “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead” (which is the only part of that song I know). She was delicious! The four bunnies that are still around have gotten much fatter since their mom is gone, so I'm thinking I am going to come up with a party right before rainy season to eat them all! I really want my garden!