Blogity Blah Block

I'm having what I will choose to refer to as "Blogger's Block".

I want to write something that is interesting to you, dear reader. I want to write something that makes you think, "wow!" Of course, only wanting to write something interesting is a sure-fire route to monotonous boredom. I've said it before: I'm way past the point where this experience is fresh as muffins and exhilarating as free-falling. I'm at home here. I really can't see myself doing anything else, being anywhere else, at this moment. So, what new experiences are there to write about!? None that seem worth blogging (see: writing home) about. I ran (and biked) around a lot this summer. A lot of the time feeling bad for not being at home, with my puppy, in my house. I was, more or less, working. There were few dull moments. I'm a little nervous--how will I cope with the drawn-out, hazy, humid days of village life again?

And I've got more work to do even before school starts in the first week of October. I had imagined that summer would stretch on forever. That I'd wake up on my creaky cot, sweating at eleven o'clock, and ask "wait...when's market day? I need something to do." As it turns out, there was a short vacation (it seems so long ago!) and a whole lot of work that needed doing. A fat block of business in between the static school year. This time, I can't wait for school to start. I get to stay put.

In another way, maybe all the work I've been doing has kept me up to pace. I'm not ready to slow down, and it wont be hard, now, to jump into it. I'm getting things started on my library project. I've decided to man up and do the leg work of researching book prices. (Until recently, I was too nervous about the inadequacies of my french to do so solo.) But running around today, for the first time, the formerly-daunting Ouagadougou felt like my proverbial oyster. No heckler on the streetside could irk me. No falter of language could slow me down. Only the magnifying sun provoked curses from under my breath. But, that's expected. I feel capable, on top of things, excited. Happy.

It was in this moment that I realized I've been living for the last year in subconscious fear! I'd been nervous about what people wanted from me. I'd become unfriendly to people I didn't know. As soon as I admitted that I AM capable of getting things done here, I quickly shirked my inhibitions. I'm not fearful anymore. I can do anything here--as well, if not better than I could in the so-distant home. I have more at my disposal.

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So, speaking of writer's block, I have a new idea: send me questions! Comment them here or email me. On anything. Burkina's culture. The weather. My thoughts on the french language. What color was the slop I ate for breakfast? Magnets! how the heck do they work? I think this exercise will inject some freshness into this here webpage. I look forward to pontificating.

J

Here are some pictures:

Kids with a snail we found while cleaning my yard.

Landscape engineers.

Girl selling peanuts.

At a bus station.

Some kid somewhere.

Hey, why not BIKE around Burkina?

One time, two years ago, I took a couple days to bike down to Champaign from home. I went with a close friend. We loaded tents, sleeping pads, two pairs of underwear, and a shitload of granola bars on our bike racks and in our backpacks for the ride down. It was a memorable trip. In desperate need of bathing, we jumped the fence of a public pool that had closed for the season only a day before. Well, no complaints…entry was free! We ate whole pizzas and chatted with the locals (who were vastly different from those I interact with these days). The day after the trip was over, I had to crawl to the fridge just for a cold beer.

Cold beer is certainly no easier to obtain here. That’s why this time, we drank “dolo”—it’s the local beverage that could be most accurately described as “hard sorghum cider”. I’m looking back on my past posts and realizing…holy crap! I don’t think I’ve talked about dolo! Lacking refrigeration, it’s consumed as cool as possible. Perhaps like a fine red wine. One of my goals for the summer was to learn how to make it. Unfortunately, I was working my butt off on real work all summer, except for the short trip home. I’m scared: will I ever get summer off again!?

So, I went on another extended bike ride. We started down near Ghana, and the tour continues in a circle around the country, counterclockwise. Think clock-face: I rode from 6 o’clock to 3 o’clock. It was great! Except one volunteer’s village, I’d never seen this part of the country before. The tour is still well in progress, and you can follow along and see pictures at: http://www.burkinabiketour.blogspot.com/

You can read about the group there. I had a great time. The first day was all on paved road—without much traffic—and it went so quickly that another volunteer and I missed the turn at 75 km, chatting leisurely, and went an extra six kilometers. Whoops. Thank heaven for cell phones! Africa has changed drastically because of them. Without them, I’d probably be dead. It’s incredible how well this worked out. Immense thanks and congratulations are due to volunteers Marita, Julie, and Rachel who organized the tour. Spectacular thanks are due to those of you who donated (you still can on the aforementioned blog!).

I kept having flashbacks to the ride I took two years ago. Waking up early in the morning, shoving some carbs into my gut and moving along before the sun gets too high. There was even a moment—coming around a curve, where power lines hugged the road and sorghum plants (resembling corn) filled my periphery—when I could’ve sworn I was cruising down Route 47.

School starts October 1st. Time to warm up the cables on my resource room project and refresh on lesson plans. Already?

Back to Thyou

I came back to Thyou for a couple days. To check on the house, to make sure everything was intact. To see if it still felt like home—however temporary.

At first it was hectic. I woke up early, from my air-conditioned room in Ouaga. Barely caught a bus. Had to get off in Sabou, and since I left my bike at home, I had to do the last leg by bush taxi. They knew who I was, though. “The white guy’s going to Thyou!” they said. Put me right on the next car out. I had to cram in, as always. A kid of about ten years took a place on my lap. Twenty minute’s ride to the school, I get off. They throw my bag down from the roof and speed off.

Walking towards my house, the car’s dust settling behind, I look around…

…Much greener than when I left… It’s been raining a lot, and often.

“…Is this home?” I say to no one. No one answers. “…For now,” I tell the presently-lush surrounding.

The stick that held shut my door has come out—by an active agent or its own accord, I don’t know. It’s the same courtyard that’s always been there. The big shady tree. Weeds crowd the ground, thick like the humid air, but it’s the same.

I float my head around. It’s just as I left it. Will it stay this way? One year down and only one left. It will become someone else’s, but a part of me will always live here—like walking into the house you grew up in.

All’s the same inside. It looks lived in. My things are everywhere. Nothing feels foreign like when I first opened the door a year ago. I will continue living this way for a long way to come. Different houses, apartments. Do different things. And I will leave pieces of myself in these places. It’s good, though. Because I take pieces from here and there to fill the parts of me left behind.

It’s amazing, really, how quickly you can feel at home in a place.

I suddenly feel more comfortable here, in my space, than I did in my old room back home just two weeks before. This is my space in the world. The little nook I cut out for myself—whether or not the surroundings feel like home.

I realize, talking to a group of children who tend their grazing cows outside, that I’ve arrived on a market day. I put on pants (as opposed to shorts…) and head for the market. The sights are familiar, too. Maybe like “home.” Maybe not. Is familiarity all that makes you feel at home?

But this is comfortable. It’s not the sense of wonder at something new that drove me before. It’s not foreign. At market, I see faces I know. Students call my last name. I don’t stop to ask directions because I know where I’m going: the veggie ladies. In back. They’re happy to see me. Others, who didn’t frequent the market last year, laugh and gasp in wonder, approval, at the white guy successfully talking prices, buying food, in Moore. I know less than they think I do.

School doesn’t start for two months, so there’s no one in town and nothing to do. I spend most of the next couple days between my house and courtyard, sleeping, reading, cooking, eating. Conducting business in my latrine. I realize at some point that this might seem lonely, unbearable, secluded. But I’ve done this for a year. I’m comfortable alone as long as someone calls and speaks English with me every few days. Everyone out there’s willing to chat if I need it. And I’m enjoying the book.

The nerves connecting my fingers to my brain are telling me it hurts to play guitar. It’s been a couple weeks, and my calluses wore away. I wonder briefly what else I’ve forgotten. In a month. In a year…

I stay up late playing, ignoring the dull aches. For a minute, I stop, stand up, fill a cup with water. And I hear a dull half-whimper, half-growl. I know that voice.

Mirza charges through the open door crack. If he were a bigger dog I’d have been tackled like an ill-placed receiver. He shoves his face in my hands. His butt oscillates with the torque of his tail. We catch up.

The next day, a few students stop by to say hi. They inform me there’s been a death. The elder guy living in the house closest to the school. Later, people are celebrating (no, not mourning. This is not a sad thing) outside. It begins to rain in sheets. There is lightning. Thunder. A group of young men take shelter in the house sharing a wall with mine. When the rains tops, I come over and say hi. I know all these faces. They know me. We do not understand each other, but we know of each others existence. Its merging in and out of our own.

They offer me a seat and continue their ongoing conversation. I understand so few words, but I’m surprised that I can follow. They’re talking about someone else. He has to go to Sabou and come back. He’ll sleep there the night. We’ll see him Wednesday.

I used to think it was rude to get up and leave at times like this. But I know, and they know, that I don’t understand and this is not all that exhilarating to me. They offer a drink, ask a sympathy question in French, allow me to be on my way.

I spent much of the last year worrying that I wasn’t making enough friends here. That I should feel this way or that. That I should speak more Moore and have a larger stake in this town. But I realize that I am comfortable, and I am confident, and I’m here to teach. And I’ve made as close of friends that I can with a select few here, given the barriers. And those friendships are only, at the most pessimistic, half over.

One of my friends in the group—probably the closest I have here save the dog—turned to me while I was sitting, listening. “So…one year left, huh?” He laughed but there was longing in his eyes. “After that, we’re going to miss each other.”

I love rainy season...

There once was a song...

I'm imagining one of those Planet Earth style cameras that sits on a tripod somewhere for twenty years while a tree grows. Then, we sit on a couch in front of a plasma tv wider than the couch with the surround sound on in super-fast-high-def-down-low-uproar vision, and watch this sucker grow into a titan of living things. The forest blurs across the screen and we get to experience first hand what might be called aural sex...

I'm imagining this camera sitting where I am, at the door of a school building, sheltered, at the beginning of the day in a place exactly like but perhaps not Burkina Faso. We see the sun rise, blazing, above the sparse savannah. People trudge by, faces glistening with sweat. There's a vague haze obscuring everything.

Then the clouds flood in. On this camera, like an invading army, blocking out the sun. Dry from my spot in the doorway, my place on the couch, I feel the humidity of the air. I look for the haze, but can't find it. And it's pouring. I've been somehow, without moving a toe, displaced to the underside of a waterfall as the rain pours off the roof, into lake in front of me, non-existant only moments before.

The rain stops. Clouds still there. The sun sets behind them, and we watch through the night as wind tickles the leaves of trees in full bloom. In the morning, the clouds are gone. The sun comes up. People walk by, faces glistening, haze obscuring. All over again.

Except being here is nothing like watching it on a screen. Maybe Todo did a better job of capturing it.

24

I wanted this post to be about America. About what shocked me upon re-entry, and about what culture shock looks like from the other end of the swimming pool. But, frankly, I talked about that enough when I was home, and I’ll go through it all over again in another year, where I can tell you all about it in person. And I still haven’t had time to process it all.

What’s on my mind now—and what was really on my mind the whole time I was home—isn’t so much about me as my…what would you call it? Generation? That is, all you buggers I grew up with (not, by any means, to say we’re all grown up).

I was class of ’08. That means two years have gone by since the end of undergrad. In the first year, a lot of us fumbled around and twiddled our thumbs, unsure of what to do next. Unemployed or regretfully employed. I played music and tutored a couple brats (and a few good students) on the side. I read books I’d always meant to read, but never had the time. I played more hockey than I had in years. I was arguably in the coveted “best shape of my life”. The day I flew out last year just about pinned that one year mark. Friends were working, living with their parents, finishing school, gettin’ schooled more. My baby sis was still passing her workdays in lecture halls. Nobody was engaged. Nobody owned a house. Nobody got knocked-up.

Ok, nobody’s gotten knocked up yet. But you’ve all gotten up a notch. By the time I’m done here, I’ll have missed between four and six weddings. Perhaps all of you will have bought houses or condos or at least rent an apartment. I hope you’re all close enough for a weekend visit. Now, don’t mistake my discussion of this as a hearkening for the good old days. I’m not resistant to these changes. In fact, I’m quite the opposite.

With a little sister just out of college, and a year of whatever-the-hell-this-thing-is under my belt, I find myself increasingly excited about what’s going on, about what’s to come. Out of the bubbled, isolated college world, we’ve all got real things to worry about. We’re finally taking our part in reshaping the world—it’s what the old fogies (pardon my bluntness) have been telling us would be our responsibility since before the re-election of Bill Clinton. Lots of you work in energy. An undeniably real problem. Others in psychology and medicine. Others in peacekeeping and business and art. And while the engagements and moves took me somewhat for surprise, it’s just a sign that we’re mature enough to handle that responsibility.

I also know I’m not the only one gambling, every time I take a step, that an earthquake of Haitian proportions won’t crumble beneath my foot. I don’t know what the next few years will bring me. All I’ve got’s whims and wits. But the wits keep growing.
But that’s exactly what makes being twenty-four so exciting! We get to poke our toes in waters we couldn’t before. We get to try and fail, and we don’t have to worry that failure will injure some silly grade point average.

So, I suppose I ought to thank all of you—for getting on with your lives. It shows me I can do the same. Really, could you imagine the degree of messed-up I’d be if I left for two years and nothing changed? I’d have to abandon you at your dead ends just to straighten my own stumbling feet. I can say, honest, that it never once during this vacation felt like “old times”. It was fresh and crisp. I felt the same connection with you, but it was forward-looking, positive. Nothing’s being lost. I feel more assured and confident. I realize that changes will happen in this next year, and I’m excited to jump in and share mine with you.

And as for the fogies: I have nothing to offer but thanks. (I make 3 bucks an hour). Thanks for supporting me in my choice to do something a little off-track. Thanks for providing for me enough that I have the chance to sniff out new experiences. For your endless, reckless enthusiasm. Thanks for pushing me to seek that out. And thanks for the granola bars.

I once described myself as a cynic. And I can’t rightly say if my shirking that descriptor is a result of my experiences here, or if it’s from knowing and experiencing the positive movement of friends. Or if it’s just something natural, a scheduled, coded program of biochemistry. In any case, what’s the fun in moping?

j

One Year Down (really?)

May 23, 2010

Well, it’s not quite June 10th—the day I left America last year to come to Burkina Faso and teach Science for the Peace Corps—but it’s close enough. By the time I get this posted on the blog, it might be past that date. My thoughts on an entire year of being in Burkina are unlikely to be drastically different three weeks from now. (Plus, given all the running around I’ll be doing, I doubt my mind will be in the right set for reflection.)

So, what I have I learned, living for a year in a foreign country? Why did I come in the first place? How have my reasons for coming been affected? And what’s going to keep me here for another year? It’s due time for some essay-guided reflection.

I wanted to join the Peace Corps for a few reasons. The professional reputation of the service is undeniable. Two years as a volunteer with so much “hardship” is seen as a measure of diligence, devotion, and determination in many arenas. Not to mention, the humanitarian implications of working so hard, and giving up so much to better the lives of a people so distant from us—a people so slightly affected by our daily-doings at home, whose daily lives so minutely affect those of ours in the West over sea, further North over land, and higher up in our skyscrapers. To be concerned for the well-being of such peoples is said to show a lot.

This is, in part, the professional perspective for me. Certainly, I care about these people. I worry for their health and their environment and their education, their self-betterment. But, it’s this very spirit that drives me towards my professional goals. The two are in many ways inseparable. So, yes. I joined Peace Corps to help people, but I joined it also to help myself.

Professional opportunities aside, there are many other reasons I joined. Curiosity factored in equally, if not more so. I’ve traveled in my life. I’ve checked the Louvre and the Outback off my list. I’ve seen fjords and beaches, skied down mountains and across water. I’ve stayed up all night in the place where the sun doesn’t set. I’ve done a lot to satiate my curiosity for new experience by travel. Yet, I was always frustrated at how quickly I had to leave. How I only got to see the surface of things. I only struggled with language long enough for an English speaker to walk in the door behind me. My curiosity drove me to seek new places in a different sense. I wanted to see a place, but get past its surface. I wanted to meet its people and learn about them. A place and it’s people are co-dependent, and it’s absurd—I thought—to just see a place and keep your feet moving. I wanted to understand the place. The place didn’t particularly matter, as long as it was new and shocking. So, I came to Africa. (Yet, I’ve realized that this word is that of a passer-by—someone who takes in all of “Africa” in one fell swoop, throwing it all together into one general category. I’ve realized that the peoples of Africa are so diverse themselves that I no longer feel comfortable saying “I came to Africa.” I came to Burkina Faso is more precise. And still, the ethnic groups here are diverse enough that even those terms seems insufficient.)

I also came for the adventure. There is no insurance in the 3rd world (well, hardly.) There are few hospitals. There are snakes and torrential rains and scorching heat, vicious sunrays, HUGE language barriers, strange foods, strange music, strange faces. And I wanted to be thrown in the middle of it all. I wanted the exhilarations and utter confusions of in-your-face foreignness.

I also came just because. And because it’s the best time to do so. No mortgage or debt or kids to raise. No job left behind. Plus, there were peripheral benefits: the opportunity to learn another language, to have a change in perspective, to maybe pick up some sweet souvenirs.

But I never thought very much about what this service would do to me. I thought, a year ago, that you can’t understand a place until you understand its people. And I still think this is true. But back then, I didn’t think about those people’s affect on me—or maybe even the effect I’d have on them. It was the disposition not of a worker or a volunteer, but of a traveler, still just passing through, albeit slow enough to taste it.

Well, a year being here, and I’ve found a few things out. I’m reassured in my conviction that you’ve got to live there to understand there. But understanding is not synonymous with embrace. There are many things I’ve come to understand about this place and its people, much of which I will never embrace myself. I’ve found that in a culture like this, so far removed from my own, there are things I’ll never reconcile—basic, believed truths that aren’t shared, nor capable of embrace by an outsider (at least, this one). Things like gender equality, work ethic, or even the role we play in our own future or demise.

There’s no doubt gender roles are different here. Women do an awful lot of work, and their education is often not a priority (despite a government agenda very much in favor of the latter). It’s hard to work in the heat sometimes. But I was raised to do my job anyways. To go to school despite a fever of 103, to brave the cold or the heat, to stay up all night studying if there’s still a lot left to understand. I’m not saying so much work is a positive thing. There IS such a thing as excess. But, the contrary is (I’d say) worse. Most people here take a mid-day nap. That’s an awful lot of wasted sunlight in a place without electricity. The heat is often an excuse to just sit and stare. If it’s not the rainy season, and therefore there’s no farming to do, many don’t work at all: not towards their own betterment (when they’d have the time!), nor to the betterment of their communities. And, finally, there’s a short-sightedness: people often do not (or…refuse to?) see the role they play in the world they live in. They see neither the positive effects they could cause, nor the negative effects they perpetuate. An old man with three wives who do all the work doesn’t stop and think that by doing nothing, the inequalities of gender perpetuate (if not progress). The same goes for a teacher who speaks to his or her students in local language outside of class (and not French, which is—perhaps unfortunately—the language of education and development.) Furthermore, that man doesn’t realize that he can be an active agent of change; that he can, for example, send his daughters to school, relieve them of housework so that they may study. Or, god forbid, even help them to study and understand their schoolwork. The same goes for a man cutting down trees in a region in danger of desertification. (This is happening behind my house as I write this.) It won’t dry up today or tomorrow. He doesn’t see 50 years down the line—his suffering grandchildren.

Being here this long, I realize that I am so very different in the way I’m raised. I can, in fact, connect with these people on many levels. And then, there are so many ways I can’t. This is a frustration, but also a consolation—it reassures me of where I belong, making me proud of where I’m from, makes me love my own people despite what faults they have. There are positives here that Americans lack—close family ties and friendly relationships between professionals (speak to my father about “lawyers nowadays…”). And, yet, I’m okay with what we lack. Perhaps as a result of this service, I’ll be more an advocate of the good things I learn here. And my people will embrace that it me.

But I’m here for another year. The sense of adventure has faded. I’ve learned enough about the people to satiate my curiosity. My french is pretty darn good, though I’m still not satisfied by my versatility in it. I’ve seen a lot of foreign things, but they’ve become daily for me. I often don’t recognize their strangeness unless I force myself to. But I’m staying. I’ll stay because (a) I have to: it’s a two-year deal and I ain’t a quitter; and (b) I still like the place, and don’t have such a hard time recognizing the strangeness, embracing it and interacting with it. My being here is equally strange to these people, and often, we don’t need much more than to look at each other, recognize our differences, and laugh about them. I have tons of fun in class (when it’s not a test week). My students continue to impress me with their curiosity and their devotion despite so little to work with.

And the adventure hasn’t totally worn off. There are days, yes, when it all seems old-news and jaded. Days I don’t want to go outside and struggle in another language. Days I just want to grab a cold one with chips and salsa from the fridge, park my ass on the couch and turn on Seinfeld. But there are also days I walk outside, excited to take it all in—realizing that my time here, while long, IS limited. Knowing that inevitably, no matter how much I do here, I’ll soon be looking back, wishing I’d done more.

I’m staying because now, after a year teaching, I’ll be so much more effective next year. Because I’m less a traveler than a teacher. I’ll connect so much more quickly with my students. I’ll open doors to them that their Burkinabe teachers never thought to, or never knew how to. And I’ll stay because my french will still get better, and I’ll pick up some very strange (to Westerners, at least) local language on the way. And I’ll stay because there’s still so much more to see.

Easter/Passover/Humidity Meter

It's Easter Sunday. April's what everyone has been saying is the hottest month. It's 9AM here--the morning, the coolest part of the day--and I'm already drenched in sweat. I was going to go to church this morning--really! But, well, there's no way I'm going to sit under that jam-packed, thatched-roof awning over the pew (which itself is nothing put chopped-down logs we sit on), beads of sweat dripping from me, the service conducted in Moore--a degree away from jibberish to me.

I'm just going to lay in my hammock, move as little as possible, and dream of Easter brunch. Ice cold mimosas. Solid (unmelted!) chocolate. Maybe if I close my eyes and really try, I can convince myself I'm eating ice-cream-topped belgian waffles and sipping on iced coffee.

I'm trying to imagine where I was a year ago. Last Easter/ I had literally just recieved my assignment to Burkina Faso. I was pouring over the information in the packet, making lists of what I'd need. All optimism, excitement, adventure.

Does it seem like that long ago? Well, yes. It does. I've been here a while now. It's surprising to me, if I think about it, how "everyday" everything I do here has become. I've all but forgotten the hum of wheels on pavement, the crunch of snow under boots. Heck, I can't remember the last time I wore shoes. This is perpetual flip-flop weather. I'm impressed how much time has passed. How far from here I was last year. I dont' feel older, really. Only farther.

I'll spend even another Easter here. A year from now, I suppose I'll think back on what I was doing today. I'll wonder where the time went.

Easter here isn't terribly unlike it is in America. The Christians dress up, go to mass. Eat and drink. No chocolate. "Peeps" are an absurd notion. The only rabbits you might see will be in the sauce you eat at dinner. Though, likely, the animal slaughtered will be larger. A goat, pig, or sheep. People at church will be baptised. Villagers will visit each others' homes and wish each other well. Market will bustle. My dog wil sit, ass usual, right in front of my screen door, panting. Too lazy and hot to move a muscle and let me pass in and out of the house. He might stand up to eat something. The screen door is reflective: My actions mirror his.

The day after a holiday is usually a holiday, too. So I'll be back in the classroom Tuesday. I'm just praying my students will be alert enough to form sentences. The brain--as if chemically induced--isn't capable of much more than staring at walls in this weather. At home, April is a forgettable month--that middle-ground between Spring and Summer. Here, it's memorable only for its heat. Granted I don't melt, I'll see you in July!