Thanksgiving Number 2

Another holiday down. Last year, we got together and substituted chickens for turkey, thinking it wouldn't be possible to find "dendon". Then, on the next day, walking out to the bus home, we passed two fat, flirting, flightless turkeys and cursed them for having escaped our eyes.

Well, this year we made it happen. One volunteer found a live one in his town, named him Brian, tied his legs together and packed him onto a public bus (normal practice), to bring up to the feast. We spent that evening hanging out with him in the courtyard. Next morning, found a butcher in town and paid him in the organs we didn't want to eat. Lit up some charcoal, stacked a massive pot on top and threw Brian's meaty corpse in there to roast for a few hours. Meanwhile, various side dishes were made--onions, green beans, apple pie. Opened a can of cranberry sauce sent from America with a kitchen knife (can opener was not to be found). Yours truly carved Mr. Brian up after the cook sliced open his thumb. It even got a little chilly, and we put windbreakers on. Football was the only thing missing. Woke up at 7am after the night's food coma. Ate apple pie and mashed potatoes for breakfast before hopping on a bus back home. Back to sweat dripping down my back in front of 80 clueless students.

Song Requests: Part I

I'll start with little sis's questions, because they're here and accessible, and I have internet access. I got a few more very good writing suggestions, which I'm going to work on when I get a chance in village.

She asks:
1. Do you want to come back next year or are you dreading it more than youre looking forward to it?
Yes. I look forward to coming back. It's been two years already since I've seen snow. It'll be three by the time I see it next. And of course there's American cuisine--tube steaks and meat patties, hormone-pumped chickens with breasts so big, meaty and boneless as to make Playmate jealous. And I dearly miss my Rock'n'Roll. I feel so unable to express myself without amplification. I often think of my stereo, sitting in a corner, gathering dust.

Still, things happen to me daily that I fear the loss of. I just recently started taking my study of Moore seriously--and if I don't learn a lot quickly, I never will. And who cares if it's not useful back home? It's just kind of cool... Will I ever learn to make dolo? What will happen in my students lives? What great things will they grow up to accomplish?

A great number of my volunteer friends from my last year of service have finished their service. Will I ever see them again? How quickly it goes...

But I'll be glad to go back. To be on track towards somewhere. To work hard and be able to rely on co-workers with a professionalism and attitude towards work that, unfortunately, is rare here. And the simple access to resources. My work here moves so slowly not only because of the culture, but because of the sparsity of infrastructure.

Still, that's a year from now. I'm only half done, and it's not until now that I feel truly capable in what I do here--work and otherwise. So it's far too soon to start dreaming of ice cream cones and microphones.


2. How is the dry season coming along?
Not quite dry yet. It still rains about weekly. But before I know it, i'll be waking up in the middle of the night to dig dry black rocks out of my nostrils.

3. How is school going? I hear you are teaching Physics and Math this year. Do the kids get it? What types of labs are you doing with them?
Good. Yes. Two math classes and one physics/chemistry. Math is fun. I can do exercises and ask applicable questions to the kids. In the lowest level, some of the kids--especially at the beginning of the year like this--have a very feeble grasp of french. It's frustrating to ask a four word question and get a blank stare in response. But the'll get a hold on it soon enough. No labs to teach. No labs to teach in! I do experiments in front of the class, reminiscent of the Late Show's "Does it float?" and my own pyrotechnic experiments in the back yard as a kid.

4. AFRICA HAS SNAILS?!??!?!
Yes. In Moore, they are called garweongo ("gar-ah-way-own-go"). Seems excessive in syllables. Guy was BIG, though!
I also saw the biggest snake on the african continent on a hike the other day. I was about to jump off a rock I had been climbing with my new volunteer neighbor, when she pointed out to me the strange, scaly, diamond-shaped texture of the ground deep down, between the weeds. I pulled up a nearby plant and started poking it down below. Suddenly, the earth shook. The weeds around the beast shuffled like a hurricane was passing. The clouds parted and lightning struck. I felt myself floating up above the ground, in the presence of a mythical god--the African Rock Python. It's a boa constrictor. It eats goats, my village friends say. We don't think it's ever caught a kid.
Moore: snake=waafo, african rock python=waa-kenfo. Best leave him be...

5. How DO magnets work?
Perhaps it was thoughtless of me to propose this question. I think it has to do with the ionization of the metal inside the magnet. It creates circular fields which grow more neutral towards the middle of the magnet, and align anything with a charge along it's axis, which is in fact perpendicular to the axis of an electric field. I forget why this matters. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps nothing does.

6. Do you want Chili's chips and dip?
Shut up. Of course.
Nowadays I crave wierd things like rice with vegetable sauce and fried dough balls. Barbequed corn. Fresh bread. The things that are, if not immediately accesible, at least within my near future. I didn't convince myself of it. It just happened. I miss cheese.

7. What are you going to be for Halloween?
A scary white dude with glasses and a beard.

8. How many girlfriends does Mirza have these days?
I don't inquire about his goings about, and he leaves me to my own. He's like any good roommate.

9. What's the bat situation at school like?
My school had a bit of a bat problem, especially over the summer when nobody was using the classrooms. They were hanging, ubiquitous and stalagtitic, from the rafters of one classroom. The ground was carpeted black in their waste. It smelled unpleasant.
We had somewhat of a specialist come in to lay down a chemical that would make them leave. It worked for the most part. Though every once in a while I hear a strangely mammalian chirp in response to a question posed in class. Could be a choked up student...


Hope that clears a few things up.

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