I last posted right before Thanksgiving ... and now it's the day after Christmas! Is it just me, or has time been flying?
And yet every week has been different. Thanksgiving was mostly just a regular working day during my second week of teaching. I had wanted to celebrate with some other volunteers that weekend, but got caught up wiring a network and some network software between all of the computers, which is something that now lets me shut down, freeze, or control any/all of the computers in the lab. The first time I got it to work in class, the students were duly impressed. Too bad they could easily disable it if they learn well: all they need to do is unplug the network cable.
But, I didn't get to demonstrate my work that next week... because classes were suddenly cancelled! Call it an "election break". As a precaution, the Ministry of Education closed all the schools for the five days in advance of the municipal elections on December 2nd. And we thought that the US elections were intense...
The break gave me some time to catch up on badly-needed lesson planning that I'm continuing on now. I had gone straight from setting up the lab to teaching, so it has hardly been an organized class. But as you might guess, that also was interrupted by a two week stay in Ouaga for In-Service-Training (IST).
IST was in general, pretty good. It was fascinating to catch up all of the other volunteers in my group, and hear stories from all across Burkina Faso. Life in village of a couple thousand in the bush is vastly different from life in a college town that's the third largest city in the country. And that is still very different from life in Ouaga, where planes fly overhead every other hour, a couple of streets look like they could have been lifted in from Europe, and real mozzarella cheese is available. In Ouaga, we enjoyed four formal class sessions every day, with snacks and a lunch in between, and the evenings were free for us to exhaust ourselves and our paychecks on cab rides to downtown restaurants, groceries, and clubs. Or in my case, poker games, Settlers of Catan, reading thriller novels late into the evening, and one wine and cheese party-- the wine being from locally made vintage: bissap (hibiscus flower juice), baobob fruit, shea nuts, oranges, etc.
I spent one night back at site midway through our training, to visit the Nuits Atypiques de Koudougou-- a yearly festival celebrating new and "atypical" food, music, and crafts. I think I've mentioned an informal group that I work with in a previous post-- we bottle tomato sauce, and had hoped to show off our work at a booth there. This plan got cancelled at the last minute for reasons too complicated to describe here, but we managed to turn a disappointment into a way to look for some new opportunities. There are a lot of people here who make packaged foods locally, but trying to go up against imported competition is hard to do alone. We'd like to form some sort of coalition.
Coming back after finishing IST, I arrived in a town that had just partied hard and was cleaning up in the aftermath. The 11 of December, Burkina Faso's national holiday, was celebrated in Koudougou this year, with the President and many other officials in attendance. I wish I could say more about it-- but I wasn' t there to see it. There's always next year.
But coming back, I also recieved a warm welcome from my neighbors and co-workers here. I'm really thankful for that. There are some cultures where foreigners are given a lot of distance, but fortunately Burkina Faso is not one of them. While it's been tough not being with family on Christmas, my friends here have helped me feel comfortable and more than full at their parties.
Next up-- a free week, to puzzle out the different moving pieces of life before making any New Year's resolutions. Thinking about it, 2012 has been a pretty wild year-- I could call it the year of no routine. I'd like to keep the adventure going into 2013, but enjoy some more organization. I'll be ringing in the year in Saponé, with my host family from training.
