Last month I went to the West African mask festival in Dedougou with some other volunteers. To get to Dedougou I had to take this god awful bus. The bus was your standard 50 year old broken down charter bus with no AC of course packed to the brim. I was expecting to see a bunch of facemasks and vendors, but when they say masks they mean full body costumes! The day show was very interesting because they had this teepee shaped costume that was dancing around then they would flip it over and no one would be inside. Not only do we get cool masks but magic too. I was definitely pleased. They also sacrificed a chicken and spilled its blood all over the giant mask, so culturally this was very exciting.
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| stuffed on the bus |
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| one of the really cool masks |
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| no one was inside of this dancing mask! |
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Back at my site things are okay. I don’t feel that I am progressing as quickly as I should be with language or with project ideas. It has been really hard for me to find motivated Burkinabe to work with. A lot of people seem very interested in working with me at first but when I start to explain community health ideas to them I always get the same responses- either the glazed over eyes or “yea, that sounds like a great idea, YOU should def. do that.” A lot of people in my village and in this country are used to NGOs coming and installing a pump or a library with out teaching them any sustainable tools. Because the Peace Corps focuses on facilitating development and rather than leading projects without country participation it has been hard finding Burkinabe that want to head projects. Some won't do a simple info session with students without getting paid. It can be really frustrating at times because at site they tell me how poor they are and how much they need help but a lot of people don’t seem to want to do anything that will lead to change. I told my program coordinator about this problem and he told me to keep trying. He also gave me this quote “Give a man a fish is to teach him to beg, teach him to fish is to feed him for all eternity”. I’ve heard variations of this quote a million time before but now it really hits home. I just hope that I can gain enough trust and build good relationships to actually achieve sustainable activities that will help someone.
It’s official! I passed my first 3 months at site mark. Me and my other stage mates had In service training (IST) in Koudougou where we learned things like how to make tofu to project planning with our actual counterparts. It was really nice seeing everybody from my stage again and I feel like I learned a lot. During IST we also went to this rehabilitation center for malnourished children to do enriched breakfast demonstrations. During my time there I met the cutest little baby. She wasn't malnourished but her older sister was. This is because her mother does not practice birth spacing so when the new baby was born the mom stopped breast feeding the older child. This happens a lot in this country, that's why I want to focus a lot of my energy on nutrition and family planning. I just hope that when I go back to site I can apply these things and find people to work with. The first thing that I want to do is a hearth model. It's basically a 12-day nutrition boot camp for moderately malnourished kids and their mothers. The women will meet every morning and learn how to make and enrich food that they feed their children. After the cooking portion there will be an activity or info session dealing with malaria, hygiene, HIV/AIDS, or any other topics of interest. During the second week of April I will take a counterpart with me to a volunteer run tree convention. We will learn how to successfully plant trees and maintain gardens. In July I am going to take 8 students and a counterpart to Camp Glow, which is a youth empowerment camp run by PC volunteers. Right now I am trying to find funding to transport the students to the actual camp, everything else like room/board and food is included.
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| learning to make tofu |
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| me and my favorite burkina babe |
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| ALEX! |
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| IST after counterpart workshop |
You all know that I have a lovely canine named Neuf. He is the apple of my eye, the sugar in my tea, the vegan whipped cream on my frozen vegan dessert... My village loves him, he’s low maintenance and he seems to recognize that I am his owner. Despite all of his amazing qualities he has developed a bad habit. In Burkina all of the domestic animals (cows chickens donkeys etc) roam around freely and somehow people are able to keep track of which animal belongs to whom. Neuf has taken a liking to chasing animals. When/if he catches them he stops and finds another victim. It looks like he is trying to kill them and it turns out that the owners of these animals do not like it when Neuf does this. Another volunteer's dog did the same thing and one day someone chopped it with a machete and that was his last chase. I do not know how to stop him from doing this. I find it hard to teach him to do simple tasks like a domesticated dog in the states. He also "allegedly" killed someone else’s adolescent chicken. I don’t know if it was Neuf who actually killed it because there was another dog around but everyone that was there thinks that Neuf did it. For the sake of Neuf and my reputation in my village does anyone have any advice or training tips to tame my rowdy pup? Note: I have to wait 7monthes before he old enough to get him neutered.
I would like to give a special thanks to all of the people that have sent me letters and care packages thus far. It honestly makes me so happy to receive your packages. Thank you Amber, Jenai, Lize, Biljana, Amanda, and my Rents!
