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Some Like It Hot

2008-09-29T02:15:00.000-07:00

Anyone who got an actual hand written letter from me during the last two years has heard me whine about the heat in Burkina. Just when I thought I couldn't complain any more, I go to a place that's even hotter. The fabled Timbuktu. Not just a hip brand of messenger bags, Timbuktu is also a really hard to get to town in NW Mali and a certified world heritage site. It took 5 full days of pain and suffering to get there overland from Ouagadougou(which is about 700 km away). The trials of this trip included having to spend the night sleeping on the bare ground in a shantytown on the bank of the Niger river where a gang of little rascal aged street urchins tried to mug me. They got nothing but my pride, since my pockets were empty at the time. Anyone attempting to rob me these days will be sorely disappointed.

Situated on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu was once a way station for the trade of gold, slaves, and ivory from the gold coast to northern Africa and of salt in the opposite direction. Geographically, this made a lot of sense up until about the 16Th century when people gave up the excruciating hassle of crossing the Sahara in camel caravans in favor of sea and river based trade routes. Owing to its prosperity as a commercial center, the city developed into a social and cultural hotbed and was home to a huge university with as many as 25,000 students as early as 1400. The library is pretty spectacular, with gorgeous mud wall construction and and impressive collection of ancient islamic and greek texts. I couldn't give it more than a cursory clark-griswald-at-the-grand-canyon type nod because the heat from the sand was seeping through my cheap Chinese flip flops(my only pair of shoes! yay for minimalism!) and scalding the bottoms of my feet. Other famous things that I didn't spend much time looking at are the Djinguereber and Sankore mosques, built in 1327 and the early 15Th century respectively.

Since there was no way in hell I was returning the same way I came, I got halfway back to Ouaga on a ferry boat running the Malian length of the Niger river. you can also pay an absurd amount of money to take a frightening prop plane out of the "airport", but I opted to save myself the cash and the panic attack. The boat ride is the preferred mode of local transport because a fourth class ticket is 10 bucks and you can bring your goats, cattle, and chickens. I chose a second class ticket for 80 bucks. Falling squarely in the center of the deluxe-first-second-third-fourth class spectrum, this will get you a bed in a four berth cabin, three days of meals, and access to a tolerable but nonetheless cockroach infested latrine. In spite of being dirty and uncomfortable, the ride is amazing and highly recommended. Sunrise and sunset on the Niger river are photographer's dream. Check out the pic snapped with a cheap digicam of the full moon rising at sunset. The boat stops at small villages along the way to pick up and drop off passengers and supplies. Most of the villages are only accessible by river during the rainy season, and are thus relatively untouched by western influences. Among the more interesting stops was the village Niafunke, which blues and world music fans will know as the home to the late Ali Farka Toure.

I got off the boat at a town called Mopti so I could check out the nearby mosque at Djenne, an architectural wonder and another world heritage site. The world's biggest manmade mud thing, the mosque was first built in 1307 and subsequently rebuilt in 1907. Not much more of interest here for the reader, but a trip well worth the effort if you are ever in the 'hood. My philosophy is that anytime one is near the world's biggest anything, one should go see it. The area gets a bad rap by word of mouth on the backpacker circuit because it's not easy traveling. Even if your pockets are stuffed with cash, you won't get better than 2 star accommodation. In spite of being inadvisable for high maintenance travelers; between Djenne, Timbuktu, and Dogon country (which I described in a post I put up last year), this part of Mali is among few tourist destinations that are worth the hype.

Pictures: Self portrait in Niger; Mosque at Djenne with monday market in foreground, Mali; Niger river in Mali; Giraffe in the wild in Niger.

Nigeriens are Nice.

2008-08-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

After Grand Popo, we moved westward to the administrative capital of Benin, Porto Novo, on the western border of Benin. Porto Novo is a sleepy little town famous for satellite villages on its lagoon that are built entirely on stilts. These villagers have elevated shacks were they sleep, but the rest of their lives are lived on boats. The lagoon is their living room, highway to the outside word, food source, and also unfortunately their toilet. A Japanese relief organization built some elevated latrines a few years back but it seems it's easier to hang your butt over the side of the boat than it is to paddle over to the public restroom. Porto Novo itself has a distinct South American flavor owing to it's resettlement by freed slaves from Brazil. It is also home to the mattress that made me itchy all over. It may be lice. I don't feel too sorry for myself since I just ran into another traveler who discovered she had worms when one burrowed its way out of her belly button.

From Porto Novo we made a brief 12 hour stop in Benin's economic capital, Cotonou. If Poto Novo is like Albany, then Cotonou is like Manhattan. The city is a sprawling mass of humanity choking on it's own pollution, traffic, and bad attitude. Cotonou was very accurately described by my Lonely Planet guide as "like being locked in a car with a chain-smoking speed freak". Once again finding that the only accommodation in our price range was an apparent brothel, we hightailed it out of there. We took a bus to Niamey, Niger (the next stop on the tour) which left Cotonou at 1 a.m. and was arrived in Niamey at 7 p.m. the next day. As you can imagine, that really sucked. It was a typical third world bus scene. Too many people, not enough seats, luggage blocking the exits, stifling heat, and alarming levels of diesel fumes making their way back onto the bus. It was at this Benin-Niger border crossing, my fourth border in one month, that it finally dawned on me that "unemployed" is not what immigration officials want to hear when asking about my profession. Apparently in their world "unemployed" is synonymous with "drug dealer" or "bank robber" or "troublemaker". I have since changed my answer to "teacher" (leaving off the "former"). I think things should go a little more smoothly for me now.

While Benin is the wealthiest country in West Africa that I have visited, Niger is the poorest with a per capita income of 260 USD. Note: all my per capita income info is coming from from a 2006 World Bank survey. This is a very interesting list. Check it out here, and notice that the US is only seventh, behind Ireland among others. Are the guys from U2 are single handedly skewing the statistics? Or maybe nobody at the World Bank ever read Angela's Ashes. The US is probably even lower on that list than it was in '06, and since then the dollar has dropped to roughly the value of monopoly money. Bermuda shares the top spot, which I'm sure has something to do with rich people avoiding paying taxes. All the other US-beaters are really cold countries. All the poorest countries are really hot. Hmmmm. Time to re-read Guns Germs and Steel.

Niger should not be confused with Nigeria, which is south of Niger and east of Benin. Nigeria is probably more familiar to most people for it's oil and as home to the musician Fela Kuti. Niger isn't known for much although has gained modest wealth owing to oil, gold, and uranium deposits. The country is enormous and geographically dominated by the Air Mountains and Sahara, Tenere, and Bilma Deserts. I hear these areas are beautiful. I didn't make it up there since the region is troubled with an ethnic uprising and land mine explosions are not unheard of. Instead I spent all of my time in Niger near the capital, Niamey. Niamey was fabulous. I mentioned in my last post the correlation between poverty and hospitality. Theory confirmed. Niamey is an infrastructural train wreck, but a nicer city folk I may never meet. Even the cab drivers are nice. It's about a zillion degrees year round. This encourages napping, which I imagine is good for the soul. It also decreases productivity, which is bad for other really important stuff like health care and education. You can't have it all I guess.

A few days ago, we took a field trip from Niamey to a nearby village called Koure where we saw a heard of giraffes. That was wicked. Next up, I pass back through Burkina to pick up some visas and make some attempt to float up the Niger river (in a boat where I hear you have to relieve yourself over the railing of the deck) in Mali and hopefully arrive in Timbuktu. I hear Timbuktu is hard to get to and not all interesting, but worth going to just to say you've been there.

No pictures this time. Technical difficulties.

Boat Rides In Benin Cause Vomiting

2008-08-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Moving to the left (stage left) along the West African coastline, a few days ago we crossed over from Togo into Benin. The border was pretty frenzied. My first impressions as we came into the country is that Benin is decidely more developed. Much like exiting Pennsylvania and entering Maryland, one notices immediately that the roads are wider and better maintained. Other hallmarks of development were fatter chickens, more scantily clad women (my friend claims to have seen bare knees), and less friendly (but by no means unfriendly) people. Seems to be an inverse relationship between average per capita income and hospitality. With a wopping 540 USD a year, the Beninois are the wealthiest people that I will visit on this trek through Africa. Barring a brief flirtation with communism, Benin's history is a lot like Togo's. She is a former french colony with many regime changes since independence in 1960 but is now considered a bonafide democracy and even got a visit from George and Laura earlier this year.

We spent our first 3 nights in Benin in a beach town with the awesome name "Grand Popo". We found a beachfront hotel with infestation free mattresses and a clean bathroom, both luxuries on our budget. On day one, we ran into some peace corps volunteers that we knew when we were in Burkina and who inspired me to lay around on the beach and drink too much beer. On day two I went out on a very eventful excursion on a fishing boat. I strolled over to the beach around 7 in the morning which was just in time to catch a medium sized boat about to be put in the ocean. With the help of a random guy on the beach who spoke both french and the local language, I managed to secure myself a spot on the boat in exchange for a liter of the local moonshine liquor, called Sodabi and made from distilled palm fruit. The boat was wooden, really heavy, propelled by something that looked like a lawn mower engine, and steered by the captain who was a billion years old and who I hoped would lay off the moonshine till we got back to shore. It took about 30 people heave ho-ing in unison to get the me and the boat (they correctly predicted that I wouldn't be much help so they let me sit in the boat while they did all the work) from the beach onto the really choppy waves. Then about 20 people, 15 extremely athletic teenagers and 5 old-man-and-the-sea types, jumped in the boat.

I clutched to the side of the boat expecting it to capsize while everyone laughed at me for being such a scaredy cat. The waves got choppier as we made our way out to sea and I scanned the boat looking for something I could use as a buoy in the likely event of disaster and wished with all my heart that a life jacket would magically appear. When we finally got about a kilometer out, the fishermen heaved a small portion of the giant net into the ocean and then a few of the teenagers jumped in to adjust the net and then swim a long distance back to shore in a micheal phelpsian manner. This repeated every ten minutes or so until we ran out of net and teenagers. Then we doubled back along the entire distance of the net while i dry heaved (fortunately i skipped breakfast) over the side of the boat and the remaining old guys laughed hysterically. After about a half an hour I curled up in the bottom of the boat and spooned the anchor while the old guys stopped laughing and started shooting nervous glances my way. We hustled back to shore and the captain scooped me out of the boat, deposited me under a palm tree and demanded that I drink water. I layed on the beach for a few hours and watched the crew undertake the herculean effort of bringing the net in. All that work for about a hundred fish. Then some guys on the crew offered me their share of the days catch. My impression was that they felt proud that a person would come all the way from America to watch and appreciate their work. For about the thousanth time in the last few years, I was humbled by the kindness and humility of people who work so much harder and have so much less than me.

Pictures: my friend Jon's gross injured toe in Sindou, Burkina Faso (he took the picture); voodoo village in front of Lake Togo in Togoville, Togo; and the boat ride from hell in Grand Popo, Benin.

Totally Togo

2008-08-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm just a moron, but it wasn't until I set an actual foot in West Africa that I had any idea that there is a country called Togo. Soccer fans may remember Togo as a 2006 world cup qualifier or know the Togolese soccer star Emmanuel Adebayor, who according to my outdated lonely planet guide plays for the English team Arsenal. Togo is a small strip of land sandwiched between Burkina, Ghana, Benin, and the Atlantic Ocean. Generally better off than Burkina (but not as well off as Ghana), the Togolese per capita annual income is a little less than the value of an 8GB iphone (around 380 USD).

Togo is your basic West African country struggling to grow into democracy in the wake of colonialism. First and most cruelly occupied by Portuguese, Togo earned the nickname "The Slave Coast". She was then briefly a German protectorate before being divided into British and French colonies at the end of WWI. When European imperialism finally went out of vogue in the early 60s, British Togoland was absorbed into the newly independent Ghana and French Togoland became Togo. After independence in 1960, Togo had several military leaders ousted in both bloody and bloodless coups until finally settling into a 38 year dictatorship. While Togo is technically now a democracy, free and fair elections are hard to come by in these parts and Togo is perennially on the UN shitlist for human rights violations (yet continues to enjoy diplomatic support from France!).

Our arrival into Togo was pretty bumpy, literally. We crossed over from Ghana at a minor (and possibly not entirely legitimate) border crossing at Wli, in the eastern Volta region. The border guards were two extremely cranky women who kept one eye on Brazilian soap operas while looking over our passports. In between Ghana and Togo is a half kilometer no man's land that belongs to neither country and no cars pass. We carried our bags over to the Togolese side only to find that no cars run from the border post to the nearest village 15k away on Sundays. The only option was to hitch a ride on zemi-johns, which are guys you can pay to let you sit on the back of their motorcycles while they drive way too fast on steep winding roads and and you precariously balance all your worldly possessions on your back and you watch your life pass before your eyes and hope that your family knows that you love them and realize why helmets were invented. After a long day of transport we finally arrived in Kpalime where we had to stay in a brothel and eat stale cookies.

In my snap judgment, Togo seems to be a pretty nice place. People seem kind and quick to laugh. The literacy rate is 60% (compared to 13% in Burkina), which makes getting around easier since more people have been to school and therefore speak French. So far we have done some hiking through the coffee and cocoa hills in the western part of the country. We are now in the capital (Lome) spending way too much of our precious time eating pizza and surfing the internet. Tomorrow we head to Togoville, the voodoo capital of west Africa. The better known Haitian voodoo was brought to Haiti by slaves taken from this area. If you need to hex anyone, drop me a line between now and tomorrow and I'll see what I can do.

Pictures: Kid with a sugar cane gun in Wli, Ghana; mating millipedes in Kpalime, Togo; and myself with some friends in Loumana, Burkina Faso.

No Direction Home

2008-08-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing no one will read this since I did such a lousy job of posting regularly but I'll try again. I finished Peace Corps in July. Two years fly whether you`re having fun or not. Illnesses aside, I would say I had fun. I had fun the way running marathons is fun. I`m better off for having done it but no way in hell will I ever do it again. I learned French, learned to teach, generally learned a lot, and made a lot of new friends. I think I'm a better person. I have no regrets.

Now that it's over, my employment status goes from "volunteer" to "not at all". Odd waitressing and babysitting jobs not withstanding, a review of my job history goes like this: student, grad student, postdoc (technically a fellowship and not a job), peace corps volunteer, and now itinerant bum. I have not, in fact, ever had a real job. Looking on the bright side (a state of mind that gets easier every year), I have a nice chunk of free time and future plans roughly as solid as my e. coli tainted bowel movements. Fluid as they are, I nonetheless have plans. I will spend a few months here in West Africa to finish my tour of the world's poorest countries. Then off to SE Asia. And back on US soil before Christmas. If I can scrape together the resources for a car, I'd like to see America through my newly acquired rose colored glasses. If you have a free couch you could loan me for a night around end of December/early Januaryish, I will schedule my road trip to pass through your living room.

At the moment I'm in Accra (Ghana) trying to take care of plane tickets and visas. Africa is not known for her efficiency, so it's kind of frustrating but the process is ambling on. Ghana is nice. Unlike in Burkina, most households in Ghana have an annual income higher than the value of my ipod. Other bonuses are a good number of English speakers (thanks to British Imperialism), moderate double (as opposed to triple) digit temperatures, and even the occasional fresh vegetable. I spent a sweet week at a beach resort, some kind of eco friendly backpacker type establishment complete with dreadlocked blonds and drunk Australians. Soon we (my friend Brandi, another ex-volunteer, and her friend Peter) will head to the Lake Volta region in the Ghana's eastern region. Lake Volta is famous for giant egg laying turtles as well as the being the largest man made lake in the world. It is also a haven for butterfly enthusiasts. And who isn`t enthusiastic about butterflies? Pictures: Both from Burkina. The first is a fisherman in the village where I lived. The second is a cool cricket that's not nearly as big as it looks in this photo.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2008-01-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

As a Math teacher in Burkina, I get a whopping 5 months of summer vacation. This coincides with the rainy season. Rainy season softens the usually hard soil making this an ideal time for planting crops. Most of the kids at my school come from farming families so their hands are needed in the fields during this time. Left with nothing to do, I took the opportunity to skip town and see a little of West Africa. I started the summer in “Dogon country”. Dogon is most notable for its ruins of eccentric cliff dwelling communities high in the mountains and for it’s proximity to Timbuktu- letting you know that you’re in the middle of nowhere. It was not so unlike Burkina, although we did learn that women in these communities are relegated to “menstrual houses” when it’s that time of the month. These “menstrual houses” are dark, dank, depressing round houses which were empty at the time of our visit but are presumably full during the dark moon.

As a side note, did you know that in the absence of artificial lighting and the birth control pill, women have a natural tendency to menstruate during the dark phase of the moon and ovulate during the full phase of the moon? Hence the 28ish day menstrual cycle (There are about 29.5 days between new moons). I guess people are more amorous on well lit evenings. In a world where people are dependent on natural lighting, the evening of the full moon would make a great “date night”. The idea is that the cycle of the moon and the menstrual cycle line up to favor conception on these nights. It would have sounded like a sketchy theory to me before I got to Africa. Now that I’m here I can really appreciate how dark it is and how different the night feels during varying phases of the moon. Doesn’t surprise me at all that behavior (and biology) could be ruled by such a thing. The science to support this theory is weak, but speaking from my personal experience I’m a believer. If you’re interested, look at the Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle#Menstruation_and_the_moon. But I digress.

After this jaunt through northern Mali, we came back through Burkina, took a break for a conference in the capital city Ouagadougou, and then went on a 2^nd trip passing through the southern part of Mali and on to Guinea. Getting there was about 90% of the battle. Overland transportation in West Africa is a grueling test of patience and endurance. We began with a 14 hour bus ride from hell to get from Bobo-Dioulasso in southern Burkina Faso, to Bamako, the Malian capital. Taking the advice of other volunteers who have traveled in his region, I didn’t get any visas. As promised, in Mali the $20 bribe was cheaper and easier than the $100 and several days it would have taken to get the appropriate stamps in my passport. The Guinean embassy in Mali was my last chance to get a Guinean visa. Here I learned that the visa would cost me about $140 and a day. I chose to pass on this formality since my traveling companions already had visas and it was going to hang our trip up several days. So I went with the bribery method which, in hindsight, was a mistake. Transportation across the Guinean border involved stuffing 10 (yes TEN) people into a station wagon for 7 hours during the hottest part of the day. The border crossing was different from Mali in several ways. Most notably, the immigration officers were neither drunk nor good humored. After considerable intimidation (of me by them), the officers refused to speak to me. The transport driver finally negotiated a bribe of about $60, but the officers didn’t give me an entry stamp on my passport. I was really nervous about traveling in Guinea without this stamp because Guinea has a lot of “barrages”. These are check points on the roads at which transport vehicles are stopped and documentation and identification is checked, usually for everyone in the car. I was worried that I was going to have to pay a lot in bribes since I had no entry stamp in my passport. As luck would have it, during the time of our trip the transport drivers were protesting these check points. The drivers claimed (probably with good reason) that these checkpoints were a ruse for extortion. It seems the drivers would pay bribes when the paper work wasn’t up to par. The few times that we were stopped, our drivers just blew right by the officers presumably “in protest”.

Guinea is a country with a lot of problems. The issues between transport drivers and military are really the tip of the iceberg. When we finally reached the capital in Conakry (after another grueling 24 hours of transportation!), we found the students on strike. This time they were protesting (surprise surprise) government corruption. There is a general feeling of chaos in this country as if all hell could break loose any second. Infrastructure is atrocious. The educational and healthcare systems are a joke. The cities are filthy. I was reminded of that joke: You know you’re from Philly when you go to New York and notice how clean it is. Once back in Burkina, I marveled at the relatively clean streets, organized border control, and reliable transportation. You know you’ve been to Guinea when Burkina seems to run like a well oiled machine. It’s all relative I guess.

Pics: My feet in the forground of a very large rock; waterfalls; foneo fields all in Guinea.

Four Funerals and a Wedding

2007-11-22T05:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about marriage a lot lately. It seems that everyone I know is getting married. I’m sad that I’m missing out on the sharing of all this joy but joyful that all this joy is being enjoyed. And finding myself reflecting on the manner in which Africans enjoy their joy. I will try and paint a mental picture for you. Not unlike in America, weddings are good times with wild and crazy dancing and acceptable public drunkenness. Unlike American weddings, everyone is invited. Those immediately involved go to the “mayor’s” house for the exchanging of vows and signing of contracts. That is the equivalent of the ceremony. No one but the bride, the groom, and their parents are expected to be interested in that part. There are no registries with china patterns and cutlery. Your gift is showing up and getting down. The party starts at sunset and ends when the roosters start cock-a-doodle-doo-ing. The bartender is someone’s underage cousin serving up home brewed millet beer in nature’s beer mug, a dried gourd. There is drumming, dancing, and chanting of the sort that one might see on the discovery channel.

Here’s the part that kills me: the wildest (drunkest) party goers are the old, the crazy, the terminally ill, and the handicapped. My hypothesis: people who have nothing to lose have a hell of a lot more fun. My secondary hypothesis: we Americans (and Europeans) are driven by a deeply rooted fear of looking like a jerk. It’s okay to BE a jerk, as long as you don’t LOOK like one. So we institutionalize all those folks who are not encumbered by self-consciousness. That way we don’t have to look at them and be reminded how uptight we are. The party line is that crazy people, old people, and very ill people can live a more “dignified” life away from our judgemental eyes. This amounts to robbing them of their freedom. You might say to yourself “My grandpa is really happy at the nursing home. He plays shuffle board and takes Viagra.” I would respond by saying fake happiness is what happens when you resign yourself to the fact that the real thing is not an option. My neighbor is 70 years old, blind as a bat, has one leg, and may be one of the happiest people of have ever met. He is surrounded by his grandchildren and treated with respect. People don’t think he’s sad. They think he’s funny. There is a crazy guy down the street from me who is the filthiest person I have ever seen in my life but he laughs all day long. No one thinks twice. They don’t care where he throws his poop as long as it’s not at them. Crazy guy and old guy are joyful and they are free. That is the rule, rather than the exception. In America I think it's the other way around. We rob them of this freedom by institutionalizing them saying it's for their own good. The fact of the matter is that they would make us more uncomfortable than we would make them. They would remind us that some day we too will pee our pants or laugh inappropriately or (god forbid) die.

This brings me to funerals. That’s when the real party starts. And here I thought weddings were fun. The drinking starts in the morning. The masks come out around noon. The black magic starts at sunset. People wail and flail. No one is sad. Death is the most natural end to Life. Who knows what lies in the great beyond but what’s the point of fearing the inevitable. You may as well party like its 1999. It makes a lot more sense to celebrate the unavoidable than it does to avoid the unavoidable. The grimness of American funerals doesn’t make any sense to me. We fixate on lives cut short rather that celebrating the good fortune of having lived at all. I am not exempt from this fear. I often feel that I waste my time chasing after some imaginary good life that will happen sometime in the future rather than living in the present. I think when I get that degree or that job or marry that guy or have those kids or buy that house or see that place I will be happy. Meanwhile life passes me by. Forgetting that I’m have this beer and laughing with this friend right now. Quality of life is a funny thing. The appearance of it and the actuality of it are not one and the same.

Pictures: Random kid; My yard at dusk; me with a few other volunteers and John Negroponte when he came to Africa to promote “Africom”. My brush with fame (or infamy).

Details Details

2007-09-01T05:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all your posts and emails! Great to hear from you guys. I'm not super excited about posting pictures of myself on a public Internet site but I'll add some to my facebook page when I get a chance. Here are some more specifics about what's happening here. There are several different types of volunteers in Burkina. Some are health workers, some work in women's empowerment (the hardest but in my opinion the most needed), some work in small business development, and others are teachers. I'm teaching Math. In French! To gigantic classes with 120 unruly students! Most students come from surrounding villages because few families can afford to pay the $60 annual school fees.The kids ages range from 12 to 25 and are learning the equivalent of 7th to 10th grade math. Communication is tough because my french is not spectacular. My science friends will understand me when I say I speak French slightly better than a Chinese postdoc speaks English. To compound the issue, the kids are still learning French themselves. Discipline is the bigger problem, particularly in my classes with younger students who seem to be perpetually on the verge of a riot. Nevertheless, I'm having a good time with it. Kids say and do the silliest things which is fun to be around.

I live in a village with about 3000 people spread out over several square kilometers. It's a beautiful village chalk full of mango trees and freindly, laid back people. Unfortunately, there are few French speakers and no English speakers. Even the English teacher doesn't speak English. The predominant language is Dioula (pronounced Jula). I don't speak much Dioula so communication problems can make the experience feel very isolating at times. Nonetheless, I have managed to find enough francophone friends.

My biggest challenge has been living "en brousse". I live in a house made of mud bricks covered in cement with a tin roof. Have I complained about the lack of electricity and running water yet? My shower is a bucket full of water which I ladle over my head. Bucket baths under the stars on a warm night are pretty spectacular. I have a outdoor latrine. Latrine is a fancy word for hole in the ground. Believe it or not, a latrine is better than a flushing toilet in those moments of gastrointestinal distress. These moments come around pretty often in Burkina. Buzz kill fact: dysentery, not malaria, is the number one killer of children under 5 in west Africa. No running water equals poor hygiene equals disease.

For roommates I have and army of crickets, mice, geckos, all varieties of bugs and spiders, and the occasional scorpion (ACK!). The other day I found a snake in my latrine. Hard to panic when squatting so I calmly watched it slither away while my life flashed before my eyes. for all you herpetologists out there, I`m not sure if it was poisonous but it looked like an argyle sock. I have a dog, who is completely ineffective as far as critter management goes so I am going to add a cat to the mix. I need a predator to bring some balance back to the ecosystem.

Transportation is my biggest headache. A former volunteer described the road to my village as the second worst in Burkina Faso. Anyone who has travelled in West Africa knows that this is a bold statement. I live about 75 km from a "larger" town which has electricity, Internet, hot showers and cold beer. I can take a bush taxi to get from chez moi to these wondrous luxuries. A bush taxi is exactly what it sounds like. Old cars stuffed with poor people. Its not so bad during the dry season but during the rainy season the trip can take up to 7 hours. All this stuff can be frustrating at times but I've learned to approach them with patience and a sense of humor. I'm learning a lot (about myself mostly) and having lots of fun. Keep writing me people! I live for your letters! BTW the pics above are some random kids, a mosque in Mali where I went on vacation earlier this summer, my living room, and my village.

C'est L'Afrique

2007-08-12T02:29:00.000-07:00

Hello! Bonjour! An ni sogoma! I’m finally getting around to starting this long ago promised blog. I was caught up in the romance of writing actual letters on actual paper for a while but the threat of carpel tunnel and a very short attention span are nudging me back on the information superhighway. Don’t quite know where to start so maybe with the facts. I started in the Peace Corps in early June 2006 and if all continues to go well I will stay here in till August 2008. That’s a long time to be living in a shack in the middle of nowhere (e.g Burkina Faso, West Africa). Not a long ways off from Timbuktu. If you google it you won’t find much. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly) the most comprehensive resource for this sort of info is the CIA (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uv.html). Wikipedia also has a nice Burkina page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkina_Faso).

These are the facts that will best help you paint a picture in your head:
1) GEOGRAPHY: landlocked, sandwiched between Mali and Niger to the east, north, and east. The Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin are to the south. A gold star to anyone who has heard of all those countries (unless you’re a soccer fan).
2) SIZE: a bit bigger than Colorado.
3) POPULATION: 14.3 million (as compared to the New York metropolitan are which is 18.8 million).
4) ECONOMICS: According to a UN Index, Burkina is the 3rd poorest country in the world.
5) LIFE EXPECTANCY: It’s not surprising that the life expectancy is 47 years. That always freaks me out a little. If I were Burkinabé, I’d already be in the final third of my life.

Suffice it to say that they last year has been character building. So easy in some ways and so hard in others. No commute, no real boss, more free time than I know what to do with, no bills. The Peace Corps gives us about 8 bucks a day and this is more than enough because there is not a whole lot to buy around here. On the flip side of the coin, my list of complaints is so long and so tedious that I’m embarrassed to share it. It’s not a glamorous life. I have no running water or electricity. At first, this was charming like camping. Now that the honeymoon is over, I fluctuate between not noticing and wondering how a country runs this way. Running water and electricity bring hygiene, which brings health, which brings pretty much everything else.

Life for many people is difficult to a degree that would have been unimaginable to me a year ago. They live with the daily uncertainty of poverty and disease. I've been to at least 5 funerals in the last year. Before that I had been to one. The great irony is the ease with which they play the hand they're dealt. They complain endlessly, but in a sporting way that doesn't seem to weigh on them. I'm no psychologist, but my gut feeling is that Burkinabe are MUCH happier than Americans. What does that say about the relationship between wealth, longevity, and security and quality of life? Maybe affluence comes at the expense of emotional balance. How can you know happiness if there is never sadness to contrast it with? I think there is something to be said for the occasional feeling of living on the edge. I think stuff like adventure sports and substance abuse might be a way of re-creating this feeling. I'm learning some kind of lesson here but I'm still not sure what it is. Or maybe that's all just a load of crap.

Anyways, that was heavier than intended for a first post. My goal with this blog is to stay connected to all you people. In a nutshell, I'm happy and healthy. Despite my ramblings I realize now more than ever that America is a wonderful place. Everyone I love is there and I keep get tidbits of happy news. Babies are being born (congrats P & M, K & JH), people are getting married (congrats C & E, A & A), getting jobs, getting on with their lives. Keep me informed. Let me know what you want to know about what's going on here. I hope to hear from you soon!