One Fainting Robin: February 2009

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Now I know why ....

fashion designers are paid so much. After buying fabric, if you want new clothes you must choose a "model" for the tailor. This is much harder than you'd think!
sinks are great ideas. They actually get your hands clean!
goats eat everything. It's the only way to survive. It's amazing how they really are everywhere though. Poor baby trees don't have a chance to grow up.
multiple choice/optical scan exams are so popular with teachers of large classes.
fast food is so popular. When you're tired and hot, the last thing you want is to cook over a fire.
mangos are fantastic. It's bizarre, but I haven't met anyone who doesn't like mangos. There are mango addicts and casual mango eaters, but so far no mango haters!

Never thought I'd ...

get water from the neighborhood water station using an old 55 gallon methylene chloride drum.
love buying strangely patterned, bright pieces of fabric by the "pagne".
think of babies tied to the backs of their mothers with pagnes as normal.
teach physics.
dream about teaching physics in french. I finally had my first dream in french, too bad it wasn't terribly exciting. Just a lesson about force vecteurs.
be able to write legibly on a chalkboard.
have nice handwriting. My whole life I've been told I need to improve my penmanship. Astonishingly my students like my handwriting. What an ego booster!
enjoy eating oatmeal ... all the time.
find Jif peanut butter too sweet and a Coke perfectly sweetened (high fructose corn syrup isn't used here and pop/sodas taste great because of it).
drink beverages out of plastic bags after tearing them open with my teeth.
kill a bug on my cutting board with an onion, remove the carcass and continue chopping a potato.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Last weekend I took a mini vacation to Youba and Aorèma to visit some other volunteers. I really needed a break and some time away from site. I love visiting smaller villages since mine is neither small nor a village. It's almost like taking a hike in the woods, except that the trees here don't exist!

The ride to Youba was difficult because we were biking the whole way against the wind. At times it was easier to get off the bike and walk.

Cloud trail over my lycée (before setting out)

The cultivating season doesn't start here for at least another three months, but we saw this man already starting to work. Very strange and definitely not easy.

Even though the trip was hard, it was worth it. Not far from Aorèma is a very beautiful barrage with caimans. I officially saw my first crocodiles in Burkina. :)

Cows leaving the barrage

the barrage

biking down to the water with a group of moutons in the distance

caiman!

caiman on a sandbar in the middle

We tried to get a little bit closer (not too close!), but they spooked readily. As the hot dry season progresses the water becomes less and less. Maybe they're starting to feel the pinch...

Essentially we were walking on the dry barrage floor. It was so crinkly and sounded like walking on brittle ice. If only it were cold enough for ice ...

Almost better than the large repitiles was the tree in the middle of the dry barrage which was covered in bird nests.

bird nests

dried barrage floor

On one end of the barrage were three kids making mud bricks. Ours bikes are in the background.

the mud bricks

Chinchillas

Last week I experienced something resembling an epiphany. The Harmattan was particulary fierce after class one day, so much so that I ended up riding home in a choking dust cloud. It was then that I decided to become like a chinchilla.

"[Chincillas] instinctively clean their fur by taking dust baths, in which they roll around in special chinchilla dust made of fine pumice. In the wild their dust is formed from fine ground volcanic rocks. The dust gets into their fur and absorbs oil and dirt. These baths are needed a few times a week. Chinchillas do not bathe in water because the dense fur prevents air-drying, retaining moisture close to the skin, which can cause fungus growth or fur rot. A wet chinchilla must be dried immediately with towels and a no-heat hair dryer. The fur is so thick that it resists parasites such as fleas. The fur also reduces loose dander, making chinchillas hypo-allergenic." source: Wikipedia

Besides enjoying dust baths chinchillas are crazy cute. Somehow thinking of cute furry rodents makes dealing with all this dust more bearable. That and I've become a huge fan of wearing surgical masks in public. The blue color is really quite fashionable.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Random Post

You know how sometimes you wake-up from a particularly peaceful afternoon nap with your heart racing because you think it's the next morning and that you've over slept? Thank goodness the panic subsides after checking the clock, but that brief period in between is truly frightening!

It’s time to link together random thoughts, events and pretty pictures in order to make one cohesive blog post. I'll start with the most difficult/frustrating and end with the pretty pictures.

Last week I gave a test in my math class. Not a remarkable event really, except that this time I caught 13 cases of cheating and therefore gave out 13 zeros! For the most part the cheating consisted of students copying the answers from their neighbors. It was easily detected by numbering the tests according to who sat next to whom. The cheating was fairly obvious if two people made the same error and they were sitting next to each other. We'll see what happens next time. Hopefully I scared them!

Random pictures of a cute little red bird.

It was hot again last week, but luckily the Harmattan blew again and cooled things off. If that was a preview of the hot season I'm a little scared! It's amazing how much of a luxury an air conditioner truly is and how many people on this planet don't have them.
Methods to cool off during the hot season (so I've heard) include not leaving the shade during the hot part of the day, soaking a pagne (basically a sheet) in water and wrapping it around you, living under a fan etc. I'm positive I'll have more details on hot weather survival techniques in the near future.
Luckily I just received another weapon in the arsenal against overheating ... indoor plumbing! I now have both a functioning shower and a sink in my bathroom.
Yesterday I made an attempt at papaya appreciation. To be honest I hate papayas, but I thought maybe there was a chance that I hadn't ever had a good papaya since there are no papaya trees in the western US. So I bought one, cut it, scooped out the fish egg looking seeds and tasted. It's official, papayas are horrible!! I think their problem is that they really do taste fishy. yuk. On the upside, I've heard papaya trees grow fast, so I popped the gelatinous sac surrounding a handful of the seeds in a twisted attempt to grow them.

papaya

Scary papaya seeds

Riding a bike through a herd of cows, sheep and goats is sometimes the highlight of my day.
In the run up to coming here whenever I would tell someone that I was going to Burkina Faso they would invariably respond "where's that?". There were two occasions however where the other person actually knew that Burkina was a country in West Africa. What's bizarre though is that both persons commented on how great the strawberries were in Ouagadougou. Strawberries? Well I can now confirm that strawberries really do exist in Ouaga (cold season only) and boy do they taste good!

Plant update: 2 out of the 5 "flowers" that I planted died, my benga (bean) bush is prolifically producing thanks to Edward and my strange desert plant is thriving with very pretty flowers.

Edward

Praying mantis on benga bush

bizarre desert plant

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Zogoré

It's time for a happy post. Yesterday I rode to Zogoré with a few other volunteers from Yatenga province. I thought it would be a small affair, but it turned out to be a full on fête. The volunteer in Zogoré did a fantastic job and obviously put in a lot of time and effort. Festivities included a woman's bike race, dance troops, speechifying, soccer games and the sensibilization that evening. Unfortunately since we had to get back to Ouahigouya the same day we weren't able to stay for the actual sensibilization.

race bikes - brakes not included!