Sunday, August 29, 2010

BOBO

My new address is:
Erika Marshall
BP 1065
Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, West Africa

Hit me up! The old one works too, but this is better now because I will not be going to Ouaga very often henceforth. Pas de probleme if you already sent something. LOVEZ U!

Swear-In was badass. The first lady of the Faso was present and gave a very lovely speech. We had wine and quiches/appetizers at the Embassy. Quite the swanky affair. Then we signed our oaths and partied hardy at the Ouaga clubs! Ridiculous/fabulous. Time for my last pizza dinner for a while! <3

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Moving For Real

I have two nights left at my host family and Stage is nearing an end. I have a meeting with my Country Director tomorrow morning and Swear-In is on Friday in Ouaga. Also, site announcements were almost two weeks ago I think. My site is located near a hippopotamus marsh north of Bobo-Dioulasso, kind of near Mali. I will be the first Health Volunteer at site, but there was an Secondary Education Volunteer several years ago and from what it sounds like a SED Volunteer before that who worked a lot with women's groups. Apparently hese women convinced their all-male CoGES (organzation that oversees community health initiatives and funding) to request a female Volunteer. The primary languages spoken are Jula, Mooré, Bobo and French. I will be living in a family courtyard in a two room house, with my own private outdoor douche and latrine. The family I'll be living with is out en brousse (cultivating and living in the fields) right now and will be back in October. My courtyard is also 100 meters from the CSPS and the houses of several of the CSPS employees and a water pump. The CSPS has solar panels which I will be able to use to charge my cell phone.

I met the Major (head nurse/dude in charge) of my CSPS this week during our Counterpart Workshop. He's young and speaks excellent French and a little bit of English. I'm very happy to have someone I already know before I get to site and he seems to be a very nice guy. Because I'll be the first Volunteer at site, I will be purchasing all the essentials for my place, like a gas range and gas tank, a mattress, buckets, goblets, kitchen stuff and food and I guess I will order furniture from a carpenter in village or something. Thankfully, the Peace Corps will be giving me a 200,000 CFA move-in allowance for this endeavor. I will be traveling from Ouaga to Bobo and staying in Bobo a couple of nights while I buy the big stuff, then a Peace Corps Landcruiser will be dropping me off in Padéma and the driver will help me set up my range and gas tank and make sure I don't break down. ;) Should be fun!

I am glad Stage is done, because this being back in school thing is way old by this point. I can't wait to start saluer-ing people in Jula and hanging out at the CSPS not knowing what to do with myself! After I get to site, I may not update for a while because I'll be busy integrating into the community and doing my étude de milieu (aka figuring out what the community actually needs from me). Also, navigating public transport from site to Bobo will probably be terrifying for me the first time, so I may procrastinate on doing it until I can actually function in Jula on a basic level. I'm super excited and nervous!

I feel like integrating with my host famly wasn't that difficult, but I think that's because I lucked out and got a hilarious family full of teenage girls and a very jolly old man father. I'm going to miss them mucho! I'm definitely going to return to Koudougou/Palogo to tease my sisters and joke around with Yvette about couper-ing la tête! She has quite the sick sense of humor and I love it! Also, now I'm pretty sure she's 16 and that people here say they're a couple of years younger than they actually are. I still don't understand why that is, but I've heard this from other stagiaires as well.

Anyway, I'm super glad Stage is almost done, but I will definitely miss my crazyass friends. Shout out to my Palogo crew, Casey, Halley, ZZ and my sis Marina, with whom I will be dining in an hour at the invitation of my host father! Living in village has been excellent and also annoying, but mostly fabulous because of these hilarious freaks. :D

Btw, I have successfully brought the game of Monopoly Deal to Burkina Faso.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Happy Independence Day BF!

It's Burkina Faso's vrai Independence Day here, but the festivities don't occur until December 11. Rainy season, ya know, everyone's cultivating... I don't know, I only half paid attention during our Burkina history lesson the other day.

Today I learned how to saw useful expressions about my health work in Jula. The CSPS is called dogotoroso aka chez le docteur. Except some of those o's are this different letter that looks like a backwards 'c' and is pronounced like the 'o' in 'bought'. A lot of the vocab is basically French words with a Jula accent, which works for me! The verb goes at the end of the sentence like German (from what I vaguely recall). It's interesting/hard. I have one fellow pupil in my class and we usually pick up each other's slack. When my LCF Auguste, (who is the sweetest guy ever, btw) starts speaking Jula at me, I just don't know what's going on half the time. Anyway, ça va aller... I'm slowly getting the hang of it. I plan to work really hard at Jula discourse when I get to site, because most villageois won't be fluent in French.

Also, shout out to Takiyah for bringing me my nalgene that I left chez juice bar!! I would die without you, you excellent friend! Read her badass blog everyone: http://tdharper.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog

OK, also shout out to Ashley Faye because she's sitting next to me and won't shut the hell up, making me waste my precious Cyber minutes!

Tomorrow we get to make bouille with eggs, corn flour and oil that Takiyah so graciously purchased this morning on her way in to village where we had class all day. This bouille could nourish malnourished, but I believe we'll be eating it. All the better, because some of us just aren't eating enough here. I am not one of those people because my host sisters make delicious ass food!!

OH! Last night, I had to poop, so I took my lantern out to the latrine and peed. While peeing, I heard some noises like maybe one of the giant cows was walking nearby. I quickly realized, thanks to the shadow on the latrine floor, that this noise was in fact the beating of a bat's wings. I had no idea I was afraid of bats!! I think mostly I'm afraid of them flying up my ass, I don't know for sure. Anyway, I got the hell out of there and didn't poop til this morning. I'm going to try to schedule my bowel movements to not occur after sunset...

On that note, send me junk food, magazines, and other random shit. Mostly junk food and pictures and picture frames. :)

Sunday, August 1, 2010

August Already!

I apologize for my unfaithfulness to this blog. I am lazy.

PST has been excellent so far. I`m living in village with my roommate/new sister Marina. We have been in village for a week and a half; and in Koudougou for two weeks exactly. Before that we spent two weeks in Ouagadougou in a hotel after we were evacuated from Ouahigouya for security purposes. Because Peace Corps staff (who are super amazing here btw) had to quickly find host families for us in Koudougou, we have been doubled up, two trainees per family. It's kind of nice, mostly because my roomie is a badass who does hilarious impressions of all my favorite SNL skits. :D We have an excellent host family with 5 sisters and at least 3 brothers, one of whom went with us to the boîte (club) last night. It was lovely. The guys here all dance together and shake their booties quite vivaciously. It`s strikingly different than aux etats-unis.

My host sister Yvette is the youngest sister and does everything for Marina and me. She cooks and brings us our dinner, brings us our bread or beignets for breakfast, washes our dishes and lets us know when we have a visitor. Today we met our cousins and aunt who live in Ouagadougou. The older sister and her two brothers go to university in the U.S. and she speaks excellent English. My family also owns a ton of livestock, mostly goats, chickens, roosters, 5 dogs, 3 workerman cows (one of them is a unicorn!), couple of donkeys or maybe just one, a cute little black and gray piggie and a precious black and white kitty who refuses to come to me. The dogs, chickens and cat fight over these giant stupidass moths that run into the ground in search of light. They seem to be delicious, and a lot of people's host families eat them, but mine does not. I'm interested in trying them, and I'm sure some day I will... Oh, I have electricity in village, and a water faucet 10 steps from my room. When I'm hanging out with Marina and her Macbook, the only differences from back home are the lack of air conditioning, the mud hut I can see from my door, the mosquito nets and the cries of the goats and bongas (donkeys).

So far during training, I have had lots of French class, lots of Jula class, and many field trips to various health-related locations. We've been to an HIV/AIDS organization, a CREN aka a place for malnourished children to bulk up, several CSPS's aka regional health centers and a primary school. We've dont some practical work interviewing families on hygiene practices and seasonal calendars. We seem to have a ton of sessions on nutrition, both for ourselves for when we get to site and for the population we'll be serving. We also just learning about all the great diseases we can get here! So many delicious worms want to get inside my booody! But seriously, there's some gross stuff that I intend to avoid by not submerging open wounds in standing water.

Overall, I am loving this experience so far and cannot wait for our site announcements on the 9th!! I love love love my fellow stagaires and my PCVFs. Also, happy birthday to my sister BECKYYYYYY!!! 22 in 2 days! I hope you get a job for your birthday! ;) I LOVE YOU!!!