Loving Our Future Town

Hi everyone!

Well we just got back from our exciting trip to Boulsa. We are both extremely happy with our site. Boulsa is a pretty big town by Burkinabe standards. Roughly 25,000 people live in Boulsa. The city actually houses a technical school, a municipal lycèe, a provincial lycèe and several primary schools. Tim and I will be teaching at the provincial lycèe. This is the largest of all the schools in Boulsa. The school itself is rather modern. The school has several regular classrooms. This lycèe is very lucky to be equipped with two laboratories: one for Psychics and Chemistry and one for Natural Science. By the way, there happens to be a regular toilet located in the building for the two laboratories :) The school also has a pretty sweet building for the computers. Tim's lab has 25 virtual computers running off of a large server. This computer lab is also equipped with TWO air conditioners! Guess where I am going to be hanging out and grading papers. Our school also has a pretty nice teachers lounge. It even has a frig! The school also has a running track and two volleyball courts; although they are essentially just dirt fields.

As for our house, well to some it up in one word—sweet. I will admit that when I first saw the house, I just wanted to cry and say no way in the world I can live here for two years, but after some time and reflection I realized how silly I was being. Now I am extremely excited about our house. We have two bedrooms in our house; although one is being used as a kitchen. We also have a huge salon with two windows on opposite sides of the room, and two doors from the outside! We were also lucky enough to have an indoor showering area. I must admit that the house definitely needs quite a bit of TLC, but I am really looking forward to it. I think that once we slap a coat of fresh paint on the walls everything will look a million times better. As for our private courtyard, I am in heaven. There are quite a few trees growing within our courtyard. I am really looking forward to possibly buying some gravel and doing some major landscaping in one section of the courtyard. I think that I could really make part of the courtyard into a beautiful oasis. We will be posting pictures soon so that you can see our house and courtyard.

After visiting Boulsa, we got to spend two more nights in Ouagadougou. This city is a break from reality. In Ouaga you can buy anything! We ate pizza, hamburgers, twice baked potatoes, BBQ beef sandwiches, breaded chicken sandwiches, onion rings and milkshakes! OH YEAH!!! Talk about being in heaven. Hey Mom guess what I actually like Hawaiian Pizza now, even with the ham on it :) While in Ouagadougou we also got to go over to the Assistant Country Directors house for dinner, Mexican themed. We also got to tour the Peace Corps' bureau, which was pretty cool.

Some not so fun news to let people know about. Traveling is a bit hard on Tim as his sinuses act up quite a bit. He chewed on quite a bit of sinus meds these past five days. I can't blame him for getting sick though, because there is a ton of dust here. As for me, well, I am officially the first one of the two of us to go and pray to the porcelain god. I woke up Monday morning and had to make a mad dash down the hall of the transit house to get to the bathroom. After my unwanted intimate time with the Hasselhoff, I curled up with Tim and popped a few Pepto. Side note all of the bathrooms at the transit house are named after deities and the bunks are names after infections. I woke up and thought that I was all better. Ha that was not quite true. So Monday we took public transport back to Ouahigouya which was not fun at all. The bus was overcrowded and extremely hot. This is about the time that my body decides to take vengeance on me. During our four hour bus ride back to Ouahigouya, I was unaware that I had spiked a fever. I just thought that I was hot and miserable due to the heat in the bus. So I began to now something wasn't quite right in the bus station in Ouahigouya. Tim and I had to leave our bike behind in Ouagadougou because there was not enough room on the bus. I wasn't feeling good at all by this time and having to hike 4k back to our house was not going to happen. We got a ride back to ECLA from the PC. That's about the time when Tim told me I looked like shit and a shade of yellow. Thank god for my hubby, he got the PC to drive us to our house and drop us off. I actually started to feel a little better on the ride home as the air conditioner was blowing right on me. I took a bucket bath and felt even better. I took my temperature afterward and it was 101. I munched on some acetaminophen and went to bed. I felt a lot better in the morning but still had a low grade fever :( Oh well, that just meant I munched on some more acetaminophen. Now my temperature goes up and then back down, so I can say fun times ahead for me. If the fever doesn't break by morning I will finally get to call Jean Luc and say, “Jean Luc, I'm dying!” LOL although, I might have to race Tim for the phone.

Well that is about everything that has happened. We love you all and miss you bunches and bunches! Don't worry too much about us. Aside from the stress, we are having some fun here.

Love
Becky and Tim

PS We appreciate all the comments that you guys are leaving it helps to boost our spirits when we see them. :p