It Rained!

Everything has been going pretty good lately. The hot season finally broke last week when it rained for the first time this year. It was wonderful. At night the temp got down around 80 and the daytime high was only in the mid 90s. We have been living it up with cold water and good nights of sleep. It is nice to go through a day and not sweat the entire time. With the rains it has started to green up around here. Our moringa trees have started to get much more bushy. The Burkinabe are worrying about malaria because of the rains.


The school year is winding down and everyone is getting excited about that. Becky just finished giving her final exam to her classes. I think that everyone involved is pretty happy to have finished the year. Now she is getting ready to start game week.

I have had a couple of meetings about my lab. The first was with the professors. The meeting started off with them bitching for an hour about not getting paid enough, which is not usual but stupid considering they are some of the best paid people in Burkina. When we got around to the lab, they were being about as unhelpful as possible, but they were demanding to use my room to calculate their grades. After coming up with every excuse they could think of for not wanting to help me, they said they would wait and see what the parent's association would say at their meeting. I was not surprised but still pissed.

The meeting with the parents was quite the adventure. I was the only professor that was there, along with the school administration. There were about 30 parents who ranged in age from late 20s to early 60s. Of course, the administration had to sit in front on the teaching platform, but then they made me sit up there with them. Not exactly where I wanted to be. So front and center of the parents, I try to act like I'm paying attention while the whole meeting is conducted in Moore. Watching the Censeur and Proviseur try to explain computers in Moore in hilarious. There is absolutely no vocabulary for it and the words they were using just made me want to laugh. Afterward everyone came over to my lab to take a look around and saw where the problems were and why I was asking for help. I turned on a computer and wrote a couple of sentences in Moore and that thoroughly impressed them. After the meeting finished, Censeur told me that the parents had agreed to help out by having every student pay a 1000cfa technology fee. That is 2 beers at the bar or a beer and a plate of rice and sauce with some change left over. It was nice to finally get some help from the community.

After the meetings I left for a training in Ouahigouya, where we had are stage. The training was over a method of influencing a community to solve it's own problems, called positive deviance. Basically it means that in every community there are individuals or groups of individuals who are more successful with the same resources. The training described how to get the community to decide which problems it wanted to address and then how to find the people who were successful in spite of the problem. To practice we visited 3 communities, and were trying to increase the rate of girls enrollment at school. It was an interesting exercise if not the most effective because of time restraints.

We have started to have some clothes made here by the local tailors. For Becky it has been interesting to say the least. Her tailor is either extremely busy or forgetful or a little of both. Becky will drop off some cloth to be made into a shirt or skirt and the tailor will say to come back in a week. Week passes and she goes back; “Not finished, come back tomorrow” Next day still not done and Becky gives her a couple days during which the tailor decides to go to Ouaga for vacation for a week. This is how the getting your clothes game is played in B.F. After she finally came came back it took another two weeks to finally get everything, and only one of the things fit, so back to the tailor is was. There is no just going to the mall in search of what you want. (Becky swears her tailor likes to play hide and seek with her)

Surreal has been doing good, but I think that she might be a little racist. She doesn't like it when Burkinabe come over to the house and will go hide under the bed. When our PCMO visited she didn't come out for the entire two hours that he was at the house, not even for treats!! Otherwise she has been doing good. Becky says she's getting too pudgy and doesn't like it when she flops in her lap. Surreal has been pulling guard duty until about 4am then she starts trying to sneak into bed with us. Some days this works much better than others. (N.B. She isn't allowed in bed) We're finding out that she takes after Desi in being a bed-hog.