February Blog

February has been a pretty fantastic and exciting month here in Burkina Faso. As usual, things are going really well here. The nights are still really cool and comfortable. Needless to say that the hot season has yet to arrive, but I have faith that it is nipping right at our heels.

School has been going really well for me. My students are really becoming very interactive in my classes. I honestly believe that some of them are really starting to like school. Then again I have started to bribe my classes with different things each week if they are well behaved and complete their homework. This is not at all a good thing to be teaching my students, but at this point I honestly just want to them to actively participate in my classes—do their homework.

One of the bribes that I used to get them to complete their homework was an entire 2 hour open room discussion on the U.S. along with a book that I have of Illinois. I had one of the best times in a very long time just chatting with my two classes. They of course were fascinated by the U.S. and everything that we do. We did a lot of comparing between the U.S. and B.F. The students that this was the greatest thing ever since they could better distinguish the similarities and differences between the two. They were super excited to learn about how we do farming in the U.S. When I showed then the book on Illinois and the saw the fields, they were completely blown away that one farmer had a field that large and then even more astounded when I told them that farmers have more than just the one field. It was really a refreshing look on the U.S. seeing things through their eyes. Oh by the way they thing that white tailed deer are one of the coolest animals ever.

Tim had to shut down his lab the last week of February because the heat during the day is too much for the type of computers in his lab. He has talked with the administration and put a little pressure on them to fix the A/C in the lab. I am still amazed that by tying into the electricity in the computer lab for the new building they sent a surge through it and burned up both A/Cs.

Our Country Director, Shannon, came for a site visit the 16th. She walked with us and got to see some of what Boulsa has to offer. She visited the school with the Principal, Tim and myself. She was very impressed by how clean Boulsa is compared to many other places. The community here does a fair job of picking up the used black sachets. Shannon also got to meet with the Vice Principal of the school and the money man. They all of course loved Shannon and loved even more the chance to talk about their school and all the wonderful things that the school has to offer to the kids.

In the afternoon, we accompanied Shannon to a 50th anniversary tour celebration in
Namtenga. This is site where Mike, a former volunteer and president of Friends of Burkina Faso, served out his two years. During his service here, he was part of a well digging stage. He and many of his friends were charged with the job of digging wells in villages that needed them. Mike said that he was able to dig around 25 wells in his two years of service. That is quite a good number to have completed in 2 years and even better; one of the wells still has water in it 30 years later.

The celebration in his village was an amazing sight to behold. The energy in that village and the love that they have for all things Peace Corps was a HUGE boost to all of our morals. They had a welcome party which was practically the entire village there to greet all the volunteers and Shannon. They had masked dancers performing for us. The kids made American and Burkina flags and sang a song for us. There was a different group of men who played instruments and danced as well. We also got to visit the women’s traditional weaving center. They make some of the most beautiful cloth I have ever seen in my life.

The day after Shannon’s site visit, Tim and I traveled to Ouaga for the SOFANWET tournament. This is a small international softball tournament held every year in Ouaga. Peace Corps had a team and we played 3 games. Unfortunately, we did not win a single game, but we had a great time playing. Tim pitched two of the three games and he was a pretty good hitter. Me, well, I got onto base several times, and I had a good hit down 3rd that the baseman caught. It was a great weekend to just be us. We do not get the luxury of just being Americans and blending in very often, so this was a heaven sent. Many of us attended the banquet dinner following the tournament. Some of us participated in the raffle. David won four different items, Michael won a necklace and I won a vase and a 24 pack of Heineken which was shared with my teammates. Good job team Peace Corps!

The end of the month was passed in Kaya with our other volunteers working on Camp Glow. The camp is really coming together. The kids are going to have such a great time at this camp and they will learn so many important things that will help them with the rest of their lives.

January Blog

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the long delay in posting an updated blog. We have been experiencing some difficulties with our Internet key in Boulsa and we are just busy. Whenever we find a free moment to post the blog the Internet key decides it does not want to work. Luckily we finally got the Christmas Blog and the January Blog up :)

January has been pretty good for both of us. We are both rather busy with school. Tim is busy teaching the students how to type on a computer. These students hunt and peck all the time. I am relatively certain that any five year-old in the US could type faster than these kids. After two weeks of using the typing program the students started whining that this was boring and they wanted to continue on to something else. Tim really did not want move on to something else because the students had not learned what they needed to learn. I told him to have them cover their hands and type without looking. Tim thought that was a pretty great idea. Now every day of class, the students have to type the following sentence at least five times: The quick brown fox jumped over the very lazy dog. Needless to say the students are not particularly thrilled to have their hands covered up while they are typing. It’s actually quite comical to watch them try and slouch down in their seats far enough to look at the keyboard.

As for me, I am busy teaching my sixth graders how to calculate the area and parameter or a circle, round numbers, compare two numbers and the basics of fractions. The circle was a breeze. They all memorize the formulas by the next class period. Rounding numbers was a little tricky for then in the beginning. They had a hard time remembering the rule of 5 or greater and you round up, but after a blackboard filled of examples, they finally got it. Comparing numbers was one the best lessons I have ever given. I explained how < and > were the mouth of a crocodile and every crocodile would rather eat more food than less. Of course I did a couple of great demonstrations for the students were I turned some of them into birds and one student into a crocodile. The “crocodile” had to choose the group of “birds” it wanted to eat. All of my students think I am insane now, but I bet you they will never forget how to compare numbers.

My seventh graders have been busy learning how to draw and calculate the volume of cylinders and prisms, multiplying positive and negative numbers, factorization and development, and exponents. They had some trouble learning how to draw perspective drawings of prisms, but after a week of practice, they were back on track. The multiplication was really straightforward for them once they memorized the rules. Factorization and development was one of the easiest chapters for them. I was able to complete the entire chapter with them in 2 hours and that included 30 minutes of exercises. Our current chapter is the exponents. There was some confusion in the beginning between the difference of doubling a number and squaring a number. After a little explaining and several examples everyone caught on. They love figuring out scientific notation.

Tim went to the IT meeting at the end of January. The committee got a lot of things completed. If you would like to check out the website for PCBF it is maintained by the IT committee. Peace Corps Burkina Website. I had a VAC meeting the last weekend of January. The meeting went very well. We were able to get several accomplished with our meeting. We also held elections at the meeting. I am the new President for VAC. Emma is the new Vice President. Althea is the new Secretary.
Tim and I are trying to schedule town meeting for Boulsa to inform them about Camp Glow. Our school’s Secretary is our counterpart for this project. She is going to help us do everything for this camp. We will post more information about Camp Glow soon.

All and all life is going pretty good here in village. We are starting into a very busy time. We have Friends of Burkina Faso in country right now. A site visit from our Country Director as well as our APCD scheduled for next week and March. Tim and I are playing in a softball tournament one weekend. Then we have a meeting for Camp Glow another weekend. I have another VAC meeting. Tim is trying to get another IT meeting scheduled and we have the end of the second trimmest at the end of March as well as our Close of Service Conference. WOW! Talk about being busy. We still have to find time to give exams during all of this as well!

Pictures to come in 2 weeks and February Blog!

December Blog

*Sorry for the delay in posting blogs. The Internet has been a little unreliable.

The first trimester of school is officially finished and we are glad to have reached Christmas break. We have been busy grading the last of our tests and checking with student s that we wrote down their grades correctly. I have had a half of my student ask for exceptions since they didn’t reach the required 50% to continue in my class. It was ridiculous. I gave them a chance for extra credit every Friday for a month and only about 10 took it. All you needed to do was watched a movie and write a little summary of it. So, there are no exceptions, pardons, or extra points in my class. Becky’s students seemed to get the idea that they needed to study. One Friday, there were more than 40 students from Becky’s classes that wanted to watch the movie. Unfortunately I had to turn a few away because I ran out of space in my lab. I hope that the movie night is that popular again, because it is nice to see success.
We just got through Christmas, which was fun and hard at the same time. We missed home a lot, but the people in Boulsa were great. A couple of our neighbors gave us chickens to cook. There was one that was ready to be cooked and another that was still alive. The live one was a bit of an adventure. Becky was the one who answered the door and as soon as the neighbor left, she started to yell for me to come and grab it. Of course neither of us knows how clean a chicken, so Mr. Rooster got to relax outside for a night while we waited to ask Nathanial to clean him for us. He ended up tasting pretty good.

Christmas in village was interesting. Everyone gets dressed up for Church then go visit their neighbors. The kids were very cute in their Christmas best. The girls had on matching dress and the boys were wearing three piece suits. The town was very busy and there have been a couple of huge market days.
We spent a couple of busy days in Ouaga trying to get work done for the Peace Corps. I don’t know how successful it was but we did try. I have spent the last two weeks fighting a never ending battle with my lab. Most people would have thrown in the towel by now as a plea for mercy. Hopefully things will smooth out soon or I think that Becky may put me down.

New Years in village was uneventful other than having to listen to the neighborhood bars blast music the entire night. I thought that going to bed at 1 was ok, but not here. When I got up at 5am they were still going strong.

This year’s cold season has been much cooler than last year. At night it is getting down to the low 70’s and we are cuddled together under our blanket. During the day it is only getting to the mid 80’s and is wonderful. Taking a shower is interesting. The water may be warm but then we are freezing right afterward. It seems like the cold season might last longer than last years as well. By now it was starting to heat back up. Hopefully this hot season won’t be as bad as last years, but on the bright side, there is A/C in my lab now.

School is starting back up now and we are looking forward to the second trimester. Becky has a test scheduled for next week and I am looking forward to teaching practicals so that the kids will stop complaining about theory. Typing practice here we come.

Our trip to Egypt is all planned out and we are getting excited for the trip. It will be nice to get to see the ancient wonders and to have something other than rice and sauce be reliably on the menu.

We’re starting to look forward to our COS (close of service). It is nice to think about home but the time here has flown by. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were just getting to Boulsa and starting to teach. We still have a lot of stuff that we would like to get done before we head home. But with only 4 months of teaching left it really puts into perspective how much time we have left.

Surreal has been doing well. She seems to think that it gets cold at night, so decides to climb in bed with us. This is a nightly battle since she tries to take up the center half of the bed with Becky and me on either side of her. We thought sleeping in bed with Desi was bad. Surreal has taken bed hog to a whole new level.
Hope you all had a great holiday season and can’t wait to spend it with you next year.

Pictures to come later--2 weeks

Lab Repairs and Tests

Tim’s voyage to Ouaga with the server was successful. He was able to get to the technician without too many problems. He had to pay a 2000 cfa fee for transporting the server on the bus. The technology fees are sometimes a little outrageous. A bus ticket to Ouaga costs 3000 cfa. When he finally arrived in Ouaga, he waited around at the bus stop for an hour with the school's accountant waiting on the technician to show up. The technician never showed up, so Tim took a taxi to the repair. After a brief review of the server and talking to Tim the technician decided he needed to keep the server and run diagnostics on it. The accountant Okayed that. Once the technician figured out the issue with the server, they would call the school and get the work approved.

Tim had a pretty good time in Ouaga. He was able to hang out with a lot of PC buddies and have good food. Unfortunately, his voyage home was not the most pleasant time. Since he didn’t take his bike to Ouaga he had to use a taxi. He caught one at the main street and road to the bus station. The taxi man helped him get his bag out of the trunk and drove off. Tim went to purchase his bus ticket and found out that his wallet and phone had fallen out in the taxi. Damn. He explained what had happened and the nice ladies selling the tickets said no problem to just pay for the ticket in Boulsa. Tim borrowed someone’s phone at the station to call his and ask the taxi man to bring his stuff back, but no such luck. In the ten minutes it took Tim to do all of that, the taxi man or another passenger had found the phone and wallet and taken it. The phone was turned off and unreachable. As you can imagine Tim was not a happy camper. Luckily he only lost about 8000 cfa, which is about $15.


School for the past two weeks for me has been interesting. My seventh grade class had their first test two weekends ago. Sadly they did not heed my warning of them studying for the exam. Only 25 of the 115 students passed the exam. Most of the students that redoubled from last year passed my exam. The one who didn’t improved her grade by 6 points from last year. I found it pretty funny that after I gave the tests back, one of the redoublers, Moussa, told the students close to him “I told you you have to study for her tests.” The look on the rest of the students’ faces when Moussa said this was a look of disbelief especially when he pointed out that all the test questions were the same as the homework problems, just with different numbers. Hopefully now that they know how my tests are, they will study a little more/better for the next exam.

One week after I gave my seventh graders their test, I gave my sixth graders their first test. Good God I have never heard so many kids complain about a test in my live. This was before they had even taken the test. They did not like the idea that I was only giving them an hour long test. They were insistent that one hour was not a sufficient amount of time to complete the test. I asked them how they knew it wasn't long enough for the test. I asked if they had seen the test. One student said yes. I told them that was great and they would get a zero for cheating. Yeah that made the student retract their yes very quickly and the rest of the class just laughed at them. The day of the test finally arrived and all be a monkey's uncle, one hour was more than enough time for them to complete the test. Most of them completed it in 45 minutes. I told them one hour was plenty of time!


Aside from giving and grading tests, class has been continuing on as usual. I really enjoy my seventh graders. They are very calm and listen to what I say. On the other hand, my sixth graders are really trying to push me, but that's normal. I have two hours of tutoring a week for my kids. They seventh graders really take advantage of the extra help that they can get and the one on one time with me. My sixth graders are still not sure about the whole tutoring thing.

Last week I did have quite a surreal moment. I was chatting it up with the school's truancy officer and one of the new teachers at the school. The new teacher is a first year English teacher. He was complaining about how rowdy the kids are and how sometimes they don't listen to a thing he says. He had one kid put a small rock under his shoe and he would use his foot to scrape it across the cement floor whenever the teacher would begin to talk. I felt bad for the guy so I told him some of the battles I had to face last year. At the end of the how thing I look at the new teacher and told him “Du courage!” This just made me laugh because that's what I got told all last year.


Tim's server has returned from the technician and is working now so hopefully his lab will be open in a couple of weeks. The school had someone out this weekend to look at the AC in the lab. Now both of the air conditioners in the lab are up and working! Next step now is going to be getting Internet to the high school. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for us.

Tim's classes vary from being well behaved and fun to work with to they need beaten with stick to get them to shut up. He is giving his first test next week to all of his classes. That is going to be a lot of work to correct with over 600 students this year. He is going to try and make his tests harder this year to weed out a few more of his students so that he has class sizes that are manageable.


Our weekend in Ouaga was a blast. We did so much this weekend that we need a weekend from our weekend. Friday we got into Ouaga and talked with our holiday teammates for the competition on Saturday. We got plans worked out for the teams which was great. Tim and I relax a little that night and had a milkshake at the Rec Center.

Saturday was a whirlwind. At 9 a.m. We visited Seb's widow and gave our condolences >with several other SE volunteers. Afterwards a group of eight of us headed to SIAO. This is the international art fair. We were blown away by all the beautiful things that were for sale. We spent about 2 hours there and bought two carved chairs, a little hippo stone statue and a mud cloth painting. All and all a great shopping trip and best of all I didn’t have to carry a thing ;) After SIAO we headed back to TH to meet up with our respective teams and help prepare for the party. The party was a huge success! One of my favorite parts was Emily's turkey dress. The food was all wonderful and of course the company was great. Lots of fun memories were made this weekend.

School Time

We have survived our first two weeks of teaching. This year seems to be running a lot smoother for us. The administration is going out of their way to make sure that they are providing us with anything that will make our jobs easier. The Censeur even scheduled our classes so that we have three day weekends! Needless to say both Tim and I are feeling pretty good about our last year here as teachers.

I am teaching two classes of math this year: one sixth grade level and one seventh grade level. I’m still not sure how my two classes will behave this year. I have a sneaky suspicion that the sixth graders are going to be little hellions. As for my seventh graders, I am lucky that I have some repeaters from last year who can talk to the new one and tell them not to try stuff with me. It only ends with me getting mad and them getting reprimanded.

I have decided to continue on with my Peanut Gallery this year. It worked so well last year that I couldn’t think of any other affective way to get the daydreamers to pay attention. I have already had peanuts in both of my classes. One of my seventh graders was a little peeved at being called a peanut and having to sit on the floor in the front. He even had a talk with me after class because he hated it that much. After hearing his side of the story I told him this: If you do not like being a peanut you have two options. One you pay attention during my class and do not fall asleep. Two if you hate being a peanut I will simply send you to the school monitor and he can discipline you. Well needless to say now he is going to try very hard to pay attention during my class, but if he does not, he has said it is ok for me to put him in the peanut gallery. :)

The only other moderately entertaining story I have has to deal with my sixth graders and their homework. I assigned them all the homework problems at the end of the chapter on Thursday and told them they were due on Tuesday. They stared complaining that I had given them way too much homework. 11 homework problems is not too much homework. After about 5 minutes of their whining, I finally said enough! I told them that 11 homework problems was not too much homework, especially since it was due on Tuesday. I then told that if they wanted to continue to complain that I would make the homework due the next day, because then it would be too much homework. As you can imagine 90% of the class quieted down and the other 10% were quickly hushed by the others. Amazingly Tuesday when I collected the homework, only one kid had not completed the assignment.

Tim has seven classes again this year. His schedule is a lot nicer this year. The Censeur really worked on trying to condense Tim’s classes. Last year he would have an hour class then two hour break follow by another class. At least this year he will be able to do more of the secondary projects that he is interested in.

Thus far, Tim has only gotten into a few “battles” with his kids. He is having some trouble getting the kids to take his class and him seriously. They do not like to listen to him at all. This as you can imagine is a big problem, especially when you have 80+ students in your class. Tim has gotten the permission from the Censeur to make the kids do P.E. when they don’t listen to Tim or when they talk back to him. Tim is a little excited about the prospect of making the naughty kids do suicides or up/downs. He knows that after the first time he makes a class participate in his P.E. class, they will more than likely become model students for a few weeks.

Oh Tim is also going to play the Peanut Gallery game this year. Two of his eighth grade classes are my two seventh grade classes from last year. He broke out the game with then on Thursday because a student fell asleep. The students were a bit surprised that Tim plays that same game, but its also familiar. It should be pretty interesting to this year because over have the school will be participating in the peanut game. Its even better because some of the other teachers know about the game and they continue with the game by calling the kids peanuts.

Tim is still working on trying to repair the server. He replaced the motherboard, but now he thinks that BIOS needs to be flashed. Unfortunately the floppy diskette is corrupted and the A drive on the server no longer works. Tim is not at all happy about this new series of problems. He downloaded the BIOS and put it on a thumb drive, but the server is not able to boot from thumb drives. Now Tim is being forced lug the 30 lb server to Ouagadougou. This wouldn’t be such a big deal in most places, but here transport is not the nicest form of getting from one place to another. Tim will have to board a European castoff bus that will be completely packed with people; more people than there are seats. Then the bus will be overloaded with motorcycles, bicycles, furniture, house hold items, chickens, goats and sheep. Then the overloaded bus must traverse 56K of pothole ridden dirt road. Then its another two hours driving on a paved road and he will arrive in Ouaga. Then the fun really begins as he will have to negotiate for a taxi to take him to the transit house. I imagine the negotiation will be a lot harder than usual since he will be traveling with a big computer. Good Luck Tim!


Surreal is doing very well. In all honesty, she is a little pistol. She loves to play games, especially when it is bedtime. She goes to school in the afternoons when I offer math tutoring. The students are very intrigued by our “American” style dog. They find it very hard to believe that she is actually a Burkinabe dog. They love to watch her do tricks. The administration at the school just love to say high to her and shake her paw.

As far as the weather goes its still not too bad out. The temperature hasn't really been too hot at all. Of course we still break sweats when we bike anywhere. Compared to last year the temperature seems a lot cooler. I don't know if we have just adapted to the weather better than we think or if it is cooler this year.

One thing that has been a little weird is that it is still raining here. Last year all the rains had stopped by the first week of September. This year we are still getting some showers. Its nice though because the temperature drops so much when it does rain.

The dog days of Summer

Summer blog 2

Tim's Time at Training
It's been a couple of months since we got back to BF and things have been pretty busy for me and slow for Becky. After flying in I headed out to work training for the new volunteers. There are almost 80 new trainees and we were moving to Koudougou. It is one the largest towns in BF about an hour south of Ouaga. Unfortunately most of the trainers and staff had never spent time there. It was hectic trying to find the stores that the trainees were asking for. After about a week, we had a list of a few restaurants, a couple of grocery stores, and an internet café for everyone to go to. Training itself was pretty busy. The trainees just started model school and were stressing out over having to teach in French. I had to teach a couple of classes as a demonstration, then they started teaching. They were doing a good job and it was interesting to see how they started and where the took the classes. They would sometimes teach a lesson I would have never thought of or thought wasn't practical, but it worked and their classes seemed to understand the ideas they were trying to get across. I also planned a couple of other technical sessions on IT setups/options and a session on Positive Deviance.

The work hasn't been too hard it is just difficult to get back into the habit of working from 8 to 5. The new trainees are a good group through and I can't wait for them to swear-in. There are 22 new teachers, 7 of which are IT teachers. The group is much different than our group last year. Most of their experience is in end-user things like Excel, graphic design, and such. There are also 4 women in this group. Quite a bit different than our group of all guys who have been working in tech rooms trying to fix broken things.

Becky was there for the last two weeks of training. All of the trainees were getting pretty excited about being done with training. It was very interesting being on the other side of training and watching them. It brought back some good memories of the last weeks, particularly Becky's last language test. During her last interview, she spent most of her time trying to explain Harry Potter to someone who has never heard of the story and has drastically different ideas about magic/wizards. It must have turned out OK because she passed her LPI. She spent time talking with the people who hadn't made language level trying to calm their fears. She gave them the same advice that we got last year, that you'll learn a lot more in the month that you're in site by yourself, and that it comes a lot easier when you're in site because you have to speak French all the time and there isn't an American buffer.

We had our mid-service conference in the middle of August. It was basically a glorified doctor's visit with a one day meeting where we got to talk about our “feelings” on our service thus far and what we hope for the next year. Becky got reelected to the VAC, the student council for volunteers. It was nice to get to see everyone again. It was the first time that we had seen everyone since January.

After mid-service, we went to a tree planting in Dori. It was a bit of a hassle for Becky and her friend Lorena because they were in charge of recruiting volunteers. Getting hold of 80ish volunteers is not easy. We are notorious for not answering our phones and refusing to commit to anything. The tree planting went better than expected, but was still an event that happened in BF, interesting to say the least. Buses getting stuck, another trying to tip over, pee breaks every 45 minutes if not sooner, and planting almost 20,000 trees. Overall opinion of tree planting: SUCCESS.

Swearing in was a great time this year. The ceremony was at the new American Embassy. The First Lady of BF came and gave a speech. The Embassy is beautiful and the refreshment after were wonderful. Even the weather cooperated and was wonderful.

Becky just had her 25th birthday. It was the best one she has had in the last couple of years. It started raining in the morning and then stayed cool the rest of the day. We both went and got out our hoodies since it was only 75 degrees out. We got to use our new camp oven and I made a stuffing pot pie thing and we had a bottle of wine. Becky was Queen of the Computer for the day so I suffered through Cougar Town, True Blood, and Julie & Julia. She got phone calls from both parents which was nice. Now she has all the scuttle on both families. She is such a gossip hound. :P

NB Thanks Matt for fulfilling Becky's B-day wish.

Summer Update

Hello everyone

Its been a while since we last blogged so there is a lot to catch you up on.

May was the last month for regular classes. Our school wanted grades turned in by the 15 which the kids loved. Tim helped an English teacher at out school with the last month of class. He got to listen to their final projects. The students were given topics in the beginning of the year to research and write a final paper on in English. Tim had quite a few students visiting our house because they needed help translating their papers.

In the beginning there was some confusion on the students parts because they thought that if they wrote the paper in French Tim would translate it all into English. He broke their hearts when he would send them home and make them work on translating it. Translating the papers was quite interesting to be sure. There were times when both of us would be working on translating one sentence because it used an idiomatic phrase. The students didn't quite understand why a translation just can't be word for word. Tim explained to them about fluidity and that word for word translation doesn't have that. They seemed to understand that idea but didn't know exactly how to execute it in English.

I also helped one group translate there paper. Lets just say I was completely floored when they handed me print-offs from the Internet and had circled paragraphs and numbered them for order. When I question them what was this, they said well this is our paper. Here is the first paragraph then the second is on this article and so on. I was dumbfounded and didn't know how to explain to a bunch of sophomores that you can't do that. Trying to explain academic integrity was an interesting feat. They didn't understand that they couldn't use whatever article they found off the internet as their own. They told me that they had found it so it was their work. It was a long day explaining to them that they couldn't do that. I was able to get them to redo their introduction and first paragraph correctly with original writing, paraphrasing and quotes. When those two rewrites took them 3 hours to complete they told me that they were done with my way of writing because it took way to long. So they returned to their direct translation for their paper.


As for my class, well it was pretty interesting to say the least. After I gave the class a final exam, which only a third of all the kids passed, we had a game week. I brought in a bunch of activities for the kids: word search, suduko, geometry bingo, Izzy, I Spy jigsaw puzzle. The kids had a blast. They all really loved bingo. It took them a few times to caught on, but once they learned that if they got a bingo they won a sticker and got to be a caller, the game was on :)

During the last couple of days for class, I would go into class and have a general chatting session. The kids really got into this. They started asking really interesting questions. One student wanted to know how agriculture worked in the U.S. They couldn't believe the way we do ours versus their way. Here everyone does subsistence farming. They also got really interested in the way the U.S. Government works. Congress was really an interesting subject to then and the process that is used to get a new law in the U.S. They also loved learning about the interesting things that some of our Presidents did. Of course Barak Obama is still their favorite, but they also really liked Abe Lincoln too. They thought George Washington was a pretty interesting guy too, but they think his hair is funny.


At the end of the school year, there is a teacher party. Ours started at 7 a.m. With a soccer match. Tim participated in the match. He didn't do half bad either. He was instructed to attack the ball and not the person. Tim just apologized and said that he was used to American football not European football. The game ended with Tim's team wining. He was pretty stoked about wining his first soccer game in Africa.

After the match, all the teachers went to the orphanage in Boulsa. Every teacher had donated 1000cfa to buy soap for the kids. After everyone gave money, we were able to buy 2 entire boxes full of soap for the orphanage. As you can imagine they were very grateful. We received a tour of the orphanage. It was a pretty surreal experience for me seeing an African orphanage. I can't really explain what made it so unreal. It was like I was watching a movie back in the U.S., but I was there. When you watch a movie that depicts a third world orphanage, they do a pretty good job of it. The metal cribs all in a row was probably the most striking thing I saw there. It was a really good experience to go and see the orphanage and meet the people who run it.

After the orphanage, all the teachers and spouses went to the school for lunch. While all the women, including me, were busy preparing the lunch, all the men were having tea and playing games. Cooking lunch with the Burkinabé women was pretty interesting. They got pretty rowdy and started joking around which made the time pass pretty quickly. They of course all made fun of me for how I cut up onions and tomatoes. They tried to imitate my cutting style, but that just ended up with them cutting themselves. The riz gras was finally ready to serve around 2 and boy were the guys excited to have something to eat.

After lunch everyone went home to sleep and get ready for the big party that night. We were told the party started at 8 so we showed up at 8. Everyone else kinda
trickled in for the party. I believe our principal finally got there a little before 10! Dinner wasn't served until midnight. We were not informed of this late dinner so we were both famished and exhausted by the time the food got there. We quickly ate our food, took a spin around the dance floor and called it a night. WOW! It was a long day :)


After school was finished, Tim spent most of his free time studying for his CCNA exam. As for me, I was lazy and relaxed. I read a couple of good books and hung out. Tim and I took a mini vacation May 28-30 in Ouaga. We used this time to just relax in an a/c room and watch a couple of movies. We also did some souvenir shopping.
May 31-June 5 we were up north for training of trainers. Both Tim and I are so excited to be trainers for the new volunteers that are here. We had a blast at the training event. A lot of our friends are trainers too so that made for an awesome time.

When we got back to site, it was a whirlwind. I was so busy getting everything prepared for our vacation home. There was so much to do and I had only 5 days to do it before I had to be back in Ouaga for VAC. Luckily Tim and I got everything done that we need done for the trip just in time. I headed to Ouaga and Tim followed me 1 days later.


June 15 was an exciting day. Tim, Emma and I were on the same plane. Once we got on the plane it was like stepping forward in time 50 years. The trip home was absolutely amazing. We ran pretty much none-stop the entire time we were home. Tim played a lot of golf. We did some shopping. We ate a ton of food. Each of our families had reunions, so it was great to get to see so many people. We got to visit with friends too. I had a couple of bridal showers to go to too. Oh we also participated in a golf outing on our 2 year anniversary. Tim won the bull's eye trophy and I won woman’s longest drive. Tim also got his CCNA certification! Going home was wonderful. Its pretty hard being several thousand miles away, but coming home made everything worth it.


Now we are back in country and continuing on with our second year. Tim is currently helping out at stage and I'm in site. He's having to work hard each day from 7:30-5:30. Me on the other hand, I am whiling away the time in village. I have been busy reading books (3 thus far), cross stitching (just finished the second bib), taking Surreal for lots of walks (trying to get her leash trained), and visiting with all our friends. They really love hearing about everything we did back home. They are particularly interested in golf and how that all works.

Well until next time. We miss you all and hope everything is going well.

Congratulations to Chance & Mary C.
Brian & JoJo
Curtis & Julie