8 Months in Africa

NOTE: My Pictures are Updated!! http://www2.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=2589346022/a=1579671022_1579671022/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

I received a text from a fellow volunteer last week saying, “Congrats! You’ve survived 8 months in Burkina! Only 19 more to go…” This is when I realized, shit, I’ve been in Africa for 8 months already! I know in the grand scheme of 27 months, 8 months is not that much. But, hell, 8 is a lot.

I’ve successfully survived my first trimester teaching English and Biology, and am well on my way through the second trimester. I am confident that not only do I know what I’m doing, but I am fully capable of living and surviving in West Africa (which sounds harder than it actually is… in my opinion). My students have learned to understand me and (for the most part) know what I’m trying to say. They understand my “Franglais” (French-English combined). I’ve been able to not only sit through, but conduct business meetings… in French!

Now that I am confident in my abilities to teach/live here, I have started working on secondary projects. Teaching is my main focus here; I am a secondary education volunteer. But, I have started working on projects that I’m more interested in. Something that (hopefully) will be sustainable after my two years of service are up. I mean, that is the point of Peace Corps… help communities through sustainable projects, not to be a glorified substitute teacher for two years. Anyway, so I’m really excited about my projects. The first and biggest project is my school library. During my planning session with my counterpart (the VP at my school), he identified one of the needs of the school as a library/resource center. When I returned to site, I started looking into this project. My school is a middle school/high school combined and there are 704 students in total. In the “library”, there are 27 books, and most of the books are so old and worn down that they are practically illegible anyway. So, I decided to take this on. I am hoping to transform one of the unused rooms into a resource center/library. This will be a place where students can go to study or read. This project is still in the early planning stage, so I don’t know much beyond this. But, I really hope it will work.

In other news, my house is coming along quite well. When I arrived here, my house was a mess. There was no upkeep (or cleaning for that matter) before I arrived, so there were a lot of issues. But, slowly and surely, I have been fixing, cleaning, painting and organizing my little humble abode. I (FINALLY!) got book shelves and kitchen shelves made, which means my things are no longer in piles on the floor... woohoo! I have a nice little sitting area and cooking area. My walls, which were literally falling down, are cemented and repainted. I now have the bluest house in Burkina Faso haha. This, I feel, is my punishment from telling the painters to just paint my salon whatever color they want ha.






I also finally planted my garden. I have slowly been acquiring seeds, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed, so I just kept putting it off. Well, one day, I decided to hell with it, and I’ll just throw the seeds in the ground and see what happens. If nothing grows, oh well, I’ll try again next year. I was thinking I could just put the seeds in the ground and they would grow. This was until I tried digging up the ground and I found that the dirt was no good. It was a mix of red clay dirt and huge slabs of rocks. So, I ordered the “good dirt” and 30 bricks to make a little wall around the garden area. My neighbor brought over my bricks the next day and filled it in with the “good dirt”. This is when I realized the good dirt is dirt that is hauled out of the trash pile across from my courtyard. Yes, I just paid a man to bring in trash pile dirt… crap. Lesson learned for next time. So I spent the next 2 hours digging trash out of my garden. There were old animal bones, broken glass, plastic bags… you name it, and it was there. At this moment, I was really wishing Wal-Mart existed here, so I could buy a pair of gardening gloves. Unfortunately, it does not. But, this was a few weeks ago, and all the trash didn’t seem to hinder the garden because it is growing by leaps and bounds. It (pathetically) is the highlight of my day; coming home from school and working in the garden. I planted tomatoes, green peppers, green beans, squash, cantaloupe and cabbage. I even have a peanut plant growing, which I never planted. Probably a remnant from the trash pile.





March and April are supposedly the hottest months of the year. It’s only the middle of February and slowly, degree by degree, I can feel the heat starting. Apparently, during the hot season, it averages 115-120 everyday! Oh boy. And, I live in the coolest part of the country! I cannot imagine the volunteers who live up in the desert… with no electricity. At least I have a fan, sort of. My fan is rather pathetic; the head fell off and now points permanently towards the ground… a lot of good that’s doing me haha. Sometimes, if I’m really hot, I’ll prop the fan head on top of a chair or in a dresser drawer. I tried the good old, college stand-by of duct tape. In college, duct tape will fix anything. Well, apparently that rule doesn’t apply to Burkina Faso because it failed miserably. One good thing about the hot season is that it brings the fruit! My papayas from my papaya tree are ready to eat now, and they are delicious! My mango tree has started growing fruit, so they should be ready to eat in about a month or so. The town I live in is the mango capital of Burkina Faso, so in about a months time, I will, literally, be swimming in mangoes. Mango bread, mango wine, fresh mangoes, dried mangoes, mango salsa. I can’t wait!



My site mate just took the GRE’s, the entrance exam for most master’s programs. This got me thinking about my future, which is overwhelming. I always thought that during my 2 years in Africa and Peace Corps, I would be able to figure out what I want to do with my life. Well, easier said than done. I know I’ve only been here for a portion of my time, but I’m starting to panic. Before I know it, I’ll be back at home and then what…? Grad school? Job? Where? When? How? It’s a lot of big questions. I’m 25 and I feel like I should have a clearer picture or idea of what I want to do with my life, but honestly, I have no clue. How do you figure out a life plan?

I’m sure my next blog post will be complaining about the heat, but until then, I’m enjoying the papayas. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the pictures!

So, this just happened to me on the way to the office, and I feel like I should write about it. I was getting off of the bus and trying to get a taxi. One driver was taking me over to his taxi, and when we got there his taxi was parked next to another taxi, but then there was a third taxi parked horizontally in front of the both, blocking them in. So, I was thinking great, it's going to take forever to find the owner of the third taxi so that I can get out of here. Well, I forgot, I live in West Africa. My taxi driver, just puts his arm in the OPEN window of the third taxi, takes off the parking break, and pushes the taxi 2 feet out of the way. Simple fix hahah, and I was off!