Contact1

Mail can be sent to the Ouagadougou office and it will reach me, sometimes apparently in 3 weeks, at most 4 months.

Corps de la Paix Americain
01 BP 6031 Ouagadougou 01
Burkina Faso (West Africa)

I am leaving today for a village near Ouagadougou for my 3 months of training, so I will rarely be on.  I am fine though, we have an excellent medical supply kit and a constant avenue of communication with the health admin and several other contacts, so I will actually never be isolated.  Everyone is reachable by phone 24/7 and I have an extra phone battery. 

I will be meeting my host family in about 6 hours.  Super excited to get to know my future family; by the time I am done with training, I will be able to live anywhere in BF essentially. 

Hopefully I will be able to post something in the next month.  Bye everyone!

Why you should watch "The Vow"

I rarely see new romantic movies because they rarely have anything new to offer.  My flight across the Atlantic Ocean played the movie so I decided to watch it.  Spoilers follow, so if you haven't seen it, watch it before reading the rest.

Story

The premise of "The Vow" is the story of a young married couple who gets into a car accident.  Channing Tatum is fine but Rachael McAdams takes a hit on the noggin and can't remember who her husband is.  She can't, in fact, remember anything past a certain date in her early life, where she was attending law school and dating some other dude.  In her current life, she is an emotionally driven artist and married to Channing; I can't remember character names.  The vows that they shared at their wedding are fairly typical and, most importantly, they are about never giving up on their love.  Channing obviously is not going to give up on his wife simply because she doesn't know who he is.  The rest of the movie is about Rachael being torn between remembering her love with Channing or going back to her old life with her rich dad, going to law school and dating the other dude, who is definitely still interested. 

What I liked

This movie had incredibly powerful moments in it that I have not seen since "P.S. I Love You", namely the scene where Channing finaly has to let his wife go back to her old life and the moment where she decides to date him again (she never actually regains her memory".  The writing for Channing's narration is not notable, but the dialog between the couple in these two moments shows that a great amount of care went into the script.  There weren't any cringe worthy cheesy moments that make me really hate the romance genre sometimes.  The editor didn't get cut-happy and the music didn't ramp up.  The really emotional moments were subtle in technique, this allowed the emotion coming from the actors to saturate your senses and the result was several tears.  BTW Channing really surprised me in this movie, I expected him to be more of a Ryan Reynolds or Ashton Kutcher, two guys who haven't shown well in movies I've seen.

Rachael wasn't an inferior character in this movie.  It wasn't up to Channing to WIN her back.  This was SO refreshing because the idea of the man needing to win the woman is rediculous and entirely the wrong message to send to young women:  "you are a prize to be won by the guy with the best work ethic".  Much like life, you want the person best suited for the job in their natural ability, not some idiot who will put on an invigorating act for the position.  The other guy interested in Rachael was not remotely a bad guy for her.  In fact he did everything right to her, he just wasn't what she was interested in.  Rachael didn't turn that dude down to go back to Channing, she did it to go be herself.  The decision to go back with Channing came naturally, exactly how it did pre-accident.  The couple came together again like couples should.  One might argue that Channing had the right to be with her post-accident, and I doubt anyone would have been mad if the movie had him winning her.  I am a big fan of how the story ended because I hate seeing the reinforcement of the idea that women are dust in the wind blown by men.

I loved that the dad had an affair with Rachael's friend.  Movies these days are too scared to be real and that was something fresh, I thought.

No cheesy stereotypical characters.  There was an absence of the loud hilarious girlfriend to the main female character.  No overcompensating douchebags threatening the male characters.  No token minority characters there only for one-liners.  I really hate when they do that.

What I hated

Channing's monologues.  I guess they were true to the perceived intelligence of Channing Tatum as an actor, but I think both the actor and the character are smarter than that.  I only watched the movie once so I don't have any quote, but I got the sense that the monologue was thrown in the movie as a list minute way of providing exposition and a driving force for the plot.

In closing, watch "The Vow".  Also "The Young Victoria" is a good period bio pic.  I probably won't see any other movies anytime soon so I will post entertaining stories. 

Driving around Ouaga and the hotel I'm staying at for 3 days.

Journey to Ouagadougou

I'm here and ok everyone!  Arrived just fine around 4pm 6/6 Ouaga time, 12pm EST.  Borrowing Diego's computer in order to write this.  I will use U.S. time here a bit, but from this post on will us Burkina time, only 4 hours ahead of EST.  At the end of each post I will try to give an estimate of when I will be able to post again, depending on internet availability.

Staging in Philly allowed me to meet the other 33 volunteers who are going to Burkina for education.  In about 2 weeks I hear the agriculture people will be going to staging.  The other sector is Health.  Every single one of these volunteers are amazing people,  I cannot stress that enough.  I got the lightest packer award, seemingly by a great margin.  Pretty psyched about not having to worry about getting more than 2 bags of junk everywhere.  We did a bunch of ice breakers in Philly before taking the bus to NYC Tuesday 6/5 morning.  We then got to hang around the airport for 5 hours before the flight.

After leaving NYC around 6pm on 6/5, we arrived in Brussels 9ish hours later.  I was able to sleep a little and there were some movies on.  We watched The Vow and The Young Victoria.  After a 5 hour layover in Brussels, we left for a direct flight to Ouagadougou.  There was a personal entertainment screen for every seat, so I played some games and watched the Hangover 2 and Darjeeling Limited.  The last flight was the first one that I got a little nauseous on, but that cleared up the second I got on the ground at Ouaga. 

I am in the hotel now and we are taking care of everything administrative before leaving for the village of Sapone on Saturday, where I will meet my host family and life will really begin. 

My next post should be 6/8 or 6/9.

Night before departure

Sitting in my Philadelphia hotel room, getting ready for my flight to Africa tomorrow.  There are about 34 of us new PC volunteers here at staging and they are all amazing people.  I am going to have a great support network from these peeps and the people already in Burkina.  All of my anxieties are gone and I am super stoked to get on the ground in Burkina.  I will get a few days in the luxury of the Capitol, Ouagadougou, before we travel to the training village.  I can't even begin to describe how happy I am with this decision.  Shoutout to my Mom and Dad, without their support at home I wouldn't be financially able to do this, nor would I be well equipped.  You two are the greatest supporters, so I will keep my word and upload tons of pictures.  Later brohans, I'm off to Africa!

Shoutout to the Parsons' Group

You guys were the greatest to work with.  I had so much fun in that lab, I will not soon forget it.  With that REI card I went and got a solar panel so I can now charge my new kindle and my ipod, so I will not be entirely without technology.  Pictures coming in a week or two hopefully.