We climbed this "mountain" (elevation ~500m) until the trees stopped.
Things are a little less restricted here in Burkina Faso. I tried explaining the concept of permission slips to the other teachers and it was one of the more difficult practices to explain, but not nearly as difficult as explaining how there can be poor people in the USA.
We took a field trip to a place called Niansogoni (my computer doesn't have the symbols to spell it correctly) and it was a blast. We rented a couple of big trucks and drove about 105 kids and 12 teachers out for an overnight hiking trip. The kids were able to sleep at a school nearby and the teachers slept in these huts they have for tourists. It was really cheap and really easy because, in part, of permission slips being a foreign concept.
I was lagging a little behind the group.
Some of the older kids
It was a great time getting to know some of the students, who tend to blend in a little when the class sizes are close to 100 and they get punished if they show personality. Don't get me wrong, they often deserve getting sent to the principals office, but animation and originality are rarely encouraged.
Some of the landscape. It took us about 4 hours to get here from Siniena, my village. I'm planning on coming back because it's a pretty easy trip and other volunteers want to see it. Might make it a camping trip. Also there are supposed to be waterfalls
Here are some of the other teachers. This is on top of the mountain. Those structures are food storage silos from back when people lived on top of the mountain. This was many years ago, but old houses and other structures still stand. My guess is they moved off because it must be ridiculously hard to go get water everyday up and down the mountain. Luckily, I was able to cleverly hide the rip in my pants from climbing the mountain so that it wouldn't show up in the picture.
