Tree Planting

Once I had become comfortable in my school with language and with my workload, I rounded up some kids who were interested in science and made a science club.  We learn about general scientific ideas and practices and we do experiments.  Hurray! 

Seeing as how everyone seems to think that trees are good, I decided to plant some trees.  I got my school to buy the seeds and I got my kids to plant them following an experimental method that I came up with at first (baby steps) and they can expand on in the future if they want.  This is the product of our first round of plantings:

Those are bags used for drinking water filled with soil and a seed; let me explain.  There is no plumbing in the village, and drinking water from pumps is not a reliable source, health-wise, and drinking from wells is horrendous.  So what they do here is to take water and purify it before sealing it in rectangular plastic bags of 330 or 500mL.  These are usually really cheap and safe to drink.  One problem is that you are left with thousands of these bags lying around empty after people drink them as trashcans are rare in big cities and non existent in villages.  You can take these bags and open one side, fill it with soil and you've got a tree's new home.

How did I get all these bags?  Kids.  Little ones.  I find a gang of 7 year olds, they are everywhere, and say every 25 bags you find I give you a piece of candy and they go bananas because they are not used to being rewarded for helping out an adult.  I ended up with 800 bags.

It works better to use two bags for every tress, to give the roots more room to grow.  This time we used a ratio of 1:1 soil to sand because I wasn't able to get any manure.  In the future, we will test the differences in germination using different amounts and types of manure.  To be honest, there are enough trees in this region of Burkina Faso, but the kids can at least see the scientific method and practice writing up experiments.

We had a lot of fun mixing up the soil; they thought it was so weird to see a professor digging around in dirt with students.  Hopefully I can update with pictures of healthy sprouts in the near future.

What to do during summer vacation

Now that everyone in my village is out in the fields working everyday, I do not have a whole lot going on.  So what to do? Banfora is a quick 45 minute bike ride away, as is the restaurant Calypso. Great pizza place, but they also have this: 

It's a brochette, like a shishkabob, with really good meat, tomatos and even pineapple.  Best brochette in country that I've seen.  Typically meat is really fatty with little bones everywhere.  Having lean pieces of nothing but meat is huge.  There is even wifi good enough to load a whole webpage in under 5 minutes!

Mango season is almost over

For about 3 months there this was a daily reality for me:

I get paid somewhere in the tens of thousands of Francs CFA every month (a gentleman never discusses his salary) and this baby runs about 50cfa in my village market not 300 meters from my front door.  Jealous?  Well now mango season is going, they will be available until Novemberish, but not like this.  So juicy and perfect.  

Camp Glow

Some of my best memories from my high school days are the summer leadership camps I did.  Camp Shelton, Navy Summer Seminar and all the JROTC camps.  Good times.

I participated in the camp G2LOW (girls and guys leading our world) last week and the kids (60 of them) loved it too.  6 solid days and 7 nights, 6am to 10pm, we were at it, teaching anything from future planning to sex education, even campfire songs.  

Me and 9 other volunteers were able to bring 6 kids from each of our villages, who were then split into 6 teams of 10 with team names and colors.

Sharks and Minnows but with Malaria

Every day we would all wake up at 6am so that the kids could get washed up, something that is very important here culturally.  I prefer night showers.  Then we would do some warm-up exercises and breakfast.

We had classes 3 times a day and outdoor activities also.  The kids got to learn about making goals, dealing with violence and even had a career panel.  I taught the sex ed session for the 30 boys.

Teehee, he drew a penis

 It's amazing (and a little scary) to me how little the kids knew, despite their being around 13-14 years old.  I don't think its very common for parents here, especially in the villages, to talk to their kids about sex.  Getting to learn all of the anatomy of men's and women's bodies and how babies are made (not by genies or god) is something that these kids don't get very often and I had a lot of fun teaching it.  The kids never make wow noises or gasp when I'm teaching math.

 Those are condoms filled with water

Burkinabe rarely smile in pics unless you make them                                                                                                        Like here

This is something the kids never really get to experience.  The culture in Burkina can be strict and repressive, and kids are not encouraged to express themselves.  If they speak their maternal language or joke around, they are punished harshly and public embarrassment is a common strategy.  If they speak Jula at school at all, they have to wear a special necklace with animal bones on it, I'm not really sure on the cultural history on that one.  It reminds me of a dunce cap though.

So, in a new and strange camp environment, where kids know they won't be hit or humiliated, it can be very difficult to keep them focused.  Some of them don't know self discipline and in group they rarely stay on task unless it is a soccer game.

At night we would do electives.  Things like astronomy, card games, arts and crafts and even salsa dancing.  Naturally, I taught the Salsa/Bachata class at nights.

I was lucky enough to have THE Marlow from the village down the road to help me teach.  She is leaving the country in 2 weeks as her 2 years is finished.  I'm sad that she's leaving, or am I just jealous that she gets to eat Taco Bell within the month?

It was so great seeing the kids have so much fun and so heartbreaking when they were all crying on the last day.  Burkinabe don't cry, they're like spartans, so I would use that as one indicator that we did something that will impact their lives.

Grandma's chex mix

I've gotten a fair number of care packages here and, as much as I like mashed potato packets, m&ms and computer games, this might have been the best one.  I had just finished a weekend in Ouagadougou doing a planning weekend for a student science camp and my mid service conference.  Halfway through service we all go to the capital to get a battery of medical and dental exams.  I got to poop in a nice tupperware container, but let's not get too much into that.  By the way, all my medical stuff went great and I got a new filling in a molar.  I know, riveting.

So I get back to Bobo-dioulasso July 13ish to relax a little before starting the leadership camp in Banfora and there it is, waiting for me at the post office:

A gigantic tupperware container of grandma's chex mix (we call it snax) was waiting for me.  Still fresh after like 2 months in the mail.  

So I take 2 days, an air conditioned room (one of the few available) and my computer.  I sit there for the majority of 48 hours and I eat snax and I watch movies.  It was a nice little break, but that's not all.

How many parents are always complaining about kids getting presents and just playing with the boxes?  As much fun as I had eating the snax, I didn't realize until I had spent a bit of time in BF that this kind of tupperware container is worth it's weight in diamonds.  So many things can stay fresh now.