Making tea in Burkina

Welcome to my new "In Burkina" series, where we will be exploring everyday activities in a village in Burkina Faso.  Today we will be making tea.

We drink it in these little glasses.  Its incredibly strong and takes a while to get used to.

This is where tea comes from.  You can buy it in any little village at the market.  There are many types, but most come from the distant and strange land of China.  From this bag of tea, about 3 inches in height, you can get 3 batches of tea, though the third one is pretty weak.  Some people refuse to drink the 1st/3rd tea round based on personal preferences.

This is all you need to make your very own tea!  The pitcher is filled with water, for making the tea and also cleaning the items because they will get sticky from sugar.  The little white bag is sugar, btw, and you add it according to your taste, after boiling the tea.  Speaking of boiling the tea...

The blue pot is for boiling water with the tea leaves in it.  You can let it boil for 15 minutes or an hour, depending on how much time you are looking to pass.  Thats charcoal under the pot, it burns for about an hour, so you will have to replace it occasionally.  After boiling the tea in water, you pour out the tea into the cup for sugaration.  Refill the blue pot with water if you plan to do another round, and set it back on the fire while you add sugar to the current round.  Now you are going to pour the current tea back and forth between the cup and the red pot, after you've added the sugar to the tea.

As you pour back and forth, a nice foam will buildup from the pouring action, this is very important.  When you are satisfied with the amount of sugar in the tea, you will save the foam that has built up.

Now you set the red pot back on the fire, setting aside the blue, as the tea in the red pot has cooled significantly.  When it is warmed up enough, it is good to drink and you can enjoy it under the shade of your favorite mango tree with your friends.

This is me (center) with my buddies Jacques (right) and Adama (left).  Jacques works at the village health center as the pharmacist and Adama is a farmer.  Typically we have some teacher friends around, but today it was just us.  Also other village people will occasionally stop by to chat.  Tea can last as long as from noon to 6pm.

There is of course a very detailed tea culture that must be adhered to.  This is the primary way Burkinabe men pass their time in the afternoon, when most people have a 12-3 break from work (as it's the hottest time).  Even class is out during this time.

Following a strict code, tea is typically served first to the most "important" person in the group, and on down the line, with the fakir (tea maker) drinking last.  Much like an American would never make the social faux pas of skipping from a double dog dare to a triple dog dare, a Burkinabe would never leave a person out of the tea serving line.  I have been trained in the fine art of preparing tea, not very common amongst foreigners here.  I wouldn't say that I'm an expert on Burkinabe culture yet, but I'm pretty sure being a fakir here is about as high of an honor as receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor in America.

I hope you have enjoyed this little segment.  I have some ideas for other, like exploring the market and interacting with a classroom full of students, washing clothes, preparing food.  I would also consider requests if you are curious about anything.

My ride into town today

Market day in Banfora, lots of villagers going in to sell stuff.  We fit 19 passengers in there, no big deal.

I'm still me

Well, less of me.  I bottomed out at 170lbs a few weeks ago, looks like ill be hovering around 170-175 for a bit as I can't really see my lifestyle changing.  That's the funny thing that I've noticed about people in general in Burkina and elsewhere:  There seems to be this belief sometimes that our personalities and habits are based on our immediate environment.  I am still pretty much exactly the same.  I have no desire to have a tidy living space, I'm not even there for most of the day.  I'm still shy with meeting new people, still fairly quiet.  I don't meet many new people in my village day to day.  During my training from June-August, other people would say things like "im not usually like this, it's just the stress of the situation", the situation being hungry and sweaty in a new country.  I think stressful situations just make the personality characteristics that you repress appear more strongly. 

After 6 months in Burkina I've hit a routine that I am happy with and am comfortable in my environment.  I just spent 14 days in Ouagadougou for IST (in service training).  I just got back to my region yesterday and was really relieved to hear people speaking in Jula again.  It's almost comforting now.  Im going to get into full gear as far as project work goes.  I will have my 10 hours of teaching every week like normal, but I will start the other parts of my job.  IST was kind of the end of the new volunteer trial period, now I'm supposed to do it all.  Teaching villagers about malnutrition and AIDS, having after school clubs with the kids and continuing to learn about the culture here. 

I'm happy with the balance so far between staying in my site and getting away to bigger cities.  One or two days every weekend I go to Banfora or Bobo.  Banfora is my regional capitol and is only 12km away, I typically bike but there are lots of bush taxis too (see earlier transportation post).  I hang out there with Matt and or Marlow, two volunteers near me.  There are two super fancy hotels with fast and free wifi internet.  I use my old smartphone or a friends computer, catch up on news and reddit and starcraft.  Really miss starcraft.  Beta happening now, so sad, and I'm returning to USA maybe a year after the expansion is released.  There is a pool at one of the hotels and they both have great food.  I also stock up on things like eggs, pasta and laughing cow cheese there.

Bobo is more of a once per month things.  I am in the bureau right now, a Peace Corps building for volunteers to use who don't want to go all the way to Ouaga, a 4 hour bus ride from here.  Lots of volunteers in the region to hang out with.  Fast internet on two computers and fans.  Even a medical room if I get sick and want to stay here.  It's very reassuring to be able to take a 90min bush tqxi fqirly cheaply and have a place to go, with a cheap place to camp in a tent only a few minutes away.  Plus the shower, that's cool.  Printer, scanner, you get the idea.  When I want a night out of site, I have two great locations and lots of cool people to be around. 

I'm going back to site in an hour or two.  Xmas break is coming so I will have a lot of time to explore my site now that the weather is getting bearable.  It was actually kind of chilly last night.

The bright light of education

Young Burkinabé boy doing math in elementary school.  I had happened to be there to take pictures for the school.  They don't have enough desks for the 80 kids so about a third of them have to sit on the ground.  They still have a blast though.  It's great how engaged and excited the kids are to learn here.  They love to do examples at the board, they practically spring out of their desks to get my attention to call on them.  Of course, I have middle school students and can't imagine having the little kids who have no french.  I thought this would be a cool, inspirationalish photo.

Waterfalls!

I live in a region called Cascades and this is why.  I got to visit Takeledougou a few weeks ago, there is a married couple of volunteers there.  We biked about 15 minutes to the falls, then went back and made some fajitas with the tortilla press that was left at my house.  After dinner, we went to a talent show that the village put on and I got to sit in the front row and drink a cold coke.  My life is really difficult here.

This is the view looking out away from the falls.  The region is very hilly and here you can see in the distance the valley with one of the only sugar cane fields in Burkina.  Many people here go every year during the harvest season to harvest sugar cane in the Ivory Coast.

There is a platform above the falls here that we all stood on.  The camera is about 50 feet away and I barely made it running during the 10sec timer.  Im on the left, the 3 on the right are volunteers leaving the country in the next couple of months.  It was interesting being the new guy around the volunteers who had aready been here for 2 years.  In the middle we have a couple of friends, one Burkinabe and on Portuguese, who work for NGOs around the country. 

There are more cascades in the region, cant wait to visit those too!

I know who I'm teaching now

The way the school years work here is like this:  you start in primary school for 6 years.  After that comes middle school, called college here with a soft 'g'.  I'll be teaching the second year of middle schoolers.  They go for 4 years, starting as 6th years and leaving when they are 3rd years.  High school (lycee) is 2nd years, 1st years and terminal year, so 3 years.  I will be teaching 5th year middle schoolers, I'll have two classes of about 80 kids and I'll be teaching math.  The ages should range from 14 year olds to 20ish year olds.  I did practice teaching on 3rd year kids and I only had 7, so this will be a step down in their french skills, while increasing the number by a factor of 10.  I have no idea what to expect, but I really just need to be scary the first couple of weeks and then they will behave better for the year.  I start on October 1st.  Hopefully I'll have some pictures with my students sometime soon.  I just bought a book on learning Dioula, so hopefully my skills will start to skyrocket.  Water fall pictures coming within a week.

I read a lot

I cant remember when exactly I decided I like reading, but I think Dune sealed the deal.  Sure, accelerated reader probably helped, but I mainly did that for the points, because I like things like points; always have.  I have the most JROTC ribbons and medals in high school because I like things like ribbons and metals.  But Dune made me decide to be a reader and now Ive read something like 8 books in 3 months Ive been here.  Just finished catch22 and am surprised that no one in my past that Ive known, or not known, has ever told me to read that book. 

The person I replaced left several hundred newspaper comic sections that I assume her parents sent her over the course of her service and they have really come in handy during the first boring couple of weeks before I get to know a lot of people.  There are crosswords and sudokos and get fuzzy, the rest of the comics are just so incredibly bad.  And this is a big paper in California.  I think Americans should pay more attention to the funnies so that the quality will rise and future volunteers that discover hundreds of future comic sections in their new village houses can laugh more.  Maybe that can be my legacy in the Peace Corps.

Now things are starting to pick up pace and I read a little less.  There are people to got sit and drink tea with on Friday afternoons, under a tree.  The tea is amazing and strong and minty and they serve it in little glasses.  That's how you get things done in village.  Find the tea.