Cinco de Mayo in Banfora

We got together in Banfora and made a Cinco de Mayo dinner complete with (clockwise) tortillas, refried white beans with velveeta cheese mixed in, pringles for dipping, sangria, guacamole and salsa.  Words cannot describe the deliciousness of this meal.  I almost puked from eating too much and felt more satisfied than I have in a very long time, stomach-wise that is.  It was pretty easy too.  All of the tomatoes, onions peppers and avacados are high quality and always available in the Banfora market, and cheap.  Life can be pretty delicious here.

Sending little things can help a bunch

Mom sent some dictionaries for the school and they wanted to say thank you.  This will help alot for their upcoming SAT style test to get into the upper high school level.  Surprisingly, dictionaries are hard to come by here and my school didn't already have any.  Thanks Mom!

If anyone wants to send anything let me know.

Niansogoni Field Trip

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.

Fine Dining

Sometimes I can get away to the city of Bobo-Dioulasso for a weekend to relax.  There is an office there where volunteers can work complete with a stove and fridge/freezer, so I make deviled eggs and drink frozen-ish coke.  There is even a room with air conditioning!

New Pump

My school got a new pump.  Now we can start the garden and tree planting.  I have about 6000 seeds that I ordered through the PC and hopefully a fair amount of them grow.

Some ~7th graders in uniform at the pump.  They like serious pictures.

It it took a week or two to do all of the work.  Now the kids don't have to haul the water from the older, more distant pump.  You can see the classrooms in the background, my classes are the furthest right and the 3rd from the right, 2 7th grade classes where I teach math.  

The pump water is preferable compared to well water.  I would estimate the village is 50/50 between pumps and wells.  Pump water is better to drink, though not the best.  I'm working on filter setups that can be built cheaply in village using plastic buckets or clay pots and sand and clay for filtering.  

Can't play until the stupid cow moves

Always getting in the way

Clothes

All of the clothes you see here were pieces of fabric a couple of weeks ago.  One simply goes to the market to the fabric guys, picks out the fabric, takes it to the tailor, they size you up and make anything.  Its so easy, and better fitting.  These are my city nightlife clothes.

You learn a lot about yourself in Burkina, with so much time to sit on your porch and read.  I've found that I am definitely a white pants type of guy.  You can literally do anything here, any color, any style, and it all works, there aren't really rules about colors and stuff.

I suppose the obvious next post would be on the enormous task to keeping those stupid pants white.