Transportation is cool

Getting around the country is fairly easy in Burkina, one simply needs decent french and small change, as in most other situations here.  Long trips can be accomplished on large buses, old tour buses usually, I took one from Ouagadougou to Banfora, my regional capital, and it was a pleasant experience, besides getting slightly felt up by a woman on the last "leg" of the trip, I crack myself up.  Its easy for me as a dude, but can be dangerous or at least uncomfortable for a lady, because of the lack of a bubble of personal space and handsy Burkinabe guys.  So thats the big buses.  It is forbidden for me to ride in a car or a motorcycle (moto) because of the dangerous traffic, so for routes that lack a big bus, it is necessary to take a bush taxi.  A bush taxi is a singular experience and involves much haggling and stinkiness at first, with the amount of haggling diminishing with practice.  A bush taxi is a van the size of a VW van and can usually fit 18 passenger, thats right, 18, with several boys in the employ of the driver who tie your bag and bike to the top of the van.  To get to my site from Ouagadougou, it is necessary to take a 6 hour big bus to Banfora and a 15 to 30 minute bush taxi to Siniena, so I have it very easy compared to some volunteers who only have bush taxis near their sites.  Bush taxis run near my site often, and it is a simple as flagging it down on the side of the road.  I can also bike the 12km to Siniena if I want.

Let me tell you a little something about hygiene...

Turns out its fairly easy to be clean here in Burkina.  My shower areas, both with my host family and at my future house in Siniena, are made of concrete and about the size 6'X6', with a hole at the bottom of one wall and a slight slant to the floor, one takes a bucket of water, a cup for pouring the water over ones self, and any desired cleaning products, soap and shampoo are cheap and easy to find, the price of everything can be haggled here.  For a shower, one simply pours water to wet oneself, applies soap and shampoo, and then rinses, I typically do this before breakfast and before dinner.  My shower is outside with my host family, taking a shower under the stars is pretty sweet, my shower is indoors at my future house in Siniena.  Im going to go ahead and say I prefer the bathroom method here to the toilets of the USA.  The squeemish of stomach might want to skip ahead past the next paragraph,


There is a plastic teakettle called a bouilloir I believe, filled with water, that one takes into the latrine, a concrete enclosure similar to the shower, but with a hole in the middle of the floor, I also opt to take my soap.  One simply squats over the hole, a naturally comfortable position, at least for my legs, and does one's business over the hole.  Ones toilet paper is ones hand :) when the business is complete, one simply rinses the hand and the other areas with water from the bouilloir and then, after the clothes are resituated, one can wash the hand with the soap.  When the technique is mastered, its actually cleaner to rinse with water than to spread all of the gunk around with toilet paper.  There, I said it.  Its also much easier on the muscles that control the bowels and is more effective at clearing your body out, we'll get through this together guys, and can actually reduce the risk of colon cancer.  Here it is a cultural norm, more predominate with muslims, to do everyting public with your right hand, shake hands, give money and objects, because the left hand is typically for wiping,


so the next time you are in a developing country, be sure to do everything with your right hand.

My Site!

Ne y windaga everyone.  Thats good afternoon in Moore.  I am
currently visiting my site and am absolutely in love with the place.
I am replacing a departing volunteer, the amazing Celinia, in a
village called Siniena, 12km south of Banfora.  I am in the region
called Cascades, named for the waterfalls.  My house has 2 bedrooms,
an indoor shower room and electricity!  Not running water naturally.
This is as rainforest as it gets in Burkina, so I am excited, and will
continue using runon sentences because the period is inconviniently
placed here.  My french is progressing, there are 9 levels of
progression, novice, intermediate and advanced, each with
low/mid/high, I started at novice mid and am now at inter low, needing
to make interhigh by the end of training.  I will begin learning
Dioula sometime in the near future as well.  I will return to Banfora
tomorrow, so I will post more info and maybe pics :)

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.