What is that over there...omg hippos!!!

Peekaboo

I went and saw some hippos with friends and it was awesome.  We payed the equivalent of like 10 bucks and we got within 30 feet of hippos that have actually killed people.

They were very majestic and seemed nervous around us.  There's not really much else to say about it.  They were awesome.

Tell me that's not a trex head.

Pepper plants

These are the peppers of choice 'round these parts.  They taste kind of like habaneros.

Happy belated mothers day and jeffs birthday

Finally got internet uninterrupted by power outages.  As my gift to all the mom's, grandmom's and my brother jeff's birthday, here are some crocodiles.

I hope everyone's doing great.  Summer is about to start and the kids here really do go work in the fields during summer break.  Explaining how American's get the 3 months off without needing to work is always an interesting conversation.

Rains are coming

Rainy season is just about upon us.  There have already been a couple of big storms, but the flood gates will really open soon, and stay open, till September.  This is actually water pumped up from a river, but I thought it looked pretty cool.  School is out in a couple of weeks so I won't have much to do.  Maybe I'll go out into the fields and help plant some crops.  That's what 90% of my village will be doing from dawn until dusk for the entire summer.  Here they actually need to take the 4 months off from school so the kids can go to work.

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.