Corn's coming in

Should be a good harvest

Science Camp

I spent the last week or so in Orodara for a science camp.  We (7 volunteers) each brought 4 students and 2 teachers from our villages and threw them all together in a great big beaker of education.  It was a little different than camp GLOW; there were fewer camp style games and activities and more formal classes.  It was a chance for the Burkinabe teachers to work side by side with volunteers to practice teaching methods and experiments.

When kids here ask questions, instead of just raising their hands they snap their fingers and say "moi, moi, moi".  I guess it can be hard to get the teacher's attention when there are 80 other kids.

Only 12 students?!?!  I can breath a little. 

We made some soy tofu.  It's starting to catch on a little.  You will see women selling tofu kabaabs in bigger cities.  I love it when I can find it because it's fairly cheap and preferable to the meat that is usually available.  I'm not a big fan of a lot of fat and bones.  

We also got the kids to make their own liquid soap to show how easy it can be.  When it was done, they all got an empty coke bottle's worth to take home.

 Here I am with my 4 students on the left and my two teachers on the right.  We were so young...

We split the kids up into groups so that kids weren't always with the others from the same village.  We were the team yellow extra terrestrials (they even came up with the name).

Most of the names were space related.  That is, in my experience, the scientific topic that interests the kids most.  They are so astounded by how big things can be and how far away stars are.  I guess American kids are similar.  By the way it translates from the Gouin language, the stars are the moon's children.  Aww

The whole camp together.  I like my positioning.  

Of course, not everything was classes and note taking.  We played tug of war, made smores (with care package graham crackers and marshmallows), played soccer and even watched movies on a projector.  They loved the Lion King and we watched some Planet Earth videos.

Finally some pictures where they smile.  Burkinabe are so serious in pictures.

Looks to me like that frisbee is her future, and it's gonna go far

I'll just show myself out

Laundry Day

This is all you need to wash clothes:

Bar soap, detergent, two bins/buckets and water and you can ash just about anything.  If there is ever a prolonged power shortage and the washer/dryer doesn't work, don't fear, Barry is here.

You have the soapy water and the rinsing water.  To make soapy water, add detergent powder (about half cup worth) and mix it around.  Agitate the water with your hand much like you would beat an egg.

Next you will want to soak the clothes in the soapy water, at least 15 minutes, some people do it over night.  I like to start with shirts while the water is clean, and then use the same water for the underwear.  I like to leave the bar of soap in the water too, so that is softens up.

Remember, the more effort you put in to washing the clothes every time, the faster they will wear out.  Because of this, I only focus on the armpits and collar of shirts and spot clean for stains.  The rest doesn't really need to be scrubbed.  

You will be using the shirt to clean itself by rubbing fabric together, in between your knuckles (the middle knuckles, not the punching ones).  Grab the shirt on either side of the stain or target area and fold the shirt over itself.  You should have a handful of fabric in both hands, and rub the shirt against itself.  Don't over do it, if you soaked enough then the stain should be out before 5-10 seconds.  I also use this method on underwear; with pants and towels I use the always reliable washboard.

Ring out all of the soap you can, plop it in the rinsing bucket and hang it up.

Turn your shirts and pants inside-out so that blowing dust doesn't erase all of your hard work and the sun doesn't rob you of your beautiful blues and reds (UV radiation breaks polyesters and cottons over time).

My Market

Every five days is my market day.  Lots of people come into town in order to sell their goods.  It's also village wide drinking day.  They have this stuff called dolo that some familes make and sell, made from millet or sorghum and its kind of like a light beer.  I'm not much of a fan but it makes every market day a party day.

I can usually find onions or spices in my village, but market day is the day to get all kinds of vegetables and grains or beans.  That's when I buy beans to make cheesy beans and rice at home.  There are dozens of tomato ladies (btw women sell the food and men sell knick knacks or clothes or hardware items, usually) and onion ladies and drink baggy ladies as I mentioned in a previous post.  I can usually find limes on market day along with garlic and some better spices.

Here is my neighbor at her stall in the market.  She sells salt and chicken bouillion and peppers, also peanut butter occaisionally.  Her grandkids help me around the house alot (weeding, getting water etc) and like to use my porch light to do their homework.  

Market day is a great day to get tools or bike repaired because there are all kinds of handymen around.  You can also buy pots and pans and plastic things like buckets and strainers.  There are fabric vendors you can buy cloth from to take to the tailor.  Here is a quick little video of part of the market, you can here me talking in the end and can see my neighbor in her stall.  Some guy is bothering me to take his picture and give him money.  

So that's market day in a nutshell.

I want to put longer videos up but the internet is never good enough.

Happy Birthday Mom!!

I give to you a picture of me on a waterfall.  

When I'm Thirsty

Most drinks, especially in villages, are sold in little plastic bags that were hand-filled and tied.  You just nibble off one of the corners and start sipping.  They range from chilled pump water to delicious sugary drinks.  They are very cheap at 25-50cfa (500cfa = 1$).  Unfortunately, this means anyone can afford them, adding to the already pervasive littering problem.  Trash cans don't exist.  I should add that most of these drinks are prepared through boiling, so are usually pretty safe; though the bags might be dirty on the outside.

The purple one's are dahjii (french bissap).  It's made from the bissap plants by boiling the leaves in water and adding sugar.  Very good but not very thirst quenching because of the amount of sugar.  The gold ones are serajii ( I don't know the french name) and made from baobob trees (the fruit?) and tastes kind of like applesauce.  The white ones are mugujii and I'm not sure what it's made from, but they add millet to it so it's fairly nutritious and my favorite from a taste standpoint, though I can't describe the taste.  The other color (lime?) is a ginger drink and is very spicy.  I don't like it much.

I come across the occasional coke in village that is sufficiently cold, but the majority of my sweet satisfaction comes from these little guys because candy is not common/good.  Surprisingly though I find myself missing salty/fatty foods from America more than dessert even though salty/fatty foods are easy to find here and dessert doesn't exist.

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.