the time

To start off with, here are a few pictures of my house. My house consists of 2 rooms, but the second room is too dark to take any pictures of and really only consists of my mattress on the floor.



This picture here is my attempt at the aerial view of the inside of the main room. It functions as my kitchen/dining room/living room. In the back, you can see my countertop with my 2 burner stove powered by a propane tank, where i attempt to cook all of my not so delicious food. The lit pico (cot) against the left wall is where i hang out and read at night before i enter my dungeon room and go to bed. The table in the foreground is where i eat/write/read/study, etc.



Here you can see a close up of my kitchen. My favorite part of the countertop that I had made is the 2 holes cut out in the top to fit a set of bowls that act as makeshift sinks. While most people have to do dishes on the ground outside, which can get messy, i can do it standing up right in my house! (if you happen to have looked at Eriks blog, yes, his house is strikingly similar to mine as we went shopping for all of our stuff together). i use the bottom shelf for some food items, though i keep most of my food in a trunk to the right of this countertop to keep bugs from getting into it. i also use it as a shelf for my dishes. Underneath, you can see the bookshelf i tried to make out of a box. For now it works well, but maybe ill go back to the carpenter eventually and have him make me a real bookshelf.


Half of my courtyard. The big purple bin is where i keep my water, and the yellow thing is what i take to the pump and back. I strap it onto the back of my bike.If i had taken this picture from underneath the hangar, you would have seen the uncovered half of my courtyard, at the end of which is my latrine/shower room where i take bucket baths.



Here is a view of my house from the entrance of my courtyard.

OK. Now for the true cogitations of the day:
I know I haven't written a blog in a while; I've felt a bit like whatever I write won't really express what I'm feeling or explain what I'm doing. That's not to say that what I'm doing is too important or "different" to explain, but it's just that I'm not sure I'm capable of any sort of true explanation. In the past month, I've had what can only be described as a tornado of feelings that make me feel like I've done nothing, yet so much has happened at the same time. The concept of time here doesn't exist in nearly the same way as it does in the United States, which is partly to blame for my confused state of mind. People kind of just tell roughly what time it is, or how many hours have gone by based on where the sun is or how hot it is at the time. Time seems to simply evaporate. I realize it's an abstract concept in the U.S. as well; that you can't physically grasp at time and have it respond back with any type of force, but here, it really seems to be a strange phenomenon. It's much more fluid and constant, a quality that I'm finding can be both the most freeing thing in the world and simultaneously the most frustrating. It's hard to have a gauge of accomplishment without a sense of time, yet you never feel like you're wasting it because it's not there to waste. For about a week, my clock on my phone was set a full hour ahead of the normal time, but i didnt even notice until my accoucheuse pointed out the difference between my clock and hers. I had even had meetings scheduled for specific times, but when people are typically 2 or 3 hours late for meetings or events anyway, it just really wouldnt have crossed my mind that maybe my clock was wrong. i cant imagine ever not noticing being a full hour off of everyone else in the U.S., but here, i went a full week functioning completely normally an hour ahead of the rest of my country.

I can't really come to any concrete conclusions, therefore, about how my etude de milieu has been going in the American/Business/Get Things Done type sense. In some ways I feel like I, myself have an outside perspective of it. Don't ask me who has the insider's point of view. Maybe it's the people in my village I interact with everyday. They could probably tell you best how well I'm integrating, and whether or not anything I've done so far has been effective, but unfortunately, they can't come here and type this out for me, and even if they could, it would be in Moore.

So what have I been doing then? Good question. I don't really have a "typical day" in village at this point. I'm at the CSPS for at least part of the day every day, but what I do there varies depending on the day as well. Every Friday, for instance, I do baby weighings, to make sure that babies are gaining weight. The mothers all bring their babies, we weigh them, and then I look at the age/weight chart and tell the mothers whether or not the baby is where they are supposed to be for their age. The other morning, my major came by my house at 7 AM and told me I was late. What I was late for, I had no idea...no one had told me I needed to be anywhere or do anything. As it turns out, he had scheduled me to perform an enriched pooridge demonstration in one of our satellite villages. So I got dressed as fast as I could and biked even faster to Komsiliga, a village luckily not too far from mine; probably 6K or so. I got there and my major was already there waiting for me (since he has a moto, he can go much faster than me on my bike). He showed me the materials for the bouillie (pooridge) and said "you know how to do it, right?" "uhhh huhhh, yes yes, sure". I mean, I do know how to make the bouillie, but I didn't necessarily know how to do it with the ingredients that he happened to have obtained. I figured we could make it work. I gave the demonstration, explaining how to make the bouillie to a group of women gathered around, as one of the women in the village carried out the procedure in a giant pot (picture witches brew). All the women who came brought their own little pots to put their portion into, so at the end of the demo, we split up the bouillie between everyone. During the demonstration of how to make it, I also talked about why it was important to use ingredients other than millet in cooking, the importance of vitamins, protein, blah blah blah. I actually think it went fairly well, but until I was in the midst of doing it, I had no idea what I was going to do or say, really. And so it goes. It seems right now that it's hard to get the things I (read in italics and bold) want to get done accomplished because I have to rely on other people to do anything, because of my lack of Moore speaking abilities. Though I'm learning, and I can have conversations about a limited number of topics, I'm nowhere near good enough to lead meetings with people on my own. For instance, there's apparently a women's soap making group in my village that I've been trying to meet with; however, all I can do is keep asking when I can meet with them, and expressing interest, until someone else sets up the meeting, because I don't know where to start at this point to organize a meeting with them and then conduct said meeting. Hopefully things like this will get easier as I get to know more people better in my village, and as my language skills improve, but for now, it stands as one of the more frustrating aspects. I don't like not being completely self-sufficient.

Besides what can be labeled loosely as "work" I spend a lot of time just doing things necessary for survival, and generally conversing with people. Pumping water, for instance, takes much more time than one might think, but is also one of the best integration tools I've found. The water pumps are very social places, and it is there that I can meet/spend time with women from all over the village, and make myself a visible force. I've also started going for runs in village, which has been comical to say the least. I inevitably end up with a gang of 50 kids running along with me, though I lose them for the majority of the run, which is on the outskirts of my village. As soon as I make it back to the heart of the village though, the same kids who started out chasing me are waiting for me, and join me for the grand finish. The first day I ran, i got back to my courtyard, and one of the women asked me "Can you run really really fast!!?" "OF COURSE". "SHOW US!!" "OK!" My competitive spirit cannot be shattered, and I sprinted for her, causing a tremendous uproar of laughter from everyone watching, followed shortly by everyone and their mom wanting to race me. So I ran races with everyone separately for about an hour, until I starting losing, and then decided I was tired. Now, every single day, people come to my door asking if I'm going to "manda sporte" today, expecting me to run races with them again and again. OYYYYYYY. WHAT HAVE I DONE????

I just got back last night from a friends village about 35K from mine. I was there helping him with an AIDS day in his village which turned out to be huge! The high commissioner of the Yatenga province came, along with other important Burkinabe people from our region. There was a womens bike race, a soccer game between the two schools that he has in his village, a big dance, and lots of talking about HIV/AIDS. It was awesome. I left on thursday to bike there, and ended up doing the bike ride in the hottest part of the day. I didnt mean to, but the morning i was supposed to leave, i had to do another bouillie demo in a satellite village, so by the time i got back from that it was already about 11. Then i wanted to leave right away, but the elders of the village for some reason decided to come over and give me chickens and then i had to figure out what to do with them since i was going to be leaving for the weekend. They escaped from my courtyard because i stupidly untied them from each other thinking that maybe id give them a break from being bound in shackles, so the kids in my courtyard spent about a half hour chasing them down and brought them back to me. I didnt end up getting to leave my village until about 1300by which time it was the absolute hottest part of the day. I had to get to my friends village though for a meeting in the afternoon, so i left anyway and did about 20 miles in probably 100 degrees. NEVER AGAIN.

"Barbie girl" just came on the radio in this internet cafe.

I feel the explanation of my life is inadequate. I feel like the computer is eating my words. Just come here and I'll show you.