AHHH it's hot! I thought the heat was almost over when it rained once about a month ago...but boy was I WRONG. I haven't cooked anything in my house in about 2 months, for fear of spontaneously combusting if I do. The only time I ever go inside my house at all these days, in fact, is at around 5:30 in the morning when I first wake up, to put my clothes on and grab my toothbrush. Then I race out of there as fast as possible, gasping for air. Everyone says the hot season this year has been way worse than last year, as we've had many 120+ degree days. I agree. You know it's hot when one day it's only 105 degrees, and you say "aaahh this feels great, it's only 105 degrees" and you don't even sweat all day!
Ok, thanks, complaint finished.
If you are interested in seeing videos of some of my courtyard kids, I posted a few on youtube because for some reason they won't upload here. They really are just silly snapshots of my little brothers and sisters; two are of them singing and dancing to their favorite song, "all the single ladies" and the other is of one of the babies, who's strapped a box on her back pretending it's a baby. Kids strap all sorts of things to their backs and pretend they're babies, like twigs, empty plastic bottles, plates...whatever they can find. But for some reason I found this particular box situation funny...maybe because the box baby is bigger than the real baby who strapped it to her back. Plus, this kid always cracks me up.
Anyway, here are the links if you're interested:
Matou
All the single ladies 1
All the single ladies 2
A couple weeks back, Erik and I organized and held a conference on maternal and child health for a bunch of volunteers who each brought two counterparts from their villages. It was your basic "training of trainers" workshop, where we focused mainly on nutrition/malnutrition/and the hearth model (you know, the 12 day nutrition workshop/malnutrition rehabilitation program for malnourished kids and their moms, where you teach people how to make good meals using their local ingredients, and do a health talk on a different subject everyday...i've done it with two different groups so far in my village, and plan to do another one soon). So the participants in our workshop learned about how to identify malnourished kids, proper nutrition, changing behaviors that lead to malnutrition, etc. They got a full run-down of how to conduct a hearth model, and got to visit the local CREN (center for rehabilitating severely malnourished kids) twice...once to see how things worked there, and the second time, on the last day of the formation, to practice putting to use their new skills by sensibilizing the women currently there with their babies. I'm really happy with how it went, and I think it's already helped other volunteers to implement the hearth program in their villages with the counterparts they brought.
I think the highlight of the workshop for me happened early the second morning, before we started the training for the day. Both of my counterparts from village were mothers who had participated in the Hearth programs I conducted and really followed it well. Both of their kids, who had been severely malnourished, are now healthy and well above the line for being malnourished, so my idea was to take them to this training so that they could serve as examples in the community, and hopefully help to conduct the same program they went through with me, with other women and their kids. Neither of them ever went to school, so they don't know how to read or write or anything, and while it didn't really matter much for this training, it did make some things difficult, like reading the scale for weighing and measuring the babies, and interpreting the numbers on the BMI chart. Anyway, one of the counterparts I brought from my village knocked on my door and asked if she could see me. I was kind of nervous that she was going to tell me that something happened and she couldn't finish the training, but instead, she asked me if she could borrow the scale that we had used to show the participants how to weigh and measure babies. I said "sure, but why," and she was like "to practice reading it of course!". Small victory, yes, but encouraging. It made me happy that she was so excited to be learning and to be helping her fellow villagers.
I just finished yesterday with an agricultural formation in village, in which 15 of the farmers (everyone is a farmer) got trained on new and improved techniques for increasing their production yield. I brought in an agricultural expert from Ouahigouya to facilitate the training, because, well, what do I know from agricultural techniques? Nothing. So because this was a training where a specific group of 15 people were assisting, and not just anyone who wanted could come, I had to be careful about the way I chose participants. In the past, when I've had to choose specific people for participation in either trainings or projects, I've talked it over with my major, and together, we've chosen the people we think would be best fitting for the job, and most likely to actually carry out their responsibility to pass on the knowledge to the rest of the villagers. 
It wasn't until recently that I learned that the chief of the village is not too happy about this, because he is not involved in that decision making process. When I first got to village, actually, I had asked my major if we needed to discuss these kinds of decisions with him, and he basically said that the chief didn't care and we didn't need to bother asking him. Ah, of course, a year and a half into my service I come to learn that it was really my major who just didn't feel like he needed to involve the chief, because he's a functionaire that doesn't come from the village, so he doesn't really care. Honestly, there are some cases where I don't understand why he needs to be involved; for instance, health related trainings that people are chosen for based on their specific health needs. He apparently wasn't happy that I chose women and children to participate in my hearth models without consulting him, but that's a program for malnourished children, for which I chose people by talking to the eligible mothers, and taking volunteers for who wanted to do the program. It did turn out that more people wanted to do it than I had space for in the first two programs, but we discussed together that we will do the program numerous times, 
so that everyone who wants to participate and has a kid who qualifies will be able to. Even so, I do know the importance of respecting the village chief and asking his permission to do projects and so forth. So for this formation, especially because there were no specific guidelines or qualifications to participate, except of course, being a farmer, which, as I said, everyone is, it was appropriate for me to consult the chief to pick the participants. I asked him to pick a group of 15 farmers, half men and half women, who gave a fair and complete representation of the village. My idea was one person from each quartier so that they could then go back and share their new skills with everyone else from the quartier, but of course, I had to just let the chief choose how he wanted to choose. What I ended up with was a group of 13 old, old men, half of which are too old to cultivate anymore, and 2 women. Haha...evenly split, eh? 
But honestly, even though it wasn't necessarily the group I was looking for, it didn't matter, and I was very happy with the way the formation went, as were the participants. The old men learned a lot of valuable techniques that they'll hopefully pass on to their progeny. It was cool to do something a bit out of the normal range of health related activities I tend to focus on, and work with an age/gender group that I don't normally get to work with. And, you know, it was really really good to have the support of the chief, making sure the participants showed up and followed the formation.
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