How Do You Measure a Year of Life in the Peace Corps?

As I look back at my timeline of blog posts I can hardly believe it has been a year since I last wrote about life here in Burkina. But as remiss as I have been in writing, I hope to make up for lack of frequency in quality, by covering the happening of the past year in one post and providing plenty of heart-warming photos of my life in Africa, Peace Corps style.

As is often common here (or perhaps in life?) time, this past year, has alternately flown and crawled. It seems not unlike the actions of my good friend's baby girl, born in January, who seems to develop in leaps and bounds anytime I am away from her and who is currently in the adorable yet frustrating-to-observe stage of pre-crawling. Aminata, now five months old, with the careful persistence of a baby, has learned how to inch along on her belly in the very early forms of an army-crawl. The observer feels the way one does while watching a bird slowly hatch from its shell, terribly thrilled yet at the same time resisting the impulse to intervene and speed up the process. In the past year I have found myself in a similar slow yet fulfilling task, as I have continued to work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso. At times I feel I have made great progress in gaining confidence and knowledge in my work as a development agent. At other times, another day passes and time has army-crawled by and all I have to show for it is some semi-clean laundry and a stir-fry dinner. For the sake of honesty and so the people back home don't think I save children every day, I must say much of my volunteer life consists of meals with neighbors, drinking tea with old men, letting kids draw scribbles with crayons on my notebook paper and speaking nonsense to babies (and midday naps when the temperatures reach 'too-hot-to-function degrees'). The other part does involved things like teaching about malaria prevention and feeding malnourished children but both are what the Peace Corps experience is about.

The biggest success in this past year has certainly been the completion of my village's well. The finishing touches were added at the end of March and the community is extremely grateful. The well now provides potable water for many families and two schools in the village. Thank you to everyone who helped to make the well possible and generously supported the project!

A second great enjoyment of this year has been my time spent with children. I started a kids club with my primary school 4th/5th grade class and have enjoyed getting to know them all and sharing life skills and American culture with them. I had the chance to organize a letter exchange with American students at my mom's school in Chester, Vermont. Also in this past year, I was able to participate in several kids camps. One was with my village club and fellow volunteers, another was an area-wide camp focused on life-skills and environmental education. The camp was entirely volunteer-organized with guest speakers from surrounding communities and included 62 students from 11 villages. We named it Camp HEERE (which means peace or good in Jula) and stood for Hygiene Education Environment Recreation Ensemble (in French). We had a great time with the kids for 4 days and tired them (and ourselves) out with work and fun. It was a labor of love and full of small creative touches like giving each camper a home-made sache and badges, scout-style, and having an impromptu American music sing-along/concert before dinner one day.

One of my last projects in my (only!) one month left in village has been a long time in coming and involves something I love- bees! I was able to organize an interested group of community members, some who are currently bee-keepers, to form a honey producers' association. And I was able to visit and invite a bee-keeping group from a larger city to come and do a training on better bee-keeping for my villagers. Having tasted some of this season's rich dark honey, I have hope that my group of fledgling bee-keepers can produce a quality product (or rather coax said product from the bees and the trees) and hopefully begin selling on a larger scale in the local market. I have very much enjoyed sitting and talking to my elder beekeeping neighbor about his traditional techniques and sharing photos and video of family's hive in the States.

Now the question remains, how to you measure a year in Peace Corps? Answer: in sunburns, in dust storms, in rain clouds and cups of green tea. In bike rides, in mangos, in laughter and beers. In hand shakes, in babies weighed and songs sung. But how about love? As a song from 'Rent' suggests, I hope that I can measure this past year by the people who have shared it with me. "Measure your life in love".

Girls reading together at a reading camp in Sara, southwest Burkina

At a 3 day camp I led with my 4th/5th grade class in my village.

Villagers waving thanks you at our new well

Pulling up some of the first buckets of water from the new well in my village.

Campers showing off their badges on the last day of our Camp HEERE

My campers and I at our final ceremony of Camp HEERE

My villager counterpart and his wife, basically my Burkinabe parents

Tending a traditional hive placed up in a tree during our training.

Kids, Camps, Babies and Bees

Summertime & the weather is breezy

The summer months are upon us here in Burkina. But that doesn't mean we get a break. In fact this is the season when everyone is working long hours. Since the first significant rains fell in June life in village has moved to the fields. Often the village is already quiet and deserted by dawn and it is not repopulated until dusk. The common topic of conversation now is 'How was your work in the bush?' What did you plant? Which field did you weed? However, the one break this season has brought is a respite from the heat. The rains come in dramatic African fashion- on a wall of dark blue-black clouds and with a torrent of wind proceeding. The rains have managed to completely transform the landscape as brown-red dry earth turns to grassland once again (and the herds of wildebeast return . . . I only wish). Many places I saw every day I had forgotten had ever had living things growing in them or any color. But thankfully my eyes which for so many months seemed to be starving for green, can now feast of fields of corn and waving soft grasses and bright peanut sprouts. (My first comment back in the States driving out of NYC was "It's so green!") Now as a result of the rains I can sleep inside without cooking myself in my mud-brick-tin-roof house. Yes there are still 100+ degree days but the clouds and winds make it bearable. While the pace of my neighbors daily work has picked up mine seems to have slowed down. It is difficult to plan or do anything with villagers with everyone working full days in the fields. So I fill my time this summer by volunteering at my local health clinic filing in data for records or taking temperatures or talking to women about malaria prevention. One week I was able to help out a reading and literacy camp in a village further south. The camp was held at a small village library- something completely unheard of in a highly illiterate country. Even so the village had a sweet and enthusiastic librarian and four walls of shelves filled with donated books. The kids I met were shy on the first few days of camp but soon warmed up to the boot-camp/craft-time/school/song-and-dance set up of the camp. I watched the kids get excited about reading and make a little dash to search out a book they could take home to read that night. Included in the camp were several sessions on life skills and health like hygiene, malaria and AIDS prevention. Overall it was wonderful to be a part of, regardless of how tiring a week with 10-11 year olds can be. As the summer comes to an end I hope to plan and organize a new association of beekeepers. I hope I can go out with them to collect honey and maybe design some bee suits. Lastly, an update on the well project: work was done in July and much of the interior well was cemented.

And the funding begins!

Great news! I have received my first grant to begin the well project. This initial installment is about $1,000 and comes from the Peace Corps water and sanitation fund. It will allow us to begin the work with the mason. It was been a long wait, but I am so grateful to finally see the project begin and the first part of funding arrive. Soon the website will open back up for others to give to the project. I will keep you posted!

Americaland: Three Weeks of Wonders

Where is there a land where (almost) every house has a toilet that flushes, every kitchen a fridge, every building wireless internet? Where cheeses are seen in variety and in abundance, real ketchup comes with your fries and real coffee flows from coffee makers and cafés on every corner? And two last words: ice cream. Need I say more?

Yes, this and more lies in the land beyond the sea, far from the heat and the dust of my past year in West Africa. And it was this land of plenty that I stepped back into when I went home for the past three weeks for my youngest brother's nuptial festivities. I was surprised by several things: how green it all was, how many several story buildings there were, how I was able to remain dust and sweat free for hours at a time, how the cashier at the gas station store didn't understand French, how funny an American dollar looked and how light our coins are, just how much cheese there really was, the possibilities . . and the choices of every aisle of every store (shampoos!). Many people asked me if I felt culture shock in returning, but mostly it was the little things: being amazed as I watched children at my mom's elementary school form quick and tidy lines after recess (Burkinabé children: Lines? What are lines?), being able to put ice in my drink (and actually thinking- this is maybe too cold), being able to hand over a $20 bill and the cashier not bat an eyelash at giving me change. Mostly though, it felt comfortable and cozy to slip right back into home and Vermont and the lovely, breezy weather.

It was incredibly special to be able to watch my little brother get married and I am still in shock that it happened (and that now he's an old and crotchety married man). (Sorry, Wes.)But it was beautiful, held just a walk from our house in the back fields and celebrated in our own restored barn. In summary the weather was perfect, the cake was delicious and seeing Wesley dance with his bride was priceless.

I also spent one lovely week with my dearest friend Candace in Buffalo, NY and re-connected with Houghton alums and my old Mennonite church. It was perfect; I ate well, and stayed up late, acted like a kid- eating ice cream, going to the zoo, biking around on a pink bike, flying a kite, . . another part of making the vacation a glorious respite from work and the heat.

Now after a long 52 hours of transit, I made it back to Burkina and stepped off that plane again into the 100 degree humidity. I had a flash back of first stepping off the plane onto the runway a year ago and realizing how much I have learned and experience and grown between those two moments of arrival. One a new beginning, the other a return. One a fearful nervous step, the other a confident almost relieved step back onto Burkinabé soil. Yes, America is a land of wonders, but how many more new and unique and wacky and dramatic and sad and touching and wild wonders have I discovered in this land called Burkina Faso? And how many more do I have to discover in this next year?

Fill to Overflowing

The post for my village's new well project is up and ready to go. You can read more about the project and help make this vital need a resource reality. Thank you so much in advance for your support!

A Well Without Water

So the day has finally come: I am deep in my first grant(s). My village, Tombila, needs water and they asked me to help. And I in turn ask you, dear reader, to help.

You’ve heard from organizations the very real struggle for access to clean water all over the developing world. But not many places feel the need for water more than the arid land below the Sahara known as the Sahel. Burkina Faso is characterized as a Sahelian climate with limited rainfall and about 30% of the landscape made up of scrub brush and acacia. My village falls just about on the line between desert to the north and forested land to the south. As a result not only does our region get little rainfall (only 4 months our of the year) but my village’s current wells are running to the end of their supplies. Therefore in several meetings with my village we identified a new well as the most important project to begin my Peace Corps service.

The people of Tombila showed a great deal of initiative when they began hand-digging the well in December. In only a few weeks the initial work was done and the village waits on help to allow the mason to cement and build the interior of the well finishing the project.

This new well is especially important for the village’s primary school only a few hundred meters away from the new site. Currently the school has no source of water so the children bring water with them in old soda bottles usually only ½ liter for the morning until they can go home for lunch. This time of year the temperature reaches well over 100 everyday and there is absolutely no relief to be found in the hot classroom. Imagine trying to learn in that environment.

The total cost of the new well will be $12,000. The community is able to invest approximately $3,772.00 in labor and materials. I hope to gather some funding from a source within the Peace Corps so that the total I hope to raise from friends and family is $5,254.00.

If you would like to contribute to this need more information will be posted at www.peacecorps.gov/contribute. Gifts will be tax deductible. I am excited to be helping the village of Tombila with such a necessary and tangible development goal. Please help me in this endeavor by giving according to what you are able.