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.
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