Camels, World Map and a Visit to My Village

Wow! A lot has happened since I last wrote on here. Over the Christmas break I went way up north to Gorom-Gorom with An and her friend Meghan, a PCV from Uganda. We hired a guide to take us on an over night camel trek into the desert. Riding a camel was really strange because unlike riding a horse, you have to keep your feet on the camel's neck the entire time. It was also really high up (camels are big!). We rode about 10 km outside of Gorom to a village where we slept in a sand dune. The guide made us a delicious dinner of chicken and rice which we shared with villagers. Unfortunately it was really cold. We brought mats and blankets, but we should have brought more. Now I really understand why people who live in the desert dress the way that they do. One of the villagers who came out to greet us in the morning started counting how many layers he was wearing in Fulfulde. Five! Then we almost couldn't find transport to get back to Dori from Gorom that day, but luckily we found a car and arrived just before nightfall in Dori (after waiting on the side of the road for an hour while the driver got a ride to Dori to get a spare tire-we got a flat). It was a fun trip though, and I'll try to upload the pics if I get a chance.

Then at the beginning of January a group of american college students came to my village from the University of Illinois. Their professor, Richard Akresh, was a volunteer in Togo and now studies economics. Every other year he has a "study abroad" program for two weeks in Burkina to allow students to see development projects. He contacted me a while ago to organize the visit, and I couldn't refuse. We went to my school just to give them an idea of what I do, how few resources we have, etc. Then we had lunch with the chief of my village, the mayor, my school director, and some of the other teachers (including my counterpart). After eating, each group got to ask each other cultural questions. I think that both the Americans and the Burkinabes enjoyed the opportunity to discuss with one another.

This trimester I started painting a world map mural with a group of girls at my school. It's a project that many PCVs have done all over the world, and there is even a manual on how to do it. You paint a rectangular wall space light blue and draw grid lines on it. The resulting squares correspond to squares on map section sheets in the manual. The map makers then copy square by square the map design in pencil onto the wall and paint/label the map. We're almost done. It's just to label the countries and have a ceremony to present it.

I chose a group of girls to do this project because they are so underrepresented in Burkinabe secondary schools. I have at most 30% female students, but the levels drop off tremendously in the higher classes. This allowed us to sensitize students and even other teachers who would come and watch what we were doing. Hopefully the map will become a resource for the community at large, as most people in Burkina never go to school and have never even seen a map. Even my students didn't recognize the basic forms of the land masses. Again, I'll try to upload photos.

Yay! The upload worked! The first pictures are of us makng the world map. After that I included two photos from Richard Akresh's visit to my village with his students. There's a photo of us all having lunch and a photo of the chief of my village and the mayor. The chief is the one wearing the green boubou and his special chief's hat. When the students asked him about why he wore that particular outfit, the mayor responded by saying, "so people know he's important, so they know he's the chief". After that you will see two photos of our camel trek. One with me and our guides, and another of the back of An and Meghan as we made our way out to the village.