it's been a long time

It's been a long time

So haven't blogged in a while, so much has happened and I haven't had the internet in a while, thought it would be a good idea to take a break.

Well, what do you people who read my bog want to hear? A day in the life? Ok, take today for example...

Couldn't sleep last night because it was too hot. Kept getting up and moving around because that was the only way to get some air movement around my body. Woke up late, took a bucket bath, I've been letting my leg hair grow out, it's just too much water and too much work to shave and it's worse to have stubble than long hair. During the winter in the states, I shave my legs like once a week or every couple of days, but that's only because no one sees my legs...

Anyhow, my friend Pascaline said I got a belly after I came back from Ouaga so I took a walk this morning instead of riding my bike to get some pintard eggs and bread for breakfast.

Let me take this opportunity to discuss eggs in this country. The Mossi people and Burkinabe in general (with the exception of the Peulh (pronounced Puul)) people have decided that drinking milk from animals besides humans is silly and weird, and if you give your children eggs they will grow up to be thieves. Therefore the availability of one of my major food groups is little to none. However when Europeans came here they were like "milk, butter, eggs, yogurt, and cheese is delicious and we'll eat it even if you don't" so there is SOME to be found, however, suggest to a Burkinabe and you can milk a goat or eat yogurt that isn't flavored with sugar and vanilla they'll look at you like you've grown and extra head and you are HILARIOUS.

This brings me to pintard eggs or guinea fowl eggs. Chickens in this country generally are underfed and when they do eat, they mostly eat garbage. They smell bad, they are plucked of most of their feathers while still alive (or just loose feathers due to malnutrition, whose to say?) So free range in this country means free to range the piles of garbage and toxic waste that litters the street, free to starve and eat plastic bags and free to mate with whichever annoying ass rooster they come across. The result is an egg, always fertilized (I've heard stories of volunteers cracking and eggs and out comes a fully formed chick) with a light yellow yolk, that may or may not be rotten. Because I have never seen an egg refrigerated in this country. Not one time.

Anyhow, pintards are stupider than chickens, but at least their yolks are a healthy orange and they are typically much fresher than any chicken egg.

So after a breakfast of chili ginger omelet with tomatoes and onions, I cleaned up my house, pulled my laundry off the wall of my courtyard and generally hung out / hid in my house for the better part of the day. Today is marche day, happens every three days here in Bousse. It generally means that there are a wider variety of things to buy than on a general day and everyone comes out to say hello to the neighbors and the people who chill at the marche. Today was too hot and too bright to leave my house. I did some yoga for a bit while listening to an LSE (London school of economics) podcast about the role of public spaces and power in relation to the Arab spring.

Then I left my house because I was feeling guilty for willfully ignoring my community, so I took another walk down to the welder's shop. In any given village you will find someone who is a carpenter and at least a couple of welders. You can tell these people by the piles of scrap metal and puddles of grease in front of their shops.

I had given a drawing to the owner of one of these aforementioned establishments to build me a stand for a gravity feed faucet to put next to my latrine so that I might feel slightly more compelled to wash my hands after I leave my bodily waste in a hole in the ground. (Did I win the prize for the longest run-on sentence? You be the judge!)

And he had built the stand. All that was left was to find a bucket and attach a faucet and I was in business. That process only took 2 hours and me turning down only one offer of marriage. So I would consider that a success!! So now I have a model to bring to school, with a complete price listing of materials and labor to start a hand washing station project at my high school!

In west africa they say (inFrench) bit by bit, it will come, and every step forward feels like such a great success that I feel compelled to blog about it. But I don't just see this as a progression, but also it wasn't a regression. Because, sometimes, despite my best efforts I go backwards, I miss appointments and opportunities, sometimes I ask for things and I get the wrong thing, or I tell a taxi driver to take me one place and they take me somewhere else because they think they know better....so when I can order something complex, communicate clearly and I get something close to what I was asking for (close enough is fucking awesome! No such thing as exact, but who's keeping track anyway?) It really makes my day.

Cheers to all you first worlders out there, don't forget to enjoy the little success and I'll keep posting!