February Etude

Written February 26, 2009

This is the life. I can understand why former Peace Corps Volunteers are jealous and think fondly of the life as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The reason is that you are kinda your own boss, and you set your own hours. Starting in April I will actually begin projects and from what I understand I will be making my own schedule. I will embrace this freedom and revel in all my free time. Unlike my fellow volunteers that come right out of college I have worked for the past couple years. Therefore, I am embracing all this free time with no ramifications or deadlines to worry about. It is like college but with nothing due and no tests to study for.

This past month my host NGO ASUDEC actually allowed me to live my etude. For the entire month I have been in Diebougou and have only gone out to village once. I also only have meetings for 1-2 hours two times a week. The rest of the time is mine.

What does a normal day entail? I normally get up with the sun or the animals depending on which one wakes me first. I then get ready for the day and depending on what time it is I head out for my daily walk around town. During my walk I normally pick up what I might need to eat for the day. Since there is no refrigeration or way to preserve food I normally have to buy everything that day. I head to center ville first where most of the alimentations are and stop in and say hi to all the boutique owners. I then wind my way back through the marche were I pick up my vegetables and bread for the day. My tour of the village normally takes about an hour sometimes more. I only head to the post office once a week.

When I get back to my house I open all my windows and doors and try to get the breeze to come into my house. There are number of activities that I can keep myself busy with:

1) Write Letters to Friends or Family (I normally send 3-4 letters out every week).
2) Write in my journal (This takes anywhere from 1-2 hours a day)
3) Read a Book
4) Watch Movies/TV Shows (My closest neighbor Linda (23 KM away) left her external hard drive with me since she cannot use it at her house, she has no electricity. It has been my saving grace this past month after the robbery. Slumdog Millionaire is an amazing film by the way).
5) Teach myself French
6) Write a blog entry or respond to emails that I have copied onto a junk drive
7) Have text conversations with friends in Burkina Faso on my cell phone
8) Take a nap
9) Wash my laundry and do my dishes by hand. (This normally takes about 3-4 hours. Makes me very thankful for machines now).

Those are the 7 things I do to pass the time here at my site. I vary it up daily. One day I might do one activity all day the next day I will do another. I normally always spend 1-2 hours writing in my journal everyday. The main point of these activities is to stay still and not sweat too much. I normally do everything on the floor because it is the coolest spot. I lay out a mat on the concrete and write, read, or take a nap. When a care package comes with magazines, I will devote hours reading the “latest” news in The Economist, People, or Entertainment Weekly from cover to cover. Normally, the “latest” is a month late, but it is better then nothing. Another ingenious thing that I do is listen to Podcasts. When I was last in Ouaga I downloaded the latest podcasts for NPR so I could listen to them back here at my house. As I am preparing lunch or dinner I normally put on Wait … Wait Don’t Tell Me.. . and listen as I prepare my food.

I really need to purchase a radio so I can listen to the BBC every night at 6pm. That is what a lot of my fellow volunteers do. I am putting it on my shopping list for this weekend. That will create something new to do in my daily routine.

When it reaches 5pm I normally go outside and relax on a mat or take another tour of village. If I feel like treating myself I head into center ville and buy myself some ice cold Fanta Apple Soda and Sparkling Water and then walk back to my house. I mix the two beverages at home and enjoy the crisp sparkling sensation in my mouth as it cools me down.

I have had to move my nightly exercise routine from 5pm to later when it is pitch dark outside. I was attracting peeping toms while the sun was still out. Either children or women would look through my straw fence while I did my pilates/excercises. It really upset me so I moved inside for a week but it is a lot hotter indoors with no air circulation. So this week I turn off all the lights in my house and go out and exercise in the dark around 7pm each night and no longer worry about people spying on me; everything is dark.

With all of this free time I do feel guilty every once in a while because I feel so inefficient. But then I look out my back window and all my neighbors are laying on mats under their mango trees taking naps or listening to the radio. Life is just different over here, and they embrace their repose time. Therefore, I would say 90% of me has given into this life style, 10% feels the guilt. I need to embrace it now because I know in 5 years when I have that 8am-6pm job again I will be jealous of all this repose time I have now. In the United States I would be considered lazy but here with the heat and the lack of amenities personal reading/writing is an efficient use of my time.

February Highlights:

A) The first week in February I felt like I ran a hotel, I had a different Peace Corps volunteer come through and stay at my house every night. Strangers become good friends in a matter of minutes over the common bond that we are all PCVs in Burkina Faso. My house is like the transit house of my area of Burkina Faso. It is nice to have company but makes me enjoy my privacy and alone time even more. Having company also lets me go out into Diebougou at night. I normally do not leave my house after 6pm because I do not feel safe. There are no street lamps and I am a women so I stay close to home. Therefore, it was great to go out at night when PCV Clay came and visited me. Diebougou looks completely different at night and has a different vibe, I am definitely glad I stay indoors when alone.

B) My counterpart Lagou and his wife came over on February 14th for dinner. Valentine’s Day is just another day over here, nothing special but it was nice to make spaghetti and banana bread for my guests. We talked in French about life here in Burkina Faso compared to the United States late into the night.

C) As I tried to sleep during the early morning hours of February 17th the wind picked up and it sounded and felt like a hurricane was ripping through my house. I felt like my roof, which is just a bunch of corrugated steel, was going to be blown off my house. Then the rain came and it poured down on my house, which is deafening but I was so happy because it cooled the air. I even did not mind that some rain came in through the window. Windows here are metal slats and there is no glass so when it rains, water just comes inside your house. It was overcast for the next couple days and cooler than it had been. I was so happy and wore my gore tex mountain shoes because it was muddy everywhere. There is no irrigation or drainpipes here, mud everywhere, horrible roads. The Burkinabe were so surprised because it normally does not rain till June, people acted like it was the worst thing ever. Imagine if Florida got 5 feet of snow. Kids actually thought they would not have school because it rained. Quite funny but I enjoyed a couple more days of reasonable temperatures and looked forward to the rainy season (actually monsoon season), though I will have to get used to the noise in my house.

D) This month I also had my first whole evening without electricity. I lived like a true villager. The electricity goes out normally 5-7 times a week, most of the time during the day. It even turned off once during the writing of this blog. It really does not bother me, because I try not to use my electricity that much, and most of the electricity outages are during the day when it is light out. In January when the electricity would go out at night it would be just for a couple minutes and then come back on. Well on February 24th the electricity went out at 7pm and never came back on. I was so thankful my family sent me a nice smelling candle from the States (Thanks!). I just lit the candle and wrote in my journal, with my face inches from the page squinting at my writing. I also took my mat outside and laid on the ground looking up at the stairs. With no electricity to veil the sky with light, the stars here held undisputed dominion over the night. The amount of stars is breathtaking and a great advantage of village life without electricity. I took my bucket bath in pitch black and went to bed early. I read my book by flashlight and enjoyed the quietness.

Many of my PCV counterparts live like this everyday and it makes me VERY VERY THANKFUL that I have electricity. Some village PCVs do buy car batteries or solar panels to use at night to power lights but most PCVs use candles or kerosene lamps and go to bed very early.

This past week I have conducted meetings with the other NGOs and associations here in DBG for potential opportunities to collaborate during the next two years. For example I met with Women groups, Organizations for AIDS/HIV.

I think the organization I will most likely work with will be the Handicap Association, they are my neighbors and I really liked the lady working there. Since they are right next door I can easily visit the association and help any way I can. I was shocked that they did not even have a ramp for wheel chairs, a project I can hopefully work on. I will say that this issue has affected me the most since I arrived in Burkina four months ago. I cannot believe how many Burkinabe are handicapped. I found out that 1 in 5 people in developing countries are handicapped and it is heartbreaking because it makes their lives that much more difficult. I am so excited to make a difference even if it is just getting some cement to make a ramp for their building!

As February comes to a close I am amazed at how fast it went by and that I never left my site once. Now that I am settled I can see how these two years will just fly by.

Please excuse me now as I go dunk my head in a bucket of water!!