Update - 12 March 2008

It's been three months!

Thank you for your letters, packages, blog comments*, and well wishes (that mom and dad always pass on). Everything is still going great here in Burkina Faso but it has sure been a while since my last post! Well, a lot has happened since December 21st, so before I tell any special stories I'll give a brief (yea right have we met?) timeline of events:

December/January
Awesome trip to Ghana. We traveled for two weeks in a group of 11 volunteers passing through Accra, Tackorati, Cape Coast, Elmina, and the rainforest. We spent Christmas and several days on the eastern beach of Ada Foah in the good hands of exceedingly gracious hosts: my American friend Megan and her Ghanaian friend Andy. We also spent several days including New Years Eve on the western beach of Busua at a really cute and cheap beach resort. We spent one night in Kumasi which has the biggest market in West Africa (wow) and one night on the edge of the rainforest in order to do a sunrise canopy walk. Fabulous trip!

When I came back, unfortunately, I learned that my cat Soumbala was dead. Somebody killed him while I was gone but nobody will tell me who did it. This was sad. And it also, ironically, coincided with the arrival of a package from my aunt and uncle which included two thoughtful toys of catnip. Sorry, Aunt Margie. :( Soumbala, RIP.

Since I last mentioned Early Terminations of Volunteers - at least two or three more quit prior to or during December. My training group started with 29, now there are 18 left.

January
I mentioned many posts ago that I was elected to represent the GEE volunteers from my training group on the Volunteer Action Committee (VAC). VAC members serve as liaisons between the volunteers and the Peace Corps Office. In January we had our last meetings with the former country director (CD) Marily Knieriemen. The next meetings will be in April and the new CD -- a former forestry volunteer and New Hampshire state legislator -- seems great!

Our friends from Ghana paid us a visit! I hosted American Megan and Ghanaian Andy for a much too brief Burkina trip. But even though they were not in country very long, I showed them Sahel sand and Burkina transport! It was really awesome hosting these friends and getting to show them (and show them off in!) my village. Since they came to visit me, I've invited them to write a blog post (if they are interested). SO, if any of you decide to visit me and Burkina in our splendor, I'll invite you to write a post too.

January/February/March
Volleyball in village continues... and we play almost every night! This is SO fun and I am so grateful to have started up this group. Unfortunately there aren't any women except me. At first one woman fonctionnaire/teacher joined us - she had the time to play because a female cousin lives with her to help take care of her son and cook. But Valerie decided to give up because she wasn't good, and wasn't in very good shape. Despite the fact that women here lead physically demanding lives, they do not have the habit of playing sports. If a woman didn't make it through a decent amount of school, she would never have played any organized game. Even when the men and I play volleyball in the evenings, the women are home preparing to cook. The men have said, if their wives started to come they'd have to hit them for not being home to cook. Is this slightly with tongue in cheek? Maybe. In any case, the women who could find the time to play, like my teacher friend, are often overweight because being big here means you are "healthy," doing "well," and "comfortable" in your life.

My girls' club continues... and this is going very well. The girls especially love to do yoga and dance. We have run, danced, drawn, talked about our dreams, gotten to know each other a bit and next on the agenda is an intro lesson in kickboxing!

February
I started doing community-mobilizing work. Peace Corps asks that you organize at least one formal activity to identify resources and/or needs in your community. The framework is called PACA - Participatory Analysis for Community Action. This toolkit includes the following activities: the creation of a community map identifying resources and highlighting the most important, most frequented, and most loved areas in the community; a seasonal calendar tracking life throughout the year and identifying seasonal variations in work, weather, sickness, income, free time, and cultural commitments; a schedule of daily activities listing what exactly one does from morning to night; and finally a needs assessment to identify and prioritize what things could make the community better, which are actionable, and how.

I am very happy to report that I completed all of these activities with my community! The first three we worked on apart -- that is, I had three meetings with the men to complete a community map, a seasonal calendar, and a daily activities schedule; and I had three meetings with the women to create the same things. We did the final needs assessment in one big group and it went great. I had the women present their work to the men and the men present to the women. I also took the opportunity to give a presentation on myself and why I am here, working in their community. Finally, I asked the men and the women to come prepared with a long list of "what could make their community better" and a short list of five most important needs. We took the five needs of the women and the five needs of the men and created a matrix for pairwise comparison. That means we compared every need to every other need and voted between the two which one was more important. What's more important - a secondary school or a second elementary school? A secondary school. What's more important - a secondary school or a more beds in the maternity? A secondary school. And so on. In the end we were able to look at the votes that each need received and see that how they prioritized the eight we discussed.

Following the needs assessment, we met again to work on action plans. Now, the needs have been parceled out to appropriate committees (mostly already existing in the community) and each group has identified a series of "first steps". At the action planning meeting I took the opportunity to give a repeat presentation of my role in the community responding to some questions and concerns I had heard that week.

I think we have laid solid groundwork for working together in the future and I am very pleased with how all of this organizing went. By now many villagers should have a clear understanding of my role. In the future, we will need to discuss which specific problems (related to the eight priority needs) are most feasible to address.

I had a Valentines Day party. My American neighbors came to the homestead bearing chocolates and love. David even biked up with a cock over his handbars. We tied "Frank" up in my courtyard until we ate him for lunch and generally had a blast.

I started running most mornings at 8am with two (buff/ripped/perfectly-in-shape) village guys. This is hilarious because they showed up at my place one night to ask me if I could "train them". What? Excuse me? Train you? In what? "Adjara, we want you to train us -- to coach us..." Huh? You mean you want me to train you in running?... Great! I had them show up the next morning and we did my first ever loop in Africa - they took me like thirty minutes out into the God-(and the villagers)-only-knows-where-we-are bush. Train them! HA! These guys cultivate fields of grain BY HAND for a living. I hope you all see the humor in this.

March
International Women's Day... March 8th is International Women's Day and a national holiday in Burkina Faso. This is a day I have been hearing about since I arrived in village -- "Adjara, what are we going to do for the 8 mars?! Last year the men cooked and the women made tea!" Indeed there was a lot of pressure for this day to be a success. The fonctionnaire women in village organized themselves, pooled their money, and bought a bunch of food to cook. They also all bought this year's 8 mars fabric and got tailor-made matching outfits. (See my photo to the right.) I participated in their party. But I also organized at the village level.

At all my community mobilizing meetings I reminded the women to come up with ideas for the 8 mars. I told them I could offer suggestions on what we should do... but that it would mean more if it they decided themselves what the village should do for their day. In the end they wanted to do traditional dances and watch a film. I threw in the idea of girls playing soccer. Early in the morning I dressed up and set out into the village to congratulate groups of women on International Women's Day. I prepared a little speech in Fulfulde with the help of my good friends Dramane and Poitiba and I delivered it over and over to groups of 5 to 20 women gathered to pound millet.

After spending the rest of the morning cooking with the fonctionnaries, we ate a very late lunch. By the time it was ready, the village women were gathered at the school to start their dancing. After I shoveled down some quick rice, I went out to the villagers, delivered another word to the group in Fulfulfe before we finally started to dance. While this was going on, eventually, my male teacher friends finished their food and took the initiative to organize the soccer game I had scheduled. Dramane took charge as the referee for the game - girls against boys. In the first half, which was 20 minutes, the girls scored a goal. Once the second half got going, however, Dramane decided to stop the game after just 5 minutes. That way, the boys would not have the chance to score a goal and the girls would win on International Women's Day!

By the end of the traditional dancing, my volleyball buddies had organized themselves and started to play - all men. But they were waiting for me to finish dancing so I could play on the women's team. We played 5 women plus one man (the real volleyball player) against a team of men. With me and Dramane on the same team, of course we - the women - won. I found out later that some people have never seen a volleyball game in their lives. They had also certainly never seem women play and win. Finally, after allowing time for the women to go home and cook for their families, I rented out the one color TV in village to show two DVDs to everyone. One was a female Burkinabe singer/ dancer that all the women apparently love, while the other was a female Malian. At least 200 people showed up to the show that night. The day was a huge success and I was certainly totally elated/ exhausted.

Most of all though, at the end of 8 mars, I was touched by all the apparent levels of support. I was struck by the leadership of my male friends. For me, much of the day, espcially the afternoon of events, turned out to be a whirlwind. If I were left to handle everything by myself, the girls soccer game might not have gotten started, or I might have tried to insist that it was a fair match up -- only girls versus girls! Additionally, I would have refused to let a man play on the woman's volleyball team and/ or insisted that the women start playing by themselves without me while I handled other stuff.

But instead what happened was that the men who have the habit of supporting me -- my teacher friend Dramane and my school Director for two examples -- took charge and initiated a proper soccer game, and then even rigged it in our favor! On the volleyball court, all my male buddies insisted that they wait for me for the game to start because there acutally aren't any women who know how to play. The first ball of the game Dramane received and passed to me asking for it back so he could slam it and get the point. I passed it to a women who never played volleyball before in her life and she missed. Even if my instincts were to try to make everything equal, equal, equal... the fact is that they are not.

And Dramane said, "Christina, NO." The next time I gave him the ball. In the midst of a crazy day I put my faith in a trusted friend and he was right on the 8 mars. The two of us played for the whole team and we won, the women won, the village won - they saw women succeed on International Women's Day. That's what counts.

So', happy women's day, everyone. And if you are a woman reading this blog, just like me, you have a lot of reasons to be grateful.


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