Site Announcement!

Site announcement was about five weeks ago and I have just been too lazy to write….So alas, here I am writing. I am very happy with my site placement; I am located about 7 km outside of Zabre in a large village of about 9,500 people. Sorry kiddos, I cannot disclose my actual site because the Peace Corps does not want any psychos flying three thousand miles to come stalk me. My village is located in the south central “green region” of Burkina. I am excited to be located in the greener part of the country. I am currently commuting to Ouahigouya which is located in the northern part of the country. Because I am in the north, it is very dry, dusty, and hot. However, as I will be living in the south, I will have to put up with the humidity. Nonetheless, I think that it is a fair compromise considering during the hot season in the hottest part of the Sahel region it can get up to 130 degrees (it is a bit cooler in the south). Apparently, during these times you just want to die because there is no relief from the heat. At site, I will be living within a family compound; however, I will have my own private courtyard. I am told that I will have two small houses (one room each)—a circle thatched mud hut and a square one. The volunteers near my site tell me that the square house is used for sleeping, the circle one is used for storage, and the kitchen is outside in the courtyard. Hmmmm…I do not know how that is all going to work but I am just excited to finally have a site and a place to call home for the next two years. I also will have three moms! Yayy for triple the love!! My village has a small market every three days; I am thinking I can find your basic fruits/veggies, bread, and maybe even eggs there. In Zabre there is a larger market. Because I am so close to Ghana, Ghanaian merchants come up to Zabre with “fine goods” and yummy sweet bread. It is a good thing I have to bike 8 km to the Zabre market because with all of that yummy bread, I will be turning into a chunky monkey. Yes..….I can foresee it now—either that nickname or Mrs. Butterworth II (second in line to Penny—of course). Even though I do not have any close volunteers from my training group near me (the closest one is 80 km away on an unpaved road), I do have two volunteers—one 7km away, and another 22 km—from the training group from the year before. If you head directly north, you run into a hippopotamus reserve and if you head North West, you will see lots and lots of elephants!! While I am excited to be heading to my site in ten days, I am sad to leave my friends. Especially, since they are located all the way at the other side of the country. Even though they are pretty far away from me, each month I will get 4 days away from site (in addition to 2 vacation days)—called Time Away From Community days (TAC). I plan on visiting or meeting up with them on the weekends in Ouaga (the capital); this will be crucial to maintaining my sanity—I have been known to talk to myself. Similarly, to preserve their sanity, lots of volunteers have adopted cats and/or dogs. I was really considering this until I heard horror stories of having pets at site. One current volunteer has been through three cats. One cat was eaten—yes, that’s right. It was eaten by the locals. Another cat was subject to animistic voodoo practices; it came back with its eyes removed. I assume it died. The last one mysteriously “disappeared.” Frankly, I would have stopped after cat number two. Nevertheless, I think I will just opt to talk to myself instead of having a cat/dog.
To prepare for site, I have started to learn another local language. Bissa is spoken by only 500,000 people and is one of the lesser known languages in Burkina. It is pretty exciting that I will be learning a language that is not spoken by a lot of people; however, it is kind of not that great because I can only use it in few places in Burkina. Additionally, because only the educated know French (located mostly in the capital), I will only be working with people that speak only the local language. I am guessing about 15% of the total Burkinabe population knows French—maybe less. I will then rely on my assigned counterpart to be my translator during village sensibilizations. Bissa is proving to be a difficult language to learn. Since Bissa is not a written language, every time my tutor spells a word, he will spell it differently. For example, he may spell the number four as “she” one day and another day spell it as “chi.” Bissa, as well as the rest of the local languages, are phonetic so you just spell them how you think they sound like. Bissa speakers also eat their words which is proving to be quite frustrating. For example, instead of saying, “Iris dogta ki,” which means “how are you,” they will condense it to, “I dogta ki.” Often times, my tutor will ask me how I am doing and because it is shortened I will not understand. I will then look confused and he will say we already went over it and then I will respond, “No, I am pretty sure we did not.” He will then point to the phrase and then I will be like, “Oh…so I am thinking you ate the word again?”
I leave for site in about ten days. We were originally supposed to leave on the 20th but the Peace Corps thought it would be cruel to send us off to site so close to Christmas. Hence, we get to stay until the 26th. I am pretty happy with this arrangement because this is the first time I will be spending Christmas without the crazy, dysfunctional Bermudez clan.