Happy Holidays from the BF,

Our training has finally come to an end and as of December 19th, all 32 of us who made the initial journey to Burkina Faso together swore in as volunteers! We’ve now got a few days to live and relax at our training site before we get shipped off to our sites for the next two years…

But before getting into that I’ve got to describe a little bit about what happened over the past weeks… To begin with we were able to take part in one of the biggest Islam celebrations throughout the year known as Tabaski (although probably not known with that type of spelling…) Seeing as our training site is up North where a large population of Muslims live, our entire city seemed to be out celebrating the holiday. Fortunately for us we were able to get the day off of training in order to partake in the festivities! At around 9 in the morning we headed to the ‘Place of Nations’ where hundreds of Muslims took part in the prayer. It was an incredible experience, whether or not you are Muslim, to be among hundreds of people who were praying together in unison. After the morning prayer, those of us who had Christian families decided to go on a ‘Tour de Tabaski’ to other volunteer’s houses who lived with Muslim families. Over the course of the day I think we made it to four other houses where we received plenty of sheep meat (families are required to buy a white sheep and slaughter it on this day), rice, cuscus, green beans, juice and whine. Overall it was a really unique cultural experience and all the delicious food that we got to eat definitely makes it one of my favorite Burkina holidays thus far!!

For this month of December we’ve been finishing up our language and technical courses in preparation for our move to site. Last week was somewhat of the grand finale of training and all of our counterparts (the person we’ll be more or less collaborating with on projects for the next two years) all made the trip to our training site. I’d say we were all a bit nervous to meet the person that we would be spending a majority of our time with for the next couple of years, especially with most of us not quite being fluent in French yet… And of course within the first few minutes when I was trying to ask my guy what his wife does I ended up asking him what his husband does instead...How long they’ve been married for… I’m sure he was incredibly impressed…

During this time those of us who spent training in the city were also busy packing up our rooms in our host family’s house. On December 19th, same day as our swearing in date, we were once again living on our own. It was definitely nice to have freedom and independence once again but at the same time it was hard to say goodbye to the people you’ve grown accustomed to seeing and chatting with for the past 2 months. My nails and hair will not be getting the same treatment for the next 2 years…

For the time being we’re all living at our training site together… I’d say it’s pretty similar to those days I spent at Camp WAPO, although with no camp-wide capture the flag. Instead we spend the days watching movies, replaying episodes of the Office and eating as much good food as we can before village! It’s nice to have a few days to relax and hang out together before we all leave and it’s especially nice that we’ll all be able to spend Christmas together. Our plan for that day is to open Secret Santa gifts, play a little white elephant, eat at a very nice restaurant and maybe have a little ‘no-talent’ show later in the evening. All in all seems like it’s going to be a good day, although maybe a little bit weird because it’ll probably be around 90 degrees…!

It’s definitely crazy to think that in less than a week I’ll be the only English-speaking, ‘Nasara’ for quite some distance…

Hope you are all having wonderful holidays! Enjoy that snow… Merry Christmas to you all and a very Happy New Years!!!

Much love.

Greetings from BF

First of all I’d like to start by saying Happy Holidays to everyone! It’s definitely tough spending the holidays here but I get to be thankful that I am with the other volunteers at the moment! We were all able to spend thanksgiving together, and despite the fact that I missed Grandma’s cake roll, we still had an amazing feast!!

The end of the training period is coming up fast. We only have a couple weeks left of actual training, then a down week to shop for our new houses, Christmas and then we’re shipped out to our villages the following day. It’s crazy to think that the people that we’ve been seeing everyday for over the course of our time here will soon be gone. It’s definitely a little intimidating to think that sooner than later we’ll be out on our own…

During the past few weeks though they have been cramming as much knowledge into our brains as possible. We have continued on with our French learning but have also added on a local language. My local language is Jula, which, in my opinion, is a pretty amazing sounding language. Besides from the millions of language courses we’re taking, we’re also taking classes for our SED programs, such as environmental classes, soap making, miranga trees, etc. We have even taken a couple of field trips, one was a biking one to a semi-nearby village (I think it must have been more than 10K, it felt like forever) for AIDS day and the other one was to a current volunteers sight to watch a women’s group tye-dye and make hard soap (luckily we were able to get a ride to that one).

This upcoming Monday is one of the biggest festival/celebrations in Islam as well as in Burkina Faso called Tibaski (definitely not spelled right). Those of us who live in the city and have Christian families will be doing a ‘Tour of Tibaski’ to our fellow volunteers who live in a Muslim family. We’ve been told there will be plenty of food, including the slaughtering of many white sheep, as well as music and a lot of all around merriment. I am incredibly excited to take part in this grand celebration and quite possibly even more excited that we get to miss almost a full day of classes for it!

The only other thing to report is that this morning I woke up and had to wear long sleeves and pants for a good chunk of the morning. Definitely made my day to see a man zoom by on his moto in a winter parka, thick gloves and a bright scarf wrapped around his head..!

I have a feeling the rest of the time in training is going to fly by and before I know it I’ll be living in my village… hopefully with a brand new, shiny little puppy!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Merry Christmas to everyone, Happy Birthday to the many that are coming up and congrats on graduating to those that will soon be leaving Eau Claire and elsewhere.

Much love.