Hello lovely people,

Well the past few weeks in village have flown by - I've given 4 trainings, held my first soccer match and attended the night of 'Zuk' in village, not to mention went on a 3 day worldwind tour of Southern Burkina...

I'll go ahead and start with the Zuk. It's a dance and as far as names go for dances, it sounds pretty cool right? None of that Waltz or Fox Trot stuff... So this 'Night of Zuk' is held yearly by the local radio station which I closely work with and so for a week leading up to the magical night pretty much everyone working there asked me about 7 times each day whether or not I was going. The only thing was, no one could ever seem to describe to me what the Zuk actually was rather than saying, 'oh it's just a dance.' The night of the dance rolls around and luckily enough for me my friend from my courtyard got permission to go to the dance from her older brother, who happens to be a very strict Muslim. Unfortunately the strictness meant that he could change his mind at any time so we had to set off towards the dance at the very uncool hour of 8:45. Besides the people that were actually working the dance we were literally the only ones there for at least 30 minutes. Not to mention they seated us under a glaring spotlight so everyone who came in could see how incredibly uncool we actually were... So we sit there for about 3 hours watching the one incredibly intoxicated person dancing solely on the dance floor (which turned out to be almost anything better than I could have watched on T.V. back home). Finally when enough people showed up my friend turned to me and goes 'Okay, this is the Zuk!' I looked at the dance floor expecting to see some kind of insane African Hip-Hop/Dirty Dancing/Salsa style dance but instead it was couples hugging each other while swaying on the dance floor. Major let down. Absolutely could of headed right back to an Eastview High School dance if I had wanted to be a part of that... But overall the night was pretty great and it made me feel young again to stay out past the normal 8:30 bed time!!

In sports news, the Solenzo girl's soccer team had their first match of... ever! My 15-19 year old girls lost to 8-10 year old boys by an incredibly score of 10 - 2 in what was probably a 50 minute match overall. You could say that we've got some work to do... Despite the fact that it was a pretty hefty loss, I am very proud that they were able to go out there in front of a crowd of unsupporting males and still try. I don't think it was easy for any of them to hear some of the comments that the guys on the sideline were making not to mention get down right laughed at, but they kept trying and actually had about 5 minutes of brilliance in there! At least it's something to build on! I also have to say thank you a million times to everyone who has been helping us with the equipment aspect, it makes both the girls and the community feel like we are a legitimate team. Honestly, thank you all so much for the generous donations!! Hopefully the winning part will follow...!

I was also able to hold some of the first formations on the plastic bag purses that I've been working on. Unfortunately for the community there exists a large rift between the women who are native to my village and those that moved here from elsewhere. The two groups want basically nothing to do with each other so whenever I teach something to one group I always have to make sure I teach it to the other one or else there's even more bickering... It's so frustrating that they don't realize that this is a huge reason that Burkinabe women in general aren't able to become more developed - I mean they don't even need the men to hold them down, they're doing a great job by fighting amongst themselves. It's incredibly hard to watch to say the least... Anyway I ended up doing the same formation with both groups and was really happy to see how excited they were to make these purses! The second formation was by far my favorite - the first day about 20-25 women showed up and couldn't figure out how to string their 'looms' or how to do a basic over/under weaving. By the end of the day there were only about 3 women who were able to adequately grasp the concept. Day 2 however, just about every women finally understood how to make the purses and were all contently weaving away. They would get really excited to show me their purses and overall just really motivated not to stop at one but to keep trying with plastic sachets until they could get professional looking purses. I took one of the better made purses back to my courtyard with me and all the ladies were telling me they wanted to buy a purse just like it, meaning that these ladies are going to be able to make money off of something that people literally cover the ground with. Very cool. The next few weeks we'll be holding quite a few more trainings on how to make more designs, how to incorporate different 'trash,' and how to make rugs from clothing scraps thrown out by tailors.

Finally the Burkina Faso Bike Tour 2009. It's not quite as big as the name might lead you to believe... it was only 3 days long but we were able to take in the Peaks of Sindou, and 3 other villages. I went from biking about 2k every 3 weeks or so to biking 76k in one day, which at the time felt like one of the worst decisions of my life. The 40k and 50k days afterwards didn't do much to help me change my mind not to mention despite the impossibility of it, I'm pretty sure the entire trip was uphill... But despite how brutal it is to sit on a bike seat for hours straight, it was by far one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life. We passed a lot of villages where the kids chased after us waving their greetings, raced Burkinabe for fun on their no gear, no brake bikes (lost of course but they bike every day...) and took in some of the beautiful orchard scenery that the South of Burkina has to offer. It was both painful and awesome and I'm glad to have done it but will probably never have the desire to do it again...!!

Tomorrow I head back to village to spend Thanksgiving there and participate in Tabaski round 2!! I hope you all have wonderful holidays as well!!

Much love.

Hello lovely people,

ONE YEAR!!!!!!!! That's right, I've managed to combat suffocating heat, battle the African wildlife (and this is more along the lines of cockroaches, rats and bats and less along the lines of lions, elephants, zebras or giraffes...), not fall into the abyss that is my latrine and do just a little bit of work in the process! Basically it feels good to have survived! One down, one to go...

Since this is nearly our half-way mark of service us in the Small Enterprise Development (SED) group got pulled into Ouaga for our mid-service conference. During that time we got a thorough (seriously) medical exam and started filling out our first of many mountains of paper. It was sooooooooooooooo incredibly good to see everyone since we haven't all been together for about 6 months now. We also had our own little 'show and tell' section of the conference where we all got up and shared our past few months, what went well vs. what didn't and projects we plan on doing in the future. Like before when we presented it was so cool to see what everyone's life was like in their village and how successful they've all been in the past year. Legitimately, despite the fact that I'm incredibly biased, this SED group that I swore in with is incredibly impressive. The whole time it was just this huge brainstorming, teamwork fest where everyone was giving out ideas and helping solve problems. There are people starting their own loan systems, people planting fields of Moringa, people starting clubs of all sorts, basically anything we can think of that'll keep us busy enough not to watch that 3rd season of Gossip Girl. It's very easy to feel alone during this Peace Corps process since normally you are the only minority, spend hours in a day talking to plants and animals, get stared at by ever male, female, child and toothless old man, go weeks and even months without seeing another American.... With all those factors working against us, I find it a bit astounding that our group can be so much more team orientated. Basically without all the support that is passed around, I don't know if I would have survived this first year.

The past week has pretty much been a reflection period of the year that's past and the year that is to come. All I can say is that I cannot wait to see what's going to happen this second year. Already I have a sweet present to bring back to my village.... Soccer uniforms!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks to the absolute generosity of my old coach and team (for those of you who didn't closely follow my career that would be the UWEC Blugolds) I'll be giving my soccer team the awesome present of a complete uniform (Normally the teams here just wear shirts that resemble each other so this is huge!!!), T-shirts to practice in and 3 brand new shiny soccer balls - also a huge feat since quality balls here are basically non-existent and very expensive which is why most kids end up forming plastic bags into soccer balls. Not incredibly durable believe it or not.... Anyway despite the fact that this team is decently terrible and has yet to figure out the concept of 'team' and 'teamwork,' it's still really cool to see the younger girls trying to play games on the sidelines in attempt to be like the older ones and to see the men at our practices actually make positive comments about how the team is playing. Other things on the agenda for the upcoming year: continue to utilize my knowledge of crafts thanks to my Girls Scout training and my mother's love of craft fairs to turn 'trash into treasures/lots of money;' attempt to win thousands of dollars for my women's shea butter group; give out trainings on Moringa, composting and other good stuff over the radio; start an English Only club; work with village women groups to teach them the basic soap making skills, and anything/everything else that I can find. I'm looking forward to the next year and hope I won't even have time to carry on long, deep conversations with my tomato plants. :)

One thing which will remain constant throughout this service is that I still miss all of you guys!! Thanks for all of your emails, calls and mail - definitely makes living over here a lot easier.

Much love.