Hello lovely people,

Well the month of January flew by in village! Just kidding, it never flies... But we have left winter behind and moved forward into the windy/dusty season. Which means that while in the middle of a conversation with someone you'll look up and discover that their finger is half-way up their nose. Even after all this time I can't say I've quite adjusted to that site...

Another thing that I will never adjust to are all the wandering animals. I don't have much talent growing things, so when I actually got 5 of my sunflowers to actually take to the soil and grow, (the other 10 died right away...) I was really proud! I checked them every time I left my courtyard to watch their progress and was so excited that one was just about to give a flower... when the sheep in my courtyard came and ate all of them. So I spent 5 minutes chucking rocks at it, which not one of them hit the target, but was able to successfully hit it with a soccer ball.. which of course it then tried to eat. So I think he really learned a valuable lesson. Legitimately before Africa I would have rather run myself of the road causing thousands of dollars in damage to my car and myself rather than hit a deer. Now, whenever our 100 ton bus goes barreling towards a donkey that's decided the middle of the road is a great place to hang out, all I can think is... 'if you're not smart enough to get out of the way when something 50 times bigger and faster than you is heading straight for you... well, survival of the smartest.' Believe me, PETA would never survive over here.

So besides unsuccessfully throwing rocks at every roaming animal I've started teaching English at our hospital. Pretty much every person here is always telling me that they expect me to 'learn them English.' Unfortunately the one phrase that they are able to come up with is 'I speak English small-small' (which is an amazing phrase because it basically destroys the entire language in fiveish words) and after that they've basically exhausted their English vocabulary. When the workers at the hospital approached me to see if I could come teach them English I figured it was just people once again saying they wanted to learn English and then never actually taking any action to learn the language... However this group was surprisingly more motivated than most so we've been meeting on a consistent basis. Basically the group consists of doctors who are used to being in charge and male nurses. Normally there's about a ratio of 5 males to 1female which makes arguments about what is considered the women's roles vs. males roles in the world incredibly lopsided... Although it is great to not be the one coming up with phrases like 'That's wife's job' or 'From man comes women who wash clothes.' Regardless they're a fun group of people to spend time with even if we do have significantly different perspectives.

The making purses out of discarded plastic trash bags is going really well as well! There are women walking around our village using them as their actual purses and showing them off to their friends and family so I'm pretty excited about how well the project has started off. My next steps will be getting them to try coming up with models themselves, drastically improve the quality of the purses, and teaching them how to organize and market their product. Basically it's a lot to do with only a little time left, especially considering how slow everything moves here in Burkina, but I'm pretty excited about the potential! I think we might even be able to find some money for recycle bins around the village so that'll behuge!! They don't actually care about recycling and will probably think their public toilets but hopefully they'll help decrease the amount of plastic burned , deaths of idiotic animals who eat them and the spreading of sickness from all the kids that walk through the trash without shoes on.

Myself and my counterpart have also decided to go on a tour of the neighboring villages giving formations on personal finances and budgets to farmers there. It's more or less trying to get them to realize that they need to save some money rather than spend all of it at once on brand new phones, motorcycles and houses. Since they get paid in a lump sum at the end of cultivating season we're trying to teach them how to calculate a budget for each month, how to save a bit for medical emergencies, how to cut out the unnecessary items such as cigarettes and Dolo and how to invest money in a garden project or animal (basically the form of banking over here...). They seem excited about what we teach them but I'm not entirely sure how much of it will end up sticking seeing as every time I step out of the courtyard there's someone zipping past on their new moto or constructing yet another huge house of which financing for will run out within 2 months...

So while I've enjoyed everything that I've done this past month my favorite project still remains by far my soccer team. Actually this past month we've run into some male critiques, something that really surprised me. Normally everyone has been pretty supportive of the team, unless of course it's the 12 year old boy who can't decide if he loves or hates girls... This time however, a teacher at the local high school has been telling the girls that the team will never last, that they're not a real team and that they shouldn't waste their time because they'll never even play a game... So awesome that a TEACHER is telling these girls that. The cool thing though is that despite the fact that he's been going around discouraging every girl on the team, we've actually had more and more girls show up. Before our practices consisted of somewhere between 8-14 girls but now they're normally more like 15-20. The team is definitely having an impact on the village, more so than I think any of them even realize. The challenge will be to have them play against a real team though, hopefully in our village, with hopefully every villager watching and cheering... Well dream big anyway, right?

Time here is starting to wind down and I feel like I've got a hundred and nine things to complete before I leave... But before I continue with all those projects I'm actually heading over to fellow West African country, Senegal for the West-African Peace Corps Volunteer conference! And the beaches... more that than anything else...! Ten days of good food, lots of English and the ocean, doesn't get much better than that!

Hope all is well for everyone back home!

Much love.