Greetings from Burkina Faso… a land that is basking in the glow of Obama’s win.

A few of us stayed over at our training sight, ECLA, to watch the ‘live’ television coverage of the election on Burkina’s local (and I believe only) channel. Needless to say the set looked like something out of the 60’s and there were no pretty colored charts, maps or predictions to follow. I won’t lie, I fell asleep at about 11:30pm BF time since the coverage wasn’t quite as stimulating as CNN… Anyway at about 5am BF time I woke up in time to catch the end of Obama’s acceptance speech. There were only a few of us volunteers left to watch the election but we cheered particularly loud when he talked about the people huddled around a radio listening to the results. Ours was a little fancier then a radio but I’m pretty sure he was talking about us… The next day we were celebrities around Ouahigouya and instead of being solely called ‘Nesara’ (not a clue how to spell that but pretty sure it means foreigner or whitey) and ‘les blancs’ by the small children we were called Obama by all. It was a welcome change!

To back up a bit and write some about the week beforehand…

We had our much anticipated Dymystification visits last week along with our overnight stay in the capital city. Myself and three other girls got to go and visit a Peace Corps Volunteer located in the center of the country in one of the largest city’s, Koudougou. Let’s just say that our visit ended up being a bit more like a vacation... Well I suppose to us this was as exciting of a vacation as going to Hawaii if we were living in the U.S.. But to you all it would be more like a vacation to Iowa complete with a three nights stay at the DaysInn. Our ‘vacay’ went a little something like this: picked out dresses from a catalogue that we wanted made, shopped at a local market for materials, dropped off the photo and material at a tailors to have it made, made delicious food like fruit salad and mashed potatoes (to be fair I didn‘t do any of the cooking, I mostly just ate the fruit as soon as it was cut up and put into the bowel.. Luckily we had our very own Rachel Ray with us), lounged out by the local pool, and spent the last night celebrating Halloween with costumes and a pumpkin but were safely tucked in bed by 8:30 before things got too out of hand…It was definitely nice to get away from Ouahigouya for a little while and to be able to see how a fellow volunteer lives and works.

After our visit our entire Small Enterprise Development (SED) group met up in Ouagadougou to spend a couple of nights at the transit house. Although the name implies that it is somewhat of a halfway house for recovering addicts, turns out it’s just the place that all Peace Corps volunteers around the world can stay in for a very low price… Free internet included! If that doesn’t make you want to join…. While we were in Ouaga we also had a Mexican feast cooked for us at our SED director’s house. It was probably the most amazing thing I’ve eaten yet!!

We returned back to ECLA after our little vacation/trip and it was back to classes in Ouahigouya. We’re fast approaching the mid way mark of our pre-service training and I can speak for most of the group when I say we are looking forward to the end! It seems as if everyone had a great time on our Dymst visit and cannot wait to get into our villages. Although I don’t know if us SED kids are entirely ready for the village seeing as many of us have electricity, a television and some of us lucky ones even have running water… A couple of my health volunteer friends came over to see the house and meet the fam and let me know that this life was in no way similar to village living. I will be taking a trip out to the bush next weekend to stay the night though, so I’m going to finally experience the African bush!
And as a side note, I think that language for all is improving. It seemed like so long ago that I was telling my host mother ‘I friend rice’ rather than ‘I like rice.’ Luckily for me though, there have been other large blunders within our group. I think my favorite of all the stories though has to be about one of my favorite health girls sprinkling millet (some sort of grain) all around her toilet because she thought that her family had told her to do that. They were a bit confused when she came back with the bin and no millet… Pretty soon we will begin attempting to learn a local African language so I’m sure there will be plenty more miscommunications along the way!

Not too much else on the horizon except within a week we will be learning which village will be graced with our presence! I know Denny is particularly looking forward to that seeing as he bought the worlds most detailed map of Burkina that shows every city/town/village/tribe/elephant and I’m sure he’d be happy to let you know precisely where I’m located!

Wishing I was in the states right now to see the aftermath of the elections….

Much love.