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.