Well another month has passed here in village. I really can’t say that it’s been a blur of activity since once again I’ve frequently found myself staring at walls and carrying on conversations with lizards, but I’ll spare you those details and instead recap the more exciting parts of the month…

At the end of the January I attended my first formal Burkina dance of sorts. It brought back memories of 8th grade dances where one awkward soul is dancing on the dance floor and everyone else is just watching and waiting for everyone to start dancing. I think I passed about 2 hours nodding my head to the beat and wondering when I could go home. After a while of synchronized head bopping and toe tapping though, a few more brave souls ventured onto the dance floor and before long pretty much everyone was dancing. Well by that time it was unfortunately about 3 hours passed my bed time so the only thing I could do at that point was head home. I was surprised though, seeing as I thought all the parties/dances would include more African drums, chanting and dancing around a fire pit and less like 8th grade… Cultural exchange right?

The next morning I biked with some people to a village 8kish away for a large Catholic prayer gathering. It’s a special event that happens only one time a year so every Catholic in neighboring villages dresses up and heads to the outdoor church, although I wasn’t able to figure out the significance behind the first Sunday in February… It was another cultural moment and was more of what I pictured Africa to be with the African gospel choir singing and dancing and all the people sporting bright African floral prints.

Other than that most days here are about the same and more or less it’s all about what you can do here to pass some time. One of the ways I try and do that is by taking long, meandering walks around the village (which is actually more like a small town but everyone refers to places as villages here..) so people can get used to the site of a white person living among them. Most the time I either feel like I’m either running for office or competing in a Miss. America pageant with all the smiling, waving and greeting that I do. For however much I don’t particularly love being stared at, there are some moments of absolute brillance on these walks. For example, this morning I came across an old lady (old ladies are by far my favorite group of people here) who was munching on some sort of peanut butter sauce. I gave her the typical smile, wave and the African greeting and she gave me the biggest, peanut butter/toothless filled grin back and gave me the one American phrase that all Burkinabe seem to know ‘Bye-bye.’ I don’t really know why I enjoyed it so much, maybe it was how proud she looked after she said those words or maybe it was the fact that she was so happily smiling with peanut butter all over her face, but I‘m pretty sure I now love her.

I’ve had a few more meetings as well, another one with the Director of the Women’s House and one with the head members of the cotton union. The Director showed me all the items that were to be assembled into a schedule for 2009 and there were definitely a lot of things that I felt I could help with. The only disappointing part was that he had yet to set any sort of dates for the events and seeing as time is a bit different in Africa, I’m thinking that nothing will get scheduled for another month or so… I rather enjoyed the cotton union meeting as well, despite the fact that it was mainly held in Jula and I waited about 2 and ½ hours for it to begin. It kind of reminded me of one of those mafia meetings where the heads of the different families all get together for some important event… Except this gathering was more or less only about cotton… Nonetheless it had all the big-league cotton farmers from around the area present and it was interesting to watch how they conducted their meetings.

Other than that just continuing to live life one day at a time here! And trying to figure out how I’m going to survive the next few months seeing as I’m pretty sure it’s already a billion degrees during the day here and will only get hotter in the next few months…

Much love