Hello lovely people,

So I skillfully navigated public transportation and made it back again to my lovely village. Once again it was wonderful to hear the 'Welcome back' in different languages.. that was until they followed it up with another sentence 'Tu est plus grosse!' Literally translates into 'you look fatter!' Great. Thanks. It's really good to see you too. I'm just going to keep telling myself that it's a cultural comment meant to flatter and not actually true...

I'm going to go ahead and jump right to my most eventful moment of the month. I had been working late at the Cotton Union/Radio office playing secretary, (which I complained about not having anything to do before so I probably shouldn't complain about having to do secretary type work...) so that by the time I arrived home it was dark. I grabbed one of my water buckets along with my nifty little flashlight phone and headed over to the well in our courtyard to start pulling my water. After the first pull I poured about half the amount of water into my bucket when I heard a weird splash. One of my neighbor girls had come over to the well with me and I turned to her and said 'Wow, must be a big fish!' I was of course incredibly excited because I've never been all that good at fishing or any of those type of chance carnival type games, but for once I had just become one of those lucky few winners! So my neighbor girl grabs my light and shines it on my bucket. Definitely not a fish. Definitely a giant rat. Not a winner. I started yelling (in English of course, couldn't think of enough bad words in French to say at the time), enough so that another neighbor came over, took one look in my bucket, went back into his house and returned with a machete. He walked about 10 feet away from us, poured the bucket out and started trying to hack the thing to death. Not successful. Instead it started running frantically around the courtyard so I took off to hide in my neighbor’s house while screaming in English and leaping over buckets and small children. Not the bravest moment in my life... but it was definitely a life or rabies type of choice. Moral of the story is that I will never again pull my water at night. Now all the courtyard kids like to say 'It's a big fish!' to me and even taught the only girl in the courtyard who speaks no French how to say it in French. At least now when she actually does see a big fish she'll know what to say in French. I'm always trying to help people learn. Huh.

Actually things around here have started to pick up quite a bit. My counterpart and I have gone out to a few surrounding villages now to do compost formations which have all had a decently large turn out... of men. It's definitely a little disappointing to see that the women are never included in any of these formations, seeing as they work just as much and as hard as the men in the fields. The compost is pretty essential here due to the terrible conditions of the soil and these men, who could have continuously done the compost since right after harvesting, have waited until after the last possible moment to start their composts. This means that it won't be ready for the end of May/beginning of June when fields are being prepped, which is a really disappointing since so many of these farmers struggle to have enough money to cover an entire year. I have a feeling that the women would be a lot better at making sure to do it in time as well as be able to use some of the compost for the gardens that most of them have during the non-rainy season. Hopefully we'll be able to hold some composting formations for them as well at the end of the harvesting season, but this means that someone will have to contribute money to the compost supplies and I'm not entirely hopeful that the men will be willing to do that...

Since I've been playing secretary to the Cotton Union lately, I've been able to spend quite a bit of time over at the office which houses both the Union and the Radio. Despite the fact that over here they don't ever rigorously work to establish 'a positive work environment' or have numerous 'team bonding' workshops, the office has such an awesome work rapport. Basically they spend quite a bit of time making fun of each other and handing out sarcastic comments, which believe it or not is something I'm a big fan of! I'm also slightly obsessed with music so it's fun to be able to play my music for them and even get them to play some of it on the radio (which I'm sure is highly illegal).

Thanks to a lot of hard work from fellow PeaceCorps Volunteers, a lot of chances for already funded opportunities have come through (funding is not something we find a lot of in the PeaceCorps). One such chance was to have our village host an agriculture expert to speak with our community about harvesting, planting, fertilizing, etc. Fortunately Solenzo was one of the villages that got to host an expert so the past week we had our 3-day training seminar. We picked team leaders, so to speak, from our surrounding villages and started off the first day in a classroom. The first day was not pretty. We discussed rotation of the crops and spent what felt like 4 hours doing examples of how to rotate crops. Literally the Ag expert would put up a big box, divided into four different boxes with names of crops in each box, and ask the farmers there to rotate the crops throughout 4 years, not repeating the same one in the same box. That first day not one person in that room could do it. It was a very hard and frustrating thing to watch, both because for us that would be something in the ball park of 2nd grade math, but also because it just shows how much the education system here fails the Burkinabe. The truly wonderful thing to watch though was that these guys asked for homework example from the ag expert, came in the next day, and got the problem on the first try. I was very impressed by their desire to learn as well as help their fellow villagers and cultivators improve their field.

So I think that’s quite enough for one post…

Hope all is well for everyone back in the states and that you’re enjoying spring!

Much love.