Hello lovely people,

So the month of April was like sitting in a sauna. For 23 hours during the day. 30 days out of the month. Pretty sure that global warming decided to pay special attention to Burkina Faso this past April. Incredibly kind of it...

Besides the weather's attempt to drain all the water from my body, April turned out to be an overall successful month. I think the reason for the success would have to resolve around discarded plastic bags. Since the beginning of the month I have started teaching classes at both the girl's center and the technical school on how to take the discarded bags and turn them into hand bags/purses. At the girls center they got off to a slow, frustrating start. It took them FOREVER to make a simple, small, woven bag but when we switched to the fused bags, everyone had one within a week, some people even had two! They were even talking about how family and friends were requesting these bags and how they would use them to bring to class, take to the market or just fashionably tote around the town! The technical college has been even more fun to teach at. There's about 40 boys and girls who come to the classes which makes it entirely more chaotic (since there is only twelve girls at the girl's center) but also makes it a lot more interesting. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty doubtful that the boys would be willing to participate in what is typically considered a girls activity, let alone be able to sew and weave a purse, but there are actually some who can do it better than the girls! This group has been so motivated, fast and hard-working that we've actually been able to create a competition between the girls and boys as to who can make the prettiest bag! Besides the huge benefit of cleaning up Solenzo it's also been a lot of fun to get closer to groups of girls other than the soccer team. Honestly the only unfortunate thing about this project is that it makes me realize how little creativity is valued in this society. This means that I have to continuously weave and design new bags as examples for the girls/boys to model theirs after because their education teaches them to copy everything rather than come up with their own ideas/designs. Fortunately one of my good friends in village is a tailor interested in creating the fused plastic purses and she's more than willing to sew all of the new models I come up with, saving me millions of hours and pin-pricks. There is actually quite a bit of interest in these recycled purses, to the point where my tailor friend is starting to take orders and make money! Lovin life.

Along that same environmental theme, I organized a clean-up day at one of the elementary schools. All the kids brought their brooms and we swept up the area around their school and picked up the plastic bags that we could use for creating the recycled purses. It was fun day to spend some time with the younger kids and the younger kids are starting to realize that you don't have to throw out plastic bags... and instead you can take them to the white girl's house! Which pretty much makes my courtyard the local trash heap... And means that these plastic bags have infiltrated every part of my life, to the point where I'm even dreaming of sewing them together in my sleep. It's made for some pretty enthralling dreams....

My soccer team, aka my life, has also been successful, as in we won our first realish match!! Our team played against the other girls team (yes there are now 2 girls teams in Solenzo, which I'm taking all the credit for) from the technical college and beat them 5-0. The win really wasn't all that exciting because the other team hasn't been practicing as long as us but the actual game itself was cool. While the amount of people couldn't really be called a crowd, there was a decent amount of people watching the game and the little kids, both boys and girls, who have been watching our practices ran up and down the sidelines screaming whenever our team scored. Honestly, I didn't even care if we won or lost it was just so cool to have people watching the girls and getting into the match. Afterwards a lot of different people, both ones that I knew and ones that I'd never met before, came up to me and told me how surprised they were that my girls could actually play and how well they played! We've also had even more add-ons and counting all the regulars, sometimes regulars and not very regulars... we've got about 30 girls! Way to many for me to handle but pretty cool nonetheless!

So I've got the rest of the month of May left in village to continue working with the recycled purses, soccer team, community garden and nutrition. One more semi-busy month left and then it's off to the WORLD CUP!!!! A very needed vacation... After there will only be 4 months left in village. I cannot believe this insane experience is slowly coming to an end and that the world of fast food, showers, air conditioning and modern technology is coming up!

Well hope spring is off to a good start for all of you and that you're enjoying the weather!

Much love.