nomaDZ: 20 Questions Asked To Me Via Email

David!

20 question time:
1) How are you?
2) How is Burkina now that you're doing service?
3) What are you doing?
4) What time do you wake up/go to bed?
5) Have you died yet?
6) What foods are you learning to love/avoiding like the plague?
7) What foods to do you miss the most?
8) What are you doing in your free time?
9) Do you have any free time?
10) Are you able to Skype, Facebook, etc. to keep in touch with people from home?
11) How are the living conditions?
12) Have you learned the language that they speak there or are you getting by with your French?
13) Have you been able to travel and see the rest of the country at all?
14) Have you been able to see other countries?
15) What do you miss most about the U.S.?
16) Have you made many friends?
17) Do you see other volunteers often?
18) How are you getting along with your neighbors?
19) Are your experiences shaping up to be what you expected them to be?

1. I'm alright. I've been in this country for more than 4 months, but at my site for 2 months. It has gotten easier, but is definitely still extremely difficult and frustrating because I haven't really done anything useful for anybody.

2. Like I just said, it is frustrating because I have done nothing helpful in all of the time that I have been here. Hopefully that will change shortly. I plan on teaching them how to make liquid soap in this next week.

3. I'm drinking a lot and reading a lot.

4. I usually get up around 7-8 and then go to sleep around 10, but my door is shut at 8 PM and I watch stuff on my computer. I bought a solar panel so I can charge it. Without electricity, you'd be amazed how much you just want to sleep. I used to stay up until like 4 am in the US regularly. Here that only happens on really drunken nights in Ouagadougou with friends.

5. I've died twice.

6. I cook a lot of meat which is a questionable idea when you have no idea how long its been sitting there. I don't care though, it is necessary to eat protein... they don't seem to understand that, so I take matters into my own hands. I have learned to like tomatoes, and when I rarely get a burger, I leave all of the fixings on it, which I never did before. I guess I've learned to really appreciate green food! There are a lot of things I cannot stand food wise here. They mix spaghetti with rice or macaroni with rice, which are both terrible carbo-filled catastrophes. There is god-awful stuff called Sumbala... I don't really know what it's made out of but it smells like old fish and is just horrid. They have African eggplant which tastes like a bitter bite of garbage. They eat fish whole, eyes and everything. I avoid the fish because they come from Cote D'Ivoire... that is way too far away to be travelling unrefrigerated. I do not care how well they are "preserved"; it just is not a good idea! The most eaten food in this country, the national food, is called tô. It is either millet, corn, or sorghum, mashed up with a smidgeon of water for consistency that and then usually dipped into some sort of sauce made from leaves... It is basically just a ball of muck. There are probably more, but I can't think of all of them. I eat a lot of tuna sandwiches because they are really good for you and I like things that come in cans...

7. I miss pizza so freaking much. Sometimes I can get it, but it just isn't the same. I'd kill for some Tally-Ho all you Marylanders. You have no idea how much you will miss them until you don't have them. I miss fast food. I didn't eat McDonald's in the states, but it would be amazing right about now... some delicious chicken nuggets or chicken selects... mmm... I miss being able to get whatever I want whenever I want it. Here, if I really, really want some kind of food, I have to make it. I'm about as useful as tits on a nun in a kitchen, so I really don't have that option. I missed meat so much I started just buying it, regardless of consequences, and sautéing it with tomatoes and onions galore. It's a nice reprieve whenever I need something that fairly resembles home. Most of all, I miss CHIPOTLE. My friend Kelly and I are planning to make burritos. If it is anything like Chipotle...or even Qdoba, I'll be pumped. Oh, and you can't really get cheese here unless you make it! You do that by taking liquid milk, which I am yet to come across, boiling it, and then adding vinegar. It ends up being kind of like Ricotta cheese. Americans eat cheese with basically every meal, and you don't realize how much you devour until you can't get it at all!

8. In my free time I read a lot. I've finished more books since I got to site than I did in all of college. I also spend a lot of time at the bar. Probably not the best thing, but there really is not much else to do. I can practice the language, and I do, but you can really only do that for so many hours a day... and I love beer.

9. I have more free time than you could ever imagine. It is actually ridiculous. I do not technically have a schedule, so if I do not want to do anything, I don't really have to. I commonly sit in my house for a few hours in the morning reading newspaper articles sent to me in care packages, or a book. Then after a lot of coffee and built up courage; I venture out and do whatever tasks I need to for the day. Every day the community sees my face, the more comfortable they get, and that's what I need in these first few months.

10. I can get on Facebook whenever there is an Internet connection. I can jump on my email less often that that because for some reason Yahoo takes a lot of bandwidth. Skyping requires some serious bandwidth that I really never have. At some point I may buy an Internet key, and then maybe I could use it, but it is not easy at this point. When people call me they use Skype and just call my African number, which can be attained easily by people whom are my friends. I am posting this email as a blog, so that will not happening in this. PS, genius idea on the 20 questions.

11. The living conditions are less than ideal. It is hot and getting hotter. The hot season begins at the end of February-ish. By the end of March it is going to be sweltering. We are talking temperatures that get up to 130°F. My house is all right. I have more space that I anticipated, but I have animals behind my house at all times, eating the old millet stalks. In the middle of the night it sounds like somebody is walking through the house, but it is actually just the animals meandering about out there. I have no electricity, but finagled a light to hook up to my battery that charges via solar panel. That makes cooking a hell of a lot easier, and just makes it feel a bit homier. I have a nice little courtyard, though I cannot make a garden in it yet as it is the only paved thing within a 40km span… Weird that they chose to do that, but I appreciate the thought. Soon I will build a little cabana for when the heat comes and it isn’t possible to sleep indoors.

12. My French is exponentially better than is was when I got here. Still, it is not great. I can say everything that I need to say and I think if I visited France they’d be able to understand me, but I do not think they’d enjoy it. The thing is, the French here is broken, so it is not a big deal that I screw up a tense here or there. I have actually spent this past week in my friend’s village, or city better yet (around 60,000 people), taking “classes” with her and our Peace Corps instructor we had in training. We worked on tenses and vocabulary in Lyélé, our local language. Actually, where I live they plainly call it Guaransi, which is the name of the ethnic group. Here it is slightly more structured, and actually has a name. This language has at least one accent in every single word. I could not imagine a more difficult language to write… except learning Chinese characters… or Russian… or a bunch of others. The language is actually very simple, but the vocabulary is all, 100%, brand new. Still, I think I will be speaking it in no time, as there are no articles. That is always a tricky part of learning a language. All you have to do with this one is get the verbs down. Once you have that, you’re good to go. That is tricky however. Ji means to water and to eat, and it also means house. This is a common occurrence.

“À la ji jiba,” means, “I will water the onions.” “À ma ji nama_kelanko,” means, “I will eat turkey meat.” “À la vo ji,” means, “I will go home.” That can get confusing.

The best sentence ever has got to be: À yè yè Jɔ yé. That means, “I was not in Réo.”

This language also uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has a bunch of letters we do not, as you can in the city Jɔ, which in French is Réo.

13 & 14. I have been to Léo, which is down South about 15km from the Ghanaian border. That is where I did my training for the first nine weeks. I have been to Ouagadougou a bunch of times and actually kind of know that city, or at least the parts that matter. Koudougou is my regional capital so I’ve been there a few times. That is where I go to withdraw money, so I know that city very well at this point. Yesterday we found a “movie theater” which is like an outdoor atrium with a projector. We asked if we could bring DVDs there and play them. They said that we could! We have the second week of our technical in-service training there, so that is definitely in the books. Other than that, I know the country pretty well. It is only roughly the size of Colorado. Out East is where all the game parks are where you can lions and elephants and what not. That is like 14 hours from me at this point. Down South there are waterfalls and trees and fruit and awesome things like that. In the North near Ouahigouya, which I’ve been in for a few hours to catch a bus, is really dusty, and really, really hot. Up in the Northeast, terrorists from Al-Qaeda are starting to get some footing moving down Mali, so that is off limits to Peace Corps people.

I am yet to leave the country, and I’m not allowed until after my in-service training in March. After that, I will try to make my rounds all throughout the ECOWAS countries. I really want to visit Senegal, Sierra Leone, Morocco, Ghana, Benin, and Togo. I plan on going on safari out of either eastern Burkina, or northern Benin. I also plan on going down south to see Bobo-Dioulasso and Banfora. Word on the street is there is a restaurant named MacDonald’s there. It is a makeshift McDonald’s, and supposedly tastes somewhat like the real thing. HOW IS THERE NO MCDONALDS HERE?!

15. What do I miss the most about the United States? That is really hard question to answer. Everything. I miss my family and my friends. I miss sports, food, and beer, and enjoying the three together. I miss getting a delicious fruity drink whenever I wanted one! I miss KFC and Popeye’s and Chipotle. I miss watching Cardinals basketball and football and seeing the Redskins. Of course the year I leave they are all awesome and worth watching every second of every game. I miss air conditioning. I miss cold weather and snow. I miss not sweating! I miss driving a car. I actually miss diving! I miss absolutely everything about America. This place has already really humbled me. I really did not understand how incredible all of those things are, and how great America is until I left and moved to one of the most impoverished places in the world. Even the nicest places are roughly Motel 6s in comparison. It’s crazy honestly.

16. I have made many friends. I really only a few that I am very, very close with. Those are the few that were in my training and I spent a lot of time with. They are great people, and we all come from such crazy different backgrounds. One worked on Wall Street, she is sitting right next to me waiting for me to say something bad about her. Her real name is Kelly, but we call her Jelly Pots or the President of the Sons of Zoro, our biker gang from training. Amber worked for Congress and had a beautiful view of the Capital Building. Abdul did government contracting in Chicago and had a nice view from very high up in a high-rise. Then there is me. I graduated from college… not as impressive.

17. I actually see other volunteers fairly often. I see Kelly the most often. I have to go through Réo to get to Koudougou and we often take our TAC (time away from community) weekends together either in Ouagadougou, where there is always a ton of people at the appropriately named Transit House, or in Koudougou, which is much calmer. The others I see when we plan a trip to Ouagadougou together. I’m sure we will all see a bit less of each other after IST, but we will still plan weekends every now and then, and will probably vacation together at some point.

18. My neighbors are true Burkinabé. Some have never left a radius of 15km. They are nice, but I get hit up for money a lot. Sometimes they disguise it as money for food, but usually it is money for Dolo. They also like to pretend they have no money, but when a funeral comes around they have a tendency to find some and give it to the family in an interesting fashion. I’ll have to get a video of a Guaransi funeral to really explain that one. It is unfortunate because they don’t send their kids to school oftentimes because they use all of their money at funerals or drinking Dolo. My American neighbors are few and far between. Kelly is awesome. There are only two others near me. I met one. He is a character. The other is a girl, and she seems nice enough, but I am yet to actually meet her. With time I will I’m sure. Apparently they have pool days in Koudougou as there are two pools there. One even has beer on tap. Fancy.

19. I don’t really think Peace Corps can be what you necessarily expect it to be. If you come in with expectations, you are sure to be let down. That is especially challenging because everybody comes in with expectations. The first month was especially challenging because no matter how hard you try, you get some sort of expectation of what your house will be like or what the people will be like or the such. Really though, you have no idea until you are here, biking up and down the dirt roads thinking about what a ridiculous decision you’ve made. It is also challenging because everybody has this grandiose idea that they are going to come in and make a big difference in the world. It just is not realistic. I even knew this beforehand, but I thought I’d be doing more by now. Like I said before, I spend more time reading than anything else. That is just how it is. It takes a long time to get to the point where things are really getting done. That is why the Peace Corps commitment is for two years, and that is why they replace volunteers for a total of six years before they move on.

Making a large impact takes a long time, and there is just no getting around that. If I can make a small impact, or even just set things up for the next volunteer after me, I will call it a success. But really, only time will tell at this point. After all, the three main goals of Peace Corps are to send trained workers, teach locals about Americans and the many, many, misconceptions they have (seeing pictures of me with friends has prompted people to ask me if there are really black people in America, many times), and teach Americans about countries and communities abroad. Even if I cannot really get anything done, I will still have fulfilled two of the goals. Regardless, teaching five people about expenses versus revenues makes an impact, so even something small can make a big difference… or I keep telling myself.

Number 20 did not really relate. It was a question asking if I will be going to Ghana to visit said friend. I think I’m going to go drink some beers now before I have to go back to site tomorrow/ There’s a place with Heinekens after all! Enjoy these pictures!