Random Memos! A Ride to the Brink of Insanity

I realized I forgot somebody in my thank yous in the last post and I feel like a fool! Thank you so much Nancy for the Camel Pak and the packages! Also I just received a package from Dan & Martha, so thank you two as well! Everything is greatly appreciated!

So as I sit in my glorious mansion of a house or before I go to sleep staring up at what was stars, but is now usually clouds or my roof as the rains have begun to arrive, I usually have a substantial amount of time to just do nothing but think. The things that come into my mind are usually stupid and unsubstantial; usually regarding food, what I will I do on vacations, or what I will do when I return home. Sometimes I think about how I can fix the issues I am having with my organizations. Sometimes I just stare at a wall until I realize what I'm doing. However, sometimes, I come up with what I would call gems. When one of these gems blossoms it's way into my brain, I try to always remember to record them on my iPhone. These have been collected over the course of the last month-ish, and I wanted them to shared with the world. It's only fair that you all learn the importance of the epiphanies I have at site, in the bush, in Burkina Faso. It is surprising how many of them are movie-related, until you remember whom it is that wrote all of these. Enjoy.

Sometimes I just stop drinking water for a few hours so I can stop sweating for a little while.

You know you'll have trouble adjusting back to American pricing when paying $5 to get pants completely tailored is just absurd. And for $2 my beer better be at least a 40oz. 

You know you need a break from site when you are considering buying a goat just to slaughter it so you don't have to hear it's incessant whining all night. You also know you've become entirely too desensitized to animal slaughter when this doesn't seem all that crazy. 

Sometimes I dream in French... It must just be nonsense because I do not speak French very well. 

When people speak to me in local lang and then obviously make fun of me for not understanding, I usually just respond with English obscenities, then when it's obvious they don't understand, I just switch to random noises. They never know the difference, and it's hilarious.

This is one of...if not the only... circumstance where being confused as French is both an insult and a compliment. 

Dune is a really long book. They should remake that movie... Maybe leave out the first 30% of the book, because it is boring as hell.

What happened to the band Orgy? I liked them. They had spunk.

How to market my Peace Corps experience: I am excellent at isolating myself and can make babies cry simply with my presence.

A couple times I've been confused as being Canadian. Do I look like I'm scared of the dark?

Deodorant is a luxury for me now. I only wear it when around other Americans. It's expensive and I blend in better if I don't smell gloriously like a summer breeze.

You know you're bored when you've considered burning yourself with lye just to see if pee really will neutralize the burn... don't worry, I don't actually plan on doing this one. I accidentally burned my arm with it; that stuff sucks.

It's funny how life works; you spend your entire winter dreaming of summer. Then you move to a place of never-ending summer and you dream of seeing snow like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, which I'd also like to see again.

The song at the end of Mortal Kombat is the same song as at the end of Mean Girls. 

When I was a sophomore in college I lived in a house with three other boys. We had no dishwasher, and though I ate out a lot (like every night), I swore that I would never again live in a house with no dishwasher. The next year, I moved in with two swimmers. We had a dishwasher, mediocre as it was, and it was glorious. The next year I broke my promise. I lived without a dishwasher, and it was horrendous, even worse than the first time. After that I was very serious and adamant about the lack of a dishwasher… Now I wash my dishes bent over a bucket, pouring water on the dish via teapot, washing it, and then repeating. Seriously though, after this, I will never live without a dishwasher again. I swear it!

Heat rash is about as fun as eating a bag of rusted nails.

It drives me crazy when somebody gets a drink in a TV show or movie, takes a sip, and then abruptly leaves. It's so unrealistic.

I've lived here for almost eight months and haven't cut my hair... I've only used half a bottle of shampoo and conditioned it one time. Jealous?

10 Things I Hate About You is the quintessential 90s movie. A young Heath Ledger, Julia Styles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the 3rd Rock days, and Alex Mack. The Cardigans, Barenaked Ladies, and happy ska music. It's the ultimate nostalgia-driven movie. 

The revelation you have after killing a very tiny camel spider in your house is a horrible one. It means there are probably many, many more. Most of those I probably won't see until they aren't so tiny...

Alongside that revelation is the one that camel spiders follow scorpions... You can pick up on where I'm going with this.

I have revelations like this quite often. I will probably be throwing a few on every post from here on out.

In other news, things haven't much changed in the last week and a half, but I do have something to work on. I joined the Information Communication Technology (ICT) committee for Peace Corps. I joined it because I enjoy making videos and this was the organization that had media as one of its subcommittees. After I joined I realized that I am rather useless in that department, but this committee did have another thing that I find very important, and has not been well utilized by Peace Corps Burkina called Institutional Memory. I decided at the last committee meeting that I would take on two projects for this subcommittee. I would compile a simple language base for all of the languages that they send volunteers to. I sent out texts to all the other volunteers from my training group asking them to bring their notes to our in-service training in March, or type them up and email them to me. I would have wanted this when I got to site, so I figured it was a logical thing to give to the next group (G28) that shows up in Burkina tomorrow (this means we, G27, aren't the babies of PC Burkina anymore!). I was going to give it to them when they find out their sites in about a month or so. 

Well, I learned pretty quickly that this was a good idea in theory, but not in practice. There are too many languages and sub-languages in this country. There are over 70 of them. I speak the third string of a language less than 500,000 people speak in the world. Less than 10,000 speak my specific dialect, and there are places like that all over the country, so this project would be impossible. It is also extremely frustrating when you learn something in training, and then it is almost non-applicable at your actual site. I learned basic things in stage (internship in French, word we use for the 3-moth training), and basically all of it was useless as the dialect is different where I live as it is in Reo, 30km away, as I've said before. Also, my friends on the most part did not bring their notes, nor did they email them to me. I gave up on this project.

Out of that idea however I've had two more projects that are better in idea and practice, and hopefully they pan out. By doing a horribly miserable cold-calling campaign, I will call basically every volunteer in Peace Corps Burkina and ask about two different things. The first is what major projects they have been working on, how it is going or how it went, what problems they've encountered, and how they would do something differently if they were somebody else trying to d this project in the future. This way we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel each time somebody wants to do a project. The next idea I think is going to be essential to PCV's throughout Burkina because it entails vacations, which every volunteer looks forward to. I will find out where people went, how they got there, how much it costs to get there, how much you should expect to spend depending on what you are doing, visa information, places you can stay at and their rates/website information, language information, and what there is to do in that country or city specifically. This should help volunteers and their friends and families plan vacations without the haphazard, "I have no idea what I'm doing" feeling that everybody feels when they are trying to go to a place they've never been to.

Hopefully both of these projects pan out. They are going to take quite a while, but hopefully I will have enough information to give to the training group after the one arriving tomorrow before they move to site in December. At that point I will have been in country for over a year and be counting down the days until I am reunited with friends and family. I'm starting to understand what people mean when they say service flies by. I have a very long time left. I've only been here eight months. However, when you look at the future and how things are going to seriously spiral, it really doesn't seem like that much at all that I have left. In August I will take my first vacation out of country to Togo. In either September or October, I will take another one with mom. In late October another group will show up (G29) and hopefully I will work their stage as a facilitator (I find out in two weeks). Also on October 9th, we hit our year in country mark. In November we have our Mid-Service Conference for a week, and then in December are my birthday and the holidays. After that, we hit 2014 and with vacation days still left over, and hopefully a certain comfort level with my surroundings, I will be in my second and final hot season, followed by the rains, and then I go home. 

That said, it is June 2nd. I leave in November or December of next year, so I think I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Oh well, at least I have some things to look forward to! I hope everybody is well, and that nobody has killed as many spiders and scorpions as I have in the last week. The count is now up to ten camel spiders (three in one night) and six scorpions (one immediately after the three camel spiders, all within 40 minutes of each other!). I really hope I never hit the twenty-mark for any of these hellacious beasts!