nomaDZ: Down There With the Southron Folk! July 4th, Then Trogdor Travels the Countryside!

The readjustment to Burkina was not near as bad as I anticipated. The second day back was a hard one, knowing that I still had seven-ish months to go, but other than that it was fine. It was probably helped by the suitcase I had stuffed with food, and bottles of Jameson, Jose Cuervo, and Bulleit bourbon. I still have not touched the Cuervo; amazing (EDIT: it's almost gone now, as of 7/28). I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. On the other hand, I drank the bourbon way too quickly.

I guess I left out a pretty important aspect of my life out of this post and the last one. Over softball weekend, which was mid-February, I met a girl from the training group after mine (arrived June 2013) named Tanya. We hit it off pretty well right off the bat (see the softball reference?!). Since then, that has become a relationship. I left it out of here since frankly, that ain’t any of your business, and it was not really relevant to many things. Now however, as we spend much of our time outside of site together, most of my stories and pictures and what not have her in them, so time to spill the metaphorical beans...or when we are at her house, literal beans. She never has food, so it's pretty much beans and rice or nothing.

After a bit of time at site, when everybody cleared out of here, (there are now less than twenty people here including children so it is pretty desolate) I went to Tanya’s site for a few days before

Tanya and Koudrain. His name is Samo for "good catch." She didn't name him.

heading down to Bobo for the birthday party of one of our buddy’s, who is about to leave Burkina in less than two weeks for good. It was fun. We watched movies and what not, hung out with her villagers, and I got to experience the small, very compact, village lifestyle that I never been to. While I love my new site compared to my old one, it would have been pretty cool if I had never moved since Tanya’s site is 1.5 hours north of my old site on the same haphazard, extremely dangerous road, and we would have been relative neighbors. But I did move, and instead we live close to ten hours form each other. The highlight of the trip was when we got up one morning, I ran my fingers

The scorpion I found in my hair, promptly stomped

through my hair, and pulled out a freaking scorpion. Luckily it was dead, but as you can imagine, there was an evident degree of panic. How it got in there remains a mystery, but it is certainly something I will not forget.

After five days chez elle, we went down south to Bobo for said aforementioned birthday. We played pub golf, which I’ve never played before, but is extremely dangerous. Basically you play nine holes at nine different places with different drinking denominations at each bar. I drew for my team. Naturally I pulled Tanya, a talented drinker, and Tyler, a UofL grad and formidable teammate. Me, being the right gentleman that I am, started helping Tanya out at the first bar. This was a mistake. I didn’t want her to get fall-on-the-ground-drunk or go in disappearing mode, as she is prone to do, so I helped her out. What this did instead was put David in a right state for the evening. I didn’t make an ass of myself, but that much whiskey is sure to make a man slightly truculent, surly if you will. It was a very fun night, with too much money spent, but a few good memories created. I have a video of a buddy crushing a can on his forehead. He missed the first time so he tried again, which was a smashing success. Afterwards, he sat down and calmly said, “Am I bleeding?” We lost it.

A few more uneventuful days passed by and when we were in Ouaga I decided it was finally time to corn row my hair. There is a volunteer who knows how, so we spent a couple very painful

Antonita slowly torturing me. Worth it.

hours doing that, and then watched The Conjuring, projected on the wall in the transit house. The corn rows were not a big hit in my village, though people found it enjoyable to call me a woman repeatedly. Their sense of humor never fails to amaze, and at times infuriate me. I left them in for about a week and then pulled them out. They were incredibly itchy. I have a lot of respect for girls/women/b-boys who do that to their hair regularly. It hurts to do it, and then itches like hell when finished. You can’t

The finished product before they came out

scratch them or they’ll loosen. It’s like head-hell.

Nothing really happened for a couple weeks after that. We installed a hand-washing station at my site for when there are large gatherings. The method that they often use is to pass around a bucket and everybody washes their hands in it. It is the least sanitary thing in the world, especially when there are thirty people there. That last person’s hands are significantly dirtier after that water than they likely were to start. This will be a good means to counter that awful method…provided they use it. There is not much to do around here other than that. Like I said before, everybody left here mid-May. Nobody is left except for the second year people, and they are working in the fields all of the time. Could I join them? Yes. Do I want to work in the fields every day? No. Am I

Aaaaand right after I took them out

going to do it? Probably not. This is not the reason I am here. If I wanted to do nothing but manual labor, I would have stayed working at the farm I was at before coming here. Rather, I am doing a lot of in-country travel during the rainy season, and waiting until everybody gets back to start a garden facing my house. That will be awesome when it is functional…tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc., all just a hop, skip, and a jump away! Now that they finished the chicken coup I can get chicken eggs extremely easily, which is fantastic, and makes any meal easy…scrambled eggs. This place, compared to other places in Burkina, does not need a volunteer. The things they are doing on

This is the hand washing station we installed

their own are pretty incredible (aided by a significant grant from the Rotary Club) and there is not much I can to help them implement them. All I can do is convince the powers that be to give me time to work with the men and women when they return learn some entrepreneurial skills they can implement when they return to their villages.

In mid-June I headed back into Ouaga, with a whole gamut of things planned. First, I shaved my head. I had been thinking about it, but finally I just got sick of it and had enough beers to get the confidence to make the first cut. Was it a mistake? No. Was it a mistake to use a razor without a guard? Absolutely. I looked like a well-fed, freshly released Holocaust survivor. It was awful. Now it has grown back a bit, so it is just short, which I am fine with. It is far easier to handle, that’s for sure! And now nobody can see that I

We braided it before hacking it off

haven’t washed it in weeks; what a plus! I had planned to walk to Dedougou with Tanya (G28)*, Gregory (G27, my group)*, and Leah (G29)* from Carlie’s (G29)* site to Dedougou, Gregory’s site, which is a mere 50 km. A nail was driven into that plan when Gregory fell off his roof and almost broke his ass. Nice Gregory. Instead I went to Tanya’s. It was a cheaper and more enjoyable alternative to staying in Ouaga, and made transportation for the next leg of our trip much simpler. We stopped into Dedougou for a night en route down south again, and ran into Gregory and Leah at a bar. Dedougou is actually quite a large city. The odds that we would run into each other are not large, so you could imagine Gregory’s shock when here we are, two nasaras, in his village without telling him we’d be there. It was fun though. We ate chicken and again with the big shocker, drank beers.

Tanya and I took a bus to Bobo the next day, stopped into the southwest bureau to grab supplies for Camp Girls & Guys Lead Our World (G2LOW) Niangoloko, and continued on to

Kaddafi No. 3! Where are 1 & 2?

Banfora, about an hour and a half south of Bobo. We were jammed into a bush taxi named, “Kaddafi No. 3” that had about a hundred animal hides on the roof. At first the men seemed funny and nice. By the end of the ride and a bunch of requests for gifts and money all while trying to charge us for things we would never pay them for, they were not funny; they were assholes. With the lack of space characteristic of a bush taxi, Tanya had a stereo on her lap the entire ride. It was kind of funny… but also kind of not?

We got to Banfora and our friend Jessica (G26)*, who goes by Chula, showed up all painted up in Mexican colors. Being a Mexican-American and Mexico playing in the world cup that night, she was all hyped up. We watched Mexico dominate Croatia, went back to her house, and called it a night as we had much to do the next day! You see, Burkina Faso is really two (or about thirty?) countries thrown into one. It really is the epitome of Africa in the sense of totally arbitrarily drawn national borders stuck a ton of ethnic groups together. Many of them don’t like each other or have histories of enslaving others, etc. Bobo should be a separate country from Burkina. The southwest has many natural resources unlike the rest of the country, and has tourist sites and other exciting things. Banfora is the quintessence of this. That first full day was one of the most incredible I’ve had in this country, and the Domes, which I’ll get to, were one of the most amazing and naturally beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Tanya getting shistomaniasis!

We started biking the seventeen kilometers to the Domes. It was far but the ride was beautiful on the most part so we didn’t mind… on the way there at least. Our plan was to hike them and then explore the Cascades. Instead we made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at the cascades, only about fifteen km. We hiked up to the top, went down lower and probably closer to danger than we should have been, and just enjoyed the beauty of the raging river. I asked a group of Burkinabe if they wanted me to take their picture instead of cycling one person out of every photo to operate the camera. Naturally this turned into, “take a picture with us!” The pictures that followed were priceless, and are a series below. The water was brown due to flooding and there was no way I was going in with how nasty it looked and how quickly it was flowing, but it was awesome to witness. When Chula saw our photos she said she’d never seen it flowing that heavily (she is set to CoS in less than two weeks as well).

After the Cascades, we continued on to the domes. At some point my bike acted up. This was a bad thing to happen seventeen kilometers from civilization with no food or water and fading sun. I got very angry and cursed the bike amongst other things. Tanya felt awkward and was ahead of me, not knowing how to react to my anger, understandably. We trudged through tons of nasty mud on a shortcut through some seriously epic sugar cane fields, and my bike stopped rolling. I cleaned all the mud out and made it semi-functional. Enough at least to get us back to Banfora, I hoped.

The Domes were truly amazing. It was like nothing I had ever seen before and real natural phenomenon. Seeing pictures does not do them justice. Burkina should have made these things national monuments/should be exploiting them more, but I’m glad that they haven’t yet, or we may not have been able to climb all over them. Many times throughout the hike, maneuvering our way to the top, we stopped just to appreciate the beauty of these things and the incredible greenery that surrounded us. I know this is quite cliché, but I really was blown away by the beauty and did not understand how I was in the same country where everybody throws their trash on the ground willy-nilly or poops ten feet from the road. I have heard these domes appear in two places in the world. The other is in New Zealand or something and are quite expensive to visit, and here we are, paying $2.00 and climbing up to the top with no tour guide or trail or really any safety precautions (parts of that climb are straight up dangerous). We hung out at the top for a while, enjoying the view, taking pictures, and loving life. When I saw it was 17:00, we knew it was a race against the clock and we started our long descent. Like on the way up, I threw caution to the wind and probably went too quickly. Tanya employed the slide and scoot method, or just crab walking down the inclines. It was funny to watch, though I also had to do that at times. After we made it out and had to walk down another hill to our bikes, we saw some sort of pipeline. It curved downwards. It was a water slide. Said waterslide is pictured below. It was very strange. Then we had an encounter with a herd of bulls, cows, and calves. Some of the bulls were incredible looking. They weren’t quite Wisconsin dairy cows, but they were big boys. The cows with calves were not pleased we were there and we got some nasty looks. Both of us scurried out of there before we got gored.

The domes. There are many pictures at the bottom of these incredible structures.

The bike ride back was slightly worrisome. The sun was disappearing quickly, my bike was set to break at any moment, and Tanya really hates biking. About halfway we had to stop. A bug had flown into her eye. She couldn’t get it so I actually had to touch her eye and grab this thing. I do not like touching eyes. Eyes and knee injuries… they really get to me. Then, about five kilometers out, this jerk decides he is on the Tour de France, and gets right behind Tanya, because there is so much draft when you are biking uphill, slowly. I told her he was doing this and she was off like a bat out of hell. The remaining five were spent close to a sprint. I guess she was tired of biking and just wanted to get it over with, but I was very impressed at the speed she was cruising at. She was not pleased when we got back, but we had an awesome night still ahead of us.

We went to a hotel/restaurant called Canne a Sucre. We ate amazing food (like actually on par with America food) and got two rum flights right off the bat. Since Banfora’s sugar cane fields own the

Jessica with our two rum flights

market on sugar in the whole country, this place decided to buy that sugar and make rum with it. Wow is all I can say. I have never had liquor that good in my life. They had many different flavors as well. From what I can remember, there were coffee, mojito, pepper, cream, mint that was truly delicious, and one or two others I can’t remember. We drank, ate, and then drank again, all while talking about the white people at the next table over from us. Peace Corps volunteers tend to lose their filters after awhile. We get so used to people not being able to understand us, we forget that sometimes, they can. Fortunately they were in their own world and were paying us no attention. It’s not like we were being malicious or anything, we were just trying to figure out where they were from slash what the heck they were doing in Burkina, as volunteers usually do when they hear English-speakers. They were British for the record. Rummed up, full of good food, and exhausted, we headed back to Chula’s and went to sleep.

Our final day in Banfora was spent with hippos, good food, and a strange dance club. After getting up later than anticipated, Tanya and I biked six kilometers to the hippo lake. We got

Momma hippo playing with baby hippo!

overcharged, but were not about to turn around without seeing hippos, and retrospectively $4.00 is not that big of a deal. We got onto a very rickety pirogue (little canoe) and were paddled to the far end of the lake where the hippos were. I’m glad we did not get too close to them, as there were adult bulls and moms and young calfs. They would not have been pleased if we encroached too much. Hippos are very volatile and territorial, and one of Africa’s biggest killers, so I was not eager to be right on top of them. We kept a safe distance and saw them playing and frolicking. It was great and we got a couple good pictures (and a lot of bad ones, but it's hard on a rickety pirogue where you cannot move). We biked back in the midday, brutal

Tanya with her lily flower necklace and crown

sun. Tanya wasn’t too pleased by the biking, but all in all, it was pretty awesome.

We ate lunch at this place with a delicious brochette (kebab), and then hung out at Chula’s for a bit before going to dinner at a chicken place. The food was great, but halfway through the meal a truly epic storm came through, and it came in with some serous speed. We moved our dinner inside of the restaurant and ate chicken, drank beer, and waited out the storm. The lightning that came with it was amazing, some of the coolest I’ve ever seen. When it finally passed, we went to a nearby nightclub just to check it out. Some European guy had recently renovated it, so we wanted to see what he had done with the place. It was pretty nice. The music was classic Burkinabe, so very loud without much rhythm, with an emphasis on the loud.

We danced with each other and these two Burkinabe ladies for a while, which was hilarious. Somebody told me to do the worm. I declined. Then Tanya tried to do the worm. It was hilarious. Then I changed my

Burkinabe LOVE watching themselves dance.

mind and decided to give it a go. I succeeded, but in the process scraped the hell out of both of my feet as I was wearing sandals. They were pretty beaten up, but at the time I did not care. I would come to regret this decision later on. Late that night, at who knows what hour, we headed back to Chula’s and called it a night. The next day was going to be a long one, traveling to Niangoloko for Camp G2LOW and watching the US take on Germany in the World Cup.

We got an early start on the day…just kidding. We got a late start on the day, which was fine since we weren’t in any sort of rush. Our lone goal was to be in Niangoloko before 4 PM, when the game started. Our friend Jessica (G27)* had spoken with a bar owner the day before who said that he would play the USA vs. Germany game. This needed to be taken care of beforehand since Ghana was playing Portugal at the same time. Small interjecting tangent here: Africa does not have a lot of international success in sports. Burkina Faso sent four people to the 2012 London Olympics. They were two swimmers, two track sprinters, and one woman in judo. I can all but guarantee you that they do not reside in Burkina Faso, and have probably spent the majority of their lives in the United States or somewhere else with Olympic success. None of them made it past the first cuts. No African teams have ever won the World Cup, or been in the finals for that matter. Here is a little factoid you might be able to use in bar trivia next Tuesday night: only eight countries have ever won the World Cup, and only twelve have ever been in the final. All of these are countries that you would expect with the Germanys and the Brazils and the what nots. Uruguay won it twice (75 years ago) and England won it once. Those are the only outliers in there, if you can really count England as an outlier. That does not leave much room for the rest of the world, let alone the little ‘ole country (according to Sarah Palin) of Africa. Back to the point.

Much of our group post-America losing, but qualifying

Africans consider all African teams to be their team, with the exception of North African teams…that is divided. Therefore, most of the people in this country were cheering for Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, and lesser so, Algeria. Algeria is the reason Burkina did not make the cut for the World Cup, so many people here were understandably still bitter, especially since they made it out of group play. To get a Burkinabe to turn off one of these games to watch the US play, is quite a feat.

After we finished our miserable hour and a half bush taxi ride from Banfora to Niangoloko where we were smooshed like sardines (but what else is new?), we sat around for a bit awaiting the arrival of everybody else, and then headed to the bar. Naturally, the Ghana game was on. We made a stink of it, as did Adama, the Burkinabe that one of my friends dated for about a year. Yelling from some jerk of a Burkinabe ensued and words were exchanged, but in the end the channel was changed, and we turned on the game in about the 14^th minute. Then, once everybody had gotten over their disappointment, people embraced the 10+ nasaras that they were with. They bought us beers, they cheered against Germany, and it was a great time. America lost the game 1-0. However, Portugal beat Ghana 2-0. The United States got second in the group and advanced. Never in my life have I celebrated losing so much. It was great. Painted up and a couple beers deep, everybody was ecstatic. It was a pretty awesome experience. The rest of the night was pretty tame. Not much to share. I decided it would be a good idea to put a bug hut on top of some brush. Rationally, this should play as a bit of padding. It wasn’t. Tanya slept like a log. I slept on a log. A couple of trees underneath me did not bend as I thought they would… nor did the rocks that gave me an all-night back massage. And by massage, I mean stabbing sensation.

The next day was our training-of-trainers for Camp G2LOW so we spent the day lecturing Burkinabe on how to act and setting things up for the campers to arrive the next day. I know I posted about the Camp G2LOW I did last year in Fada N’Gourma, so I am not going to go too deep into detail about this one, as it was basically the same. I was on the red team again (by choice) and we were

Camp G2LOW Niangoloko 2014

spirited and awesome and what not. One thing that is really cool about camps like these are it is possible to see the kids come out of their shells throughout the course of the week. The first day, the kids were definitely apprehensive and nervous to get into our team cheers. By the end, I had taken myself out of it and my self-assigned leader, named Mohamed, was leading the cheers with all of the kids screaming their heads off. It was great to see these kids, who rarely get the chance to just be kids, enjoying themselves and playing like kids should. Oh, and as can be expected, red won…the arbitrary point-giving contest.

Other than that, the camp was about the same as last year, except I got deathly ill at one point. This is where things get weird, so brace yourself. If I’m going to be honest on here, why not go all out with it right? A few months ago, I was helping the people from my center shovel sand onto a tractor-trailer for our now finished chicken coop. When I got home, I had a crazy pain in my right lower

The red team! Camp G2LOW champs! I made that banner by the way...

abdomen going down to my right ball. I was worried. I called the medical officers and they told me to drink water and oral rehydration salts like madman, and if I was still in pain in the morning, come into Ouaga immediately. I listened, and the pain subsided with hydration. This same thing happened again halfway through the week of Camp G2LOW. I hydrated like crazy, and it went away. We wanted to encourage kids to exercise, so my friend Hallie (G27)* and I led sessions in the evening doing Insanity workouts. I was worried the kids were going to die, so we did easier workouts to keep them alive, which worked on the most part. Anyways, this was probably a mistake for me considering my condition, and after all of this, the pain came back. After stupid amounts of trying to hydrate, it wouldn’t go away. I again called the medical officers, and I was told to come into Ouaga to get x-rays and run some tests. I was pissed. I have never stayed in the med unit and did not want to abandon my fellow volunteers in the final two days of camp, but I had no choice.

The night before I left was the United States vs. Belgium elimination-round game. I didn’t care how crappy I felt or how high my fever was (it was 101.6 when we got back) or bad my nut hurt, I was not about to miss this game. It was a good game that we blew in the final minute. We should have scored, and instead of winning in epic American fashion, we overshot an open net, went into extra time, gave up a goal in the

Us during USA vs. Belgium when it seemed we had a chance

first five minutes, another ten minutes later, and weren’t able to fully close the gap. We lost, which sucked, but wasn’t that big a deal. We were all infuriated by this complete and total asshole behind us. He was cheering for Belgium the whole game solely because we were Americans. He wasn’t just clapping when Belgium had an opportunity. He was basically heckling us. When Belgium scored their first goal, he went nuts and was just yelling at us. We definitely talked back, which we shouldn’t have done, but he had it coming. Then we decided to go with a good method of shutting him up: we stood up and formed a semi-circle around the TV. They asked us to sit down; we laughed. The extra-time halftime happened and we did sit down. Then Belgium scored again and he continued to heckle. One person may have pulled out pepper spray and “tested” if the can worked. It didn’t hit them…though I wish it had. The US scored and I definitely showed him one of my fingers. I’ll let you decide which one. Then we almost evened the game, but failed. We had lost, and this dick had won. It was deflating.

The worst part of all of this is the basic facts of life outside of soccer. America invests an insane amount of money into this country. Every new road or bit of infrastructure you see is followed by a sign that translates to: This road funded and built by the American people. You cannot miss these and since I’ve been here, at least four major roads have been built, all from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). These roads cost millions of dollars that you and I paid for. Sitting in front of this man are ten Americans, donating more than two years of their lives to live in his country, not in the capital, but all over the place, in tiny little villages. I have never met a Belgian in this country. I’ve heard “Belgique” maybe twice since I’ve been here, and one was after the game. What have the Belgians done for Africa? You should pause reading this and google the Hutus and the Tootsies. Look up the history of arbitrary borders in Africa (France, Portugal, England, & Spain) and how the Belgians decided to separate these two ethnic groups and then put the minority group in power, setting the stage for a genocide later on. People here know about European colonists and how they screwed them over. Still this man sits behind us and heckles us for two hours. He should have been pepper sprayed. Jerk.

The next day I did one of my sessions (I should have done three but wanted to make it into Bobo by the evening to get to Ouaga early the next day) and I did said session terribly. I was exhausted, I felt like crap, and I did not have the level of pep that I usually have. The session was, “Boys and girls as friends.” It was a rather mundane session, which didn’t help. We made friendship bracelets and taught them a song about friendship. The girls taught the boys to braid their bracelets and these signified the friendship that now existed between each boy and girl in the room, and in the country as a whole. It sort of worked? I had to make the girls stop doing the work for the boys, but they eventually figured it out. We took the camp picture, which involved everybody standing in the midday sun for about an hour, and filmed the kids doing a dance that Matt and Leah had taught them during the week. That was pretty cool indeed. They massacred the banner that I had spent hours on throughout the week, which was quite irksome.

I left that evening (July 2^nd), got to Bobo, and went to a restaurant. I always thought Burkinabe restaurants only take forever when you have a bunch of people. I learned this is not the case. I waited for almost eighty minutes for a brochette and French fries. After my phone died and I no form of entertainment, I was bored and annoyed. I got into Ouaga at 13:00 the next day (July 3^rd) and had my medical appointment. We determined it was not a hernia, nor immediately dangerous, and somehow I was allowed to leave the next morning to go celebrate America Day! I was to get the weekend off and then be back in Ouaga on Monday (July 7^th). It was fantastic, very welcomed news after a couple days of being almost sure I had a hernia.

I left with a group of six other volunteers at 8:00 on America Day. We killed a bottle of Jack Daniels fresh from the states in about an hour… then had nothing to do for the next three hours. David, who I will refer to as the Captain from here on (G29, has passed the Oklahoma State Bar Exam)*, and I spent about forty-five minutes talking about crocodiles. It was very entertaining. What did learn you wonder? The largest species of crocodile in the world is in North and Central America. That’s right. No, I do not mean alligators. I mean crocodiles. Those crocs swimming around off the coast of Florida are bigger than Nile Crocs! Crazy stuff, but I digress.

We got to Garango, the same place we did the Youth Development Conference before going to the states, and went to Emily’s (G24)* house. We painted up all America-like, drank horrible gin and whiskey ($4 total for a liter of each), played drinking games, and did Blue Waves. A Blue Wave is

July 4th Garango crew

when you take a shot of said horrible whiskey and then get nailed in the face by two large basins of water. It is an excellent chaser; I cannot lie. We ate chicken and team DABA (Amber, Joa, and myself) won a game of survivor flip cup. We watched Germany score on France and then stopped watching because those are literally the last two teams I want to watch play anything. I was hoping the score would end up Germany: 0, France: -1. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, but the result was the same. It was a very fun day. It wasn’t quite the epic festival that July 4, 2013 was, but it was a lot of fun.

After searching for lost phones and wallets and pride, a group of seven and myself left Garango

The guys in Garango... I don't know whose idea the splits were

en route to Tenkodogo, 15km from my village. We went to the same pool as my birthday, which was filthy and not worth paying a cent for. I hiked up the road to the newly opened, swanky, Hotel Laafi. This hotel has four stars above its logo. Why they didn’t spring for that fifth star is something I will always wonder considering this place is privately funded and has more money thrown into it than most of Tenkodogo combined. I talked the lady at the hotel down from five mille ($10), which is exorbitant for a Peace Corps Volunteer to one mille ($2). This is definitely one of my proudest negotiations. It won’t last, but if we can leave that price at $4, I will be a happy man. The site of eight dirty PCVs with all of their ripped bags and other ridiculous packages and things walking through the lobby of this hotel was pretty hilarious. I had the three-quarters full bottle of cheap whiskey in my backpack’s side pocket with a mini American flag alongside of it. We looked like transient hobos honestly. But the pool was very refreshing and the food was good and reasonably priced, which was a welcomed surprise.

At one point I asked the concierge if there was a bathroom inside. She directed me to the ones

Hotel Laafi! Swanky right?!

that were outside near the pool. I knew those existed, but I wanted to see a nice indoor, expensive bathroom. I explained to her (a Burkinabé woman) that many bathrooms in this country are not quite up to standard and I wanted to see a nice one. It came out awkwardly… She was confused. I gave up and walked out of the lobby with my tail between my legs. It was awful.

We came back to my house in the evening, made a delicious pasta dinner with some mango/banana smoothies thanks to my blender I brought back from America (which is now broken because African wattage is nuts), and all kind of conked out pretty quickly. The next day we watched The Lego Movie, which was great and I highly recommend it. It was the day of the Wimbledon final and my friend Hallie and The Captain wanted to watch it desperately. I always like watching Roger Federer cry so I went with them in search of a television with the channel. We checked four different televisions and none of them had the channel, so we stared at numbers on a screen. We did manage to find a Wizards vs. Bulls NBA game from March, which was pretty funny. The night was uneventful, with avocado sandwiches and a bunch of friends shooting the shit. It was fun and quite relaxing.

Hallie and I left early in the morning, her to go to Natalie’s site to paint a mural and celebrate Emma’s birthday, and me to Ouagadougou for all of that fun medical stuff. Kara, , and Amber stayed

Amber stayed behind and took creepy pictures
with the doll hand found in my courtyard...

behind because who wants to leave the house at 6:00 AM? I got to Ouaga, went straight the radiology center to get some x-rays, and was promptly fondled by a Burkinabe doctor. I cannot say I’ve ever had a more uncomfortable doctor’s experience… This was no turn your head and cough, oh no, this was about fifteen minutes of intimacy that I easily could have done without. I think the doctor was getting annoyed because I didn’t understand some of the things he was saying. I apologized. We never learned the words for all of the things inside of the male reproductive system in training. I’ll be sure to put that in my Peace Corps evaluation at the end, “need to learn more words relating to the balls.”

Turns out I’m fine…according to them. Just a good ole’ fashioned case of Epididymitis! Whatever that means… Whatever it is, it was caused by too much strain from exercising too hard too often. All that matters is that I don’t have cancer or a hernia or anything bad really. Unfortunately, what it has done is make it so that I cannot work out. I was told to rest a lot until it gets better, so it has been a month since I’ve exercised, which is nuts to me. Also, because I was exercising so much before, my metabolism kicked back into high gear, like when I was in college. So now I’ve been dropping weight like a mad man, despite eating less healthily and not exercising. I know all the women reading this want to stab me… but I don’t like it either, trust me. I’m starting to look like a shell of myself!

There isn’t really much else to report. Tanya came to my site for a couple days and we had some of the best meals that I’ve had in this country: crazy, delicious nachos, mac and cheese with all sorts of goodies, margaritas, hash browns, sausages (made from soy!), latkes, and lots of pineapple. It was awesome. Four nights ago a plane crashed en route to Algiers, Algeria from Ouaga. Quite a few people were worried I was on the plane. I was not, thank goodness. The next night, eleven volunteers from the training group before me closed out their services, jumped on some planes, and left here unscathed, again, thank goodness. The night before they left was one hell of a party though. I look forward to getting on a plane out of here, and that time is coming pretty rapidly! My close-of-service conference is in two weeks and then it is just administrative stuff until all of the sudden, I am in Tallinn, Estonia! It cannot come soon enough.

One last story before I close out this insanely long post. The other day when I was coming into Ouaga I experienced possibly the worst thing I’ve seen since I’ve been here, and it wouldn’t be right to not mention it. I have seen mothers smack their one year olds so hard I thought they’d have brain damage. I saw a man fall of the Greyhound Bus-sized TKF bus that I used to take to get to Bouldié and break his leg. I’ve seen ritual sacrifices of chickens, goats, and cows. This one takes the cake.

I was waiting for a bush taxi to come through Gonkin, a couple kilometers outside of Dialgaye. I need to get one there to get to Koupela, to take a real bus all the way into Ouaga. There was a girl, probably around twenty, and clearly mentally handicapped. In French/in Burkina, they call these people fous, which means crazy person. With the amount of malnutrition and lack of health care in this country, there are a ton of them, usually at least one in every village. This girl was walking towards me, and through two years I’ve learned the best thing to do is to ignore them or they won’t stop asking you for money or touching you or whatever they decide to do at that moment. Well she got very near me, probably around two yards, and stopped. Then a man came out of nowhere with what looked like a bunch of wiring encased in metal and lashed the crap out of her. I heard it coming down like a whip, and it made serious contact. While we learned early on about bystander intervention and how dangerous it can be, there was no way I was about to stand there while this man beat the shit out of this handicapped girl. I screamed at him and told him to stop. He tried to say she did something to his boutique behind me. He wouldn’t tell me what when I asked, nor could anybody explain that me. All they kept saying was, “Elle a fait quelque chose. Elle a fait quelque chose.” This translates to, “She did something. She did something.”

The man knocked it off for a minute. Naturally the girl hung around near me for about five minutes. I knew that as soon as the bush taxi came and I left, the same thing was going to happen, so I was hoping she would walk away. She did, and he pursued. I yelled at him again as he passed by, but there was nothing I could do but watch. It does not take long for things to turn in Africa, and Burkina has had a series of lynch mobs in the past couple of months, so physically stopping the man was a bad idea and I knew it. Instead, I screamed at him from a distance, and watched as he flogged her bloody. It was disgusting and despicable. I was noticeably upset. When she walked back over towards me, which I really did not understand the point of; she was bleeding, a lot. About two minutes later she turned on me and started screaming in Mooré. I don’t know what she was saying, but I can only assume it was along the lines of, “I thought you were going to help me,” or, “it was worse because of you,” or something close to that. I tried to help; I really did, but there was only so much I could do.

I have not been that angry since I was a child. So what did all of the Burkinabé do? They laughed at me for trying to help her and for being so angry. I cannot express the anger I felt when I got on the bush taxi that eventually showed up. My French is not at the level where I can really go off on somebody and have it all make sense, so I screamed at them that they were savages in English…I believe that is the same word in French. I know I shouldn’t have done that, but if the shoe fits and you deserve it, then I am probably going to say it to you.

My Peace Corps clock is winding down. I will be gone form this country in less than four months. Some days I wish that I could skip all that time and get on a plane immediately. Other times I try to stay positive and tell myself to enjoy the last couple months, and do what I can work wise. Amazingly, this morning I had the same thought that I had when I got to this country in October 2012. It was, “holy crap, I can’t believe I’m actually in Africa.” This is a very cool continent with tons of things to offer. When I think about all the negativity and depression and horrible things that I’ve written in here, it makes me sad. I think that in the future I will look at all of this as a good experience. I will never regret joining Peace Corps, and I’m glad that I was able to see and smell and experience things that most people in the world never will. However, it bothers me that such an incredible, unique experience has been so marred not only by a Peace Corps bureau that has been in shambles since before I arrived, but also my own self-pity and depression and inability to get the things done that I wanted to before arrival. Still, and I have a few months left to get some more stuff done, this country and this experience and the people that I have shared it with have taught me so much about myself and the world that we live in that I know I will never look at these things the same. I have a passion for travel and getting into trouble and living the life that a mid-twenties person should that I never had before (though I definitely got into trouble, it is not the same thing). I am excited for what my future has to offer. Everyday I have a new idea of what I want to be when I grow up; where I want to live, what I want to do, who I want to do it with. I am excited for what the future has to offer and if it was not for this experience, I would probably be nervous as hell about it. But I know that if I can make it through this experience, and the Burkinabe can keep living their lives of hardship when I am living in relative luxury, that whatever comes in the future will be a welcomed challenge. Now if only we could get that challenge started immediately.

3 MORE MONTHS! (ish)

* G27 is my training group. G26 is the group before me that is in the process of leaving at the time this was posted. G28 came in eight months after me. G29 is the group that arrived one year after mine. Now G30 is here in training, swearing in on August 19, 2014.