Having Patience

Tyler and I are proud to welcome a new member to our Tougan family – our new kitty, Patience. As Tyler said, this is the first time in his life that he has had a pet that doesn’t live in a glass tank! Patience, so named to remind us how important it is to have patience here, was a gift from our good friend Yaro. The first few days were rough (as they ought to have been considering that Patience was vaccinated and transported in a cardboard box on a very bumpy bike ride to our house)! But since those initial two days, Patience has proved to be the most social cat either of us has ever known. He is a blessing to have in our home, helps us slow down a little each day, and has significantly and pleasantly depleted the cricket population in our house :)

Tyler started teaching at the provincial high school last week and loves it! He teaches three math classes of middle school-aged kids and is really enjoying getting to know them. Tyler teaches during the morning hours and does lesson planning in the afternoons. Little by little, Tyler is also getting to know the other teacher and how the Burkinabé education system works (which is not always easy to get use to!) Teaching and planning in French is definitely a challenge, but has thus far proven quite rewarding.

Work for me has been a bit more “undefined” as it is not yet clear what group of kids I will be working with. The education ministry, on a Tougan level, decided to invite me into Alwata Diawara (1 of 9 elementary schools here in Tougan) to start my work. Since classes at Alwata did not officially begin until this week, a lot of what I have been doing there is hanging out with teachers and strategizing with the school director and my counterpart. By next week I will probably be sitting in on a couple of classes each day to get to know the students and teachers better and start identifying which girls I would like to work with (i.e. to do girl’s clubs, health classes, awareness meetings, etc.) I have also been keeping busy attending various meetings in Tougan related to Girl’s Education and Empowerment (i.e. monthly meeting of Tougan’s women’s group and a training for the province’s parents of students associations). I also had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Tapsoba, the person sent by the ministry of la promotion des femmes (promotion of women) to work in Tougan. Mr. Tapsoba and I are equally excited to have met and look forward to working together on girl’s education and empowerment issues.

Aside from work, Tyler and I have been keeping busy meeting up with new friends and acquaintances and attending community events. Unfortunately, such community events have included two funerals within one week – the first for the young owner of a local bar/eatery and the other for the young daughter (school-aged) of a teacher at Alwata. Both funerals were attended by at least 200-300 people (if not more) and were very much somber community gatherings. It was, however, amazing to see how everyone came together - Christian, Muslim, and Animist – to mourn with the family and pray that God give healing and strength. According to one of the priests at the service of the young girl, she was the second student the private school has lost this year alone.

Tyler and I continue to have a close connection with the Yaro family and are at their house every other night for dinner. We have eaten so much tô (the staple dish here in Burkina) in the last month that Tyler and I have finally admitted defeat and have actually taken a liking to the once avoided food. Tô, for those unfamiliar with the food, is a squishy, almost jello-like white substance usually made of crushed corn or millet and served with one of several sauces (i.e. fish sauce, okra sauce, eggplant sauce, leaves of a baobab tree sauce, and if we’re lucky, goat meatball sauce!) Traditionally, the dish is also eaten with your hands, though Yaro always offers us a spoon. My counterpart, Alice, has also had us over for several meals and continues to join us at our house every once and a while to “see what American food is like.” Our last culinary exchange was a very tasty chili served with an excellent corn bread that Tyler made in our Dutch oven. We also spent last Saturday “hanging out” with Mr. Tapsoba and his wife Salma eating lemonade cookies that I made, and if you can believe it, watching two Steven Segal movies at Tapsoba’s house (the first activity was certainly preferred over the second!) Nonetheless, it was a good time.

We’ve kept relatively busy with our efforts to improve our once barren courtyard. When we arrived it was a lot of red-brown dirt, various ugly piles of gravel and rocks and bricks that we weren’t allowed to use. Since then we’ve made a walkway with the gravel and rocks and managed to plant some trees, flowers, shrubs and other plants. We’ve been told that we will be eating bananas, papayas and this thing called pomme cannelle from our courtyard before we leave, and can currently make tea using the mint and lemongrass that we’ve planted. Our next improvement will be having a hangar (thatched roof awning) constructed next to the house which will provide some shade for us to sit under with our guests, and hopefully keep the walls of our house from warming up so much during the day.

October has been a hot one, with temperatures in our house reaching 95°F (even warmer outside). The unshaded concrete walls retain a lot of heat, and if you touch them at three in the morning they are still warm from the afternoon sun. Fortunately, we’ve been told, the weather should start cooling down in November and we can look forward to days in the 70s! We shall see.

Thank you again to everyone who has been writing and Skyping us (it is always one of the best part of our days, hearing from all of you!) We continue to miss you tremendously and pray all is well back State-side. Much love!

Jessi & Tyler

Home sweet home in Tougan. There was actually a rainbow over the house when we took the photo but its pretty faint.

This is the barrage/seasonal lake next to Tougan. No hippos here, but supposedly we can find them 20 miles from here.

Jessi demonstrates how to eat the IMFAMOUS tô (pronounced toe) with our favorite goat meatball sauce, made by Madame Yaro. Ok, we actually use spoons most of the time.

Transporting chairs and lemongrass and mint back to our house the Burkinabè way, on bike (donkey cart and moto work too). We have transported a surprising array of things on our bikes.

Painting our house the first week here. If you think this looks precarious, you are correct, it was. Thankfully the paint didn't dry quite like that.

Tyler bringing water into the courtyard for our seedlings. Yes, it is as heavy as it looks.

Tyler and one of the many trees we planted. Note the mint and lemongrass in background, and overall color of the yard. Yep, it was just dirt before.

Welcome to our study/dining room. The blue really does make you think its cooler inside than it is. We spend most of our time in this room, probably because the two windows in here make it 15 degrees cooler than the other room in our house.

Welcome to our kitchen, the second half of the room shown above. Gas stove, propane tank, cupboard that doesn't keep insects out of our food, and our water filter. Oh how we miss running water, but cooking really is an escape for Jessi (especially when we can mimic US food).

Jessi and our kitty, Patience. Isn't he cute?

Patience is definitely Tylers little boy. Tyler is considering being a cat person over a dog person, at least in Burkina.

Whats happening in Tougan

Apologies for the delay in blog entries (this one was actually written 5 days ago but we haven't had internet til now). Life has certainly been busy with meeting people, language tutoring, hosting other volunteers, my first week long teacher inservice, and making home. I realized this week that we’ve already completed over 10% of our service here. Holy cow! Here’s a couple highlights.

Floby

Jessi and I forgot to mention it last blog, but on our third night in Tougan we had a great opportunity for cultural integration: a Floby concert. Floby is a Burkinabé musician, who has sort of been a one-hit-wonder during our time here. All during training the Burkina television would play this one music video of his over and over, and the radio played this one song over and over. So we went with Nick, another volunteer from nearby, and Alice, Jessi’s counterpart, to this Floby concert. To no one’s surprise, the 8pm concert started at 11 (we are getting more accustomed to West African International Time, aka WAIT). It was sort of an outdoor venue, as most Burkinabe events are, with a covered center pavilion for Floby to perform on, and the audience sitting around the center. We had seats right up front. As we were waiting for the concert to start we kept noticing that the distant lightning wasn’t so distant anymore, and with the wind picking up we knew a storm was imminent.

Floby hadn’t been on the stage for more than two minutes when the rain started to pour. Everyone picked up their chairs and flooded the stage where Floby was performing, leaving him about a square yard to lip sync and dance in. Then about halfway thru the concert the sound system went out, and they couldn’t get it to come back on. Sound systems, and particularly microphones, here are pretty crappy and unreliable, which is why most musicians simply lip sync and dance instead of taking their chances with microphones. The system finally came online again for one last song, the infamous one from our training. Out of nowhere Floby came over to Nick and pulled him up from his seat to dance with him for about 15 seconds. People went wild, and we all thought it was hilarious. Then a minute later some of Nicks friends, Alice, and myself pushed Jessi out onto the stage to dance with him, which he had no objection to. The concert really turned out to be quite an event when all was said and done, and was certainly not something we expected to be doing three days into our life in Tougan.

My Birthday – Warning! FOOD rant

Our second week in Tougan my birthday rolled around, and Jessi worked some miracles to make the day special. She started the day off with a stack of pancakes and some black-raspberry syrup and then let me play games on the computer all morning. While I was enjoying that, Jessi was out on the town trying to figure out how to get ground beef. She went to a restaurant where we knew we’d seen it before, and they had somebody run and buy the beef, and then taught her how they put it through the grinder and cook it up for their meals. She said it was quite an experience and a lot of fun for everyone involved. She came home, made some homemade salsa, homemade tortillas, homemade lemonade, and taco meat using a packet of seasoning my parents had sent. She had also got our dutch oven set up and baked me a cake with chocolate frosting for my birthday. That evening we made popcorn and had a few friends over for popcorn, cake, and lemonade. They were all really impressed with the cake (you can’t find anything like cake back home here), and equally impressed with the dutch oven itself, and the lemonade. We wrapped up the day with a game of Phase 10. It was a really fun day for both of us.

Making home

I paid our first electric bill here this month, so I guess that means that we are official residents! We’ve slowly but surely been getting the furniture we ordered, which has really made our house feel more like home. We’re working on planting some flowers, trees, and other shrubs in our giant courtyard of nothing. I’ve come one step closer to being a true Burkinabé by weeding our courtyard of anything green that wasn’t actually planted there. Its kind of depressing that the end result is a much browner courtyard, but considering we don’t want rodents and have seen two scorpions in the house, the brown courtyard is probably worth it. We’ve got a kitten picked out that will be making home with us soon, if we can ever find a vet with a rabies vaccination. It’s all kept us very busy but has been a lot of fun to do.

Yaro’s family

We’ve felt very privileged to have met some really great people in Tougan already, especially the Yaro family. We met Mr. Yaro, who was assigned as our language tutor, on our site visit to Tougan when he had us over to his house for supper with his family both nights. There are seven kids in their family, plus a nephew and a girl that helps with house work. According to what Yaro told us, we are now to be included in those numbers too. Supper at the Yaro’s has become somewhat of a tradition for us now, and we probably share supper with them five nights a week. We’ve had a lot of fun watching TV, eating good food, and discussing cultural things together. We’ve had a good time doing language tutoring with Mr. Yaro too, which has been centered around reading the national newspaper aloud together to improve our horrid pronunciation, and discussing the current happenings around our host country. The Yaro family has really made us feel welcome here, and I can’t imagine how different it would be without them.

Ramadan

Yesterday marked the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. Muslim holidays are on a lunar (11 month) calendar, so they fall at a different time every year, and nobody is exactly sure when the dates will fall until the night before, which makes it a little exciting. The end of Ramadan is marked with massive celebrations, and we joined in with our friends and neighbors and the Yaro family in celebrating. The night before Ramadan the Yaro girls helped Jessi put henna ‘tatoos’ on her hands and feet to prepare for the festival, and Jessi helped the neighbor girls make little gateau (cake like things) since they had invited us to eat with them. The morning of Ramadan we went to the Yaro house to help with food preparations, which were a lot of fun. We spent the afternoon and evening visiting neighbors and friends to wish them a ‘Happy Ramadan’ and share little candies with their kids. This visiting of nearby neighbors and friends is a cool little tradition that crosses religious boundaries, as Christians will go visit their Muslim friends to celebrate Ramadan and Tabasky, and Muslims will visit their Christian friends to celebrate Easter and Christmas. At every house we went to we were offered immense amounts of food and drink, and partook in more than our bodies could really handle. According to Jessi, it definitely ranked in her top ten “I’ve never eaten so much in my life” days. It was our first real holiday in Burkina and it was a lot of fun. Jessi and I are already trying to figure out how to make Christmas cookies to share with everyone, and are searching for fabric so we can have new clothes made for the next festival (Tabasky).

Like I said, life overall here has been very good here. We hope to get photos up online of Tougan soon, but we really don’t want to flash around our camera just yet. We’ve certainly felt homesick on a number of days, and we miss everyone back home a lot. Thank you all so much for your prayers, emails, letters, packages, and phone calls. I don’t know what we’d do without them. Until next time!