Welcome to the Blog

Bonjour! This is where we will be posting our experiences from Burkina Faso during our two years and three months with the Peace Corps.

To give you a heads up on the process from here, we will be heading to Philadelphia on June 9th for two days of "staging" where we get some immunizations and fill out a bunch of paper work. It doesn't sound like the most enjoyable two days of our lives. From there we will fly with our cohort of volunteers to Burkina where we will spend the next three months immersed in intensive training, probably in one of the bigger cities.. We will hone our skills in using French while practicing the skills we will be needing to use daily in our work. We will also be learning another "local" language, such as Moore. While French is the official language of Burkina Faso, the people in the villages speak their indigenous language in daily life. Kids learn French during school, but I've been told that their knowledge of French won't be much better than ours. During our training we will be staying with a host family which will encourage us to use French and learn about Burkinabe Culture.

After training (assuming we "pass") we will be asked to swear in to the program and will be assigned to a village or a city (though that is less likely) where the program director feels our skills will be best matched. I will be teaching junior high - high school level math. Jessi will be working with the Girls Education and Empowerment program, which is a government sponsored program to encourage communities to send girls to school. Its a bit vague at this point to us, but how the program works is dependent on the conditions and needs of the village we work in.

From there we will carry out our two year commitment.

Thats good enough for starters. I hope to post some other PCV blog links on here soon so you can see photos of Burkina and other volunteers' points of view.

Thank you everyone for the immense support that you have given us thus far. It is overwhelming. Of all the challenges we may face in the next 27 months, the most difficult one will be living so far from the people we love.

Au revoir!