Burkina Faso!!!!

So the package came yesterday and it turns out it didn't get lost in the mail, it really did take two weeks to get to my house. Very strange. Anyhoo, it's official: Burkina Faso!! Woohoooo!! I'm going to get the coveted stereotypical peace corps experience!!! No running water no electricity in a rural village in a country noone has ever heard of!! Awesome :)

Okay here's what the pamphlet says specifically about my assignment:

Country: Burkina Faso
Program: Secondary Education
Job Title: Science Teacher
Dates of Service: August 24, 2007 -- August 23rd, 2009
Pre-Service Training (in Ouhigouya, Burkina Faso): June 7, 2007 -- August 24, 2007

Here's some tidbits about the country, taken from the pamphlet and wikipedia:

Statistics:
Development efforts in Burkina Faso are important because Burkina Faso is one of the ten poorest countries in the world. Burkina Faso ranks 175 out of 177 countries in the UNDP's Human Development Index: of countries with a Peace Corps presence, only Niger rates lower. Life expectancy is 47.5 years, 50% of the population is under the age of 15, literacy rate is only 12.8%, primary school enrollment is 36% (31% for girls), only 9% in secondary schools. Less than 1% reach university levels. Official statistics show that between 2.3 and 4.2% of the adult population is infected with HIV/AIDS. Nearly 86% of the population lives on less than $2 per day.

However, the pamphlet assures me that Burkina Faso is peaceful, stable, and making steady progress towards transparent and democratic governance.

Geography:
Burkina Faso is a landlocked nation in West Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the south east, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the south west. 80% of the working population is in agriculture. There is mineral exploitation of copper, iron, manganese and, above all, gold. Burkina Faso has very few isolated hills it is overall a very flat country. It lies just below the sahara desert with the northernmost regions within the sahara. The middle of the country is dry sahvana and the south is more green and lush. Temperatures within the country range from 60 degrees (in the coolest darkest hour of night in the dead of "winter") to 120 degrees (all summer). I say winter and summer but really in africa there is only two seasons: dry season and wet season. The dry season is hotter ("summer") and dry with no rain, and the wet season is hot ("winter") and it rains about once or twice every day for an hour or so. The rain cools everything down to the 90's or so on average. This'll be fun for someone who thinks 80 is hot!!!! And no air conditioning!!! Ya I'm looking forward to some wonderful character building there :) :)

Religion:
Approximately 50% of the population is Muslim; Christians account for about 30%, and followers of traditional African religions (typically animism of various forms) make up about 20%. Many Christians incorporate elements of animism into their religious practices.

Peace Corps presence:
90 Peace Corps volunteers work in Burkina Faso right now, including 18 in Health, 21 in Small Enterprise Development, 24 in Education, and 26 in Girl's Educations and Empowerment. I will probably go to training with about 30 or so volunteers but I don't know the specific number yet.

Training will be for 11 weeks in a town called Ouahigouya (don't ask me how to pronounce that). At first I thought this was a misspelling of the capital city (Ouagadougou, can't pronounce that one either), but it turns out this is a seperate town about 182km north-west of the city. We will spend the first few days in Ouahigouya, then we will meet our host families and live with them for the duration of training in the surrounding villages. We will all meet once a week in Ouahigouya for cultural training. We will be assigned host families and villages based on our french proficiency and volunteer program, and we will be in groups of 4 or 5 per village where we will study french and have technical training together. So I will be in a village of 3 or 4 other people who have a similar knowledge of french and who are all education volunteers, and then I'll meet up with everyone else who went to other villages once a week in Ouahigouya. The training model is community-based with many opportunities for interaction with the community. On top of learning french, I will be learning one of the local languages too, such as Moore, Jula or Fulfulde.

"The technical training component will prepare you to teach effictively in Burkinabe secondary schools. You will learn about the structure of the Burkinabe educational system and the main differences with the US school systems. You will learn to prepare lessons to meet the needs of students with different learning styles and to implement them effectively. You will learn how to write and administer a test. Youw ill have an opportunity to learn stragegies for developing students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Classroom management can be a challenge so stragegies for dealing with this will be covered during training. In addition to the theoretical sessions, there will be a number of opportunities for practice, starting with peer teaching and working up to teaching full-length, full-size classes in a four to five week Practice School (in the form of a summer school program for local youth). This will provide the opportunity for you to strengthen your pedagogical skills and prepare for the donditions you will likely find in your assigned school at your site."

Pre-Service training also includes health and safety/security and cross-cultural sessions. There will also be opportunities to travel away from the training location for a "site visit" with a current volunteer. There will also be a 2-day counterpart workshop where we meet our future counterparts and visit our future volunteer sites. My permanent site will be assigned based on my level of french proficiency, the second language I have been learning and the need for education volunteers in the area. I will almost certainly be the only volunteer in my village.

Teaching Conditions:

I will work about 20 hours a week in a classroom with between 50 - 100 students, sometimes over 100 students per class. Students will not have books, and there most likely will be no photocopy machines, no printers, no overhead projectors, often the only resource will be a blackboard and chalk. I will have to come up with (very) creative ways to get the kids to learn without books or handouts. The Burkinabe teachers usually lecture and have the kids copy notes from the board and memorize everything. We are encouraged to be more creative than that. I will have a counterpart (another teacher) which should help me to integrate easier into the school and will help me and give me feedback about my teaching style and other classroom issues. The classroom schedule is flexible and will allow for time to incorporate issues like AIDS prevention and evironment lessons. All volunteers in Africa are involved in HIV/AIDS education and prevention. As a science teacher with a captive audience I will have a golden opportunity to teach that subject extensively.

Living Conditions:
As a secondary school teacher, I will be placed in a large village or small town. I will be expected to live in a manner similar to my Burkinabe counterparts. Housing will likely consist of a modent building constructed from mud bricks or cement blocks with a tin roof. Floors are made with cement.

SARA AND ASHLEY STOP READING NOW






("dont be surprised if you occasionally have vistors in the form of spiders, cockroaches, mice, ants, etc")









OKAY SAFE TO CONTINUE

I will most likely not have running water or electricity. Water may come from a well or a pump. Depending on the distance, I will either transport the water myself or pay someone to do it. This means I will take bucket baths (big bucket full of water with a plastic cup. I hear from the PC blogs the best strategy is to dunk your hair in the water first to conserve water, then lather up and rinse off with the plastic cup. I'm not sure if I will ever really be clean that way), and pit latrines. A pit latrine is basically a hole in the ground surrounded by concrete and four walls. It's usually outside apart from the rest of the house/hut. Usually this is also your "shower" area or there may be a second "shower" area in an attached room.

The staple food in Burkina Faso is called To. They pretty much eat this stuff breakfast lunch and dinner. It is made of millet and it is ground and baked into a playdough-like texture and served in a large communal bowl. You eat with your hands (did I mention most Burkinabe don't us toilet paper? Do you know what they use instead? I'll let you imagine what they use instead of toilet paper and how that relates to me sharing a bowl everyone is eating playdough out of with their HANDS), roll the To into a little ball, dip it into some type of green sauce (haven't found out yet what that green sauce is made out of), and eat it. I hear from the blogs that it tastes terrible and can actually make you really sick. Mmmmm looking forward to that!! Food selection is actually pretty limited in the villages. Usually there will be only one fruit or vegetable available, especially in the dry season, and I hear right now that fruit or vegetable is onions. Yum. Nothing like a fresh, crisp onion in the morning!! Haha!

Okay well that's what I know so far. I looked through the paperwork last night and it's daunting but doable. I have to get passport and visa pictures taken, and fill out a bunch of forms. But first I have to read through the peace corps volunteer manual and accept my invitation. I have ten days so I will do that today or tomorrow. I'm soooo excited and I feel soooo lucky to have gotten Burkina Faso!! I had a feeling for a while I was going to Burkina Faso and I was getting really excited about it but I was worried about siking myself up just to be dissapointed if it turned out to be somewhere else so I wasn't allowed to read about Burkina Faso anymore and I read as much as I could about other countries and started to get excited about those too but then I ended up actually getting the country I wanted!! Thats so awesome!!!

Why was Burkina Faso my first choice? Well, lots of us PC volunteer wannabes are attracted to this extreme climates/conditions. If I wanted comfortable living conditions in another country I'd move to canada! But I want to see how different life can be, and live and work and get to know people in a community as different from my own as it can get, and fill a need in the community. The most daunting thing about this task is being a teacher since I have never taught and teaching conditions sound very difficult but that is all part of the challenge! I am looking forward to this sooo much and I'm super excited and can't wait to go :) Oh and you guys had better write to me!! I'm surprised I actually got a couple people at work wanting to write to me while I'm gone so that's super duper awesome!! I'm sure I will have plenty of awesome stories to write about and plenty of time to write them to all of you :) You could even send me packages with candy and stuff in them if you really want to :) and I could send you genuine african gifts like dresses or voodoo potions! You could even visit if you wanted to!!!

Okay well believe it or not I actually was supposed to be productive today and I've been on here writing this blog for over an hour now and I haven't even eaten breakfast so I am going to go hope you guys enjoyed learning a little about my future awesome home of Burkina Faso!!

Au Revoir!!! (see I know lots of french!)