hey there! well its been five months since ive written in my blog. sorry! i will try to write more often. the bad thing is, i dont write letters or emails, i dont even have a journal and i hardly take pictures. im going to leave and after a few years i will have no memory of this place. but i read a quote that inspired me yesterday "Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly start remedying them - every day begin the task anew" --Saint Francis de Sales. so here i am, i will journal!

so things have changed a little bit in the last few months. i no longer have the happy 11 hours of teaching every week, i now have 19 hours. the students werent happy with the way the director was teaching english so they went on strike and got a new teacher, and in order for him to teach 3eme i took the two 6eme classes, so that makes 19 hours for me. i decided i really dont enjoy teaching and i dont even like those damn kids they are all like little soldiers with every teacher except for me, in my classes its like a party, the little bastards. anyway, the teachers are awesome, we setteled into a routine at the end of this last trimester where everyday at 3 oclock we would start tea and end when it got dark so everyone can go eat and sometimes we would reconvene after dinner and then the tea-taking would continue until maybe 11ish. its fun, even though i dont participate too much in the conversation. im to the point in my french where i can always get the point across but when it comes to rapid fire conversation intersperssed with local language, i still get pretty lost.

yesterday i decided to say a big SCREW YOU GUYS IM GOING HOME to the world for my eternal singleness and made a conscious decision not to see my inability to have a relationship not as a fault but as a virtue and exploit it for all its worth. being unattached at this age grants almost unlimited freedom to do adventurous things. so screw you, world, when im done with africa im going to asia. after peace corps, ill travel around east africa, spend a few months in america then im heading off to somewhere in asia to teach english. the programs are easy enough to get into for americans and they actually pay real money. awesome! im doing it. im already sad to be leaving africa. i really do love it here. i will most likely do a third year working with an ngo in a regional capital before heading off to asia. africa's an amazing place, and having at least a loose idea of a plan for afterwards makes me sad to leave, i can already imagine missing burkina lots. i will be sure to appreciate this place as much as possible while im here.

so let me elaborate on the whole tea taking process. process is definately the correct word for it. it takes hours and hours, often all day. you have charcoal, two tiny tea pots, one to four shot glasses, one large glass, a tray or plate, tea, sugar, water, and if youre lucky mint or vanilla. first you wash everything with water (noone ever skips this first step), get the charcoal hot in a little basket, then you measure out one shotglass full of tea and one large glass full of water and you add that to a little tea pot and put it over the charcoal to heat up. then you wait for it to heat up and when its boiling over, you pour the tea out into the large glass, then pour the tea back into the pot and pour it back out several more times then put it back on the charcoal to heat up again. repeat about two more times, then you transfer the tea to the second teapot, add water to the same tea leaves in the first tea pot (this is called the duxieme) and heat that up, meanwhile you add sugar to the large glass and mix it with the tea in the second tea pot, then you make the foam by pouring the tea from way up high over the large glass, then into the tea pot, over and over until theres lots of foam, then you put the foam into the little shot glasses and heat the tea (with mint or vanilla optional) over the charcoal, meanwhile you mix the duxieme into the large glass, then you pour the hot tea into the shot glasses with the foam, and serve it on the plate or platter, in order of the most important people present. its really good with peanuts floating in the tea. In america tea parties are for little girls and their stuffed animals, but here its a very testosterone driven male-only activity, and at any point of any day you are gauranteed to see groups of men outside taking tea. i have managed to inflitrate this world and take tea with my teachers daily, i have even made the tea several times, mastering the entire complicated process. i rock. they just say that my tea is a tad too strong.

so for christmas and new years me and almost all of the volunteers in burkina went to ghana! now that was fun! christmas on the beach!! it was awesome. i had kenny chesney's "all i want for christmas is a real good tan" stuck in my head the whole time. we took a 24 hour bus down to the coast and that on its own was an adventure. i used so many of the most unsightly latrines imaginable on that trip. many people resorted to going in feilds, between buildings or behind cars but i never did. we stopped in the middle of the night for about an hour at a place where we all got off and ate egg sandwiches and drank hot chocolate. i cant tell you how happy i was to eat egg sandwiches and drink hot chocolate with my friends in the middle of ghana at 2 in the morning just a few days before christmas. It was just one of those expriences i will taken with me forever. so some people actually managed to sleep on that bus ride, i was not one of them. we spent a week with a volunteer's friend who is researching sea turtles on the beach so after lounging around on the beach for several days, on christmas eve at night we went walking down the beach looking for turles laying eggs. we didnt find any and then we got tired so we stopped by a fishing boat and we all fell asleep on the sand. we then woke up at midnight, said merry christmas and walked back. christmas was spent on the beach and eating seafood and then a party at night. i got a little sick so i went home early at the party but i had a great time. after christmas we went to a second beach and stayed at an amazing resort where we all got a faux mudhut literally right on the beach with a resaraunt, bar, gift shop, bonfires every night. it was all for 5 dollars a night! ya, it was freaking awesome. so new years was spent there, specifically watching a really bad magic/hiphop show. but the whole trip was amazing, ghana is definatly a more developed place than burkina, and the beaches were beautiful.

so recently ive traveled around a bit, visited djibo, dori, kaya, ouaga, and a little village east of ouaga. thats most of the central north and central burkina, next i want to visit west and south, in the bobo, banfora, cote d'ivoire region.

there are now two new volunteers in kongoussi, my regional capital. i went five weeks once without leaving my village and i was going INSANE so after that ive been leaving every two weeks on the dot to kongoussi and the two volunteers, the electricity, big stores, and internet. it was a very wise decision.

well i cant think of anything else to say. i love africa, my site, my collueges, the other volunteers. im excited about my plans for the future and im working on appreciate every moment i have here. i miss america a lot sometimes, and the people there, especially lex, my best friend. but i will see everyone again someday, once africa's done with me and i'm tired of traversing the world.

oh im going to france in the end of june just got my ticket. im so excited cant wait!!! the developped world woohooo!!!

bye!