House

Let’s try again, this time with a shorter video of my house that is more likely to upload.

Latest amusing thing – I am at the peace corps office in Ouagadougou, using one of their computers. It has a full-blown AMERICAN keyboard. All the letters exactly where you at home know them to be. With this fantastic return to Pre-Burkina normalcy and the American Way, it took about 15 minutes for my fingers to remember where everything was.

At least that means I’m getting used to the French keyboard layout, with it’s necessitating hitting “SHIFT” everytime I want to make a period. I’m sorry, but that’s really just dumb. How about I design a keyboard where you have to cold “CONTROL” to type the letter ‘m’? Gah.

Any rate, not much to report since last time. I’m going to the American Embassy to watch the inauguration speech. I recently spoke with my fam down in DC and apparently the city is duly nutso. Good luck to anyone venturing there to catch the speech live – should be an interesting scene on the metro. And hopefully no one will throw shoes at the motorcade this time.. – didn’t that happen at Bush’s last inauguration?

I’m meeting the mayor of my town finally – but here in Ouagadougou. He spends a LOT of time here apparently, so I tracked down the place he stays while in the capital, and sent him a text message introducing myself and asking if I could come by. He’s already sent me a mattress for which to sleep on, so the least I can do is say ‘thanks’ in person. That and see what all he’d like me to do for his town. Kind of a funny place to be in – ‘Hi, I’m with the Peace Corps. I’m here principally to work on health-related things, but really I can try and mount any sort of project that makes people more content’. Or something along those lines.

Speaking of such projects, I had my first truly fruitful discussion with a couple of importantish village folks yesterday. We sat in my lil’ courtyard for like an hour and a half discussing a.) why the hell I’m in Sabce (Peace Corps air dropped me here… with only a mosquito net and the latest Prince album) , and b.) some initial ideas about what I’m capable of doing / where I can be of use. The topics ranged from soap, to stoves, to agriculture, to sensibilizations, to trees and desertification, and a bit about how there used to be lions, panthers, and hyenas around the Sabce area.

But talk is always a first step, and now I need to wait a bit and follow up with some concret ‘let’s do this thing at this time’ logisticizing. At any rate, I am once again awed by the process of conversation and how several parties can discover ways to help each other even when, at the beginning, neither party completely understood what the heck was going on. I’d argue that attitude helps a lot – if you genuinely want to apply yourself to a task, even a general theme of work (i.e. ‘health’), there’s a nifty organic process of discovery that happens when you talk to the right people. Now, as noted above, to move onto the actual application part of things. 

That’s how things appear at the moment.

Ah, and the process of integration continues – as does the local language learning. It’s a really powerful way to make people smile here.

 

Hey!!! The video uploaded!! Oh that’s totally sweet!

 

K, I’m gonna take that as a good sign and run.

Oh, I just picked up a host of packages here in the mailroom – thank you INCREDIBLY much for your boxes of pure love. Also letters and magazines!! Oh, man, what a fine day this is.

Ok, off to maybe reheat some lunch, and catch some transport over to the embassy.  Tee hee, govt work is funny. At least this kind.

 

Best

 Aaron