Perhaps too tired for a witty title

Greetings all, from the land of the upright people (did I ever mention that before? ‘Burkina Faso’ is actually two words from two different languages… ‘Faso’ meaning ‘Land’, and ‘Burkina’ meaning something like ‘Upright’ and referring to people. Very modest…)

I feel as though I’ve been remiss recently with the keeping-you-abreast-of-strange-activities. In general, life has/had shifted gears into a much less village-based experience and a much more organization-based experience. The village-life routine I had more or less established up until, say, three months ago seems very different from how things are now. For instance I look back at the ‘Bike Ride Through the Brousse’ missive I wrote a while back, and realize that I have not done that trip in about a year. An entry from Feb 2nd is all about crazy fantastic projects I was starting and how we could all band together and do Neat Stuff. Indeed a lot of that Neat Stuff has/is happening, yet now my mind is strangely far from the community where I’ve ostensibly been setting up shop for a year and a half.

At root, one of the strange things about Peace Corps is that it’s very…. consuming. Something I appreciate very much about my prior life in Cambridge was that there was 1.) work, and 2.) things outside of work; They were very distinct worlds. There were all sorts of little social nooks and emotional crannies I could go play in to fulfill whatever interests/quirks/aspirations I was feeling. Peace Corps, however, is something you kind of seem to put your whole self into. There’s not much choice. The concepts of work and life are pretty dang well entwined here, and the result seems to be (at least for me) less feelings of ‘comfy!’. I suspect the ‘Ode to Loneliness’ I wrote a while back is one expression of this lack of ‘comfy!’, although what I’m really trying to get at here is the lack of boundaries / derth of freedom.

But let us get on to somewhat more concrete things. Like… the training of 79 new volunteers.
Sweet lords this is complicated.
I really don’t know where to begin, so, perhaps I’ll just focus things on the straight-and-narrow and describe for you a ‘typical’ training session for our community health trainees.

So we have this big ‘ol training schedule, which basically blocks out the trainees (and our) lives’ for the next two months. Monday through friday we are together from 8am to 5pm, with four different blocks of time in which to learn about Peace Corps rules, Burkina Faso culture, and health technical stuff. Also, to get immunizations.
Yesterday we had a session on something we lovingly refer to as ‘Demystification’ (seriously, where did this name come from…?? I feel like it’s something David Sedaris would like to make fun of.) ‘Demystification’ is where we take our trainees who’ve been in country for about two and a half weeks, and then fling them off to visit veteran volunteers in the bush (or, in one case, a small city). In order to prepare them for exposure to the REAL LIFE of a volunteer, we do the only reasonable thing – theater skit!
For good or ill, theater skits figure large into Peace Corp trainings. It’s very hard to just kind of describe life over here to people who are just arriving. So instead we choose to show what exactly they can expect when travelling around the country, and how to be courteous to a host volunteer who’s house consists of two tiny room, a gas stove, and letters from home strung to all of the walls.
Thus the training session starts with a skit showing the dos-and-donts of visiting someone:

DONT – ask your host why they didn’t prepare osso-bucco for your much-vaunted arrival
DONT – insult your host’s housekeeping abilities
DONT – get indignant if your host’s kitchen has only four plastic bowls and a few spoons
DO – help get water
DO – offer to wash dishes
DO – be generally positive about discovering how a PCV gets along in village after being there for over a year

Nothing too shocking here, but it helps to give at least a little frame of reference that PCVs often don’t live as though they’re going to be hosting 5 other american guests at any given time.
After the skits is the long description of logistics. And, as with most feats of organization, it involves a lot of prep for what will probably go awry anyway. We tell the trainees where they are going, how much their bus will cost, the bus schedule, when they will buy a ticket, whether to bring a tent/mosquito net/pillow/bike/headlamp/toilet paper/etc, and what the host’s house is like. For the trainees, these well-crafted and well-meaning explanations makes things slightly clearer than mud, and we field like 20 minutes of questions on lengths of bus rides, diarhhea, and sleeping arrangements. Everyone is excited and confused (much like a They Might Be Giants song about turning an airport into a techno night-club), and generally ok.
But.
Then the ‘Language and Cultural Facilitators’ (LCFs) call me to the back of the room, and proceed to pepper me with a thousand understandable but unexpected questions about what the heck they are to to during ‘Demystification’. Now then – LCFs are awesome Burkinabe hired as language instructors and also to help out with training and explain cultural dos-and-donts in their country and in their specific regions. While they are on the whole a very laid back and fun-loving group, apparently they too can feel ‘out of the loop’ when logistical details are explained only in English, and when said logistical details involve their schedule over the next week. See, the LCFs go on ‘Demystification’ as well, and need places to sleep, bus tickets, mosquito nets, food, etc. Whereas I (and the Burkinabe technical trainers I work closely with) thought the LCFs would be pretty laid back and figure things out on their own / ask us a few questions, they instead actually kinda freaked out and we had to have a meeting where they all vented for half an hour and we made everything ok (note: this is sort’ve an interesting cultural thing, where everyone is given a chance to complain, and the leader of the meeting apologizes and says things like ‘we will find a solution’). So, we found a solution, namely printing out lots of specific directions to better elaborate their ‘ROLES AND RESPONSIBLITIES’, things that go a very long way for well educated Burkinabe. Again, kind of an interesting cultural thing, and definite buzzwords over here.

In the end, things turned out ok, and tomorrow we will go to five separate bus stations and have the trainees buy bus tickets. I wish them luck.
Also, we made liquid soap.

Thats all for now my friends. Please continue to send letters and tasty things.
Aaron