I've been wanting to write for some time about my actual work here as a volunteer. It's just hard to put into words the complex combination of progress, setbacks, pride, humility, frustration, and awe that inevitably result from Peace Corps work. On the one hand, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but on the other, I don't want to downplay something that is actually meaningful or impactful. I also hesitate to say when things aren't going well, because I don't want to discourage anyone who reads this.

Some of the moments here are incredible, like the (upcoming!) story about my health club students. But sometimes little successes can bring on the warm fuzzies in full force. Hearing someone say, "Wow, you can really speak Jula now!"  Seeing a friend become extremely animated and inspired while we debate a social issue together.  Finding out that my mentor, Oumar, feels like he learns something new from me whenever we're together.
Other times can feel downright useless. Since I'm being honest here, I'll admit that there are some days I shut my door and pretend I'm not here because I'm tired, sick, or just don't feel like speaking in another tongue. There are times when I really give myself a hard time for not doing enough, or talking to enough people, or going to the clinic enough. But nobody said the Peace Corps would be easy. They just said it would be worth it. There have been times when I've doubted even that. 

But more recently, I'm seeing my service as one long project rather than 800something days added up. I've taken stock, and I feel good about what I've accomplished even if I have had to spend some time on the bench from allergies, amoebas, and mild anemia.  I've been here almost a year and a half, and I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I've become an actual part of the community.  Of course I still stick out, but less like a sore thumb and more like the quirky nerd I've always been.  

I've often been asked what a typical day is like in my life as a PCV. Like I mentioned, you could pick two of my days at random and one would make me look like a saint, the other a sloth. So here is my best shot at a fair and honest depiction of a typical week walking in my dirty, Nike memory foam flip flops:

Sunday. Get up at 8 to wash the clothes.  Have instant coffee and a snack. Wash all morning. Stop to eat lunch once hands start hurting. Rinse whatever's still soapy and leave the rest for next time. Spend the rest of the day recovering from the exhaustion. Play scrabble by lantern light with Chad after dinner.


Monday. Be woken up by a neighbor knocking who wants to borrow my bike. Give her the bike, go back to sleep. Get up for real when she gets back from the market. Spend the next hour talking on the porch about her marriage prospects. Weave in discussion of family planning options and how to discuss it with her partner. Eat brunch. Call another volunteer about girls' camp preparations. Hang out at home until sunset, then go to a friend's house and drink cashew apple juice as we discuss the future of her business. Then head home for dinner and catching up on my favorite shows on the computer.


Tuesday. Have tea and pancakes. Bike 1km to the health clinic for a meeting with the new health staff. Explain what Peace Corps is and discuss plans for upcoming training activities. Stop by the school briefly during lunch time to ask the director a question about spring break. End up talking with a teacher for two hours about literacy rates, student motivation, and behavior change theory. Go home very hungry. Make plain noodles with parmesan (thanks, family) and then help my surrogate grandma sweep up the leaves in the courtyard. Try to learn some new guitar chords.

Wednesday. Wake up feeling motivated. Start cleaning the house. Get overwhelmed and give up. Start watching a movie instead. Get interrupted by a friend I haven't seen in a while. Sit on the porch together and discuss a possible budget for building a new pigpen for her family farm. Grab lunch once she leaves and fall asleep, overheated. Wake up confused, drink lots of water and talk for an hour with Chad about my new ideas. Eat dinner together and finally at least get all the dishes done. Well most.

Thursday. Grab coffee and a granola bar then head to a nearby town for a family reunion. Greet all of the important family members, including the eldest women who are in the ceremonial hut, complete with four disembodied bull heads. Proceed to being forced to eat oily rice with beef after insisting that we already ate, thank you. Smile to hide some mild gagging. Hand over the remaining beef chunk to Chad (the benefit of serving as a married couple). Drink copious amounts of water. Leave after a polite amount of time. Lend a friend our camera to record the rest of the event. Grab a semi-cold Coke and go home to finally finish that movie.

Friday. Eat. Bike to the school to remind the kids of the upcoming health club meeting. Stop by two houses where individuals do composting. Discuss an upcoming training opportunity in broken Jula then take their pictures for use in the composting publicity. Realize too late that I forgot to put on sunscreen. Go home. Eat. Go to bed early.

Saturday. Wake up in the middle of the night from mouse noises. Think of a great project idea and write it down. Have a bottle of water and go back to bed. Get up for real later and make sure everything is ready for health club. Have breakfast. Invite a friend to come help teach the kids. Bike to the school after lunch. Teach the basics of nutrition and play a sorting game based on favorite foods and a matching game with food and food groups. Discuss upcoming spring break activity plans. Then hand over the soccer ball and watch to make sure they don't hurt each other. Grab a Coke, almost cold this time, on the way home, and spend the evening drawing and maybe playing guitar and singing.




Note:  This is just an example to create a picture of what my personal experience is often like. Peace Corps service is very diverse, between volunteers, across sectors, and around the world. Some volunteers work 9 to 5 schedules. Some take every meal with their neighbors. Some fill clear job positions, and some, like me, create their jobs as they go along. There is not just one right way to be a volunteer. The key is that we try to live by consistent principles of development and respond to the real needs of our communities. Feel free to post any unanswered questions you may have as a family member, blog enthusiast, or future volunteer. I will be glad to post a FAQs entry some time soon.

Behold the utter majesty of a tree whose name sounds like the French word for cheese. Its bark is white and thorny. Its gargantuan, weird-looking roots usually protrude out of the ground from all sides at 45-degree inclines like skateboard ramps. According to neighbors, the fruits aren’t edible, but a mean tea can be brewed from the flower petals for headache relief. In terms of enormity, Fromagers look like something straight out of the rainforest, so I always do a double-take when against a barren landscape I notice a single four-storey tree that seemingly got lost and wandered away from his jungly home.

If you follow Burkina’s latitude line with your finger around a desktop globe, Fromager trees crop up in this climate on every continent. Amazonian tribes use the cottony fluff in the seeds to wrap their blow darts. And wouldn’t you know it—in Cambodia, there’s an overgrown Fromager posing for tourists at the famed Angkor Wat Temple.




Here’s another familiar sight among Banfora’s plethora of flora: the mighty Ackee fruit. When it’s ripe, the bottom pops open, revealing three black marble-sized seeds and yummy spongy stuff. Ackee fruits (as well as shea) contain fatty acids that make for top-notch traditional cooking. People appreciate it here, but not in the same way they idolize such Ackee-based dishes in the Caribbean. Apparently, ever since it was introduced by way of slave ships in the late 1700s, Ackee has remained a dietary staple for islanders and is Jamaica’s national fruit.



Baobabs with their abnormal rotundity and gnarled branches look like something Tim Burton would dream up. The trunks of some of these trees grow big enough to fit a car inside. Much like cactuses, they’re famine-proof desert dwellers with water reservoirs inside their bellies. The flowers smell like death and are bat-pollinated. The fruits, called “monkey bread” by locals, can be prepared into teodo, a pulpy bland-tasting juice with the consistency of apple sauce. Apparently it’s pretty nutritious, but there so many better local juice options I prefer: for instance, passion fruit juice, mango juice, hortchata (a soy-milk-like drink from the Bambara groundnut), and bissap.




In the picture above, the baobab is surrounded by rone palm trees. The rone may look like an ordinary palm tree, but it's actually a special type that’s vital to a key industry in Southwest Burkina: alcohol consumption. Not only do its nuts make tasty munchies at traditional bars, its wood helps build bar benches and secure walls, and most importantly the sap is extracted each day and fermented to produce palm wine or banji. Barflies like Tana and her dad Ken can sip this translucent white liquid out of a calabash like the one she's holding. This sap comes out just below the leaves on female trees, so the sap collector making his rounds has to repeatedly shimmy up two-storey heights. Ken liked the palm wine, but opted not to sample the menu option: caterpillar soup.

On Christmas Eve, Michel, Nick, Tarek, Jon, and Luis prepared our Christmas dinner: two charred pigs. I was surprised after it was cooked to watch the pig give birth to herb-covered potatoes and couscous that they had put into its stomach to cook. It doesn't get much more gourmet than that. This was a vacation jam-packed with fine dining, including the only breaded fried chicken available in this country.


Fada residents Joey and Scott pose with the Christmas piñata, made from a blown up condom and hours of paper machéing.


For our meal the new volunteers of the East, Clarissa and Nick, shared the Christmas couch with us. They live close to Niger.


Scott took Nate, Jon, Tarek, and I to the legendary sand reader of Fada. Mediums in the US usually read tarot cards and tea leaves, but here it's the sands that communicate with clairvoyants. Clients are instructed to close their eyes, draw a small circle in the sand with their fingers, and ask the sands the question silently with their hearts. After the circle is made, the chain-smoking sand reader makes mysterious marks, dots, and lines. Then the client asks the question verbally, so that the reader can interpret what he has just deciphered and try to put these abstractions into words. What was revealed about our futures did not disappoint us.

Volunteers have been visiting this fortune teller for a while, and stories have circulated about how the readings have changed the courses of volunteers' love and professional lives. After much contemplation, I gathered up all my courage to ask a couple doom and gloom themed questions. My first question was "what problems await me in the future?" The sands hesitated a while then gave a foreboding response: one day my mother will become nervous about something. When that day comes, she will ask a request of me. I must obey her wishes, or else...

My second question was "how and when will Tana and I die?" After I silently asked this with my heart, the psychic tried to read the sands, but he seemed to look frustrated. When I asked him my question verbally, he pointed at a bold line in the sand that was obstructing his ability to interpret it. The sands had refused to reveal the answer to this question.

My third question was "what kind of work will Tana and I do when we return to the States." The sands responded that I shouldn't follow in the livelihood footsteps of my father and grandfather, that our work would be successful if we worked together, and (quite randomly) that our firstborn will be male. The sands tell no lies.


Later, about fifteen volunteers participated in a "white elephant" gift exchange. It's a vicious game of treachery and dream crushing in which wrapped presents are circulated and stolen by those who you once considered your friends. Some of the commodities of our game included a squirt gun and a bag of Sour Patch Kids, a scarf and hat promoting nationalism, quality leather wallets, a set of cutlery that looks like medieval torture implements, some Hello Kitty bouncing balls, and Blitzen the Christmas Chicken (pictured above). I won a backpack and Tana won a foot-shaped bath mat that will complement the colors of our indoor shower room nicely.


Above: Cindy and the piñata in the foreground. Celenia, Luis, and John in the background.

To the Right: A group of impeccably dressed Burkinabe kids smashing up Luis and Doug's master creation Christmas piñata. They were blindfolded and dizzied up then they took swings while Luis and Celenia sang a traditional Mexican song. One little girl used an intimidating amount of force when it was her turn.

The youth of Fada performed a variety show for Noel. All of us volunteers went up on stage for one act and led the whole room in singing "Deck the Halls" in English, singing "Fadadada" instead of "Falalalala." When the emcee put us on the spot to translate the meaning, Doug grabbed the mic and walked them through it line by line in French, even somehow translating the line: "Troll the ancient yuletide carol."


In the tree: Antoinette, Tarek, Pat, John, and Scott. Standing: Tana, Chad, Luis, Jon, Josh, and Nate. Crouched: Clarissa, Michel, Celenia, and some guy.

STEP 3: Perfumigation

Now that the bats have taken to the skies, you toss a few sticks of incense into the fires to make the residual odor more bearable. This step may seem like a splash of cologne after bathing in the sewer, but at least it motivates the clean-up crew. Now that it's somewhat less of an olfactory nightmare, it's time to go back indoors and pull out all the furniture, which will remain unguarded in the schoolyard for days to come. Local thieves have no apparent need for tiny desks.


STEP 4: Fill in the cracks




You buy three bags of cement. The school director commissions a mason who he continually addresses as "the old man" to patch up the holes. This is apparently the same guy who built the school thirty years ago. The mason mixes cement, sand, and water in the middle of each classroom, then he mounts the stacked tables with his trowel in hand to slop up and smooth on the wet concrete. The village carpenter Thomas gives him screens and wooden frames he made to block the aeration holes in the ceiling. "Hey, the old man!" The director says. "Don't forget this room!"


STEP 5: Give it a fresh coat

The afternoon school bell hasn't technically chimed yet, so there are hordes of students still loitering on the premises. Time to capitalize on their boredom by getting some brooms, sponges, towels, and buckets. You pour bleach and anti-bacterial soap into buckets, ready the materials, and use the Huckleberry Finn picket-fence-painting method to motivate them to action. Suddenly, everyone from kindergarten through fifth grade is in full force cleaning mode, competing to have the sparkliest room of them all. Now to mix quicklime powder and water in a cauldron, resulting in a bubbly chemical reaction that drops the jaws of the kids. This makes whitewash, the cheapest kind of faux paint, which looks like the real deal after multiple coats. In all five classrooms, gloved students with paint brushes and sponges restore the walls once again to their original pristine state, forever washing off the foul stench of the bald mice.





CELEBRATION: It's done! And just in time for winter holiday break. Call the village's favorite mustachioed minstrels to the school to play traditional xylophone and drums while the children dance. High fives all around.