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Record Breaking Rains

Hi Everyone,

Long time no blog. I am in Tougan to check my email and work on more stuff regarding the new library we will be building this year. Details later. Was in OHG for a while training the newbies. They all made it and are now settling into their new sites. Luckily I got a few new neighbors out of the deal.

"The 263.3 mm that fell in less than 12 hours in Ouaga on Sept 1 is a record for Burkina and probably would be hard to match in any other capital city in the world." That's the big news. 150000 homeless in Ouagadougou and three dead. Plus it rained again for twelve hours in my village yesterday.



One of the small bridges near me that was washed out.

I will be in Ouaga for a week or so in mid-September, so I plan on really putting up lots of pictures and blogging (seriously).

Death of a Laptop

My laptop is dying. The fan doesn't work. The power jack appears to be short circuiting all the power adapters that plug into it. I think the motherboard is short circuiting by the power jack. Help. Dell Latitude why are you failing me now?

Squash the Rumors

Well, since I haven't officially made the announcement yet, I might as well...

I am doing a third year! I am staying at my current site, and continuing to teach mathematics, and hopefully other subjects next year. Secondary projects in the works are:

• Making an awesome website which will the tell the world more about Peace Corps Burkina Faso and also enhance the PCV experience by making collaborative resources available;
• Building a school library to better French literacy, and thus, French grades, and indirectly all other school subject grades.

The end of the school year wrapped up well. My sixième (sixth grade) students finally started to understand my teaching style, and did really well this trimester on tests including tough topics such as relative numbers (positive and negative numbers), plotting points on a graph, ratios and orthogonal symetry in a plane. So, I felt really accomplished! The only down side is everyone thought that I had lowered the level of my tests, even though I hadn't (in this class)!!! They didn't seem to understand that the students really stepped it up a notch.

The other math teacher and I also had an Olympiad for our top students in each class to see who the best of the best were. The Olympiad was really challenging, but some of the kids did okay. It's my latest FB profile pic.

I am doing some summer school work with interested students... which isn't a lot right now, but I'm hoping the word will spread, and that others will jump on the bandwagon. The kids who are interested are super bright and motivated, so I am inspired!!!! :D

So, I got selected to be a trainer for the incoming Stage, which is an exciting opportunity to meet new volunteers and also my future neighbors. I will be getting three within a 50 km radius of my village, if all goes well. Also, I get to work and do one of my favorite things: Teaching. Yes, as much as I get frustrated with my indisciplined students and correcting tests in bad lighting, I love teaching.

It's been just darned hot these past few months, but the good news is the rainy sseason started early (compared to the last two years). So things are already green and it's only the beginning of June.

Other exciting news... because you all know how much I love to use certain types of punctuation!!! I will be back in America in July. So, clear your calendar folks because trouble is coming to town.

Well, that's all I got for now... I will hammer out flight details soon, so you all can be ready. :)

Best and love,

AK

The Tao of Pooh

So, I spent/am spending this "Spring Break" in the hot hot heat of... Bagre, Beguedo and Ouaga. I am on the final leg of this trip. In visiting Liz and An, I got to see amazing things like delicious food, electrified villages bigger than the "cities" by me, rice paddies, fish farming, GliderPro on a Mac, gigantic pigs that were propre and Taiwanese people.

All in all, it's been REALLY HOT, but I've been eating well and relaxing and thus, able to perform important functions for my COS/extension tests. BF RPCVs you know what I am talking about.

Here's me and Liz hanging out in some rice fields. Ignore the date, my camera is on crack and refuses to register the AA batteries half the time and resets the date randomly. I will try to post more pics later as I will be in town for most of the rest of the week doing some work .

40 km WNW of the Bush

Hi, I am alive and typing in Tougan. What has been going on? Mostly teaching or scolding, I don't feel like there is a big difference between the two. I guess I have mentioned that I am teaching twice as much this year as opposed to last year. I am twice as tired and much less dynamic or friendly as is usual with me.

My service is winding down. I am considering applying for a third year, and despite my interest in doing so/desire of colleagues/needs of the village, I might not. We will see. There are certain factors weighing against a third year (people I love very much!)

PCBF just got a new IT committee going and I have the chance to contribute to it. Unfortunately, I'm technically not around for much longer (unless of course I apply and get accepted for that mystical third year) so I hope to push it far enough so that we can go live with a beta-version of a publicly-accessible website in August keeping all you interested parents, friends, prospective volunteers, and Burkinabè-loving people up-to-date on what we crazy volunteers are actually doing to try to help Burkina Faso develop on top of other fun stuff for us PCVs in BF.

So, in other crazy news, the weather! First week was cold (50s to 60s); second week was HOT (over 100); third week it was hot and humid which meant it RAINED!!! Twice in fact in the third week of February. This week it has just been hot is all. So, the month of February has gotten all four "seasons" that BF normally gets in a year:

• hot season, March through May, over 100 daily
  
• rainy season, June through August, rains often
  
• mini-hot season, September through October, gets hot as everything dries out
  
• cold season,November through February, dry, windy and cold (for Africa that is)

March is upon us! So happy birthday soon to my dad and all the other March birthdays! I will be heading back to village probably tomorrow morning with a nice cheery 65 km bike ride (short story but not a lot of time) or 15 km (if I get lucky).

Thanks to all the people who have written recently: TE and CS in particular.

I promise to be online in the second week of March, so be ready for more contact from Africa!

New (Now) Year's Reflections on Service

I should really be correcting tests that I have put off correcting all break. Instead, I thought I would share some thoughts... i.e. procrastinate some more.

This is my first Gregorian New Year away from family and friends since last year I was (un)fortunately with my family. But really, am I away from friends? I've been lucky to have formed a few good friendships with HCNs (with whom I celebrated) and non-HCNs alike.

Things have been tough, and as usual, I have been delinquent in updating. Though I've been trying to make up for it by posting lots (lots is a relative term considering the connection and my lack of picture-taking prowress) of pictures. I definitely had some emotionally tough times this past term. As my service starts to wind down, I have to ask myself... what have I really done? Who have I really inspired? I guess I suffer from the degradation of society's ability to be patient because I want to know if what am I doing is having a positive effect and I want to know now.

There's a sort of hazy lost generation between 1975 - 1984 that I would like to call the "TGIF generation". Yes, there are lots of other names out there for that time period, but let me justify. We were the generation that grew up watching TGIF and absorbed those familiy values and catchy theme songs and 90210 was less shock and more family-oriented. It was a time before cell phones in every middle school students backpack. It was a time when the Internet was still text only, graphic bullet points were all the rage, and page-loading took minutes... not fractions of seconds. It was a time when we needed time to find the answers, and part of the process of growing up was the search.

All of us kids falling under this lost generation watched technology grow by leaps and bounds, but the first technology that really educated us was the television. I would like to propose that our generation was well-educated on family values, service, patience, and trying to cooperate and get along with others despite race, religion, ethnicity, etc. (even though many of us wanted to hide it because it was "uncool"). It is why those of us who were just shy of voting against you-know-who the first time around were outraged (especially when that whole war talk started, despite the 9/11 business) and those of us who weren't were outraged even more so. It's why when I look at my group of friends I don't see color, I just see friends. It is why we worked so hard to get where we are today, and look around disgusted at the world today.

Why did we work so hard in the first place? What was the point?

In the course of four years, TV went from TGIF to teenage dramedy. Now, with shock TV (and I don't mean Jerry Springer) as the basic diet of children growing up plus the Internet full of YouTube and other powerful share-all sites. Reality has blurred. Values are no longer valued. Friends are no longer your friends. Growing up is hard. Do we really need a world where the only safe people are maybe your parents, and even then, what teenager doesn't have that occasional power/growing-up struggle with their parents? A place where everything is Now?

Now is a dangerous place. It is no longer a future waiting to happen, and a past waiting for consequences. Now is Now. It's too late now for society, we can only cope with the immediateness of Now. People want everything now: money, information, service, friendship. At what cost? Credit only runs so deep. Truth is a matter of perception and corroboration of facts. Automation can only go so far. Trust can only ripen with time.

It's why things that take patience and time have become even less popular: science, research and development (from social skills to relationships to newer and better things and ideas). It's why we have pro athletes who skip college for the big leagues. It's why we have fast-track programs to high-paying careers and even fewer teachers in the public school systems.

Now is the time of forgive, but not really forget. But would there be something to forgive, if we had just used a little patience?

Don't you remember a time when you were young and you really wanted that cookie/toy/cartoon? And your parents told you, "Not now, honey." The victory was so much sweeter when you finally got what you wanted. Anticipation and patience, they made it all worthwhile. That doesn't happen Now.

Teaching and Peace Corps are the anti-thesis of Now. The developing world is catching up with the concept, but it hasn't infiltrated to the very core of it yet. After all, much of it is still unpowered, and hence, unconnected. However, as someone who started to feel the effects of the Now generation tainting my very existence when I left college and entered the working world, I can say that I suffer from wanting to know now if my work was worth it. Teachers who work so hard and see that their students don't have the ability to read and critically think like students of generations past. Why work hard? What is the point?

Dear friends, family and most importantly strangers who have suffered this long through my hypothesized TGIF and Now generations rambling. Thank you. I want to say that it is worth it, but I can't tell you the why right now. Even if you and I won't see the effects right away of the little things that we do because we really should (and not because someone else tells us we should). Don't let Now control you. Yes, I realize this takes critical thinking skills on your part to make the tough decisions and sacrifices.

If you all let the world fall to pieces while I'm outside of the Now, I'm going to be very disappointed. After all, what is the future of programs like the Peace Corps and the world in general if there are not enough people who are capable of waiting?

The president elect has a lot of work on his hands to transform a society of Now to a society of (k)Now. I hope the world realizes that if he moves at the speed of Now, the world might go to pieces even despite the best of intentions. Change can't happen fast. The world is a place that needs to be gently molded, otherwise it springs back into its original form, or worse yet, it collapses. Here's hoping for a speedy but not hasty transformation from Now to (k)Now - a generation that treats the information it has Now responsibly.

Happy new year!

Happy new year everyone! Photos have been uploaded for my New Year's shindig in village. I spent both Christmas and New Year's in village, with a brief visit to my new neighbor Annette in between. She has a real nice set-up down the street... and 45 km is not a bad bike ride.

As we like to say around here... Bonne annee! Prosperite! Sante! Bonheur! Paix! Moins de problemes! Beaucoup d'argent!

In Ouaga for another day or so... and then disappearing back into village for a while...

Hugs!

Love, AK