*The opinions expressed here are Garrett's and not Peace Corp's, especially in the last few paragraphs, these are STRICTLY GARRETT'S VIEWS*

Greetings everybody. It's been a very long time, there's little to say when life continues on as normal. Given that school's been out for a while, I've only had a few projects to do.

The main thing that's been on my mind is the drought of this season. June-September is generally the rainy season here in Burkina, and May had a couple rains. Well, in this season, May had equal rains to June and July, which was really bad. Those were just a few small rains. To me, the reality of global warming taking place has come. Global warming is no longer a future worry in my mind. It's a unique situation for me because I'm seeing my villagers, who are people who'll be the type most negatively impacted by global warming in the coming future, trying to understand this phenomenon. They complain and worry about the lack of rain, and I tell them it's because of cars emitting gases and their cows farting a bunch. But, they just shake off my explanations and accept their fate. When I talk to them about agricultural techniques that will help crops grow in the face of drought, they often shake it off because doing such techniques betrays what they do by custom. I've been thinking about the effects of villagers having a diminished harvest and how hungry my students will be during the school year and how tough it will be to teach them. On the one hand, I'm sad I won't be here to help those in need. On the other, I'm relieved I won't have to see so much agony.

However, at the very end of July, we finally did get some good, consistent rains. That's a relief, the harvest shouldn't be a disaster. It just depends on if the rainy season ends early or late. I've told my replacement in village, Jonathan, that he has a lot of tough work ahead of him. I've left him notes on secondary projects to do at school to cope with these problems. The big thing I've asked him to do is continuing some senisitizations with the students on why not to get the female students pregnant. That was a huge problem last year with our 23 pregnant girls who had to resort to prostitution in order to get enough food to survive. Because they're far from their parents, they have to rely on others for food. The key thing for improvement in that area is to have more ambitious projects and really set forth expectations for the students to behave well.

In the meantime, I've also worked in the training of the new Peace Corps trainees. It hearkened back well on my life in training: the diarrhea bouts every week, the stress of constant workshops, the being thrown into a different culture. The new group is a good one, they're creative with how they teach, were full of confidence (at least in the beginning), and nobody has dropped out yet. My replacement in village, Jonathan, is a nice, guitar-playing, song-writing science expert. He made a visit to my site where I was host for him in my/our house and helped introduced him to the big men of the village. He seemed a tad overwhelmed, especially being thrown into a place where French is necessary to speak. I hope his confidence wasn't shot, because he'll need it for the challenges up ahead.

The other big event in my village was the creation of a new agricultural association. My friend and his fellow villagers attended an agricultural conference a few months back on the big details of agriculture that most traditional farmers aren't aware of. They felt inspired to start an association to collectivize their crops and sell them on the market. They have taken me as a bit of a moral leader, even naming the association after me using my village name, Wendyam. I get to hear all their decisions and approve of everything. My goal has been not to interfere in the democratic structure of the 6 members and present my ideas as possibilities and provide objective info. I gave them a little investment to start things up, which they spent on peanuts and fertilizer. The focus for them is registering their association with the government in order to receive microfinancing in the future. It's an interesting phenomenon seeing villagers deciding to do something new, especially starting something so official-looking and dedicating themselves to do work. Villagers don't have the mindset necessary in a capitalist society of putting in a lot of work for a possible reward in the distant future. They tend not to be comfortable accepting that you can put in work on a project with a lot of risk, thus receiving nothing in the future. But, I enjoy seeing them accepting the new responsibility that's unlike what is expected of them in their African communities.

Overall, my adventure in Africa is pretty much done. I've got exactly two weeks left here. All that's left is a week of training the newbees and then having one day to say goodbye to the people in my village. My journey in Africa has brought me everything I've wanted: a reality check of what life is like in the third world (though I was only given one example of it), a chance to challenge my ideas of the world which I've changed, a chance to experience the bondings of a traditional community, a chance to appreciate something that's not America, a reason to greatly appreciate my own country and culture, and a lot of time to rest my mind in fast-paced America.

There is one viewpoint of mine that has changed the most. Before, I had the typical attitude of people with my political viewpoints that the world's poor are strictly victims of problems of which they could never surmount on their own. For example, I used to believe that people in the third world were incapable of paying off their IMF and World Bank debt or that global warming is going to make their lives impossible. Since I've been here, I've seen businessmen taking the courage to buy merchandise and sell things in a fashion which is so alien to their culture, but which has brought benefits of improved salary and comfort to their family which has been appreciated. I've seen these businessmen pay off their personal debt, and I realized that African countries can surmount their problems if their people take the courage to take risks and not become involved in the all so tempting corruption. I also see now that there are agricultural techniques that villagers can do with minimal resources which will allow them to sustain their lifestyle in the drought-ridden future. They just need to accept more work and benefits which will possibly come in a future that's more distant than they have the habit of looking at. The viewpoint that the have-nots have insurmountable obstacles, I’ve realized, is very belittling to their intelligence and capacity to do good themselves. And for the view that the have-nots are complete victims of their problems, I’ve learned to see communities of people can surmount these big issues if their individuals personally decide to adopt the key virtues in life like: hard-work, courage, open-mindedness, and a capacity for thinking critically of their problems.

On the BBC, I often hear a lot of the wiser, more worldly Africans saying that Africa's problems need to be solved by Africans. I've seen how that's true here. Many people want hand-outs from Westerners thinking they can become rich that way. The wiser Burkinabe I respect greatly, realize their future and their material wealth is strictly in their own hands. Westerners can only help these people by giving knowledge and reason to take initiative in their lives. Peace Corps has trained us well to be wary giving people money out of our salaries, and I've realized the reason for it: that encourages dependence on Westerners. I often think of a lot of liberal accounts of the future being apocalyptic menaces ridden with global warming, mass poverty, societal collapses, and so on. I've learned to see in Africa that little by little, people will become aware of these things and people will have the courage and willingness to work with people different from them to fix the challenges of the future. People will become more educated and worldly, better able in the future to think critically about their challenges and work with others in a peaceful, rational manner. In an unexpected way, I think the greatest gift I got from Africa is a positive view of the future.

*The opinions here are Garrett's, not the Peace Corps'*

Hey everybody. I hope things are going well. Little new has happened here in Burkina to tell about. I've done a few projects here and there and developing some for the rainy season June-August when everybody will be in their fields.

A recent major project I did was a writing contest for the students at my school on the question: "Why is it important that girls go to school?" In this culture, people often don't want girls getting secondary education because they're afraid the girls will get impregnated and will not want to help maintain family cultivation and housework and all that. But, of course, girls' education is necessary for the education of young children and so that women will be able to make good decisions regarding the health of their families. In reading the essays that my students wrote, I was a little surprised that the main reason they think girls' education is important is so they can get important government careers and have prestige in their adulthood. Out here, people believe the point of education is to become presitigious, which implies getting government work. It's not like in America or other Anglophone countries where people want to pursue careers in the private sector in order to do business. The government is the biggest, and in the mentality of the people here, only employer; thus they don't see any other options in their life if they bothered going to school.

The other developing project I had going on was preparing a field for the rainy season to plant millet and peanuts. I've was considering having it there to show people how to do various agricultural techniques that are being introduced into the country so they can see how well they work and thus help their own fields and prevent erosion. The main new technique is one called zai holes where you dig a series of holes in the ground and put animal poop in them, then cover them. Then, ants will come to eat the poop and thus disperse the poop's nutrients throughout the soil and aerate the soil, making it perfect for cultivation. This is practiced farther up north in the Sahel region where soil is on the verge of becoming the pure sand of a desert. I'm discovering that people in my village are resistant to these new techniques because it's against their custom; they don't see the necessity of it in face of future global warming and the encroachment of the Sahara. Custom is a strange thing in these traditional cultures. Americans will be surprised to realize that traditional peoples would rather die, starve, and suffer in maintaining their traditional lifestyles than changing their lifestyles to meet the modern world. Agriculture is one example of this. Luckily, Peace Corps gotten money for us to lead conferences in our villages regarding agriculture techniques for cultivators. I have a friend in my village who is related to the chief who is willing to facilitate a three day conference on agriculture for the village. This way, because it's being done by a respected local, cultivators will be more apt to listen to new ideas than if it's a 23 year old white guy talking to them in french.

The other big event that happened recently was one of the teachers at my school just got married during school break. They invited me to their wedding in a village about 25km north of mine and then for the wedding party on the way back to village. I made a bit of a faux pas that I felt stupid about when I arrived, I forgot to dress formally for it. It was especially bad because I had to bike to the wedding in the heat because of certain Peace Corps regulations about taking motorcycles. So, I show up in my sweaty Humboldt Alumni shirt where everybody else looks very nicely dressed. Luckily, the Burkinabe are a very polite people and didn't mention the elephant in the room. It was supposed to be a Muslim wedding, but I was surprised to see how modern it was, the bride had a white dress and the groom a tux. For the ceremony, they went to the mayor's office where the bride and groom sat on one side of a desk with a family member each. Then, two officials sat on the other side of the desk and read some various laws on marriage and such. Second, the bride and groom both gave their consent for marriage based off of a reading from some government law book or something. Third, the groom shows his wedding ring to everyboy in the room who acts as witness and the bride does the same for her ring. I could see they were nervous showing their rings and seemed a tad uncomfortable with the protocol of it. At the end, they gave an embarrassed, half-hearted french kiss in front of everybody. In most of Africa, PDAs aren't tolerated, so I could see their embarrassment doing the kiss. On leaving the building, they got sprayed by white confetti. The food afterwards was good.

That's all I could think up. I'll try to get wedding photos and more photos of my Closing of Service party up if I get the time.

*The opinions here are Garrett's, not the Peace Corp's*

 

Hey everybody. Life's been going well here, how about in the US? My big event that recently happened was...watching the Super Bowl. Life in Africa certainly is made easier when I get to see something spectacular like that to remind me of the US. I was expecting to meet up with around 20 volunteers who would come into town like last year. But, I only met up with one friend who wasn't originally planning to watch it! What's up with that! There are 120ish American volunteers here and I'm the only loyal American intending to watch it. I'm thankful that my Peace Corps country director, Doug, let us over to his house to watch it, he sure is fun to hang with.

Well, otherwise, what's been keeping my really busy in my village is my statistics project in one of my math classes. The book has a chapter on statistics, so I found 9 different problems in Burkina (child mortality, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Education of women, primary school enrollment, etc.) and made it into 11 different projects for 11 groups of kids. The students have to do some diagrams of the statistics and answer questions about what the statistics tell about the problems. I made them talk to various experts in the village (mostly the nurses at the local clinic) to help answer the questions. The tricky part at the end is they have to do one action to help their community against the problem. I was hoping they could do some active things, but they couldn't find anything to do, so I allowed them to do sensibilizations, grrr. Most of them did a little talk in class to their fellow students. That went ok, but when the kids' friends are up in front of the class, they're so rude to them and won't quit talking. It's not a normal school activity, so they didn't know how to handle themselves. I'm hoping to teach them to keep disciplined. There are two groups who were brave enough to do their sensibilizations in the market. I got the local clinic to lend me their microphone for the sensibilisations. They edited the scripts of the kids before giving permission. So, on Thursday afternoon, we met at the village market, I handed the microphone over to them, and they did a little walk around the market to talk about tuberculosis and the reasons for infant mortality. It was tons to set up logistically, but I think it was good that some impact was made, and it was made by my students.

The other big news regards the group of volunteers that have formed the Food Security Committee to work against hunger in the country. I've been made the director of Soils and Compost, so I'll be heading volunteer activities and giving ideas on teaching people to improve their soil and make compost to help their fields and gardens. I've had ideas about creating a model field in my village where I use more modern field and garden management techniques to grow a little millet and sorghum. If my millet turns out well, the villagers might become curious and start implementing some new techniques to help their soil and prevent deforestation.

Well, not much else I can think of.

*The opinions here are Garrett's, not Peace Corps'*

Hey all, long time no blog. I think I wrote my prior blog before my first trimester of this school year. So, I'll talk about the good things that have happened during the trimester. My big project I've been up to outside of teaching is my Life Skills Club where I talk about being aware of your lifestyle and how it will affect/be affected by the AIDS epidemic. I try to encourage positive lifestyle decisions for preventing HIV transmission in a culture where often, people just want a drug to cure any disease (even when there is no such drug as in HIV..AIDS case). I've talked about the modes of transmission, a review on how to use condoms, the three lifestyle choices to prevent HIV infection (fidelity, abstinence, and condom use), the statistics on HIV regarding how serious an epidemic it truly is, and how to negotiate not having sex or condom use in a confident manner. Some lessons the students got bored with i.e. statistics. However, the communication activity was a blast for the students. I led a game where one student will, say, ask another for sex or encourage their friend to have sex with another person. Then, a few students will give the best response they can to that peer pressure, and everybody votes on what was the best response. Because there was a lack of girls there, some guys had to take girls' roles, thus they took some headscarves that women wear to wear themselves and thus do a little cross-dressing. It was great fun.

Otherwise, classes have been fun. My English students enjoyed a game of bingo I did with them where they filled a grid with various french words and listened to my english words to cross out. They liked that. Math is my favorite class to teach just because I see how the students' are learning to really think critically, it's the more rewarding subject to teach.

I've also had a project going where I've given out moringa trees to gardeners to grow. Moringa's a tree which has leaves loaded with all kinds of vitamins, so in a malnourished area of the world, people could take advantage of it to help against malnutrition and even make some profit. The problem is getting people to be aware of the benefits of the leaves and integrate it in their cooking. What I'm envisioning is teaching the gardeners about it and encouraging them to sell the powder of the leaves to people for getting profit. That will add moringa into the staple foods of the people here.

Otherwise, I got to visit an annual festival at my regional capitol of Koudougou just recently. Lots of tourists will come to check out the city at the time and lots of people sell art.There was also an Alpha Blondie concert that I went to. He's a big reggae star, huge in West Africa. Of course, I hadn't heard of him before the concert. In typical African fashion, it all started 2 hours late. And to start it off, they hired a comedian as a bit of a filler until the singer showed up. I was the only one there who didn't care for his style. He has a typical African style of telling stories where he talks about whatever's on his head with no restraint for as long as he wants. Because he doesn't wrap up to make points, I don't hold on to what he says easily. The concert finally started after a while. There was an buffer zone in front of the stage the security set up. But, Alpha Blondie easily made that his mosh pit. I decided to sit in my paid seats . A little into the concert, Alpha Blondie decided to let everybody in the city in for free, so I felt a bit ripped off after paying lots to get a seat. Oh well, it was a good experience.

Those are all the big things I can think of. I hope all is going well for you guys.

Garrett

Hey everybody, long time no see with the blogs. Life in Africa has been good. I've been getting going with the bigger peace corps projects, you know, the reason taxpayers send me here. And the school year has started off well, I think my students will learn much.

The long rainy season ended. The weather was a tad strange. It stopped raining for about two weeks, then rained for four days in a row (just the evenings of course). While it was nice to be cooled down, the villagers were telling me their concerns that because the millet is ripening, the rain can make their millet go bad. I guess that's a potential peace corps project. If it comes down to a problem of storing crops, I could talk to villagers about steaming the insides of their granaries somehow to keep the bugs from getting into their wet crops. I just hope it's not that their millet is going to go bad right away. For the next food security committee meeting (a group of volunteers that I'm with), I'm going to request them to educate me about how to help this little problem. I'm already getting visions of grandeur being a hero of my village; I saved the year's crops.

I'll be teaching English and math again. With that bad english group of students I had the year before, well, I get them again for math. They were respectful at first, now they're back to being themselves. For starting out the school year, I had them write a list of rules in their notebooks on day 1. What I'll do is if they're being bad, they're going to read the rule out loud, get laughed at by the other students, then get sent outside. The problem is mostly with my English classes. Because I speak almost exclusively in English and do goofy things to teach vocabulary, the students get uneasy. I don't know if when they talk, they translate my English for their friends. But, calming the students when speaking in English is tough.

My current big project is sensitizing all my students on the problems of female students becoming pregnant. There are 8 classes in my school, and I'm going to go to each class with some other teachers to talk to them. We first ask what problems the girls will have if they become pregnant (we apparently had 21 in total last year, so they must be familiar with the problems). People say in the Mossi society that the male family members won't talk to a young pregnant woman and will, in extreme cases, exile her from the family, if not stop paying their school fees. We then break down some of their superstitions such as: old guys can't make you pregnant, you can't get pregnant at an age earlier than when your mother had her first child, and others like that. Towards the end, I get to do the honor of putting the condom on the corn. It's my main role here. I was quite encouraged when I couldn't go to one sensitization for a 7th grade class. My other teachers told me about 30 kids from other classes showed up to participate, they just really wanted to learn about the issue. It make me so happy. Well, I've got five more to go.

Otherwise, I'll be doing some agriculture stuff soon. My friend in village has been managing my moringa plants, all 300 of them. He says they need to be transplanted soon, so he's been writing down names of people who want some. I'll give them and talk to them about how they manage their fields in the dry season. There's a lot people don't know about regarding how they can improve the quality of their soil. I want to add some sensitizations along with my presents of moringa trees. I'm also told two gardeners want to do big plantations of moringa; they requested 100 trees. That would be great to have major plantations and teach them how to dry the leaves and make a nutritious powder for sauces.

Little else out of the ordinary. I hope that I'll be getting some of the Harry Potter books in french from my folks. I've read the first one and want to finish the series in French. It would be cool if I manage to.

*The opinions here are Garrett's, not Peace Corp's*

 

Hey. It's been a while since I've written a blog. There's been a lot of good happening. My life has centered around teaching English during the summer to middle school and high school students. It's done through the American Language Center, a little place ran through the US embassy here in Ouaga. We have a group of part time teachers who teach traditional lessons for two hours a day. Then, myself and two friends, Kim and Julia, have planned a bunch of camp activities for the kids to do. The activities are relevant to four weekly themes: civic education, child trafficking, volunteerism, and the environment.

I've been incredibly impressed by the students. They're all quite wealthy, they're parents had to pay more than $100 to get them here, a huge amount in Burkina terms. I thought they'd have discipline problems given they're wealthy, but discipline hasn't been a problem. The advanced students understand most everything you say to them and enjoy participating in the more ambitious camp activities; the beginning students don't understand much of what you say, but many do try. It's a big confidence booster after you've been teaching in the bush for a year.

I'm quite impressed by some of the things they've done. They sing a lot of English songs quite well, including: Bingo, I believe I can fly, and Three Little Birds. On one day, they've asked us questions about our lives in the US and how it differed from theirs as children. Many have designed nice posters. Most of the best work centered on child trafficking, which is where employers take children from villages far from home and exploit them by having them work a lot, but paying them little or nothing. It's a major problem in West Africa, especially given the children don't go to school, earn so little, get abused, and don't see they're parents for a year at a time. There were some heartflet poems that many students wrote that I'll include at the bottom.

Otherwise, I've gotten the pleasure to live in the capitol city for 3 weeks, and two more to go. It's good getting to see other volunteers constantly coming in and out and getting to say goodbye to volunteers who are finishing their two years. Me and my two co-workers always focus on getting ourself inexpensive food during the weekdays. It helps a lot that we three all have the same mindset in spending money. We get reimbursed for travel and a little for food, but we're still conservative.

On one day, a PCV named Ryan was telling me about a tree called Moringa which is known as a miracle tree for many of the world's poor. It grows leaves that are loaded with many vitamins, even some key ones that are lacking for many children here in west Africa. People can easily pound the leaves into powder and use it in their tô sauces for increased nutrition. In addition, its seeds can be grounded as well and used in dirty water to separate the mineral deposits as the bottom, so people won't have cholera and other problems with dysentery. Given all this information, I was motivated to go back to my site and plant 23 moringa trees in my courtyard. What I have planned is leading a big sensibilization in town where give people a few seeds, I tell people about growing the trees, using the seeds to clean water, and the nutritional benefits of the leaves. I'll have many people grow trees in their houses where they protect them from animals. If their trees have grown well, I'll take a picture of them with their tree and promise to give them a printout of the photo when I have the chance. People here love having their photos, and I don't want to become a village photographer. But, if they do some good work, then I'll reward them with a photo.

Au revoir tout le monde. Oh yah, some poetry reflecting on child trafficking:

 

I see the ibg fire on the night and people around listening to old person's stories

I hear my fellow children singing and playing joyfully

I smell the good sauce and tô of my sweet mother

I feel disoriented and painful because I'm so far from all these good things

 

I see a child walking across the desert in search for a better life

I hear the booming of thunder everywhere I go

I smell the odor of my folks drifting away

I feel my soul leaving my body

 

I see pain and suffering on children's faces

I hear the yelling of the never satisfied farm owners

I smell the odor of sweat and blood in the sad atmosphere

I feel indescriptible pain rising from the bottom of my heart

*The opinions here are Garrett's, not the Peace Corps*

Hi everybody. Well, I thought I'd tell a bit about my vacation I took with Dave in the verdant southwest region of Burkina. Overall, I have to say it was fun seeing nice verdure and the differences in culture and practices around here.

Well, it started out going on the least reputable bus line in Burkina to get to the big western town, Bobo Dioulasso. Dave and I got lost (or myself rather, I thought I knew this part of town) trying to find a good bus station. So, we gave up and had a taxi bring us to the less reputed one that I knew goes to Bobo often. In the bus, we got cramped in a stinky corner, but Dave loved it. It was just so much better than what he's used to in the near-desert north. Getting off, we got a taxi to bring us approximately to the Peace Corps bureau in town; I had a vague photographic memory of the area. We looked around for about 45 minutes (a common theme in this trip was getting lost). Eventually, we did find it as well as the nice hotel to stay at. Over there, we had dinner with an Australian woman who's been doing more adventurous trips through West Africa than any Peace Corps volunteer. She told us about trying to go on a boat in Mali to Timbuktu, an interesting story more epic than any Peace Corps volunteer's story, my goodness. It was full of robbery, hunger, digging boats out of mud, avoiding hippos, and getting crowded by little kids.

First stop was Banfora with the nice waterfalls. We stayed at a tourist campement outside of the town. It had cement huts (kinda fake), a metal gate, and a staff that has been trained well how to treat westerners; all these things are rarities. But, the thing I just loved was the sweet dog named Plaque. Dogs usually aren't trained to do a thing in Burkina, but just live to be abused. This one always wanted to be petted and would lie its head on my leg, and would guard my room at night, and escorted me to the waterfalls. We grew quite a friendship. Almost as good was the thick crust pizza, yum. All pizza I've seen in this country is thin crust.

Ok, the waterfalls. I've found the best part of tourist sites in Burkina is not the sites themselves, but the ride to get there. The path had long open spaces with rice and sugar fields, looking very pretty. We arrived at the waterfall area, but our guide first showed us the domes of fabedougou. These are rocks I think 1.3 billion years old, worn in curvy shapes by having being underneath the ocean for so long. We then walked about a mile and a half to the river. It had many nice small falls, then a big one at the end. But, it wasn't the right time of the year, so not much water was falling. What was bad was I forgot my camera at the camp, but Dave took some pictures. Here's where you can see some http://picasaweb.google.com/davebowser1

Also in Banfora, Dave and I searched for the local McDonald's. We heard there was one here, the only one in Burkina. So, I was keeping my eyes out for the golden arches, and...it was a fake McDonald's sponsored by a fake Donald Duck. We were disappointed and went to a different restaurant. We're later told it's the best restaurant in town, bummer.

After, I went to Orodara to visit a volunteer named Veronica. She showed me the organization she works for that dries mangoes to sell. I was amazed by all the fancy equipment. She gave me a tour of her big town, reputed for growing lots of fruit. There's a good company in the area that buys these fruits to make boxed juice. It's one of the clearly accomplished Burkinabe companies and I always want to buy their juice at restaurants, but given that each one is a quarter of my daily salary, it'll be the death of me. We pretty much just watched movies after that.

The next day, I decided I'm crazy enough to bike 75 km to Sindou, the last tourist spot. I wanted some good nature photos, and got a few. I felt like I was transported to the Congo or something, it didn't seem like the savannah anymore. At one point, a village chief was driving by and saw I had a camera around my neck and pulled me over on his moto. I knew he wanted money for the photos, so I said I took the photos a few villages back (which I did). But, I gave him some money anyways. I got a bit scared the whole time. I observed how the fields are in the area. People use different tools here with the different climate. In the savannah, people use a daba which is a piece of wood with a little metal to pound a small hole. Here, people also use one that is a wood with a little shovel on it backwards. I observe that here, people want to kick up more dirt in order to absorb more rainwater. I don't know all the differences in implications.

Arriving in Sindou, I found that it's a very small little town, but clearly well trained to receive western tourists. People don't call you a white person left and right. Also, people authentically want you to feel comfortable. There was a PCV here a few years ago, and I think she helped train this town on how to treat westerners well.

The Peaks of Sindou were awesome to look at from a distance. Once nearby, they were ok. A lot of it was off limits because they're sacred area where the locals sacrifice animals, so I was limited in doing a nice hike. But, I got some good photos for y'all to enjoy.

Now, I'm back to site to read War and Peace and do more sensibilizations. I hope I'm accepted to teach English at Ouagadougou this summer.