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.