Burkina Faso Adventure

House and Cacti in Burkina Faso 

What have I been up too? Well, I completed my volunteer response form, which is this form that all volunteers need to do every six months, and although the software for the program is horrible, and with the internet crashing every few minutes and the power going in and out sporadically, intermingled with the turning off and on of the generator and power surges that come as a result, it was an interesting time but finished. Not much to report because I've been in three month challenge concentrating on culture and language study, and PC doesn't really want us to start large projects because time has shown that projects started too early usually fail. And well, I've been reading lots of books, but you knew that from before.

This past week, my passe of life changed dramatically. I went to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, with 3 other volunteers from Gambia and attended an agriculture conference held by an organization based in Florida. Overall, I'd give it a B+, some really interesting stuff, research, and tools that blew me away, pretty excited about it. Some of the sessions were like infomercials, so there was free wifi in the hotel and I took advantage of that during those times. I was really impressed by Ouagadougou, there are paved streets with sidewalks and for the most part people follow traffic patterns. There were also buildings higher than 3 stories, with incredible architecture. There were bridges that went over roads, never mind bridges that went over water ( the gambian river does not have a bridge that crosses it). The markets were organized in stalls with lots of walking room around them, there were leather products and nice mali mud fabric. In general, people weren't pushy and would bargain with 'toubabs' on prices. I got lots of fabric, one with corn all over them that I'm going to have made into a pair of overalls, I'm going to look pretty silly, and I'm going to love it.  There were restaurants that served really great food, I had my first chicken Cesar salad in over six months and it was a beautiful, beautiful moment. Also, because it was colonized by the French, there are french themes remaining, like they speak french and french patisserie shops. There were some really great volunteers there from other countries, and a good time was had by everyone. Bottom line, Ouagadougou was pretty cool.  I now know that I need to speak some french, but for the moment I'll put that towards the bottom of my to-do list. There were interesting moments in travel, we flew, thank you PC, and one would think that international flights would be on-par standard with what people typically think of as international flights. But no, Africa won't let you forget that your in Africa. A flight from Burkina to Dakar was delayed an hour because a flight from Azerbaijan hadn't landed yet and there were passengers on that flight that were heading to Dakar with us, so we waited for them.  Security personnel, in one of the countries we flew through gave us a hard time about our carry on luggage, suggesting that we check some and carry on each-others luggage, which I reminded him was also against international law, but well it worked out eventually. Flights in general left about 30 minutes late, but in -air meals are now something I consider excellent. We were served meat on the way there and the single portion of meat was larger and more tasty/more tender than anything I have yet to see in my families food bowl. But flying the 25 minute flight from Dakar to Gambia brought a sense of coming home that I haven't felt in a while. It's great to be home.