Burkina Faso RPCVs

Since Markus and I can't claim to be Burkina Faso PCVs anymore (we tried, but we kept getting threatening letters from the US government), this blog is kaput. But never fear. If you just can't get enough of that zany little African town called Titao, check out our replacements' blog: aaronandamyrose.blogspot.com. If you dig my style, Ill be writing at eekgodjilla.blogspot.com. Markus fans, don't fret! He'll be an occasional guest writer. It'll be pretty much the same thing but with considerably fewer black people.

Thanks for reading!

Escape from Titao

By guest writer Kurt Russell*

Thunder shook the tin roof. As the first drops panged on the metal, Markus's cell phone rang.

“Marku. . .It. . .ylvie. We nee. . .stool sample. . .mediately!” The phone cut out, but Markus knew what he had to do. He had to escape from Titao.

“JILL! Get your stuff! We gotta get our stool samples to Ouaga!” Jill frantically picked up the six cats that seemed to multiply like gremlins.

“What do I do with these?!” she yelled.

“Get rid of 'em!” Markus shouted.

Jill threw the cats in Markus's direction, creating a screaming ball of claws and fur. Markus jumped dramatically to the side to avoid the striped cloud of death that was heading straight for him.

Amy and Aaron, the replacements who were in Titao to see their site, looked at each other. “What's going on?” Amy said. Aaron just shook his head, confused.

The rain was pouring as they ran to their bikes. Markus cursed. “Someone slashed our tires!”

Jill frantically picked up all the bikes. “What do I do with these?!”

“Get rid of 'em!” Markus shouted.

Jill threw the bikes in Aaron's direction, creating a devastating wave of spokes and handlebars. Aaron jumped dramatically to the side.

“LET'S GO, LET'S GO, LET'S GO!” Markus commanded.

The four set out, stool samples in hand, toward the bus station. “Oh no!” Jill shouted. “The road's covered in water! We're trapped!”

“We can do it!” Markus replied as he grabbed Jill's hand and the two of them sloshed their way through the six inches of muddy water. When they got to the other side, they heard screams and turned to see Amy and Aaron wash away. Markus dropped to his knees. “NOOOOO!”

“We have to keep going,” Jill said to Markus as she yanked him to his feet.

A few minutes later they spotted the bus. “Go, go, go!” Markus yelled.

As they got nearer, they had to push their way through a crowd of villagers moaning, “Take us to America!” Women held up their babies and screeched, “Take my baby! Take my baby!” Markus pushed everyone aside, but Jill frantically picked up all the babies.

“What do I do with these?!”

“Get rid of 'em!” Markus shouted.

Jill threw the babies in the villagers' direction, creating a squealy ball of baby. The villagers jumped dramatically to the side.

Jill and Markus climbed into the bus. “Floor it!” Markus yelled at the bus driver. As the bus picked up speed, the driver started panicking. “What is it?” Markus said.

“Look up ahead,” the driver said, nervously.

Markus squinted through the windshield and saw a group of four-year-old bandits who'd set up a toll booth made of twigs. “Damn!”

“I have to stop and pay them,” the driver said.

“Not this time,” Markus growled as he stepped on the driver's foot and the bus crashed through the twig barricade. The four-year-olds jumped dramatically to the side.

“Phew,” Markus exclaimed, sinking into his seat and putting his arm around Jill. As they passed by the Titao sign, he said, “We're out. It's over.”

“But what about getting out of Ouaga?”

“Oh dear God.”

*Note: Inspired by Markus, written by Jill (not actually Kurt Russell)

Rose Colored Memory

Something weird happens every time I take transport in Burkina. I sit on a sack full of carrots, struggling to avoid the pointy ends and waving my hands around to keep the carrot-loving fly army at bay. One, two, six hours later the bus shows up. Or rather the ex-bus, considering how many vital bus parts are missing--windows, seats, axles, tires. I push, pull, and bite my way through the crowd to get a seat and we're off. Kind of. We'll get going once the driver feels like it and right now he's more keen on eating, praying, and holding hands with his buddies than driving a rickety old bus. At last we shake, rattle, and roll our way down the scenic dirt roads of Burkina, and I keep my fingers crossed that the bus doesn't run out of gas, break down, or explode. But as soon as I get to where I'm going, I'm so happy to be there that I immediately forget how horrible the experience had been.

I feel the same thing happening with my Peace Corps experience. Already the view's getting rosier, which is great. Bring it on. But I don't want to completely forget the bad things. That sounds so pessimistic, but nothing's more obnoxious than listening to someone returning from living in Africa who won't shut up about how cute the kids are and how interesting the culture is and how pretty the language is and how delicious the food is. Yeah right. No PCV goes around all day saying, “I'm so happy to be here! This is just so amazing!” If they do, they should probably cut back on the Larium. Instead we struggle through all the little difficulties and actively try to have a good time, which most people succeed in doing. No one would stay for two long years if they weren't having a good time.

But it's been really hard, and I'm glad I'm leaving. Most of my problems with this place stem from my being a married woman in Africa. It's not culturally appropriate for men to be friends with married women, so after greeting me, they turn to Markus and don't look back. That's the official line, anyway; I think the real reason men don't talk to me is because they're not at all interested in what women have to say. Men and women have very little interaction aside from the obvious, which they do all the time judging by all the tiny, pantsless kids running around, so they don't know how to talk to each other. Even the Burkinabé men working in the Peace Corps bureau--educated men who work with Americans--treat me differently than Markus. After two years the head of Secondary Education still isn't quite sure if my last name is Markus or Fleisch, but he's pretty sure it's Markus.

Not only does Markus have the good luck to have been born male, he also happens to be nice and charming. So after the initial, “You have a penis?! No way! I do too! Let's be best friends” interest died away, the Burkinabé stuck around because they liked him and became even less interested in me. Our neighbor, who is also a teacher at the school, would come up to me and say, “Go tell your husband that he and I are going to go get some beers and leave you and my wife at home.” Instead, Markus and I went out for beers and left him at home. So at least I got to benefit from Markus being nice and charming.

I don't want to forget what it was like to live and work in a village where no matter how many times I corrected people, they always called me Madame Markus because that shaped every aspect of my experience here. Paradoxically, it made me enjoy teaching even more than I would have because I relished hearing my students call me Madame McKay and listening to everything I said--they might not have respected me as a woman, but they sure respected the red pen I wielded. I also really enjoyed teaching because although the digestive system of a cow isn't a lifelong passion of mine, I love biology and I like teaching, especially when I get to do goofy stuff like pretending I'm a crab walking sideways. Teaching was my therapy for the neurosis I developed from the way people who weren't my students treated me.

No transport story's complete without describing the goat that peed on your foot, the baby that vomited on your lap, and the spit from the dude in front of you that flew back through the window and smacked you in the face. So I'll definitely come back with rose colored stories about how much I enjoyed teaching in Burkina, but I'll also tell poop brown/snot green/yellow vomit colored stories of sexism.

Au revoir, Titao!

For the past few months I've been meaning to get a picture of the cute little Titao sign that says "Au revoir et bonne route" and another sign that has a picture of a giant goat, sheep, and chicken threatening to eat some normal-sized fields. But it was hot and it rained last night so now it's all muddy and my back kind of hurts and my tire's flat and I'm kind of hungry and oh man I ate too much and where'd I put my sweat rag and oh I feel a little sleepy and zzz. So instead here's a picture of a couple of dudes in tiny shirts. Enjoy!

Adventures in nostalgia

On our last day in Ouahigouya, Markus and I invited our friends to get chicken and beer with us later that night, set out the half empty bottle of gin we planned on making gin and tonics with at the bar, and allowed ourselves to feel a tiny bit nostalgic.

At five I asked Markus if the sound I was hearing was thunder, and he said it was just the wind. At quarter to six, Markus stood outside and looked up at the dark clouds. I joined him and asked him what he thought. In uncharacteristically optimistic style, he said he thought they would pass us. At a little after six it suddenly started pouring. I shouted at Markus over the rain that I didn't want to bike through all that mud; Markus shouted back that he was leaving as soon as the rain stopped. At 6:30 the electricity turned off. At 6:31 Markus and I took out our frustrations by snapping at each other. I shined my bike light on the book I was reading, Expat, and he used his cell phone to light the book he was reading, State of Fear, the Michael Crichton book in which he argues (badly) that global warming is a myth. I shouted at Markus asking if he wanted to sit next to me to share my bike light; he shouted no.

Cranky as hell, I cursed Ouahigouya and read my book, which was a collection of essays by women living abroad. I was in such a bad mood that I relished the parts when the author struggled with culture shock, weird food, and annoying people and glared at the page during the inevitable cultural assimilation and appreciation. Why couldn't my experience have a happy ending like that? Instead I was sitting in a humid room with rain hammering on the tin roof, mentally shaking my fist at the lights and fan that refused to turn on and daydreaming about how much fun I should have been having on my last night in Ouahigouya.

If Peace Corps's supposed to be such a life changing experience, how come I haven't been able to feel sad about leaving Burkina no matter how hard I've tried? I tried to feel it when I taught my last lesson, when I handed back my last test, when I left my last school meeting. But my lesson was about dysentery and my students' last impression of their white science teacher was her repeatedly telling them not to “défequer” outside. My students totally bombed their last test, and I formed my last impression of them while contending with a bunch of pissed off fifth graders. And after the school meeting, the other teachers neglected to tell us when lunch was and ate all the chicken without us, giving us a pity plate of chicken guts when we showed up late. Nope, not sorry about not teaching anymore.

Now here in Ouahigouya, I'm saying goodbye to the town where we had our three months of pre-service training. The town where I had all my first Burkinabé meals, including fish heads on rice and goat femur soup. The town that Markus and I escaped to when we were bored with Titao to drink ice cold beers and sleep in air conditioning. And it totally sucks. Instead of chatting with my friends about our first impressions of this place, I'm eating powdered mashed potatoes—the same thing I had for lunch—and tippy tapping out my frustrations.

But if nothing else, Burkina's taught me that nothing turns out like you thought it would. I know that if my students had surprised me and Markus with a giant “We'll miss you!” card that they'd all signed, I'd be totally weirded out. And if I'd had the perfect Ouahigouya goodbye, biking down to the bar without people yelling at me from all directions, then receiving excellent service from a smiling, attentive waitress, I'd think something was up. And if something like a ridiculously badly timed thunderstorm hadn't occurred, I'd be looking over my shoulder the whole evening, watching out for someone throwing dirt at me or stealing my iPod. The cynical moral of the story is that everything in this country goes wrong all the time. And that's ok. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if everything went right.

Serenity now!

I wish I could go back to those first few days in Burkina when I thought all the tiny kids running after me as I biked by were shouting “Ça va?! Ça va?!” Caught up in my initial excitement about being in Burkina, I enthusiastically answered them back, “Ça va!” And it really did ça va. It ça vaed pretty damn well because these adorable little black kids were politely asking how I was doing. Then I figured out that what they were really saying was “Nassara! Nassara!” Then it didn't ça va so well anymore.

This wasn't the jokey “gringo” I'd heard in Mexico. Or the descriptive “gaijin” I'd heard in Japan. It's true that sometimes “nassara” is jokey as in “Nassara speaks Mooré!” And it was certainly descriptive: Everyone from our faux typey boutique owner to our well-dressed landlord felt the need to remind us that we were, in fact, nassaras. As if we could ever forget. Not with the obnoxious adults yelling “Nassara!” and then laughing with their friends as I bike by, feeling extremely self-conscious and dorky in my bright blue helmet. And not with all the kids shouting “NASSARA! NASSARA!” in their screechy little voices—I got to the point where I actually felt scared when I saw a group of toddlers loitering on the street.

This isn't a unique problem, of course. Many volunteers deal by introducing themselves to all the gangs of roving children so that they screech their name instead of nassara. But as it turns out, “Jill” is about as difficult for a Burkinabé to pronounce as “Ouédraogo Fatao de Abdoulaye” is to a new American teacher. Most volunteers just try to ignore it. Easy enough. That is, until you crack and find yourself cursing and giving the finger to a bunch of four-year-olds. And finally there's the rare breed of volunteer who manages to just get over it. These volunteers, also called “third years” or “crazy,” have attained a level of serenity just below nirvana.

Recently I tried to convince myself that I've become nassara immune. Sure I flicked off a bunch of kids on the way to the internet café, but I didn't really mean it. And yeah, I noticed when the old lady I passed called me nassara, but it didn't bother me. But then Markus said, “What if we get to America and it turns out everyone there has turned into Burkinabés and yell nassara at us all the time?” Yeah, not so serene anymore.

My Perfect Marriage :)

This blog has tried to be funny because lots of people have said that humor is the best medicine (probably Mark Twain, but I'm not sure and am too lazy to look it up). I think Jill and I have made a few people laugh and anybody who really knows us knows that we are both sarcastic, dry-humored people. Our marriage occasionally becomes the target of this difficult-to-interpret-over-the-internet-style of humor. If you like to make fun of people and the only person in the room is your spouse, guess who's getting made fun of?

I wanted to write this blog to let people know that Jill and I, despite my bad grammar, are better than ever. In fact, I invite anybody reading this blog to come with their spouse and try two years in the stinkiest, sweatiest, diseasiest, place in the world. Try staying up with your spouse as they are vomiting and running to the latrine every five minutes. Try sweating constantly and still trying to make yourself look appealing. Try supporting your spouse when people are rude to you, but you can't complain because picking on the white people is part of the culture. Try dealing with people who literally call your spouse “thing there.”

Most marriages aren't strong enough to make it. Jill has already mentioned the statistic; here we are, two years later, no divorce. Actually, Jill and I are really looking forward to re-starting our lives in America. Buying a car, renting an apartment, finding jobs, applying to grad school, cutting open monkey brains, brewing beer. (Second to last is mostly Jill, but that last one is mostly me; Jill does love the end product though—that's right, I married a woman who likes beer more than wine, how many of you can say that?)

So if we post a blog that is critical of the other person, know that we are being sarcastic and there's no need to question our devotion to each other. In fact, it's down right insulting, thus the creation of this post to clear up any misunderstandings our previous posts may have caused and future posts might create. The Africa offer still stands. Any takers . . . ?

Les blancs, part deux

One of the worries running through volunteers' heads at the end of their service after “Will I be able to get a job?!” and “Oh God, I hope I don't end up living with my parents again!” is “Will I be replaced?” Technically you can be replaced as long as you're not the third volunteer at a site. But since there are a ridiculous amount of young, eager, unemployed college grads applying to the Peace Corps crying, “Send me to Africa!” in reality, the rules can be bent a little. In Titao, for instance, there was a volunteer a few years ago named Tom. All I know about Tom is that he was well liked at the school and that he left one memento for people to remember him by: a really bad picture of himself with a mullet. The volunteer after Tom was a woman named Anne, who was apparently a feisty one. She left after several months because she pissed off the principal. Hearing this story, we were a bit wary of our principal, who is himself a feisty one. But he has turned out to be a nice man as long as you're not a punk ass student who mouths off during class (I'm looking at you, Hamidou).

Since Anne and the principal had a conflict, the Peace Corps waited a few years before sending another volunteer to Titao. Enter Jill and Markus. Despite being the third (and fourth) volunteers in Titao, because there was a gap of a few years between us and our predecessors, we were considered the new first (and second) volunteers. Two years later, enter Amy and Aaron, our replacements. Before actually meeting Amy and Aaron, we knew them by reputation. Which is to say, we knew the most important thing about them to Burkinabé and Peace Corps Volunteers alike: They're married. Since they're the only married couple in the new group of volunteers, we knew that they were destined for Titao.

When we arrived in the Paris airport on our way back to Burkina after Patrick and Connie's wedding, we immediately spotted the large group of clean, excited looking white people with matching ribbons on their backpacks setting them apart as Peace Corps. After introducing ourselves as Burkina volunteers, we were swarmed. Many of the new group apologized for being so curious, but we enjoyed answering all their questions—it's quite an ego trip being surrounded by people who are dying to know all the minor details of your life. We were curious too and asked several people where the married couple was, despite knowing from experience how annoying it is to be stuck with the label “the married couple.” Soon a friendly blue-eyed dude and his friendly blue-eyed wife sat in front of us and said, “We're the married couple.”

We shouted, “You're going to Titao!” and babbled all about the grill guy Moussa, who makes the best chickens in town; my students coming by the house because they didn't quite understand what a flower was; the great Friday marché, which has people coming from as far as Ghana; that time Markus had amoebas and E. coli at the same time (that was so gross); and that weird, huge spider Markus got squirted by when he stomped on it before they had a chance to say “What's a Titao?” After clearing up the confusion, Markus and I rambled on and on about how great Titao is while watching our replacements get more and more excited about the next two years.

But Peace Corps likes to play hard to get, which is why it took Markus and me over a year to get through the application process—“Won't you please just let us go to Africa to teach children math and science, please, please, PLEASE?!” So Markus and I weren't too surprised when our boss implied that the couple might not actually go to Titao. We were pretty bummed at the idea because when we paused in our Titao pitch to take a breath, Amy and Aaron managed to get a word in and turned out to be charming people who we liked a lot. After all, he cooks! She teaches biology! What's not to like? But we're pleased to find out that they will in fact be replacing us in Titao.

Being the kind-of-sort-of first (and second) volunteers in Titao, Markus and I haven't experienced Replacement Syndrome, which is when the villagers let the new volunteer know what the old volunteer was really like. Sometimes this means the new volunteer sees people crossing themselves and forking the evil eye whenever the old volunteer's name is mentioned. More often, this means the new volunteer is told that their predecessor had better French/local language/cooking/teaching ability/all around awesomeness than they do. This is just the villagers' way of expressing appreciation for the old volunteer. Complimenting people to their faces is just not done in Burkina. I've heard three, maybe four compliments about my work in two years. Those compliments plus the compliments I've given myself—I've actually patted myself on the back—and the nice things I hope people will say about us after we're gone have kept me going.

So, cheers to Amy and Aaron for being brave/stupid enough to take on the challenge of teaching the hoards of Titaoramba* and I hope they have as interesting and fulfilling a time as we did.

*Mooré for “Titao people.”

Vive la politique!

Growing up, I've moved from one political stereotype to another. The first stereotype was Texas, where I was the most liberal of my friends by far thanks to my family—when I asked future political scientist Amy what the difference between republicans and democrats is, she said “Republicans are bad and democrats are good.” I spent much of my time having heated debates with other high schoolers, grumbling about the constitutionality of prayer circles at a public school, and mocking the fundamentalist girl in my biology class who did her final project on evolution and how it's wrong.

But before I got pushed too far to the left and started wearing a Dennis Kucinich button, I went to college in Washington, where instead of kickers in cowboy hats, there were hippies playing hacky sack. Now I was one of the most centrist of my friends. I just didn't agree with the people who believed organized religion is the worst thing to happen to this country, said they wanted to move to Canada after 9/11, and threw their Nalgenes away in disgust when animal rights activists pointed out that the company makes cages for animals used in experiments.

When I joined the Peace Corps, I thought it would be more of the same. The University of Puget Sound is the number one small school in alumni joining the Peace Corps (the number one large school is the University of Washington). In many ways the political environment in the Peace Corps was the same as it was in Washington. But even though it sometimes felt like my only opportunity for political debate was with Obama supporters who called me conservative for supporting Clinton, it was soon clear that Peace Corps Volunteers are much more diverse than they seem.

Living in a foreign country, especially Africa, affects everyone's outlook. Many volunteers become more conservative and patriotic. It's easy to say that America should send more money to Africa to fight AIDS and malaria, build schools, and feed the hungry when you're in America. But when you're in Africa, you see the hoards of white Land Cruisers covered in NGO stickers driving down the washed away dirt roads covered in trash, past the naked kids with bloated stomachs, and the adults in raggedy clothes selling peanuts for a living or just sitting around, not able to read because they dropped out of school at 12. Where does all the money go? The cynical answer is that most of it's going into government officals' pockets and the rest isn't making a difference.

It's very hard not to become cynical about development work. It's also very hard not to appreciate America. I was reading an article about the effects of Katrina and couldn't muster up the sympathy I was supposed to feel looking at bleek black and white photos of trailers with cars parked next to them. That would look like a mansion to a family of ten living in a tiny mud hut with a donkey instead of a car. I'm about to go back to America, and my main money concern is what size apartment we can afford, not if I can afford to buy a sack of rice to feed my family.

Living in a place that changes your perspectives so much gives volunteers a more sophisticated political outlook. Among the volunteers who manage not to become cynical, some become very motivated to do development work but have much more realistic, scaled-down goals than they had before coming here. For me, the experience has helped me get a better grasp on international politics. I love listening to the contrast between new volunteers' often naive, optimistic perspective and old volunteers' cynical outlook. Add to that the opinions of volunteers who are about to start a third year in Burkina. They're just as cynical as the rest of us, but they've managed to think of things in a more positive way while acknowledging the things that suck. Listening to all the different perspectives has done the debating for me.

In high school and college I was an active participant in political debates. In the Peace Corps I've listenened more than I've debated. It seems like the issues are much more complicated here than they were back home. Or maybe I've become more mature—instead of “Gun control good, prayer in school bad” it's “If all the ex-pats left, would Africa be able to handle it? Would it be morally wrong to leave or is it condescending to think Africans need white help?” Um, good? For now I'm content with watching other people duke it out before figuring out what I think.