Christina's Excellent Adventure Update, Nov. 4, 2012

Short-term Nora substitute teacher (and my personal daughter) Christina Mullen is in Burkina Faso, West Africa, undergoing her Peace Corps training. She's been sending updates via Facebook that I'm reposting here for students, family, and friends.

I feel like my previous posts have been, well sad. Here’s the thing—I’m genuinely extremely happy here. Obviously bad things happen, but they happen everywhere. And the good things massively outweigh any bad thing that happens, so this post is devoted to all the good things in my life right now:

1) Watching the sunset and moon rise as I take my evening bucket bath: words can’t really do the pure ecstasy of bucket bath after a long hot day justice, but it is absolutely phenomenal. And as the sun sets on one side of my shower area, the moon rises on the other. I want to say yesterday was the full moon and it was absolutely gorgeous. I love the full moon here because it completely illuminates everything and you really don’t need to use lights at night.

2) Giving Todd a haircut with 15 children watching and laughing—this was not only awesome because Todd REALLY needed a haircut, but because the kids thought it was so ridiculous. I think this was the first chance I had to talk with Todd one-on-one without too many distractions (our chats on the bike ride to and from Leo are often interrupted by other stagaires or large trucks and taxi brousses going by). I’m thinking of starting a haircutting business while I’m out here too, Todd isn’t the only guy who is starting to get shaggy.

3) Coming up with a great idea for our first sensibilisation and executing it. Today we had a “practice” sensibilisation—the word essentially describing a small workshop designed to educate community members about various health topics. Sensibilisations range from informal conversations with a few people to large formal trainings or community wide events with many people in attendance. Brittany, Donna and I had to do home hygiene sensibilisation to a group of women in Sanga. We decided to focus on handwashing, particularly emphasizing the need to use soap. To illustrate this, we had a volunteer from the group of 6 women in attendance, as well as myself, coat their hands in oil. We then greeted all the other women in the group in the local language (Nuni), and shook their hands. After, we asked the women to raise their hands if they had gotten oil on their hands as well. Every woman raised their hand. Then the volunteer and I washed our hands with just water. We shook everyone’s hand again, and everyone got more oil on their hands. Finally, everyone washed their hands with soap and water and greeted each other for the last time, with no one getting oil on their hands. Then, in French, we explained that the oil worked the same way as bacteria that is everywhere and that if you fail to wash your hands before eating, preparing food for your family, etc. you’ll be passing germs onto them and they in turn will get sick. We had a translator with us, which was extremely helpful. The entire workshop lasted about 20 minutes and probably wasn’t terribly successful in helping woman understand the connection between the oil and bacteria, but it was nice to come up with an original idea, plan, and execute it. The unsuccessful aspects will all become successful with more practice.

4) My friends here are pretty awesome: I can give countless examples, and I will. Abdul was insanely protective during a highly uncomfortable situation (which I won’t discuss because this is a positive post) and gives some of the best hugs in the world; Todd never fails to cheer me up, cracks my back all the time, and is literally always positive; Darius seems to find the moments where I need affection the most and appear out of nowhere to give it; Amber is always making me laugh and helps me to laugh at myself and pretty much every situation that might make a weaker person cry; David says the things I’m afraid to say, but am thinking and is one of the best listeners in the world (which is shocking for someone who talks so much); Gigi is one of the most caring people I’ve ever met and is the best listener in the world. There are many more examples, but those are the big ones.

5) Starting group bonding traditions: The village of Sanga gives goodnight and good morning hugs every day because I basically required everyone to do it. We were all craving affection, so now we all get it on a daily basis from our family away from home. I got the PCVFs (Peace Corps Volunteer Facilitators—basically the RAs of training, except that they change every week) to help me make mailboxes for every one (a la LeaderShape and NOLA 2011) so that we can leave nice notes and support everyone during the crazy time that is stage (pronounced staaaa-juh).

6) Surprising myself by being bold—case in point, last weekend, I went to the marche with Abdul, Chris, and Jonathan because we all needed things. I got a local vendeur to lead us around the marche to help us find a floor mat for Abdul, power convertors for Jonathan and myself, and a funnel for me to pee with. Let me say this again. I walked up to a perfect stranger and asked him, in a foreign language that I am, on a good day, barely comfortable functioning in, to help us find items and then bargained—like hardcore, no backing down, even walking away from bad offers—not only for myself, but for Abdul and Jonathan, in FRENCH.

7) The bike ride home: the sun is always setting behind us and is so beautiful, the ride is mostly downhill, and the conversations are always so wonderful. They are among the highlights of my day.

8) My Language and Cultural Facilitator (LCF) Armel, who is a 28 year old Burkinabe man who is one of my closest friends here. Our language lessons have quickly deteriorated into us talking smack in French, but his presence is so incredibly comforting. He comes to our homes a few times a week just to check in on how things are, converse with us in French, and solve any problems we may be having. He is the perfect combination of sassy and kind and has made adjusting to Burkina infinitely less scary.

9) The taxi brousse-again words cannot describe, so I’m posting some pictures with some more descriptive captions. But it was an adventure to say the least and while for some it was scary and uncomfortable, I could not stop smiling the entire ride.

10) The little things: omelettes at maison de femmes, peanut butter, doing yoga in the morning, watching the League at night, doing things slowly, language classes outside, getting packages/mail from my friends, switching off mefloquine and taking the less psychologically damaging doxy instead, singing to myself and everyone else around me, sleeping in my underwear at night, having time to read books, catching myself daydreaming in French, biking home with my youngest host brother, finally getting the Nuni greetings down correctly, finally figuring out how to pee, discovering anti-nausea medicine, working on my quote book, and many many more things. Life is good.