Divide and Conquer

JFK was right --being in the Peace Corps is the touhgest job that you'll ever love. Sometimes I am more certain of the former than the latter but I digress. Its been a month since I swore in and became an official volunteer and oh what a month's it's been. To back track a little - the last two weeks of PST flew by. I spent my first American holiday away from home but had the good fortune of being able to share Thanksgiving with my new PC/Burkinabe family. We prepared a huge potluck dinner, complete with turkey and most of the trimmings. While sheep and goat meat are very popular here, turkey is not. Lucky for us, one of our host families raises turkeys because the father thinks that turkeys are cute. He normally tries to sell the turkeys in pairs and in fact offers a better price for 2 vs. 1 because he wants others to breed turkeys as well. You can imagine his reaction when we told him that we wanted to eat them. It took some coaxing but the CFA (local currency) prevailed.

During our last week of training we ran hurriedly around town as we prepared to be parceled out to Burkina's farthest corners. In true Burkinabe style, we would head to the marche to pick up whatever we needed and then strap the load to our bikes. We were quite the site one afternoon when 7 of us biked home, each of us with a 100 liter trash can strapped to our bikes. Looking back on this now I realize that was nothing; just yesterday I saw a man go by on his moto with a huge pig onboard.

The last few days in Ouahigouya were spent with our counterparts during a multi-day workshop. Each PCV is assigned a counterpart that acts as his/her go to person in their host community. The counterpart helps with everything from negoitating a fair price at the market to helping brainstorm new community development activities. Over the course of my 2 years I will undoubtedly work with a number of different people based on the type of project Im working on, however its nice to have formal counterpart that I can go to as well.

Meeting my counterpart for the first tile was a memorable, and at the time, a very nerve-wrecking experience. I was having all of these visions of frequent, awkward pauses because of the language barrier but thankfully I feared the worse for nothing. My counterpart, Ousmane, has turned out to be very patient and light-hearted and appeared to be happy that we would be working together. I am also replacing a volunteer that has served in this region for the past 2 years so he is already accustomed to Americans' various quirks. When day two of the workshop came to a close, I felt content with how things stood and anxiously anticipated swearing in. The next morning, 38 out of the 39 people that were apart of my training class swore in, determined to help fulfill the mission of the PC. There were several speeches from both the US and Burkina government and another 5 speeches given by fellow volunteers in various local languages. We were quite proud of ourselves for having made it through training as we hooted and hollared while watching ourselves on the local broadcast that night after the celebratory dinner. Little did we know the the toughest part was yet to come.