Attempts at Laundry, Playing Clarinet, & Doing Business with the Local Tailor

July 16, 2011

Today is Saturday, and so we only had class until noon.  Normally, Sunday is a complete free day for us, but not this week.  Tomorrow, we leave at 9am for Ouaga.  We will be spending 2 days in Burkina’s capital, where we will meet our homologue – a designated mentor from our site who is in charge of helping us integrate into our community – for the first time and attend workshops and training sessions together before departing for a 3-day visit to our site (i.e. the village we will be living and working in for the next 2 years).  After checking out our future home, we then go to our regional or provincial capital to meet up with other fellow volunteers and make the trip back to Ouaga, and then head back to our temporary home in Sapone with our host families for another 2 months of training.  All in all, we’ll be gone for a full 7 days.  I haven’t packed yet, but I figured I’d just do that in the morning.   What else do I have to do with my time from 6-9am besides take a bucket bath and then sit in my chair in my family’s courtyard? 

Exciting events within the past few days:

1. LPI Exam

2. Site Announcement

3. Tailor-made Dresses

4. Playing my clarinet for my host family

5. Doing laundry

LPI Exam:

The LPI is a language proficiency test conducted orally by conversing with one of the professors for about 20 minutes, in order to determine what language level we’re at.  We had one when we first arrived in Burkina, had our second LPI today after about 3 weeks of language classes, and will have several more throughout our Peace Corps experience.  Considering I was deemed “Novice-Low” to begin with and knew next to nothing coming in, there’s no way I can do anything but improve, and so I’m assuming I’ve moved up to Novice-Mid or even Novice-High.  Plus, I thought my exam (i.e. basically a casual conversation) went really well and I spoke with half-ways correct grammar most the time.  Technically, to become an official PC Volunteer and be allowed to swear-in at the end of our training, we need to have achieved a language level of at least Intermediate-High.  I’m still a long ways away from that level of proficiency, but give me a few more months, and hopefully I’ll be there.  It’d probably help if I studied a bit more on my own, too.  Or maybe read a page of the French dictionary each night to acquire some new words.  But after having class all day (and having been graduated from college for over a year now), I have zero motivation to do “homework.”

Site Announcement:

Since we’re meeting our homologues and visiting our sites this coming week, clearly, we must know what site we’ve been assigned to for the next 2 years.  On Thursday afternoon, an exciting session/class was held with all 50 of us gathered together to announce each of our individual sites.  It was more like a celebration or ceremony, though, than a class.  I was expecting them to hand us a piece of paper with the name of our village and some info about our site and then be done, but instead a HUGE map of Burkina was taped to the wall and we were called up to the front of the room, one by one.  Our village was announced, and we had to find it on the huge map, where we pinned a photo of ourselves on the location of our village.  Then some interesting facts about our site were read off.  Similar to our adoption ceremony with our host families, everyone’s reactions were priceless.  And I got a picture of everyone, displaying their reaction as they stood in front of the big map and learned about their future home.  Check them out on my photo page!  It'll give you an idea of "who" we Peace Corps Volunteers are, what we look like (well, at least what we look like in Africa), and where we're all going in the country.

Some amusing facts we learned about each other’s sites: one guy will be living with monks; one girl will be near Catholic sisters who make cheese (REAL cheese!! That’s, like, virtually impossible to find in Burkina!  We were all jealous!); some will be the first volunteer ever in their village; others will be the 3^rd or 4^th volunteer and inherit all the things previous volunteers left behind, which for one girl in our group includes a cat, a freezer, and bedroom walls painted with Care Bears and music notes; a couple people will have air conditioners and access to swimming pools while most of us will be without electricity; one girl will literally be in the middle of nowhere, but at least her village “comes equipped with 3 other current volunteers nearby: all males” – and apparently – “all good-looking, especially Hottie Scotty”  Or so that’s what the piece of paper she received said…seriously!

A little about my site, the village of Lanfiera.  Lanfiera is located in northwestern Burkina Faso, not too far from the border between Burkina and Mali.  It’s part of the Sourou Valley, where the Sourou River flows, and thus land is fertile and not nearly as dry or desert-like as most of northern Burkina.  Because I’ll be in the Sourou Valley, I’ll also be smack dab in the middle of a whole slew of Peace Corps Volunteers, namely, ALL of my DABA friends (the 12 members in our current group who are training to work with agriculture) plus a few other Education volunteers.  All 12 DABA volunteers will be spread throughout different villages in the Sourou Valley, and so I’ll have easy access to friends and be able to visit the majority of them by simply taking a bike ride anywhere from 5-50km.  We’ve decided to rename this heavily infested Peace Corp zone as “Party Valley” since so many of us will be so close in proximity and we will be “infusing” this region of Burkina Faso with Americans.  I’ll be the third volunteer in this village, and the school I’ll be working at has a good connection to a school in France that helps supply them with resources, like pencils and notebooks for the students.  That's about all I know right now, but I'll know more soon after my site visit there this week!

Tailor-made Dresses:

Since I’ve been in Africa, I’ve bought a few pretty pagnes at the local market.  Pagnes are essentially rectangles of fabric that are about 1.5x2 meters, and are used for many things: as a towel when showering, for a light blanket, as a curtain or room divider, wrapped around a women’s waist for a quick make-shift skirt that’s perfectly acceptable in public, or as a piece of fabric to have a shirt or bag or anything else you could want created at a local tailor’s shop.  Now that I actually have a bit of French to work with in my vocabulary base and have seen plenty of local women’s clothing fashions, I also have an idea of what I would like done with my pagnes.  So I sketched a couple of dress designs I thought would be easy to make and look good on me, and then explained to my host mom that I would like her to take me to a good tailor.  After class yesterday, my mom (along with Christi and baby Cecilia) met me at the market and then we walked to the nearby tailor.  I showed the tailor my design ideas and fabric, but to my dismay, the tailor said, “No, not possible…how about this instead?” and proceeded to show me photographs of African dresses that were pretty traditional looking and gorgeous…but definitely more like something a super model would strut down the runway in…and not what a young American lady in the Peace Corps would wear to teach in a school.  After 20 minutes or so – and a lot of frustration with my lack of ability to effectively communicate that I just wanted a simple dress – my host mom and tailor were able to agree on something they thought would look good on me and on a fair price for it.  What exactly I was having made, I haven’t the slightest idea…but the tailor pulled out her measuring tape and started writing down my measurements.  After paying a small down payment of 1000 CFA (about $2 American), we headed home.  Hopefully I’ll like whatever the tailor is sewing for me.  But I won’t know until I pick up the finished product (products?) in a few days or so. 

Playing my clarinet for my host family:

I finally took the liberty of playing my clarinet in front of my host family.  Instruments are certainly a rare luxury in Burkina Faso, and this is especially true in village.  I hadn’t played in quite a while, so I was pretty rusty, but my family still thought every sound that came out of my clarinet was amazing.  I attempted to play some of my repertoire that I brought with to Africa in my neatly organized binder, and was thoroughly disappointed with how awful I sounded, compared to what I used to sound like in college when I would play my clarinet 2 or 3 or even 5 hours a day with clarinet lessons, wind ensemble, orchestra rehearsal, woodwind quintet, private practice, etc.  Plus, playing an instrument takes work and energy – it’s a physical activity – and so within minutes I had sweat just dripping down my face, which also made it difficult to play well.  Amusingly, there were village kids from all around that started to gather and just stare at me. They intently watched me for over an hour while I played. Nonstop staring.  It was kinda awkward, but I pretended that I didn’t notice that there were a dozen little faces creepingly peering into my courtyard.  They probably had never seen or heard a clarinet before, so this was an epic experience for them.  I felt bad for my host family who had to listen to all my squeaks and practicing of scales and repetition of difficult measures over and over, rather than just being able to hear pretty and flawless music.  Furthermore, and also awkward, they thought they HAD to listen to and watch me the whole time, as if I was putting on a concert for them and it would be rude for them to continue with their daily life tasks, like washing the dishes, while I was playing my clarinet.  I tried to explain that I should practice more, possibly even every day after class…and they took that to mean that I would like to practice every day…which, in a way, of course I do....or at least should want to do!...but then again, not really, cuz I don’t particularly enjoy my practicing in this hot climate with my practice sessions turning into concerts for village children who think I sound amazing when I know I actually sound like crap.  It’s not good for their ears to be exposed to my horribleness …    Interestingly, this whole “should vs. would like to” misunderstanding led to an interesting conversation with my host dad, as I tried to explain to him that they don’t mean the same thing in English.  In French, the words for “should” and “would like to” are very similar and are often used interchangeably, and so explaining that I SHOULD do something (or ought to) does not mean that I WANT to do it.  I’m not sure if my dad ever fully understood, as I attempted to explain this speaking the languages of English and Francais and broken French…all of which combine to form what we Peace Corps volunteers have coined “Franglais” – similar to “Spanglish” (Spanish/English”). 

Doing laundry:

Because I’ll be gone for a week visiting my site and other shenanigans, I needed to do my laundry.  I don’t have a whole lot of clothes here to begin with, and with all the sweating, dust, and rainstorms that result in massive amounts of mud, my clothes get dirty pretty easily and need to be washed quite often.  If I wanted to have clothes that were remotely clean for this upcoming week, I had to do laundry.  And of course I waited until this afternoon to do it, allowing myself only a few hours of daytime for my clothes to dry…or attempt to dry – they’re still pretty wet, hanging on the line, as a I write this at 11pm.  But unlike last time I “did” laundry, this time I actually was the one who did my laundry.  All by myself.  Well, kind of.  I bought my own soap and laundry detergent, filled my buckets of water, and started scrubbing my clothes which I thoughtfully had soaking in bleach water all morning to help kill germs and bad odors.  Everything was going well…until my neighbor came over.  We went through the typical greetings and hellos, and then I went back to work, scrubbing away.  After 5 minutes, my host dad got really concerned that I was “getting tired” and overworked, and made me sit in a chair.  I rested a few minutes to please my family, but when I tried to go back to my bucket of clothes, my neighbor got all concerned and then bluntly told me in French, “No.  You sit.  I’m doing your laundry.”  I tried to say something along the lines of “Thank you very much, but no, I need to do this, it’s important for me to learn” but she wouldn’t have any of it.  I wasn’t touching any more of my laundry, and that was final.  So I gave up and watched her wash a few of my shirts.  Then I went over to her, took a dirty skirt out of the bucket of water, and washed it alongside her.  And I guess that was fine…and that I got the point across that I was going to at least do some of my laundry, whether or not they liked it.  So there we were, washing laundry together, side by side.  Granted, she could wash 3 things in the same amount of time it took me to do one item, but still, at least I was doing some of my laundry.  Within no time, my laundry was washed, rinsed, washed with soap again, rinsed again, soaked briefly, and then rinsed another final time.  It’s probably a good thing my neighbor helped, otherwise I would have been scrubbing clothes for at least 3 or 4 hours, rather than just the hour it took us.  Plus, I’m sure my arms would be absolutely dead and my muscles sore, (aka more sore than they already are), cuz doing laundry by hand is hard work!  I don’t know how all these women (and even the young girls) do it, but they are tough.  They’re hands are like leather and they have the strength to overpower any American athlete.  As one of the guys in our training group put it, “My host mom is scary strong.  She’s half my size but could kick my butt any day. She carries 30 pound jugs of water in each hand AND balances a basket of fruit on her head, all while carrying a baby on her back, as if it’s no big deal, and just sticks her bare hand right into boiling pots of rice to check if it’s done or not.  I wouldn’t mess with my mom.”  The women of Burkina are amazing.  Enough said.