A Week in Ouaga

Well, my week's training here in the capital is coming to a close. We leave tomorrow to head back to my regional capital Ouahigouya for one last week of formation. It's been a busy week full of field trips, good food, and new people. Allow me to explain.

This week we have visited several of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that work in Burkina. We visited the World Health Organization, Plan Burkina, Unicef, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS). While some weren't applicable to my service because they do not work in my region, they were all pretty interesting to learn about what they do and tour their offices. I especially enjoyed the Unicef presentation which focused on breastfeeding and the importance of exclusively breastfeeding to six months of age and complimentary feeding beyond that. We also got to meet a volunteer who has extended her service for a third year to work with CRS. It was really interesting to hear her point of view.

As I have mentioned before, food is never better than when we're in Ouaga. We ate Mexican at the Country Director's house one day, Thai at the SED APCD's (head of the small enterprise development program) house, as well as burgers, shwarmas, acheke, as well as my favorite frozen treat: Fan Milk. There are lots of boys who push coolers full of the stuff. Burkina's equilivant of the ice cream man. You can buy FanChoco (which tastes like frozen chocolate milk, 150CFA = $0.30), Lait Vanille (which tastes like frozen cake batter, 100CFA = $0.20), and several other fruit-flavored ice treats (50CFA = $0.10).

In other exciting news, we received a brand new Health volunteer last night. She was a volunteer stationed in Madagascar but if you have followed the news, political unrest has caused PC to evacuate from the country. While some PCVs there returned home to the US, others have been placed in other Sub-Saharan African countries. Because French is required for our country, only one girl had enough French fluency to be placed here. Ironically she went to high school with Christy from my stage. So last night, Christy and I, along with the Country Director Doug and two other staff members drove to the airport to pick her up and welcome her to country. It's excited to everyone to have a new volunteer join the group.

Today, I woke up and headed to the bureau for moto training. Although we are not allowed to drive motos, we can request permission to ride on one with your counterpoint for specific reasons such as vaccination campaigns in satellite villages or such. Of course, while 12 year old Burkinabe are allowed to drive motos, we need to go through training in order to ride on the back of one. But it was fine, actually kind of fun. Afterwards, I went back to the house, changed my clothes, then headed to City Hall. The daughter of one of the language teachers during stage was getting married, so a group of us went. Because moto training ran late, we actually missed the ceremony, but we were able to attend the reception and had some good food, such as chicken, salad, sheep brochettes, fries, rice, and to, washed down with some delicious bissap. It was really a cool experience and a nice closure to the week. As we head to Ouahigouya tomorrow, I am excited to get back closer to home. I hope to post again in a few days from there. Wend na ko-d nidaare!