April Shmapril

So we have hit Burkina's most dreadful month. The month where temperatures reach their annual crescendo and where one cannot move without sweating. The mercury began rising through March, usually hitting 110ish degrees at its peak most afternoons. My house hovers around the 100 degree mark most of the day, only cooling down to about 90 in the early morning. Luckily, I am better prepared for the heat this year with a life-saving fan which I rarely turn off. Without that (and the power does routinely cut off), my house becomes an oven with no air flow and suddenly you're sitting in a pool of perspiration and wondering when it will come back on. Even still, I feel like I have handles this hot season much better than the last. Perhaps it is the fan, perhaps I have become habituated to the heat, perhaps we haven't seen the worse yet (I think all three are true, actually) but I am getting by fine. Je me débrouille.

But as life always brings the good with the bad, cushions the difficult with the easy, the hot season here also corresponds to our mango season. Yin meet Yang. Yang, Yin. The country is becoming inundated with these juicy, sweet fruits, and they make the heat slightly less unbearable each year. There are dozens of varieties of mangoes in Burkina, maybe more, and each brings something different to the table. Large or small, stringy or buttery, the subtleties in taste and texture make mango season a good time to be alive. Everyone has their favorite kind and their preferred method of eating. Some people eat the skins and all, others use a knife to cut the meat into cubes. I tend to peel back the skin with my teeth and then dive right in. My plan is start drying a lot soon, so that I can keep the mango goodness well past the end of the season (that is, if I can keep myself from eating them right away).

Last weekend, almost every volunteer (more than 100) showed up in Ouaga for the COS party, our ritual celebration honoring those volunteers who have reached their Closure of Service and are getting ready to head home beginning in June. It was a lot of fun to see all my friends living in other parts of the country with whom I rarely get to hang out. It is weird to think that another group is preparing to leave. Once they have departed, my group will become the new senior volunteers. For logistical reasons, our group's COS conference and party will actually take place in July, much much earlier than normal. It is far too early to consider the end of the road here in Burkina and the prospect of rejoining American society.

In work-related news, not much has changed in village. I am still actively working with the soap group I helped organize (they have made almost 20,000 cfa in a month and a half, i.e. a lot of fric), and I may expand to form a new group in a satellite village. I have also been asked to help coordinate a regional conference on maternal and child health for several volunteers and their village counterparts that will take place in Ouahigouya at the end of the month, so I've been fairly occupied planning the logistics. There's a lot of work still to be done but hopefully the effort put into it will show during the workshop.

Well, that basically sums up everything that's going on right now and my current place in this crazy world, taking life one day, one degree, one mango at a time.