Third Year Update

Hello again. As you may know, I had decided to say adieu to this blog at the end of last year. My two contracted years of service with Peace Corps had finished, and although I would be returning to Burkina for another year, I thought it high time for a change. Moving from my small village in the North to my new home in the capital city of Ouagadougou warranted a break from cyberspace as I began to get habituated to my new surroundings, my new job, and my new life (for 2011). It has been about six months since the move, and I feel obliged to at least bequeath some small sort of update to those of you still reading this blog. If you would like me to continue to update this on a more recurrent basis, please let me know. Otherwise, you will have to take what you can get. With that, let’s get everyone up to date.

I moved to Ouaga at the end of January, after a month long vacation in America. For those who don’t know, Ouaga(dougou) is the capital of Burkina Faso. The city is about as Western as Burkina can get. Situated smack dab in the middle of the country, it boasts a population of 1.5 million people, and has pretty much anything you could possibly want (if you know where to look). I don’t like taking my camera out around the city but I’m sure if you Google image search Ouagadougou, you will get a better idea of what it looks like. It’s actually quite large, as it takes me at least 45 minutes and a change of taxis to get from one end of the city (i.e., my house) to the other (i.e., Peace Corps office). Luckily taxis, green and usually dilapidated, are fairly plentiful, and most days it isn’t hard to snag one heading in your direction. Downtown, there are lots of great restaurants and cafes, which I try to avoid as much as possible to save money, though I have been known to splurge from time to time. There are also a couple fairly decent supermarkets downtown, which have lots of the luxuries of the West (I’m thinking cheese, meat, wine, etc), but I try not to break the bank there either. Other places around town to spend money at include Eurotex, the large textile warehouse (think Project Runway) to buy fabric to have clothes made, as well as several home stores like Orca, an amazing four-story building that’s the closest thing to a Bed, Bath, and Beyond that this country has.

If you head southwest of the city center and just keep going, after twenty minutes or so, you will hit my neighborhood, a slice of Sector 17 known as Kouritenga. It is here on the edge of town where I live and work. My humble abode is pretty amazing for Burkina (and Peace Corps) standards. I have a private courtyard, which just means my house is completely walled in and has a large metal door at its entrance. Most homes are gated in the city, for safety and privacy, I suppose. Upon entering my house, you see a fairly spacious living room (20’ x 10’) which I have furnished as best as possible on my limited means with a bookshelf, a coffee table, a “couch,” and a few end tables and a chair. By “couch,” I am actually referring to something that more resembles a wooden park bench with cushions on it. Beyond the living room is a smaller-sized kitchen with a double sink and a good-sized countertop. I have added to it a gas stovetop, a small refrigerator, and a few cabinets for dishes and glasses. Off the living room are two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. I have made the bedroom closest to the front of the house the master bedroom since the bathroom is a wee bit larger, and I use the other bedroom for storage. In addition to the living room furniture, I had a carpenter build a full-sized bed and two bedside tables, and I bought a build-it-yourself armoire from some vendor on the street. My bathroom has a shower (no hot water), a sink, and a real flushing toilet (good riddance, hole in the ground!). Let’s just hope everything stays in working order. My entire house has white tile floors, which makes regular mopping necessary yet easy. I have hired a young woman named Balguissa to come to my house twice a week, once to mop and tidy up and another time to wash my laundry. I pay her 8,000cfa (roughly $16) a month, and she does a fairly decent job at it, especially considering the wrecking ball of a creature that is my kitten. Every morning she (who I have dubbed Lady Waga) has serious fits of friskiness which can only be expressed by tearing up my house and clawing on my curtains. To say she is spoiled is an understatement. Living with a cat has certainly taught me one thing – I am definitely a dog person.

If you leave my house, and walk a block south, you will hit the association with which I am working this year. Yes, I am still a Peace Corps volunteer (as seen by my paychecks), but my primary responsibilities are now concentrated on a local NGO. This organization is called Association Trait d’Union des Jeunes Burkinabe. It really has no good English translation, since trait d’union means hyphen in English, and no one is able to really explain why it’s called that. From here on out, I will call it, as everyone calls, ATUJB (in French, it comes out sounding like “ah-to-ji-bay,” God bless you). At its heart, ATUJB is a youth organization that focuses primarily with kids and young adults who are at risk of HIV/AIDS. While this encompasses many individuals, most fall into one of three categories: street children (enfants de la rue), street vendors (vendeurs/vendeuses ambulants), and sex workers (travailleuses de sexe). Our association, which we often refer to as “the center,” is comprised of a large gazebo in the middle of a courtyard, surrounded by buildings on all four sides. On one side, there is a row of offices where most of us usually work. On another side, there are two large dorm rooms where about two dozen street children sleep every night. The remaining sides house various workshops, where underprivileged young people take apprenticeships in tailoring, motorcycle repair, carpentry, metal work, traditional crafts, etc. The goal of the center is to give kids without homes (or healthy homes), who are at risk of HIV transmission, a place to stay and to provide them the opportunity to go to school and learn a trade so that with time, they will be able to reintegrate into society with the skills necessary to succeed.

The ATUJB team consists of close to 20 full-time employees, some of whom I work with everyday and some of whom I never do. For instance, we are one of 42 associations in Burkina that provides free, confidential, and anonymous HIV testing to anyone who comes in. There are a few individuals who are in charge of testing, but since I work mostly on the prevention side of the fight, I hardly ever work directly with them. Others are in charge of the education programs for the children at the center, which I am not. I would say the team I work most closely with usually consists of about seven individuals, including the president and vice-president of our organization. Our president just got back from a trip to New York City to attend the World HIV/AIDS Summit that happened a few weeks ago, so we are clearly a force of an organization. Both he and our vice-president, a giant of a man, are incredibly nice to work with.

My position at ATUJB is as Technical Support Specialist for its HIV/AIDS program, which sounds more impressive than it is, I’m sure. Basically, I’m involved in two main projects. The first is a UNICEF-funded, two-year long project of HIV awareness activities using peer educators in five different cities throughout the country focusing on high-risk socio-professional groups. We held a training about a month ago entitled “HIV Risk Mapping,” c’est-a-dire, identifying the localities in an area where the risk for HIV transmission is elevated due to a higher concentration of high-risk individuals. The second project is an ongoing PAMAC-funded activity that involves educating prostitutes here in Ouaga on HIV and other STIs. As in any big city, prostitution is a real problem, and the latest information suggests that about 14% of sex workers here are HIV-positive, which means about one in seven are infected. Burkina has been lucky that HIV hasn’t hit the general population as it has in East and Southern Africa, but prevention activities are still paramount to blocking a pandemic in this country. Therefore, ATUJB works with prostitutes to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS, other STIs, the importance of condoms (male and female), how to properly use a condom, how to negotiate condom usage with clients, and basically anything related to their sexual health. We also partner with local clinics to provide free health screenings (including STI exams) and distribute as many condoms and sachets of personal lubricant as possible. For the past few days, I’ve been working on brainstorming new strategies of intervention. Since recently many of the brothels in Ouaga have been shut down, unfortunately many woman now simply take to the streets, so where we could have simply planned health talks at the brothels before, now we have to figure out how to reach these women who no longer have a fixed location. It is actually a fairly complicated situation, and one that requires a new strategy on our part. Other activities I had assisted with include interviews with Nigerian sex workers, surveys with area bars and nightclubs on their clientele, and follow-up and evaluation on various HIV trainings in different cities. I also act as a liaison between ATUJB and UNICEF (who actually interviewed and hired me), documenting for them our association’s activities that they fund.

All in all, I am enjoying my final year in Burkina. There have been ups and downs as with any experience, but hopefully when I look back at 2011, I will be content with my decision to stay. It has not been without challenges. Not to go too deep into detail, but beginning in February, Burkina Faso began experiencing political protests that resulted in military mutiny, a coup, and a complete restructuring of the country’s government. If you want to know more, I’m sure Google would be able to help you out once more. But basically, this means that from February until May or so, the country was under various national curfews and saw destructive protests by everyone from the military, students, and merchants. And since Peace Corps’s number one duty is to protect its volunteers, my life was made complicated for several months as PC placed its own curfews and restrictions on us, which made a daily routine rather difficult, especially here in Ouaga, the epicenter of it all. Also all of our activities at work were for all intents and purposes blocked by sponsors who insisted on waiting out the situation before making the funds available to us. But now things have seemed to calm down considerably, enough to dive into work without wondering when the next protest will happen. And as the political climate gradually cools down in Burkina, so too is the actual temperature, which makes me especially happy. It seemed as though this year’s hot season was much more intense than the previous year and lasted longer. It is still fairly hot, but a few weeks ago, the rains finally began. Now we are averaging perhaps a good rain every three days or so, which often comes with a nice chill in the air. Hopefully in the weeks to come, we will see it raining every other day. Although the rain brings mosquitoes and mud, the benefit of not sweating all the time greatly outweighs any downside. I am excited to finally say I’ve survived my last hot season in Burkina and look forward to more temperate temperatures until the conclusion of my service.

And that about sums up my experience so far this year. We are already at the halfway mark, and I can feel the sands in the hourglass falling swiftly. It won’t be long before I am planning my returning to the States (with a possible side trip along the way), so I need to remind myself to take everything in that I possibly can, to suck the marrow out of every experience left here.

(Let it be known that my internet connection is through a usb key that runs off of the cell phone network, so uploading photos will be very difficult, but if I get the change to have a faster connection, I’ll try sticking up a few photos too)