I Spy With My Little Eye Something . . . Orange

The end of April is close at hand, and I feel this month has flown by in an instant. I have been steadily preparing for a training conference on maternal and child health that I have been asked to help organize in Ouahigouya starting on Tuesday. For the past several weeks, we’ve had to make multiple trips to Ouahigouya, as well as the capital Ouaga and another town named Gourcy, where our formatrice (the woman who will be conducting the majority of the sessions) works. The actual conference runs for three days starting the 27th and will focus primarily on nutrition and malnutrition as it relates to rural Burkina. It will bring together six volunteers and 12 village counterparts to discuss successes, challenges, and strategies for the future. If all goes well, it should really be advantageous to all the participants.

Unfortunately, I feel like I have not done many activities in village lately like I would have liked to do aside from my regular soap-making with the women, but I am certain once this is over, I will be able to direct my concentration back on my own projects. At least I can say I’ve survived my second April in Burkina with only a couple sweaty t-shirts as battle scars of hot season (which is more than I can say of my poor papaya tree). I would guess that I’ve drinking about 4-5 liters of water on average everyday, even more on those scorching 120° days and haven’t lit my stove save once or twice in the past three weeks. I’ve avoided the stove (which raises the temperature in my house a good 5-10 degrees) by changing my diet to that of a woodland creature. A lot of raw veggies or vegetable sandwiches – cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers make a great sandwich – plus as many mangoes as I can manage. I try to eat a bag of peanuts each day for the protein but every once in a while, I’ll supplement that with tuna or chicken packets from home. Every market day, I also buy something known as acheke (pronounced a-check-ay or a-keck-ay) which is made from cassava root, with a small piece of fish for lunch.

Last week we finally experienced, albeit a month late, that magical event known as “the first rainfall of the year.” Unfortunately, it occurred the same night as something known as “the first time I tried to sleep outside because it got too hot to sleep inside.” So when it started sprinkling around 9pm, I tried to ignore the droplets. I managed to last until around 2am, when it really began coming down, at which point I was forced to drag everything back into my stuffy house.

Speaking of wacky weather, I awoke on Thursday and looked out my screen door to see a sky completely orange. When I stepped outside, the air was saturated in red dust and a thick layer covered everything. I’ve added a couple pictures below to help you understand the sheer level of dustitude. It stayed comme ça for the rest of the day. The words on everybody’s mask-totting lips that day were “Sebgo waogame,” or “There’s too much wind” in Mooré. It took me much of the following day to remove the thin layer of dust that coated everything in my house. The wackiness that day was apparently felt by everyone, human and terrifying flying rodents alike. You see, my latrine was taken over Thursday by a small fidgety bat. I thought it might just be confused about the hazy sky, but evidently coming out during the day is a sign of rabies among bats. I wish I had known that then as I edged closer and closer to the creature to get a decent picture (see the shots below of my new, potentially-rabid friend), but a part of me did want to have a Bruce Wayne experience as it fluttered around me, but I rather not fall into my latrine to do it.

Below are the accompanying photos:

There are usually houses in the background

Hazy view of my CSPS

A layer of dust on everything, even my awesome blue plastic patio chair

The chauve-souris, in the flesh

About to strike

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.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho

As it turns out, February has been the most productive month to date for me with regards to actual projects in village. To start, I have begun working with a group of women making liquid soap. This type of project, termed by Peace Corps as an ¨Income Generating Activity¨ gives these women the opportunity to save a small amount of extra cash for themselves and their families. After hearing about successful soap groups from other volunteers, I decided it might be something good to try in my village. I wasn't really sure how to go about getting a group of women interested in it, since other attempts to start these kinds of groups in my village have not succeeded. So one evening, tired of waiting for people to come to me, I decided to head over to my friend Ynoussa's house. He is one of my good friends in village, as well as the President of the CoGes group that I work with at the health clinic. I explained to him what I wanted to do and asked him to explain it to his wife, Alimata, who only speaks Mooré. I knew her better than most other women in the village simply because I often passed by Ynoussa's house to say hi, and I thought this would be a great chance for me to work with her. She said she was very interested inlearning how to make soap and that she could find nine other women to make our group an even ten. From there, it was fairly easy. I decided the quickest way would be for me to buy the materials first and have them women pay me back once they sold the soap. It took only two rounds of soap-making for them to earn enough money to completely pay me back and start generating a profit of their own. In all, we have sold about 140 bottles, and we will be starting our fifth batch of soap this week. The women really enjoy getting together to make the soap; plus, they are all making an extra income for their families.

On the first day, the women whip a product called tansagex in a large basin for 10 minutes. The tansagex is sold by the kilo in the capital. It is basically concentrated soap that resembles shaving cream or marshmallow fluff after a good beating.


After 10 minutes, the women add salt water to the tansagex to make it soluable, followed by small amounts of alternating fresh and salt water to make about 15 total liters of foam.


They let the basin sit over night to allow the foam to dissipate, and the following day we meet back to add perfume and coloring. We then fill up recycled plastic soda bottles with our awesome soap and sell them in the community for 125 cfa each (roughly $0.25). We usually make about 35 bottles per batch but this time we doubled up and made 65 bottles! We then break for a couple days before we meet back to collect money from everybody. All in all, they are very proud of their new business and the money they've made.

Besides helping start a soap group, I have also been incredibly busy planning and finally executing what we in Peace Corps call a Hearth project (in French it is known as a FARN, or Foyer d'Apprentissage et de Réhabilitation Nutritionnelle). This is an activity for mothers with moderately malnourrished children to help rehabilitate them through 12 days of making enriched porridge together and discussing various health topics each day. It requires a lot of planning - finding the children, convincing the mothers, setting dates, getting counterparts to help, gathering materials. I have been trying to figure this out for months. Finally, we set the dates (February 15-26), found 11 mothers to participate with their children, and got the support of all three of the nurses at the health center. We divided the 12 days so that each nurse would help me for four days each. Throughout the activity, we discussed a range of topics which included, basic hygiene, diarrhea and dehydration, nutrition, vaccinations, family planning, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and meningitis. The women were clearly really appreciative of all that they had learned throughout the program. Despite several small hiccups, which is expected for the first time of this quite complicated activity, and that fact that I am still completely drained of all energy, I think it was a good experience for everyone involved. Most of the babies gained about 0.2 - 0.4kg (though one baby gained almost a full kilo) during the 12 days. It sounds like a small increase but most of these babies had not gained (or even had lost weight) in the past few months, and the real results will not be fully understood until after a month or two when we do follow-up weighings with these children. That is when we will better know if the women have kept up what we taught them during the activity. If I do decide to do another Hearth, I think it would go much smoother now that I've already done one, but all I know is that I need to recover from this last one before I think about a sequel.

Our group photo on the last day of the Hearth

To America and Back

I know, I know. I’ve been slacking. Apparently, I am still in “vacation mode,” despite being back in country for over two weeks now. As most of you know, my family gave me the best Christmas gift in the world – a plane ticket to the States for the holidays (thank you so much again, mom and dad!). So on December 16, I said adieu to Burkina for three weeks and boarded an AirFrance plane bound for home. I flew about seven hours to Paris, where I waited for another four hours or so in what felt like Arctic conditions without any kind of jacket at all. Honestly, I was physically shaken when I first stepped off the plane. I am ashamed to have spent over $7 on a small coffee just to get warm a bit. After another half hour delay due to snowfall, I was finally headed for America. Although I didn’t get any sleep on either flight (I knew I wouldn’t), I did catch up on some new movies, ate some good French food, and robbed AirFrance of as many mini bottles of red and white wine they were willing to give me. Another eight hours above the Atlantic and then we finally touched down in Washington D.C. It’s always a nice feeling to be on American soil again. After a quick customs stop, I got my bag and headed out. My parents and my brother were waiting for me in classic airport homecoming movie cliché, and it was great. It had been 14 months since I had last seen my family, and everyone looked good (slightly pale by comparison but still good). My mom brought me a heavy coat and hat, as well as some homemade brownies. It was nice to be home.

It was really weird to be home at first. I can’t really describe the feeling but the word “surreal” comes to mind. So many cars. Everyone speaking English. Nobody staring at me like a celebrity. So many fat white people. Within a couple days of being home, we had a big snowstorm, leaving us with well over a foot of snow. They said it hadn’t snowed like this in Virginia in December since, oh, about 1918. Another Christmas miracle. It seemed like the days before Christmas went by much slower than those after. Perhaps it is because at first I mostly relaxed at home, caught up on TV shows I had missed, and didn’t do much. But after Christmas I hung out more with friends, ran errands, and checked things off my to-do list, basically sucking the marrow out of America, as it were. I drove to Williamsburg (my college town) one day to hang out with a friend there, and another one of my friends drove up from NC to bring in the new year with me and hang out with the family for a few days. Very cool. I also saw lots of movies with my family while I was home, including Invictus, Me and Orson Wells, The Young Victoria, Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, and I know I’m missing one. I would also describe all the food I ate, but I think that would only serve to hunger and sadden me, so I will just say I ate really, really good food and a lot of it.

The snow was almost completely melted when we drove back to Dulles on January 6. I was just getting used to American life again when it was time to say goodbye. I took back two bags full of food and a head full of great memories (thanks again, guys). The plane rides back to Burkina were as uneventful as the first ones, except running into a fellow volunteer in Paris on her way back as well. We split the cost of taxi back to the Peace Corps house in Ouaga and even lucked into snagging the last two beds in the house for the night without making reservations. Another Christmas miracle, right? Since then, I have been trying to readjust to Burkina life again, and resettling into village for my second year here. I have a malnutrition program loosely planned for the start of February, along with a few other smaller activities scheduled for the coming weeks. Crossing my fingers that I can get into a work grove soon to keep me busy. Until next time.

Independence Day (Burkina Style)

I am sitting in our Peace Corps house in Ouaga the day before my flight home to America to celebrate Christmas with my family, and I am ready for a vacation. Last week was a very busy week, and it will be nice to have some down time stateside. There is a new tradition in Burkina where each year for Independence Day a different city is chosen to hold the festivities. This began last year in Fada, a city in the East, and this year it was my nearby city of Ouahigouya that was picked. So for the past few months, our little city has been making upgrades - paving roads, constructing new buildings, and painting old ones - all for this one day, December 11th. The highlight of the celebration is a huge military parade to showcase Burkina's strength and pride, in which the entire military force of the country and several thousand civilians take part. Even the President of Burkina Faso and other important government officials make an appearance.

Peace Corps was invited to join the parade, so a dozen volunteers from the surrounding area, myself included, accepted the call to march. Of course, this isn't your typical American parade that includes large balloons of cartoon characters and ends with Santa, so of course the marching is not taken lightly. I would not go as far as calling it goose-stepping, but it is definitely highly militaristic, which means everyone has to practice. The soldiers had been practicing for several weeks, but for us civilians, we all came into town on Monday to rehearse. Like all things in this country, practice consisted of waiting for several hours in the heat, followed by twenty minutes of actual marching. I biked back to village afterwards, as I had baby weighing and other activities to deal with in Aorema. I returned to town Thursday the 10th, as we were required to be in our places to march at 6am on Friday. Thursday turned out to be interesting as well with more than a dozen parachuters falling from the sky, a sight that caused all men, women and children to take off running towards their landing spot.

So we roll over to our position Friday morning a little after six in our awesomely amazing (and not at all frumpy) lime green uniforms. And then we wait. And wait. And wait a little more. It isn't until about 9:30am when the President, a man named Blaise Compaore, shows up. He does a quick drive-by, waving to all the different groups who are going to march. When he saw all of us, the only whities in the parade, he gave us a big smile, which was kind of cool. Then we waited about another hour for the parade to actually begin. All in all, it was pretty tiring but a really cool experience to march in front of the President, the thousands of people watching in person, and the hundreds of thousands watching on TV (as standard television in Burkina has only one channel). I hope we made Peace Corps and America proud. Afterwards, a few PC staff members, including our Country Director, took us all out for lunch, which was really nice on their part. As I wrap this up, I should remind you that this is the last blog post I will write until I get to America. My flight leaves tomorrow (Wednesday) night and if all goes well, I will be on US soil Thursday afternoon. See you next year, Burkina!

Until then, enjoy the following photos, courtesy of fellow volunteer Rob Hartwig, who came to support his fellow PCVs:

Our group photo, during the three-hour waiting period before the parade began

Finally, the arrival of M. le President

A troop of 50 horses takes to the street, one of which came from my village

Eventually, it is our turn. Don't we look sharp?

What is a parade without baton-twirling, pompom-waving cheerleaders? N.B. this was the first time I had even seen cheerleaders in this country.

Burkinabe veterans marching

Bringing out the heavy artillary

Even heavier

An impressive sight: 6 men on one motorcycle

Trip Report: Mali

So I finally have enough time to sit down and type up a summary of my latest adventure, this time in the region of Mali known as Dogon Country (Pays Dogon). I have been back in Burkina for about a week but was too occupied with our mid-service conference in Ouaga to write out this report until now. I'll try to be as vivid as possible, but I warn you that names and timelines may not be exact.

Exactly two weeks ago (a Monday), our quartet met in Ouahigouya, my regional capital and the town where I am currently typing this up. Our group consisted of myself and three fellow volunteers from my training group: Sara, Audrey, and Ilana. Ilana and I greeted the other pair at the bus station here in the evening and then grabbed some burgers at a restaurant in town. After dinner, we split up. Ilana and Sara went to stay in Ilana's village only a few kilometers away and Audrey and I stayed with a fellow volunteer in town.

TUESDAY: We met up again the following morning at around 7am near the bush taxi station. We were quickly greeted by a man in a black cape with a scarlet lining. You know your trip is going to be great when the first person you meet is a man in a cape. He showed us to our mode of transport, an old van that had seen better days. We bought our tickets to Koro, a large town just across the Mali border and found spots on a bench. We sat, eating our breakfast of chocolate croissants and chatting amongst ourselves for maybe two hours or so until the car was full. We then piled inside, about 16 of us, only to wait another hour or so. It was amusing to find out that more people on our ride spoke English than not, as we were in the company of two Nigerians, two German girls, and a man from the Netherlands, which put the anglophone tally at 9 people. We finally left Ouahigouya at around 10:30am, only to have our bush taxi get a flat tire not even three kilometers into the trip. After another 15 minutes or so, we finally started moving, albeit at a snail's pace. As we neared the border we began to make several arbitrary stops, five in total, which ate into our day. We first stopped at a Burkina police station to have our passports looked at, and then we stopped at the Burkina border control to receive our exit stamps. We stopped again at the border to buy our visas, then another time to have our passports looked at again on the Mali side, and finallly a last stop, apparently so a Malian policeman could purchase a bag of dried coconut from a lady in our van. During these stops we took the opportunity to get to know the other whities who were traveling with us. We ended up invited the two girls from Germany to join our party as they really didn't seem to have much of a plan. We finally arrived in Koro, where we met our trusty leader Oumar, a one-of-a-kind guide. It is impossible to fully appreciate Oumar simply by describing him. He is a 31 year old, Dogon-born man whose English has been ¨perfected¨ by twelve years of constant Peace Corps groups coming through. He said 95% of all his clients are PCVs, so you can imagine how colorful his language is. He could have been pulled right from the movie screen, a fusion of Borat and the Crocodile Hunter. As he is used to American ¨troublemakers,¨ he has no problem answering your pointless inquiries with ¨That's a stupid question, shut up.¨ He also has the tendancy to curse like a sailor constantly, always asking things like: ¨Where's the f***ing food? I'm f***ing hungry.¨ I digress. So we met Oumar in Koro and he took us to a restaurant for lunch, where he showed us a map and described what we would experience on the trip. After lunch, we all loaded in a station wagon and headed to our first destination, Telly. It was dark when we arrived at our encampment, similar to a hostel with several rooms and space to sleep on the roofs. It was located at the base of the escarpment, the large flat-topped cliffs that stretched for at least 70km and the focus of any Dogon trek. We had a dinner of spaghetti, some drinks, and then headed to rooftops to sleep under the stars.

WEDNESDAY: We awoke early and took in a beautiful view, the first time we saw the cliffs in the daylight. There was an entire village, now abandoned, built into the sides of the cliffs halfway up. As it is the dry, windy season, the horizon and the cliffs disappeared into a haze of dust in the distance. The morning air has become quite chilly as well, but for us it feels nice to feel cold again. We had breakfast at around 7am, bread and jam, and then began exploring the old ruins that remain. For a brief history lesson, it was the Tellum people who fist built their homes into the rock face to escape predators like lions and enemies nearly 800 years ago. They were later conquered by the Dogon people who continued to live in the cliffs until 70 or so years ago, when families began moving to the their present location at the base. We returned for a rest, then began our trek to the next village 4km away, Ennde. This village, still at the base of the escarpment is Oumar's home village. We had lunch at the encampment, explored the village and then were introduced to Oumar's parents. His father, the oldest man in the village, is apparently close to 100 years old, and we learned that he has had three wives and that Oumar has roughly 24 siblings. His father is quite a busy man! We ate a rice dinner at our encapment there, listened to some music from my iPod, and Oumar made us all some delicious tea. As there were no blankets in this encampment, Sara and I decided to sleep inside, while Ilana and Audrey braved the cold on the roof.

THURSDAY: We awoke ready to tackle the cliffs, as we knew we were going to go all the way up today. After a quick breakfast, we walked another 5km along the base to our lunch stop in a village called Yabatalou. We stayed here until the heat of the midday sun passed, and then we began our hike to the top. Oumar pointed to a sliver in the cliffs, which is how we would climb up apparently. Past a shaky rock staircase and across a couple scary crevices via some old logs, we eventually made it to the top, a moment we had been waiting for. We sat on the edge, looking out into the horizon, the wind whistling around us. It was actually quite peaceful and serene. After a few minutes of satisfaction and photo taking, we continued, now atop the massive escarpment , for another 6km to the village of Bemmatou. It was interesting to see the homes made of stone, as opposed to the mud-brick buildings found at the base. It was clear that when you live on a giant stone, you use what you can find. Also a bit surprising were the couple of TV antennas we could see throughout the village. We didn't stay here too long though, for we still had another 8 kilometers to reach our encampment for the night in the village of Douru. This was by far where we saw the most tourists. There was one large group of maybe 20 middle-aged French people as well as several other smaller groups of Europeans. All the rooms were taken when we arrived, so after our couscous dinner, we had no choice but to sleep on the roof.

FRIDAY: When I awoke friday morning, it was the coldest I had felt in a long time. We had breakfast, then had a quick tour of the village before we were off again. We had a good day of walking, and we were able to see some beautiful sights of the rocks, gardens and landscape along the way. We ate lunch in another village along the way where I was able to take a quick nap. When we made it to the spot where we were to descend the cliffs, the view from there was absolutely stunning. No picture could ever do it justice. In the distance, a tiny village called Nombori was situated on the other side of a small river. Across the river, herds of cattle came to drink from its waters and beyond the herds were immense sand dunes which rolled into the horizon. We climbed down, quite carefully, and made our way to Nombori, our final stop. For dinner, we ate some delicious potatoes with a potato sauce and potatoes on the side. We played a Malian card game known as 151, which was similar to UNO, and then headed to bed.

SATURDAY: When we awoke, we had a quick breakfast like always, then toured the village a bit. Afterwards we headed out onto the dunes. It was so nice to feel the cool sand on my feet, but walking on the dunes was actually much more tiring than I had imagined. By the end, I was wishing we had brought some camels. Then all of a sudden, we spot our station wagon in the middle of the desert. I bean wondering why he was parked in this arbitrary location and why he hadn't park closer. Nonetheless, we piled in the car and began our ride back to Koro. We jokingly asked to see Oumar's house in Koro, and surprisingly he took us there upon our arrival. It was actually a really cool pad, with Dogon blankets, photos and maps all over the walls, and wood carvings around the room. Afterward, we headed to a restaurant where we had our final feast together. We said good-bye to our German friends as they continued their journey to Mopti and we got into another bush taxi, this one much more reliable, and headed back to Burkina. It took us only half as long to go back as it did to get there, and we were able to still made it home in time for burgers. It was a great vacation.

Mud mosque in Telly

View of Telly from old cliff village (mosque from previous photo seen near center)

Monkey skulls were attached to the walls of the old village as a way for hunters to show off their skills

The crack in the rock face which we used to climbed to the top

Rock staircase inside said crack

View from the top

At the top. Ilana, Sara, and Audrey (from the bottom)

Our fearless leader, Oumar (on his cell phone)

Yours truly enjoying the view

The day coming to an end

Poor monkey (really wanted to set him free)

View from the village Yabatalou

Savanna on top of the escarpment

Along our hike

The most amazing view I've seen in Africa so far, which no photo can do justice. This is me trying.

View from our last village (the previous photo was taken from the cliffs in the background here)

Our group shot with Oumar at his house in Koro.

Working For Peanuts/Praying For Gold

I know I have been slacking on blog posts lately, but in actuality not much is happening currently. My village is still nowhere to be found, with most people off in the fields harvesting their millet, corn, peanuts, and beans. As no one is around, it is near impossible to plan anything of real significance. But I do have a few activities I am hoping to do once my village repopulates including health funtivities with my primary school and hopefully a malnutrition program as well. This past Tuesday and Wednesday, I went out with one of the nurses on our monthly vaccination campaigns in our satellite villages. In one of our villages, someone gave us a small plot of land for peanuts, so after we finished up, we checked on our crop and did a little harvesting. I had never really known how peanuts were harvested , but it is fairly simple. You just pull them out of the ground, comme ça:

People have given me so many peanuts lately, I don't know what to do with them all. Maybe I should give Planters a call. Anyways, after we checked on our field, we took a hike to see the gold mine nearby. They have discovered a lot of gold throughout our region, which has prompted many people to head to the mines in hopes of getting rich. Unfortunately, the mines are not the safest place to be. Falling into the mines, cave-ins, and mercury poisoning are all plausible dangers while working, and rape and STDs including AIDS are also elevated at these sites as well. Most of the work is done at nighttime when you can more easily see the gold glitter from the lanterns' light, but there were a couple people working when we showed up around 11am. We found this boy from my village sluicing for gold dust that may have been overlooked.

He told us he hadn't found any gold yet.

Our Assistant Nurse, Madame Zongo, is stricken with gold fever.

I feel like the rest of the year is going to be much busier, which will definitely be a nice change. In November I will be going on a mini-vacation to Mali for 4 days, hiking around what is known as Dogon Country (be on the lookout for more pictures). Then just before Thanksgiving, we have a Mid-Service Conference to discuss successes/failures and strategies for the coming year, as well as a medical and dental checkup. I have between then and mid-December to try to realize my 12-day malnutitrion program before leaving on Christmas vacation to America! That's right - I will be home from December 16th through January 6th to see family, friends, and eat some really awesome food. It looks like a busy two months ahead. Until then enjoy these random photos from village:

Isn't there something heavenly about light breaking through the clouds? C'mon, you know there is.

At 6am, while waiting for our nurse to head out for vaccination campaign, I caught these vultures chillin on my major's roof.

One of the last storms of the season

Panorama of the countryside near my village, what we call the brousse (the bush)