**I ought to say before continuing that with Guinea Worm Week, we set out to do what we meant to do. Something that Ive learned here, you have to always have a bottom line, a line drawn where you can say this is the least I can tolerate getting done, or the most I can put up with. I have also learned that you have to console yourself with the fact ( Read more... )

Guinea Worm Week could have just as easily been called give whitey the run around week. Actually a lot of the white PCVs here throw the word whitey around a lot. It is a curious thing ( Read more... )

Dear Joelle ( Read more... )

Its occurred to me, maybe I should announce a time Id be online to IM chat with everyone.

I miss my friends.

Who likes this idea?

Rain has finally hit Burkina. Only twice now but it is a blessed thing all the same. It means the weather cooling to bearable temperatures. It means impossibly bright orange puddles. It means that my clothes are going to be perpetually mud splattered until November or so instead of dust caked. It means Im not going to the elephant park with ( Read more... )

No one is going to convince me otherwise, Peace Corps Ghana is a complete cakewalk compared to Burkina. There is a reason why the one woman I spoke with only knew of two people quitting service early, one of whom had a nervous breakdown. Ghana is in a word, awesome ( Read more... )

On the way home from France I watched the first half of The Trail. (By the way, how odd to call the middle of Africa "home ( Read more... )

This morning when I left my house I gave my family back a bag full of maybe 30 mangoes. The kids keep giving them to me. Theyd leave them in my porch/thatched hut area even after I finally started saying no ( Read more... )

The weather here keeps getting more and more brutal. Most days I feel as though I am boiling in my own sweat ( Read more... )

Last night, the funeral officially started. Which meant last night, I also got no sleep. The masses had taken up every available space around my house, sleeping under my porch etc ( Read more... )