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Burkina Faso!

I absolutely LOVE to travel, yet somehow, there is something really enjoyable about settling in somewhere and unpacking your bags. The SIL centre here in Ouagadougou feels like “home”. It is just plan nice. Also, having good internet access and a phone make me feel like I’m connected to the world again after 2 weeks of travel.

Of course the itch to explore hasn’t gone away… As soon as I got the internet up and running, I started looking at maps, and making potential plans for my bike trip. It is hard to concentrate on preparing for the course, though, so I am trying to keep that in the back of my head.

The first participants will arrive Sunday, and all should be here by Tuesday for a Wednesday start. I have quite a bit to do the first week, so I need to buckle down. Right now, (or what I would be doing right now, if I wasn’t writing this blog) I am struggling to find a good way to discuss the role of a literacy worker in relation to politics and NGOs, particularly in being an advocate for the language and the people. Hmmm…. I might try some case-studies. It’s kind of a heavy subject for the first day, but then again, it’s not like we have a lot of really easy light stuff to start off with. It’s complex, important stuff all month long!

At the end of next week, I am going to running a special workshop on diagnosing reading problems and that is taking up the majority of my brain-power since I want it to be really helpful for them. This will be one of my biggest contributions this year.

Ps – just in case you thought I was suffering from missing Ethiopian food, you’d be sorely mistaken. Since I’ve been here, I’ve enjoyed Foutou with peanut sauce (Ivorian and Ghanaian cuisine), Tchep (Senagalese Cuisine), Attieke (from my region of the Ivory Coast), and several Burkinabé specialties including mangos that way close to 2 kilograms each! Although, it is not “fine dining” here, I love it for it’s unsophisticatedly strong tastes and the community feeling of eating “on the street”. You just choose one of the many tables that line a street and ask what they have. If you like it, you say how much you want (ie. 50 cents worth please, or 25 cents of millet and 1 dollar’s worth of chicken, etc). Then you sit down on a bench with others enjoying the same food and wish them “bon appetite”.