A Tubabu in Burkina Faso: Holidays, Herds, Hakuna Matata

Hey there!

I know its been a while but things have been a little hectic the past few weeks. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year celebration! Kids in village here don't exactly get presents (small children love to go through trash to find the cans and wrappers and other knick-knacks to construct their dirt-castles and will go crazy for a tire to launch and chase down the road...for hours) so I decided to get my host family some small gifts and make the day fun for the kids. I planned out a scavenger hunt for my 3 host siblings (Koya 6, Moctar 17, Hamza 20) around the neighborhood to lead them to find their gifts and early on Christmas morning I sent the kids on their adventure. They had a blast running around (with Koya always running a solid 20 feet behind, trying to get her legs going fast enough to catch up to the boys all the while yelling “waaaaaaaiiiittttttt for meeeeeeee!!”) and went nuts for the water guns, remote controlled car and Barbie doll they found at the end of the hunt.

My host parents were also very happy about the 25kg bag of rice I bought for the family (they feed me everynight and never accept for me to help them pay for food so this bag will feed them for months!). Of course I couldn't leave Captain out (my puppy) so I bought her some dried fish heads and she had a great time. Christmas lunch consisted of salad (its lettuce season, I am lucky enough to have it in my village, not all volunteers get lettuce!), pasta, rice, some sort of meat (you just don't want to ask) and watermelon, delicious!

A few days later I headed to Ouaga to meet some other volunteers to celebrate New Years Eve. We went to a dance club typical of Burkina with mirrors on every inch of the walls so that the dancers can watch themselves dancing (sometimes it gets really awkward and Burkinabe will dance with themselves in front of a mirror with nobody else around..they just love it!). The next morning (about 2 hours of sleep later) we got on public transport to the village of Pama, about 30km from the border of Benin. It took us about 8-9 hours of travel, half in a horrifyingly speedy charter bus and the other half in a deteriorated bush taxi where the seats in front of us fell onto our shins and forced 2 terrified Burkinabe girls into our laps.

We stayed in a “hostel” (in the Safari coordinator's house) and got picked up by the Safari truck at 5am. As we headed into the park we saw some lion tracks but never did end up finding them...but being charged by a herd of pissed-off elephants made up for that! We saw:

A ton of Elephants (veerrryyy up-close)

Hippos

Crocodiles

A bunch of different Antelope

1 Baboon

Warthogs (the group before us got to see a lion chasing one of these Pumbas down!)

Really cool, electric blue birds

I wish I could write more about what other things have been going on but I am currently battling for the limited internet access with the rest of the volunteers trying to contact family for the holidays. We had a great time bringing in the New Year & I hope everyone back home had safe holidays. :)