Burkina Faso has a pretty young population, and thus, there are many cute little children running around! One of my neighbors has a young boy, and has brought him over to my host family's house a few times. However, every time I look at him, he starts to cry. I'm not even that scary! Lol. I think many children haven't really seen white people before, so they're not used to it. Most of the time though, children are curious and wave to me. I also busted out colored pencils and crayons the other other day for my host brother and some of the children in the neighborhood, and they seemed to enjoy that. But so far, I think I've scared about 3 babies.
Left hand = bad:
An interesting cultural tidbit about Burkina Faso: you're not supposed to use your left hand for anything. This stems from the fact that the left hand is used for wiping, in the lack of toilet paper, and thus is considered unclean. So whenever you wave to people, eat, or hand something to someone, you're supposed to just use your right hand. Considering I'm left handed, this will take some work. Mostly, it results in me being uncoordinated and awkward. Definitely have had some trouble trying to use a fork with my right hand, lol. Luckily, there are 2 other left-handers in my group so we can suffer together.
Sunday is for reposer-ing
As you can see, I've adopted the PC habit of using Franglais already. Reposer basically means to rest, and since people have school and I think work on Saturday, for a half-day, Sunday is pretty much the only full day you get to rest. Quite a big change from my 4 day weekends spring term senior year. Yay for 10A-2A-3B schedules! Lol. This past Sunday, I ended up waking up a bit later than normal, at around 7 am or so, and then had my usual breakfast of half a baguette and tea. Then my host sister brought me to the marché (market) to buy some vegetables. I learned some useful words for various foods, and then promptly forgot them all. Maybe I should start carrying a small vocab notebook or something around with me. Well, afterwards, I came back to the house and had fun drawing with kids. Hung out with some PCTs for a bit at a local spot, called El Dorado, and then learned to do laundry! And man, it was a workout for the arms. My host sisters showed me how I was supposed to do laundry by hand, and there's a lot of scrubbing involved. Pretty sure that all the Burkinabe women are jacked, lol.
And speaking of the women here, I guess they don't really get Sunday off. This is a pretty patriarchal society, and women are generally expected to do things like cleaning, cooking, general household duties. Women and men also usually eat separately, though we PCTs are considered kind of a third gender. That means we don't really fit into the traditional gender roles here, so I eat with my host father and brother. My host mother seems to always be busy with something, whether it's cooking dinner over a campfire or washing buckets full of laundry. It's pretty impressive how much she works. I'm too lazy to even clean up after myself, so I feel like I probably wouldn't have the stamina to take care of an entire household
Also, photos coming soon, hopefully! And we had demyst this past weekend, when we went and visited PCVs out in the field. Will post more about that later! Miss you all!
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