Bold American Prose

Once again I set myself down to write a blog post and every passing observation I have made during my week that I felt was worthy of note vanishes from my mind. So i'm left just typing words to that will hopefully coalesce into clever anecdotes. In any case Barack Obama just one and as far as I can tell the entire African continent is rejoicing. It became quite evident in the lead up to this election that the burkinabé view barack as one of their own- not an African american at all but a full blown son of kenya. I had an interesting chat with one of my gendarme friends about ethnicity and nationality. His whole premise was that beyond anything your nationality is dependent upon that of your father; where you were raised and what your behavior is like has little impact upon the essence of your national identity. In his words: it's all in the blood. It was an interesting idea to a child of an immigrant nation and I quickly brought up that (for arguments sake) that my grandfather came directly from Italy thus was my father american or italian? And in turn what was I? He quickly responded that due to this line of descendence I of course was Italian, not American. This was far from what I expected as I know he thinks of me as american and perhaps it was just a bit of burkinabé jocularity but I do think it speaks to the reason why the burkinabé (and perhaps much the rest of africa) relate to barack. He's proud of his heritage and any in the opinion of many burkinabé I've talked to he's African by blood.
In general I am quite amazed by the reaction over here surrounding the victory. In the words of the director of my school "this puts into evidence that the united states is the greatest democracy in the world". His words, not mine. Not to mention that essentially the only international news I get here is from the French perspective (the nation that perhaps criticizes the bush administration the most openly in Europe) and they have just been ridiculous with their praise for barack. On news report I watched was entitled "The end of anti-americanism". Another band of traveling French tourists was quite eager to buy me drinks of celebration in Tougan. It really does make you happy that this decision seems to have integrated us so well into the world community.
In other news I'm still cruising with the Jula. I've acquired another tutor, who is the servaente at my school. His name is Djiabati and he is quite the expert grammarian. I'm now pulling about 5 hours of private tutoring in Jula each week for the price of about 1 dollar per hour. I'm really excited to be learning the language for real. Salutations are nice but there is no substitute for a unbound conversation that doesn't follow any abstract pre-rehearsed dialogues.
I should also say that I've re-imagined myself as a baker here in Burkina. My hand crafted dutch oven and I have already produced three delicious cakes and I am planing and throwing together some banana bread when I get back to the big L. The only thing I'm in want of is some honest to god betty crocker frosting out of a can. So for all you people wanting to break the global frosting apartheid feel free to ship some this way to the developing world. I have completely abandoned recipes and now prefer to bake directly from the balls. That involves heavy handed use of cinnamon, eggs and whatever butter substitute I can track down around here. In any case gonna try to beat the sun going down so I'll catch you latter.