Tu bronches sur cet imparfait du subjonctif!

I'm approaching the half way mark of September, and the abrupt realization that school will be arriving precipitously and along with it the end of my international playboy approach to Peace Corps that has defined this summer. Soon my days of burning through cash dancing 'en boîte' in ouaga will grind to a halt and be replaced by grade calculation and bandit fustigation. It's bizarre how I looked forward to the school year starting up for the past 3 months but now that I stand on the precipice I feel hesitant.

I definitely can't say I've accomplished everything I wanted to this summer, but I have used these last few weeks to amass the resources necessary to be effective in this coming year. I acquired a good set of resources for 3ème SVT including past lesson plans of other volunteers and practice question from old BEPC's (the test for which I am preparing the students). In addition to that, if god favors me I shall have my peace corps partnership library budget finished before the end of September (wasn't it august before?). I've got all of the vendors that I need to talk to lined up, it's just a mater of implementation now. As someone once said "all we need now is a little energon, and a lot of luck"


I do think I've gotten better at Julakan this summer too. Not as much as I would like, but every little bit helps. I also have learned how to say a number of colourful phrases such as:


N bi na n ka juguw kan tigèn Allah togo ra=


I'm going to slit the throats of (can also mean butcher) my enemies in the name of God.


N b'a fé ka ni sunguruba ni songo teremi=


I want to discuss the price of this prostitute.


Also some insults:

I fa foro! =

Your father's cock!


Apparently that is insulting. If I heard that in English I would just be confused.


I would also like to think that my French has gotten better this summer. With my trip to Gaul, and also the extra reading time I've definitely acquired a bigger vocabulary. I've also perfected throwing down absolutely nasty subjunctive phrases -eg. "je cherche quelqu’un avec qui je puisse parler facilement" (you best believe you use the subjunctive there!). I don't know if I ever gave my book review of "La Nausée" by JPS but in any case it was awesome. After finishing it I just walked around for the next week thinking "MY LIFE IS ABSURD". I'm currently reading "La Chute" and it’s distinctly a little trickier, but I bought a reading guide for it at a library in downtown Ouaga which should allow me to unravel the internal irony. I'm still making flash cards like a maniac- their number has to be in the thousands.


I may have had a personal lifetime high recently. When helping my new neighbours in tougan settle in, I went to a Flobi concert. For those of you unfamiliar with Burkinabé artists, Flobi is a youthful musician that was catapulted to fame after the public discovered him on "Faso Acadamie", the Burkinabé equivalent of American Idol. When gathered around the stage awaiting the concert, we had the unfortunate (or soon to be show fortunate) occasion to be overtaken by quite a wrathful storm at the moment of his arrival. Being a good natured chap, he still put on the show despite the fact that seemingly 200 people crowded under the hanger of his stage in order to escape the storm. This reduced his available dancing zone (or as I would say performance space) to only about one meter squared. For those of you at home this is NOT SUFFICIANT to effectively execute a burkinabé booty dance. The plus was I was only centimetres away from his majesty the whole night. This culminated in a moment of complete rapture when the man himself (YES, i mean FLOBI!) in seeing my obvious enjoyment at the spectacle, pulled me out of the crowd to dance with him. I rocked my whiteness with complete abandon and everyone seemed to enjoy it, above all my mates in Tougan.


Finally, I've recently begun a pretty substantial bike trip. It's between Ouaga and the Big L, a total of about 350k. I'm stopped in Ouahigouya currently where I get to hang out with my host family and live it up per usual. Yesterday I was in Yako and tomorrow I'll be in Tougan with the aforementioned new neighbours. They're pretty neat folks, and as a married couple it's already clear that their experience will be vastly different that mine. Not worse or better, just very different.


Anyways, sorry I couldn't really find any pictures that corresponded to this blog post. I know just text can make your eyes bleed. I’ll make the next post spicier.