We'd spent Monday morning on a long walk with Samuel to one of the nearby hills. His neighbour, Rasmata, was walking the same way, and patiently let us try carrying her large bowl of food and farm tools on our heads. She showed us her own millet field at the base of the hill and introduced us to her family, who took a break from their work to hike up the hill with us and chat, eat wild grapes and take plenty of pictures (which should appear on Megan's blog sometime soon). When we got back to the field, they let us try hoeing around the millet and operating a donkey-drawn plow--dusty, awkward jobs to our untrained hands.
Samuel has spent the past few school years living in Kaya with Edith, in order to be able to better concentrate on his studies and hopefully be the only one of the five siblings to finish high school. Edith didn't hesitate to chastise him in front of us for apparently slacking off last year, despite having enough money and sisterly support available to pay his school fees and get him to the door of the lycée each morning--clearly a speech she'd given him before and motivated by concern for his well-being, but still speaking to the ongoing and profound barriers to education in Burkina. A lot of families, even when both parents work full-time, have difficulty paying school fees for their children, and that was apparently the reason Edith had to leave school after three years of secondary and come to Kaya to look for work. The pharmacy depot is apparently working fairly well for her, but she also wrote an entrance exam for the public service the weekend we were there. Like school entrance and exit exams in Burkina, the public service exams are apparently extremely competitive, and she won't know until August whether her results will be high enough to make a career change a possibility.
In the meantime, we had a great time chatting with her, André and André's brothers, and the hostess-guest dynamic was such that I felt for the first time that I was paying someone a visit just like I would at home. I'm not sure if it's because I'm settling in, or if Edith is just cool, but it could be a bit of both. There's a chance she'll join us in Bobo for a couple of days during our post-work travel, which could be quite fun.
Speaking of post-work, it's approaching fast. We're realizing that between report-writing, special events and general loose ends, the next eight working days are going to be jam-packed. We've already crammed two soccer tournaments, a batik workshop and a neighbourhood garbage cleanup into the past two weeks, all of which I hope to talk about on the blog when I get a bit more time, but I think we'll have to turn down the intensity of our direct work with the kids in order to get our reports in to the directors. In between, we're also hoping to take another weekend trip, destination TBD. I'll keep you posted.
posted by Emily @ 10:23 p.m.
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