Pictures!

 I've been terrible about posting pictures in the past couple months, but it's not my fault!  The internet here is terrible and doesn't work well with the Blogspot interface (yeah I still know some fancy tech words).  I finally found a way to post photos through Picassa and Google+.  Turns out the failed social networking site that Google insisted would replace Facebook actually has some obscure uses.  Without further adieu (almost spelled  that ado.....or adue...... but my friend Jessica informed me that it comes from French), I present to you a glorified view of the few moments in the past 8 months that can actually be considered awesome.  I would post the pictures of my low points as well, but who wants to see pictures of me sitting around doing nothing, sweating my ass off, or getting made fun of by little kids.  

 My "happy place" at site. It's about 5 km into the bush along the river that borders the west side of my village.  Running in public in Burkina Faso will draw countless stares and jeers, but when I run along the trails around here I usually encounter less than 10 people.  The sound of water running over the rocks is a poor substitute for the sound of the ocean, but it reminds me of home. Basically paradise.......

 Baobob and me.  Yeah, these trees are big.  There are a ton of them at my friend David's site, which I discussed in an earlier post.

 Tower and  tank at a nunnery/hotel in Koudougou.  Purpose: unknown. Temptation to climb: high.  Feelings sitting halfway up tower after giving into temptation to climb: terror.

Sunrise over the sugar cane fields.  Takaledougou was once located in the area that is now occupied by these fields.   At some point in the 80's, the government negotiated a deal with the village chief that gave his people ten years of tax breaks in exchange for the land.  He split the village in two, creating Takale and Takale II, located on opposite sides of the sugar cane fields.  The corporation that owns the sugar cane fields, SOSUCO, employs men in my village on temporary contracts, but pays them virtually nothing.  The sugar cane fields occupy nearly all of the village's former cultivation lands, complicating subsistence agriculture.

View from under a mango tree at sunrise.  There are an abundance of mango trees in the southwest region of Burkina.  They are an extremely important part of the village and regional economies.  Mangos taste good.  If you know me well, you know that I don't really like fruit.  I felt that being placed in a region with hundreds of thousands of mango trees was a sign from a higher power that I should like mangos.

My site is 15 km north of Banfora.  10km west of Banfora is one of Burkina's premier tourist attractions, the waterfalls of Banfora.  I  hadn't visited them for a variety of reasons, but I finally got the chance when Ouadrago, one of the nurses at my health clinic, offered to take me there one Sunday.  As far as Burkina tourism is concerned, the waterfalls of Banfora were AMAZING.  Because it's the beginning of rainy season, the largest waterfall isn't much to look at, but we hiked up past the lower falls and found a series of smaller falls.

 Ouadrago and I.....chilling in a waterfall.

Enjoying a beer in one of the upper waterfalls

The team of Burkinabe that helped me with the malaria discussion/debate at the local primary school.  From left to right: Makoura (younger woman in village who I'm starting to work with), me, Ibrahim (an amazing Burkinabe in Takale who has helped me every step of the way), Ouadrago (nurse at the health clinic), and Diallo (head nurse at the health clinic).

Siaka's cassava fields.  Cassava is used to make Ateike, a local specialty that can best be described as sweet kous kous.  Siaka is the closest thing to an American entreprenuer that exists at the village level.  He just received a second loan from Zidisha, a micro finance non-profit that connects business owners in the developing world with internet users of the developed world.  Internet users can choose what projects to fund based on user profiles.  He has ambitious plans for expansion.  Although I've made it clear to him that I can't assist him financially, I helped him take pictures for his profile on Zidisha.