Absent Without Leave

I have been remiss. I've had lots of exciting things to write about - interesting travels, work in village, future plans - but as the pace of life only continues to increase here (with the odd reprieve of a sweltry, lazy village day), I find it hard to sit down and blog when I have the opportunity. Thus, a quick recap of the past few months and the invitation to check out my goings-on via photos (the medium that I have managed to spend some time making public!).

Highlights include:

- 8 Mars: International Women's Day which we celebrated in village with a host of activities including a parade, speeches, an exposé on the feminization of HIV/AIDS (the theme of this year's IWD), soccer games, a relay race, a bike race and a soirée with dancing.

- an Easter trip to Arly National Park, in a somewhat remote corner of Burkina's southeast. Our group biked around the park (on some VERY rough trails) and saw an array of creatures: elephants, buffalo, koba, bush deer, warthogs, baboons, hippos, some neat birds, etc.

- a late March trip to Burkina's southwestern region for the Semaine Nationale de la Culture (Nat'l Week of Culture) which consisted of some amazing dance and musical performances from groups all over the country, including several from the eastern region and villages near mine.

- in early April, our group's Close of Service conference, where we processed some of our Peace Corps experiences, talked about leaving BF and life after Peace Corps, discussed career exploration - resume writing and informational sessions with local development workers and foreign service officers, and, finally, had a pretty sweet party celebrating our two years and the atypical fact that almost of all of our group actually made it to COS (Burkina has one of the highest "early termination" rates of Peace Corps countries). Our group's official COS date is in late August, though many volunteers will leave in June or July.

I have photo albums documenting all of the aforementioned on my Picasa page so please check 'em out if you're so inclined:

http://picasaweb.google.com/hart.christine


I hope that my next entry will include some exciting and definite news about my plans post-August, but I don't want to report anything before my plans are concrete (so mysterious! ok, not really, I just don't want to be presumptuous). I'll say this: my eagerness to return to "la vie americaine" may have been premature.

…at my worst, I have been a cacophony, a mass of human noises that did not add up to the symphony of an integrated self. At my best, however, the world sang out to me, and through me, like ringing crystal.

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet