Arrival

Blog- 10/12/2011
We just finished our first full day in Burkina Faso. I did learn alot today during my brief tenure as a Peace Corps Trainee. First, there is an incredibly large number of people who work for the PC in the country. Second, the Peace Corps loves to abbreivate everything. Everything from PST (Pre-service training) to IST (In-service training) to some other ones that I haven't figured out yet and I've been curious for longer than it would have taken to just say the phrase. Third, it gets light here really early. To give you an idea, breakfast everyday is at 6:30. I wake up at 5:45 to get a run in beforehand but it's still rather early (although it's completely light out before 5:45 so it's normal here). Today we started off our day with breakfast (bread, marmalade, tea). Usually eggs are a part of breakfast as well. Then we had a meeting with the country director, and a large number of other people: the head of health, the head of business, the language people, the safety and security people, and many others. They then gave us a checklist of things to accomplish including: 1) Bike fittings 2) getting a walking around allowance (29,000cfa which is about $60 I believe) 3) handing in any valuables to the peace corps safe- I turned in my credit card and drivers license because I'm not going to be driving here 4) going to a medical review exam 5) taking a few surveys 6) meeting with the head of our group (my boss' name is Dr. Claude). My name is generating a lot of attention and everyone wants to know why I have two last names, usually the people who want to know ask in english which is certainly easier than trying to explain it in french. 7) Language assessment. After that we had the rest of the day to ourselves and most of us bought cellphones to use in country, and just walked around a bit of the city. There are peace corps volunteers (PCVs) around all the time who have been guiding us around.
The food here is pretty good, and basic. Pasta, Rice, Chicken, a bit of beef, onions, and some other vegetables that I just can't figure out are all foods that we've eaten so far. Tonight we went to the country director's house for dinner and she actually had her cook make chocolate chip cookies- I didn't think I'd be having those for a long time. Apparently the diarrhea and other problems will start next week when we move in with our host families for 8 or 9 weeks. Each of the PCVs with us now speaks very highly of their host family so I'm optimistic.
Traveling to Burkina Faso was an adventure in and of itself. We left Philly at 10 (on October 10), got to JFK by 12, left JFK by 7:30, arrived in Brussels at 8AM on the 11th, left Brussels at 12:30 on the 11th and made it to Burkina Faso by 3:30 on the 11th. Brussels is 6 hours ahead of Boston, and Burkina Faso is 2 hours behind Brussels (so 4 hours ahead of Boston until Daylight savings time ends in which case it will be 5 hours ahead). Although, I must say flying over the desert is cool- really cool.
Oh yea, it's also hot here, it's really hot here.