This week's fun: Ouahigouya, fake penises and cookies

Happy December! The school year is chugging ahead steadily. I can't believe it's already grade calculatin' time, but alas, 'tis so. Luckily, I was able to use another volunteer's laptop to calculate my Math and English trimestrial grades (all 210 of them). I've just got one more test to give before break on Tueday. This weekend is a long one due to a national holiday on Monday. Woohoo! So I'm enjoying the ammenities of the big city here in Ouahigouya, along with the phenomenal cooking skills of fellow volunteer, Dr. David. (There's 3 volunteers based here right now, so I'm getting some good socializing in.)

In case you weren't aware, December 1st was World AIDS Day. And, like last year, my school took part in the "Leçon de Vie" (Life Lesson), a worldwide program where schools take an hour out of the normal school day and use it for a lesson about HIV/AIDS. My lesson went pretty well, despite being completely disruly. It was definitely worlds better than my lesson last year. I started with a "True or False" game trying to dispel myths about HIV/AIDS and people with the virus. Then I used the animal world as an analogie for how the HIV virus works, using students to play the parts of a baby elephant (the human body), adult elephants (the immune system) and lions (common diseases, sicknesses or infections). Thankfully, that part went really well because our town's prefect (high-up gov't official) observed my class at that time. Then, I took questions. One student asked how to use condoms, so using the condoms I'd brought with me, I did an impromtu condom demonstration. Wow, the kids sure were excited about that. In fact, when I started, I was stuck for a "penis" and one kid in the back (sometimes a troublemaker, in fact) jumped up and raced out the room. No more than thirty seconds later he came back in and produced my "penis": a large stick. Good work! By this time, I'd outlasted all the other classes, so I had my 105 kids in the classroom plus pratically the whole school looking in all the windows and the door, enthralled with the demonstration. Luckily, former health volunteer Katy taught me how to do a thorough condom demo, so it went really well.

I'm also attempting an English Club at my school, as I talked about last time. The first meeting had an overwhelming attendance but the second was quite underwhelming due to end of the trimester exams. We'll see how next week goes. For any of you teachers or parents out there that know of kids who would be interested in an African penpal, let me know!! My kids would love to practice their English with letters (and maybe someone could practice their French with us?).

Good work, Mom, getting those questions in. You see, making stove-top cookies is quite simple. One makes the batter as normal, but for baking, you just plop a nice heavy frying pan on a low flame. Then, depending on the size of the pan, one can place about 6 cookies on the pan at a time. Then take the normal time for baking, divide it in half (gasp! math!) and let it go for that long, flip the cookies like pancakes and give them the second half of baking on the other side. They turn out pretty much just like oven-baked cookies, but with two crunchy brown sides instead of one! I don't recommend it for you folks in AmericaLand as it is quite time consuming. My Ramadan festival batch took me ALL morning.

(Oh and hi right back to Teich!! It's been so long! Shoot me an email: karatierney@gmail.com or a regular letter, ya lazy bum.)