I guess it's been awhile since I've written. I guess it just hasn't
been that exciting. I have been working. I'm supposed to work from 8
am til 5:30pm with an hour for lunch and a half day on Sat. That's
pretty long hours although right now I'm sure if I'm really making
that as I take the hour for lunch to eat with Ben but I also take an
hour to do my french lessons and some times I leave a bit early to go
to the gym. I end up spending a couple hours at night doing work
though and sometimes nearly a full day on Sat so I figure it balances
out. I also am incurring expenses that I can't recover and have people
running around doing errands for me.

For here my salary is really good and actually it's the vacation time
and compensation that are really the amazing part of the package. I'm
making less hourly now than I did in high school in the 80s but round
trip airfare twice times a year to anywhere I want to go was never
part of the package. Even hourly I still make more than probably 90%
of the population.

It's weird working at home. You feel like you are always at home and
never feel like you are actually getting anything done. The other
things that make it feel weird are how long things on the internet
take. Because it takes so long to open web pages, send emails etc. at
the end of the day, you aren't sure exactly what you accomplished.
Although things are getting crossed off my list, it's just going
really slowly. Loren has been helping me with some stuff. I had to
look into how to register a company here and they give a list but
don't explain any of their acronyms, like why you need them. So he was
great at explaining all that to me. Probably got more accomplished in
the 20 minutes he spent explaining than the whole rest of the day.

The only thing that I have as a compass as to whether I'm getting the
right things done is occasional emails and one phone call from the
Director. So also not used to having so little feedback as to what the
priority is.

The Director is going to be coming up the week of the 24th and we'll
do a tour of the mines here and hopefully get us set up in an office.
I found a couple suitable places. The tour of the mines will likely
require me to stay overnight somewhere. Then the following week I am
to go to Ghana with the Director, drive down, fly back. It takes most
of a day to drive to Accra. I will be away for 4 maybe 5 days
depending on flights. I asked to not be travelling over a weekend if
it can be helped and Steve (the Director) agreed. We leave on Monday
and should be home by Friday. The house girl agreed to stay overnight
with Ben as I need someone to get him ready for school in the
mornings, feed him etc. and be there at night for dinner consistently.
Loren isn't around enough for my comfort.

Last weekend we went to the opening of a new maquis and met a couple
French guys, both who have been living in Burkina for at least 5 or 6
years and other parts of Africa for the last 10 or 15 years. They look
about mid-thirties so they must have come here really young. Both work
in construction so are direct competitors of Loren's company. They
were great guys and one guy, Arnot is married to a woman from Guinea.
They have a son a little older than Ben and live around the corner
from us. This had me thinking about the fact that I don't yet really
have friends here. I have Loren's friends, mostly men, who I can sit
and talk with somewhat if I go over to one of the nearby maquis. Some
of their wives are friendly with me. There are a few neighbours I am
friendly with. There's Dembele and Cita but with 3 kids and one is a
newborn, they don't have much time for going out. I don't have friends
to go out with and do stuff. I chat with the girl who runs the fitness
club but no one I can call and say, let's go for coffee or want to go
out dancing? Many people are married and it's sort of the same problem
as I encounter in Canada, few people have the same interests as me
which is probably why in Ottawa many of my good friends were young
people at karate. Not that I mind spending my free time with Loren or
his friends but I still feel a bit that I am missing that… to use a
french word… complicity. In English it doesn't have the same
connotation I guess, it means more like someone to get into trouble
with. Camaraderie? Arnot struck me as someone I could be friends with.
A guy of course, the majority of my friends are men at home, but here
that isn't really acceptable. One of my other friends was out with us,
and he called me Lisa which sent the whole table into a tale spin. How
dare he call me by my first name?! Everyone calls me either Madame
Loren (most people can't pronounce Loren's last name - Lungren, or
they know we're not married so don't try to call me by a last name,
thereby pointing out that we're not married) or they call me Maman de
Ben which is fine with me but it's one more layer of separation.

If I go out and have a good time by myself, (I.e. go to a bar and play
pool or go dancing, places where I know other people even), even if
Loren doesn't mind (which he doesn't), if his friends see me, he's
going to get an earful as will I.

Although you find complicity in the strangest places too. Loren likes
to make fun of my black belt since he thinks that it's basically katas
and pushups. He thinks that the fighting is choreographed. It makes me
mad but most of his friends know I have a black belt and that I like
to fight. The last person who should be supporting me in that sort of
thing is a village chief. There is a chief who comes to the maquis now
and again. He has this running joke with Loren that he's going to
steal me from Loren, calls Loren his rival. It's starting to get thin
at this point. But when out last weekend, the chief was encouraging me
to continue my training. Turns out he's a 3rd Dan in Judo and 4th Dan
in Taekwondo. He keeps telling me he's too old and weak to do it
anymore (the Judo I can understand, I have friends at 35 who find it
tough to keep it up) and the chief is probably early 50s. He
compliments me on my strong handshake grip and always wants to talk
about training techniques. The rest of Loren's friends just think I'm
crazy for doing martial arts and Loren crazy for letting me.
Unfortunately, the other thing he always wants to talk about mind you,
is village relationships (I.e. how you always give the gift chicken to
your father's brother's wife, not to his brother) and me having more
children…

We're still having guard troubles from the standpoint that Paul and
Ziidi, who alternate weeks are not cool with the hours. They want to
arrive at 6PM and leave at 6AM whereas I said 5PM til 9AM. Ziidi
doesn't speak any French. In fact it is probably fair to say I speak
more Moré than he speaks French. Paul is trying to explain the problem
to me, half in French, half in Moré. I sort of get it but am not sure
I understood his solution, and definitely couldn't answer. I told him
to take it up with Loren and he told me I need to learn Moré. This is
very frustrating for me. I am trying to learn Moré, I probably know 50
- 100 words and have a rough concept of the grammar and sentence
structure. But I'm still at the 101 level of greeting people and
putting together point form responses, very badly constructed
sentences and incorrect verb conjugation. Trying to work at a brand
new job, take care of Ben, get to the gym, improve my French and learn
a whole new language is very brain intensive. People don't understand
that Loren has been speaking Moré for well on 20 years now and started
to learn it when he was 12. He already spoke Gourounsi which although
isn't similar gives him particular advantage. The other problem I'm
having is that the way you speak Moré is different than speaking
French or English although it's closer to English. When you speak
French, your breath is held in your mouth more and it is spoke at the
tip of the tongue. English is spoken more at the back of the mouth but
you still tend to hold some breath there. Moré you absolutely must
speak pushing the air out, it's forced out from the back of your
throat (how else would your pronouce words with 3 consonants lined up
like yilgdge pronounced n'yilgedege said so fast that the front and
back of your tongue are basically flapping up and down opposite each
other) which is the opposite of what you are doing with your mouth in
French. Also I have a dictionary but one little word can have a huge
description so complex, I can't imagine ever using it yet hear it in
conversation all the time. It's like Chinese characters where one
character can be a whole sentence. For example yoa (n'yoan) -
intensive reinforcing of an idea or totality; yeesme (n'yensemeh) -
mutually rejecting the responsibility for the execution of a task. Uh,
ok. Some things are also pronounced differently depending on where
they fall in the sentence. For example dawa = mister or man. It's
pronounced dawa if at the beginning of a sentence or rawa if in the
middle or near the end.

Anyway, it'll come but I wish people would cut me some slack. Your
"husband" speaks Moré, how come you don't? It's worse coming from
people who can't speak French.

Explanation on the husband thing: if you have a child together you are
together unless your husband sends you away. Usually men keep the
children and get rid of the wife (they usually have a couple extra -
wives and children) unlike North America where men piss off leaving
wife with children and no means of taking care of them. I was told
once there are 3 kinds of women. Someone's mother, someone's wife, and
hookers. In French and in Moré the word for woman and wife are the
same word, femme and paga. It's the context of the sentence, the
wife/woman of so and so, versus random woman, that decide which of the
previous categories you fall into. (there is a distinction made
between a man and a husband) None of this bothers me really, although
it can be tiresome since we aren't married really and I'm not
accustomed to having to defer to someone all the time in public.
My French is getting better however, I am trying to get Mattieu, my
teacher to focus on things I would need in the professional realm. He
spent 2 lessons getting me to learn the names of animals (ram, sheep,
lamb; male dog, female dog, puppy, etc) and the sounds they make
including the verb and noun forms. This is generally important in
everyday conversation since many of their jokes revolve around the
pastoral since most people come from villages where their families
were farmers. However I'm not sure how far this will take me at work.
All this language learning is impacting my English since I seem to
have trouble finding the correct English expression lately. Everything
is getting mixed up, even to the point where I can't remember if I had
the conversation in English or in French, which is a good sign but
frustrating too. I'm sure a year from now this will all be a distant
memory.