Peace Corps - Site Visit

I plastered on a big smile that I hope conveyed more excitement than fear. I jumped in the cab with two other volunteers and their homologues, all of us heading towards the same bus station. At least I would have company on the way there.

Due to a clerical error, the day before we departed for Ouaga to meet our homologues, I found out my site was not in fact going to be in the beautiful south of Burkina Faso 10 Km away from Banfora, which is famous for its gorgeous waterfalls; but in the dusty north, 45 Km away from a regional capital. It took everything I had not to burst into tears at this sudden change of fate. I had spent the last month bragging about all the food, coconut rum, and good weather we would be having in the south. About how everyone could vacation to my site. With two flicks of a paper, I was removed to a wasteland with limited phone service, poor food supplies, and terrible transportation.

I sucked it up though, figuring that even if the paper was wrong, I had been assigned to Kaonguin-Sanrgo all along anyways. I figured they had put me at a remote site with so many challenges because I could handle them. It was a compliment. It’s funny looking back on that moment now. I was devastated to lose a site so well equipped, but little did I know, I would be gaining a community that would help me accomplish more than I ever could imagine in the Peace Corps.

We arrived at the bus station, me with an overstuffed backpack containing a couple packets of ramen and cliff bars, and holding a green sack containing my bug net. I felt burdened and out of place. My French was only a month old, so the conversations I had with my homologue were difficult and brief. I struggled to find my passport when the gendarme stopped the bus for inspection. I spent most of the bus ride trying to control my breathing and focus on the insane music videos playing on the overhead screens.

Everything felt absurd. My brain was trying to take in and process all the things happening around me while also suppressing astronomical levels of stress. I was alone in a “dangerous” country with a person I had known for less than 48 hours traveling to the middle of nowhere. Was I crazy?

We finally arrived in Kaya, my regional capital, where I was expected to eat, find a stove, and items to cook with, all before heading out to my site. In a thoughtless move on my part, I told my homologue I was perfectly capable of cooking for myself during site visit. I wanted to seem independent and capable, and also didn’t want to offend people who brought me food I wouldn’t eat.

Before I realized what was happening, my homologue found himself busy with some work related items, and I was handed off to someone else. A president of something in the village whose name was something I didn’t quite catch. What?

Soon we were walking down the street, my bike in tow, wandering through the market. “What did I need? What was I shopping for?” He asked in his broken French. What was I looking for? A stove, but what was the word in French? It came to me with a cartoon image from my basic French textbook, FOURNEAU! But I didn’t know what that looked like in Burkina. I ended up purchasing the equivalent of a camper stove with a large gas canister. How was I supposed to cook on this? So I purchased a pot as well, but later realized I didn’t purchase any utensils.

I was walked to the bush taxi station, and sat on a bench. I was told to stay put as my babysitter hopped on the back of a motorcycle, and drove off. I can see myself now: exhausted, disheveled, scared, alone, and surrounded by my bulky belongings. On top of everything, it started to rain!

I eased my growing anxiety by texting other volunteers to see how their journeys were shaping up. It seemed as if everyone else had made it to their sites with large welcomes and were now comfortably passing the evenings in their homes. I was still waiting for my bush taxi to load up and leave.

I did the math. It was only 4PM, and the sun doesn’t set until 7PM and its only supposed to take two and a half hours to drive to my site, and 45 minutes to bike to my site, with my stove and backpack, so if we leave now, I still have time! But it was raining, so we weren’t leaving. I kept recalculating the time, as if by some miracle, the sun would set later and I would magically have another hour to bike in the daylight to my site.

At around 4:30PM the bush taxi was finally loaded up and ready to go. It was teetering. It was bearing more weight than the old VW van’s bones could take, but it still puttered along. I was fine as long as we were moving in the right direction. The paved road suddenly turned to dirt, and our pace slowed. We approached a spot that would give me anxiety for months to come. A little ravine was dug out in the road so as to let water pass between the fields on either side of it. The bush taxi cautiously stumbled across the first ravine, filled with flowing muddy water. The second ravine looked steeper, but the driver seemed to be maneuvering the bush taxi just so… we could get stuck because he bottomed out the van. We were stuck in the middle of a ravine.

My stress went through the roof at this point. I called Peace Corps, telling them we were stuck and having problems. I called my homologue, telling him we were stuck and having problems. I wish I could have called more people, because I legitimately didn’t know what to do. I had no idea where we were, when we would get moving again, or if I could make it to my site that night. We sat there for half an hour, waiting for the van to be fixed as the sun set in the distance. I lost all hope of biking in the light of day.

Just when I was about to call it quits on the whole Peace Corps thing, the engine started as if nothing had ever gone wrong, and we all piled back in the van to more carefully cross the ravine and continue our journey. I called the Peace Corps back, telling them we were moving again, but I don’t think they got the message. I received a call from a driver at 11PM that night telling me he was in a village 12Km away waiting to take me to my site, after I had already arrived about two hours earlier.

I don’t remember most of of the bush taxi ride out to my site, only the dancing of headlights on trees lining the road. I was so exhausted, I could barely keep my eyes open, and I promptly fell asleep on my pot.

I woke with a start as the bush taxi pulled over and I was ushered out and into a truck. Wait, a truck? My homologue had received a call from the Peace Corps telling him about my literal struggle bus, and he rallied the troops to help get me out to the village so I wouldn’t have to bike with all my stuff through the middle of the night. At this point, I stopped asking questions. I was far too exhausted to care how or what was going on. My brain decided to shut down before it imploded.

We arrived at my courtyard to a small party of ten or so people, who opened up my home in the dead of night, and left me to rest until the next day. I walked into my dark and dusty home, watching spindly spiders descend from the tin ceiling on thin threads. I hung my bed net from a piece of wire left by the former volunteer, and curled up on the cement floor with a blanket.

The rest of site visit was pretty standard. I met all of the VIPs in village, was shown the health clinic, participated in a vaccination day. It was hard, and I counted down every one of the hours until I would set off back to training.

I encountered one of my hardest rides in biking back to the village where I picked up my bush taxi. My bush taxi ended up breaking down again on the road, so I got to drive into Kaya with truly glorious style in the front seat of a semi truck.

I remember walking out of the small hostel we were staying in the night before heading back into Ouaga, Oasis des Enfants, and locking eyes with another volunteer in my group as he arrived from his site. The terror, anxiety, relief, shock, overwhelmingness that were in his eyes were reflected in mine. We hugged, and we commiserated.

Everyone has difficulties when they embark on their site visit. One volunteer had to bike 40Km into Kaya using only one peddle, another volunteer wasn’t offered any water, and ended up washing his hair with the remaining oral rehydration solution he had in his Nalgene.

Site visit is the first time volunteers are truly alone in country, and vying for themselves. However, it is thought that volunteers who have difficult site visits are the ones who typically see their service through to the end. I don’t know the numbers, but I do know that encountering everything that could go wrong at site ahead of actually moving to village helped me prepare to deal with the problems that would come, and helped me overcome them. It made me stronger, and making it through site visit made me feel I could accomplish anything in Burkina.

I remember going back to training and seeing a marked improvement in my French. I felt comfortable going to the market alone and biking around Leo by myself, which I was terribly afraid of when I first arrived in Burkina. Site visit is the bandaid every volunteer must rip off, but actually moving into village is so much easier because of it.

I thrived off the friendliness of my village during site visit, people who gifted me with eggs to eat, and brought water to my home. People who guided me, and forgave my terrible language skills. I was lucky, still am lucky, to have had such a supportive community. Transportation continued to be a difficulty for me, but over time, I worked out a solution that, again, only existed due to the generosity of others.