Week 1 in Burkina

It has been many days since my last confession, and it is not much of a confession at all.

The trip from Mali to Burkina Faso was on a big bus, a bus with a schedule, each person with their own seat, a 12 hour trip on a ship tighter than an airplane with no air conditioning and windows shut.

Burkina Faso has been days worth of training. Moore is my new language. I have met tons of volunteers because of the film festival. I have been shopping to furnish a new house in a village without electricity or running water.

I have been busy.

But how have I been feeling?

Transferring to a new country is difficult. It is a challenge. I came to Africa looking for challenges, yet I didn't find many.

The other day I got teary-eyed.

I think I may have found my challenge.

It is hard leaving a village you love, a village you were only beginning to feel comfortable in, a place where you were starting to make friends. It is hard leaving that for something totally new.

Here in Burkina, my village will be big with daily transportation, with flat dirt roads for biking with an easily accessible nearest neighbor who shops at my market that stocks toilet paper and mayo, a village with class sizes of 100, with cell phone coverage, with internet 30 km away, with a mail system that actually works.

It is hard not to compare Burkina's village to my little isolated village in Guinea.

It can be a bit weird, overwhelming, sad having to say goodbye to something I really loved in Guinea to adapt to a new environment here in Burkina.

I can only hope that the Burkina village will one day become my home.