The Universal…

Last night, as I was chatting with the French family, touring North Africa on bicycle, Sali came by.  The day before I had given her an IPod that my friend Sarah had asked me to give to her.   Sali had the IPod in hand and said it wasn’t working.  I looked at it and it said it had to be restored….it no longer worked.   She doesn’t have a laptop to recharge the IPod, but she had found someone who did and they charged it for her.  The Ipod was now not working.  I told her I would look at it tonight.  My concern was that, from my perspective, once an IPod is pooched…it’s pooched.  There are not a whole lot of options.

After my soirée with the French couple had finished, I proceeded to plug Sali’s IPod into my laptop.  ITunes recognized that the IPod needed restoring, so I pressed the restore button. A 4hr download began.   4hrs..I’ve never held an internet connection for 4hrs here.  Every time the connection was lost the download would start all over.  I felt terrible.  Needless to say it was a very frustrating and late night 

Getting up this morning was quite challenging due to the lack of sleep.  I felt terrible.  When Sali arrived to my astonishment she was singing, as she laid out this morning’s breakfast.  Here’s someone who had just received an IPod  and within 24hrs it had stopped working with little hope of getting it working again, and she was singing.  I told her that I would continue to try and get it working.  After breakfast I immediately began the download again.  A 15 minute download began where once it had been 4hrs.  Wooohooo.  But that’s what the internet connections are like….hit and miss.

Later that day, around lunch time,  Rebecca and I connected through Skype (with video!).  Aside from actually connecting and being able to use video, I walked straight outside the door of our compound and onto the street.  “Can you see the donkey Becky?”.  Yes she could.  What she couldn’t see was everyone on the street looking at me as I was talking to my laptop. They must have thought, “Nasara must be losing it and he’s only been here a couple of days”.

At the end of the day I had the chance to teach a few of the ladies in the office some English.  Of course, this is as challenging and fun to them, as it is for me to speak Mooré.  Being Friday, and recognizing a universal appreciation of the end of the week, I decided to have them all learn how to say “TGIF-Thank God It’s Friday”.  This was fun, but lost a little of its glow when, while leaving one girl said…”See you tomorrow”.  This is when i learned they work on Saturdays.   I’m glad that’s not a “universal”.

For dinner the Waterloo students invited me over for Crepe night.  That’s right these folks have become quite innovative and resourceful.  2 members of the US peace corps joined us as well.   During dinner we talked about the about fare trade chocolate and the reality of children from pace like Burkina Faso are taken to work in Coco plantations and the Malian crisis just to the north.  How some news reports had placed Yako in “the red zone”.  Shortly after this we heard gun fire off in the distance.  We laughed at the irony as we knew the gun fire was more than likely related to a festival related to a “festival of Nabon”(the local chief).  After dinner and chatting was over, I walked back to my hostel, with one of the Peace Corps members.  I had asked her about what she planned to do once her tour was over later this year.  She said that she didn’t know, but that someone could get quite cynical in an environment like this.  Where establishing a priority and working with people to keep them engaged can be quite frustrating.  Sound familiar?  I told this young person, who has not yet entered the working world (back home at least), that she should not be surprised that when she gets back home she would definitely encounter the same thing.  I said this was a “universal “ challenge and that the skills she was developing here in Burkina Faso, would put her in a very good place.  I told her that we never escape this and the it’s how we relate to the outside world that forms our reality. I suggested that the unique skills and experience she is acquiring will likely play to her advantage and that, what has developed inside of her was not a “universal”.  It will be the unique way that she leverages her experiences that will shine through and create value.  I hope I am as fortunate.

As I sit outside my room, I can always hear different sounds.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between bleating goats and the sound of children.  Sometimes it’s the sound of bird.  Sometimes I just don’t know.  One sound had caught my ear and I curiously listened for sometime before I realized that it was the guy down the hall; the guy who had beat me to the water for a shower the other day…Snoring.  I could hear him all the way down the hall and outside my door. Another “universal” "