Jour 3

Daily thoughts from Africa with Benjamin Lackey, who thinks he's french.

" That's my dream job, to be a gate guard here."

to dane, talking about when it's time to leave burkina: "Let's runaway, if you really did it I almost really would."

Today was an early departure for the team and a semi-long drive out to the worksite. Today we began a project out at the LAC. The LAC stands for Lycee de Alliance Chritienne, or the Christian Alliance School. This is one of the more developed projects we have here. On the land is housed a compassion center with 250 children in the program, a middle school with between 200 and 400 students, some of which live on the property in the dorms. There is also a church, a pastors house, the site of the Evision housing (for short term teams) a missionaries house, a huge soccer field, a basketball court, and the storage facility for Friends in Action, a Christian well drilling team out here. So none the less, this is a very busy and occupied piece of property. Our job today was to clear a straight line out of the brush and trees so that they could begin to build the new wall around the property. Below are some pictures of our work and the site.

These are some of the classrooms

Try aiming into that little hole everytime you need to use the bathroom, oh yeah and not to mention bearing with the smell....( you know what i am talking about)

One of my favorite things on this site is the Compassion center, in this picture you can see the new classroom/office that I raised money to build when I was living out here. When I left they had just begun drawing the lines and digging the holes for the foundation and now it's finished and houses 40 children every compassion thursday.

This is the other classroom/hangar I raised money to build, all in all I wanted them to have enough space to add 80 more kids to their program. This site is very special to me because it's where the little girl that I have been sponsoring for 5 years attends.

www.compassion.com (for more info-compassion day for the team to come)

Then began the work...

Machetes were our primary tool of labor for the day...the on looking Burkinabe thought it quite funny to watch a bunch of white people (more or less girls) trying to hack away at tall grass....

We also had to break through the old walls to draw a direct line...Ben is a monster!

Here is a little shout out to Camelbaks, what saves your life in the dry hot heat of Africa!

There was also a few trees to cut down, let's just say I should open my own tree service when I get back to America!

Susan rocked that wall today as well!

oh the destruction of our legs, ankles, shoes, arm pits, and well entire bodies was due to these little spurs that stuck literally everywhere on you. The 'brush' we were clearing was mostly spurs, you can imagine the annoyance.

Inside the Church! I loved walking in there with Courtney today as she said; "We have it all wrong in America, our churches are concerned with carpets, color, lighting, temperature, and smell and all they are concerned with here is worshipping God and growing in discipleship."

The private school (which is one if not the only private Christian middle school (potential high school) in all of Burkina and their recent addition is going to allow for them to expand into a highschool very soon. Schooling for children here rarely stretches into highschool so this is an honor for the students. (if you are interested in helping boys or girls (more importantly) go to school there is some scholarship opportunities, let me know-school is about $700 a year for boys to live on campus, and about $200 for girls who will have to live at home or elsewhere).

After working at the LAC we toured a few close by ministry sites, the one below is the site of the new team center, which will house probably triple or more teams and people than the guest house does now as well as serve as the apartments for interns and couples. (Probably where most of the team will be living at some point, as that most people, not just from this team but from many other teams with Franklin, desire to come back and serve here for atleast 2 years.)

And just after lunch our dear dear dear friend Virginie came over, she was the girl who helped us out at our house when we lived here. (It's normal for people to have house help, guards, chefs, and nannies here, mostly because there is very little means of work for these women and it helps to feed their families.) We were able to spend a little time talking and eating and reminiscing with Virginie, and she gave us the big news that she is expecting in April, check out another posting on Cultural norms for talking about pregnancy.

After all of that we headed to a huge artisan festival that is only in Burkina every 2 years (and we just so happened to be here the same week) to do a little shopping, eating, and enjoy some live african entertainment. (sorry no pictures from that, too many pick pockets and thieves there to bring cameras, just try to imagine thousands of burkinabe roaming around, selling anything they can outside of the building, even fried catepillars, which we all tried...not soo much a fan myself...and then walking into the buildings to find booth after booth after hundreds of booths full of art, jewelry, clothing, etc. anything people can make and sell. It was a fun experience for everyone.

and:

Just a fun and somewhat terriftying fact, as I sit here and type this right now the huge (probably 2 feet or more in size) rats are scurrying in the ceiling over my head, and I am being attacked by bugs, in my bedroom none the less. OH the beauties of Africa.