I can hardly believe it’s already 2011! Gosh that feels weird to write. It was even weirder to spend my first New Years in… 6 years? not with my sister in South Carolina. I was a kind of quite night, but still a fun New years. Josh and I traveled down to the other side of the country to spend New Years with friends in Gaoua, a small city in the South-West. A small city, but it still has running water, electricity, paved roads, and street lights, so not really that small of a city. There, we met up with Shannon, Kyle, Austin, and a new health volunteer named Hailey. We sat around until dinner time asking the new girl (her stage arrived in mid October) about what had happened back home since we had left and listening to new music. All of us but Kyle had only been gone 6 months (Kyle a year), but being in the US seems like ssoooo long ago. We were also eager to hear any new, or new to us, music that she had. Finally at around 7:30 we decided as a group that we were hungry and called for a cab to take us into town. While we waited for our food to be ready Hailey and I went out to stock up on sparkling wine, because what’s new years without a little champagne? We ate a delicious dinner and I was amazed then the spaghetti came out with real cheese on top! (there is no cheese in this country… Where did they get it?!)
After dinner we went back home and hung out some more until midnight. A couple minutes till someone realized the time and shouted it it was almost the new year, we had to get ready. We poured our glasses with champagne (rouge sparkling wine, it’s the only thing we could find), and as we tried to count down the time realized that everyone’s watch said a different time. Not having a TV or watching a ball drop, having no way of knowing what the real time was, we made a group decision to just count down to zero and call it good. Three… two… one…. Happy New Year!
After the New Year’s toast the men went outside to smoke cigars and try to be manly. The conversation was mainly about football and sports, it was kind of funny. Finally at 1 Josh and I decided it was late and we needed to go to bed. We went to grab our bikes to head back to the hotel, only to discover that once again I had a flat tire. We tried our best to pump it up just to get us home (hey, it worked on my Birthday), but neither one of us could pump the tire at all (The pumps we were given are real fickle and can be hard to work). Fine, we’ll just walk our bike home. After 5 or 10 minutes of walking we decided to try something we see Burkinabe do all the time- one person pedals while the other sits on the back of the bike and pulls the other bike along. For reasons I now can’t remember, there was no way I was going to be the one on the back holding the other bike. So I climbed up onto Josh’s bike (it’s a man’s bike and a lot bigger then mine) and tried to pedal while he sat on the back. Nope, not going to happen. Back to walking.
When we were almost home, Josh was stopped by a Gendarme as we passed a bar. He may have tried to stop me too, but when I’m walking out at night I put blinders on and walk with a mission to get home, so I didn’t notice him until he stopped Josh behind me. “Give me money”, he said to Josh. Taken off guard Josh relied “what?”. “Give me money!” the police man said again. He had clearly had a little too much to drink. Thankfully another man saw this and intervened, and Josh quickly walked away telling me to “walk fast” before the Gendarme had anymore ideas. We were both glad to finally get home and go to bed.
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