Hello, hello, hello everyone!
I hope you are all doing well, and to hear from you soon. Here are some news of the family on our end.
Omar, turned nine months October 19. He's growing fast, getting taller and bigger. He finally decided to eat some solid food and drink formula as well as breastmilk, about three weeks ago. Now that we don't have our one-on-one feeding session, every two hours, I can ran away for longer periods of time:) He is the king of smiles, he smiles to each and everyone without discrimination, even when he is sick. He also started screaming with a very high pitched voice: it sounds like he's trying to break a crystal glass! He started "talking", Hakim says: "daddy, baby, mama, adadadada …". He rides his walker like a car bumper and run from a room to another at a very high speed. This is the only time when hakim fears his brother, he doesn't enjoy his toes crushed by the "engine"!
After a few days of crying, he is finally able to go to sleep by himself at nap time and bedtime at night. He naps at 10am and 3pm, and plays for the rest of the day, to maintain the freshness of his smile and complexion:) Hakim and him have been playing more and more together recently.
His favorite activity at the moment is cushions climbing; he also likes to put himself in all kinds of unstable positions, and to fall out of balance on a thick floor mat… You don't buy those type of things here, but it was very easy and affordable to make thick mattresses, covered with plastic bright color sheets for hakim and omar, as well as all a serie of cushions of different sizes, covered with the fabrics of your choice. That way he has an exercise field to work out his muscles.
Right now, the big challenge for me: to pay attention to the way I talk to both of them. It's very easy to be constantly yelling at hakim -for all the "terrible twos" , and to talk with softest voice to omar -who is as gentle and laid-back as can be!
I am progressively finding my way to yell and spank only in critical/dangerous situations, and using time out more often, as well as just reasoning him the rest of the time. when he pours all the salt, soap, sugar container on the floor, when he empty all the nail polish remover in the bathtub -as soon as I bought the bottle-, when he lays butter and jam all over the table -pretending to do painting…
Matthew is less challenged during the week, because he spends long days at work. But week ends just run his energy out much faster than he would have hoped! He also noticed that he has more authority on hakim when he warns him in English.
Here is my transition to talk about our toddler. Hakim is a delightful child, full of discussions, humor, malice, and curiosity. He is also 2 years and 5 months old: His favorite word, "No" to everything, he does not want to eat, he is fussy and cranky for no reason, he is still jealous of his brother -even thought he got much better, he is "glued" to mameena. The school in the morning is probably tiring him up, which might explain the fussiness, but boy! it's exhausting. After bath time, story time -in English-, and lying down on his big bed -which he doesn't want to sleep in yet- , all with daddy, he opens up much more about what he does at school than with me. He even sings to him that he has been painting and playing… Another challenge for me is: it hurts my feelings and my spirit much more than his when I spank him, for several reasons. It doesn't feel right to be violent, weather it's verbal or physical violence; it for sure doesn't teach him anything but fear; it's hard to spank him and to tell him at the same time that he shouldn't be hitting his friends at school (because even though I differentiate hitting and "parents occasional spanking", it doesn't really sink in his brain). So I decided to really pick my battles and spank him only when I think that time out is not appropriate enough. And learning through patience, listening, a lot of play and reading time and communication how to get through this challenging period. And Matthew and I have been talking about those challenges a lot, to update ourselves, give or get advice, and stay on the same page.
Hakim has been asking me many time "why does mameena give spankings to hakimou?". I considered myself lucky, because it was a chance for me to tell him why, but mainly to reinforce how much I hate doing that, and how much I'd rather give him just hugs, kisses, and love.
Daddy likes to tell hakim secrets. The biggest one, that he says loud as well as gently in his ears is :"I love you soooo much!". So each time you ask hakim to tell you or someone a secret, that's the exacte same words that he tells everybody!!
He has been going to school for a month: we were fortunate to find a very good daycare and pre-K, run by Marie-Cecile, a French teacher living in Ouaga for over 30 years! It took his 10 days of regular morning crying to get to like it, and enjoy staying there for three hours every morning. He is still saying that he doesn't want to go to school, every other day, but it's rather that he doesn't want to get out of mameena's arms…
And I think omar can appreciate some calmness and gentle playtime without his brother around:)
Matthew has a lot of work, he won the ten-hour days schedule. After installing their offices, and getting them and the studios equipped and ready to broadcast, he and his team had an intense recruitment period, with 7 to 10 interviews a day. they are right now in the process of training them to script writing and radio production and broadcasting.
At DMI office in Ouaga, there's the country director, two international broadcaster, all foreign. And the local hires are: a financial consultant, the director assistant, a communication specialist dealing with the local broadcasting radio stations, two secretaries, and 14 radio broadcasters…
So it's a pretty busy office, with a pretty good atmosphere of work so far…
Except that the country director is leaving in december, after 7 months of work, and that matthew has been asked by the London office if he would be ready to take over.
Matthew is highly appreciated and respected by his Burkinabe collegues, and they are all hoping that he will be the next country director. Although he knows that he'll have much more work, and that it will probably be less interesting than the work he does in his current position, he doesn't really have any alternative than to say "yes", and it will probably be a great learning curve for his personal experience and his resume.
He went to London for a week this morning, to help with interviewing new candidates for their office here in Ouagadougou.
Last year was pretty intense for matthew: juggling work at the VOA, hunting for a new job, raising a toddler and a newborn, moving in MD and to Ouagadougou, going through thousand of CDs and selling them in Princeton, NJ, starting a new job and launching a new project here in Ouaga with no vacations… That ended up weakening his immune system big time, and the mosquitoes knocked him out for a week!!
He was the first one to catch malaria! In a way it was the less stressful situation: hakim and omar would have suffered much more from the disease and mainly the strength and secondary effects of the medication, and… matthew would have been completely overwhelmed with the boys if I had been in bed for three days. But poor daddy, you could barely recognize him, lying in bed for three days, and suffering from residual head and stomac ache the rest of the week.
He finally went back to work after a week of rest, and some work done at home; and he went this morning to London on a business trip, to help the main office with interviewing new international candidates for the position of radio producer/broadcaster.
I think that physical fatigue added to the stress of his country director departure in december got to him. Let's hope that, once this launching period is over things will cool down a little, and he will adjust better to the rhythm of work, and the challenges ahead of him.
He is very pleased with the local team though, and he enjoys going to work for the most part though, which is good.
On his way back to Ouaga, next monday, he has a 4hours layover in casablanca, Morocco. He asked my brother Omar to meet with him at the airport, and he begged him to bring a plate of Jimi's couscous and a bottle of fresh orange juice:) For the record, hakim always says that jimi's couscous is "the best couscous in the whole World". And he's not the only one!
Mameena ... I told matthew we don't need to have a third child for several good reasons, but I never expected to give him the argument that "we kind of have that third child already since Marcel, the driver, calls me mameena as well:) And hakim classmates also started calling their moms "Mameena"!
we began to live according to the local way of life, that is to say "as long as we eat, we are happy." In other words, we downgraded our expectations and ambitions, and learned to live with the resources, materials, skills, and ways to live that are available here. Not the ones we were used to, or wish we had, or think would be "natural to have". It's a lot less frustrating this way.
Matthew has been living this way for a long time, for he has a broader and more sensible understanding of the african people. I… had to adjust, and to go through frustration and annoyance before switching gears. A lot of things that I couldn't understand and enjoy, many situations that I didn't really chose, lot of things that happened out of my/our control appear to be not so serious, to be "the way things work here", and to even be enjoyable.
The latest example I can think of is our car. We bought a second hand Peugeot 406 two months ago; it had three connected problems and we took it to a mechanic. The car spent three weeks in three different garages, and came back home in a barely different shape than it was three weeks ago. Why? Because none of the car spares ("pieces detachees") in the engine are original; because all a mechanic does here is to fix a part, and… probably unfix another one:) The car owners here have very old cars, in poor conditions and don't have the finances to buy new car spares, and pay the price for good quality maintenance. So all they do is locally and temporarily fix problems until they occur again, and again.
When you ride with a regular taxi driver, you sometimes wonder weather you are going to make it to your destination or not, you sometime feels like you are rather in a boat than in a car, you sometimes wonder how can these people be so close to death all day long - a family of 5 riding a moped with no helmet, a sleepy 5 years old child riding with her mother on a moped with no belt or helmet…- and be so relaxed with it!!
Well this whole car story got our driver into a depression. He came back in tears the 5th night, because he was "out of work"; he couldn't drive us everywhere we wanted. To calm him down, we had to reassure him and tell him that despite the complications that went for so long, it was a car, not a person with a critical condition.
I'm working on acquiring a massage table, good quality essential oils and creams. But mainly working on a business plan to finally open a "Wellness and Balance" center, a massage therapy place, here in Ouagadougou. Who would have imagined that? Not me!
There are very few trained and certified massage therapists here, there no legislation in the massage therapy field. The massage businesses exist within beauty salons or in a hotel spa (for two of them). And the business mostly done on site (in clients homes), seeks relaxation exclusively, except when you go to a physical therapist. And relaxation doesn't always rime with "best intention".
So I believe there's a market for a professional, customized, diversified, and therapeutic massage services; and I am working on how to bring these new concepts to people over here. We'll see how it goes: either a big "flop", or hopefully a good idea!
Ouagadougou is like a big village: people have more time to eat and meet, friendships happen faster, some type of information flows well, networks intersect more rapidly, and things happen in an easier way.
The children are living a community way of life: they live with 5 other people at home during the day, they meet a lot of kids and people outside home; kids we meet in the streets knock at our door to come in and play with hakim. That we have to monitor a little, or else we will quickly open a daycare. Because parents here, and adults in general let children play with children; they don't really "take care" or spend time with them in the way we do it in the western countries. So matthew and I end up babysitting a lot of kids in many situations:)
The streets in Ouaga are not suitable for walking; traffic is so chaotic with motorcycles and bicycles, you are not immune to accidents even when you are a pedestrian! there are no parks in the city, but there is the forest of Bangr Oueogo, three equestrian centers, a nice hotel swimming pool, a recreation park, a dam and a lake not far from us, where we take omar and hakim and to get some fresh air, and run their energy out.
Here are the news on our end,
We miss you all,
with love,
hakim, omar, matthew and mameena
