I decided that climbing a mango tree would be a good thing to do. I haven't climbed a tree in a long while. Sometimes living here in just-barely-sub-Saharan Africa feels like fighting a bunch of battles that you have no chance of ever really winning. A lot of it comes down to the just-barely part of being just-barely-sub-Saharan, that is, the lack of humidity for most of the year. As a consequence, you’ll rarely find yourself in a comfortable temperature. There are the times of ridiculous heat which coupled with constant strong wind makes walking around village feel like walking around outside a gigantic hairdryer. With no humidity to moderate how the temperature feels to your body, when the weather does cool down, you find yourself freezing at night.
A few weeks ago: I boil a pan of water to add to my bucket I bathe with to make pouring water over my body tolerable. But with the strong wind, once that bucket runs out, I grab my pagne, wrap it tightly around my body and sprint for the house to find Turtle on my bed staring at me, wondering if I could possibly act any stranger. I sit there huddled under the comforter my until my skin dries off, and I can stand to go find some clothes to wear.
But now: Hot season’s coming. I bathe two to three times a day and with in minutes of drying off again, I feel uncomfortably hot again. Sometimes it feels like nature is just slowly roasting me since when you merely are next to something else you feel such strong heat coming off of it that you want to move away. This includes my house, my mattress, my water, my dog, and the air. Turtle can no longer stand to be on my bed because of hot mattress and instead sleeps stretched out on the floor by the door, panting.
The land is screaming out for rain but when the rains come, they will be so strong that the ground won’t be able to handle the volume and the water will just flow in little rivers through the dirt until everything turns to mud. Until there are grasses again, the sun will bake the mud until it dries and cracks and turns back to dust, usually before the afternoon is over. Down where I live we have been lucky enough to have a couple rains in March; they aren’t like rainy season rains, but they are longer and drizzlier. They’re called Mango Rains since Mango Season will be coming up in a few weeks, just as the hottest part of the dry season arrives. (How is that possible?) I eat about two mangoes everyday now; I can’t wait until there are so many I can eat as much as I want.
Cleaning is another battle you can’t hope to ever win. With the constant wind blowing, you can almost see the dust coming in the window, settling on the floor behind you where you have just swept. I dared to wear white pants to school the other day. No, that didn’t work too well. They were orange by noon. The neighbor’s son comes over and sweeps for me sometimes, which tends to be a lot more effective than when I do it myself. I joke with my neighbors that they’ll never be able to marry me off to an African since I make such a ridiculously poor African woman. Yes, they agree. And I’m getting skinnier. That doesn’t help.
This is a pretty typical shot of the residential area of Bagre Village - the traditional Bissa part of Bagre. I was originally supposed to be put out on this side of Bagre to live but they couldn't find a house that met Peace Corps' standards. It's as stereotypical africa as you can get: mud huts and thatch rooves behind mud walls. As you know it's the dry season so everything is this brown grey dead color. Life would be different out here.
My doctor came to pay me a visit in village a couple weeks ago. Nothing much to report. I’m healthy. My house is safe. They said I have the single nicest house of all the Peace Corps Burkina Volunteers.
My best friend in village had to move away. Moussa was a vacateur, which means that he was teaching but without really actually being trained as a teacher. He was simply a university graduate helping, as I am, to fill the desperate need for teachers. Well he sat for a competitive exam to get an actual teaching title and position in English and he scored at the top of everyone! They select about 10 out of 300 who try and they get promoted to teachers. Since it was an English test I tell him he only succeeded because he’s been talking to me so much. Anyway, normally he could have just stayed here and continued teaching at the school he was at but the higher ups do things sometimes for their own reasons and not for what makes sense. After we all did everything we possibly could we found out there was pressure coming from one of the higher up higher-ups and that there was nothing to be done. He left within days to Beguedo, about 45k from me as the crow flies. I got him a ride in a truck thanks to the CB and I went with him under cover of darkness at 5 am to his new village. We went with a big sheep too. The boy who takes care of the CB and his house said that the sheep had to go to the pastor in Tenkodogo on the way but turns out that said sheep actually was going to Garango, not so far from Beguedo. Anyway sheep got dropped off at the wrong place and so on the way home we picked him up and took him back to Bagre. Was sad to see Moussa go. Could be worse though – Beguedo is An’s village, the closest Peace Corps Volunteer to me. It’s more like 100k by road but it’s really not that far. It’s really hard with him gone. The neighbors, he and I, we were all like a family. We spent basically all our non-teaching time together.
These are my neighbors and me. There's Moussa, me, Bance and Ouedraogo (we call him Oued). I biked out to see Anatole’s garden a couple weeks ago. It’s about 4 k past Bagre village out in the bush. It’s amazing to see because here in the dry season everything is almost the same color of brown. Dead dry brown. And then out of nowhere is this enormous green garden – the collaboration of several villagers and wells dug by the government – which stands out like some oasis you think you could be hallucinating in the desert. He’s playing with different ways to make money and he tried his hand at gardening this year. I guess with gardening at the very least you’ll have enough to eat if not make money at market. The gardeners were thrilled to see a camera.
This is Anatole being the ham that he is laying down in his garden for me. Those are mango trees in the picture. How the F are they so green when everything else is so dead and brown.On the way home we passed a lot of people heading to one courtyard where we could hear a lot of singing and drumming. Anatole said it was the funeral of a very old woman and that everyone in the village would be coming at some time or another to greet the family. Anatole took me to the courtyard where there was a huge circle of women and children dancing and in the middle were drummers and women singing/wailing. As I walked in everyone turned to look at me and the drumming paused. Nassara. I wasn’t sure what would come next… laughter? more silence? greetings? stones? After all I didn’t know the family in the least. Well luckily it was greetings and hands dragging me into the circle to dance. And I guess then laughter at my attempts to dance the dance while greeting everyone at the same time. And Anatole’s crazy. He took my camera out of my bag and took a picture of me. Yes I feel even more overwhelmed than I look.
Then Anatole’s wife got really sick. I heard that he had gone to Tenkodogo to the hospital there and I was really worried. For someone with no money in their pockets to pick up and take their wife to the hospital probably means she was sick enough to die. Villageois don’t go to the doctor to prevent problems here; they go at the latest possible moment when nothing else has worked. They spent over a week there and she almost did die. Still unidentified stomach problem coupled with bad malaria. His medical bills were huge. I sent them 50 dollars in a bush taxi which he said he spent all on the medication that saved her life. Like I said, his pockets were empty. Crazy. This is him and his wife Joyce and their only son Godwin.
Another weekend I decided to bike out to see Moussa in Beguedo. Anatole had found me a path through the bush that cut the 90 km ride down to under 60 km. That distance isn’t so bad so I agreed to give it a try. I paid a kid a dollar to do the first 16 km with me since the road was bad – only passable by bike – and there were a lot of little turn offs leading to tiny villages along the way that could confuse me. Before I left I asked for how to say “I’m lost” in Moore but Anatole just looked at me strangely and told me in Moore that if someone has a mouth he cannot be lost. He said that if I knew where I was trying to go and from where I was coming then there could be no problems with being lost. The ride was hard, but a lot of that was my fault because I left at Windiga (midday). I drank the 4.5 liters of water I carried on me and drank at least another 2.5 that I bought but still as I was pushing through the last 10 km I knew I was in trouble. My skin felt strange. I was hot and cold at the same time and my skin on my face was starting to burn from the amount of salt on my skin. My muscles kept going but my stomach started to feel tight and nauseated. CRAP how did I get that dehydrated? I pushed on since I was only going to be able to recover once I got to a house and I wasn’t going to be able to do that till I was in Beguedo. I got to Moussa’s place and he was still at school with An, teaching. So I locked the door and stripped down to wash. His water was warm from the afternoon heat but I didn’t care; I drank it down and then sat in the shower trying to cool down my skin. After I had relaxed a little bit I started to really feel sick. Moussa came home and, like EVERY Burkinabe it seems, noticed that I was sick to my stomach and then tried his very best to get me to eat. He made me a gorgeous salad.
“Liza I know you like salad; you must eat this,” he said handing me a salad big enough for four people and half a baguette.
“In America when someone tells you they want to puke, you don’t make them eat.”
“Are we in America? You have to trust me – you need to eat this now,” he insisted.
“I know we’re not in America. I’m saying if I eat that I will throw it up.”
“It’s better to throw it up then to not have eaten any!” And he placed the monster salad on my legs. I gave up; I didn’t have the energy to argue. I ate one slice of tomato and two bites of cucumber and with in 3 minutes had thrown them back up.
I should have downed salt and sugar with some water but it took me a while to realize it was still dehydration that was getting me. Within another hour I felt strangely fevery and finally I realized I wasn’t sweating like I should be and that that was why my body couldn’t cool down normally. I wet down a pagne and wrapped myself in it and tried to replace my fluids/salts.
When I got back home (by car) I found out later that week that the gendarmes from my village had caught a man who had killed 4 women near that path I took through the bush. Why did he kill them? He killed them to take their blood to sell to a traditional doctor. Someone told me that women’s blood is good for many things, including foot problems. Needless to say I will not be biking that route again.
Turtle is doing well but she is ka soma ye! Not good! A man came to my house the other morning and told me that Turtle had killed 4 of his Guinea Fowl. I would have completely not believed him except he didn’t ask for money. It’s unbelievable because Turtle seems like she’d make a crappy hunting dog and everyone makes fun of her. On top of that, Guinea Fowl are big, fast, aggressive, and can fly. We ordered some Guinea Fowl from the gardien of the school about 2 weeks ago and still don’t have them because they are so damn hard to catch. Anyway if it’s true or if it’s not he asked me to tie her up. If they see her there again then they’ll shoot her. Mam wumdame; I understand.
This is her with her bandage from her operation on. It's around her waist and it's her-colored so it's hard to see. She gets this really confused look when I take out the camera. She has a lot of really dog-y insincts. I gave her a piece of meat the other day and she couldn't finish it so she took the leftovers out of the yard to take to her hiding place but another dog was between her and her hiding place so she tried to fight him but realzed she would lose her meat so she came back in the yard and then cried to come in and then proceeded to follow me around with her mouthful of meat whimpering for me to take it for 10 minutes. I scolded her for being a wuss and then put the meat, for lack of a better place, on my window sill. Of course I had company later that day and they must have seen the meat. Wierd Nassara.School is going well. Classes are classes. Lots of work. Lots of frustration with students. I’ve done a couple sensitizations on Malaria and a couple on girls’ excision. I’ll write more about that another time. The second trimester is over and now we are on spring break! I hope to get another post up during this vacation.
Thank you all again so much for your support (every kind). Raebecca my students go crazy over the stickers you sent. *HUGS*
