For Christmas I decided to get a sheep. Usually functionnaires flee the village to go to the cities during school breaks but once I started talking about a sheep, I noticed that people's travel plans started after Christmas instead of before. Buying a sheep, while a fairly common thing in village, is not that easy to do as a white person. Naturally the thing to do was to delegate the task to someone else. So first we tried to get one through a Peul (the ethnicity that raises livestock) high school student at the lycée. They kept saying that the sheep was coming, the sheep was coming, but no sheep. Finally, one day late and at night, the students showed up on a moto with a sheep in their arms. I'd saved up 60 dollars for the sheep, so it should have been a real big one. The sheep they'd brought was more like a 35 dollar sheep, but they were asking 50. After much questioning we found out that the students had told the sheep's owner that it was professors who wanted to buy a sheep, which explains why the price was so high. We told them to take their sheep and go. And they did.
The next strategy was to ask the old man who is the watchman for the school to do it for me. A real villageois, the man doesn't speak any French and wears a long boubou and muslim cap everyday. He rides a bike around and often puts his youngest baby in the basket in front of the bike. I told him in broken Mooré that I wanted to buy a sheep, how much money I had, and the day we needed it by. I asked if he could got to market the following day and he said that he couldn't - that he needed to travel. I felt silly because it hadn't occurred to me that the old man did things like travel. Anyway, the following market day, which was Christmas Eve, he went to market with a colleague and i wished them good luck (may god let them find a good sheep). I didn't see them for over 2 hours. I was convinced no one had brought sheep to market that day and that Christmas would be sheep-less but just as I was giving up hope they came barreling into the school yard on Oued's moto with the guardian holding the sheep on the back. He was beautiful! Cost: $55. He's pictured there below with me and Moussa's brother Brama who was visiting from the Cote d'Ivoire, which is the other big news. Brama, and all of Moussa's direct family, lives on the Coast of the Ivory Coast and while all the kids are Burkinabé, they've never been to their own country. So Brama, at the age of 24, took a tour of his country and got to see where his people come from.
He's the only one of us who actually says his 5 daily prayers, so he was the one to slaughter the sheep. I thought that coming to a place where one day animals are alive and the next they are on your plate would make me either like playing with animals less or like eating them less.
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