Marionettes

I collapsed into bed last night and slept until 11:15 this morning. I awoke to my housemates (two students from the university at home who are also working on research projects here) exclaiming, “You’re alive!” I think the toll of traveling, moving here, beginning a new project, adapting to a new environment, speaking French, and the heat here have exhausted me, so I’ve been sleeping a lot and taking it easy.

Today was the celebration of the end of Ramadan and much of the city was celebrating with a day-long feast of sheep or goat, rice and sauce. The French Cultural Center (the CCF) in Bobo sponsored a “spectacle” this afternoon, which was a show of marionettes – some 20 feet tall – and drumming and music, and then a parade through Bobo. There was one character in a monkey mask who frightened all the kids along the way, and as the parade passed through neighborhoods downtown, families would come outside of their homes to watch, and many to join. We walked along the red dirt roads and under the leafy green trees, past mud-brick square homes to a large open field next to a school, where the marionette players constructed a makeshift stage and produced a show with live music and lots of dancing.

Afterwards, my housemates Katie and Leslie, and I walked back towards the CCF and stopped in the garden café there for a cold beer on tap, which was heavenly since it was frosty. It was really comfortable to sit there, under a canopy, enjoying a slightly cooler afternoon than yesterday’s unforgiving heat, chatting about the high points of a great brunch, since we want to host a pancake breakfast for our Burkinabe co-workers. Although we don’t have maple syrup here, we decided that we could make pancakes and it would be okay to serve them with powdered sugar and jam, or stacked with sliced bananas. We were in the middle of pondering what we would put in a frittata when it looked like the sky would open up any minute with a downpour, so Katie suggested we head home. Then we walked over to buy a watermelon and took a taxi home, arriving just as it started raining.