Fiesta

Another student, Lisa, arrived from California this past week to work on one of the other nutrition studies underway here for a few weeks. In addition to her personal belongings, she kindly hauled with her a couple of bags full of study supplies for us. Unfortunately, one of her personal bags – the one with all of her clothes – was lost in transit and didn’t arrive in Ouagadougou. So she arrived with two bags full of tubes, needles, a centrifuge, measuring tapes … and her extra suitcase full of goodies for other people here, including corn tortillas!

We promptly declared Mexican fiesta night at our house, and bought the fixings available here to make roasted veggie enchiladas (carrots, zucchini, onions, and garlic) with guac (avocados, limes, hot sauce, and more garlic), and salad (cucumbers, watermelon, mango, and papaya mixed with salt, lime, and cilantro – picked from our garden!). We set our expectations low when we set out to make enchilada sauce, knowing that it would be hard to match real California-Mexican enchilada sauce with what we could find in Bobo. However, the combination of tomatoes, garlic, onion, and a hodgepodge of spices to Leslie’s taste ended up quite delicious. (Our main goal was to not make pasta sauce, at which we’ve gotten quite good but which would be disaster on enchiladas.) We even found chips and salsa in the fancy grocery store downtown, but the chips tasted like soap and the salsa was basically a jar sugar and a tomato or two. (Not even boxed red wine, which we mixed with bissap (hibiscus juice) and lime could mask the taste, so we gave up on apps and waited for dinner.) While the enchiladas baked and the beans cooked, my housemates and I pulled clothes from our closets to outfit Lisa and made a plan to ask a stylish co-worker to take her shopping (or to the tailor) downtown. (The story has a happy ending: the airline found her bag two days later and sent it courier-service to Bobo on the bus, arriving intact.)

We had a few others joining for dinner, so it was perfect timing for a fiesta night. Two students from Boston who are conducting a nutrition study in Mali came to visit from Bamako to check out the study sites here (we all work for the same professor). I met one of the students briefly in Dakar and had exchanged emails with the other (who’s also a dietitian, and one who previously worked in the NICU, too), so it was nice to host them in Bobo. A surprise treat for me was seeing one of the drivers who I knew from Mali last fall (think back to the road-kill story). He drove them from Bamako to Bobo and it was such fun to visit. He even wore an Ichiro (Seattle Mariners’) t-shirt that I had given to him before I left Mali to fiesta dinner (when he tasted Mexican food for the first time, and approved of our Bobo-version of enchiladas).

We had spent the day traveling to Dande, which is about 60 km north of Bobo, to tag along with a survey team on their final day of field work. A geographer and his team of 5 census workers were mapping the area with handheld GPS devices, noting key landmarks and assigning addresses to each house (and concession, which is a compound of households) using GPS coordinates for their records, then painting a study ID number on the house. The census workers interviewed the heads of each household to determine the number of people living in each household, in particular the number of pregnant women and the number of children under 6 months of age. As the same census/geography team will be repeating the process in Orodara next month for my study, I was keen to see the census in Dande and have the chance to ask questions about the process.

Including the driver, 11 of us piled into the Land Cruiser and left the main road, off which the main health center sits. We set out on a bumpy, potholed, unpaved road for 45 minutes – bumpy enough to require several stops for fresh air for those of us in the back of the car (including one round of motion sickness … fortunately outside of the car!). After a round of musical chairs, switching the front seat passengers with those in back, we were on our way and outside traipsing through waist-high fields to reach some of the most remote houses. We passed crops of corn, sorghum, millet, cotton, and sesame, and saw ears of corn drying on the roofs of some houses, or in the middle of the courtyards. Mango trees dotted the landscape and we passed rice fields on the way back to Bobo, and we stopped at the weekly market in Bama to buy watermelons and bananas, to fend off hunger until we returned to Bobo for a pre-fiesta nibble.