You Can’t Outride a Thunderstorm

I’ve been taking French classes two evenings each week and find the courses both helpful and amusing. There’s just one class for students of all levels, which isn’t exactly ideal, but the class is a nice mix of conversation, grammar, reading and writing, with exercises in pronunciation and vocabulary (and, often, Pictionary and charades). The previous week, the topic was “emotional reactions” and we learned how to express irritation, frustration, or outrage. For an hour, we took turns exclaiming phrases such as, “I’m at the end of my rope!” or “That noise will make me crazy!” or “What a scandal!” My favorite was the phrase in which all of our vocab words were combined in one: “Je suis indigné, outré, scandalisé, offusqué, ulcéré, révolté.” I was laughing by the time I finished reading that one aloud, trying to picture just when it would be necessary to put that to use.

This past Thursday, our vocabulary lesson revolved around going to the cinema. It’s ironic that we learned how to ask, “How many screens are in the theater?” when there is one movie theater – with one movie screen – in town, which routinely plays action movies. Although the French Cultural Center frequently screens films, they’re always “en version francaise (v.f.)”.

One of the other students read the phrase, “I dislike musical comedies but I like westerns.” He looked up from the page and asked, “What’s a western?” The teacher is a sprite French woman with hipster glasses who sports a short spiky haircut, and is usually clad in flowy outfits. She asked me, the lone American in the class, to explain the meaning of a ‘western movie’. I mustered up a working description, referring to a horse, a lasso, a gun, and a man wearing a cowboy hat. The latter finally elicited a reaction from the student, who brightened and nodded, “Oh! A co-boy film?”

I repeated, “A co-boy?” and looked to our teacher to translate.

She laughed and said, “Ah oui, we say ‘co-boy’ instead of ‘cowboy’ film,” putting forth her best American accent, rendering it “cowwwboy”. I giggled, and soon the class was laughing with (at?) me. Although several words are spelled the same between the languages, the changes in pronunciation are often subtle enough to leave me perplexed as to what the word is until I see it written. Others are words that originate from the U.S. and are therefore said in English with a twist. Rarely are they so funny, though.

After the class finished, I walked out to the street and, as I gave the parking attendant 50 CFA and attached my bike light to my handlebars, the wind was picking up and the air felt cooler than before class. I sensed a storm was on the way, but I was confident that I’d make it up the hill before the sky opened and released a downpour.
Wrong! Not 5 minutes later, the drizzle became driving rain. Shopkeepers hardly had time to close umbrellas and break down tables and bring their goods inside where they’d be safe from the storm. I tried to keep going, as I thought to myself, “I’m from Seattle! I’m not afraid of rain! I’ll be home in 10 minutes!” However, the rain was so heavy, and the wind so strong, that I was forced to pull over and seek shelter under the awning of a row of shops, where other people had stopped as well.

It’s an amazing force of nature, the rainstorms that unleash a week’s worth of rain in 20 minutes. I was soaked head to toe and could feel puddles of water squishing in my shoes, but was pleased to discover that my Timbuk2 bag is indeed waterproof. The cool rain felt refreshing on my skin after the stifling heat during the day and it was kind of mesmerizing to watch the downpour and hear nothing but rain pounding into the ground.

After 15 minutes of waiting, the rain grew less intense and I heard a drum circle start nearby. I turned my lights on again and climbed onto my bike, braving the lingering rain. Slowly, people began to spill back into the road and ride up the hill. By the time I reached the top of the hill, where the women sell vegetables on the corner, a few vendors had set up shop again, and there were even a few stars visible in the sky.

I arrived home to find that one of my housemates had prepared dinner. By the time I changed into dry clothes, 3 bowls of lentil soup were on the table, with crusty bread and cucumber salad. I was grateful to dig in.

Hard to Miss

There are times when I miss being able to drive, in the comfort of my own car, to a familiar store, where the prices are known and you wouldn’t dream of bargaining, and go shopping for new household items. It seems that they’re the hottest days, without any breeze. Days when walking down the street in the blazing sun seems crazy. I’ve been less-than-eager to search for household items – even simple ones like a bookcase – because the heat has drained my energy.

Other times it’s fun to shop for the mundane things because, in a place where people thrive on shopping in chaos, it’s kind of a thrill. Some discussions take the same amont of time – whether the discussion is over fruit or a mattress or a piece of art or a pagne of fabric – and if I’m in the right frame of mind, it’s a kick. And once I’m having fun, it’s easier to ignore the sweat dripping down my face and neck. It’s akin to thinking that it’s not so difficult to motivate when you’re already out there. I think of it like running, biking, or hiking in the rain: if you’re already out there, you know you’re going to get wet anyways, so you just keep going and it’s not so bad; but good luck leaving the comforts of home if it starts pouring before you take that first step.

Leslie and I walked home from downtown one Saturday and stopped at a workshop along the main road that goes to our house (which we call the fireman’s road because the fire station is on that road) and asked about having a bookshelf made. The quoted price seemed awfully steep for the simple design and neither of us was feeling up to a proper negotiating session, so we kept walking.

Leslie reminded me of the lumberyard – right across the street for work – and we stopped by the following week to see if we could pick up the materials to make a bookcase. We met Giles, the man-in-charge, who greeted us nicely and I liked him right away.

I asked him if he would sell us 3 boards, each 1 meter in length, and perhaps a third of a meter deep, along with a couple small blocks of chevrons, which we’d use for bookshelf feet. He said that he could sell us that, but seemed perplexed – and somewhat skeptical – that I didn’t want it assembled. I said that I was looking for something temporary, which could be easily disassembled for when I move to Orodara, and thought it would be easy to find cement blocks or use big cans of tomato concentrate to hold up each shelf. I explained that I could use build the shelf as I wanted, rambling on that my dad is a wood worker and I had paid attention when he taught me and a friend of mine how to build a deck. He looked incredulous, “You built it?” I told Giles I’d bring him a photo of the deck as proof.

I asked him when I could stop by again to pick up the wood and he said a few days. I pointed to the building across the street and offered, “I work across the street” and he simply replied, “Yeah, I know.” Guess it’s hard to miss two Toubabous.

The following week, I picked up the planks of wood and asked Giles to make two wooden chairs. We discussed the wood, the color and quality, and he insisted that it would be “tres joli” so I asked him to have a couple made and varnished. When I stopped by to see if they were ready last Saturday, he asked, “Can I send you and the chairs home with sandpaper and varnish? I mean, you like to do projects yourself, right?” And gave me a wicked grin that made me laugh. I told him to either drop the price or to varnish them himself and that I’d be back in a couple of hours. He laughed and agreed to finish the chairs.

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.

Velo

I bought a sweet new bike last week. There's a striking resemblance to the green clunker I had in Cambridge in that it's a step-through cruiser painted mint green. There's a basket on front and a rack for panniers on back, and even a bell on the handlebars. It’s adorable and although it only has one speed, it’s the perfect speed for Bobo … cruising.

I tried to look for a bike a week earlier, but foolishly went to the market by myself and attempted to haggle the price on my own. I was nearly ready to take home one bike until I took it for a test drive down the street and discovered that the handlebars were wobbly beyond repair. As I turned into the market stall, a security guard on foot demanded that I pay him 5000 CFA because I rode my bike the wrong way on a one-way street (never mind that I followed a motor scooter going the same way for the length of the street). I turned to look for a sign designating “one-way street” and saw none, and when I turned back, the guard was laughing with the shop keeper, but still demanding money from me. I asked him where the sign was and he pointed me in the other direction, so I left the bike, began walking in that direction and didn’t go back.

After my unsuccessful attempts to find a bike at three different market stalls left me feeling discouraged, I asked for help from a co-worker of mine, who was all too pleased to help me find one. He arranged for us to go with a friend of his to a shop, where I immediately spied the bike that I wanted to buy. Fortunately, after taking it for a spin, it was easy to decide that it was indeed a keeper. After a few words were exchanged in Dioula by the guys, the shop owner said a price that seemed reasonable to me and we struck a deal.

Fall Comfort

Leslie and I made a mutually favorite comfort food last night: tuna noodle casserole (with canned green peas, onions, dehydrated cream of mushroom soup, and cheese). Leslie said was suffering from what she dubbed as "Africa Sickness" - i.e., gastrointestinal uproar – so we decided that comfort food was needed, stat. Even though a liter of water mixed with ORS and the BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) diet would probably be better for a digestive system that was on strike than tuna noodle casserole, the TNC seemed to fit the bill.

Maybe it’s the missing fall at home that made me crave comfort food. I miss making pumpkin soup and apple cobbler, sitting cozy by a fireplace, bundling up in an extra fleece, seeing who will make it to the World Series, watching the leaves change color and gradually drop from the trees, piling up on the streets. It's still hovering around 90F daily here, and it feels hotter than the first week after I arrived. Someone said it’s like the mini hot season before it starts to get cooler, but I don’t know if it’s true.

It was slightly cooler for one brief evening last week, so that I finally felt somewhat comfortable, but clearly it had signaled to locals that the cold is coming. Leslie and I came home from dinner, wearing t-shirts, to find our guard sitting in an ankle-length wool coat.

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.

Bon Arrivee

I wish I could somehow bottle the feeling I have right now and store it for the bumps in the road during the coming year and a half. I’ve felt genuinely happy to arrive in Bobo and am excited to begin to settle into my new home and to dig into this project. It’s a really nice place to start, having everyone exchanging ideas and bringing their own thoughts to the table. We’ve established ground rules of speaking whichever language you feel most comfortable (French or English) and asking when you don’t understand. So far, the system seems to be working well and no one seems too shy or proud to call time-out and ask for clarification. I have a feeling that people still find my grammar rather amusing since sometimes a smile will creep across the face of the person I’m talking with and I am suddenly aware of some error in how I phrased something, although not always sure what unless the other person corrects me.

It’s been really nice to reconnect with several people from the research center who remembered me from my visit here in July. In addition, I’ve met new people with whom I’ll be working over the next several months. All of the Burkinabe greet me warmly, first with a handshake, saying, “Bon arrivee!” and then four air kisses on my cheeks, alternating left, right, left, right. Without fail, each person asks about my travels into town, my family and friends at home in the US and the folks working in Dakar.

I arrived in Ouagadougou, the capital, late on Monday night, but right on time – 11:00 pm. That was a pleasant surprise since the last time I had flown on the same route, the flight arrived at 3 am. I had left Dakar convinced that it would be delayed again. (I shouldn’t be so pessimistic.) I flew with a co-worker from Dakar to Bamako and enjoyed having company for the first stretch of the trip. From Bamako, the flight to Ouagadougou is just over an hour, and from the air, as the plane approaches Ouaga, the ground is spotted with bright blue-hued lights (perhaps halogen?) stretching outside the city center, then yellow lights in the middle of town.

I was surprised to find the road from the airport to the hotel, dry with no evidence of the recent flooding that devastated other parts of the city. From the very little I saw of Ouaga and the outskirts of town (on the west-bound road to Bobo) the following day, you wouldn’t know that the capital had been flooded just two weeks earlier, so I have to assume that it was a different part of town that was the most affected. On September 1, nearly 12 inches of rain fell and destroyed the homes over 100,000 people in the capital, most of whom are the city’s poorest. They have been displaced to temporary shelters and have lost nearly everything.

I had a ticket and was scheduled to leave Ouaga at 8 am on a flight to Bobo, but arrived at the airport to be informed by an agent there that the flight had been cancelled. The driver of the hotel shuttle took me to the bus station for the local company, TCV, and waited while I purchased a ticket for the next bus, leaving at 9 am. I lucked out since the 9 o’clock was a VIP bus, meaning that there are only 4 seats in each aisle, as opposed to 5 seats on the non-VIP bus (but squashed into the same width bus).

The bus left promptly at 9:05 and I had a window seat. The girl sitting next to me was about my age and was grooving to the music playing on the bus. When we stopped in Barolo, I asked her where the toilets were and she said to follow her. We stepped off the bus into a crowd of women and children selling nuts, bananas, sesame biscuits, chewing gum, cold sodas, and individual packets of tissues. She waited for me as I jumped over the puddles of water and tried to avoid slipping in the mud, and led me to the toilets: 3 stalls behind a corrugated tin door with ‘Femmes’ written in white paint across the door. The stalls were simple pit latrines, without a roof and with 3 sides each, i.e., no door where you did your business. My seatmate handed me a tissue, the last of her packet, and disappeared to the other side of the wall.

When I walked out, I was surprised to find her waiting for me, and more surprised when she said that she had paid the 25 CFA each for me and for her. She paused at a cart where men were grilling meat outside and I asked if she was going to eat. She nodded so I motioned “two” to the guy behind the grill and exchanged a few coins for a black plastic bag filled with grilled beef and onions and a couple of toothpicks wrapped in brown paper. She asked if I wanted bread, and I nodded when I turned and saw the “village bread” (as we’ve come to call it) – fresh soft white mini baguettes – for sale from a woman standing behind me.

We boarded the bus and took our seats, and spread out our lunch to share. I nibbled on the meat, much of it was really tough or really fatty and I tried my best to covertly sneak some pieces into the tissue in my hand while I saw only one bone sitting on a tissue in her lap. After I had finished and we tossed the remnants and the bag into a plastic trash bin circulating the bus, she offered me a piece of chewing gum, the brand which is named ‘Hollywood’. Her name was Alice, and she was traveling from Ouaga to Bobo to see a brother, then on to Bamako a few days later to visit another. We watched a few African sitcoms playing on a DVD on the bus, and I understood only a few of the jokes, but those that I got were pretty funny. I was pretty amazed by how effortlessly she responded to my questions and her willingness to make the trip for me a more pleasant one.

I went for a run this morning before heading to the research center and it was already hot at 7:30, almost unbearable. I passed groups of men sitting drinking tea in a roadside stand, women sitting on tiny stools fanning a fire over which to fry doughnut balls by the side of the road, phone card stalls and hair salons opening up. I passed one man fixing a motorcycle and he looked up as I passed and shouted, “Courage!” and smiled. Young kids yelled, “Toubabou! Toubabou!” It’s really cute how the kids here do a little dance and outstretch their arms like a scarecrow and shake their hips when they shout “Toubabou!” which is the same as “Toubab” (foreigner) in Dakar, but the extra “ou” on the end is somehow more endearing.