'Tis the Season

Last week I met a scientist that was visiting the research center in Bobo for a couple of meetings with the ethics committee, seeking their approval to proceed with a study. He’s Burkinabe and has studied in Europe and the US and has returned to Burkina Faso to work. I asked about his project and he explained some of the delays; we decided it’s part of these kinds of projects. We spoke about the funding agency for the study he is working on in a rural area north of the capital city, and he said to me, “You Americans, who have so many resources, must share them.” He said it so straightforward, matter-of-factly, shrugged his shoulders and smiled. We who are given much have a responsibility to share. Simply by virtue of where I was born and raised, I have had the opportunity to go to school and pursue work that I find interesting and meaningful. I’m lucky.

Ride Safe (Let Us Entertain You)

Last night my housemate and I were preparing to leave work just as it was getting dark, so we took our bike lights out of our bags as we slung the bags over our shoulders and put on our bike helmets, before saying goodnight to our collaborators. We didn’t get out the door quickly – the two Burkinabe guys who were sitting in the conference room with us were staring at our ensemble of helmets and lights and started bantering with us about our attention to safety. Injury prevention seems to be the slowest public health trend to reach Burkina; although motorbikes are the pride and joy of many folks here, riders rarely wear helmets, and it often seems a luxury if seatbelts can be found in a car.

Once we escaped further good-natured heckling from our collaborators and left work, we rode our bikes through downtown, past the early signs of Christmas (shops exploding with tinsel, 3-foot plastic trees, an occasional strand of holiday lights) mixed in with the usual ever-changing lively soundtrack of music blaring from one shop or bar to another. Just as we were about halfway up the long hill that climbs ever so slightly, but constantly, to our neighborhood, I noticed a teenage boy following me on his bicycle. I slowed down, he slowed down. I picked up the pace, he peddled faster. Although young children (and grown men alike) yell, “Les Blanches!” or “Toubabou!” and wave as I ride up the hill each evening, I thought it bizarre to be followed so closely since most people don’t pay much attention to foreigners (other than a quick shout-out).

Eventually, I saw the boy riding in front of my housemate, looking back every few seconds to make sure we were still there. We were nearing the turn-off to our house when I noticed that young boy of about 10 years was also following us, riding a tired BMX bike and keeping my pace. We continued past our house and rode a little further, to a bar where every stool was taken. We stopped in front of the bar and waited to see what the boys would do. We’d not been standing there for 2 minutes when a man, who looked about 30 and was wearing a tracksuit, walked over to us and asked if all was well. I said that we had been followed on our bikes.

He asked, “By whom?”

I turned around and motioned towards the corner, where the younger boy had paused. The older boy had kept riding and was out of sight. “By the young boy there, and another one, a bit older.”

His eyes followed the direction of my hand and he asked, “That one, there?”

I nodded and said, “Oui, oui,” as is frequently said here, as if saying yes once isn’t clear.

The man yelled, “Hey! Le petit! Come here!” Somehow everyone, everything little here is best described as, or called directly, “le petit”. One can refer to “le petit” in choosing a watermelon or in describing a younger sibling or a child.

The young boy rode over on his bike and stopped a few feet away. The man started talking to the boy in Dioula and then asked a question. The boy looked at the ground, then up at the man, then back to the dirt. He said a few words, glancing at us a couple of times.

The man started laughing as the boy finished speaking and turned towards us. He relayed that the young boy, in response to him asking why he had followed us up the hill, explained that he’s not used to seeing white people on bikes, nor with hats and lights. He was simply curious about the fanfare cycling up the hill in the dark. Apparently we were a bit of a circus on our two bikes with our red, flashing tail lights and reflective helmets.

My housemate and I started giggling and reached out our hands to the little boy to shake on it and declare “no problem.” He smiled shyly and then rode off into the neighborhood. We thanked the man for helping us to understand and shared another laugh over it.

This morning we couldn’t wait to tell our collaborators the story. As anticipated, they found it highly amusing and were hardly surprised – they practically finished the punch line before we could tell it.

Boromo

Burkina has a few wildlife parks, one of which is located halfway between Bobo and Ouagadougou. Intrigued by the idea of seeing elephants and ready to have a change of scenery, Leslie and I decided to take the bus to Boromo last weekend to visit the park there, the Deux Bale Forest.

We arrived in Boromo and asked about a taxi that would take us to a lodge situated inside the park, overlooking a river where the elephants go to find water. The first guy we asked simply laughed, “There aren’t any taxis in town!” We walked across the street from the bus station to a gas station where the attendant was sitting outside. I asked him if he knew the lodge and he said he did, but that it was closed for construction. I said that we were looking for a guide to take us into the park. He pointed west and said, “Walk down the street a few hundred meters, go to the bar called ‘La Solution’ and ask for Woulouwoulou.”

We walked down the main road in the direction he pointed and had nearly reached the edge of town when we saw the sign for La Solution. When I asked the bartender (who looked about 17) if he knew Woulouwoulou, he giggled – almost as if blushing – and said he’d call him. He disappeared for a few minutes and, in the meantime, three little girls rushed up to us holding sesame cookies packaged in small, unlabeled, clear plastic bags, reciting, “Biscuits! With vitamins! Vitamins A, B, C, D, E all the way to Zed! Cent francs! Cent francs!”

I asked, “Really, all those vitamins?”

The oldest girl, who looked to be about 8 years old, nodded and repeated, “Vitamins A, B, C, D, E all the way to Zed!”

I couldn’t help myself; I tried to turn it into a teachable moment on actual sources of vitamin A and zinc and the like; we ended up just listing foods like carrots, mangoes, and eggs. They didn’t seem all that convinced and resumed singing all the letters of the alphabet. One thing was certain – they were adorable, and persuasive sellers. We bought a package from each of them, vitamins or none. (At least vitamin E in the sesame.)

The bartender returned and, still unable to stop smiling, said that Woulouwoulou was out in the field but would come by “soon” to meet us and talk about going to the park the following day. Leslie and I sat down and split a beer while waiting for word from this mysterious guide.

The daylight was beginning to fade, so we paid the bill and told the bartender that we were going to go check into a room at the hotel we’d spotted across the street. He nodded and said that he’d tell Woulouwoulou that he could find us there.

The hub of Boromo, at least at first glance, is the bus station. The main drag has bars, small restaurants, a few hotels, signs for the park, a national police guard station, and a mix of kitschy tourist shops selling souvenirs. We saw huge trucks traveling through, carrying grains and other goods heading for a market, or loaded with rows of motorcycles. Some carried animals, and a few others carried people sitting on top of watermelons. The main attractions seem to be an annual mask festival in March, and the park, but it was the off-season for spotting wildlife.

So when the hotel receptionist said that there were no available rooms, Leslie asked - about three times – if he was sure that there were no vacancies. He suggested another hotel located just outside of town and gave me the number to call. The guy on the other end of the line said that they had rooms available and agreed to come pick us up. He showed up about 20 minutes later but on a moped. Leslie and I ro-sham-bo’d for who would go first on the moped while the other guys laughed at our decision-making process. I went first and sat on the pannier rack of the P-50 (pronounced “pay-cinquante”, short for the Peugeout 50, an older model motor scooter with a single seat, rather than a seat large enough for two). We drove a few kilometers out of town to a small compound of bungalows. By then it was dark and a few halogen lights lit up the compound while a generator whirred.

The guy was just about to return to town to pick up Leslie when the headlights of another moped appeared; the other hotel receptionist drove up with Leslie hanging on behind. We checked into one of the bungalows and discovered that, not only were we the only guests, but the kitchen was closed because the chef was on vacation, and there were no other places to eat nearby. However, the guy was willing to drive back into town to get some food for us, so we gave him money for rice and sauce.

We sat down at a table that he had set up outside for us and had a beer while we waited for dinner and started to wonder if we should call Woulouwoulou. As if on cue, a motorcycle appeared and a guy walked over and introduced himself as Mamadou and said that he was a guide. We asked if he knew Woulouwoulou; turned out that he went by any one of four names, and that he was indeed Woulouwoulou.

We arranged for Woulouwoulou/Mamadou to drive us into the park and lead a walking tour of one area of the park the following morning. He regaled us with stories of elephant sightings near the road in Boromo but said that we had a 50% chance of seeing elephants. Leslie and I had decided, before leaving Bobo, to set our expectations very low, and thought 50% seemed high, but we were willing to go have a look anyways.

The next morning all went as planned – surprisingly enough; we were picked up promptly at 7 am, stopped for an omelet and coffee, then drove into the park and stopped at the lodge under construction. We didn’t see another soul – not another person, no wildlife. We walked through the bush and it was reminiscent of walking house-to-house for the census at work, only there were no houses. Woulouwoulou pointed out a few elephant tracks, but that was as close as we got. We finally returned to the lodge construction area and Leslie and I sat down in a hammock strung across the deck. We were just agreeing that it was time to go back to catch a bus to Bobo when we suddenly found ourselves falling to the deck with a loud thud. The hammock broke, sending us down on our derrieres! We broke up laughing and decided it was the icing on the cake for our weekend jaunt.

Jack O’ Melon

I tried to explain Halloween to a Burkinabe co-worker and I think he was just being polite when he said that he understood what I had described, from carving pumpkins to trick-or-treating in costumes. Although there are various types of squash found here, I hadn’t see any pumpkins recently and by late yesterday afternoon, I felt a little crushed by the thought of letting Halloween slip by unnoticed. I announced to my housemates that I was going to pick up some veggies for dinner and to find the closest substitute vehicle for a jack o’ lantern: a watermelon. Two of them laughed and said they’d come with me, so we walked down the street to the market stand together, just as the wind was picking up. We stood before the pile of watermelons in search of one that was round enough, the right size, and would stand up on its own. We selected one and bought a few other veggies just as drops of rain began to fall. By the time we were halfway home, the rain turned to a downpour and we arrived home soaking wet.

We changed into dry clothes and started making a veggie and bean soup while the rain poured outside. While the soup simmered, Katie and I cut the top of the watermelon and started scooping the insides out. We made ‘cocktails’ with the leftover watermelon juice, lime and carbonated water (only missing a dash of vodka). We carved a design in the watermelon but discovered that we didn’t have any candles, so Leslie turned on her cell phone flashlight and put it in the watermelon.

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.