If you want to know the names of those mystery birds in the last blog, check it out again. I received lots of suggestions and I think they are now all properly labeled.



Tiebele

One of the tourist sites I was able to visit while I was traveling with my friend from John Carroll, Elizabeth Swenson, was a village that is famous for the way folks there paint their houses. Everywhere else in the country traditional houses are made of mud brick, like this one that is currently under construction in my village.

After it is finished, the people will cover the walls with clay to form a protective coating so the mud does not wash away in the rainy season, so it looks like this.

Sometimes people mix concrete with the mud and for concrete blocks, like this.

Either kind of construction can then be covered with mud and concrete mixed together for a longer lasting covering. In either case, the walls as usually left the color of the material with which it was constructed. What makes Tiebele different is the designs the women paint on the houses. The place that is the official tourist site is the compound of the village chief. I have no idea how many people live here, but I would guess over 100. Here is the entry to the compound.

When you walk through the compound you can see that there really are people who live here and it is not just to show to tourists. Actually there are probably not enough tourists who find their way to this town to keep up a place just for show.

Many of the houses are round, like these.

This is the one house that is set up to show tourists. This low rounded door is a defensive measure. Through it you can see another low wall. To get into the house you have to duck down crawl in. Then you have to crawl over the little wall. That would make it hard to surprise people in the house. Someone would be able to club you on the head before you could get in and do any damage to the residents.

In the house we were allowed to visit there were three round rooms. In this one you could cook in the rainy season or when the wind was too strong to cook outside. The gourds hanging on the wall above the place to build a fire would act as cups and bowls to eat out of.

The doors to get from room to room were similar to the one to enter the house, except there was not the extra barrier to crawl over.

Here is the door to another round house. Notice the column by the door with the white stuff on top. That is a fetish, a place where people can make sacrifices if they are asking the powers in the traditional religion to do something, like make it rain, or assure the harvest is good.

No all the houses are round, as you can see in this picture. Notice the snake made of clay that is part of the decoration on the one straight ahead here.

One of the women was making local beer from sorghum. The beer in my village is yellow, but this beer would be red, because of the kind of grain that was used to make it.

The decoration of the walls is a job for the women. They use the feathers of the pentards to do the painting.

All of the designs have some meaning, which our guide explained to us. Some stand for particular animals, and he told us that the mark that looks a bit like a wagon wheel is a beauty mark that you might find as a scar on the cheek of a village woman. Traditionally people here cut babies faces with particular scar patterns which helped identify the ethnic group to which a person belonged. For example, if I see a man with three small lines by his eyes, as with my friend Prosper, I know that that man is a Mossi and will understand Moore.

As our guide said, facial scaring was a kind of identity card in the traditional culture. This kind of scarification is not practiced as much these days as it was in the past. You do sometimes see marks on babies’ faces, but usually it is a simply X on a cheek. A Peace Corps volunteer friend told me that many people believe that if the baby is flawless, the spirits may want the baby and it will die. Putting a scar on the face assures that the baby has a flaw and that may protect it.

BIRDS!!!



While we were at Ranch Nazinga we saw lots of birds. We saw them at many other places as well. Most of these pictures were taken by my grandson, Jesse, who has a great eye for nature and a pretty good camera. I suspect some of you bird watchers will have an idea of what these birds are. I found a couple of them in a bird book and put their names in the captions, but I could be wrong and am open to suggestions. Others are, for the moment, nameless. I will update the names as folks tell me what they really are.

First, here is one of my favorites, because of the bright colors. I think it is a sunbird, although the colors do not match the picture in the little bird book I have here. It also resembles a group of birds called bee catchers.

Sun birdIt was fun to watch it swoop down off the branch, grabbed a bug, and returned to the same perch.

Sunbird in flight

They were quite common at the ranch, as you can see from the tree, below, that is covered with them. Yes, those are birds, not leaves on the branches!

A tree full of sunbirds They have nests in a clay bank, kind of like swallows in the states.

Sun bird homes This is some kind of hornbill, but I don’t know which one.

Here are a couple of African grey hornbills (I think) hanging out together.

This is an African jacana.

African jacana

This amazing bird is a kingfisher. We saw it hang in the air above the lake, almost the way a humming bird can stay in the same place above a flower. Then it suddenly dived straight down into the water and flew off with a fish.

Giant Kingfisher

I think these are cattle egrets. They follow the cows and eat the bugs they stir up.

Cattle egrets

I think this is a Goliath heron

Goliath heronThe coloring here is similar to a red cheeked Cordon-Bleu, but the head is not quite the same. Suggestions?

Cordon-Blue? Maybe..They call this bird a pentard. We call them guinea fowl. I think they have about the ugliest face of any bird I have seen, but they sure are good to eat. You know that this one is domesticated, because of the knob on top of its head. The wild ones look just like it except for the knob.

As everywhere in the world, there is a need for carrion eaters, like the vultures (of whatever their real name might be here). These were at the ranch, but I have also seen them on the road, disposing of road kill.

Vultures?You may have noticed this big pile of straw in the branches of this tree in the middle of the lake in the elephant pictures. It is actually a bird nest. If you look carefully near the bottom of the nest you can see a hole through which the birds enter the nest. We saw a couple of them go in and out. The bird is called a hammerkop.

Hammerkop

Now it's time to play "name that bird." Let me know if you recognize any of them. I will move them to the identified section when I have names for them.

Name that bird 1

Name that bird 2

Name that bird 3

Name that bird 4

Name that bird 5

All suggestions are welcome!

In a previous post I told you about the elephants at Ranch Nazinga There were lots of other animals there and here are a few pictures of them. While we were out riding around we stopped by one of the dams and saw this crocodile lounging on a sand bar.

Crocodile at Ranch NazingaWe did not get up close and personal with this guy like we did with the sacred crocodiles of Sabou, which we visited later in our trip.

Dawn's family and one of the sacred crocodiles of SabouFrom the observatory by the lake we saw a troop of baboons that came down to get a drink and play in the water.Baboons

More baboons We also saw these wild boars (AKA wort hogs).

Wort HogsThere were a number of different kinds of antelope. I only have good pictures of two kinds

Bush buckBush buck baby

Water buck

Water buckThere were also monkeys. There were some that hung out in the trees.

Monkey in tree

Monkey jumping

There were others that came right up to the dining room windows, looking for a hand out, I suppose.

Monkey at the dining roomNot all the animals were big. Here is a kind of lizard I had never seen before, with a blue tail.

Blue tailed lizard

Our final big animal adventure was in the southwest, near Banfora, where we saw hippopotami. At first they just looked like rocks sticking out of the water.Rocks? Then we could see their eyes, noses, and ears.Eyes, ears and nose. Finally one yawned and it was easy to see that it really was a hippo! What can make a hippopotamus yawn?We went out to see them in these little flat bottomed boats. There were five people in this boat. We had eight people in our boat, including the man who did the paddling. I guess we must have been sitting pretty low in the water.

Hippo boatAs you can see below, I am well looked after by folks here. I call it playing the white hair card. It is one of the fringe benefits of having lived a long time!

A little help for an old lady Last, but not least, Camels!

Five wise men?Not wild animals, but they seem to belong with this blog. Reminding me to say a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

As I have told you, my daughter Dawn, her husband Jay, and their two children, Annie and Jesse were with me for Christmas this year. After we left Ranch Nazinga, where we saw all the animals, we went to my village to prepare for the holiday. Things are done a bit differently here than in the US, as you might expect.

Burkina Christmas Customs

While you may see plastic Christmas trees in the big cities where there are lots of foreigners, in the village the only kind of Christmas decoration you find is a crèche that Christian families may build by the gate to their courtyard. These are usually built by the children. Here is an example of one. It probably does not look like a crèche to you, but if you looked inside you would find clay figures of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus.

Crèche Gift giving at Christmas time is not a usual thing. You probably try to have your children have new clothes for Christmas. If you have money to spare, you might buy one gift for each child, but none of the kind of over abundance of presents that you find in many American homes. There is not an exchange of gifts between adults or with friends.

Probably less than half the people in the country are Christian. Most of the others are Muslim, although there are many who follow the traditional religion to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes along with Islam or Christianity. One nice thing about Burkina Faso is the religious tolerance. Actually, acceptance of people regardless of their religion might be a better way to put it. Many families have some people who are Catholic, some who are Protestant and some who are Muslim. Most people celebrate all the holidays of both Christianity and Islam. On the Muslim holidays, the Muslim families prepare a great feast and they are visited by all their friends and neighbors, regardless of religion. In the same way, the Christians prepare a big feast for Christmas and Easter and the Muslims come to share the feast with them. I described Tebaski in a blog last year, when I went with an important Burkinabè man to the feast at his house as well as at the home of his secretary and later at the home of the cabinet minister for who he works. Last year on Christmas day Janet and her family were busy painting my living room and I was not prepared for all the visitors who showed up.

My Christmas

This year I decided to be prepared. On December 24 Dawn and I fired up my Dutch oven and we baked several batches of brownies. In Ouaga we had purchased a number of jars of prepared American style spaghetti sauce and lots of spaghetti. We made Koolaid Pink Lemonade and had some candy Dawn had brought, too.

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we went to the Catholic Church for the Midnight Mass. The church is quite a large one, probably seating about 2000 (with people crowded next to each other on the benches, as they do here). The church was only about half full, but there was still a good crowd. In the processional the priest carried a baby doll to represent Jesus, and placed it in the crèche in front of the alter. As he did so, many of the women let out that yell that is called ululating. There was lots of singing by the two choirs, one that sang in Moore and one that sang in French. This is the choir that sang in Moore.

There were a couple of hymns Dawn recognized, but the only one I knew was the processional, Silent Night. With all the ululating, it was definitely NOT silent in the church! Of course we did not understand a thing that was said, but you didn’t need to understand the language to understand the feeling of celebration. The congregation and the choir moved to the music, dancing in place.

Christmas Baptism

Christmas morning Mass was a time for some babies to be baptized, among them, Prosper and Martine’s baby, Jean Crystosome. Dawn took Jesse’s good camera and we sat up front to get good pictures of the event. Moms and babies were seated in the front row, with dads behind them.

As with weddings, it is the custom for people with cameras to crowd around the principals and take lots of pictures of them. At first Dawn wasn’t sure it would be OK, but when she saw what others were doing, she got in there and got some good pictures. There were about 20 babies being baptized. These were the ones who were not able to be present when most of the new babies for the year were baptized back in November.

Prosper and Martine’s baby was not to happy to have water poured over his head!

There were five people who were celebrating the 25th anniversary of their baptism At the end of the mass they were recognized and lead a dance around the church.

Dawn is the pastor of a small church in Nelson, New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Association of the United Church of Christ (UCC) gave her a clerical stole to present to a church in Burkina Faso. There are not UCC churches here, and we attended the Catholic mass, so it seemed appropriate to give the gift to the church. We told one of my friends she would like to see the priest after the service to give him a gift to the church from some churches in America. Imagine our surprise when, at the end of the mass the reader announced that there was to be a presentation from a church in America. I managed to mumble a few words in French trying to explain, and the priest said, “Thank You!” in English. He seemed to be pleased with the gift and put it on over the other robs he was wearing. Maybe you can make out the word "Holy" that is embroidered on the stole.

After the service the thing to do is to take pictures of your kids by the crèche. Here is Jean Crystosome and his mom and dad. (Notice baby Jesus lying in the traditional woven African material.)

Christmas Visitors

When we returned to the house we prepared for visits from neighbors. We had quite a few people stop by, but not as many as we might have had. They arrived in twos and threes and we were able to serve them on the porch with the few dishes I own.



And that was my Christmas. Hope yours was a good one!

When I left Cleveland, many of you asked what you could do to help me with my work in Peace Corps. Here is a chance for you to do something for some Burkinabè young people. Peace Corps volunteers and Burkinabè men and women are going to be running week long summer camps for girls and for boys in four locations around the country. These camps are based on a model that has been used in other Peace Corps countries to develop leadership among girls. It was originally called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). The name has been change here in Burkina Faso to Camp G2low (Girls and Guys Leading Our World). That is, there will be sessions for guys as well as for girls. It is important to educate boys as well as girls about gender equality, good decision making, and leadership in a patriarchal society such as Burkina’s.

These week long camps will be for boys and for girls in the equivalent of 7th and 8th grade. There will be 4 girls from each of 15 communities attending each of the girls’ camps, and 4 boys from each of those communities attending each of the boys’ camps. That means there will be 60 boys and 60 girls in the camps at each of the four locations, for a total of 480 students attending in all. The communities that send students to the camps will help in selecting the students who will come, will send adult leaders to be part of the adult leadership teams, and will pay for the transportation to and from the camp. The communities where the camps will be held will be donating space and other support for the camps. We hope to raise about $6400 (about $50 per student) in donations for each camp so students can come at no cost to their families.

You can read more about the goals of the camp at http://pcburkina.org/camp-glow. If you are moved to make a donation, or an organization you belong to would like to contribute, go to that web address and click on the bottom picture on the left hand column, for the Leo camp. That is the one where I will be working. (If that camp has already received full funding, feel free to select one of the other camps. I have been told this is unlikely to happen, but one can hope!) The donations can be made by credit card. Your contribution will be sent through Peace Corps directly to the financial officer for the camp, who has to turn in recipes for all expenditures. I hope some of you will be interested in assisting with this project.

Elephants!

My younger daughter, Dawn, and her family were here over the Christmas vacation and we had several interesting adventures. The first one was a visit to a place called Ranch Nazinga, an elephant and wild life preserve. It was started in the 1980s by a Canadian who wanted to try to save the elephants in the wild. He located the preserve in an area elephants sometimes visited and attracted the elephants and other animals by building dams to hold back the water that falls in the rainy season. The dams are built of the rocks and stones you find around there, and the road goes right over the dam. Stone damThe preserve covers 98,000 hectares and there are 11 dams that have created ponds and lakes. To get there we took a nicely paved road south from Ouaga for about two hours and then spent another two hours on dirt roads that got progressively bumpier and more rutted until we reached the ranch. There are one room cottages with showers and toilets and there is electricity between 6 and 10 at night, from a generator. Here is what they look like. cabin at the ranchThere is a dining room/restaurant were you tell them a couple of hours ahead of time what you want to eat from their rather limited menu and they fix it for you. It is a good thing that they have one, because there is nothing else around for miles. Here I am with Dawn after a meal.Jan and Dawn in the dining roomOn the drive into the park we saw several different types of animals including antelope and elephants, but not too close to the road. We arrived at the ranch just at dusk and did not see much there. The next morning we started early with the family perched on top of the 4 X 4 we were using for transportation. I stayed down below with the driver and guide.

Riding on a 4X4We drove around the park for two hours or so and saw several more groups of animals, including a couple of kinds of antelope and more elephants. There was a mother with a very small baby (well, small for an elephant) and two other juveniles. They crossed the road right behind our car and my grandson got this great picture of them.Elephant family After we got back I wondered what we would do for the rest of the day. There is a viewing area by the lake at the ranch and we went down there to see what we could see. Here is what it looks like from across the lake, as you approach the ranch.Observation place Here we are, checking things out from inside the observatory.Observing in the observatoryAbout 11:00 my grand children came running into the observatory and told us there was an elephant right outside. Annie had been reading on the porch and the elephant walked past her, juts about 10 feet from the house. It was heading for the lake and we watched it dust itself off by blowing sand over its back with its trunk, and then go into the lake to get a drink and take a shower. I always thought the cartoons showing elephants with their trunks extended at a 45 degree angle looked a bit odd, but that is actually how they draw water up into their trunks. Here is a series of pictures showing the process:

At about the same time a group of elephants came down to the lake on the shore opposite the observatory. As you can see, we saw LOTS of elephants, compared to last year when all Janet and her family saw was the head of one through the branches of a tree. More about the other animals in my next posting.

Lots of elephants!

Going to School in Burkina Faso,

I have told you that schools here are very different from those in the USA. The first thing to understand is that most of the people here do not speak French at home, but a local language, based on their ethnic group. Where I live most of the people are Mossi, the largest ethic group in the country, with about 40% of the population in this group. They speak Mooré at home so many of the children start in the first year of school knowing no French at all. In other words, in first grade, you not only have to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, you have to learn these things in a new language.

The primary school consists of the first six grades, followed by a nationwide test that you must pass (the CEP) in order to go on to the next level, called collège here. If you do well and get to go to the collège, you are there for is the next four years. This is called the first cycle, and they name these grades in the French style, sixième, cinquième, quatrième and troisième, (that is, 6th, 5th, 4th, and 3rd). After troisième there is another big test, the BPC. If you pass that, you can go on to the Lycée for the second cycle, where the grades are called second, premier and terminal (2nd, 1st, and final). Actually there are many places where the Collège and Lycée are on the same campus and people refer to them together as the Lycée. At the end of this you again have to pass a national test called the BAC. In other words, there are 13 years of school, so it is not surprising that study at the university is only three, rather than four, years for a bachelor’s degree.

Only the first six years of school are a free,public education. Even though they are nominally free, there are school fees you have to pay, as well as school supplies to buy. For this reason families must sometimes chose which children to send to school. If there is a choice between a boy and a girl, traditionally the boy is chosen. The reason for this is that the boys will stay with the parents when they finish school, build a house nearby, and be there to help support them in their old age. When girls get married, they join their husband’s family, so educating them does not seem like a good investment for the parents. In fact, I have been told that when a baby is born, traditionally you ask, not is it a boy or a girl, but is it a member of the family (boy) or a stranger (girl, who will end up in another family). The federal government here has passed a law that all children between 6 and 16 must attend school, and the number of children going to school has increased. In the early grades there are about the same number of girls as boys. Failing a grade, or “redoubling,” used to be quite common. That often lead to students as old a 16 being in the primary school and people decided that was not such a good idea. Now students seldom repeat a grade more than once or twice in elementary school. The result is that many do not pass the CEP test to get their certificate saying they have a basic education so they cannot go on to collège.

There are government supported and private collèges and Lycée. Here in my village there is the Lycée for the department, kind of like a school district, and two private collèges. The reason for the private collèges is that there are a limited number of place in the public school, so not all who have passed the ECP can attend. The lycée takes those with the best scores on the test, and the parents have to pay a fee for the students to attend. Students with lower scores can go to the collèges if they can afford the fee, which is higher than the government support schools, but even there seats are limited and the best students are chosen. If you can’t get into the collège or if you are forced to drop out for some reason, there is the possibility of going to night school. Again there is a cost associated with attending classes.

The classes here are not at all like American schools. I want to show you some pictures of the schools so you can see for yourself what they are like. This is a typical classroom at the Lycée.

Empty ClassroomTypically there are three students at each desk. Here is one full of students:

Students in ClassStudents in this school are in the same seat in the same room all day, every day. The teachers move from room to room. Class sizes are huge by American standards. At the Lycée here, collège classes have between 75 and 85 students in each class. In the upper levels classes are a bit smaller because fewer students qualify, but there are still 40 to 50 students in each classroom.

Blackboards are pieces of wood painted with a special kind of paint. There are no blackboard erasers. Chalk is removed by washing the board with water and a sponge, and the teacher may write on the board when it is still wet, making it kind of hard to read.

Painted Wood BlackboardFor the Lycée, school starts at 7:00 in the morning and goes until noon. There is a three hour lunch break when students and teachers can go home for lunch and a rest during this hottest part of the day. There are classes again from 3:00 to 5:00 three days a week. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are reserved for sports and physical education. At this school there are no Saturday classes, but the schedules may be different in other towns.

The schedule for primary schools is different. Classes officially start at 8:00, but students typically arrive about 7:30 and clean the classrooms and blackboards before the teachers arrive. Classes are from 8 to 12 with a half hour break at 10:00. There are also classes in the afternoon, from 3 to 5. There are no classes on Thursday, but there are classes from 8 to 12 on Saturday.

Because the weather here is never cold (never below 65 degrees) and there is only rain between June and October, school rooms open directly onto a courtyard. Windows do not have glass in them, but are closed with the metal shutters you see in the pictures. In some schools these shutters can not only be opened to let in light, but the whole window can be swung out, to let in as much air as possible. The walls are built of cement blocks or mud bricks. The roof is corrugated sheet metal.

ClassroomsIn this picture of the Lycée campus, if you look carefully, you will see some sheep wandering through the school yard. The trees are a typical part of every school yard. They provide shade, which you appreciate year round. They are also a part of the effort toward reforestation, which I will probably tell you about in a future blog. School Campus, with Sheep In the next picture you can see the usual mode of transportation for students here, old fashioned one speed bicycles. In the big cites, for students from families who have more money, students may ride motorcycles.BicyclesHere is a picture of the outside of the school library.

Library Here is a picture of the inside of the school library.Library InteriorYes, those are the ONLY books in the library. Students can come in to look up information, but you cannot check out books, and there is no town library either.

All quite different from the USA!

Sheep versus Goats

In response to my last blog, my friends who raise sheep commented that the sheep I showed looked more like American goats than sheep, although the tails were certainly sheep like. I thought you might like to see the differences between sheep and goats here, so I took some pictures and asked Prosper about the important characteristics.

As my friends said, the dead give-away is the tail of the animal. The goats have tails that stick up, and sheep have tails that are longer and hang down. Here are a couple of examples.Baby Goat

Baby SheepThe second difference is the ears. Here sheep have ears that hang down, like their tails, and the goats have ears that stick out to the sides, like these:

Goat Ears Stick Out The other big difference is that all the goats have horns, but only the male sheep have horns. Here are a female (no horns) and a male (with horns) sheep, and a female goat with horns.

Female and Male Sheep

Female Goat As you can see above, the goats have thin, slick coats, and most of the sheep short coats, too.This should be no surprise, given the temperature here. Sheep's coats tend to be a little thicker than the goats but not by much. Prosper has this one sheep with longer hair, but this is about as much wool as you are going to see on a sheep here.Long Haired Sheep

Wild Animals?

Another question was about wild animals attacking livestock that are allowed to roam free. In spite of what you see in movies and on television, in West Africa most of the dangerous carnivores have been hunted to extinction, except for a few you might find in the game preserves. I have not heard of any livestock being attacked by wild animals, except for snakes. Prosper did lose a sheep recently to a snake bite.

Because my village is on a major highway, that is to say a two lane paved road, traffic is the greatest danger to roaming animals. Trucks carrying goods between the capital and other cities race by, blasting their horns, day and night. There are also lots of buses, 4X4s, and vans carrying passengers rushing past. If there is a choice between hitting an animal, driving off the road into a ditch or crashing into an oncoming bus or truck, you can bet the animal will lose.

The other major hazard for a farmer trying to raise animals is thieves. Prosper lost a donkey several weeks ago, and we can only assume that it was stolen. On the day Prosper took me to see his plot of land here he hopes to eventually keep his animals, we encountered a man on the road carrying on to a group of people including the boy who lives with Prosper and Martine and helps with the animals. This guy was telling them about a boy who had tried to steal a sheep, which was, in fact, one of Prosper’s. The man was able to stop the boy and he was saying he was going to tell the kid’s parents, because he knew who he was. I could not understand all he was saying, but I am rather sure it was something like, “What is this world coming to, when you can’t trust your neighbors not to steal your animals!”

Trying to grow moringa

I have written before about the value of the moringa trees. While I was in Ouaga this summer, Martine and the children started four trees for me. We (I should really say they) transplanted them into my courtyard, but we knew it was about time to let the animals roam free, so we took some of the mud bricks from my fallen wall and built protection for them. Here you can see the leafy tops poking up through their cages.



Unfortunately, that was not enough! The goats and donkeys love moringa, and, with the other three sides of the wall around by courtyard missing, the goats climbed the bricks and ate the tops off the trees. Here was the first attempt to protect them, with branches with long spines, intended to discourage the animals.

That helped, and they started to sprout new leaves. Unfortunately, the donkeys were not deterred, pushing the spiny branches out of the way to get at the leaves. This weekend Prosper and some of the boys replaced the secco (woven grass mats) that formed the roof of my porch, and put the old secco up on posts to act as kind of fence. I am expecting the animals to eat their way through to get at the trees, but they assure me the animals do not like that kind of grass. We shall see....

Raising Animals

In America, if you are raising livestock, you put a fence around your pasture and turn your sheep or cattle out to graze. Here, in the time between harvesting and planting, you just turn them out in the morning and hope they find their way home at night. I think the way you make coming home more likely is that you give them some grain or other food each evening and they know there will be a treat when they arrive a night. When people start planting, you are supposed to tether your animals in some way when you put them out to graze, and to do it in such a way that they do not eat other people’s crops. If you look closely, you may be able to see the rope holding these sheep to the bush.

There is a person who is responsible for deciding when it is time to tether the animals. This is announced to the villagers by a griot or singer who acts something like a town crier from the old days in Europe. On the day you are supposed to start tying up your animals, he goes around the marché delivering the message. Even then, some people do not respect the message and some people assign one of their children to guard the field from the animals. In the fall, after the harvest, the griot sings out the news again, saying it is now fine to let your animals roam free. If you are late getting in your harvest, too bad for you!

The cycle of planting and harvesting

I now have pictures of the whole cycle of raising grain. First, here are some folks preparing the soil the old way, with dabas, small hand-held hoes.

If you had a good harvest last year, maybe you could buy a mule and a plow to make things easier this year.

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As the millet grows, at first it looks a lot like corn, with the tassel. The tassle is actually the part that turns into grain.

When it is ripe, it is so heavy it makes the stalks bend over.

People cut off the part with the grain, by hand, and then cut down the stalks. When that are finished, you can actually see your neighbors' buildings, that have been hidden behind the grain for several months.

People take the stalks they have cut down to their homes and store them to feed to the animals during the dry season.

Because this looks like it will be an especially bad year, with the lack of rain and poor harvest, people are stocking up as much fodder as they can. They store it on top of structures like you see below. It not only stores the fodder, but provides shade for the animals.

It starts out looking like this:

Than you add as much as you can. Not quite like a barn hay loft, but the same idea

This picture is quite hazy because the farmer was burnign the stubble that was left after the stalks were harvested.

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After the chief of the land gives the word, by way of the griot singing in the market, people can let their animals range free. People with cattle usually have people (African cow boys) walking along with the cows to keep them together and to make sure they do not wander off. I suppose the cattle contribute fertilized in return for what they eat in the fields.

Smaller animals, like sheep, goats, and pigs, are just allowed to roam free. They generally come home at night, but sometimes people have to go out looking for them when it is getting dark. Unfortunately, as I have said before, there are bad people everywhere, and sometimes people will grab a goat or sheep that does not belong to them and take it to market to sell. Chickens and guinea hens wander around freely all year. They are also vulnerable to thieves grabbing them and selling them. Just one more photo. This is another crop a lot of people raise, peanuts. They are eaten raw, boiled, or roasted. I prefer the roasted by far, although I guess they are more work to prepare.

New Arrivals

Lambs

Some of the young folks whose parents follow my blog like pictures of animals. Here are a couple of pictures of baby lambs that have been born to the sheep owned by my friend Prosper. Sheep seem to have lambs any time of year rather than there being a time of year that is lambing season, like spring time in the US. The one with the black face was born back in April and the all white one that prosper is holding was just born in October.

New Baby

These same friends and neighbors, Prosper and Martine, also have a new member of the family. I happened to be working at the Maternity center helping with weighing babies the day he was born so I got this picture of him when he was about three hours old. All of the babies are born missing a lot of their color. Their skin darkens after a week or so. A good thing, too, with the sun they have to live under all their lives!



Here he is again, at two months old, big, and healthy!



Medical checkup

Peace Corps always says the health and safety of the volunteers is their first priority. In keeping with this, all volunteers get a full medical checkup after a year of service, to make sure everything is OK. At the end of August I had my medical exams and all is well. I had my mammogram plus sonogram and, at least from the reading of the Burkinabè Doctor, there is no problem there, thank goodness. I understand they will be sent to the US for a second opinion, however. My TB test was negative, although I was a bit worried they would not be able to read it because the nurse nicked a blood vessel and the area was bruised. All she had to do was run her finger over the place and see that there was no bump to know that there was no reaction. I have gained weight and the doctor is happy, because I lost a lot when I good food poisoning last year. I want to quit gaining, however, so I guess there will be fewer pancakes for breakfast and other goodies for a while.

Dental Checkup

Another standard part of the medical checkup is a dental exam and cleaning. They have a different way to take dental X-rays than my dentist in Cleveland uses. There is a small, flat square thing that is connected to a computer that they put in your mouth. As they zap it with X-rays the information goes to the computer where the dentist can check it out. Another volunteer told me her dentist uses it in the states, but another said her dentist thought the resolution was not a good as with the old bite-wing X-rays. The tooth cleaning session with the dentist was also a bit different. They clean with an electrically driven instrument and water under pressure. I am not sure if it vibrates or rotates, but it was not too bad. Over all I found it a little less painful than the metal pick they use at home, but there were a couple of “shocks” that felt like I must have an exposed nerve at the gum line. The continuous spray of water in the mouth made me gag a few times, too. They did not find any cavities, however.

New Glasses

I did have to get new glasses because the gold plating (or paint?) on the ones I brought from America had worn off and I am allergic to the nickel, like you find in cheap earrings. I think it may have been the sunscreen and bug repellant I always put on every day that removed whatever was covering the underlying metal. In any case I started to get red sore spots on my nose where the frames sometimes touch my face, just like the reaction I get in my ears to cheap ear rings. The visit to the eye Doctor was quite similar to what you might experience in the US, and I did get a new prescription. When I told the optician I wanted trifocals, he said it is not possible. They only make progressive lenses here. Ugh! They give such a limited field of view that I find them really annoying. I learned that there are different qualities of glass that can be used and, if you pay a premium price, you can get a larger field of view. Thank goodness Peace Corps willing to pay for the better ones. With these glasses here is distortion in about half of the lense. If you look through the wrong part of the lenses the world is not just out of focus, but moving as you turn your head. After a few days your brain gets trained not to look there, but I also find it annoying to have to turn my head to keep the print in focus when I am reading. I am looking forward to being able to get trifocals when I get home.

Several people have responded to things in my blogs with interesting information that I would like to share with you. I will also answer a couple of questions people have posed.

Nancy Drew in French

Several people did internet searches and found information about the French translations of the Nancy Drew series. They confirmed my guess that the reason for changing the name is the difficulty in pronouncing Drew, just like the difficulty in pronouncing Larsen. R in the middle of the word here tends to come out as a W.

Apparently this was a very popular series over the years and there is a lot of information about the various translations at http://www.nancydrewworld.com/french.html if you are interested.

Bird on the road

Here is the picture of that bird again. My sister in law identified it and sent me the following information about it:

It is a Red-billed Hornbill. It lives in quite a few places in Africa. They feed by hopping on the ground, searching the surface and probing holes for insects. They follow the paths of game animals in order to hunt for dung beetles. As with most hornbills, the nest is in a hole in a tree. The female inside the nest, helped by the male outside, plasters the entrance with mud and droppings, leaving only a narrow slit. The male brings food which is passed through the slit, and droppings are squirted out. The female leaves when the young are half-grown, when they know to come to the slit for food. The parents reseal the nest until the young are ready to leave.

Quote on the carving in the forest

One friend suggested it was similar to an American Indian proverb:We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. –

My daughter who speaks French better than I do, having lived in Paris for 4 years, said:

I would have read it more in the sense of something that is not our birthright, something that belongs to us and is ours to squander as we will (as an inheritance might be considered to be), but an obligation, something we have to protect for the future generations. I think that contrast between squandering and preserving, rather than the idea that the forbearers didn't think of it, is probably what the saying is about.

Answers to a few questions:

Rain

A friend reported that Cleveland has been having record rain fall this year, with 55 inches so far, compared to an average of 36 inches and asked how much rain falls in Burkina. There is some variation, but the web indicates that the range is 23 to 36 inches. The big difference between here and Cleveland is that here it all falls in the four months of the rainy season, June-September, and there is virtually no rain the rest of the year. I am in an area that is closer to the 23 inches.

Schools

Another question was why the schools are the way they are. I certainly do not know the whole story, but I am sure much of it is because of the poverty of the country. They try to get everybody to send their kids to school, but, in reality, there is not enough room in the existing schools. Why not build more schools? Buildings cost money, even if a community gets together and builds classrooms out of mud bricks. There is still the cost of doors, windows, and roofs.

Another problem is that teachers are paid by the Burkina Faso government, and not the local government, so money to hire more teachers competes with funding roads, water, electricity, and so on. You have to get governments permission to build a new classroom because that will mean a new teacher will be needed.

Because teachers are government employees, the central government decides where they will be assigned, rather than local school districts hiring. That may be why it takes untile the second week of school to get teachers assigned to classrooms.

The Provisor, or principal of the local Lycée or High School was just moved to another town and the new man arrived Monday. I asked him if this was a promotion and he told me that this was about the same size school as where he was Provisor for the past five years, but the government has a policy stating provisors should not stay in one school for more than 5 years. The idea is that if you stay in one place too long you lose your edge for innovation and fall into doing things the way they always have been done. When people move around they bring new ideas with them. There may be something to that, but it must be hard to know you are not going to staying in a place and it might discourage people from taking on long term projects.

Teachers move around, too, but mostly at their request. When you start out you may be placed in a less desirable location. After you have been there for five years, you can request a transfer to a location you prefer. You may or may not get the place you want, but your new place may be closer to where you would like to be.

Village Chief

I was asked about the role of the village chief and his relationship to other government officials there are in small town like the one I live in. Please realize this is just the way I understand the system from talking with folks here and there could be some misconceptions.

The position of village chief is more or less hereditary, although I understand that the oldest son may not want to take on the responsibility or may be living in a big city. In that case the community (somehow) selects the new chief who may be related to the old chief, another son, a brother or nephew, for example. It may be that the village can chose a man from a different family, but I am not sure about that. There is a sub-chief for each small community (or neighborhood), but there is an overall chief for the town, to whom the sub chiefs give homage. There are responsibilities of these chiefs that I probably don’t know about. Someone told me that it can be a problem if the son who would inherit the responsibility has moved to the city. He may not want to return to his village to take on the role, and he may not have been trained in in how to make the appropriate sacrifices and how to conduct the traditional ceremonies.. These folks have no official authority from the government, as I understand it, but they are still held in great respect. For example, the chiefs of the various sectors of Ouagadougou and the head chief were invited, along with government officials, to the swearing in ceremony for Peace Corps. The head chief of Ouaga has the right to say who can use the field where we played games with the students in the English camp last summer. They probably have other responsibilities I know nothing about.

Being homeless in a village

If you are poor in Burkina Faso and live in a village, you can build a house out of the dirt from the ground and make a roof out of the tall grass that grows wild here. Your village chief can designate a plot of land where you can build a house and where you can farm the land. Here is a small house my friend Prosper built on this new farm plot. It will be a house for a caretaker when he gets the place fenced in for his sheep and goats.

If you are just living on a piece of ground the village chief assigned to you, you can plant millet or corn, and, at the end of the growing season, you may have food for the year. If you want a window or door for your house, that would require money. You would need to get someone to loan you seeds to plant, but it is not like being homeless in Cleveland, Ohio. Here you do not need to worry about freezing to death in the winter, and the possibility of growing enough food for a year is there. Of course farming is an iffy business and if there is a bad year for crops, things may not be so great. Most of us would not like to live that way, but at least nobody freezes to death under a bridge here!

Property rights (or lack there of)

Property ownership is just being westernized. If you were that poor person who asked the village chief for land to cultivate and to build on, it would be yours to use only as long as the chief lets you live there. If he decided to grant it to someone else, you would have to move. Now days it is possible for you to get a paper showing you have the right to that land, a title of sorts, but that costs money and requires a degree of sophistication that most village folks do not have. Prosper is a school teacher so he is what we call a functionair here, that is, a civil service employee. He has both the knowledge and resources to get a deed to this little plot of land.

Unfortunately, the traditionally way of dealing with land use is changing. I have heard of a village in Mali where the government decided to give a long term lease on parcel of land to a Chinese group and the people who had been living there for generations had to move out. Their village was destroyed with no compensation for those displaced. There have been articles about this in the New York Times, explaining that this seems to be happening all over Africa. It seems that richer countries that are running out of land see a lot of apparently vacant land in Africa and want to get the use of it to feed their own people. That really leaves the Africans in a bad way. The government gets the money and the people who lived there really become the homeless poor. They have to find a new place to live and the crops that are raised where they used to farm now leave the continent.

Pests

One similarity to Cleveland is that ants like to invade the house, especially if you fail to wipe up sugar spilled on the counter. These ants do not look like the American red ants I see each spring and fall. They are bigger and almost transparent. They also move really fast if you try to squash them. Another type of pest that has an American relative is termites. They are a constant problem in the villages. You may be fine for weeks at a time and then, suddenly, there is termite trail climbing your wall. Here is a picture of one, before I knocked it down.

When you go into any house in the village you are sure to see the signs that people have had visits from these critters. People say, “just spread some Rambo insecticide and they will be finished,” but really it only lasts a few weeks, and they are back again. I had a termite attack on the branches that support my hangar. My friend Prosper was visiting and saw the signs of the termites. He jumped up and started knocking their coating of mud off my support and later on sent his nephew over with a can of used motor oil to coat the base of the posts (see below). That seemed to keep them at bay for a while, but it also lost effectiveness and had to be re-done.

Early in my stay the termites attacked some of my books that were sitting on a little wooden table next to the wall. I am sorry I did not think to take a picture of the attack until I had destroyed it, but it looked like some mud had fallen out of the attic onto the top of several of my books. When I pried it off, the little critters scampered down the tunnels, back out into the yard. Here is a picture of the edge of one of the books they chewed. Fortunately they mostly ate the margin, and not the text, so I can still use it.

Bats

You have already heard about my bat problem, but I wanted to show you a picture of my new bat house. The last time they exterminated the bats, I decided to try giving them an alternative place to live. I had the carpenter construct this bat house but I am not sure if they have decided they like it better than my attic.

There are hundreds of differences between how things are done here and in America. Here are just a few of them:

The Beginning of School

Schools here are supposed to open on October 1, which was a Saturday this year. The primary schools have Thursdays and Sundays off and just a half a day on Saturday, so you might expect teachers to be in the classrooms on October first to welcome the students and get things started. However; on October first many teachers did not even know where they would be teaching or what grade level they would teach. When I was teaching at the university, I knew the courses I would teach and the days and times they would meet almost a year in advance; so this system of assigning people to classes seems very odd to me.

Last year; my neighbor was the director (head teacher) of a small school quite far away from where he lives: He asked to be assigned to a school closer to his home. He found out he would be given a new assignment; but not where or what grade. In fact; he did not even find out the school where would be teaching until a week after classes were supposed to begin! He will be teaching the first level of primary school at a school that is, indeed, a bit closer to home. He has 80 children in his class and, at the moment, no desks or books for the children. The children now sit on the floor, but he assures me that the desks will be coming.

School readiness

Most of the children in my neighbor’s class arrive at school speaking only the local language spoken by their family at home. The only French they are likely to know is “Nassara, pas de cadeau?” (foreigner, no present?). The first term is obviously spent teaching beginning French and many teachers have no choice but to use “the direct method,” that is, speaking only French and teaching the meaning through gestures, acting things out, and so on. Teachers are not assigned to regions based on their maternal language; but by some other criteria, seniority I suspect. My neighbor speaks three of the local languages, so he can use the language the children know in most cases, but the educational philosophy for most schools does not allow bilingualism. There are a few experimental schools in the country that start by using the local language 90% of the time and gradually increasing the amount of French until by the 6th year the local language is used only 10% of the time. Even though, from what I have been told, these schools seem to produce better results, many parents want the traditional French only method: I find this interesting, given that most of the parents cannot speak French and are illiterate. This means that they are unable to prepare their children for school. It is only a handful of children who arrive at school speaking any French or having seen books around the house. Even among the better educated locals, the idea of reading for pleasure is not a concept.

Beautiful Homes

I just got word that my house in University Heights received a “House Beautiful” award this year. This is because University Heights bills itself the City of Beautiful Homes, and because the folks who are taking care of my house for me while I am here have been doing a great job.

This would not be a concept here. If you have a big fancy house in the city, you hind it behind a big wall, with a guard to be sure no one comes in who is not invited. I have; in fact, seen some beautiful homes here, with lush landscaping. But you would never know if from looking at the wall. Here are a couple of examples. You have to use your imagination about what is behind them. I don’t know!

Time and Planning

I know I have talked about the Burkina idea of time before, but it is interesting how this affects planning. Being “on time” in the American way does not happen in the villages. People may not have watches, although have cell phones that show the time. This is not a big help, however, because you have to get your phone battery recharged every few days, and, without electricity in your home, that means you take your phone to a boutique to get it re-charged. Often this involves removing the battery, so you have to re-set the time when you put it back in. Unlike American cell phones, there is not magic signal from the cell phone company that resets your phone to the correct time. You have to rely on others to get the best guess of the actual time.

If you decide you want to have a meeting at 8:00, you tell people to come at 7:00. Of course everybody knows you are going to do this, so they do not bother to come until 8:00 or 8:30. It is a viscous circle, as you can imagine. I am planning my sex education meetings at the primary schools. Last year I was there at 2:45 to get ready for a meeting at 3:00. At 3:15 the director of the school finally came to open up the classroom and get some kids to sweep the floor. We actually started at 3:30 but people kept coming for the next half hour.

Contact information

FYI, my e-mail address: larsen@jcu.edu

I know most of you get my note to say I have posted again and have my e-mail address, but there are a few folks who read this blog who are not on my distribution list. If you would like to be added to the list, send me an e-mail. Do the same if you have questions or comments

Peace Corps is 50 Years Old

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps. As many of you know, it has placed volunteers in 139 countries around the world. For those who are not already familiar with the goals of the Peace Corps I will quote them here:

Peace Corps Goals

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served and

3. To help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans.

The celebration in Burkina Faso

To celebrate this anniversary there were special events throughout 2011, with a big celebration on September 24, around the world. Here in Burkina Faso we had a three day “Peace Corps Fair” in an effort to inform people in Burkina about the work volunteers are doing here. On the first day of the fair there were two special events scheduled, the swearing in of a new group of volunteers and the arrival of a group of people who rode on a bike tour of Burkina Faso to raise money to help volunteers fund small projects at their sites.

We arrived bright and early 6:30 AM or so to set up our displays. It was cloudy and we all hoped it would not rain, but it did. As is often the case here, the rain was preceded by a strong wind, full of dust. The wind continued as the rain fell, and the result was that the tents and tables that had been so carefully set up were just about destroyed. Maybe you can get an idea of the damage in the picture below.

As we ran for the building, many of the carefully prepared poster displays got quite wet, and some escaped from people and blew away in the wind. We waited out the rain and tried to dry off things as best we could. Eventually we all went to the auditorium for the swearing-in ceremony.

There are a few traditional things that happen at these events. One thing they always sdo is to have representatives of the new volunteers, who have been studying local languages for several weeks, say a few (or a lot of) words of greeting in several of the local languages. This volunteer was one of those giving greetings. He is dressed in a traditional chief’s costume because his stage mates had voted him chief of their stage.

Another traditional aspect of the event is cultural entertainment. This time there was a dance troupe and musicians who played the balophone and drums. I am told this particular group dances in the style of a city called Bobo-Dilasi. If you watch the video on http://pcburkina.org/, you get a much better idea of what the dancing was like. (By the way, I am not in the vidio)

Also there are speeches by important people, in this case, the Directorice of the Burkina Faso Peace Corps, the American Ambassador to Burkina, and the Prime Minister of Burkina. The prime minister presented this gift to the Peace Corps to honor this 50th anniversary.

Peace corps presented baskets to the Prime Minister that contained tree seeds, representing the commitment of the Peace Corps to plant 50 trees in each of the 50 towns and villages where volunteers serve, and a million trees over the next 5 years. Trees are an important element in the fight against the desertification of the country.

After a reception honoring the new volunteers and the people who rode through that rain storm to get here by the end of the ceremony, we set up for the fair. Here is what things looked life when the blown over tents were re-erected or replaced with new ones.

The group I work with here, Pengdwendé had a table highlighting some of the projects of the association that I am not involved with, making shea butter, growing onions, and recycling the small plastic bags in which people buy water. Because safe drinking water is not always easy to find, water is packaged in these little plastic bags and sold on the street. When you buy one, you bite off a corner, suck out the water and throw the bag away. You see these bags all over the ground, along with the black plastic bags I wrote about before. These water bags are made from a thicker kind of plastic and they happen to be recyclable. The only problem is collecting them and getting them to a recycling center. Here is a picture of out informational display about the organization surrounded by the folks who worked at the tables.

I was at a table telling about the soap opera project. Pengdwendé has a community radio station in my town and cooperates with five other community radio stations in producing informative radio broadcasts. These six stations agreed to broadcast the soap opera Cesiri Tono, a soap opera aimed at informing people about children’s rights and the tragedy of child trafficking. In the soap opera one of the characters is a boy who is given to child traffickers by his parents because the tell the parents they will give him a good education and they tell the boy he will get a bicycle. He ends up working long hours under very harsh conditions on a cocoa plantation, but is finally saved from this terrible life by one of the other characters. Because it is a melodrama, there are lots of other problems in the story line, including forced (arranged) marriages, violence against women and children, prostitution, and alcohol abuse. As I have mentioned before, this program is in Djula, the trading language of much of West Africa, and was written and produced in Mali, the country where my daughter, Janet, served as a volunteer 1983-1985.

As I may have mentioned before, the exciting news is that Population Media Center, the group that helps countries conduct the research needed, to write, produce and broadcast the program, and do a follow-up evaluation, has received funding to do not just one, but TWO soap operas here. The reason for doing two is that the target audience here are the people of the small villages who probably do not speak or understand much French. Among those people there are a total 14 different languages spoken, which is the reason French is used as the official language and is the language used in schools. There are, whoever, two languages that are spoken more than most of the others, Djula and Moore. Those are the two languages that will be used in these new soap operas.

I guess that is enough about the fair except to say that, in spite of what looked like a total disaster on the morning of the first day, it was a great success, with lots of fun and information for those who visited. It was organized and run by the volunteers, with the support of the professional staff, and it was, in my opinion, an outstanding event.

And the Wall Came a’Tumblin’ down.

While I was in Ouaga at the American Language Center helping with English, I got several text messages and phone calls telling that my wall had fallen down. This wall was just built in November and I had some concerns about it early on. It was built in the local building style, out of mud bricks with a bit of straw (shades of the Israelites in Egypt), and I noticed right away that it was leaning outward rather than being really upright. Furthermore, the mason who built it put one end of it under the roof overhang so as soon as the rain started, that part of the wall washed away. My friends took some rubble from a house that had collapsed and put it along the base of that part of the wall to try to protect it from the rain water flowing past, but that was not enough. But it was not only the wall that had been leaning, but the one on the opposite side of the house that fell, too. They both fell away from the house, so it was not the wind that blew it over, although there was a big wind with that rain storm.

My friend Prosper tried to support the remainder with some big branches.

In spite of that, a couple of weeks later, the rest of that part of the wall fell over.

To top it off, the wall in the back of the house went over, too. This is looking hopeless! They will not be able to do anything about it while it is the rainy season, and I am afraid the bricks will all melt away before it is time to build again. This is not my problem, however. When the Peace Corps sets up a site, there is an agreement that the community will provide housing for the volunteer with a courtyard and a hangar, as well as a private latrine and a private house with at least two rooms. I have it all, except for the wall. I do miss my privacy, but I can live with it for now.

Dutch oven burns up

Here is a picture of my cannary and marmite that I have posted before. To make a Dutch oven, you fill the bottom of the marmite with 3 inches of sand and put it on a burner on the stove and heat it for a couple of hours to get rid of the dirt taste.

I did that and the Dutch oven to baked things pretty well. That is how I made the small cakes, in muffin pans, for the birthday party I wrote about before. It was OK, but it was a bit hard to get things in and out of it. I was also worried I was going to run out of gas. I understand you really get no warning. In the middle of cooking, suddenly the burner just goes off.

I decided I wanted a bigger version that sits on its own gas burner. That way I would have a bigger Dutch oven and I also have an emergency backup gas supply. Here is a picture of the final project.

On the way to getting this, however, I burned up a marmite. A friend who has a similar one told me just to use high heat. No problem. I turned the burner on fairly high to burn out the dirt taste and, after an hour or so I thought I was hearing something funny. When I checked it out, it looked like a leaf had blown in and was sitting on the burner. When I looked more closely I realized it was a part of the bottom of the pot! The bottom melted off and the sand spilled out. I was luck that the burner was not damaged. Here is the pot with the hole in it.

My friend Prosper had bought the marmite and burner at the marché and had brought them home on his moto. When I burned a hole in the bottom of the pot he went back to the marché and got the guy who had sold the pot to him. The merchant agreed to go back to the man who made the pots and to get several from which we would be able to chose our favorite. Prosper’s wife, Martine, tapped and lifted them and picked the one she thought was best. So far she appears to have made the right choice. I have made cakes, cookies, biscuits and even roasted a piece of pork in it. Luckily it did not do any damage to the burner, so a new pot with lower heat seems to have fixed the problem.

Cell phones and my internet connection

As I may have said before, most adults carry cell phones, referred to her as “portables.”

There are several different service providers, but the one I use is Airtel. It used to be Zain, but they were bought out by a Japanese company last spring and the name changed. So did the color of all the little booths all over the country where you can by “unité,” the way you buy minutes (or seconds in this case) of air time in the US. The network here if often overloaded, making reception TERRIBLE!!!! There are often dropped calls, a message that the network is busy, or ZERO bars anywhere. And, if the call goes through, it often has so much static it is hard to hear the other person. It is even worse in Ouagadougou (the capital) than it is in my little village.

My internet connection is with the same company. The only way I can get on line is to get up early in the morning, when no one else is on the network. Then it is sometimes about as fast as being in a cyber café (internet café) in a big city. Sometimes even that connection is slow, but it is certainly better than no connection at all. Several times it has taken be three days to get my blog uploaded and my e-mail notices sent out. I do try to post about once a week, but the net work does not always cooperate.

I do not mean to complain. These stories are just to give you an idea of what it is like here. This is a developing (third world) country, after all, and it is all part of the adventure.

While I was in Ouaga this summer, I went to visit a big park, referred to here as The Forest. There is one entrance located near the transit house where we stay when we are in town, but I have seen other entrances on other roads, and the map shows that it is a pretty large area.Near the entrance we saw this tree, carved with several animals and people. The message on the open book, in French, is something to the effect of, “We did not inherit this from our parents but pass it on to our children.” I think the point is that this park is not something people thought of having in the past but it should be preserved for the future, as the world changes.

Here is a picture of one of the paths through the woods. As you may be able to tell, this place has quite a mixture of different kinds of trees and other plants. There are not any really tall trees, but there are not many really tall trees anywhere in Burkina Faso.

The tree in the foreground here, with the shiny leaves, is called a karaté (sounds like carrot-a) tree. From its nuts you get beurre de karaté, which you all know as shay butter.

Here is one of the few mushrooms I have seen here. I don’t know enough about mushrooms to know if this is good for food, but I sure would not take any chances!

Here is one of the strangest flowers you are likely to see. Sorry, I have no idea of its name.

There were lots of birds flitting about, but most of my attempts to take pictures of them are just pictures of leaves. This guy, however, sat nicely on the road and I was able to enlarge a little corner of my photo so you can see him.

Here are a couple of pictures of what appear to be a lot of birds swarming around this tree. In reality, most of these are big fruit bats. I was surprised to see them out in broad daylight.

This plant has lovely little thorns, as to quite a few of the plants here. If you don’t want to be eaten by the roaming goats, you had better taste pretty bad, or be pretty prickly.

Last, but not least, is this plant that looks like an agave plant. I suspect it is becaquser I understand they were imported to Europe from the southwest by the early explorers. The climate is certainly right for them here!

That's the end of the travelogue for today. Just a final note to tell you I am doing very well. My health has been fine and we just had our mid-service medical checkup, so that is official! My French is improving, although far from good, and I am happy to be here.

FESPACO

Back in February, I was in Ouagadougou when it happened to be the time of the Africa film festival, called FESPACO, that is held in Ouaga every other year. Quite a few of the volunteers came to town that week to see the movies, and a couple of committees conveniently scheduled meetings that weekend. I was there for a meeting of volunteers who were going to be bringing students to a youth leadership conference the following month. We each had to select a piece of the program to do and make plans about how to do it. In any case, the Transit House, where I was staying, was full of volunteers. I had not planned to go to the film festival, but a meeting with my counterpart that I had scheduled for that evening fell through because she was not feeling well, and I tagged along with the crowd. It was a movie called “When China Met Africa” and we had expected it to be mostly in English because it was done by BBC. It was a documentary set in an English speaking African country, but much of the dialogue was in Chinese and the local African language. The English was also a bit hard to understand because of the accent. There were subtitles, but they were in French and I found I could only read about 2/3 of each one as it flashed by. I did get the general drift and it was a bit discouraging. The Chinese were planning to do several projects there that are now on hold because of the world economic crisis. One Chinese farmer immigrated to the country and bought three farms, thinking there would be one for each of his children, but the children are not interested in farming in Africa. A road project and manufacturing project seeing to be going well, however. It was the only show I saw, and I am sure it was not one of the prize winners.

Living in style (for one night)

Kriss Barker, who is a vice president of Population Media Center and who is co-author of the training manual about how write and produce soap operas to change behavior, was in town to make final arrangements with group that will fund the project for a Burkinabè soap opera. Actually, the project is mostly funded, for writing TWO soap operas, one in Moore, and the other in Jula. These are the two local languages most commonly spoken here.

I had talked to her by phone and Skype several times, as well as having a number of e-mail exchanges with her, so when she was in the country we wanted to meet each other face to face. At first she thought she might be able to come out to my village, but that was not going to work out. I had offered to go into Ouaga if that would be better for her, and she asked if I would do so. I decided that, after five weeks in the group living at the transit house, I was entitled to one night at a real hotel, so I asked her to get a reservation for me at the hotel where she was staying. For that one night I paid the equivalent of about half of what I get to live on for a month as a volunteer. That makes me glad that the transit house is a place I can stay for a reasonable price. However I did enjoy my day of luxury. I would have thought I was back in the USA for 24 hours: good European style food, hot water and a bath tub, and real high speed internet.

It was great to meet Kriss, who is quite dynamic and exudes enthusiasm for the project. We had dinner with the man who owns 11 radio stations and a TV station, who had worked with the Peace Corps group when we started trying to find financial support for such a project. He is very enthusiastic about this project, too, but I think the funder Kriss has found wants to use the official national radio for the broadcasts. Maybe they will decide to allow it to be broadcast on community and other commercial stations as well. I think the people in the target audience, folks in poor rural areas, are more likely to listen to local stations than to the official government station, but I don’t know that for a fact. That is one of the things the first phase of the project, which is research about local conditions, will show.

Profiling, Burkina Style

When I came into the hotel in my traveling cloths, with just a back pack, I think they wondered about me. They told me I would have to wait a while for a room to be ready, so I sat down in the lobby and started my knitting. Almost immediately they had a room for me. Maybe it was chance, but I bet they thought I did not fit in with the clientele very well.

When I was leaving to catch the bus back home, I asked the door man if I could get a cab from there to the bus station. No problem, except that the taxi driver wanted three times as much for the cab ride as the standard door-to-door rate for volunteers. I ended up calling one of the approved Peace Corps taxi drivers, who not only took me to the bus station, but also went in with me to be sure I would be able to get on a bus before dark. He would have taken me to another station, at no additional charge, if there had not been a seat available. So here I am, back in my village, with the contrast of rich and poor, European and African, spinning through my head.

Contrasts

In Ouaga the main streets are paved, but there are many side streets, and whole neighborhoods, that have only dirt roads, like we have in my village. It is not surprising to see something like you see in the picture below, a donkey cart driving down one of these paved roads, with cars, motos, and trucks sharing the road with this very traditional means of transporting goods.

You may also see motos load with goods to sell. I actually took this picture just outside of town. This guy is transporting some kind of produce to sell in the capital.

As in the villages, most houses are surrounded by walls, but in the city they tend to be higher, so you can’t see much of what is inside, unless the house has more than one floor. In the more upscale neighborhoods, two or three story houses are not uncommon. Any fancy house has a guardian at the gate. There are a number of companies that supply guardians, each group having a different kind of uniform. Houses gowned by the American government are guarded by people in blue uniforms with a US flag patch. If you are a Peace Corps volunteer living in Ouaga, you are required to live in a place with a guardian. Mixed in among these rather fancy houses you may find people living much as you might in a village, cooking on a wood fire and sleeping on the ground, with animal in the courtyard. It is a land of contrasts.

When we were planning the English Camp activities, the men planning the week related to water said something about protecting the wetlands in Burkina Faso. I, clever woman that I am, said “were are there any wet lands here? Everything dries up in the hot season.” Boy was I wrong!

I had dinner with the Permanent Secretary for Climate Change and Sustainable Development and his wife, whom I know through my son in law, and I asked him about it. He said, "Of course there are wetlands here, and Burkina Faso is a signatory to a UN convention on preserving the wetlands." He said, however, he would defer to his wife, who knows more about the topic. She works for an NGO call International Union for Nature Conservation. I think of a wetland as a swampy area, but according the definition as she explained it to me, it is any land that is covered with water for part of the year. A river qualifies, as does an area that traps and holds water during the rainy season, even though they are dry for much of the year. She and her husband offered to take me on a tour of a wet land area.

We went to a place where a dam has created a big lake that serves as a backup reservoir for Ouagadougou. It is not actually used as a source of water for the city water system, but could supply water to the capital in an emergency. It is what is called a multi-use location. First, so you can get an idea of the size of the place, here is a picture of the over-flow area, the place where the water leaves the lake when the reservoir is full.

Here is a shot across the lake created by the dam, although I can’t show the size of the lake in one picture.

Here is one of the ways this water is used. These guys are filling the big cubes on the back of the truck with water, to take it to Ouaga to use for building.

Another use of the water is growing food. Here is a canal that has been cut from the lake to a place were food is grown. This plant is called oseille. The people use the leaves to make a sauce for tō. It is quite acidic so you add potassium, which is a base, to it to make it taste better.

People also raise other things like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and squash as you see here at this roadside stand.

This man was raising okra, called gumbo here.

Where there is water, there are fish (sometimes). This guy got one, but I don’t think it is a keeper.

I am sure they actually do get good sized fish, sometimes, because we found BIG scales on the beach. Yes, that is a single fish scale around my thumb!

Here is a fish net that was drying near the lake. Maybe that is how they get the big ones.

The dam itself is mostly made of dirt. The side toward the water is protected in some places with rocks set in concrete, like this:

We walked along the top of the dam, and my friends informed me that the folks will be removing and burning the grass growing on the dam. If you let it grow, the roots soften the soil so it washes away. They try to keep it packed down solidly. I always thought the roots would help hold the soil, but that is not the way things are done here.

This is a levy, quite distance from where the water is now, that protects an experimental agricultural station. There different varieties of corn were being tried out in neat little plots, much as they do experimental plantings in the US.

This is, in fact, a permanent wet land. It does not have as much water in it now as it should have by this time of the year because the rains have been late and scarce this year. Crops are way behind where they should be by this time in the growing season and it may be a bad year for farmers here.

During the month of July I was in Ouagadougou, AKA “Ouaga,” learning something about teaching English by working at a summer school for students who want to improve their English. The classes were held at The American Language Center which is somehow related to the American Embassy, although I am not quite clear about how closely they are connected. I spent three days in June at a workshop to get basic instruction in techniques of teaching English as a foreign language. As some of you may remember, I had to take courses in teaching English as a Foreign Language when I thought my Peace Corps assignment was going to be teaching English in Mongolia. The classes here covered some of the same topics, but I really enjoyed seeing video tapes they showed us here of teachers applying some of the methods that we learned about in my classes at Cleveland State.

The English classes for the students ran for four weeks. Each day began with two hours of formal instruction in English, using books written to teach English, but with an emphasis on American English and American culture. Most of the Burkinabè learned British English, and there are some interesting small details that make this clear. For example, is the color gray or grey? Color or coulor? In the USA it is the first spelling but in England, the second.

Most days I was able to sit in on classes at various levels of proficiency to get an idea about how you could teach English at different skill levels. There were 7 classes, with 6 skill levels. The students were between 11 and 19 and were placed based on their proficiency, not their age. The formal teaching was from 8:00 to 10:00. From10:00 to 10:30 was a half hour break, during which the students bought pop, water, and sandwiches from a woman who showed up in the courtyard at that time.From 10:30 to 12:30 the volunteers lead camp type activities, although the teachers were present to help out as needed. We spent a week before the classes started planning what we would do during the camp time. We decided on the theme of Captain Planet, whom some of you may remember from a kids’ cartoon series in the 1990: “Captain Planet, he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero…” He had five helpers, “Planeteers,” with the powers of Earth, wind, fire, water, and heart and the tag line of the theme song is, “The power is yours!” We made the over-all theme of the camp saving the environment, trying to emphasize that everyone can do something about these problems. By combining wind and fire we had the themes of the four weeks. The first week, Earth, we discussed basics of threats to the environment and endangered species, of which 4 of the top 10 live in Burkina Faso. The second week, with wind and fire, we had as a guest speaker the man who represents Burkina Faso at climate change negotiations. The third week, water, focused on the problems of safe drinking water and water for growing food here. The last week, heart, was about volunteerism and what the students could do.

Most of the students there come from fairly well to do families and many know next to nothing about the places where we volunteers live. They could not imagine not having glass in the windows and air conditioning, let alone not having electricity and having to go to the well to draw water. Some students were delivered to the door by drivers but many of them arrived riding Motos. Here is a picture of the student motos lined up in front of the center.

This is me in one of the classes, just to give you an idea that this is a bit mor like an American school than the typical Burkinabè school. The kids mostly go to private schools, so this may be normal for them.

During the first week we had a contest among the students to make a design for the camp t-shirts. On the front we put the slogan for the camp: THE POWER IS YOURS.

The winning design was quite clever, the globe (with Africa at the center, of course) with a very sad face, and smoke stack showing the source of much of the pollution. The artists had added the slogan: THE WORLD IS SUFFERING. STOP THE POLUTION.

One of the activities students enjoyed was making posters, which we did several times. Here are a couple of posters about my favorite complaint, those black plastic bags.

We also had field days a couple of times. Here are some of the students doing a water balloon toss. It was nice to be the looser and get splattered with water when it was so hot out.

Another activity was picking up trash. We gave the kids rubber gloves to protect them from the nasty stuff that is likely to be in ditches here. They loved it!

After five weeks away fromj my site, I was glad to get home again. I will say more about life in Ouaga in a future blog. It is quite different than life in the village, but not like the good old USA!

Rainy season has begun

I think the last time I wrote about the weather I said it had rained a bit, but not enough for people to start planting. What they did do, to get ready for cultivating and planting, was to clean up their fields. When you buy something here, whether it is a pile of tomatoes or loaf of bread, the merchant will put it in a black plastic bag. All winter I have been appalled at the number of these black plastic bags that have been blowing around all over the place. People just drop them on the ground or throw them over their walls as if they were biodegradable and would disappear after a while. The first step in preparing the fields is to go around the field, pick up the bags and burn them. Then, if there are stalks and roots from last year’s crops they are cut out and burned as well.

The next thing is to prepare the soil for the seeds. You can do this the old fashioned way, with dabas, as these ladies are doing here:

A fair number of people in my village have mules and plows, which they can use to cultivate a bit deeper with a lot less human effort. Good neighbors will sometimes loan their plow to friends after they have finished with their field.

After the dirt in the field is loosened, you have plant the seeds. If you look closely in their hands you can see the peanuts these ladies are planting.

After this, you have to wait for the rains. Too much and not enough are both bad.

Donkeys

I mentioned that donkeys are used to pull plows, and showed you a picture of one at work. There seem to be quite a few donkeys around my village. I sometimes hear them braying at night, and often during the day. They seem to be more noisy at some times than at others. I am not sure if it is mothers calling to babies, like the sheep do, or if the noise is a mating call. I had never heard a donkey bray before I came to Burkina Faso, and I don’t know exactly how to describe the sound. First of all, it is not a simple hee-haw like the sound we made as kids. It is incredibly loud and seems like it should be coming from a bigger animal. It almost seems like the poor animal can’t get the sound out without a lot of painful effort.

The donkeys are mostly used to pull two wheeled carts called “charrettes.” The girls who bring me my water use this kind of cart to carry my 200 liters of water. Kids and adults use them to transport the mud bricks used for building and the sand and clay used to make the mud mortar that goes between the bricks. People also use them to haul wood from the bush and things they want to sell at the market. After the kids have delivered the loads, they sometimes have races down the road, standing up in the carts, like charioteers. The donkeys do not have halters or bridles with reins to guide them. The driver carried a switch, cut from some handy tree. If you want to donkey to move to the right, you hit it on the left side, and if you want it to go left, you hit it on the right side. Donkeys are dragged from the court yard by a rope tied to one front leg. They are allowed to wander free after the harvest, but now that things have been planted again, they are staked to the ground with this rope around the leg to some spot far enough away from crops that they can’t get them.

More about black plastic bags

I am happy to report that there are some enterprising ladies in Burkina Faso who have found a use for these ubiquitous black plastic bags. They cut strips from them and weave them into a fabric to make purses and wallets. I wish more people were doing this. It would help clean up the country! Here are some samples, modeled by some of my fellow volunteers:

A Purse

A wallet

A toiletries bag

BAD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

In one of our first meetings with the directorice of the Peace Corps here in Burkina Faso, she reminded us that there are bad people everywhere. Even though most Burkinabè are generous and honest, they have their fair share of criminal types. Volunteers do tend to get a bit romantic about the good qualities of the Burkinabè and to forget the fact that every culture has bad guys. I have encountered two so far, but not face to face, thank goodness. A couple of months ago, after I had locked the gate in the wall of my courtyard for the night, I went to my "office" to check my e-mail. When I returned to my living room, I could not find my cell phone, which I was sure I had left on the table. Someone climbed over the wall and quietly entered the house to take it. Since then I have started to lock my door whenever I am in the house, and I have given up sleeping in the court yard. A friend told me his cell phone was taken from right beside him while he sleept outside. It is kind of a nuisance, but I was lucky that it was just someone snagging that small item, and I was not threatened or hurt.

The second encounter was a couple of weekends ago. I had a skin rash in reaction to an antibiotic I was taking and the Peace Corps doctor asked me to go to the medical center to have the doctor there take a look at it. I rode my bike there and left it in the "parking" while I went into the compound and waited for her to be ready to see me. While I waited, a man entered the courtyard and came over to me. He said something I did not understand and waved his hands by his ears. I thought he was looking for help with pain in his ears, but others have told me that was to indicate that he was deaf and dumb (which he was not). After I saw the doctor I went to get my bike, and it was gone. He had told the kid who was watching the bikes that I had said he should take my bike to town and get something for him. He left his bike there in place of mine, but it turned out he had stolen that one from someone else. The Peace Corps bikes are quite distinctive so the police and gendarmes both thought they might be able to find it, but sofor a couple of weeks there was no luck on that front. From now on I will be locking my bicycle (the original or a replacement) even when I leave it in guarded parking. Sad to say, there are, in fact, bad people everywhere. I am really happy to report that most of the people here seem appalled at the idea that someone would steal it and they have been supportive and have spread the word about it.

<strong>Just when you give up hope</strong>

I was in Ouagadougou for a work related activity I will tell you all about later, and decided while I was there I would pick up a new bicycle to replace the one that was stolen. Because the bike was not locked and I did not have a "parking" receipt, the Peace Corps rules say I am responsible for it and have to pay for a replacement. I would hate to see them try to collect for the poor father of the little boy who was fooled into letting the thief take my bike, so I was happy to pay for it. Well, not really HAPPY, but willing. They gave me a used bicycle and charged me the equivalent of $200 for it, which is a just about half of the value of a new bike like this.

The day after I paid for it, I got a call from the Gendarmes in the big city about 23 kilometers away from my village (I will just call it X for simplicity, because we are not supposed to give out any information about where we live) saying they had found my bicycle. I was going to take a bus to X to retrieve it, but when I found I could get a taxi to take me from the capital to X for about $40, I decided to go that way. I am sure glad I took him up on it. When we got to X we stopped at the Gendarmerie at the edge of town assuming that would be where my bike was. It turns out there are actually three different gendarmeries in town and my bike as at the one on the other side of town. The bus station was half way between them, and if I had taken the bus I would have had a long walk just to learn that the bicycle was at the other place.

When we arrived the bike was sitting there in front of a pile of about 30 bikes. I am not sure if they were all stolen and the owners had not been located, or what. I had asked the bureau to print up an receipt/proof of ownership and with that and my Peace Corps ID there was no problem, We put it in the trunk and headed out. The driver told me he was surprised that there was no charge. He said if it had been his bike they would have demanded payment for their trouble. Go figure.

The front tire was completely flat and the bike was in first gear on each gear shifter, so I expect he rode it that way for a while. The break cable was frayed and the gel seat is also somewhat the worse for wear. Surprisingly, there was a new set of hand grips on the handle bars. I guess he stole them from somebody else. The Peace Corps put on a new tire and break cable and a volunteer who was leaving the country gave me a slightly used seat, so it is almost as good as it was before its adventure.

The Peace Corps safety and security folks talked to the gendarmes and found out that they had been chasing this guy, who had stolen something else. Apparently the tire went flat and he abandoned the bike. He got away, but the gendarmes rescued my bike. Go gendarmes!

Janet D. Larsen, Ph. D,

Professor Emeritus

Department of Psychology

John Carroll University

Peace Corps Volunteer

Burkina Faso, West Africa

Remember the parties you had when you were a kid? Imagine being a girl here in a village in Burkina Faso on your 9th birthday. There is what it would have been like. When you get home from school at 5:30, some of the neighborhood kids are already there, waiting for you. While you go into the house to wash and put on your party clothes, they sit quietly on a bench, waiting (something African kids do amazingly well).

Your best friend goes into the house with you and puts on the clothes you wore to school, because they are prettier than what she was wearing. When you have on your party dress, your adopted “extra grandma,” the Peace Corps Volunteer, takes your picture.

Your mom has brought the tables and adult chairs out onto the porch and put on the nice table cloths. There is a big plate of the kind of shrimp chips we get in Chinese restaurants as appetizers that your mother made. She gets a package of little disks at the boutique and drops them into hot oil. They expand and get crispy as they cook.

After a while your father rides into the courtyard with a bag of things from town. He went to look for candles and something for the adult guests to drink. Your mom and big cousin, who is living with you so she can attend the Lycée, put each candle on a little piece of cardboard to make it stand up and to catch the wax. Your mom puts a big thermal insulated bowl and a couple of metal cooking pots on the table, along with a few plates and silverware for any adult guests who might want to use them, and dinner is ready. You look at the table with your nine candles spread all around and wonder how you are going to blow them out.

Fortunately your mom and dad are joking with you, and they gather them together so you have a chance to blow them all out at once. A few people try to sing “Joyeux Anniversaire” (AKA Happy Birthday to You) but they do not seem to know the tune. You try to blow out the candles, and, success! Maybe your wish will come true.

Your mom spreads a mat on the porch for the kids to eat on and reminds you all that you need to wash your hands. While everyone is running to the water buckets, Mom gets a big bowl of spaghetti ready putting sauce on the top. When everyone is gathered around the bowl, you all dig in, eating only with your right hands, of course. It is hard for you American friend to believe how quiet and cooperative all the kids are. She takes their picture, too.

While you all are eating, the adults are served on plates at the table, and they even get pieces of fish on top of their spaghetti and sauce. Unlike a birthday party for kids in the US, there are no party games, and no favors to take home, although Mom does package up some of the shrimp chips or spaghetti and sauce to send home with some of the kids. There are no presents from your friends and no birthday cake, although your neighbor baked something chocolate, called brownies, in her Dutch Oven. They were yummy! Quite a different experience.

A Mass Baptism

June 1 was Ascension Day, a legal holiday in Burkina Faso. I was informed that there would be a big Mass at the Catholic Church, at which a lot of young people would be baptized. I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate for me to go, but my friend who co-leads the sex education meetings for girls invited me to come. I asked what time and she said 9:00. Remembering all the times I have waited for a hour for a meeting to start I wondered if 9:00 meant 9:00, but like a good American I got there at 8:55. Much to my surprise, it sounded as if things were already in progress. When I parked my bike and headed toward the church one of the ushers (designated by a green sash with a red cross on it) came over to me and directed me to the door to the front of the church. There I was again, in one of the seats for special folks, right up by the altar. There was not room next to my friend, who was a few rows back, so the usher directed me to the bench right behind the nuns. The mass really had not yet started, but the folks were all saying the rosary.

When I looked out over the congregation I was stunned to see how many young people were there to be baptized. You could tell who was in the group by the fact that almost all were wearing clothes made from the same material. The styles were very different. Some of the boys wore just shirts of the pagna, but others had matching pants, long or short, and others had tunics and pants, which that remind me of men’s pajamas. The girls had a wide variety of styles. Some resembled ball gowns, with lots of satin or other material in addition to the pagna material. Some looked like a typical American little girl’s dress, but many were in a traditional African style, with a fitted bodice and pagna, wrap around skirt.

The boys were all seated in the front rows of one section, and the girls in the front rows of another, and across the chancel from where I was sitting the other side was filled with teens and young adults. I tried to count the boys, to get an idea of how many were in the group. They were in the first seven rows of benches, with about 25 boys on each bench. Comparing that to the space taken up by the girls and young adults I guessed between 300 and 500 people to be baptized. Later I was told several “official” numbers that ranged from 425 to 475. In any case, a LOT of people.

The way they managed this was, when it was time to baptize people, three priests and a couple of helpers created three baptizing stations. Each person to be baptized had a piece of paper to hand to the priest, giving their name, much like the cards the students hand to the Dean at graduation at John Carroll. They also carried white candles, unlit. One of the helpers handed the priest a small gourd filled with water. Another positioned the person over a big bowl and the priest tipped water onto the person’s head three times (in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I presume, but did not hear). While people filed by to be baptized the choir sang a series of songs. Even though they sang in the African style that I find hard to listen to for long, I was right next to the choir and could appreciate the harmony and watch the choir director, which was interesting. By the way, the Mass was all in Moore, as were the songs. I couldn’t understand a thing that was said.

After everyone had been baptized, they all filed around again for the priests to make a cross on their foreheads with holy oil. That went a bit faster, but I kept thinking about how tired the poor priests must be getting. I wonder if they needed someone to message their thumbs and wrists after the service! With everyone back in place, the priests and their helpers passed the flame from the big Christ candle to the newly baptized folks until all the candles were lit. There was a short prayer, and everybody blew out the flames. I wondered what an American fire marshal would have thought of so many young folks waving around lighted candles at such close quarters. They newly baptized folks then each held up a crucifix on a cord of some kind. The priest said a blessing (and I noticed that the man sitting next to me had help up his rosary, too). They, in unison, they all put the symbol of their new status around their necks, reminding me of the Masters degree students putting on their hoods at graduation.

Then it was time for the Eucharist, and the newly baptized folks had their first communion, followed by the rest of the congregation. Not exactly like a first communion in The States! After the Mass I visited the homes of a couple of people I knew who had relatives who had been baptized. At each home, food and drinks were served, and music was playing. At one home I visited the neighbor was having a similar party and there was loud music playing at each. Once in the court yard I didn’t notice the competing music, however. I think a lot of folks had several calls to make.

I wondered whether the reason there were so many children being baptized was because the church is relatively new in the town so they had not been baptized as infants. Close, but not quite the right idea. I was told the reason was that infants are only baptized if their parents have been married in the Church. Otherwise, they have to wait until they are old enough to understand things and go through two or three years of preparation before their baptism and first communion. I think those baptized at birth have a different time for their first communion. In any case, it was a stunning number of new members for this church! I understand that these same folks will not have two or three more years of classes before they are confirmed by the Bishop of the region.

A note about the weather

It has continued to be hot, but now it is a bit muggy. Everyone is waiting for the rains to begin. We have had several days when it looked like there might be a storm, and even some strong winds with the smell of rain, but the ground is still bone dry. A neighbor, who is a cultivator, told me that, if it does not rain enough for folks to plant the seeds of some plants, like millet, before June 15, there will not be enough time for the grain to fully develop before the rains end in the fall. The result would be stalks without good grain to provide food for the coming year. This could be a serious problem.

Another wedding

I was invited to another wedding at the Catholic Church. I had met the father of the groom, but no one else in the wedding party. This wedding was on a Saturday at 10 in the morning. When I arrived at the church there were lots of cars and motos, and even a bus. In the front of the church was a small band, consisting of two keyboards, a bass guitar, a drum set and a trombone, playing rather up beat music that sounded like it could be European popular music. There were orange and white balloons at the ends of some of the rows of benches, like you might see flowers or bows at the ends of the pews at an American wedding. There were six or eight men running around with video cameras. I think one was an official videographer and the rest were friends of the bride and groom, but they went around like a swarm of bees, filming every moment. There were at least that many people with cameras clicking away so I kept my camera in my back pack until the reception, when I felt more comfortable taking pictures of these folks I did not know.

There were eight girls in matching pagnes with matching peach colored satin tops with a strip of the pagne material sewed on them diagonally. You can see two of them in the picture below that I snapped at the reception.

The procession started with a boy carrying the crucifix, followed by a flower girl in an orange dress, the girls I described above, and the bride and groom arm in arm, the bride in a flowing white dress and veil like you might see at an American wedding and the groom in suit and tie. Here they are at the reception

They were followed by 10 priests. The processional music was Mendelson’s wedding march, the one that is often played as the recessional music at American weddings. After getting the bride and groom settled in their chairs in the front row, the girls all rushed off the join the choir that was seated in the front four or five rows. Throughout the Mass, the choir, over 50 voices strong, sang many songs that were literally music to my ears. They used beautiful European style singing for some anthems that were probably from the classical repertoire, and enthusiastic and joyful voices on some other numbers that sounded like gospel music. There was not a screeching voice to be heard.

The service was entirely in French, so I could follow most of what was said. The bride read from one of John’s letters and the groom did a reading that, if I understood correctly, was from the writings on one of the Saints, although I did not catch the reference. His reading was accompanied by background music from one of the keyboards. This had clearly been carefully planned and rehearsed. This church is quite large and has a good sound system. Microphones were used throughout so it was easy to hear the bride and groom say their vows. They had either memorized or were reading them, but they did not do the “repeat after the Priest” type. After the Eucharist, the bride and groom said a prayer together, and then the groom ran over to join the choir for the Hallelujah chorus from the Messiah. It was clear he was a popular member of the this choir that had come from Ouagadougo (on that bus I saw) to sing at his wedding. They ended with another song that sounded like it could also have come from the Messiah, and they sang it in English. The main part was “forever and ever” repeated a lot. Then the band broke out in another upbeat tune and the bride and groom lead a line of dancers around the church. All of this lasted about two and a half hours.

There was not the traditional receiving line at the church. People just left the church and headed down the road into town to the reception. The midwife who does the sex ed presentations with me met me there and guided me through proper behavior for this part of the event. We started out walking to town, wheeling my bike. Eventually someone picked her up on a moto, I hopped on my bike, and we joined the long line of cars and motos going to the reception.

There was a head table for the newlyweds and their parents, and another table for special guests, mostly the priests and nuns.

The bridal party and special guests were served from platters onto china dishes, but the rest of the crowd (a couple of hundred, I would guess) were given Styrofoam boxes packed with two kinds of rice and sauce, a very small piece of chicken, lentils, some kind of meatloaf thing that may have been sausage, and, of course, tô and sauce. No silverware, unless you were special, like me. I ended up taking the box with me and passing most of the food on to the family of my community homologue, who had given me the message that I was invited to the wedding.

There was a time for a toast to the newlyweds and remarks from the families. The bride’s father talked for her family, all in Moore, so I have no idea what he was saying. The groom’s brother told a story, in French, that was the story of the romance. It seems that the groom started in school at the “petite seminary” at the center where we had language training, which I wrote about before. When it came time to decide whether to go to the university or “la grande seminary,” he chose to go to the university, where he studied philosophy. The bride was in her last year at the lycée and needed a tutor in philosophy. That is how they met. Even though the groom decided not to be a priest, it was clear that he is very active in the choir at the Ouaga church.

The wedding cake was actually three little cakes, which were put on a stand designed for this purpose. There were crowds of people with cameras around the cake cutting. They did not do the “feed a piece of the cake to your new spouse” ritual you see at American receptions, however. In the picture below you see the cakes and, in the background, a guy eating from ome of the Styrofoam boxes

The choir gathered in front of the bridal party table and sang a couple of numbers to the bride and groom, ending with the “forever and ever” one. That got a big laugh. Then they began the process of presenting the gifts to the bride and groom. The bride and groom stood in front of the table and people filed past to present their gifts. The guy with the microphone announced the name of the donor for each one. They you could congratulate the bride and groom, and one of the attendants gave you a little net sachet with a couple of nuts and a mint, kind of like the table favors you might have at an American wedding. At that point people started to drift away and helpers started taking down the decorations. Party over. All in all, it was very interesting.

As I rode home I passed the house of the groom’s parents, and there was a big party going on there, too. I think it was the party for the neighbors and that the bride and groom would appear there later for the singing and dancing, but I did not stop so I am not sure.

As you can tell from the description, these are relatively well to do people, and the bride and groom have adopted a lot of European culture. It was quite a contrast to the other wedding I described last fall, and was also very different from a Moslem wedding I (sort of) attended recently. More about this in a future blog...

Technology in my town

The Burkinabè need to have copies of all sorts of papers, like identity cards, school completion certificates, and birth certificates, in order to apply for jobs or to be admitted to the next level of school. As a result, there is a market for a copy center, which I was surprised to find here. It is a little one room place with a copy machine, two computers and a printer. It is not an internet café because it does not have a connection to the internet, but you can see that it would like to be, because their sign has “Yahoo” on it. It is only open during the hours when there is electricity in town, 8AM to noon. It may be open in the evening when the power comes back on, but I don’t ride my bicycle in the dark so I have never been there at night.

Power

While there is electricity a few hours a day in the center of town, out where I live there are no electric lines. People who live in this area and can afford them use big batteries, even bigger than car batteries, to run electrical things like CD players and TVs. My neighbor, Prosper, has a solar panel that is hooked up to his battery and whoever is home moves the solar panel around during the day to keep it facing the sun. Other people take their batteries into the part of town that has electricity to get them charged. As I mentioned before, Prosper connects my little battery into the circuit and charges it whenever I let him know I need to have it charged.

I have not yet been invited into a house that has electricity so I do not know whether people with power use other appliances, but I would bet they have fans and refrigerators. I am pretty sure that things like washing machines and dishwashers are unheard of in this town, but I could be wrong about that. Several of the larger boutiques and the small marques that sell drinks have refrigerators, and someone has a freezer because a lady was selling frozen beesap at the marché.

Beesap is a local drink that is made by boiling the leaves of some plant in water, with a lot of sugar and a touch of ginger. It is relatively safe for me to drink it because it is boiled in the process of making it. I just have to hope that they did not decide to dilute it with water from the well if they made it too strong. When I first tasted it, I did not like it all that much, but since then I have had some that was pretty good. Maybe it was just that it was a cold drink on a hot day that made it taste better, but I think there are different versions and that the first one I had was a little heavy on the ginger.

Because there is not electricity all day, the tailors I told about in the clothing blog use old fashioned treadle machines. Some look like they are really old machines like people used to use in the states, but some are more modern, with zig-zag and embroidery options. They appear to have been retro fitted for the foot treadles. A belt from the treadle goes around the motor shaft and runs the machine.

Nancy Drew in French?

I have been trying to study French by reading some young reader type books from our local “lending library” that consists of maybe 150 books in random piles on shelves at the place in town that has a copy machine and a couple of computers. I selected a book called “Alice and the Candlemaker” as my first one to try. It features a teenage girl, old enough to drive, named Alice Roy. Her father, James Roy, is a lawyer and she has two girlfriends who share her adventures, Bess and Marion, and a boyfriend called Ned Nickerson who makes an occasional appearance. My first thought as I began the book was that it seemed a lot like a Nancy Drew book. When I encountered Ned Nickerson, I decided it WAS a Nancy Drew book with a few changes. Then I thought to look at the author and that settled it, Caroline Quine.

Those of you who were Nancy Drew fans when you were younger, help me out here. I am curious about what has been changed and what is the same. In these books Alice lives in River City that is, I think, in some southern state because they drink ice tea with mint. They have a live-in house keeper (named Sarah), because Nancy’s mother is dead. Sound familiar? Let me know by replying to my message that I have posted, or send e-mail to Larsen@jcu.edu.

I am now on the third Alice Roy book, and the reading is getting easier. I try to “read through” words I don’t know and get the meaning from the context, but sometimes I have to do a translation word by word, using the dictionary, because I can’t understand the story if I don’t. I think if I keep on reading books at this level I will learn a few new words, and will get to be better at reading French. They are not as engaging as Harry Potter, but about the same reading level.

Weather

I thought the hot, dry season would last through May, but I was wrong. We have had several showers and the other day there was a big storm, with lots of wind blowing the dust around before the rain. There were big storm clouds with lightning and thunder. It was very dramatic storm with a good downpour of rain. The path in front of my house turned into a little stream. Unfortunately, I have discovered drainage problems with my new wall around the courtyard. I had to wade through about 3 inches of water to get to my gate. My friend Prosper and his friend Basolé saw what had happened and made a drain hole at the base of the wall that pretty much solved the problem. They even found a rock about the right size to close off the hole to keep out snakes, which people worry about here. Since then we have had another big downpour and one night with a gentle rain that lasted for hours. There were only a few puddles n the courtyard. Prosper says he will find some dirt to fill them in because you do not want puddles during the rainy season as mosquito breeding grounds.

When it rains, things cool off temporarily, but it often returns to the 100 degree mark shortly after the rain stops. Other days there may be cloud cover and highs in the low 90s. I am not sure how long these rains will last. I think they will be pretty irregular for a while. People do not start working in the fields for a while yet, and I understand you have to time the planting of your crops so that there is rain consistently when you do plant your seeds. Since the rain has started the weeds growing, however, and there is a carpet of green in each low lying area. The sheep, goats and pigs are happy to have fresh shoots to munch on.

Trees in the dry season

In the fall some of the trees lost their leaves and I had expected most of them, except for the mango, to follow suit. Wrong again. Most of the trees not only kept their leaves, but grew lots of new shoots where folks had cut off branches for building and fire wood. The ones that did lose their leaves started to put out flowers and then seeds in the middle of the hot, dry season. Before the rain began most of the trees had put out leaves again. I don’t know how they can be growing with no rain. I had expected them to be dormant until the rain started. They must have tremendously deep roots to get the water they need to grow like this.

Other odds and ends

Traffic

I live rather close to a major highway. It is a paved, two lane road between two big towns. The locals ride bicycles and motos on it, but I even get off my bicycle to cross it. Most of the traffic consists of busses going between the two towns, bush taxies, big trucks transporting gas, wood for cooking, or other products, and some private cars. You can often stand at the road, look both ways, and see nothing but bike and moto traffic, but when the trucks and busses come, they fly by. The drivers, especially of the busses, love to use their horns, which are loud and may play a tune instead of just beeping. All this is fine if they are letting bikes and motos know they are coming and another vehicle is coming toward them, so get off the road. Most beep at anybody they see on the road. This is not so bad during the day, but it goes on all night, too. I am a good sleeper, but sometimes it takes a while to go to sleep because of the sudden sharp sounds of the horns.

Bicycles

Most of the bicycles here are simple single speed bikes, although you occasionally see a three speed or a 10 speed. It is amazing what people carry on bicycles. You may see baskets of goats with their feet tied together on the way to market, or chickens hanging from the handle bars. More often than not the women have babies on their backs and something balanced on their heads. The men often have huge loads of boxes, bags, or lumber, tied on with stretchy black bands made from old inner tubes. I brought bungee cords with me, but these black bands work much better. You stretch them tight and easily adjust them to any size load. Some people have baskets on the front of their bikes, but I have not been able to get one because my mountain bike has a bigger frame than the local ones and I have not found anyone who knows how to put one on for me.

Bicycles are often used for fetching water in the plastic jerrycans I showed you in a previous blog. A couple of these make a pretty heavy load, and it is not surprising the bicycles break down pretty often. It is rare for me to ride into town without seeing someone replacing the chin that has slipped off their bike. Peddles tend to get broken and fall off, and tires go flat. Because bikes are the main means of transportation here, there are a lot of places to get help if you have a flat tire or just need some air. New peddles and new seats are on display at boutiques all along the road.

Cadeau? Cadeau?

When I am riding my bicycle kids tend to chase me and try to keep up for a while. Some are really good runners. The ones that bother me are the ones who catch hold of the luggage rack on the back of my bike, or my back pack that is strapped to it, and either pull or push. I don’t have great balance, so when they do this, I put on the brakes (which takes them by surprise) and chew them out. Most of the kids along my regular route have figured out that I don’t like it and leave it at yelling “nassara, pas de cadeau,” that is, “foreigner, no present?” I guess tourists sometimes respond to this phrase by giving small coins or candy, but I have a strict policy of “pas de cadeau” because if I start giving things to kids (or adults who often ask the same thing) it will never end. I am not here to give physical gifts, but, hopefully, the gift of knowledge. I also think that this may be the only French phrase kids know. They see a foreigner and figure they will not understand the local language, so yell the only French phrase they know. I am trying to teach them some other things to say, by following “pas de cadeau” with some other French greetings. We shall see if I have made any progress on that front after two years.

Update on my work here

When I asked people why girls do not finish school here, one reason everybody gave was “undesired pregnancy.” I also found that, in the Burkinabè culture, people don’t talk about sex. Because of the cultural taboo, it is hard for parents to talk to their children about sexuality including talking about avoiding unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Even with America’s openness about with sex, I think it is hard for parents to start this kind of discussion.

In January we had two weeks of in-service training. For three days a counterpart of our choice joined us for the discussions. I invited the Inspector for the schools in my area to come and together we decided the problem of unwanted pregnancy would be a good problem to take on. He told me that the school curriculum did not address issues of sexuality until the equivalent of 10th grade, which is much too late for many girls. First of all, only the brightest and most motivated get that far in school. Second, many unwanted pregnancies are among girls in late primary school or early junior high. I thought meetings with mothers and daughters in the last year of primary school, giving some basics to get the conversation started, would be a good place to begin. When I got back to my village I talked to the people at the maternity clinic (where I go twice a week to help weigh babies) and they told me that sage femme (the midwife), was the person to talk to about sex education and AIDS prevention. She was enthusiastic and happy to help.

I needed a local person for several reasons. First of all, my French is only so-so and all I can do in the local language is give greetings and make people laugh at my attempts. Many of the parents have not been to school and do not understand French, so someone to translate ideas into Moore was important. Also, a goal of all our projects is to make them self-sustaining. By having a Burkinabè counterpart work with me on this, my hope is that a sex education program for the schools may continue after I leave, with the schools and the maternity center working out the plan.

One of the things we got at the in-service training was a kit to help with AIDS prevention education, including a flip book of pictures, a supply of male condoms, and a wood model of the male sex organ for demonstrations (thanks to USAID). The pictures are quite graphic and the wood penis is a bit shocking for people who don’t even talk about sex.

I wanted to start with the primary school that is in the center of town. I talked to the Director (principal) of the school and he seemed a bit reluctant, but willing to think about the idea. We decided the thing to do was to have a meeting with the officers of the parent’s associations and see what they thought. After introductions, we began the meeting with me giving the general idea in French. I asked my counterpart to translate that and she took off and did the whole presentation in Moore. I just made a few comments to show how graphic the materials are and to do the condom demonstration. I did not understand most of what she said, but I did get the discussion about the fact that Islam and the Catholic Church agree that people should be abstinent before marriage and disapprove of condoms. I was really glad that on my list of things we would talk about I had put abstinence as the first way to avoid unwanted pregnancy. We all agree that would be best, but the reality of teen pregnancy is pretty clear and if kids are going to break one tenant of your religion (no sex before marriage) isn’t it better for them to break the other (no condom use) and not only avoid unwanted pregnancy but also protect themselves from AIDS?

The bottom line was that the parents decided it would be OK to have this program for the girls, with me and my counterpart, but they thought a man should talk to the boys. We began with the girls and so far have had programs at two primary schools and one junior high school with a total of 145 girls and 24 mothers attending. I should explain that, while I am calling it junior high, it is really the 7th through 10th year of school. On the attendance list for the junior high I asked for ages and they ranged from12 to 22, so it is not like a junior high in the US. The midwife and I have dates to talk at another primary school, the other junior high, and the Lycée, which combines junior high and high school on the same campus. Here are a couple of pictures, one of me talking to the students and one of me and the midwife. After the presentation we have a little question and answer session in which we use the rough sketches you see behind us.

I asked the head of the health service here is he would find a man to work with me, but when I first approached him he had just arrived in town and did not know his staff. A week or so ago I asked him again and he drafted one of the men who works for him who is the equivalent of a practical nurse. I thought he might just do the presentation without me, but he wanted me there, which was fine. We have done one program so far, at a primary school, and it did not seem to bother the boys that I was present. I hope we can get to the boys in all the schools before the summer vacation. In addition to the information on HIV/AIDS, we hope to give the boys the message that they are responsible for any children they father and they should avoid having that burden, but I am not sure they get it. Culturally, it is up to the girl to deal with it if she is having a baby. Maybe the HIV piece will encourage condom use and have some effect on the undesired pregnancy problem. I am sure a soap opera I described before, including these themes, will be much more effective than my little presentation, but something is better than nothing.

People here actually have heard quite a bit about HIV/AIDS and the official figures show a less than 2% incidence. There are people here living with HIV, and even special programs about respecting the rights of people living with HIV. There are special scholarships for children affected by HIV/AIDS because of the loss of one or both parents, or loss of income for the family because of the illness. There have been major educational efforts on radio and TV, and in posters you may see from time to time, to educate people about using protection to stay healthy. There was a program for students in the fall at the Lycée and the junior high schools, allowing them to have a blood test and getting a report about their HIV status. So, they know about it. Will they protect themselves? I can only give them the information and hope it encourages behavior to protect themselves.

How people dress here

Here is a picture of a gardening group who had a celebration of the success of their onion preservation project (in the building behind them). It shows people in many of the kinds of clothing I will describe below.

Clothing for women

As I have mentioned before, the standard clothing for women is a top and matching wrap around skirt that is called a pagne. A pagne is defined as a loin cloth in the French-English dictionary, but here it means a piece of 45 inch material about 2 yards long that you simply wrap around your waist. A good example is the lady in the front row, on the right, with the long sleeved striped t-shirt. I have not got the hang of it and the picture in an earlier blog of me in a pagne is a “cheater” that has strings on each end of the cloth that you can tie to keep it up. Often women keep coins wrapped up in the end they tuck into the waist. When they make change or buy something they essentially start to take off their skirts. Usually they have a couple of pagnes on so it is not a big embarrassment. Tops are either very close fitting, with a zipper up the back, or very loose, to serve as a maternity and nursing top. These are worn by women of all ages and often slip off one shoulder, as in the picture below:

The fabrics are very colorful, with big designs on them. Sometimes the pattern in the cloth is ignored and heavy embroidery designs are sewed around the neck and down the front, as well as on the sleeves and bottom of the pagne. Another kind of decoration is done with bias tape, as on the one I am wearing in the picture. There is another example in the back row, left side, of the first picture.

Shoes

Check out the feet of the women in the photo. The standard foot wear is plain plastic flip-flops. Some are made of leather and have a decoration on the part that goes between the toes, and may have a slight wedgie type heel. Occasionally people go bare footed, but there have been big campaigns to teach people the dangers of hook worms and other parasites you can pick up walking around without shoes when there is animal dung all over the ground, as there is here.

Women’s head wear

Women almost all wear pieces of cloth tied around their heads, as you see in the photos. Often this is a scarf or a piece of the same material the rest of the outfit is made of. The Muslim women may wear another style of scarf that wraps under the chin and covers all the head and shoulders. That is not a sure sign of one’s religion, however, because I have seen Catholic women wear them, too (none in the picture, however).

Clothing for men

There are examples of most of the following in the top photo as well. Men, especially those who are not simply farmers, often wear European style pants, shirts and shoes. Neck ties are not often seen in a village like mine, although you might see them in a big city. My language tutor stopped by the other day with two neck ties and asked me to show him how to tie them. The choir director had decided he wanted the men to be wearing ties for a special occasion and he (and I expect his friends) did not know how to knot them. More traditional clothing for men looks a bit like pajamas—at top and pants made out of the same kind of material as women’s clothes. The tops are somewhat like a caftan, but not so long. There are several men in the back row dressed in these outfits but it is a bit hard to tell because you can’t see their legs. Most men wear flip-flops, even if they have on European style shirts and pants, but some wear European style shoes, too.

Head covering for men

Muslim men wear some kind of head cover, too. Some look a bit like a big Jewish yamaca, but most are more like a pillbox hat. Check out the guy on the extreme right side of the photo. They are sometimes quite fancy, crocheted or covered with embroidery. Men may also wear base ball caps or traditional woven hats that are kind of cone shaped, to keep the sun off in the hot weather. Here is a picture of one, on the head of my language tutor.

School clothes

In primary school the kids wear whatever they have. Some look like they are ready to go to church or a party and others look like they are dressed in rags they picked up off the side of the road. Foot wear is almost always flip-flops.

In the secondary schools, students are supposed to wear uniforms, which may be different for different schools in the big cities. Here they are all kaki so that, if you go to college (middle school) in one of the private schools, your uniforms will still be good when you go to the Lycée (last three years of high school). The shirts for boys and girls are about the same, short sleeved European style shirts. Boys wear pants, and the girls usually wear long, straight skirts, but a few wear pants, like the boys. Here is a picture of some of the girls in my girls’ club. The two on the right are in uniform. The extreme right one is wearing the school t-shirt and typical skirt, and the other is wearing the shirt and pants style uniform. The other two girls have on more European style clothes. Again the overwhelming majority of students wear flip-flops for their foot wear.

Making clothes

By the way, the term pagne can also refer to a measure of cloth. When you go to the marché, you buy on one, two, or three pagne piece of material. Then you take that to your tailor and explain the kind of outfit you want. You may point to a picture on the wall that is similar to what you have in mind, or you can draw a picture. The tailor takes your measurements and, without a pattern, just cuts it out and sews it up. I have found that I sometimes have to go back a couple of times for them to get things right. For example, women do not generally ask for pockets in things and I insist on pockets in skirts and dresses. I also have had to make them change the location of darts in dresses but, in general, they do an amazing job cutting things out “free hand” and sewing them up. It reminds me of the costume makers in the theater whom I have seen do the same thing. Tailors tend to have big seam allowances so it is easy to let things out if they are too tight. Better to make things too big and take them in than to lack material if they are too small.

Eating here

People have asked me what I find to eat here. Actually about half my meals are made from things I buy at the marché or boutique (a tiny store with a few basic supplies). My town has a marché every three days. At the marché I can find peanut butter, and, depending on the season, fresh fruit and vegetables. At the moment there are lots of tomatoes and onions, and also a bit of okra, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers and lettuce, but things in the latter group may or may not be available on any given day. At one point I could get what they call sweet potatoes. They taste just about like American potatoes. The flesh is white, but a bit fibrous. You buy the already cooked and people eat them as a snack. I could make hash browns and mashed potatoes with them. I have not seen any for the last couple of months. There were bananas but they have not been available for quite a while. The only fruit currently available are mangoes. Apparently there are several types of mangoes. The ones in season now are small, about the size of your fist. They start out green on the tree, but turn yellow and are soft when they are ripe. You squish then in their skins, cut off an end, and suck out the juice. Actually, I like to cut them open, squeeze the pulp and juiceinto a bowl, and eat it like apple sauce. It is really sweet and I am beginning to like the taste.

Meat

Another thing I have learned is that, if I get to the guy cooking up goat meat and other animal parts on his grill early enough, I can buy a raw piece of goat leg without the other stuff. I have to cut the meat away from all the ligaments and fat, but when I do that, it is just plain meat and makes a good meal. I sometimes fry up little pieces and put them in a sandwich of local bread. What I usually do is fry up some onions with the meat, and then add water and rice with some American herbs and let it cook until the rice is soft. On market days there is a guy who cooks up a pig, if he can find someone willing to sell him one. I can buy a small sack of just plain pork (no organs, intestines full of blood, or brains) and use that in sandwiches or with couscous or rice.

Cooking

Here are a couple of pictures of my kitchen. First you will notice this used to be a house with running water, but years ago all the plumbing was ripped out. I have a sink, but the water would drain onto the floor if I did not put a bowl under there to catch it. The water for washing dishes and cooking is in the two buckets, one in the sink and one on the floor. I add a capful of bleach to each bucket to kill off any bugs that have escaped the local water treatment efforts. The cloth over each bucket is to keep out the dust.

The stove is a three burner gas stove that is hooked to that blue gas tank under the shelf. You see my two favorite pans, a no-stick frying pan from the US and my one pan with a handle. Next to the stove is the Burkina Faso Peace Corps Cookbook, called “Where There Is No Microwave,” full of helpful hints from past volunteers.

The next picture shows the rest of the kitchen. Except for some herbs and spices, everything was bought here. There is a big can of powdered milk, iodized salt (that you have to search for), a kind of oleo that stays solid at 100 degrees (called Blue Band), oil, and vinegar. On the bottom shelves are the rest of the nested set of pans, none with handles, and some miscellaneous cooking things.

Bread/sandwiches

There are a number of folks who bake “local bread” in what you might call a stone oven, although these are built of the mud bricks you use to build house. I never am sure who will be baking on any given day, but there are a couple of places that usually have bread. Mostly they bake it in these small, long skinny loaves that are just about the right size for one sandwich, but a bit hard to stuff. Here is a picture of a loaf on my small cutting board with a mug, match box, and kitchen tools to show the size.

In addition to the meat sandwiches I have mentioned above I like omelet sandwiches when I can get eggs. At the moment eggs are not available. When there is not much food, the chickens and guinea hens stop laying eggs. Another reminder of home is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The local peanut butter is just plain ground up peanuts. I like to add a bit of salt before I use it for sandwiches. The jelly is something I get when I am in Ouagadougou. There are a couple of stores that cater to Europeans and American and you may be able to find all sorts of French food items there. You never know what they will have in stock, so you can’t go with your heart set on a particular item or you may be disappointed.

Freeze dried food

When I was sick and losing weight last fall the doctor suggested I try to find ways to eat food I am accustomed to. One of the things Janet and family brought to me in their three suitcases full of goodies were the freeze dried back packer’s meals. They are pretty expensive, I guess, but good for a change of pace. Another thing my daughters have sent in care package boxes is something I never even knew existed in the states, past sides. They are some kind of pasta with sauce ingredients all together in a packet. You just add the packet to a couple of cups of water (with powdered milk) and you have a really American tasting meal (actually two meals).

Sweets

There is not much here in the village in the way of sweets. Desert after a meal is not a concept. There are hard candies, but that is about it for sweets. In my food supply boxes from home I get my favorite kind of sweet and salty granola nut bars. I have to ration them so as not to eat the while box at once.

Soft drinks

Coke is here! (Pepsi is not.) While I can by Coke, Fanta, or Sprite with no problem, warm soft drinks are not too refreshing. I can get a cool (not cold) half liter one for about a dollar, but what I drink most is Kool-Aid pink lemonade (again from home). I can buy sugar here and mix up a half a package at a time in the Nalgene bottle you see below, next to my canari (desert cooler).

The canari is a clay pot sitting in a pan of sand. You put water in the pot and it seeps out through the clay. As it evaporates the water in the pot gets cooler than the outside air. It can be as much as 30 degrees cooler than the outside air. A drink that is 70 degrees tastes pretty good when the room temperature is 100!

Next to the canari is they kind of pot the Burkinabè use for cooking all their food. I will be using it to make a Dutch Oven that is explained in “where There Is No Microwave.” I have yet to try it out, but I will tell you about it when I do.

Power where there is no power

When my Burkinabè son saw me studying with LED flashlights at night he told me I needed to get a battery and small florescent light. I knew people sometimes use car batteries for such things, but it seemed to me that, if I bought one, it would be hard to take it to a place to get it charged. He explained that there was a smaller one that would work and that, if I bought one, he would happily charge for me with his solar panel. All I would need to do is let him know when it needed charging and he would send one of his girls over to pick it up in the morning and return it in the evening. We went shopping and got the battery and light, which you can see in the pictures below. The battery also works well for charging my cell phone, which you can see happening on the table.

Beating the heat

Yes, it does get hot here. Most days since the middle of March it has been about 100 degrees in the middle of the day. One of the other things that the battery can run is this little fan. It actually puts out a fair breeze.

If I am really hot and want to get cooled off I use the squirt bottle you see next to it to get my face wet and let the fan evaporate the water. It gets almost cold, which is surprising when it is 100 degrees in the house! Another trick I heard about is getting pagne wet and putting it over you. The first time I tried it I was really surprised how cool this is. If I want to take a nap after lunch, as most Burkinabè do, this is a great way to get comfortable. A small cloth dipped in water and waved in the air for a few seconds is also pretty refreshing on the face.

The best thing, however, is putting a long sleeved blouse in a bucket of water, wring it out and putting it on. I call this trick my village air conditioning system. I dip the long sleeved shirt you see on the chair in water every 20 minutes or so. By the evening my t-shirt or blouse is wet and cool, and I think, this is a pretty comfortable temperature. But if I stop wetting to top layer I am suddenly hot again. I was really worried about getting through the hot season, but for now, these things are making it quite bearable. The heat lasts through May, however, so this is just the beginning.

Sleeping

First of all, here is the bed I normally sleep it. You saw a corner of the mosquito net in the pictures showing water damage before and after painting. The mosquito net was supposed to hang from the pieces of wood you see at each corner of the bed. I felt a bit confined by the thing and decided to suspend it from the ceiling.

I had to get two mattresses for the bed because, with only one, I felt the bed slats. I think of it as a box spring and mattress set without the springs. I do always sleep under the mosquito net even though I have not seen a mosquito in my village since the end of the rainy season. Even though I take anti malaria medication I am told there will be malaria in my system when I leave here. Less is better than more, however, and mosquito bites are itchy.

Sleeping out under the stars

When it is 100 degrees or more in the house at bed time and cooler outdoors, I am glad I bought this screen tent and 4 inch think self inflating sleeping pad. The stripped thing on the sleeping pad is beach towel that I put on there to absorb the sweat. Sometimes in the middle of the night it is cool enough that crawl under it and use it as a light blanket instead.

The Moon

Shortly after I arrived I glanced out one of the windows after dark and the thought “How can there be street lights out there? There is no electricity here!” flashed through my mind. Of course that was just the instant reaction, but I was surprised at how much light there is from a full moon. It is quite possible to walk around outdoors and pretty well see where you are going, although I am not likely to try to ride my bike by moon light.

And stars

When I am sleeping outside and the moon is not up, I can see lots of stars. The constellations, of course, are displaced compared to where I am used to seeing them at home, but the familiar ones are there. (No, I don’t think you can see the Southern Cross from here.) When the moon is full, you can hardly see any stars at all. All of this may not be surprising to those of you who camp out a lot, but as a long time city dweller it is something I had not realized before.

The yard

You will notice that the screen tent is sitting on bare ground. That is the way you keep a tidy courtyard here. You chop out any plants that try to grow there with a daba, a hand held hoe. Then people sweep their courtyards every day, to gather all the trash they have dropped around during the day. I have hired one of the village women to wash my clothes for me and, when she comes, she sweeps the yard, too. That gets up all the leaves and makes it look like a good Burkinabè yard.

More about my house

I told you a bit about my house, but I thought you might be interested in seeing some pictures of the interior. I am not allowed to post pictures of the exterior as a matter of security, but I think the inside is more interesting anyway. First, here is a picture of me in my living room.

There are several things to notice here.

Chairs

The chairs are referred to here as village chairs. They are made of tree branches, goat hide, and metal wire. They are very cheap, the equivalent of about $3.00 each. In normal use, being hauled to and from the courtyard every day, getting caught in the rain, and so on, they may last a few months or a year. I am hoping these will last for my two years here. I found the seats a bit hard for sitting and asked my Burkinabè daughter in law where I could find some cushion stuffing. A couple of days later she showed up with the blue cushion I am sitting on which is a cover over a piece of foam rubber. At Christmas, when my family and we did a run to the big marché, I was able to buy a chunk of foam to use for making cushions. I had some left over pieces of material from dresses I had made for me at the tailor (there will be another blog about clothes) and I used them to make the covers you see behind me and on the other chair.

Table

The little table is lucky to be here. When I had my first termite attack it was sitting in the corner behind were I am sitting. I had lined up my books on it against the wall and thought it was a great idea until I noticed one day that there appeared to be mud on the top of several of them. I looked closer and found that they were termite tunnels. I knocked the tunnels off and put insecticide all over that side of the room. Before I noticed the tunnels the termites had eaten the margin of my Intermediate French Review book, and a track across the top of this table. They only got through the first layer of the plywood so it is still serviceable. On the table is also a copy of that great picture of my family some of you have seen in my office or on the wall in my living room at home. It is a great conversation piece and reminds me of home. The whisky bottle is filled with peanuts and a gift from my Burkinabè daughter in law.

Water storage

Behind me in the picture are the things in which I store water. About every 10 days I get 200 liters of water. The daughter of my community homologue comes with the donkey cart and a 200 liter barrel filled with water from the town water supply. I understand that it has received some treatment and is much safer to drink than water from open wells, but I still treat it. Below is a picture of the things I store water in. There is a big 100 liter garbage can, four jugs that hold about 22 liters each, and a few buckets for what won’t fit in the other containers.

Water treatment

Even though the water is supposed to have been treated I don’t trust it. Here is a picture of my water filter.

You put the water in the top bucket and it slowly drains into the bottom one through a filter. I add Eau de Javel (bleach) to the bottom bucket and the water tastes like it came out of the faucet in Cleveland. Now I also put Eau de Javel in all the water I use to wash dishes and rinse vegetables, etc. I had an attack of giardia back in November and I am pretty sure it was from not putting the bleach in the water I use for dishes and such. I have always soaked vegetables in bleach treated water as soon as I bring them into the house. However if I leave tomatoes on the counter after that, they get dusty. I think I rinsed some off with untreated water and the rest is history. Ugh! Not fun.

Other stuff in the living room

The picture above shows my book case with one of the wall hangings from the handicapped gift shop I mentioned before, and a small drum that is decorative but makes a good sound. I will try to bring it home if the termites don’t get it before I leave. The book case if full of paperbacks from the “library” at the transit house. I am really grateful to have a place where I can get books to occupy my time where there is no work to be done. Every time I visit Ouaga I have a half a dozen books to return and come back with more. On top of the book case are two bronze bookends that my family bought for me at Christmas. They are a boy and a girl reading books. Next to them you see my substitute for a fly swatter. When flies get into the house (every time you open the door) they tend to end up on the screen doors. I have found it very efficient to take that piece of cloth, trap them between it and the screen, and squish them. It is much easier than trying to swat them and saves the screen, I think.

A couple more pictures

Above is another wall hanging from the gift shop I have mentioned,

This last picture shows a piece of hand weaving that I also use as a wall decoration. I actually wore it as a pagna at our in-service training when I first bought it and I think I stretched it out, so it looks like it is hanging crooked. I still like it. Also notice the bicycle in the livingroom. My neighbors would have a fit if I tried to leave it in my courtyard over night. Someone might steal it!

Bicycles

In the Peace Corps all volunteers get bicycles to use for transportation. When my daughter, Janet, was a volunteer in Mali, the country next door to Burkina Faso, she had a moto. A few years ago the Peace Corps decided that motos were a bad idea because so many volunteers were injured in moto accidents. Now you need special permission to even ride as a passenger on a moto, and no one is permitted to drive one. You get approved only for riding on dirt roads and you have to wear a helmet. Riding a moto without a helmet is an automatic ticket home. All of that is fine with me. I was given moto privileges and a helmet, because for one of my projects I need to visit some villages that are far away. With luck I will travel in a car with someone from the association I am working with and will never have to use the moto privileges.

Moto dangers

The other volunteer in our group who is about my age (I think she is about 2 months younger) was riding her bicycle and was hit by a moto. She is still recovering from a fractured ankle. I heard about a teacher at the International School of Ouagadougou who was in a moto accident and seriously injured. He has been in medical care in the US for the past 6 months. The son of the Inspector of schools in my village (essentially the supervisor of all the schools in the school district) was in a moto accident that broke his jaw. He was in the hospital for quite a while with his jaw wired shut. When I come back from a trip to Ouaga and am carrying a back pack full of food items you can only get in the big city, I am grateful that my Burkinabè son rides down on his moto to meet me and help me carry stuff home., but I am also glad I go back home on my bicycle.

PC Bicycles

The bicycles we were given here are wonderful. Here is a picture of mine. They are 24 speed mountain bikes, although I generally keep the left set of gears (with a range of 1-3) set on 2 and use only 1 to 8 with the right set. It is surprising to me how much I change gears when my eye says there is not much difference in the lay of the land. It looks like a pretty flat ride, but sometimes there is a little uphill grade and I shift down to 3 or 4, and then there is a slight downhill grade and I shift up to 8 so I get some effect from peddling. I am getting to know the road from my house into the village and am no longer surprised when I find I want to change gears. Near my house I shift down to 4 or 5 on the way into town, and up to 8 on the way home and “go like the wind.” If it were not for the fact that I change gears all the time I would say the land here is quite flat.

Biking in Ouaga

When I visit the capital city, Ouagadougou, I leave my bicycle in the village and use a “community bike” (an old, reconditioned Peace Corps bike) that is more like the single speed ones the locals have to ride. When I ride around Ouaga I really miss my gears! I should explain that the Peace Corps headquarters and the Transit House, where volunteers can stay when they are in town, are in a quiet residential district where bicycle riding is safe. I do not ride on the busy paved roads such as you saw in my picture of road traffic, although there are lots of Burkinabè who do.

Transit House

The Transit House is a large house in Ouagadougou where volunteers can stay when they are in town. It costs the equivalent of about $7.00 a night to stay there, and there is a kitchen so you can cook meals, as well as hot water in the showers. When I arrived in Burkina Faso a number of people told me I would not want to stay at the Transit House when I was in Ouaga but would want to go to a small hotel nearby. They warned me it was dirty and noisy, with a fraternity house kind of atmosphere. It turns out I really like staying there. First of all, there are several rooms with bunk beds, but most volunteers sleep on mattresses on a big screened in porch. There are ceiling fans and lights so it is the best of all possible sleeping arrangements short of an expensive, fancy hotel with air conditioning. When it gets really hot I may opt for that choice, but for the moment sleeping on that porch is about my favorite thing about visiting the capital. It is true that it can get a bit noisy when all 28 “beds” are occupied, but I am a good sleeper and have not had any trouble sleeping yet. As I have often said, sleeping is one of those things I do really well!

The chance to meet and get to know other volunteers is a thing I also get out of a visit there. All of the volunteers are interesting people, with amazing life stories and skills they are happy to share with you. Many of the younger volunteers do like to take advantage of being away from their sites to do a little partying, but I just say no thanks to invitations to go bar hopping and find other people who also prefer a more quite evening. I even found a volunteer who likes to play cribbage, so I sometimes get my cribbage fix. If I were staying alone at a hotel I would never have the chance to get to know these folks and hear their stories. I also learn about what other volunteers are doing at their sites, learn from them, and get ideas of things I can do.

For example, one of the men, who is about 28, worked for 7 years for a law office doing data crunching and designing ways to present data for court cases. He is an Excel wizard and his job here is with an organization that gives loans to small businesses. Among the other things he does he is showing that organization how to make use of Excel, and he is a terrific resource when I have a question about how to use it with the organization I am working with.

More about babies

I am still going to the maternity center two mornings a week, when I don’t have other things scheduled at the time, to help with weighting the babies. Since January they have changed the routine a bit, and I also understand things a bit better, so here is the story. When a woman comes to the maternity center for pre-natal consultation she gets a little blue book which she brings with her each time. It contains a record of all the consultations before the birth. After the birth there are sections that get filled out about the baby: name, birth date, birth weight, date of polio vaccine, and so on. Babies get the polio vaccine shortly after they are born.

Mothers are supposed to bring the babies in once a month, especially the first, second and third month, in order to get the series of baby shots. I am not sure what all is in the mix, but I expect diphtheria, tetanus, measles, and so on, just as in the states. The problem is that most of the mothers are illiterate and don’t know how to read their appointment date. They also may not have a calendar or know what day it is. This results in mothers showing up too soon for the second or third shot, or, on the other hand, not coming back for 3 or 4 months. On the baby days the mothers arrive with babies on their backs and sit around on wood benches in the waiting area until the staff finally get there and get set up (West Africa International Time, WAIT). There are often mothers there by 8:00 and we often do not get started until 9 or 9:30. Last week the vaccine did not arrive until 10:00.

The baby weighing routine

In theory I could do this alone, but most of the mothers do not speak French and I don’t speak enough Moore to be able to explain things to them, so there is always another woman there with me. The mother comes into the room and hands her book to me or the other woman working there. We check to see if it is time for the baby to be there and, if it is, we find the baby in a record book and find his or her record card. Mother strips off the clothes and puts the baby on the baby scale. In taking the baby off her back and stripping off the clothes, most of the time she holds the baby up in the air by one arm, just the way we were taught NOT to do it for fear of dislocating the baby’s shoulder. At first I found it alarming, and I still cringe when I see it, but the babies seem to do just fine. After we record the weight, we measure the length by having the mother hold the baby’s head at the top of a plastic gizmo that is about 3 feet long. The baby is lying on her back with her mother holding her chin to keep her head at the top of the gizmo, and I grab the poor little thing’s feet and slide a plastic plate up against the soles of her feet. Most of the babies don’t like this too much, although if I am quick we can sometimes measure the length before the baby starts to scream.

Malnutrition

We then check a chart to see how the baby is doing. The options are better that 100%, 85%, 80%, 75% and so on. I think the 100% means how much a child that length should weigh. When you get a baby at less that 75% the nurse I am helping explains to the mother that there is a problem and refers her to the head nurse for a consultation. I assume in really bad cases they refer the family to the center for malnourished children, up the road. On average we see 25 to 45 babies each day, and there are usually two or three who need consultation. Sometimes it is clear as soon as you see the baby on the mother’s back that there is a problem. Other times the baby looks OK until his clothes are off, and then you see the skinny little arms and legs and know the child is not getting proper nutrition.

Kick Polio out of Africa

I mentioned the polio vaccine. It turns out that polio it is still a problem in this country and I believe in all of Africa. In November there was a big campaign to get all kids vaccinated, with the slogan “Kick Polio out of Africa.” There is another one coming up this month. They want to vaccinate every child under 5, and I think there are plenty who do not ever come in for immunizations. The other day I met one of the women from the maternity center and a man from the health service on the road wearing vests with the Kick Polio out of Africa slogan, complete with a soccer player kicking a soccer ball. They were doing a door to door (or courtyard to courtyard) trek around the village, looking for unvaccinated kids.

Evidence of polio

Everywhere I have been in Burkina you see people riding adult sized tricycle-type carts that they peddle by hand. The chain to move the bike is attached to peddles that are in front of the rider as he or she sits in the three wheeled cart. You see people in them on the busy streets and even going down the highway. There are homes for handicapped where people are trained in handicrafts and in my town there is a gift shop that is operated by the handicapped association where they sell their products. When the Pershings were here they bought some of their souvenirs there and I have bought a couple of wall hangings from them to decorate my living room.

Sex Ed for 6th graders

When I started to ask people why girls do not finish high school, one of the common responses was unplanned pregnancy. I have learned that Burkinabè do not talk about sex, even with their spouses. There is no sex education in the schools and the first encounter student have with sexual information is 10th grade biology. That apparently is too late for many girls. In a meeting I had with officers from the parent’s association and the mothers association, one of the suggestions from the mothers was to have a program for mothers and girls about sex and how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. I thought it was a great idea. At our in-service training we received a sex education kit from the Peace Corps. It is designed as an HIV prevention kit, but you can use it to cover any aspect of sexuality. Because of my connections at the maternity center it was easy to find the perfect person to help me with this project. She is a retired mid-wife who has seen too many young girls having babies and is very enthusiastic about this project.

We will first of all explain what menstruation is. Apparently many girls begin to have their periods without having any idea of what is happening to them, and they are terrified. Next we will explain how to avoid unplanned pregnancy. Abstinence, of course is the first method we will discuss, and it is the only sure fire way of course. We will do a demonstration of condoms and how to use them, using a wooden model of the male sex organ, and then explain other forms of contraception. Finally we will talk about HIV infection and how the use of a condom can prevent transmission. My counterpart, the retired mid wife, is fluent in French and in Moore and I expect I will not get to say much, which is fine with me. It is better coming from a Burkinabè than from me! We shall see how it goes. I hope this will become a tradition that continues in these schools after I leave the country.

My House

In the middle of August there was the Peace Corps placement ceremony where I received an envelope to find out where I would be for the next two years. I was somewhat surprised to read that I would have a small two bedroom house with a living room/ kitchen and indoor “shower” in a small town with electricity and running water. When I arrived, I found that was NOT the case at all. In fact I am in a small village next to that small town. There is no electricity or running water in this village but the house is bigger than advertised. It clearly used to have running water because there is a small kitchen with a sink and the stub of a water pipe. The hole in the sink, however, would drain onto the floor if I did not have a big bowl under it. In the indoor bathroom there is a nice shower stall, again with the remains of a water pipe, but no water. From marks on the floor you can see that there used to be a sink and a toilet. In fact the water tank for the toilet is still hanging up on the wall, overheard, as in old fashioned toilets you may have seen in old houses. In addition there are three bedrooms, not two. There is way more space than I need, but I am not complaining. It is good for having company.

One thing the community must do when asking for a volunteer is to agree to provide free housing. Volunteers really don’t have much choice about where they are going to live. There are, however, several Peace Corps regulations about houses provided to the volunteers. They must not have bats, and they must have a private latrine and shower, a hangar or other shady place, and be in a courtyard, surrounded by a wall. Here people live mostly outdoors, so the courtyard is their living room, dining room and kitchen and you need a wall so you are not living “on the street”. As you have read, I had bats. There was a private latrine and shower for my house, but no walled courtyard and no hangar. Gradually all of those things have been corrected so there are no bats and I have a wall and a hangar for shade.

When I first looked at the inside the house I thought it was filthy. After careful examination I discovered that it was not dirty, but that people had scrubbed the walls clean and in the process they had removed the paint. As a result the concrete walls showed through on all the corners where there had been dirty little finger prints. It still looked like there were the marks of dirty hands, but really it was the result of scrubbing dirt off. Furthermore, there were water marks on most of the walls from rain leaking through the roof and down the walls, picking up bat poop on the way. In a word, it was revolting. Here is a picture of what the water damage looked like. It was like this if all of the rooms in the house.

This house has a tin roof with enough room between it and the walls for a kind of ceiling made out of thin pieces of plywood. Every day I would sweep around the edges of the walls and remove bat droppings and dust that had sifted down from the attic in the night. This continued even after the bats were eliminated. When the Pershings came at Christmas they brought a calking gun and a number s tubes of calk. Jonathan sealed the edges of the ceiling in the living room, kitchen and bathroom, and, later on, I did the bedrooms. It is amazing what a difference that has made. The only thing to sweep up now is the dust that blows in through the windows. In addition to calking, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the Pershing family painted the living room and kitchen. What a difference! Here is the "after" picture of the same wall:

This picture also caught the corner of my mosquito net incase you are wondering what that thing is in the right of the picture. I no longer feel like I am living in slum housing. I have continued the painting project and now all the rooms are finished. I have hung a few decorations on the walls of the living area, and it now feels like a home.

Paint

The paint here is interesting. It comes in 30 liter cans, costing about $22 a can. That is a lot more paint than you could get for $22 in the states! It is very thick and cleans up with plain water. It is easy to wipe up drops of paint that get past the drop cloth, even after they are dry. I used a bowl to put paint in and, when the paint dried on it. I thought it would be a total loss. I left it in a bucket of water over night and the paint slid right off. On the other hand, I will not be able to wash the walls or I will wash off the paint, like when the folks cleaned up my house before I arrived. I am trying very hard not to touch the walls!

Checo

I mentioned that I now have a hangar, which, for my house, is a kind of roof over the “front porch” of the house. It is a frame of tree branches covered with checo (pronounced seko), big mats woven of grass. The checo is used for roofing material in traditional houses, covering for the stalls where people sell things at the market, storage bins for grain, and, of course hangars. After the grain is harvested there are tall grasses (6 feet or so tall) that people go out a collect, then weave into these mats. Here is an example of checo used almost like a wall.

The fact that one layer of checo would not keep the rain off is not an issue since there is never rain this time of year. What you want is shade! If you were using it for the roof of a house you would use several layers and it would only leak a little bit. Almost all the houses in my region have tin roofs but the rooms we stayed in when we went to the animal park at Arly had roofs made of 6 or 8 layers of checo.

My hangar

The hangar was built with branches cut right off the tree, not given any time to dry out. Not surprisingly, the weight of the checo has bent the branches a bit and I had trouble opening my front door. Fortunately my Burkinabè son, Prosper, and one of his friends figured out how to correct the problem. First they stuck other branches up on top of those used originally to raise the roof a bit, but after a week of two, the door was hitting the branches again. The current solution has been to add a new prop to hold the whole thing up. It is a forked branch sitting in a can that used to hold dry milk. We shall see how long that works. It is really great to have someone who takes care of me as if I were his mother!

Weather, again

The weather has been staying pleasantly cool here, low 70s in the mornings and most days no more than 90-95 degrees in the afternoon, although it did reach 100 one day. As long as it cools off at night I will have no complaints. I just remember that my original assignment was supposed to be Mongolia and think about how much I hate to be cold. There it might be -40 degrees right now, so I am happy to be here. Some days there have been real clouds, not just dust in the air, which helps keep it cooler. We actually had about 15 seconds of a shower the other day, a very rare event this time of year. At first I did not believe I was really hearing rain on the roof, but I got outside before it stopped and it was real.

With the hot dry season approaching the trees are blooming and making seeds to put down before they go dormant in the heat. The sweet smell in the air makes me think of spring back home. Leaves are beginning to fall from most of the trees. I understand the Mangos keep their leaves, but most of the other trees drop them in preparation for this time of stress, just like our trees drop them in the fall to get set for winter.

Moringa trees

Speaking of trees, have I told you about moringa trees? These are the miracle trees the Peace Corps is encouraging volunteers to promote with the Burkinabè. They are drought resistant, fast growing trees that have other great virtues. The biggest one is that the leaves contain lots of good things. Here are the statistics:

If you compare100 grams of moringa to 100 grams of these other things you can see how good moringa is

7 times the vitamin C of oranges

4 times the calcium of milk

4 times the vitamin A of carrots

3 times the potassium of bananas

25 grams of leaves a day will give a child the following % of recommended daily allowances: protein 42%

Calcium, 125%

Magnesium 61%

Potassium 41%

Iron 71%

Vitamin A 272%

Vitamin C 22%

The trick is to get the Burkinabè women not to cook them so long that they cook out all of the good stuff. The usual cooking method involves hours of cooking things over a fire to make sauce for the to. You have to get people to add the morenga at the last minute so that people get the nutritional value.

Apparently you water the morenga trees a bit if you want them to keep their leaves all year, but if you want them to go to seed, you have to stop watering them. I have a stash of seeds and I would like to pant them in my courtyard, but I have to do that good old soil preparation and dig big holes first. Me dig the holes? No way in this dirt, but I have a friend who has dug a few for me. Now he is looking for well rotted manure so that there is fertilizer for the seeds. I may get trees planted by the rainy season.

Malnutrition

I have talked before about the malnutrition here and my visit to the center for malnourished babies that is sponsored by the Catholic Church in town. It is actually supported by donations from European countries, mostly from Italy I think, which is the home of the order that founded the church here. When people take babies there for help with nutrition they learn how to make a kind of baby cereal from local ingredients, and one of the recipes uses morenga leaves. Again the secret is not to boil it to death, as the Burkinabè tend to do. With malnourished babies you usually have malnourished mothers as well, so you need to convince the mothers that they need to eat well to provide good breast milk. Another thing I have learned is that mothers often give their very young babies water in addition to breast feeding them. This is a dangerous practice because of the contamination of the water sources here, and also because it fills the baby‘s stomach. Then the baby does not drink as much breast milk, and the mother produces less.

Non Peace Corps Volunteers

I recently encountered a couple of other nasaras (white people, foreigners) riding bicycles down the dirt road that passes my house. I stopped to greet them and find out who they were and what they were up to. She is a French pediatrician, newly retired, who is volunteering at the center for malnourished babies. Her husband is an agriculturist who has been doing some training about farming and also helping with the garden at the medical center.. They have been here for almost two months and this was the first time I had encountered them. They had been riding up and down the highway and finally discovered this safer dirt track. I invited them to my house for lunch Sunday and I was pretty proud of my menu. It was all local food except for the seasonings which Janet had sent me. I get a piece of goat meat, cut out the good bits and fried them up with onions. Then I added water and rice, along with a mixture of herbs of Provence, and it made a yummy casserole type dish. Add to that cooked carrots, local bread, and a lettuce and tomato salad, and it was not a bad lunch if I do say so myself. It was a very pleasant afternoon, but, unfortunately it was their last week here so we will not be getting together again. Too bad. It was good practice for my ear listening to good French, and they were interesting folks.

The pediatrician was talking about some of the things I mentioned above about malnutrition and giving babies water. She also told about the family’s lack of a sense of urgency if a child is sick. One child was brought to the center, so ill it finally died. When she asked how long the child had been sick, the mother said about 7 months. Can you imagine watching a child get sicker and sicker and doing nothing? Maybe they had tried other things, like traditional medicine and had only come to the western medical place as a last resort. Maybe they kept thinking if they gave it enough time the baby would improve. Maybe it was a matter of not having the small amount of money it takes to get medical help. I have no information, but you have to wonder what they were thinking.

Time in Burkina Faso

I am sure you have all heard that the American view of time is different from the view of time in developing countries. I have just had a couple of examples that I will tell you about.

I had an appointment for 9:00 with the director (principal) of an elementary school. I went there on the appointed day at 9:00 and was told by one of the teachers that he had left, and maybe he was over at the health center. I went over there to see if I could find him. They were doing annual physical checkups, with people lined up at various stations, like the eye chart with the Es that face different directions. I didn’t see him in the crowd, but I was explaining to someone who I was looking for and he said, “Oh there he is, just arriving at the school.” I went back over there and the director told me he had received a notice from the Inspector (superintendent of schools) that there would be a meeting that day at 9:00 so we could not meet after all. Come back at 16:00 (4:00 pm). I am sure the teacher who told me he was not there called his cell phone about it and he left his meeting with the Inspector to come tell me we could not meet, or was also late to that meeting.

I arrived at the school at 3:50 and waited around until 4:30. Then I sent him a text saying that I was there and that if this is not a good time, tell me when I could see him. Within 5 minutes he appeared on his moto, shopping bags in hand. He said the meeting at lasted until 1:30. I guess that means he needed to take his 3 hour lunch break late. (Yes there is a 3 hour break in the middle of the school day here, to let the children and teachers go home for lunch and a rest in the heat of the day.)

The second example is even worse. Someone asked me to be somewhere at 8:00 am for a meeting on a particular day and, when she did not show up after 2 hours, I called her. She told me the meeting had been changed to the following day. I had some things I wanted to discuss with her rather than in the meeting with others so she said to be there at 7:20 and we could talk before the meeting. I was there at 7:15 and she arrived at 8:00 so we did not get a chance to talk until afterwards. Another day she and I had a meeting scheduled with a group of girls at the private college (junior high school). She was supposed to stop at my house at 7:00 so we could discuss the plan for the meeting that was to be at 8:00. When she had not arrived by 7:30 I called her and told her I would ride my bike to the school and meet her there. No, no, no, she said, I am on my way. Wait for me. So I waited at my house and she finally arrived at 9:30. We got to the school at 10:00, after I convinced her it would be a good idea to go straight there rather than stopping off to see some folks along the way. We arrived at 10:00 for this 8:00 meeting. I had expected all the girls to have given up and gone home, but there were actually 50 girls sitting around waiting for us. Amazing.

On the other hand, I have had a couple of meetings with a man who spent quite a few years in the US and he has been early for the three meetings we have had. As he says, in the US people say “Time is money.” Think about the value of people’s time in the US considering the salary of each person waiting at a meeting place for someone who is late. It is certainly true that, if you consider the value of their work they could have done in the time they are waiting for late comers, money is being wasted.

I was warned to expect people to be late here and for meetings to be very late in starting, an hour or more not being unusual. What I was not prepared for was people who know they will not be there for a meeting with you who do not bother to let you know about that. It is one window into the cultural differences. This being late for meetings is chronic. I have heard people say they should tell people to get to a meeting an hour before they really want to start. To my way of thinking, that just rewards late comers and makes the problem worse, but it is such an ingrained part of the culture I doubt if I can fight it. I was able to convince my language tutor that if we agreed to meet at 3:00 I expected him to appear at 3:00, not 3:30 or 4. Maybe it is knowing that the job might disappear if he did not conform to that American standard, or maybe he is more westernized, but he is always on time now. It is possible for Burkinabé to arrive when expected, just not the usual custom.

I think I have already mentioned that the same thing happens in church. I arrive at 7:30 and usually the pastor and one or two other people arrive about then. They begin the service and after a half hour or so there are 30 people in the room and the choir has started to trickle in. By 9:00, when the service is almost over, there are probably 60 there. Some of those late comers may actually be arriving early for the next service that is in Moore, but I don’t think so.

One of the reasons things tend to be late here is that people stop along the way to chat with all the people they know. When they arrive, there is the ritual of greeting everybody in the room with good morning, how are you, how is the family, did you sleep well, etc. These ritual greetings are a deeply ingrained part of the culture and people tell me the relationships take precedence over any idea of time. Good thing or bad thing? I am not sure I will adapt to it here. I am sure when I get home I will still be that compulsively prompt person you all know who has been indoctrinated with idea that if you are not early, you are late, because only one person can walk through the door exactly on time.

More Changes in the weather

As I have mentioned, in December the weather got cooler, rather suddenly. Some days you can barely see the sun because of what appears to be low hanging clouds, but is actually dust in the air. The feeling is of an over cast sky in the states, but it is kind of like there is smoke or fog in the air. I guess it is the African version of smog. It is not from emissions from gas burning vehicles, but the dirt that is blowing in the wind because of the loss of ground cover and trees.

I keep thinking of that old song “Dust, dust , dust in the skies, dust in the heavens, dust in my eyes. oh dust, dust can this be, can this be eternity? Oh Lord, have mercy on poor me” Most of you are too young to have heard it. I think it was popular for a while in the late 40s or early fifties.

The dust is hard on the eyes, hard on the lungs, and gets on everything. When you ride a bike or moto on the dirt roads, they kick up quite a cloud of dust. Motos going fast are particularly bad. People wear a face mask/dust filter over their mouths and noses to keep from breathing in the dust. Sometimes they have the kind you buy at a hardware store to use when you are working in your shop, but mostly they use the blue sleeping masks you get on overseas flights. I guess someone at the airport collects them from the trash and sells them to folks. I am sure that most people have no idea of their original use because I have discussed it with a few and they were very surprised, and perhaps a bit puzzled. Why would you want to sleep when there is light?

WE have more dust and wind in the future, I understand. In the hot season (March, April and May) the wind slows from the north, across the Sahara desert, picking up lots of sand and dust as it comes this way. I understand it can be like a whiteout snowstorm, only red. Something to look forward to in a house that does not have glass windows but just metal shutters

For a while the days were on the cool side, only getting up to 80 or so. From here on out it will begin to get hotter and hotter. I am sure you will hear more about the heat in these blogs as the days and nights get to be really hot. For now the weather is quite comfortable for me most of the time. It was actually 68 degreesw Sunday morning when I headed out to church. (Thanks for the thermometer, Garret-Larsens). The Burkinabè find it quite cold and wear their warmest clothes. For some, mostly the men, that means knitted stocking caps and heavy winter jackets. Women tend to layer their pagnas and to use them as shawls, so a woman might have two or three pagna “skirts” and a couple wrapped around her shoulders. I sometimes wrap one around me, over my slacks, in the morning if I am feeling cold. It is surprising how warm multiple layers of cotton cloth can be.

It is really strange to get up in the morning and not to give much thought to what the weather except to wonder how hot it will get. At home, when I first got up, I always put on the TV news in the morning to hear what the weather would be like before I decided what to wear. Here, for the next three or four months, there will only be a question of how hot it is going to be.

In Service Training (IST)

It has been several weeks since my last post. That is because, after four months at our sites, the Peace Corps brought our various program groups together for two more weeks of training. The first week for Girls Education and Empowerment was held at the conference center I described in the last blog. We learned about the reporting expectations, which look like they will be a bit of a pain, but this is a government agency, after all. In order for the Peace Corps to get funded they have to document for congress what the volunteers are doing and how many people they have worked with, etc. It starts with each volunteer filling out a report his or her activities for a four month period. Of course there is a form to fill out. I feel sorry for folks who did not bring a computer or who do not have internet access because you have to go through a sequence of forms, selecting from drop-down menus or filling in blanks. Among other things you have to indicate the number of people who participated in each activity. I am really glad I followed the Burkinabè custom of having people sign an attendance sheet at meetings so I know how many people were there.

We also had presentations from second year volunteers about activities they had done. There was a Burkinabè English teacher who described the kinds of activities he has done with his English clubs and a third year volunteer (yes, a lot of people here sign on for an additional year) who is working with an organization called Friends of African Village Libraries. There are not many libraries anywhere in Burkina Faso, and reading is not a major activity, even for the well educated. Very few smaller towns or villages have libraries, but I sure wish there were one in my village! The ones that do exist have children’s books in local language as well as French, and it would be a great way to practice Moore. It turns out that such books are very expensive because there is a very small market for them, so they are not produced in large numbers.

We had a session on gardening, hoping volunteer would start a garden to show people how to use compost and how to do drip irrigation. I don’t think I will be doing that, but you never know. The most fun was the session on soap making. It is one of the most popular income generating activities. You can seel the product for twice what the ingredients cost, so it is a pretty good deal. The liquid soap is easy to make and the ingredients are even safe for children to handle. I would not want to fool around with the hard soap which requires rubber gloves and a good deal of care, although the soap you get in the end is pretty nice.

I am going to stop my discussion of IST here and continue in the next blog. Hope you all are enjoying all that cold, snowy weather. Just imaging a place where you have to put on a einter coat when it is 70…… I’m there!

After three and a half months at our sites to get settled in and familiar with our new homes, Peace Corps provided us with a week of language training in the local language spoken in our village or region. (Yeah Peace Corps!) For me, that is Moore (pronounced as if the last letter were a long A), the language that is spoken by about 40% of the people in the Burkina Faso as their first language. I have been seeing a tutor for about 10 hours a month, thanks to Peace Corps that reimburses us for what we pay tutors. I have also been trying to study some books of Moore, but I am not doing very well at learning the language. In my week long training there was another member of my stage group who had been living with a family that speaks Moore with her day and night and she was way ahead of me. The other member of our group was so good in French when he got here that he did not have any French instruction during stage, but studied Moore all 9 weeks. I have been doing most of my communication, except for the ritual greetings, in French.

I have been working through the Ultimate French Review books, trying to learn things I never really learned, and to remember things I knew once upon a time. People assure me my French is better than it used to be. I certainly hope so, but it is still not good and I have a lot of trouble understanding people in normal conversation. If they are speaking directly to me and paying attention to when I look confused, they usually use other words or explain ideas until I catch on. When there is just a conversation going on in a group, I can understand a lot of the words, but often miss the few important ones that convey the meaning of a sentence. Talking on the telephone is a particulate challenge because you do not have any visual cues and can’t lip read.

Adding Moore on top of the French has been hard for me. In French, at least, you have a lot of cognates. If I don’t know a word in French, I can often use the English word with a French accent and actually be saying the right word. No such luck with Moore. There are a few Moore words that have been adapted from the French because they refer to modern ideas, like school that were not a part of the culture before colonization. For the most part, the words are completely different.

At first I thought Moore verbs were going to be way easier than French or English because, regardless of whether it is first, second or third person, singular or plural, you use the same form of the verb in a given tense. It turns out there are six types of verbs and you have to learn the type of verb to get the right endings. This is hard to figure out because there is no general rule (like –er verbs in French) and I have yet to find a good Moore dictionary. To make things even more confusing, you add an ending to the infinitive of the verb, but if there is an object after the verb, you drop part of that ending, and sometimes (I am never sure when) you drop off another letter. Of course, as in every other language I have tried to learn, there are irregular verbs (lots of them).

Moore is a very nasal language with lots of double vowels. You can have a word that looks just about the same except that in one word there is one o, in another there is a double o, and in another there is a tilde (~) over the o or the first of two oos. There are also three extra vowels, and I have trouble hearing the difference between the two kinds of u. the two kinds of e and the two kinds of i. Many words in Moore start with k, w, or z, I know I will never be good enough in Moore to give a talk in the language, but I hope to learn enough to have a short and simple conversation with some of the mothers who do not speak French.

There were only three of us in this group, although some other groups in other places had as many as 5 in a group. Our LCF (Language and Cultural Facilitator) was a young man who did his best to keep everybody in the loop, in spite of the differences in our levels of knowledge of the language. The schedule was the same as stage: 8-10, 30 minute break, 10:30-12:30, and hour and a half for lunch, then two afternoon blocks of a hour and a half with a 15 minute break. That is a long time to be trying to pay attention to a language you do not understand. He tried to keep it interesting by using topics we had indicated were important for our work, but the other two are part of the Small Enterprise Development sector and I am in Girls Education and Empowerment. After the first day, he tried to have one block each day as kind of a field trip to try to hear Moore from other people and to use Moore in a practical situation. We visited a market and bought a couple of things, went to a juice bar and had interesting fruit drinks, talked to the secretary at an NGO that is sponsored by the Catholic Church here, focusing on the use of water resources, and so on.

The training week was held at a conference center associated with a Catholic seminary. We each had a private room and I could eat breakfast and dinner in the “restaurant” there. It was really a dining hall and there was no choice about what you got to eat, but that way I did not have to hop on my bicycle and ride into town to find food. Because I do not bike in the dark it was a wonderful arrangement. They also had a good internet connection.

The grounds are beautiful and very well maintained. You feel like you are at a fancy resort and not in one of the poorest countries in the world. Every day men were out raking up leaves and sweeping the dirt areas. Here are a few pictures of the pretty flowers.

Folks who have been in my office at JCU should note the flowing green plant. That is what I had around my window, but this is living in the wild.

There were a lot of birds in the many trees on the grounds. We had our classes on a covered porch of one of the large buildings were conferences can be held. I have to admit to being distracted by the bird calls and the geckos scampering up the trees and walls of the buildings. I understand that sometimes the conference center is packed full of large groups, but it was a pretty quiet the week when we were there.

On the Saturday, there was a wedding in one of the chapels on the grounds. It was interesting to see all of the guests arriving in a big motorcade of cars and motos, including the bride and groom in a car decorated with streamers and balloons. I am pretty sure that the whole group had been at the civil ceremony before this church wedding and that is the reason they all arrived at the same time. Being on time for events is so un-Burkinabé-like.

Another interesting thing was hearing the boys at the seminary singing each morning and evening. They must have a European trained choir master because the sound was what Americans would think of as beautiful. The other thing we heard 5 times a day, starting at 4:00 in the morning, was the Muslim call to prayer. I am not sure if all the sound was coming from one mosque, but it sounded like two men having a conversation in chant. The sound was amplified, of course, so you couldn’t miss it.

One of the things I learned about several years ago in a talk by Albert Bandura at a meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association was a practical application of one of my favorite theories of learning. Some of you know about Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. Without going into the details, the basic idea is that we can learn about the consequences of behavior by watching other people and seeing what happens to them when they behave in certain ways. For example, if you see someone slip on a patch of ice, you don’t have to slip yourself to be cautious in that place.

This idea, along with several other theories related to communication, was used by Miguel Sabido, a producer of Mexican TV programs, to develop the idea of using soap operas to change behavior in many people in a country. He focused on the exploding population of Mexico. One of the programs he produced featured a character had only two children and worked at a family planning center. Her sister had so many children and so little money that the family had to move in with the grandmother. The differences in the lives of these two families, of course, were quite dramatic. During the time he was producing this and other programs with similar social themes, the population increase in Mexico dropped 34% and Mexico received a UN award for its progress in controlling its population growth. He produced another soap opera in which an old man responds to publicity about a learn to read program for adults. In the program the man faces some obstacles, like people telling him he is too old to learn how to read, and his own feeling that no one would want to work with him, and he succeeds. Before this program, about 100,000 people each year enrolled in Mexico’s adult literacy program. During the year it was broadcast, the number was over 900,000, and the year after the broadcast it was 500,000. The point is, soap operas with a positive social message can lead to big, measurable changes in the behavior of the people in a whole country.

I could go on about this for quite a while longer, but if you are interested in hearing Bandura tell the stories of how soap operas have changed behavior all over the world, listen to his lecture about it at the Everett M. Rogers Award Colloquium, 2007, on Youtube. This link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjIbKaSXM3A) is not live, but you can cut and paste it into your browser if you are interested. Actually the first 10 minutes or so are him getting the award. His lecture is what you want to hear.

Population Media Center is one of the groups that is now active in trying to help countries who wish to use this method to work on social problems. I contacted them and asked about how I could help bring this idea to Burkina Faso and they told me about a soap opera focusing on child trafficking in Mali and Burkina Faso that was produced in Mali about 8 years ago. It was intended to be broadcast in Burkina Faso but apparently many of the stations that were supposed to be participating did not actually broadcast the program regularly. One of the groups I am working with here is a small community radio station and I asked them if they would be interested in broadcasting this program if I could get Population Media to get permission for it to be rebroadcast. They are a part of a small group of community radio stations that are working on ways to collaborate. I should point out that this soap opera is in the local language of Mali and western Burkina Faso and the story is actually set in Burkina Faso, so it is perfect for broadcasting in the western part of the country. As I think I have mentioned before, there are 14 different local languages spoken in Burkina Faso. Although this program is in Bambura, Jula speakers here should be able to understand the program.

I recently had a meeting with several of the people from these radio stations. The meeting was similar to what I have been told to expect here. Of the six people who were expected to be there, only two actually came. After some phone calls it turned out that the other four were either sick or taking care of sick children. Two of them called other people who eventually came to the meeting. The meeting was supposed to start at 9:00 but finally got underway about 9:45. After introductions I made a PowerPoint presentation (in French) and explained the project. Then at 10:30 one of the people who had been called to fill in appeared and at 10:45 the other arrived and I went through the whole dog and pony show again. The bottom line is that the four that were there agreed to present the program and my professional homologue took the other two sets of 29 CDs for the other two groups and said she would explain it all to them.

This project is intended to be a pilot, or perhaps demonstration, project to show Burkinabè that people will listen to such a program. This particular show does not have a theme that is so easy to capture in measurable behavior as those I described above, but we are going to do some monitoring to see that the program is actually broadcast and to sample some opinions about the problem of child trafficking and children’s rights to see if we can show a difference in the broadcast area and areas where the program is not broadcast. I hope that eventually I will find people in the Burkina Faso media who are interested in tackling some of the identified problems of the country, such as the need to increase the number of girls continuing with school or the advantages of delaying having children until girls have completed their education. If you read about the method you will learn that an outsider like me does not go into a country telling the people there what problem they need to work on, but rather we can facilitate the people of the country talking about the problems and the kinds of solutions that would work in their country. All goals addressed in Population Media projects must be consistent with the UN human rights statement and with commitments and rules of the country. In other words, this is not an idea imposed by outsiders, but developed by the people of the country to help them improve their lives. That is exactly the philosophy of the Peace Corps, so this seems like a good partnership if it works out. You can also read about the method on the Poplulation Media Center’s web site. http://www.populationmedia.org/ I know there is supposed to be some what to make these links active, but I can't do it. Any suggestions??

A celebration at the church

Early this fall there was a very special celebration at the Catholic Church in my village. The Bishop of Burkina Faso was there to officiate, and my community homologue was busy for a couple of weeks getting things ready because she is president of the Catholic Women’s Association (or whatever the official name is). The church was repainted and redecorated, and this was a very big deal. I wasn’t going to go to the mass, but several people I know well encouraged me to come so I decided it would be a good idea to show up. I went to the protestant service first, but left a bit early to get to the church a bit before 9, when the mass was to begin. I followed lots of people heading to the church, many carrying their own benches and chairs. I arrived to find the church surrounded by people seated on their own benches and on the ground. After putting my bike in the paid parking (not a usual feature of the services here), I marched right up to the front door and was immediately invited to come in and sit with the dignitaries. My homologue had told me she would reserve a seat for me, but this was beyond what I had expected. I sat right behind the nuns and the brothers who were not participating in the service, up by the alter, so I could really see what was going on. The benches for the congregation were packed and it was standing room only. The building is a pretty big space and I would guess there were easily 1000 people in the church, with at least that many sitting around outside.

They had a small electronic piano, set to sound like an organ, to play along with the choral selections and the hymns. The organist set the automatic rhythm and played the melody, and there were several drummers, someone playing a percussion instrument that had the sound of metal hitting metal, but not tuned like a triangle, and a couple of guys playing some kind of whistle, like an ocarina, that made only one sound and that did not seem to be tuned to the melody. The procession of priests was lead in by a group of women and girls who danced them in, and danced three or four other times throughout the 3 hour service. The Mass, which lasted about 2 of those hours, was primarily in Moore, although from time to time there was a bit of French. There were several rituals that may be familiar to those of you who are Catholic. At the beginning of the service, a number of calabashes were filled with water that was blessed by the priests who walked around, inside and outside the church, sprinkling the congregation with holy water, dipped from the gourds with a bundle of straw which serves as a broom in the village. The altar was bare when the service began but, before the Eucharist, they used the sensor (with incense) to bless it, walking around it three times, and put a new alter cloth on it. At the end of the Mass, the dancers lead a dance up and down the aisles and some of the people in the congregation joined in. After the Mass there was about an hour of thank yours and gifts to the church and to the sisters who were opening a new convent.

When my homologue and I left the church we walked over to the new convent. After the convent was blessed, there was a big feast (rice and sauce, tō and sauce, and so on). People were fed in groups based on where they lived. My community homologue took me to the area for our village and I waited around with everybody else while she got things organized. After about an hour she came back and took me to a room where the functionaries and westerners were eating with plates and silverware. Quite an event!

Carrying things

As I think I have made clear, the average citizen in Burkina Faso does not have a car. In my village there seems to be a bicycle or two in most families, and the more well-to-do have a moto. Motos are bigger than mopeds, but smaller than the typical US motorcycle. They do have a long enough seat that two can ride on them. For carrying things, there are also the donkey carts.

You may remember that I was not able to get propane gas for my stove when I arrived. I bought a canister to be ready to get gas when it was available and my community homologue gave me her gas canister to use. In early November I got the news that there was gas available, so I got my good neighbor, Prosper, to take my empty canister to get it filled. He returned with the news that there was not yet gas for the kind of gas canister I had. After waiting a month, I asked him to get a full canister of the kind of gas that is available and he did so. He and his wife, Martine, came over to help me set it up and we discovered that the handle for turning the gas on and off was bent and I was not going to be able to manage it, so I asked him to take it back and get another one. Prosper and Martine carried the canister between them for a little way, but it was very heavy. They were about to set it down when Martine told Prosper to help her lift it up onto her head, and she walked the rest of the way back to their place carrying it alone. Incredible!

I see women carrying the most amazing amount of stuff on their heads. They certainly get a lot of weight bearing exercise. Maybe that is why there is so little osteoporosis here! They even ride bicycles with a baby on their backs and things balanced on their heads, like a bucket full of water or things to sell at the marché. It is amazing what they can carry and how great their skill at balancing things on their heads.

The Burkina Faso Arly National Forest is adjacent to national forests in Niger and Benin, so the wild animals are free to roam where they want to in the three countries.

On the 26th we left my village at 7:15, with the driver, Prosper, me and the family. The first part of the trip was pretty smooth, about 7 hours on paved road. My friend Prosper had made reservations for us in a “hotel” at the game park, Arly, with a friend who works there. He called his friend to make sure the rooms would be ready and found out that, unfortunately, there was a screw up of some sort and the reservation never got into the book. At first we thought we would be able to stay there only one night and then have to move to another place where there was no electricity and no dining facility. Eventually they worked something out so that we were able to stay all three nights.

Getting There

Between the end of the nice paved road and the game park the road was unbelievably bad and the drive took us 5 hours. My son in law, Jonathan, said that the road was similar to some he had taken out west as a geology student, but there were times when I was not sure it was a road, and the driver was not sure which way to go. I certainly was glad we had Prosper with us. He knew exactly where he was going because he used to teach at a school near the park. The last hour we were driving on a track that often was deep sand, and then deeply eroded rocks. It was kind of exciting, but also kind of scary, especially when we were not sure if we had a place to stay out in the middle of nowhere.

The Encampment at Arly

The resort was an amazing place, designed for eco-tourism. They had 12 housing units, most of which were built in the round room style with grass roofs.

There was a lounge area near the swimming pool and bar. The food was first class. There was a set menu for each meal, but everything was delicious, and there were three courses for lunch and dinner. The encampment is not only for photo safaris, like we wanted to make, but also for hunting. I was shocked when Prosper asked if my family wanted to hunt some of the wild animals while they were here when he was making the reservation. Just as in the States, there are seasons for killing various kinds of game and they sell hunting licenses for the park. Essentially the hunters keep down the population of grazing animals because there are not enough lions to do the job. Human beings, after all, are the ultimate predators. As a result, the meat we ate was fresh meat from the hunt.

Our Evening Photo Safari

We visited the park twice, once in the late afternoon and once in the early morning. In the afternoon we piled Jonathan and the kids on the top of the 4X4 in the luggage rack so they had a great view.

We had to have a guide with us, and took us on one of the bumpiest rides I have ever had. He explained that the elephants preferred to walk on a cleared path rather than through the tall grass, so the road is full of holes made by elephants walking in the mud. Here is an example of the tracks elephant make, with Janet for size comparison..

We saw lots of an antelope of some sort, or maybe of several sorts. I could not tell for sure, but here is a picture of one of them.

We also got a look at some of the wild boars. I think these are the two creatures we had for lunch and dinner at the encampment.

Our morning Photo Safari, the Elephant Experience

The kids really wanted to get a look at an elephant. The guide said there were some near by so we set out on foot. We saw lots of foot prints and scat (AKA poop). We knew they were nearby because the scat was fresh. The guide pointed to a thicket and said there were a mother and baby behind the brush. Jamie said he could see the baby, and then a big elephant head stuck through the branches of the tree, ears fully fanned out on each side of her head, tusks gleaming in the sunlight, and trumpeting loudly. The guide yelled RUN (in French, of course) and we all took off. Abby ran right out of her flip flops. No time for pictures, of course, but here is Janet at the place we saw the elephant head, pretending to be the mother elephant.

My impression of the event was that it was like being on Disney World on a ride of some kind where a big elephant head pops through the brush and trumpets at you. Really hokey at an amusement park, but stunning when it is the real thing.

Baboons

We took the 4X4 on a different, awful road and saw a few birds and a troop of baboons on the top of a cliff. Those things at the top of the cliff are not rocks but the baboons.

Later on, back at the guide post, we were visited by a troop of baboons, above. We could almost have skipped the bumpy ride and just hung out where the guides live.

Back to Ouaga

We returned to Ouaga by daylight and the rough road was a bit easier for the driver to navigate so we got back in a little less time. I was able to take the family on a tour of the Peace Corps office. The next day we had planned to visit the Artisan Village, a great place to shop for authentic African art here. Unfortunately I got very sick during the night and was not able to go with the rest of the family. I ended up in the Peace Corps infirmary (again). When the family came to say good by, several of them were also feeling the effects of whatever I had. We think it was the food we ate along the road. It is all part of the African experience, and I was glad it didn’t happen until the last day. Luckily there were able to get on the plane and make it home without any tragedies. All in all, a wonderful experience for all. So, when are YOU coming to visit?

On December 21 I went to the capital city, Ouagadougou, known here simply as Ouaga, to meet Janet and her family for their Christmas visit. On the bus I got a call from the Peace Corps Country Director, with whom they were to spend the night. She told me there had been a big snow storm in Europe and many flights had been canceled. She wondered if I had heard anything from the family about a flight cancelation. I went on to Chez Joanna, the little hotel where I was to spend the night. Fortunately I had my computer with me and Chez Joanne has an internet connection. I was able to check on their flight which, fortunately, had left Paris and was on the way. It was 2 hours late, but at least they were not stuck on the ground in France. I understand that they were very lucky because flights before and after theirs were canceled!

We had a very nice dinner with the Country Director who generously put the family up for the night. I had arranged with the brother of my neighbor, Prosper, to have a 4 X 4 with seating for 8 people for the time the family was with me. We did some shopping for things with which to paint the inside walls of my house, two big commercial sized buckets of white paint. After we added the luggage to all those things we looked like a bush taxi and headed back to my village for the night.

Crocodiles and Old Friends

The next day we visited with the family where I stayed during my training. On the way we stopped to see one of the tourist attractions, the sacred crocodiles (actually caiman). The attraction is that you pay a fee and the men who run the place use a chicken tied to a rope to lure a caiman out of the water. These things are so used to being fed and dragged around by their tails that they are almost tame. They haul the critter up onto the beach and invite you to touch them or pretend to drag them around by the tail, as in the picture below. This is my daughter Janet and the three grand children playing crocodile hunter.

We had a nice visit with my old host family and Abby and Ellie got to meet the two girls in the family with whom they have had a few e-mail exchanges. I took advantage of having a big vehicle at my disposal and bought a mattress and a big clay jug to use as a water cooler.

White Christmas?

It certainly was not a white Christmas here, except for the walls inside my house. Christmas Eve day and Christmas were mostly spent with the family scrubbing the walls, putting grouting around the edge of the wood pieces that serve as a ceiling to keep the dirt up in the attic, and painting my living room, kitchen and hall. The rooms used to be a rather dark turquoise. Below is Janet on my new ladder by one of the water stains that made the house look so dirty. The flash lightened the color of the old walls, but you can get the idea.

They used stark white paint and the old color bled through a bit, so now the walls look like a very pale turquoise. My gift to the family was their trip here and their gift to me was painting the walls of the rooms I use the most. If they had been here for a week, they could have finished the job. I am not sure if I will ever get around to doing the rest of them. We shall see.

Christmas in Burkina Faso

On holidays here the custom is to go visit your friends. On Christmas day Janet and I went to visit my community homologue, who has helped me get integrated into the community, and my neighbor and “Burkinabé son”, Prosper and his family. Prosper takes care of me as he would his own mother. At each place we were served food drinks. I was totally unprepared to entertain in this way, so when people stopped by I just gave them greetings and invited them to sit for a while. Next year I will be prepared.

Soccer, the International Language

Because they had lived in Paris for 5 years, all of the Pershing speak better French than I do, except for Jamie, who forgot all of his French as soon as he came back to the United States. Jamie brought a soccer ball with him. As soon as he stepped out into my courtyard and started kicking it around, about 20 kids appeared. He and Ellie had a good time playing with the kids, although Jamie can’t speak a word of French. One day Able, one of the sons of my homologue, went with him to the soccer field by the school. Because Able speaks a little English idea was supposed to be that Able would translate for him, but Jamie could not understand Able’s English. He had a good time, anyway. Somehow with soccer all you need is hand signals and feet.

Fetching Water

All of the kids went with my “water girl” to get water from the forage (a faucet from which you can fill your water jugs without having to pump it or pull it out of the well). This water is somewhat treated, and safer to drink than other water sources, although I still add bleach and filter it. The girl uses a big 200 liter barrel which she hauls in a donkey cart. When she gets to my house she has to transfer the water in 25 liter jugs that used to hold palm oil, and pour the first 100 liters into a garbage can in the house. Then she fills the four palm oil cans and I am usually set for about 10 days. With the family there they had to go twice to get water. I think the kids got a better idea of the value of water in Burkina Faso after hauling it a couple of times. Many of the people here carry their water in big basins on their heads. Abby, my oldest granddaughter wanted to learn how to do that, but I think you have to start pretty young to be able to carry so much that way.

More on the trip in the next installment….

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to all!

My older daughter, Janet, her husband Jonathan, and their three children, Abby, Ellie and Jamie will be here for a ten day visit over the holidays so I won’t be posting again until after the New Year. I am really looking forward to a lot of hugs and family time. We will spend some time in my village and some time seeing the sights, so I will probably have a lot to tell you all about after they leave.

Change in the weather

At the beginning of December there was a sudden change in the weather. It started getting cool, even cold, at night. It feels quite nice to step outside after sunset and feel a cool breeze, but if I have my windows open, I am actually cold at night. In any case, I am glad I brought a fleece jacket and a sweater. It warms up as soon as the sun comes up, but is not so beastly hot as in October, and I am not sweating off all my liquids during the day any more. I guess this beautiful weather lasts only about three months and then it goes back to hot, hotter and hottest for the rest of the year. I am trying to enjoy this while I have it.

Windows

The windows here do not have glass in them but are simply metal louvered shutters. When you close them they keep out the rain, and they do help keep the heat in the house at night now. They also darken the room and provide privacy, but the dust and dirt still come through. On a normal house, so do the insects. One of the requirements of Peace Corps housing is screens on the windows, so the insects do not get in through the windows at my house.

Building

With the end of the rain and with the crops in, it is time to do the building. People mix straw and mud, fill rectangular forms with the mess, and set them in the sun to dry. In a couple of days you have mud bricks, like these:

To build a house or a wall, you get a bunch of these bricks, map out the size of the thing you want to build, and start laying them, like ordinary bricks. For a house you might have a concrete floor, but maybe not. The wall is simple set out on the ground. For mortar, all you use is more mud. Here is an example of a wall, in progress:

To keep the whole thing from washing away when it rains during the summer, you cover it with another layer of mud, this time mixed with concrete or some other, stronger material, kind of like spreading stucco on a house. This layer has to be refreshed every few years, or your wall or house will wash away.

They also make concrete blocks in much the same way. Get your sack of concrete, mix it on the ground with sand and water, dump the mixture in a form, wait a bit, and let it dry in the sun. If you are making concrete block, you have to water the blocks so they don’t dry too fast and crack.

Hangar

Another thing you want to have here for most of the year is a good shady place. If you don’t happen to have shade from trees, or if your trees drop their leaves in the hot season, as most of them do, you build a hangar. This is just shelter made out of poles and woven grass mats. The mats are quite pretty and this is quite effective, but the material degrades over time and has to be replaced every couple of years, of course.

Courtyards

A typical house will be in a courtyard. There may be only one house, or several houses inside a wall. The houses usually consist of just a couple of rooms. In a typical, more modern one, there is a living room and one or two bedrooms with an indoor place to take a bucket bath, AKA shower. There may be several houses like this for family members, and some may consist of as little as a single room. Most of the living goes on in the courtyard, however, where cooking is done over a fire built under a pot sitting on three rocks.

When a visitor arrives (like me) the kids run into the house to get “a place” (chair) for you, and put it in the shade. To make a courtyard, you need a wall. This serves the purpose of delimiting you more or less private space and may keep animals in at night, or out during the day

Sheep vs Goats

Speaking of animals, can you tell which of these is a sheep and which is a goat?

There are some that look even more similar than the ones in these pictures. Do notice that there is not much wool on the sheep, and this is winter! No, I have not taken up raising animals. These guys belong to my neighbors. You can see their wall, covered with the protective coating, and how big this corner of their court yard is. This is about ¼ of their courtyard. They keep about 15 sheep and goats, a flock of chickens, a flock of guinea fowl, a couple of dogs and a cat. Good thing they have some space.

When I arrived in my village one of most common inquiries from new acquaintances was about the church I would attend. Many of the people I know best here are Catholic and some go to mass every day. In fact the first church I did attend was the Catholic church, for the wedding mass for my community homologue’s daughter. There are a couple of European priests and a Burkinebé priest as well as at least one African brother, who happens to speak very good English. All of the Masses are in Moore, the local language, of which I now understand about 10 words beyond the simple automatic greetings you say over and ever every day, so that would not be a good choice for me, either from the religious stand point or from the stand point of having a clue about what was being said.

Protestant church #1

My homologue was very concerned that I get connected with one of the protestant churches so she took me to meet the pastor of a church that is not too far from my house. They have a three hour service each Sunday. The first hour, 8-9, is billed as the sermon, the second hour, 9-10, is for singing and the third hour, 10-11, is for prayers. I said in the US church services tend to last about an hour, not three, and the Pastor assured me it would be fine if I just came for part of the morning so I said I would attend the middle part, with the singing. He promised to have someone to translate for me. I arrived about 8:50 and they had put a chair for me way up in the front of the church. I indicated I would rather sit in the back, thank you, and they moved the chair. All the members of the congregation, which was not very large at this point, were seated on benches, men on one side, women and children on the other. A man came and sat next to me on a bench. A woman was reading, in Moore, from a booklet. My translator had a copy and he translated very rapidly into French, but it was too fast for me to follow and I have trouble hearing two things at the same time, especially when I don’t understand either of them.. There was a lot of room on the benches, but after the sermon part of the service the children, who had been having a Sunday School lesson or choir practice under the trees, came in, along with a lot of other people, and it was pretty crowded. Once the singing started the man again tried to translate the words for me, but I told him to forget it. I could not hear him because the volume of the singing and drumming was too loud, and I could not understand most of his French even when I could hear him.

There were several groups who sang: a group of teen aged girls, the Sunday School kids, a group of women, a group of boys, and so on. The choir director sang, as did a woman soloist. For all the singing the only accompaniment was drumming, which was loud and enthusiastic. The little church was packed and when everybody sang, the sound was overpowering. The kind of singing that is considered good for choirs here is the kind of sound every American choir director tries to get rid of, that is to say, singing as loud as possible, in a rather nasal tone. When they are on the last verse of a song, the director had them sing more softly, which sounded great to my ear, but on the last line they return to the usual loud, sing-out-at-the-top-of-your voice sound. In addition to the voices, there was a lot of clapping and swaying. One of the children’s groups had a little dance to go with one song. It was dancing in place, but resembled the kind of movements I have seen in the traditional dances.

After an hour I decided I had had enough and left. The pastor came out to say good bye and I thanked him for trying to have a translator for me, but explained that I could not hear clearly with two things going on at once. I attributed it to a hearing problem and apologized, but said I would not be back until I understood more of the local language.

Protestant Church #2

Next my homologue took me to meet the pastor of the big church in the center of the neighboring town. I say big, but it is not as large a building as the Catholic church. They have a service that starts at 7:30 on Sunday morning, in French, which I have a chance of understanding, so that is the place I have been going. They use a book that is the same as the one they were using at the other church, but in French. It is essentially a Bible study book, put out by the national church office here, or maybe it is for all of West Africa. The church clearly produces these lessons both in French and some of the local languages. In any case, I understand a bit of what is being said, and it is good practice for trying to understand spoken French. Both of these churches are Assembly of God, quite a bit more conservative than my comfort zone, but which seems to be the only protestant church in this area, and maybe in all of Burkina Faso.

I asked the pastor if I could get a copy of the book they were using, thinking I might understand better if I could follow along, and he came up with one for me. He also loaned me a copy of the Bible in French, too. Interestingly it is a study Bible, translated by Catholic missionaries, so the Old Testament has the books of the apocrypha interspersed with the books in the protestant Old Testament. In this church there are several men who participate in leading the service. I found out that they are something like lay ministers, and have had three years of training. They not only help with the service but visit the sick and help deal with problems in the congregation. In addition to reading the little book, the lay ministers, and sometimes the pastor, sermonize a bit about each section. I do OK when they are reading from the book and I can see what they are saying, but still have trouble understanding what they say when I can’t see it.

Before and after the reading from this book and the sermonizing there are prayers. I have yet to figure out if all the people are just saying their own prayer or if they are all reciting the same prayer, just at different speeds. Sometimes I think they are saying the same prayer and it is a race to see who can finish first. At other times the leader rings a little bell to indicate it is time to stop. In any case, I can’t understand a bit of it. There is also some singing by the congregation, from a song book that has the words in French. Some have familiar tunes, and one of the lay ministers who sits near me shares his copy of the song book if he can find the page. There is also a small choir, that arrives piecemeal throughout the sermon time. They have a drum to accompany them, but there is also a girl who has a half of a gourd (a calabash) with a bunch of shells around the edge. She tosses it in the air and catches it, in rhythm with the beat of the drums. The choir director and two young men usually sing a trio, with a guitar! It is the only musical instrument I have seen in either of these churches. There is sometimes another group who sings, usually with the lay minister who shares his book with me leading the group. I am not sure how much of a religious experience this is, but it puts my face in the community and helps people place me as a protestant. I think it may improve my French listening skills so I don’t mind biking 20 minutes each way to attend.

One other thing is worth mentioning about this church. At the service I attend, most of the people who come are what they call functionaries, that is, they have jobs with a salary. In this service they pass a basket for the offering, much like in the states. There is, however a table at the front of the church, and as people are entering for the next service, in Moore, some bring a bag of grain or whatever they grow, or a casserole dish, which I assume has food in it as well. I have also seen poles with little mesh baskets, like fish nets, on the ends which I assume get passed in the Moore service as well.

The Muslims

I realized I had contacted the Protestants and Catholics, but not the Muslims and I did not want to neglect them. It took a little while, but eventually my homologue found a Muslim neighbor who was willing to introduce me to the Imam. He seemed like a very nice fellow and happy enough to meet me, although the whole conversation was in Moore except that I had to say in French, with my homologue translating for me.

A word about my health and other health topics

I was doing fine health-wise until a couple of weeks ago when I picked up a water born parasite called giardia that gives one nasty cramps and other intestinal distress. I was going to Ouaga for a check of some skin spots anyway, but went a day early when I found I was hot, not just because it was 90 degrees or so but because I was running a fever. They kept me there for 10 days, which was a good thing because I lost more weight and was feeling tired all the time. The Peace Corps takes very good care of our medical problems. The dermatologist assured me that the places on my skin I thought might be a problem were not, and I regained my appetite so now I am back at my site and feeling fine. That is also the reason I was fortunate enough to be in Ouaga for Tabaski. Now on to health issues for the locals.

Malnutrition

I have been going to the local maternal health center twice a week to “help” (mostly to get in the way and scare the babies) with the baby weighing. All of the babies born in the town are supposed to come once a month to be weighed and to be vaccinated at the appropriate times. Vaccinations of various kinds are free to the people who bring in their babies, but not all babies come in on the proper schedule. The mothers have a little booklet in which the midwife made notes about the pregnancy. After the baby is born his or her name is added to the book and a record is made of the baby’s weight each month. We have a book that stays in the center that lists each baby born in the town. When the mother brings the baby in, the official worker, who can speak Moore, checks the mother's book to see the baby is there on the right day, has the mother put the baby on the scale, and records in the mother’s book both the weight and whether the baby’s weight is > 100%, > 90%, > 80%, >70% of the expected weight for a child that age. If the baby is 70% or less of the expected weight, the baby gets an examination by the “sage femme” that is, wise woman, or midwife, and the mother gets a consultation about the baby’s problems. The mother is then supposed to bring the child back weekly to keep track of progress and for the midwife to talk further with the mother about better nutrition. Some of these kids are easy to spot at the health service. Often they have reddish hair and a very swollen belly, along with very thin arms and legs.

Up the road a bit is a medical center connected to the Catholic Church where I went for the wedding of my community homalogue's daughter. I met one of the nuns at the wedding, who happens to be American, and she gave me a tour of the facility. They treat severely malnourished babies there, but their main mission is to teach mothers how to make a nourishing baby cereal by combining ingredients they can easily obtain in their villages. For example, cereal that combines a grain, such as corn or millet, with either beans or peanuts, will provide a complete protein for the baby.

This Sister goes out on her moto to visit remote villages that are too far away for most people to be able to bring the children in. She has trained someone in each village to take a simple tape measure and measure the upper arm of each child under 5 in the village. The area of the tape that measures the smallest circumference is red, the next yellow and the rest green. If the arm measurement falls in the red or yellow area, chances are the child is malnourished. She visits the villages every three months for a year, weighs the children, and talks with the group of mothers whose children have been identified as being malnourished. For people who live closer, she tries to get mothers to come to the center to learn how to prepare more nutritious food. There is a big room at the center, with lots of openings to the outside air, in which there are wood burning “stoves” where the mothers cook as they would at home. They also make bags of the cereal with they give or sell, I am not sure which, to the mothers. This seems like a very fine program.

Government Health Care

I have mentioned the maternity and baby part of the government supported health service, but I should say there is another building where people with health problems can come for consultations and prescriptions, and there is a dispensary for giving out drugs. I am pretty sure there is a charge for this service because people have tried to get me to give them medicine for some kind of problem. We were warned this might happen and given strict orders never to share our medications with others so I have to tell them, “No, I am not a doctor or nurse and I have been forbidden to give out any drugs.”

Polio

There is a real problem with polio in Africa and there is a big push to get all children immunized. In November there was a big country wide campaign to get all the children under 5 immunized, regardless of whether they had already been immunized or not. The idea is that, if all children are immunized it will be possible to end this epidemic.

In the town near me, and in other towns I believe, there are centers for handicapped people. Many of these folks have problems with their legs and they get around on big tricycles. The peddles have been placed up by the handle bars and they “peddle” with their hands. Some of them can move pretty quickly. There are also folks who have to use a crutch, like the guy in my favorite little store. They create original arts and crafts or work as tailors, or at other jobs that do not require a lot of moving around or strength. I believe most of these folks are polio survivers, but there are probably other reason for the handicaps.

More on the neem tree

I had the name wrong for that tooth brushing tree. The tree is the neem tree, known in its native India as the tree of 40 because it is said to cure 40 diseases, according to Wikipedia. It is apparently good for more than just cleaning teeth. Check out the article if you are interested in all the things it is supposed to be good for that have not been substantiated. They claim it is drought resistant and evergreen. We shall see about that in the spring when it is really hot and dry.

For those of you who do not know, Tabaski is an annual festival in the Muslim faith that is the beginning of the new year. It commemorates the day when Abraham showed his obedience to God by being ready to sacrifice his only son, and the fact that God then sent a ram to be sacrificed instead, so the son did not die. In the Judeo-Christian tradition the son was Isaac, of course, but in the Muslim tradition that son was Ishmael, through whom they trace their heritage back to Abraham. In any case, it is a big religious festival and a legal holiday here. Every family that can afford it buys a sheep, kills it, and has a feast.

I was fortunate enough to be in the capital for another reason at that time, and to have just met an acquaintance of my son in law here, who very kindly invited me to join him and his family for the fete. I did not get in on the sheep sacrifice part of the day, nor did I go to the mosque. My escort, who works in the government here, picked me up (in his car, no less) about 1 in the afternoon and our first stop was at the home of his secretary. He gave her one of the ubiquitous black plastic bags everything is put in here when you buy anything. I think it had some of the meat from his sheep, but I am not sure. The women in the family were in the court yard, preparing the mutton and other food. We were escorted into the house and served pineapple juice. Then the secretary brought a plate of French fries and fried plantains, and another plate with several pieces of grilled chicken. I ate only a little because he had warned me that on this day you are expected to visit many people and eat everywhere you visit.

Next he took me to his house where there were quite a few people gathered. Some were seated on the front terrace and others in the living room. I was invited to sit in the living room where there were overstuffed chairs and couches to seat about 9 people. I sat there and tried a drink made from the sap of the palm tree. It was not bad, but had a bit of a bite to it. I still wonder if it was not a bit alcoholic. I assumed it would not be because Muslims do not drink alcohol. Later those of us in the living room started the line to the food. First there was of a big plate of crudité, that is, all sorts of raw vegetables, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes (green) canned corn, grated carrots and I don’t know what else, with a yummy dressing. Then there were the French fries served with an onion and tomato sauce in place of ketchup, fried plantains, baked fish, couscous, very well cooked lamb, and grilled chicken. Having eaten my fill, it was time to visit another house.

He drove me to the fancy part of town, called Ouaga Deux Mille, that is, Ouaga 2000. It is the new area near the presidential palace where there are a number of government offices, embassies, and very upscale houses for the high up government officials, I think mostly at the level of cabinet ministers. There were a lot of people there, all dressed in their holiday clothes, and here I was, this ancient American woman wearing my traveling clothes. I was glad that my blouse was the one made of the material celebrating the 8th of March, International Women’s Day, so I was not a total western interloper.

At the gate there were guardians, like for all big important houses, but these were dressed in camouflage fatigues so I think they may have been military. Happily, no guns in sight, however. As at my host’s house, there were several seating areas. First there were those seated outside. Then there about 20 men seated on one side of the six sided entry hall. In the center of this hall was a gravel pit, about 10 X10 feet, with a banana tree or some other tropical tree, growing up toward the sky light a couple of stories above. On another side there was what was clearly to be the buffet line, and another set of doors opened into the air conditioned “great room.” There were a couple of seating areas for 10-15 people. We greeted folks at the first one and ended up seated in the second one. At first I was seated in one of those plastic lawn chairs that serve the function of folding chairs here, but very quickly I was asked to stand for a second so they could replace it with a padded chair from a rather elegant dining room set. And THAT is a sign of respect, folks. You get the really good chair if you are an honored guest. My host introduced me as a Peace Corps volunteer and the mother in law of a colleague in American and that was about all the conversation about me.

In any case, after a few minutes it was time to start the buffet line and our room was invited to go first. The choices were rather similar to those at my host’s house, but there were a few differences. In addition to the things he served, there was to and sauce, although the sauce had big chunks of chicken in it, which is not your usual to sauce! The mutton was being sliced by a carver, as you might see at a fancy buffet in the states, and was pretty tender.

After all of the people in our seating area had eaten a server brought over a bottle of Champaign and one of red wine. Only about half the folks accepted and I found out later that, in fact, Muslims will serve alcohol to guests because they know others expect to have wine with meals. The only rule is, they will not serve too much, so as not to cause problems for their guests. It is also possible that the minister and his family are not Muslim, becasue everybody celebrates all the holidays here, regardless of their religion. I had been introduced to the minister on the way to the buffet line and had a chance to thank him on the way out. We were escorted to the front gate by his wife, again a real honor.

We returned to my host’s house were the people who work under him were paying their duty calls to give good wishes for the fete and the new year. Some of them had met my son in law and I knew they really did know him from the little French I could understand, “the big guy with the beard who talks fast and negotiates hard.” That’s him, all right.

By 5:00 it was time for the neighbors to start calling and for my host to go visit neighbors so I asked to be taken back to my living place, having seen the general idea of the fete, having eaten way too much, and being rather tired. What an adventure!

There is, of course, a lot of illness and disease here in Burkina Faso. The thing you hear about the most is malaria. Just a few weeks ago the government health service in this part of the country gave out free mosquito nets to people in the villages who had signed up to receive them. I, of course, have been sleeping under my Peace Corps issued mosquito net or in my Tropic Screen Tent ever since I arrived and taking my anti malaria drugs faithfully.

In spite of putting on insect repellant every day, I still get mosquito bites. Malaria is carried by the mosquitoes that are out in the evening, hence the value of sleeping under a mosquito net. My Peace Corps friends in the health service say that people tend to say they have an attack of malaria (the palu) whether it is malaria or a cold. There is, however, an anti-parasite drug that people get treated with when they have malaria. Several people I know, or their children, have been in the hospital and were treated with this drug, so I am sure many of those who say they have malaria actually do. I hope the new mosquito nets help. The data suggest that using them significantly reduces the chances of getting the disease.

Teeth

One of the most obvious signs of poor health is the condition of people’s teeth. So many adults have missing teeth that it is surprising to see someone with all of them. Often you see a smile with big gaps in it, or only one or two teeth visible. Sometimes you see decayed stumps in the mouth. Pretty sad. There are tooth brushes and tooth paste available at the local stores, but the most common way to clean teeth is to grab a twig off a tree and rub your teeth with it. It turns out this is not just any old tree, but the mim tree. One of my friends stripped a twig of it for me to try and it is pretty bitter. It must have some particular chemicals under the bark. Some people who use them a lot seem to have pretty good teeth, so maybe it is one of those reasons to preserve biodiversity. It may be the next new ingredient in your tooth paste. Who knows? Another friend told me that it works best if combined with sodium, which you can buy at a boutique or the marché. He said that, if you don’t have money for sodium, you can crush salt and use that powder. He has great teeth, so he is a pretty good testament to the effectiveness of this method.

Truffela Trees

If you are a Dr. Suess fan you know about truffela trees, that were all cut down to make sneedes. (Dr. Suess aids the environment.) Someone pointed out that in some of my pictures there are trees that remind one of truffula trees. They are the mim trees, mentioned above, and here is a picture of one. Compare it to the book, if you have one at your house.

Eyes

I have been struck by the number of people with a lazy eye, that is, one that does not focus with the other. You see this in children and adults. You also see people who are clearly blind in one eye. I am sure many people who need glasses do not have them because the only people with glasses are the functionaries, that is, the people who receive a salary

Umbilical Hernias

It amazes me how many of the children have huge umbilical hernias. They may protrude several inches. Most of the young kids run around naked, or nearly so, so it is something you can easily see. Because clothes tend to be quite loose, and often rather ragged, you can see that these hernias are not a new thing. Adults have them, too. I don’t think it matters whether the baby was born at the maternity or at home, but I will keep an eye on the babies I see at the baby weighing

Here we are at the beginning of November. The rain has ended and it is harvest time here in Burkina Faso. When the millet has ripened, people go out and cut the grain bearing part off of each stalk. You see donkey carts or big bowls balanced on people’s head going from the fields to the courtyards, where the grain is dried in the sun, removed from the stalk, and stored to be used later in the year. The peanut plants are pulled up and carried home in the same way. As I mentioned before, there were beans growing up the millet stalks, which were harvested a while ago. In some fields you now see the gourds, used to make the calabashes for eating and drinking that have also been growing among the millet.

After the grain is removed, the stalks of the millet plants are cut down and left to dry. They can be used as animal fodder during the dry season, when nothing grows, or woven into mats to be used to create shade, like the hangar I showed you in the demystification entry. To build a hangar you need poles. Because it is against the law to cut down trees here I wondered where they were coming from. Then I heard chopping from semowhere down one of the paths by my house. I looked out to see a neighbor up in a tree, cutting off a couple of branches. It is really just pruning the tree, and it will grow two where one was removed, I guess. Below is an example of this kind of pruning. I did not get the top of the tree in the first picture because I had no idea they were going to prune it. I was get taking general picture of the countryside. I am standing in front of this tree in the picture in the pagna blog, so you can check it out there, too. The top used to be much higher than the part that is left. Maybe you can get an idea from these pictures of how much was “pruned” to get wood for the fire and for a new hangar.

Another thing that happens is that the animals, which have been carefully tethered to stakes pounded into the ground, away from the crops, during the growing season are now set free to roam and graze at will. One day I was surprised to hear cattle lowing and a loud rustling sound. I looked out my window and saw a herd of 50 or more cattle wandering through the millet field behind my house. I had not seen many cattle here, but there were a lot that day! I did not see any cows, only “beef” as they say here. They sure do make a lot of noise!

I asked a neighbor about whether people were upset to have the animals grazing in their fields, and he told me there is a person who tells the village when it is OK to let the animals graze freely. I guess if you are slow getting your crops in, it is just too bad for you. Now there are pigs and piglets of various sizes, goats and sheep with lots of baby goats and sheep, chickens and guinea fowl with their chicks, as well as the cattle and donkeys, roaming everywhere.

Bats are gone

It appears that the poison gas attack was successful in getting rid of my bats, that is to say, killing them all off. They removed the dropped wooden ceiling in one of my rooms and the smell from the attic is terrible. Now I am waiting for the carpenter to go to the nearest big town to make the lath that will hold up the bigger pieces of light plywood that form the ceiling. Interesting to have to make lath! I have to keep the door to that room shut and hold my breath when I walk past it. Hopefully it will have a ceiling and the smell will be confined to the attic soon.

Now that the bats are gone, I thought I could sleep at night without being awakened by critters, but the other night I was awakened by the rustling of paper. Yikes! What was that? I knew it could not be a person because my house is very secure. I told myself to go back to sleep, but that wasn’t happening! I got my flashlight and checked out the room. I found a toad (I love the French name for toads, crapaud, pronounced crap-oh) sitting on my package of toilet paper that was on the floor. I think it perceived the plastic wrapping as water and was trying to go for a swim. In any case, I threw a pair of slacks over it, captured it and put it outside, only to be awaked in another hour by the same sound. This time the toad (the same one or its friend, I don’t know) trying to swim on the wrapping of a small pack of tissues that was on the floor. Another toad trapped and put out and I made sure there were no more attractive places for the toads to try to swim in my room.

I told a neighbor about the toads and she said, yes, the toads come into the house this time of year and hide in the corners. Now that there are no puddles for them to swim in, they try to find cool places to go to ground. I think that they burry themselves for the dry season and re-emerge when the rains return in June or July. I don’t think I have told you about the racket they make. During the rainy season they were very noisy, singing to each other all night long. I got used to hearing the sound, and had not noticed that they are no longer singing until my recent toad encounter. As every perceptual psychologist knows, it is easier to detect the presence of something than the absence of something, unless the change is abrupt and here is a good example of that. (Sorry, I can’t quit being a dispenser of information.)

Bats in the attic

One of the requirements for suitable Peace Core housing is “no bats.” Now I know why. Here is the story:

The first night I was in my new home, about dusk, I heard what sounded like someone tapping on the back wall of the house. I went outside to see what was going on and saw bats leaving the attic though the ventilation holes. They were crowding each other out of the way to leave. It was almost like watching the bats leave Carlsbad caverns, if you have ever seen that. They swooped and swarmed like a flock of birds. Shortly thereafter three men and a boy appeared at the door with a ladder and explained they were going to plug up the holes while the bats were out feeding. They assured me that the bats would not be able to get back in and would find another place to live. They put screening in the holes so the air can still circulate (a good thing in the hot season), and left.

Unfortunately, the bats like my house well enough to find another way in. I was studying French at my table one evening and heard a thump on the ceiling. I was sure it was a rat from the sound of the thump and the skittering of little feet, but people said, no, that’s the bats. For almost a month I have been talking to various people about the critters in the attic, asking them how to get rid of them. Not only do they make a lot of noise day and night, waking me up with their thumping and bumping, they also create a very bad odor. There is a hole somewhere in the roof and when it rains the water drips down into one of the rooms with bat guano dissolved in it. That room smells like a room where a dog that was not house trained has been living. Yuck!

Finally the Peace Corps got to my site to check out all the safety and security aspects of the house and started putting pressure on the locals to help me with the problem. We arranged that I would leave town for a few days so they could put a “product” (poison) in the attic to get rid of the bats. Peace Corps paid for a sack of cement and a mason to apply it to all the visible holes. This “product” is a can of powdered stuff that is supposed to be sprayed on fruits and vegetables with sprayer, to get rid of pests, but they don’t have one of those so they have a creative solution. They will punch two holes in the top of the can and put a can of pressurized insecticide in one hole so the product is forced out of the other hole. I read the label on the can which says “do not enter the treated area for two days without protective clothing.” I sure am glad I arranged to be out of town!

The idea is that there will be people all around the house when they start the treatment and they will see if there are any escape (and re-entry) routes. If there are, these will be sealed with the cement. If not, someone will go up into the attic and clean out the dead beasts after a couple of days. Sorry little bats! I will be glad to be rid of the noise and the odor, but I really do like bats on principle because they eat the mosquitoes that eat me. However I don’t think two years living with bat guano would be very good for my health.

So, where am I?

Sorry I can’t post to the web the name of the village I live in or town I am close to. This is a Peace Corps rule, for security. For the same reason, I can’t post pictures of my house. I WILL show you and tell you where I have been when I come home. I will describe things in general, without distinctive information. Many places here are similar, so that should be easy.

Electric Power

I was assigned to a large village/small town but I actually live in a small village that is right next to it. In the town there is electricity for some houses and businesses some of the time. The power is on from 8 AM to noon, and on again from 5 PM until sometime in the evening, midnight, I think, but it could be 10 PM. That appears to be a rather normal arrangement in the villages that do have electricity. I guess the big demand for electricity in the big towns is noon to 5, for air conditioning or fans in the hottest part of the day, so the seats of power get the “current,” as they say here.

I, of course, do not have electricity. I DO have a wonderful neighbor who had a big solar panel. He offered to help me find a rechargeable battery that would run a small florescent light to study by at night, and maybe run a tiny little fan in the hot season. When the battery needs to be charged he sends the daughter of his live in baby sitter/mother’s helper or one of his own daughters over to pick it up. It really is easier to study at night with this little light than to try to study by the light of an LED lamp, which is what I was using.

Water

I also do not have running water. My community homologue (person responsible for seeing that I get integrated into the community) has one of the kids from her family fill a 200 liter barrel with water from the pump and bring it by donkey cart to my house. At the moment the helper is a girl who hauls the water from the big barrel into the house in 20 liter containers that used to hold palm oil, the most common kind of cooking oil here (Yes, I know it is bad stuff and clogs the arteries, and I don’t use it.) I have a 100 liter plastic garbage can (with lid) that she fills, and then she fills up my four oil containers and the four buckets I have. That lasts me for a little over a week if I am not doing a lot of cleaning.

Even though this is the safest kind of water available, I still put it through a filtration system, provided by Peace Corps, and add bleach to kill the local bugs. It doesn’t taste bad to me, and so far I have had no water related illness. I think I mentioned before that it is the custom to offer visitors a cup of water when they arrive, not a bad idea in this very hot climate. However far folks have traveled to see you, they are probably thirsty. I give them the untreated water because they are used to drinking it and my treated water tastes funny to them.

Pagnas

What is a pagna? It refers to a two meter length of cloth, usually cotton, with a bright print, or a pattern commemorating some occasion. There are pagna patterns for holidays like Christmas, the installation of a new priest, or the 8th of March which is International Women’s Day, a big event here, if not in the US. The US embassy designs a pagna pattern each year about friendship between the United States and Burkina Faso. When you buy material, you get it in pieces that are one, two, or three pagnas long.

Pagnas, of the one pagna variety, are very useful. This is the most usual type of skirt for women. Women wrap them around their waists and tie their money in the corner they tuck in, because there are no pockets. The top can be a t-shirt or it can be a matching blouse. I have bought a few three pagna pieces and have had quasi-African outfits made.

Here is a picture of me in one of them. I am wearing a blouse that was supposed to be made like an American women’s blouse, but turned out to be more like a loose fitting man’s shirt, right down to the way it buttons. I am wearing a “cheater” pagna skirt because it has ties on it. It is also decorated with bias tape, which is something tailors may do to make an outfit look fancier. I have not yet got the hang of just wrapping that piece of material around my waist and keeping it up. I still don’t see how women can wear them and ride a bicycle, but they do it!

Women also use pagnas for carrying babies on their backs. To do this you bend at the waist, sling the baby onto your back, and spread the pagna over the kid, just under the head for infants, or arm pits for bigger kids. You tie this very tightly above your breasts and tuck in the ends. Then you pull the bottom of the pagna up to support the baby’s bottom and, with the feet sticking out on either side of you, and tie those ends just under your breasts aand tuck in the ends. The effect is kind of like a halter top over whatever you are wearing, but there is a baby on your back. The cotton material dries very quickly, which comes in handy when the baby wets on you.

Pieces of pagna are used as diapers and sanitary napkins. All the babies have belts of beads or yarn around their waists, often with a religious medal or shells attached for decoration. When I first saw them I asked someone about them and was told “they are for security.” I thought this meant that they were some kind of animist charm or something, but actually they hold up a piece of pagna that serves as a diaper! Silly me.

Once kids are no longer the baby on the back, they may go around wearing just a t-shirt, or maybe nothing at all. They are trained to go into the field to squat when they have to relieve themselves, although they may join the animals and relieve themselves on the road. Once they are “toilet trained” the kids usually wear pants of some kind, but they may be ripped and torn in various places.

Other clothing

The women breast feed their babies for at least their first six months, and often longer. This, of course, is very good because it passes immunity to some diseases the baby and keeps them from getting the bad bugs that are in the water here. en take their babies just about everywhere with them, to the market, to the church, to visit, or even to meetings. They do “demand feeding,” that is, if the baby cries, feed it! To make it easy most women do not wear bras and the tops are very loose to make it easy to feed the baby. Even older women wear this kind of top that is looks like a maternity smock, and has a scooped neck line that tends to fall off one shoulder.

Men may wear western style pants and shirts, or pants and tops made of pagna material. Most clothes are tailor made, by the many tailors in every town. The tailors use the old fashioned treadle machines. You take them a picture of something you like, find a picture in their shop, or draw a sketch. They take your measurements and, magically, without a pattern, they produce something similar to what you had in mind. Not always what you asked for, but interesting. One thing I have had to insist on is pockets in my skirts and dresses. Pockets for women are not a concept here, and not a possibility in a pagna.

Most people have only a few of sets of clothing. They usually have one better outfit for church or celebrations. Some of these can be beautiful, with fancy embroidery on the blouse or shirt, sleeves and skirt. As I mentioned before, you do not go into people’s houses, as a rule. I have been in only two or three here and there is no closet. I have seen clothes piled on the floor or hanging over a clothes line in the room.

Ready made clothes

At every marché there is a person with what I call Salvation Army rejects, that is, American used clothes that have been bundled up and sent to Africa. They are usually quite cheap, so what the person charges is really how he makes a living, carrying these things around from place to place. I expect these folks have to pay something to get a bundle of clothes, too.

Kids may be dressed in anything from a satin and gauze party dress to rather raggedy clothes. A pretty dress will be worn everywhere, fetching water, working in the field, sweeping the courtyard or going to school, and it is worn until it is worn out. Often the zipper is the first thing to go, so it may be open in the back. It is interesting to see people wearing t-shirts with slogans in English, French, or German on them. I think people usually have no idea what the message is on the clothes they are wearing

And me?

Someone asked what I usually wear, and the answer is, my American clothes. I wear cotton pants and either blouses I brought from home or one of the ones I have made here from pagna material. For church and special occasions I may wear a skirt, but I am more comfortable biking in pants and that is the only way to get around. I ALWAYS have on a long sleeved blouse with 50SPF sun protection (in theory) to keep from getting burned and to protect me from skin cancer. I wear a hat when I am not wearing my bicycle helmet and I put on sun screen faithfully, too. So, that’s the story on clothes.