A Little Less Conversation...

Living in a small town in an unfamiliar country with people who speak unfamiliar languages and have unfamiliar customs provides ample opportunity for “cultural awareness experiences”. And when you sit on your front porch all day with only authors and crossword puzzle editors for company, those experiences are about as frequent as seeing the diarrhea-stricken neighbor boy poop in the front yard.

Two Burkinabe bike towards each-other. I swear this whole conversation occurs without slowing the bikes. This whole conversation happens without stopping or even slowing.

A: Good morning.
B: Yes. Good morning to you
A: How was your night?
B: It passed well. How is your family?
A: They are well. And yours?
B: Yes, everyone is well.
A: How is your health?
B: Excellent. There are no problems.
A: How is your left leg?
B: It is doing just fine. How is your grandfather’s second wife’s third child?
A: He gets stronger each day.
B: God blesses us all in many ways.
A: Yes, He does.
B: May He continue to look after you and your family until we meet again.
A: God willing you will remain in good health.
B: As will you.
A: Amen.
B: Amen.

***

I recently got electricity in the form of a car battery and two fluorescent light bulbs. Here are some words of warning from my Battery Storage Manual. These are direct quotations; the manual is written in English. Odd in a French-speaking country.

“The storage of battery of this type is far from bright fire.” Dim fires are OK?

“If you cannot use the battery of this type properly that will lead to exploding.” Duly noted.

“Suggest using the way of march charge the battery so that the use of the battery in function is the best.” What?

***

Though French is the official language in Burkina, few people use it regularly outside of the big cities. There are over 60 regional languages, and most people use one of these in their everyday lives. The people in my village speak Jula, and I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to pick it up.

Old Lady: Ini tile. (Good afternoon.)
Me: Mbaa. Heere tilena? (Good afternoon. Have you had a good day?)
OL: Heere. (Yes.) (Shocked that I speak Jula.)
Me: Somogowdo? (How is your family?)
OL: O ka kene. (They are good.) (Huge smile.)
Me: Heere. (Good.)
OL: (Lots of fast words that I come nowhere close to understanding.)
Me: (Smile and nod. Uh, that’s all I got lady.)
OL: (More words I don’t understand. Lots of laughing.)
Me: (Laughing, smiling, nodding.)
OL: (Huge smile.)
Me: Heere. Ini ce. (Good. Thank you.)
OL: (Laughing. Walks away.)

***

As a functionnaire (the “middle class” in Burkina), I am expected to do little in terms of household chores. As a man, I am expected to do even less. I’ve hired a kid to bring me water, and a lady down the street does my laundry. However, I do my own cooking and cleaning.

Burkinabe: Good morning.
Me: Good morning.
B: What are you doing?
Me: Cleaning my dishes/ sweeping the floor/ making dinner.
B: That is woman’s work. You should get a wife.
Me: Haha.
B: Do you have a wife?
Me: No. I’m only 24 years old. Besides, if I had a wife, do you think she’d let me leave her and come here?
B: That is plenty old enough. This is women’s work.
Me: In America, men and women often share household duties. A man who knows his way around the kitchen is thought to be sensitive. Women like that in a man.
B: (Puzzled look…so much for cross-cultural exchanges.) I will find you a wife.
Me: No really…
B: Here is my daughter. She will be your wife.
Me: Thank you. But she is much too young.
B: She is a strong woman.
Me: She looks like she’s 12 years old.
B: She has curved feet. (Good luck in Burkina.)
Me: Really, thank you, but…
B: You need a wife.

***

We have a medical clinic in town. I haven’t figured out what services they offer yet, but I talked to one of the nurses the other day…

Nurse: Are you French?
Me: No. I’m American.
Nurse: But you speak French.
Me: A little. I’m going to be a teacher at the middle school here.
Nurse: Ah, you will teach French?
Me: (Are you joking? Is this place really in bad enough shape that I could teach French?) No…
Nurse: English then.
Me: Actually I’m going to teach math.
Nurse: You know math?
Me: Yes. I studied math and biology at university in America.
Nurse: But how are you going to teach? You don’t speak French.
Me: But I’m speaking French right now…and didn’t you just tell me I should teach French?
Nurse: The students won’t understand you.
Me: …grr…

***

Me: Hello, I’d like a ticket for the 9:30 bus.
Worker: There is no bus today.
Me: Yesterday you said there would be a bus.
W: There was a bus yesterday. Today the drivers are on strike.
Me: Oh. (Somewhat disappointed.) Will there be a bus tomorrow?
W: (Blank stare.)
Old Man: You should come back this afternoon. There will be a bus at 2:30.
Me: Thank you. Do you work here? (What is this? The drivers go on a morning strike so they can have mimosas and a casual brunch in bed?)
OM: (Blank stare.)
Me: (to worker) So if I come back this afternoon there might be a bus?
W: (Already resumed sleeping.)

…4 hours later

Me: Hello is there a bus this afternoon?
W: (Obviously irked that I woke her.) The drivers are on strike today.
Me: Oh. Are all the drivers on strike, or is there another company I can try? I really need to get home today.
W: There are no buses today.

(Across the street at a different company.)

Me: Hello. Do you have any buses this afternoon?
W: Yes. It leaves right away.
Me: (Kiss of death.) Great.

Fifteen minutes later the bus pulls up. Except it’s really a van. Boarding the bus I notice that you can see the engine through the floorboards. There is a spare can of gas behind the driver’s seat. The ceiling is held up by three poles, and the wall paneling is held together with duct tape…at least it was ten years ago. Ten minutes later, still at the garage, the bus shakes and dies.

***

There’s no garbage service in Burkina. Actually there’s a noticeable lack of many public services- garbage, water, electricity, health care, sewage…- so people burn their trash. I had my first garbage fire last week.

Neighbor: What is that?
Me: Garbage.
N: What are you going to do with it?
Me: Burn it. Isn’t that what people do here?
N: Wait. (Calls over another neighbor.) We will help. (Dumps garbage into the yard.)
Me: Well thank you.
N: The kids like to play with these (tin cans) and these (plastic bottles). I could use this (old magazine, faded and in English).
Me: (But you don’t speak Engl…whatever.)
N: Here, take these (hands some torn plastic report binders to her kid, whose primary clothing is a “new” ratty headband I found in the bottom of one of the canteens in my house).
Me: (I guess I didn’t do that good of a job sorting through the garbage to save useful items. At least the things will be reused. This is nice: inhaling fumes from burning plastic, keeping the goat out of the “not-yet-burned” pile. The kid next door is taking a bath in the front yard and blowing bubbles in my old tomato past can. Something tells me I’m not in Kansas anymore.)

Let There be Light

My big news this week is that I now have electricity in my house! It’s a great convenience, but before you get too jealous of my luxurious life, let me explain.

Envious of my neighbor’s well-lit porch, I mentioned to him that I was interested in getting power installed in my house. He brought me over to the hardware store, which is run by a man and his one or two assistants (you never can tell around here). The store itself shares a building with one of the tele-centers in town and is a rectangle maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. Some pipes lie on the floor, and a shelf holding light bulbs, wire, and miscellaneous tools runs along one wall. Everything is covered with the signature layer of dust that inevitably accumulates on any item in this country not used for more than ten minutes.

I explained what I wanted to the electrician, and he showed me plans he had made for another customer. It all looked great except for the price tag- the equivalent of $500, or two month’s salary. A little pricey. I told him what I was willing to pay, and together we whittled down the existing plans, leaving me with a basic but extremely sufficient setup. At the end of an hour, I walked away with a 15W solar panel, a 12V car battery, 20 meters of wire, two fluorescent light bulbs, a wall outlet, and a light switch.

To my slight surprise the electrician showed up at my house the next morning only a couple of hours later than scheduled. You don’t get that punctuality in the States. Of course I was probably his biggest customer of the week, if not the month; very few homes in village can afford even the basic setup that I bought. The first thing he did was raid the garbage fire pit for a nice piece of charred ash. He used this to mark an outline of his plan onto my wall. No measuring tape. No level. No ruler. Just his eyeball. My grandfather, Mr. Fixer-Upper, would have laughed out loud if he had seen this inaccuracy.

With the plans etched in the wall, he went to town…with an axe! He chopped away at the cement layer of my wall creating a trough a couple inches wide and about half as deep. It reached down to the underlying mud brick and ran the height of one wall, along its base, around the corner, and up the next wall. He widened and deepened the trough about halfway up the first wall and at its top and bottom; these spots are where he would later install the light switch and wall plug, and where he would drill a hole through the wall so I could have a light outside. After laying the wire in the trough and cutting it to size, he cemented it all in place, filling in the trough and approximately smoothing the surface by hand. Again, no tools except for a wire cutter.

By this point the job was basically done. His assistant mounted two fluorescent light bulbs- one above my stove and one on the porch- and they added the cover for the wall socket and light switch. All said and done, it was pretty cool. All I had to do to get power was hook up the car battery to the wires that run straight out of the wall (right through the cement…no fancy cover or anything). When the battery runs out of juice, I hook it up to the solar panel and harness the sun’s energy from my front yard. The setup is a bit crude, and now I have the remnants of the trough to paint, but hey, it works! I’ve been using the light for an hour or two for over a week now and haven’t had to recharge the battery yet.

Does this mean you can come over, eat microwave nachos, drink a cold margarita from my blender, and watch a movie in surround sound? Not exactly. All those fancy appliances would drain my battery faster than you can say “Ouagadougou”. What it does mean is that I can make dinner (usually rice or pasta), read a book, and see my guitar music after watching the sunset. However, despite having access to this cutting-edge technology, my favorite nighttime activity is still sitting on my front porch and admiring the stars. I have yet to see a movie or read a book that equals the magnificence and splendor of Nature’s nightly feature.

Notes from Africa

The days that followed were considerably more positive than that first afternoon. There have been some rough moments, but on the whole, things are looking good as I adjust to life in my new ‘hood.

My house is mostly cleaned out. I’ve converted the second bedroom into a yoga/meditation/music studio, and the living room/kitchen is going for the “beach house without the water” look. As the fourth volunteer to live in my house, I’ve inherited a lot of crap, some useful, and some useless. Tops on the list include old lesson plans, a Peace Corps health manual from 2005, about 30 novels, and a slightly used tent. I also have a ton of my village’s famous pottery. The only thing I don’t have yet is electricity. After sunset I usually play the guitar in the dark before going to bed around 8 or 8:30. I don’t think I went to bed that early when I was five years old, but that’s life in Burkina.

It’s rained everyday except one that I’ve been in village. Most of the time this keeps the temperature pleasantly in the mid-70’s. I don’t know if this is a bad omen for what awaits me in the hot season, but the Burkinabe are now wearing winter coats. Yikes! They make San Diegans look tough. The rain has also allowed me to make an important discovery about my new house: the floor isn’t level. Usually the storms come from the south, the back of the house, so this isn’t a problem. One day, however, we got a storm from the front of the house, and the rain blew right in under my front door. It collected in a nice little…large actually puddle across the living room from the front door. Fortunately the living room is also the garage, so it wasn’t too tough to sweep the water out again.

The other unfortunate affect of the rain is the toll it takes on the roads. The nearest paved road is about 100km away, and all the dirt roads have been transformed into Swiss cheese. Despite this, I’ve taken several bike rides to neighboring villages. Between potholes, I’ve managed to make several observations. One, there are a lot of potholes. Two, add a little water and the Burkinabe countryside is actually quite beautiful. Three, kids are given a lot of responsibility here. It’s not unusual to have to steer around a herd of cattle being led to graze by a set of three year olds. Four, people walk a long ways to get to market. Check that, women and girls walk a longs ways to get to market; men and boys ride bikes, motos, or donkey carts. Not only do they walk it, but the women carry all their goods to sell on their heads.

Most days, town is pretty quiet. The bus stop on the main road sees four buses a day, two in each direction. We have a buvette and one or two restaurants. We also have a medical clinic which employs a doctor and nurse. The only person over there the day I stopped by was the mayor’s daughter and a friend, just hanging out. Town comes alive on market days though. Two big trucks bring in goods from the nearest big city. You can find everything from eating utensils to plastic sandals. Also: Britney Spears t-shirts and “real” Rolexes. Villagers bring in their crops, and there’s a huge meat section. With all the people and goods crowded into a small area in the center of town, sanitation is largely ignored. I walked by a cow head hanging out on the ground in front of the butcher’s stand.

All in all, life isn’t too bad out here. Since school hasn’t started yet, I have very little to do. Most days I take a bike ride, go for a walk around town, and do a lot of reading. There’s also the humorous half conversation with the servant/daughter of the family next door. She speaks less French than I do. There’s also plenty of time to watch the endless parade of animals that comes through my yard: cows, goats, pigs, sheep, chickens, roosters, dogs, cats, donkeys…As long as they don’t poo on my porch, I’m happy.