How They Harvest Peanuts and Make Peanut Butter

Peanuts are planted at the beginning of the rainy season, from mid-June to early July.  The fields are cultivated with the short-handled all-purpose tool called a daba, from its name in the Dioula language predominant in the western part of Burkina Faso.  It can be a hoe, a shovel or an axe, and it is most often employed in the bent-over (oh, my aching back!) position that is used for most jobs, from weeding to washing dishes, to be referred to hereafter in this blog as “the Position.”

A Burkinabe 'security system' (their words, not
mine) watches over the peanut field.  The innards
of a calabash are purported to ward off thieves. 

In early to mid-October the peanuts are ready to be harvested.  Women assume the Position to pull the peanut plants out of the ground, shake off the sandy red soil, and pile armloads of plants in the fields.  The kids then come out with bushel-sized or larger aluminum or plastic tubs, and fill them with the bundled plants to carry home on their heads. Often the filled tub is taller than the child.

This field is nearby, just behind our courtyard.

In our case, we harvested the peanuts of both families in our courtyard, along with those of two other families in the area.  Everyone (except the men and older boys, of course) gathered under the trees outside our courtyard to pull the peanuts off the plants.  Kids traded off carrying tubs of plants to dump at our feet and joining in the peanut-plucking. 

While tearing peanuts from the roots, you can eat as many as you want.  They aren’t all that tasty at this stage, though, and difficult to shell, but the kids consume quite a few.  I put in a good three hours under the trees, listening to the women gossip (I’m assuming that’s what they were doing), and laugh, and holler at the kids, and laugh some more.  They also rocked and breast fed the babies while plucking peanuts. The plucked plants went back in the tubs and onto kids’ heads to be dumped back out in the fields as fodder for the roving cattle and goats.  The peanuts themselves went home with their owners for the next step in the process:  drying.

It takes about a week of lying in a single layer in the hot sun for the peanuts to be dry enough to store.  The girls come out early in the morning to spread the peanuts on tarps or simply on the ground.  This has to be done after sweeping the courtyard with a handle-less broom, starting a fire, and hauling and heating water for the families’ bucket baths, and before washing, eating and leaving for school (which starts at 7 a.m. for high school and 7:30 a.m. for the younger kids).  In the evening, and any time there’s a threat of rain, all of the peanuts have to be swept up and piled into tubs and sacks and taken indoors.

During the harvest, people are very generous with their bounty.  Several of the kids I’ve been helping in small ways brought me sacks of peanuts, claiming they were “for you from my mom.”  On my way to school one morning, a family returning from the field with a donkey cart piled high with peanut plants shouted, "Nipela! Please take some peanuts!  We have plenty!"  If you see an acquaintance or are introduced to someone on the street, chances are he’ll pull several handfuls of peanuts out of his pockets and force them on you.  Walking, talking and eating raw peanuts.  It’s what you do.  The ground is littered with peanut shells wherever you look.  At least this is biodegradable litter.

Sometimes you’ll see a big mound of peanut shells, which indicates that someone is going to roast them and sell them in little 25 f bags at the market, or make peanut butter.  The shelling process calls for another communal, or at least family, gathering.  Each little shell is cracked and emptied by hand.  These are not your big ol’ ballpark peanuts; they are the size of Lesieur tiny peas, extra fine, and only rarely will you find three in one shell.

                   

Pretty in pink party dresses, perfect
for processing peanuts.

The next step is roasting.  You sit by a wood or charcoal fire, continually stirring the peanuts in a marmite, until the desired degree of roasting is attained, and then you turn them out onto a tarp to cool, and loosen the blackened papery skins.  Tossing the nuts and skins repeatedly in a shallow basket will separate the skins from the nuts.  At this point, I figured they would pound the nutmeats into a paste in a big mortar, but when I asked, lo and behold, the answer was, “No, we take them to the mill to be ground.”  Transport to and from the mill is, of course, on one of the girls’ heads, but there is at least this one mechanized step in the process. No oil or sugar is added.  This is the real thing.

There are several peanut butter vendors at the market.  They spoon their brown goo into small plastic bags.  It’s normally sold by the spoonful, but I have them fill my Bonne Maman jelly jar, and it costs 300 F, or about $.60.  The flavor varies from vendor to vendor, as some roast the nuts longer than others.  I’ve found a vendor whose peanut butter I like, in the shade of a colossal tree, so I’ll stick with her.  And I get a kick out of her traditional chair -- lashed together with blue string!
  

Patience

Patience was a dog.  He looked like every other dog in this part of the world:  pointy snout, shades of brown and white, slowly healing, scabby wounds at the tip of each triangular ear, oozing, fly-paper wound on the top of his head.  Maybe he was a little better nourished than most.  Patience belonged to one of the families in our courtyard, and therefore he belonged to all of us, since private property, and privacy, for that matter, are foreign concepts here.  Patience guarded the courtyard and barked loudly at strangers entering or simply appearing outside the gate.  He chased away other dogs and any pigs, goats, sheep or chickens that didn’t belong here. He accompanied us to the market or the library, bounding joyously through tall grass but never straying far, and growled at would-be aggressors, either human or canine.

I was probably the only person who actually touched Patience, petting him and applying Neosporin to his wounds.  He really started liking me after I let him eat the heads of my friture (small, whole fried fish), for which I was reprimanded because I was spoiling him.  His family did feed him, but kept him chained much of the day so he wouldn’t stick his nose in the corn flour spread on a tarp to bleach in the sun of the courtyard or the rain water so carefully collected in basins and buckets during a deluge.

[I probably should have eaten the fish heads myself (no way!), or at least left them for one of the kids.  No matter what I leave on my plate, be it half of the much too large serving of rice they offer me, or just the bones from a piece of fish, even if I’ve spit them out, someone will eat it.*  When the first riz gras (risotto) prepared in a new pot stuck badly, I added water and soaked my cooking spoons with the mess for a while.  Once I’d scraped the rice loose I offered the neighbor this brew to give to Patience.  The dog never had a chance; the girl ate it herself.  There’s no point trying to cook enough for more than one meal at a time, since there’s always someone wanting to ‘taste’ whatever I’ve concocted.  They are equally generous with the foods they prepare, though.]

Patience was only a dog.  Monday evening he accompanied (‘followed’) the other courtyard family (not his true owners) to the market.  When he was hit by a truck and badly lamed on the paved road, his owners contacted a Dagara family who administered the coup de grace and ate him. 

Muslims will not eat dog, but several other ethnic groups do.**

It was somewhat gratifying that the girl who fed Patience every day wept at his demise and at the fact that he had become someone’s much appreciated dinner.  During PST, one of our cultural awareness activities called for American and Burkinabe groups to illustrate their vision of family and friends in a graphic with concentric circles.  The Burkinabe chuckled when Americans included the family pet or pets in the inner circle.  For the HCNs (host country nationals), all animals, even Patience, belong ‘either way off the chart or in the freezer with the rest of the meat.’

Young dolo drinker. A calabash full, or about a liter, costs a dime.

As upsetting as the loss of Patience may be, I can’t help feeling some relief that the casualty was ‘only a dog,’ and not a child, or one of the many cripples who cross the pavement at a snail’s pace to get to the market.  The goudron is the main drag of the village.  It is lined with shops, cafés, cabarets (where people hang out enjoying a fermented millet beverage called dolo), repair shops, etc., and at any given time it is populated with pedestrians, bikes, scooters and the occasional automobile.   People socialize in the middle of this road.  Mechanics lie under vehicles with their legs sticking out into the road.  Children race along the road propelling hoops, bike tires or wheels with sticks.  Women with babies on their backs and loads of firewood on their heads make slow progress and lack the luxury of rear-view mirrors.

The big truck that hit Patience did not even slow down.  The trucks transporting goods to and from Ghana are the reason the road is paved at all.  Sometimes they blast their horns as they enter the village, but not always.  They own the road.  Why are there no speed bumps?  I’m told the village does not have the right to install gendarmes couchés (policemen lying in bed) on this international highway.  Without speed bumps or outright road blocks, the local police on their motorbikes are about as effective as the ‘slow down’ signs at either end of the village.  I’ve been advised to try writing a letter to the ministry of public works, and to have patience.

*/**  If you’re not tired of reading, here’s a description of traditional Dagara eating habits from Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Somé, a man between cultures:

“Indigenous life is a constant physical exercise.  From plowing the earth with your bare hands to running after an antelope during the hunt to carrying huge stacks of wood for the fireplace, the body is constantly involved in expending energy.  It is not surprising that my people don’t have weight problems.  The energy each person burns during the day is incalculable.  No wonder the amount of food available always seems insufficient.  My younger brothers always behaved as if they were starving.  They would gulp down an enormous dish and yet keep sniffing around as if they had not eaten anything at all.  Guillaume told me one day that he never knew what satiation felt like.  He said he stopped eating when there was no more to eat.

When my mother prepared meals, she always made two servings, one for the males and the other for the females.  Father presided over male meals and she presided over female meals.  We always sat in a circle around the dish.  The grown-ups sat on stools, and the young sat with their left legs folded under their butts as a seat.  The evening meal, about ten o’clock, was the most important of the day.  It gathered together the whole family, including visitors, since in the Dagara tradition no visitor can be denied food.

Dinner began with the hand-washing ceremony.  The male leader was first, followed by the next-oldest person and so on till the youngest had washed.  The first bit of food was always offered to the spirit of the earth shrine.  This is called a clearance bite.  My father always performed this ceremony.  He would take a bit of cake [corn or millet cake, akin to corn-meal mush] and dip it into the sauce, say something rapidly between his teeth, and then throw the thing away as if he did not want it.  The dog loved it – even though it was not destined for him but for the Spirit of the earth shrine.  Sometimes the dog would catch it in midair and swallow it at once as if he did not want to know what it tasted like.

To, or millet cake, and sorrel sauce.

Then my father, who pretended not to pay attention to the fate of the first bite, would prepare another for himself.  I noticed that his portion was larger.  He would stick the whole portion into his mouth, hold it in there for a few seconds, and then nod his head before swallowing it.  This was the signal that the dinner was safe to eat.  Seven hands assaulted the dishes, determined to empty them, and the meal was enjoyed in silence.  For the Dagara, there is no such thing as a plate for each person, because in the context of a real community, separate plates cultivate separateness.  The older people were supposed to stop eating first, allowing the youngest to finish it all up.  Anyone who burps is expected to stop eating immediately, as that indicates that he or she is full.

Eating with one’s hands is a fascinating art.  You are supposed to lick your fingers one by one after each swallow, starting with the front of each of the four fingers, then their backs, and finally the thumb.  Then the entire finger must be taken into the mouth and carefully sucked.  The person presiding over the meal is in charge of making sure that these rules are followed carefully.  Consequently, any voice you hear during a meal is the leader’s voice correcting bad eating habits mostly related to finger-licking.  Children who are very hungry don’t take the time to lick their fingers properly, so someone must be there to instruct them in good table manners.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, ISBN 0-14-019496-7:  tedious and at times downright freaky, but a fascinating look at the Dagara culture, spiritual initiation and rite of passage, the pain and damage wrought by colonization and missionaries, the ability to commune with ancestral spirits, and spiritual travel to other worlds.  Healers, diviners, ritual initiation….  A grain of salt wasn’t quite sufficient for me!  But there is going to be an initiation here in Dissin this year.  Nowadays they only perform the initiation every few years, when enough eligible young men are available.  Not everyone is suited for it, and it can be fatal.

Around Town

(This was written early in September)

The first few days at site were exciting and confusing, and an introduction to the art of WAITing, which came in handy at the bank!

The Bakery

Destination:  the Mairie, or mayor’s office, or city hall.  This lies at the western edge of the village, about a 20 minute walk from my house.  No one can understand why I’d rather walk than ride the bike, which, especially now, after 3 minor falls, is still a white-knuckle horror trip for me.  These people are engaged in physical labor 8 – 10 hours a day, but they consider walking a chore.  Florent was willing to make the trek with me, though, and we intended to stop at the electric company, just this side of the Mairie, to transfer the meter and account into my name.  En route we met the Chef de Terre and several of Florent’s relatives, and learned that the mayor was actually going to be present some time that morning (she does not live here in the village) and that the electric company was closed because they had no electricity.  There has been no electricity at the Mairie for quite some time; when I was here in July, city business was conducted at the Prefet’s office at the top of the hill.  Whereas the electric company relies on computers, forms are typed at city hall, and births, marriage and deaths are entered into the big état civil register by hand.  I was able to observe quite a few such entries, along with the issuing of stamps for school registration, while waiting in a blessedly drafty corridor and trying to understand a word or two of the conversations that buzzed around me in several languages.  The French spoken here is not ‘school French,’ and it travels at the speed of light.  La blanche / Nasara / Nipela were the distinguishable words that prevailed, as is usual in my presence.

Madame Mayor, however, a cheerful woman in her 50’s, I’m guessing, favored me with school French liberally laced with English.  She had lived in the Washington, D.C. area for some time.  After a short, pleasant chat in which she expressed the village’s gratitude for the past, present and future contributions of Peace Corps volunteers, Mme la Maire granted me ‘the road.’  That’s how you indicate your readiness to leave:  you ask for the road.  ‘Je demande la route.’    Normally it’s readily granted.  It’s also how you toss someone out, by giving him or her the road.  ‘Je te donne la route.’

On the subject of demands, they are constant.  People are continually asking for food, money, the clothes off your back…  I’m used to it now, but the first request came as a shock.  A kid outside the school superintendent’s office greeted me politely and then said, ‘Je demande ta casquette.’  I was wearing my credit union baseball cap, a gift from my host mother in Sapone, and I wasn’t about to part with it.  I try to be polite in my refusals, but I made an exception for the young man who wanted 25 fr (about a nickel) to buy a beignet because he was starving; his outstretched right hand was empty, but his left hand clutched a newly opened pack of cigarettes.

Next stop:  the hospital.  Like the schools, the hospital consists of a number of gray concrete buildings with gray concrete rooms strung together motel-style. All of the rooms open onto covered concrete walkways, and there are concrete benches built into or onto the walls outside each door.  There are no screens, just the louvered metal windows and doors that are the norm everywhere, but a fabric curtain hangs in each open door to discourage flies.  The Major, or head nurse, gave me a tour of the maternity building.  In addition to a delivery room with stirruped table and a second metal table, there is an 8-bed ward that’s almost as nice as the upper-class Tibetan dwelling in the Heifer Ranch Global Village II.  All of the babies had gone home that morning, and there was only one woman in labor at the time.  She sat outside on a low stone wall, wearing only a skirt.

While I sat outside the consultation room with Florent waiting to introduce myself to the doctor, I observed the row of rooms opposite.  Some visitors sat on the benches chatting with the patients inside.  A man led a strikingly beautiful woman towards the last room in the row.  She was slightly too buxom to be a super model, and she was staggering a bit.  It took me a moment to realize she was blind as well as very ill.  She groaned, squatted down and vomited into the sand.  The man dragged her on up to the concrete bench outside one of the rooms, and a visitor rose to kick sand over the vomit.  After a while a nurse came along with an IV pole and started a drip for the blind woman.  She was still there, outside on the bench, leaning on her companion who steadied the IV pole, when the doctor gave us the road.

On the way to the bus depot, we passed what had been the original Catholic mission.  It is now a complex that houses maybe a dozen families.  The Dagara people, native to this region, are Catholic, and there is a Catholic grade school and agricultural lycee, as well as an orphanage run by nuns.  There is also a sizeable Mossi population.  The Mossi, who make up much of the population of the rest of Burkina Faso, speak Moré and are Muslim.  At the same time, everyone is Animist, and everyone gets along.  Often there are both Catholics and Muslims in the same family.  One of the families in my courtyard is Catholic, and the other is Muslim.  I live close enough to the Mosque to hear the calls to prayer that start at 4:30 a.m., but not close enough to the church to hear the bells.  When I hear drums, I know someone has died.  More on funerals later.

The chef de gare at the bus station is a good man to know, since the bus companies serve as the informal postal service.  There are post offices, but no mail carriers or home delivery.  For that matter, there are no street names or house numbers.  I live in the courtyard with the yellow gate ‘over behind the gendarmerie and the credit union.’  Everybody just knows who lives where.  If you are looking for someone’s house, you ask the next person you meet, who will then point you or even lead you to the right courtyard.  In order to get mail you have to have a post office box or use someone else’s.   When the PC medical officer sent me my prescription meds from Ouagadougou, she sent me a text message telling me to expect the package at the TSR Gare sometime the next day.   What she didn’t tell me was that I should alert the chef de gare to expect the package.  As a result, he didn’t run out to ask the driver for it and it went on to Ghana, but it was still on the bus on the return trip the following day.  The ‘package’ was a brown paper lunch bag with my name and the name of the village on it in black marker, stapled closed at the top.  I now have the chef de gare’s phone number in my portable, or mobile phone.

Swearing-in and Transfer to Site

The U.S. Embassy in Luxembourg could never get away with serving Coke and Fanta at a big deal, recorded-for-tv-news event like the swearing-in of 46 new Peace Corps Volunteers, but in Burkina Faso, anything cold and wet is most welcome.  My next taste of champagne, in a couple of years, is bound to knock me for a loop. Somehow I don’t think I’ll mind.

Rain threatened but held off long enough for the requisite speeches, oaths, congratulations and photographs in the garden of the ambassador’s residence in Ouagadougou.  PCV at last!  Wet weather forced the ‘after’ party at the home of the new Peace Corps Country Director indoors, though, but it was a great time to meet present and former volunteers and chat with PC staff.  Lots of food!  And more Fanta!

The day before swearing-in had been our big shopping day.  Those who were starting a new site had to acquire gas stoves and propane tanks, covered trash cans to hold water and other necessities.  As the basics were already covered at my house, I just bought a cot, which is quite comfortable, especially when topped with my REI camp bed, and will surely be much cooler than the foam mattress in hot weather.  When it really gets hot, in April, I may have to do without the camp bed.  I also picked up some plastic basins, wooden spoons and groceries, but together with my suitcases, water filter, bike, mosquito net, boxes of books and old-lady sick-room toilet chair (for emergencies) my pile of things to be moved to site was quite impressive.

Thrilled not to have to take public transportation, I was ready to roll at the appointed hour of 7 a.m., but true to his reputation, my traveling companion was late, so we didn’t pull out in the PC Toyota till almost 8.  Sanfo, my favorite driver, is easy to talk to, and my companion slept part of the way.  The 5 hour trip was pleasant and I was able to see a lot more than I had on the first trip by bus.  Among the noteworthy sights were a pull-off place where people can park to watch elephants, although none have been spotted lately, and a billboard announcing the final resting place of the 28 victims of a two-bus crash in 2008.  Glad I missed that the first time around.  We made a couple of short pit stops and picked up snacks of popcorn, sesame cakes and bananas. 

Children descended on the van from all directions when we arrived outside the courtyard.  They grabbed things out of the van and out of my hands and carried them into the house.  My homologue (counterpart) was there, too, and he had arranged to have the water man deliver a tank of water.  We immediately started dragging trash out and cleaning.   Even the 3-year-old was helping.  The boys knocked down cobwebs and sorted through the trash.  The girls and I scrubbed out water containers, swept floors, washed floors, washed dishes…  I perspired.  To celebrate a job well done, we went to the market for a few more necessities and I bought everyone a juice or, in one case, a beer. 

The cleaning crew.

How they handle money, or Banking in Burkina

Cash only!!!  ATMs exist, but the system is down much of the time, I am told.  Francs CFA, the coin of the realm and of most of the former French colonies, come in 25, 50, 100, 200, 250 and 500 coins, and 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 bills.  Smaller denomination coins are said to exist, but I haven’t seen any.  Except in bigger stores in bigger cities, it’s hard to find anyone who can change anything bigger than a 2,000 F bill.  Sometimes market vendors even have to turn to their neighbors to be able to change a 200 F coin.  There are roughly 500 F to USD 1.  Roughly.  So 3-4 tomatoes cost 50 F, or a dime, at the market.

 

Market vendors don’t think or speak in Francs, though; they use the old sous system.  The French had 20 sous to a franc, so each sou was worth 5 centimes.  Here the amount of 100 F is referred to as 20.  If the tomato man says nouh-nouh (= five-five.  For some reason they always say the price twice.  Maybe this means ‘five each.’) he means 25 F, or five times five francs.  Piie-piie (ten-ten) means 50 francs each.  Piie-na-nouh – piie-na-nouh (fifteen-fifteen) is 75 F each, and lizer-lizer (twenty-twenty) is 100 F each.  Luxembourgers will understand. 

In stores, though, prices are marked in francs if they are marked at all.  You tell the shopkeeper what you want, he puts in on the counter and grabs his calculator, and you hope he’s not charging you Nasara / Nipela prices. White people are equated with the colonial powers and presumed to have scads of money, so why not double the prices?  Shopkeepers are supposed to have fixed prices, but at the market, for anything other than food, you need to, and are expected to bargain them down a bit.  The best way to avoid being charged Nipela prices is to have one of the kids wheel and deal for you.  The girls know the prices and can select the best vegetables.  Until I figured out the sous system, they also had to interpret prices for me.

The Peace Corps encourages ‘modest living standards’ and accordingly allocates a monthly allowance for ‘subsistence needs’  which is probably enough to live better than most Burkinabé counterparts.  In addition, newly-minted PCVs receive a settling-in allowance for purchasing items needed at site.  All monies are deposited in accounts opened for us with one of the bigger ‘Pan-African‘ banks, and our accounts actually had money in them when we got to  Ouaga before swear-in.

Armed with a check book (the ATM cards got lost, somehow), and in anticipation of the big shopping day provided in Ouagadougo, Diane and I marched down the road, or rather sloshed our way through the mire of grit and garbage resulting from a torrential downpour, to the bank.  A guard outside the door looked dubiously at his watch (it was 16.40 and the bank closes at 18.00) before handing us well-worn, almost felt-like rounds of construction paper with numbers written on them.  Hmmmm.  Inside, the bank resembled the old revenue office in Cabot, only much smaller.   Our general bonsoir! greeting (soir starts right after lunch) to the 12 – 15 faces that stared at us as we entered was probably inadequate, as subsequent arrivals, who were few in number before the cut-off time, went around shaking hands.  Constricting, tailored pinstriped suits distinguished the bank employees from the rest of the population of Burkina Faso.  Two of the three guichets were manned, as were a couple of cubicles off to the side.  While waiting for seats to become free, we realized each customer was taking a minimum of 10 minutes at the window.  The woman at guichet no. 1 was there for at least half an hour.  Since this bank is automated, i.e. has computers, we managed to get our hands on some cash and escape before closing time.

Caisse Populaire

The situation is somewhat different at the savings bank/credit union here at my site.  The pan part of pan-African does not extend to my village, so I had the bright idea of opening an account locally and having funds transferred to avoid having to take a bush taxi and spend an entire morning or more just to withdraw funds.  This establishment is not automated.  On my first visit (it took four in all) it was the end of the month and the benches were crowded.  Handshakes and even some crossed-arm curtseys were in order.  The woman behind the tiny window, which is so low that clients invariably leaned their elbows on the sill and stuck their rears out at the assembly (I made a feeble attempt not to do so when it was my turn), wore a t-shirt and round wire-rimmed glasses, and filled out savings books, deposit and withdrawal slips in triplicate, and various other forms in labored longhand.  She then pushed each completed form through the window for signature.  This extended the ordeal for an elderly man who had to be helped to and from the window for each step of the operation.  No numbers had been distributed, but when several people pointed at me, I rose to assume the position at the window.  I had realized that I was the only person in the room who was visibly perspiring, but I was still horrified to actually drip my way across the floor.  Why must I always counter the theory that ‘awkward’ doesn’t exist in BF?

My questions sent the teller off to consult with the director.  Uh-oh.   The director would see me.  Good!?  He was busy with another customer, but moved a defunct printer off a chair to make room for me and ignored the other person for the next 15 minutes.  Awkward!  What I wanted to do was probably possible, though it had never been done before, so it necessitated a number of phone calls to head office in Ouaga and to the pan-African institution, both in the nearest city and in Ouaga.  It was decided that I should go to the photographer down beyond the police station to have ID photos made, and come back in a few days (it would take that long to get the photos developed, anyway) to open an account, and by then the director would know what action to take.

Two visits and many forms later (most had to be done twice because the woman thought Susan was my last name), I was the proud owner of a savings book bearing the stapled-in and stamped-over likeness of a beet-faced, gray-haired woman who didn’t quite make the cut for a Bryl-cream ad.  By visit four I had decided to forget the monthly transfer idea, as it was proving far too complicated, and just write a check to be deposited to my account.  A couple more phone calls were required to determine whom the check should be made out to, but the funds, less a fee equivalent to the cost of the bush taxi, should be in my account in about 4 days!  Success!  Now I just have to go withdraw the cash!  Fortunately, the office is just around the corner from my house.  I’ve learned to go early and avoid the ‘rush.’

My personal shoppers and advisory committee

Keeping pace with the high-as-an-elephant’s-eye corn, the millet, gumbo and peanut fields have grown so much that the paths we walked last time around now lead through labyrinth upon labyrinth, and I’m having trouble finding landmarks if I stray too far from the paved artery of the village.  On my first solo foray I walked in circles like Pooh and Piglet, to the amusement of people who good-naturedly accepted my repeated greetings.  Two older boys came to my rescue and lead me to the office of the school inspector, which was closed.  I may write about my various encounters in the village in a later post. 

How They Live

Henning Mankell, my favorite Swedish crime fiction writer, also has connections to Africa, I’ve discovered.  His Eye of the Leopard takes place at the end of the colonial period, and in his Kennedy’s Brain (surely the Swedish title was better!) he writes: “…we know all about how Africans die, but hardly anything about how they live.”  Well, that’s what I intend to find out while I’m here, and what this blog will try to portray, especially after swearing-in and ‘affectation’ to my site.  You see plenty of famine, drought, AIDS, starving children, refugee camps, war and destruction on the evening news. If you have questions about how Africans live, let me know!  I’m happy to do the research.

I’m surrounded by beautiful, happy faces!

Your book suggestions are also welcome! Some of the best I’ve read lately are The House on Sugar Beach, Things Fall Apart, and The Poisonwood Bible

The end of PST (Pre-Service Training) is finally in sight!  While the cross-cultural sessions have been intriguing and the language sessions vital, the rest has been more or less one interminable professional development workshop, including the inevitable small group work, colored markers and butcher paper.  Fellow teachers, pity me!  We’re even doing our student teaching in a ‘model school’ for which local kids have been enlisted for a month of morning summer school sessions.  So far, everyone who’s observed my classes has been happy with my work.   I hope I don’t slip up in the next few days!  I’d really like to wear my new African outfit and swear in as a PCV on August 23!

From my vantage point as an observer at model school.  6^th grade math.

Site Visit

At the Site Announcement ceremony on July 3 it was confirmed that I am to serve in the southwest region, replacing Matt, who has been teaching math at the lycee (high school) there for the past two years.  My village is the home town of the family of Alice, my present host mother, but she was raised in Ouagadougou and does not speak the Dagara language I’ll need to learn in order to communicate with children and pretty much everyone outside of the school setting.  Mooré and Djula are also spoken there, but the region is that of the Dagara people who also populate northern Ghana.  I will need to know at least the standard phrases of greetings and salutations in each of these languages.  There are several dialects of Dagara, too.

The next big step for our stage was meeting our homologues, or counterparts, at a 2-day workshop in Ouaga (no one says Ouagadougou, I’ve learned) that kicked off the eventful Week 5 of Pre-Service Training.  My homologue is the principal of one of the elementary schools, and I am to do some tutoring at his school, the École A.  As an added bonus, Florent is a Dagara speaker and Dagara teacher, and his school is changing to become a bi-lingual elementary school, so I will have greater access to Dagara lessons.  A second gentleman was also present as one of the 5 supervisors invited to the workshop.  Gustave is one of two conseillers who oversee the schools in the village, or town, of about 10,000 inhabitants, and he will be a further contact person for me. 

At the conclusion of the workshop, Florent and Gustave accompanied me and explained the intricacies of travel from Ouaga using one of the bus companies as far as a crossroads and a bush taxi for the final 12 km.  The trip, entirely on paved roads, took about 6 relatively comfortable hours. As we drove west from Ouaga, the landscape changed slowly but dramatically from brown houses surrounded by scattered scruffy trees in brown fields pleading desperately for water to the lush green of the southwest region where the annual rains, having started about one month later than usual, have brought the corn to a height of 30 to 50 cm and filled the lowlands to accommodate fields of rice and a profusion of water lilies.  Men, women and children are bent over their rows and mounds in the fields, working with short handled hoes known by their Djula name, daba.  My delight in the verdant panorama was dampened somewhat, though, by the knowledge that mosquitos are happily breeding here to spread malaria, and that many people suffer from diarrheic illnesses at this time of year from drinking the dirty water they find in the fields.

The final leg of the trip descended gently through fields of corn and millet, dotted with an occasional palm tree, and thwarted by wide spans of gray and white rock, larger and rounder than the Turtle Rocks at Petit Jean but not as big as the pink granite Elephant Rocks near Belgrade, MO.  Photography was not possible on the trip.  My camera was jammed into one of the many pockets of my amazing little backpack on top of the bush taxi.  I sat in the very back, with the feet of the man who loaded my bike and all the bags on top of the van, and then stayed there, dangling just within my field of vision. 

Matt had gone shopping in the bigger town of Diebougou and was unable to get back in time to receive us because none of the bush taxis available to him was going in the right direction.  I had a coke with Florent and Gustave and met one of the town fous who, attracted to my shiny new bicycle, and maybe to my glaring whiteness, thought he’d found a sure bet for a handout.  My hosts chased him away, much as folks deal with dogs and pigs who wander into their courtyards, but without the throwing of bottles or launching of stones with slingshots.  That stupid bicycle!  I was required to take it along on the entire trip as part of my training, although I knew full well I wouldn’t ride it in Ouaga, where the traffic is insane, or in the village, where we planned to walk to the many points of interest, or in Gaoua, which is very hilly.  Later we had to hunt Gustave down to recover the dumb bicycle tools that had been removed from the bike just before the bus trip and tucked into his bag.  Hauling the tools and pump all around creation is also a required element of training. Grrrr.

I waited for Matt at the home of his homologue, a young math teacher, and watched Brazilian soap operas and a French movie with his daughters and their friends on satellite TV.  Florent and I had planned to try to meet many of the local officials that afternoon, but with Matt’s late arrival and my not-to-be-denied desire for a bucket shower and clean clothes, we were only able to stop in at the school superintendent’s (Gustave’s) office, the gendarmerie, the police station, the hospital, and a number of shops and market stalls.  When we returned to the house with the makings of a spaghetti dinner, the neighbors were home and I was able to meet the amiable inhabitants of the two other houses in the courtyard.

Matt’s, and soon to be my house, is the one in the middle.  Dig the crazy columns!  There are three rooms, an indoor ‘shower,’ an enclosed and covered latrine, i.e. with a roof, and electricity.  Matt is leaving a fan and a little fridge.  The lap of luxury!  Yea!!  Peace Corps requires screens on all doors and windows, and doors that lock.  Here you have the view of the house from the courtyard, and the view of the courtyard from the house. I plan to be good friends with my neighbors!

On day two we visited Florent’s elementary school, the lycee, the library, one of the three cyber cafés, several carpenter shops, numerous shops and bus stations and the boulanger’s unattended oven.  The boulanger himself was probably at the wedding, the same one that took the mayor and the prefect out of their offices when we tried to find them in the afternoon.  Florent was able to introduce me to the chef de terre, which was an interesting encounter and may be the topic of a later, shorter post.  This one is getting pretty long-winded.  We were able to meet with the prefect later in the afternoon at the conclusion of the wedding.  

Matt has quite a following!  I pulled out the camera to get a shot of the biggest baobob tree I’ve ever seen (the area around the tree is sacred and cannot be cultivated), and within seconds had a crew lined up and ready to try hard not to smile.  This was in the poorest part of town, and there is such a thing as poorer than poor.

The final two days of this trip took me to Gaoua, a regional capital I am unlikely to visit again because getting there on public transportation is not easy.  I enjoyed meeting Daniel, an IT volunteer who, like Matt, has integrated very well into his community, as well as a couple of French ex-pats and their delightful Côte d’Ivoirean and Burkinabé girlfriends.   Côte d’Ivoirean food is fantastic! 

It is highly unlikely that any of the places I visited on this trip, or anywhere else other than the capital city, is anything like what you may be picturing in your mind.  For example, ‘town’ takes on entirely new meaning in West Africa.  A carpenter’s shop may be a bench and a plane at the side of the road, and if I mention a restaurant, I’m probably referring to a collection of rusty metal tables and chairs under a tree, screened off from traffic with woven grass mats called secko.  For those of you who’ve been here, I must sound like such a clueless novice.  And that’s exactly what I am.  Boy, do I have a lot to learn!

Second Impressions

Three weeks into the home stay, it’s a little late for first impressions.  They were superficial and unfair anyway, and dealt primarily with the heat and the dirt, which appear to be tantamount to death and taxes.  The heat continues unabated despite the fact that this is supposed to be the rainy season.  This extension of the hot season is very worrisome to the villagers.  What will they eat this coming year if the rains don’t fill the rice fields and allow the maize to grow beyond its present two inches?

There is no lack of water for the people.  Many artesian wells are accessible throughout the village.  Some are self serve – pump your own for free, and others have a mechanical pump that fills a tank on stilts from which water flows from an actual faucet.  At the latter, for a fee, you can leave your cart full of jerry cans in a queue and fetch them later when the faucet guy has had a chance to fill them.  At the former, the pumpers are almost all in the 12 and under league.  They hang out, play around in the water, and toss what I estimate to be 5-gallon jerry cans around as if they were nothing.  The one time I went there alone with a couple of empty cans, a skinny 7 year old girl insisted on pumping the water for me.  I only let her fill them half way, or I would not have been able to lift them.  Most kids leave the pump with eight cans in a two-wheeled push cart or donkey cart.  Some have home-made frames attached to their bikes that let them carry two cans like saddle bags.  Others lift a single can and carry it home on their heads.  I’ve seen them set a can on the bike seat, too, and then walk the bike home.

Steve, 12, pumped water for my laundry.  Steve is also known as “Papi” to his family, because he is named after his grandfather.

They need a lot of water because they wash a lot.  They brush their teeth and wash their bodies from head to toe, with lots of soap, at least twice a day.  They wash dishes and clothes and corn and rice and fruit and vegetables in three or more changes of water.  They wash floors and scrub pots. I drink only the water I get from Peace-Corps-provided water filtration and purification set-ups.  They fill small plastic bags with well water and put them in the fridge for drinking (bite the corner of the bag and suck) or in the freezer for ice.  They do not give water to animals, however.  Pigs, goats, dogs, donkeys, chickens and sheep are expected to fend for themselves and live on the garbage tossed into the streets.  None of the aforementioned scavengers get any respect, and all are as likely as not to get eaten.  Not even the donkeys hauling the water and goods through the village have names.

Not every family has a refrigerator.  Not every family has electricity.  In my neighborhood, many homes have electricity for lights and TV, but few have refrigerators.  My family consists of a young couple, both of whom work (he’s a nurse, and vaccinates kids!, and she works at the bank/credit union), their 2 year old son, and their ‘bonne,’ a girl of about 13 who does all of the washing and water hauling mentioned above, along with the cleaning, cooking and babysitting.  She also fills the plastic bags with water and sells them for about a dime each to people who wander in and out of the courtyard during the afternoon and evening.  It helps pay the electricity bill!  Others who come by frequently are the family of the grandmother a few courtyards down who keeps her insulin in ‘our’ fridge. And then, of course, the kids.  I am a big attraction to many who have never seen a white person.  Most come into the courtyard shyly, curtsy and shake hands and offer me the traditional polite greetings, but some little brats have just climbed up and shouted, “Nasara! Nasara!” (white person) over the courtyard wall.  To many of the sweet ones I am now “Mami Suzanne,” or Grandma Susan, and they run to greet me when I get home in the evening.  My best buddies are Steve and Yanne, who also live in our courtyard with their parents, Farid, my ‘little brother,’ and Yassine.  I berated the brats for their lack of good manners on their second visit, and invited them into the courtyard to “saluer” me properly.  That got rid of them.

 

Yassine, of the Wild Team, is one of my biggest fans and a real doll.  Amos, in the yellow shirt, will hopefully become an engineer.  His tin can pull toy truck was impressive.  Yanne, Steve’s brother, is partially hidden behind Fabio’s bald head.

With TV, a fridge, two scooters, a car and a maid, my family is pretty rich.  There is no paint on the walls, though, and not much to make the four-room house homey in any way.  It’s a gray concrete bunker inside, partially smeared with red mud outside.  Thanks to the Peace Corps, my room has a screen on the window and a lock on the door.  I sleep in the path of a fan (special request) on a comfy but hot foam mattress under a mosquito net, but I have seen very few mosquitos anywhere as yet.  The rain, if and when it comes, will probably bring them out in swarms.

For those who worry, I am riding my bike to and from training sessions every day, eating well, and taking my malaria prophylaxis regularly.   I am following the Peace Corps security regulations, of which there are many, to a T.  No one from my staging group has given up as yet, which is apparently fairly unusual.  The training schedule is packed 6 days a week from 8 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., and we are miles from the nearest air conditioner.  Some in the group have had stomach bugs and other minor complaints.  One, however, suffered a slipped disc, and another, almost my age, lost his mother, who had suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years.  The Peace Corps is very quick and efficient with medical attention and other support.   Shannon Meehan is our Country Director, and she is an inspiring leader.  She’s been working with refugees in conflict and crisis zones for some 30 years, and has further specialized in sexual violence against women, including in conflict. We are honored to work with her for a few weeks yet.  She’ll finish her stint here before we complete training and are sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers on August 23.