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.