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.