(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.
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