Questions and comments

Several people have responded to things in my blogs with interesting information that I would like to share with you. I will also answer a couple of questions people have posed.

Nancy Drew in French

Several people did internet searches and found information about the French translations of the Nancy Drew series. They confirmed my guess that the reason for changing the name is the difficulty in pronouncing Drew, just like the difficulty in pronouncing Larsen. R in the middle of the word here tends to come out as a W.

Apparently this was a very popular series over the years and there is a lot of information about the various translations at  http://www.nancydrewworld.com/french.html if you are interested.

Bird on the road

 

Here is the picture of that bird again.  My sister in law identified it and sent me the following information about it:

It is a Red-billed Hornbill. It lives in quite a few places in Africa. They feed by hopping on the ground, searching the surface and probing holes for insects. They follow the paths of game animals in order to hunt for dung beetles. As with most hornbills, the nest is in a hole in a tree. The female inside the nest, helped by the male outside, plasters the entrance with mud and droppings, leaving only a narrow slit. The male brings food which is passed through the slit, and droppings are squirted out. The female leaves when the young are half-grown, when they know to come to the slit for food. The parents reseal the nest until the young are ready to leave.

Quote on the carving in the forest

 

One friend suggested it was similar to an American Indian proverb:

We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. –

My daughter who speaks French better than I do, having lived in Paris for 4 years, said:

I would have read it more in the sense of something that is not our birthright, something that belongs to us and is ours to squander as we will (as an inheritance might be considered to be), but an obligation, something we have to protect for the future generations. I think that contrast between squandering and preserving, rather than the idea that the forbearers didn't think of it, is probably what the saying is about.

Answers to a few questions:

Rain

A friend reported that Cleveland has been having record rain fall this year, with 55 inches so far, compared to an average of 36 inches and asked how much rain falls in Burkina.  There is some variation, but the web indicates that the range is 23 to 36 inches.  The big difference between here and Cleveland is that here it all falls in the four months of the rainy season, June-September, and there is virtually no rain the rest of the year. I am in an area that is closer to the 23 inches.

Schools

Another question was why the schools are the way they are. I certainly do not know the whole story, but I am sure much of it is because of the poverty of the country. They try to get everybody to send their kids to school, but, in reality, there is not enough room in the existing schools. Why not build more schools? Buildings cost money, even if a community gets together and builds classrooms out of mud bricks. There is still the cost of doors, windows, and roofs.

Another problem is that teachers are paid by the Burkina Faso government, and not the local government, so money to hire more teachers competes with funding roads, water, electricity, and so on.  You have to get governments permission to build a new classroom because that will mean a new teacher will be needed.

Because teachers are government employees, the central government decides where they will be assigned, rather than local school districts hiring. That may be why it takes untile the second week of school to get teachers assigned to classrooms.

The Provisor, or principal of the local Lycée or High School was just moved to another town and the new man arrived Monday.  I asked him if this was a promotion and he told me that this was about the same size school as where he was Provisor for the past five years, but the government has a policy stating provisors should not stay in one school for more than 5 years. The idea is that if you stay in one place too long you lose your edge for innovation and fall into doing things the way they always have been done.  When people move around they bring new ideas with them.  There may be something to that, but it must be hard to know you are not going to staying in a place and it might discourage people from taking on long term projects.

Teachers move around, too, but mostly at their request.  When you start out you may be placed in a less desirable location.  After you have been there for five years, you can request a transfer to a location you prefer.  You may or may not get the place you want, but your new place may be closer to where you would like to be.

Village Chief

I was asked about the role of the village chief and his relationship to other government officials there are in small town like the one I live in.  Please realize this is just the way I understand the system from talking with folks here and there could be some misconceptions.

The position of village chief is more or less hereditary, although I understand that the oldest son may not want to take on the responsibility or may be living in a big city.  In that case the community (somehow) selects the new chief who may be related to the old chief, another son, a brother or nephew, for example. It may be that the village can chose a man from a different family, but I am not sure about that. There is a sub-chief for each small community (or neighborhood), but there is an overall chief for the town, to whom the sub chiefs give homage.  There are responsibilities of these chiefs that I probably don’t know about. Someone told me that it can be a problem if the son who would inherit the responsibility has moved to the city.  He may not want to return to his village to take on the role, and he may not have been trained in in how to make the appropriate sacrifices and how to conduct the traditional ceremonies..  These folks have no official authority from the government, as I understand it, but they are still held in great respect. For example, the chiefs of the various sectors of Ouagadougou and the head chief were invited, along with government officials, to the swearing in ceremony for Peace Corps. The head chief of Ouaga has the right to say who can use the field where we played games with the students in the English camp last summer. They probably have other responsibilities I know nothing about.

More Differences

Being homeless in a village

If you are poor in Burkina Faso and live in a village, you can build a house out of the dirt from the ground and make a roof out of the tall grass that grows wild here. Your village chief can designate a plot of land where you can build a house and where you can farm the land. Here is a small house my friend Prosper built on this new farm plot. It will be a house for a caretaker when he gets the place fenced in for his sheep and goats.

If you are just living on a piece of ground the village chief assigned to you, you can plant millet or corn, and, at the end of the growing season, you may have food for the year. If you want a window or door for your house, that would require money. You would need to get someone to loan you seeds to plant, but it is not like being homeless in Cleveland, Ohio. Here you do not need to worry about freezing to death in the winter, and the possibility of growing enough food for a year is there. Of course farming is an iffy business and if there is a bad year for crops, things may not be so great. Most of us would not like to live that way, but at least nobody freezes to death under a bridge here!

Property rights (or lack there of)

Property ownership is just being westernized. If you were that poor person who asked the village chief for land to cultivate and to build on, it would be yours to use only as long as the chief lets you live there. If he decided to grant it to someone else, you would have to move. Now days it is possible for you to get a paper showing you have the right to that land, a title of sorts, but that costs money and requires a degree of sophistication that most village folks do not have. Prosper is a school teacher so he is what we call a functionair here, that is, a civil service employee. He has both the knowledge and resources to get a deed to this little plot of land.

Unfortunately, the traditionally way of dealing with land use is changing. I have heard of a village in Mali where the government decided to give a long term lease on parcel of land to a Chinese group and the people who had been living there for generations had to move out. Their village was destroyed with no compensation for those displaced. There have been articles about this in the New York Times, explaining that this seems to be happening all over Africa. It seems that richer countries that are running out of land see a lot of apparently vacant land in Africa and want to get the use of it to feed their own people. That really leaves the Africans in a bad way. The government gets the money and the people who lived there really become the homeless poor. They have to find a new place to live and the crops that are raised where they used to farm now leave the continent.

Pests

One similarity to Cleveland is that ants like to invade the house, especially if you fail to wipe up sugar spilled on the counter. These ants do not look like the American red ants I see each spring and fall. They are bigger and almost transparent. They also move really fast if you try to squash them. Another type of pest that has an American relative is termites. They are a constant problem in the villages. You may be fine for weeks at a time and then, suddenly, there is termite trail climbing your wall. Here is a picture of one, before I knocked it down.

When you go into any house in the village you are sure to see the signs that people have had visits from these critters. People say, “just spread some Rambo insecticide and they will be finished,” but really it only lasts a few weeks, and they are back again. I had a termite attack on the branches that support my hangar. My friend Prosper was visiting and saw the signs of the termites. He jumped up and started knocking their coating of mud off my support and later on sent his nephew over with a can of used motor oil to coat the base of the posts (see below). That seemed to keep them at bay for a while, but it also lost effectiveness and had to be re-done.

Early in my stay the termites attacked some of my books that were sitting on a little wooden table next to the wall. I am sorry I did not think to take a picture of the attack until I had destroyed it, but it looked like some mud had fallen out of the attic onto the top of several of my books. When I pried it off, the little critters scampered down the tunnels, back out into the yard. Here is a picture of the edge of one of the books they chewed. Fortunately they mostly ate the margin, and not the text, so I can still use it.

Bats

You have already heard about my bat problem, but I wanted to show you a picture of my new bat house. The last time they exterminated the bats, I decided to try giving them an alternative place to live. I had the carpenter construct this bat house but I am not sure if they have decided they like it better than my attic.

Differences

There are hundreds of differences between how things are done here and in America. Here are just a few of them:

The Beginning of School

Schools here are supposed to open on October 1, which was a Saturday this year. The primary schools have Thursdays and Sundays off and just a half a day on Saturday, so you might expect teachers to be in the classrooms on October first to welcome the students and get things started.  However; on October first many teachers did not even know where they would be teaching or what grade level they would teach.  When I was teaching at the university, I knew the courses I would teach and the days and times they would meet almost a year in advance; so this system of assigning people to classes seems very odd to me. 

Last year; my neighbor was the director (head teacher) of a small school quite far away from where he lives:  He asked to be assigned to a school closer to his home. He found out he would be given a new assignment; but not where or what grade. In fact; he did not even find out the school where would be teaching until a week after classes were supposed to begin!  He will be teaching the first level of primary school at a school that is, indeed, a bit closer to home. He has 80 children in his class and, at the moment, no desks or books for the children. The children now sit on the floor, but he assures me that the desks will be coming. 

School readiness

Most of the children in my neighbor’s class arrive at school speaking only the local language spoken by their family at home. The only French they are likely to know is “Nassara, pas de cadeau?” (foreigner, no present?). The first term is obviously spent teaching beginning French and many teachers have no choice but to use “the direct method,” that is, speaking only French and teaching the meaning through gestures, acting things out, and so on. Teachers are not assigned to regions based on their maternal language; but by some other criteria, seniority I suspect. My neighbor speaks three of the local languages, so he can use the language the children know in most cases, but the educational philosophy for most schools does not allow bilingualism. There are a few experimental schools in the country that start by using the local language 90% of the time and gradually increasing the amount of French until by the 6^th year the local language is used only 10% of the time.  Even though, from what I have been told, these schools seem to produce better results, many parents want the traditional French only method: I find this interesting, given that most of the parents cannot speak French and are illiterate.  This means that they are unable to prepare their children for school. It is only a handful of children who arrive at school speaking any French or having seen books around the house. Even among the better educated locals, the idea of reading for pleasure is not a concept.

Beautiful Homes

I just got word that my house in University Heights received a “House Beautiful” award this year. This is because University Heights bills itself the City of Beautiful Homes, and because the folks who are taking care of my house for me while I am here have been doing a great job.

This would not be a concept here.  If you have a big fancy house in the city, you hind it behind a big wall, with a guard to be sure no one comes in who is not invited.  I have; in fact, seen some beautiful homes here, with lush landscaping. But you would never know if from looking at the wall. Here are a couple of examples.  You have to use your imagination about what is behind them.  I don’t know!

Time and Planning

I know I have talked about the Burkina idea of time before, but it is interesting how this affects planning.  Being “on time” in the American way does not happen in the villages.  People may not have watches, although have cell phones that show the time.  This is not a big help, however, because you have to get your phone battery recharged every few days, and, without electricity in your home, that means you take your phone to a boutique to get it re-charged.  Often this involves removing the battery, so you have to re-set the time when you put it back in.  Unlike American cell phones, there is not magic signal from the cell phone company that resets your phone to the correct time.  You have to rely on others to get the best guess of the actual time.

If you decide you want to have a meeting at 8:00, you tell people to come at 7:00.  Of course everybody knows you are going to do this, so they do not bother to come until 8:00 or 8:30.  It is a viscous circle, as you can imagine. I am planning my sex education meetings at the primary schools.  Last year I was there at 2:45 to get ready for a meeting at 3:00.  At 3:15 the director of the school finally came to open up the classroom and get some kids to sweep the floor.  We actually started at 3:30 but people kept coming for the next half hour.

Contact information

FYI, my e-mail address:  larsen@jcu.edu

I know most of you get my note to say I have posted again and have my e-mail address, but there are a few folks who read this blog who are not on my distribution list.  If you would like to be added to the list, send me an e-mail.  Do the same if you have questions or comments

Peace Corps at 50

 Peace Corps is 50 Years Old

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps. As many of you know, it has placed volunteers in 139 countries around the world.  For those who are not already familiar with the goals of the Peace Corps I will quote them here:



Peace Corps Goals

1.  To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women

2.  To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served and

3.  To help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans.

The celebration in Burkina Faso



To celebrate this anniversary there were special events throughout 2011, with a big celebration on September 24, around the world.  Here in Burkina Faso we had a three day “Peace Corps Fair” in an effort to inform people in Burkina about the work volunteers are doing here.  On the first day of the fair there were two special events scheduled, the swearing in of a new group of volunteers and the arrival of a group of people who rode on a bike tour of Burkina Faso to raise money to help volunteers fund small projects at their sites.

We arrived bright and early 6:30 AM or so to set up our displays.  It was cloudy and we all hoped it would not rain, but it did.  As is often the case here, the rain was preceded by a strong wind, full of dust. The wind continued as the rain fell, and the result was that the tents and tables that had been so carefully set up were just about destroyed.  Maybe you can get an idea of the damage in the picture below.

As we ran for the building, many of the carefully prepared poster displays got quite wet, and some escaped from people and blew away in the wind.  We waited out the rain and tried to dry off things as best we could.  Eventually we all went to the auditorium for the swearing-in ceremony. 

There are a few traditional things that happen at these events.  One thing they always sdo is to have representatives of the new volunteers, who have been studying local languages for several weeks, say a few (or a lot of) words of greeting in several of the local languages. This volunteer was one of those giving greetings.  He is dressed in a traditional chief’s costume because his stage mates had voted him chief of their stage.

Another traditional aspect of the event is cultural entertainment.  This time there was a dance troupe and musicians who played the balophone and drums.  I am told this particular group dances in the style of a city called Bobo-Dilasi. If you watch the video on http://pcburkina.org/, you get a much better idea of what the dancing was like. (By the way, I am not in the vidio)

Also there are speeches by important people, in this case, the Directorice of the Burkina Faso Peace Corps, the American Ambassador to Burkina, and the Prime Minister of Burkina.  The prime minister presented this gift to the Peace Corps to honor this 50th anniversary.

Peace corps presented baskets to the Prime Minister that contained tree seeds, representing the commitment of the Peace Corps to plant 50 trees in each of the 50 towns and villages where volunteers serve, and a million trees over the next 5 years.  Trees are an important element in the fight against the desertification of the country.



After a reception honoring the new volunteers and the people who rode through that rain storm to get here by the end of the ceremony, we set up for the fair.  Here is what things looked life when the blown over tents were re-erected or replaced with new ones.

The group I work with here, Pengdwendé had a table highlighting some of the projects of the association that I am not involved with, making shea butter, growing onions, and recycling the small plastic bags in which people buy water.  Because safe drinking water is not always easy to find, water is packaged in these little plastic bags and sold on the street.  When you buy one, you bite off a corner, suck out the water and throw the bag away.  You see these bags all over the ground, along with the black plastic bags I wrote about before.  These water bags are made from a thicker kind of plastic and they happen to be recyclable.  The only problem is collecting them and getting them to a recycling center. Here is a picture of out informational display about the organization surrounded by the folks who worked at the tables.

I was at a table telling about the soap opera project.  Pengdwendé has a community radio station in my town and cooperates with five other community radio stations in producing informative radio broadcasts.  These six stations agreed to broadcast the soap opera Cesiri Tono, a soap opera aimed at informing people about children’s rights and the tragedy of child trafficking. In the soap opera one of the characters is a boy who is given to child traffickers by his parents because the tell the parents they will give him a good education and they tell the boy he will get a bicycle.  He ends up working long hours under very harsh conditions on a cocoa plantation, but is finally saved from this terrible life by one of the other characters. Because it is a melodrama, there are lots of other problems in the story line, including forced (arranged) marriages, violence against women and children, prostitution, and alcohol abuse. As I have mentioned before, this program is in Djula, the trading language of much of West Africa, and was written and produced in Mali, the country where my daughter, Janet, served as a volunteer 1983-1985.



As I may have mentioned before, the exciting news is that Population Media Center, the group that helps countries conduct the research needed, to write, produce and broadcast the program, and do a follow-up evaluation, has received funding to do not just one, but TWO soap operas here. The reason for doing two is that the target audience here are the people of the small villages who probably do not speak or understand much French. Among those people there are a total 14 different languages spoken, which is the reason French is used as the official language and is the language used in schools. There are, whoever, two languages that are spoken more than most of the others, Djula and Moore. Those are the two languages that will be used in these new soap operas.

I guess that is enough about the fair except to say that, in spite of what looked like a total disaster on the morning of the first day, it was a great success, with lots of fun and information for those who visited. It was organized and run by the volunteers, with the support of the professional staff, and it was, in my opinion, an outstanding event.

Not every thing works as you might wish

And the Wall Came a’Tumblin’ down.
While I was in Ouaga at the American Language Center helping with English, I got several text messages and phone calls telling that my wall had fallen down.  This wall was just built in November and I had some concerns about it early on.  It was built in the local building style, out of mud bricks with a bit of straw (shades of the Israelites in Egypt), and I noticed right away that it was leaning outward rather than being really upright. Furthermore, the mason who built it put one end of it under the roof overhang so as soon as the rain started, that part of the wall washed away.  My friends took some rubble from a house that had collapsed and put it along the base of that part of the wall to try to protect it from the rain water flowing past, but that was not enough. But it was not only the wall that had been leaning, but the one on the opposite side of the house that fell, too.  They both fell away from the house, so it was not the wind that blew it over, although there was a big wind with that rain storm.

My friend Prosper tried to support the remainder with some big branches.




In spite of that, a couple of weeks later, the rest of that part of the wall fell over.

To top it off, the wall in the back of the house went over, too.  This is looking hopeless! They will not be able to do anything about it while it is the rainy season, and I am afraid the bricks will all melt away before it is time to build again. This is not my problem, however.  When the Peace Corps sets up a site, there is an agreement that the community will provide housing for the volunteer with a courtyard and a hangar, as well as a private latrine and a private house with at least two rooms.  I have it all, except for the wall.  I do miss my privacy, but I can live with it for now.

Dutch oven burns up

Here is a picture of my cannary and marmite that I have posted before. To make a Dutch oven, you fill the bottom of the marmite with 3 inches of sand and put it on a burner on the stove and heat it for a couple of hours to get rid of the dirt taste. 

I did that and the Dutch oven to baked things pretty well.  That is how I made the small cakes, in muffin pans, for the birthday party I wrote about before. It was OK, but it was a bit hard to get things in and out of it.  I was also worried I was going to run out of gas.  I understand you really get no warning.  In the middle of cooking, suddenly the burner just goes off. 

I decided I wanted a bigger version that sits on its own gas burner.  That way I would have a bigger Dutch oven and I also have an emergency backup gas supply. Here is a picture of the final project.

On the way to getting this, however, I burned up a marmite.  A friend who has a similar one told me just to use high heat.  No problem.  I turned the burner on fairly high to burn out the dirt taste and, after an hour or so I thought I was hearing something funny.  When I checked it out, it looked like a leaf had blown in and was sitting on the burner.  When I looked more closely I realized it was a part of the bottom of the pot!  The bottom melted off and the sand spilled out. I was luck that the burner was not damaged. Here is the pot with the hole in it.

My friend Prosper had bought the marmite and burner at the marché and had brought them home on his moto. When I burned a hole in the bottom of the pot he went back to the marché  and got the guy who had sold the pot to him.  The merchant agreed to go back to the man who made the pots and to get several from which we would be able to chose our favorite.  Prosper’s wife, Martine, tapped and lifted them and picked the one she thought was best.  So far she appears to have made the right choice.  I have made cakes, cookies, biscuits and even roasted a piece of pork in it.  Luckily it did not do any damage to the burner, so a new pot with lower heat seems to have fixed the problem. 

Cell phones and my internet connection

As I may have said before, most adults carry cell phones, referred to her as “portables.”
There are several different service providers, but the one I use is Airtel.  It used to be Zain, but they were bought out by a Japanese company last spring and the name changed.  So did the color of all the little booths all over the country where you can by “unité,”  the way you buy minutes (or seconds in this case) of air time in the US.  The network here if often overloaded, making reception TERRIBLE!!!! There are often dropped calls, a message that the network is busy, or ZERO bars anywhere. And, if the call goes through, it often has so much static it is hard to hear the other person. It is even worse in Ouagadougou (the capital) than it is in my little village.

My internet connection is with the same company. The only way I can get on line is to get up early in the morning, when no one else is on the network.  Then it is sometimes about as fast as being in a cyber café (internet café) in a big city. Sometimes even that connection is slow, but it is certainly better than no connection at all.  Several times it has taken be three days to get my blog uploaded and my e-mail notices sent out.  I do try to post about once a week, but the net work does not always cooperate.

I do not mean to complain.  These stories are just to give you an idea of what it is like here. This is a developing (third world) country, after all, and it is all part of the adventure.

A forest in the City

While I was in Ouaga this summer, I went to visit a big park, referred to here as The Forest. There is one entrance located near the transit house where we stay when we are in town, but I have seen other entrances on other roads, and the map shows that it is a pretty large area. Near the entrance we saw this tree, carved with several animals and people. The message on the open book, in French, is something to the effect of, “We did not inherit this from our parents but pass it on to our children.” I think the point is that this park is not something people thought of having in the past but it should be preserved for the future, as the world changes.

Here is a picture of one of the paths through the woods. As you may be able to tell, this place has quite a mixture of different kinds of trees and other plants. There are not any really tall trees, but there are not many really tall trees anywhere in Burkina Faso.

The tree in the foreground here, with the shiny leaves, is called a karaté (sounds like carrot-a) tree. From its nuts you get beurre de karaté, which you all know as shay butter.

Here is one of the few mushrooms I have seen here. I don’t know enough about mushrooms to know if this is good for food, but I sure would not take any chances!

Here is one of the strangest flowers you are likely to see. Sorry, I have no idea of its name.

There were lots of birds flitting about, but most of my attempts to take pictures of them are just pictures of leaves. This guy, however, sat nicely on the road and I was able to enlarge a little corner of my photo so you can see him.

Here are a couple of pictures of what appear to be a lot of birds swarming around this tree. In reality, most of these are big fruit bats. I was surprised to see them out in broad daylight.

This plant has lovely little thorns, as to quite a few of the plants here. If you don’t want to be eaten by the roaming goats, you had better taste pretty bad, or be pretty prickly.

Last, but not least, is this plant that looks like an agave plant. I suspect it is becaquser I understand they were imported to Europe from the southwest by the early explorers. The climate is certainly right for them here!

That's the end of the travelogue for today. Just a final note to tell you I am doing very well. My health has been fine and we just had our mid-service medical checkup, so that is official! My French is improving, although far from good, and I am happy to be here.

Adventures in Ouagadougou

FESPACO

Back in February, I was in Ouagadougou when it happened to be the time of the Africa film festival, called FESPACO, that is held in Ouaga every other year.  Quite a few of the volunteers came to town that week to see the movies, and a couple of committees conveniently scheduled meetings that weekend.  I was there for a meeting of volunteers who were going to be bringing students to a youth leadership conference the following month.  We each had to select a piece of the program to do and make plans about how to do it.  In any case, the Transit House, where I was staying, was full of volunteers. I had not planned to go to the film festival, but a meeting with my counterpart that I had scheduled for that evening fell through because she was not feeling well, and I tagged along with the crowd.  It was a movie called “When China Met Africa” and we had expected it to be mostly in English because it was done by BBC.  It was a documentary set in an English speaking African country, but much of the dialogue was in Chinese and the local African language.  The English was also a bit hard to understand because of the accent. There were subtitles, but they were in French and I found I could only read about 2/3 of each one as it flashed by. I did get the general drift and it was a bit discouraging. The Chinese were planning to do several projects there that are now on hold because of the world economic crisis. One Chinese farmer immigrated to the country and bought three farms, thinking there would be one for each of his children, but the children are not interested in farming in Africa. A road project and manufacturing project seeing to be going well, however. It was the only show I saw, and I am sure it was not one of the prize winners.

Living in style (for one night)

Kriss Barker, who is a vice president of Population Media Center and who is co-author of the training manual about how write and produce soap operas to change behavior, was in town to make final arrangements with group that will fund the project for a Burkinabè soap opera.  Actually, the project is mostly funded, for writing TWO soap operas, one in Moore, and the other in Jula. These are the two local languages most commonly spoken here.

I had talked to her by phone and Skype several times, as well as having a number of e-mail exchanges with her, so when she was in the country we wanted to meet each other face to face.  At first she thought she might be able to come out to my village, but that was not going to work out. I had offered to go into Ouaga if that would be better for her, and she asked if I would do so.  I decided that, after five weeks in the group living at the transit house, I was entitled to one night at a real hotel, so I asked her to get a reservation for me at the hotel where she was staying.  For that one night I paid the equivalent of about half of what I get to live on for a month as a volunteer. That makes me glad that the transit house is a place I can stay for a reasonable price. However I did enjoy my day of luxury. I would have thought I was back in the USA for 24 hours:  good European style food, hot water and a bath tub, and real high speed internet. 

It was great to meet Kriss, who is quite dynamic and exudes enthusiasm for the project.  We had dinner with the man who owns 11 radio stations and a TV station, who had worked with the Peace Corps group when we started trying to find financial support for such a project.  He is very enthusiastic about this project, too, but I think the funder Kriss has found wants to use the official national radio for the broadcasts.   Maybe they will decide to allow it to be broadcast on community and other commercial stations as well.  I think the people in the target audience, folks in poor rural areas, are more likely to listen to local stations than to the official government station, but I don’t know that for a fact.  That is one of the things the first phase of the project, which is research about local conditions, will show.

Profiling, Burkina Style

When I came into the hotel in my traveling cloths, with just a back pack, I think they wondered about me.  They told me I would have to wait a while for a room to be ready, so I sat down in the lobby and started my knitting.  Almost immediately they had a room for me.  Maybe it was chance, but I bet they thought I did not fit in with the clientele very well.

When I was leaving to catch the bus back home, I asked the door man if I could get a cab from there to the bus station.  No problem, except that the taxi driver wanted three times as much for the cab ride as the standard door-to-door rate for volunteers.  I ended up calling one of the approved Peace Corps taxi drivers, who not only took me to the bus station, but also went in with me to be sure I would be able to get on a bus before dark.  He would have taken me to another station, at no additional charge, if there had not been a seat available. So here I am, back in my village, with the contrast of rich and poor, European and African, spinning through my head.

Contrasts

In Ouaga the main streets are paved, but there are many side streets, and whole neighborhoods, that have only dirt roads, like we have in my village.  It is not surprising to see something like you see in the picture below, a donkey cart driving down one of these paved roads, with cars, motos, and trucks sharing the road with this very traditional means of transporting goods.

 You may also see motos load with goods to sell.  I actually took this picture just outside of town. This guy is transporting some kind of produce to sell in the capital.

As in the villages, most houses are surrounded by walls, but in the city they tend to be higher, so you can’t see much of what is inside, unless the house has more than one floor.  In the more upscale neighborhoods, two or three story houses are not uncommon.  Any fancy house has a guardian at the gate.  There are a number of companies that supply guardians, each group having a different kind of uniform.  Houses gowned by the American government are guarded by people in blue uniforms with a US flag patch.  If you are a Peace Corps volunteer living in Ouaga, you are required to live in a place with a guardian.  Mixed in among these rather fancy houses you may find people living much as you might in a village, cooking on a wood fire and sleeping on the ground, with animal in the courtyard.  It is a land of contrasts.