Visit to My Village!

**July 20-22: Visit to My Village!

It took about 7 hours to get to Lanfiera, with brief stops in several cities/villages along the way.  At each stop, little kids and women would shove various snacks and cold beverages in our face or up to your bus window, in hopes that you’d purchase something from them.  Additionally, a few people would get off at each stop, but twice as many would get on.  Tickets for busses aren’t sold “by the seat.”  Thus, everyone who wants a ticket will get one, and – somehow – they WILL get on the bus.  They might not have a seat, but they will fit on the bus…somewhere.  My bus experience wasn’t too bad, despite my row of 3 seats containing 2 women, a young girl, a baby, and myself… annddddd our bags.  Good thing the windows were open, cuz there was no air conditioning.  But too bad that half our route was on gravel roads.  So, it was pretty dusty.  Such fun.  I arrived in my village late in the afternoon, and immediately had tons of kids run up to me and try to help carry my bags and my bike.  And then there were the random kids who just wanted to touch me.  Poke/jab me is more like it, though.  Much to their surprise, yes, I am in fact, a real person.  I may look different, but I’m not an alien, nor am I a figment of their imagination.  While I’m not the first volunteer in my village, the last “foreigner” left about a year ago (rumor has it his name is Nick and he loved his service in Lanfiera so much that he’s currently serving a third year with the Peace Corps in Mali), so it’s been awhile since some of these village folks have seen a “white” person.  

My homologue immediately took me to my house so I could drop off my bags and wash up after that dusty bus ride.  But when I arrived, I saw that my house wasn’t quite ready for me yet -- a man was working on attaching the door to my house and there currently is no latrine for me to do my business.  BUT, there was a huge hole in the ground, where I assume a latrine is going to be built for me sometime in the near future.  My house will be nice, but definitely needs some work.  It has a lot of room for potential, and also was a lot bigger than I expected.  There’s 3 rooms, along with an indoor “shower” area (basically a little closet with a drain in the floor for when I take my bucket baths).  I don’t have electricity, but many of my neighbors do, so either it should be very easy for my house to also be equipped with a power source, or else I can just go over to my neighbor’s.  But if I can get electricity, that’d be nice.  Then I could have some lights, power my computer, and maybe even invest in a fan to help keep me cool.  My walls are currently a dirt/cement-like substance, so hopefully I can get them plastered.  This will prevent random clumps of dirt from just falling off the wall, which will keep my floor and shelves and anything else I own much cleaner, and then I would also be able to paint the plaster.  White or blue or yellow or, really, any color at all, is so much more “homey” and appealing than gray dirt walls.  My courtyard is currently pretty bare, besides for the big shade tree in the center of the yard and the other house on the left side (my house is on the right side).  The “other house” is currently inhabited by 5 young Burkinabe men/boys.  I think.  I’m not really sure what’s going on with that.  I don’t know how old they are (16? 22? 30?), if they actually live there or if it’s just temporary, or even if they’re really all brothers and their parents were gone...  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  We’ll see what happens.  But if I do in fact share my courtyard with these young men, oh well.  Future husband, perhaps?   and/or 5 “brothers” to adopt me as their new sister and help me do work around my house.  I have a lot of landscaping plans I’d like to implement (tree planting, a garden, a patio, an overhang for shade…etc.) and I certainly wouldn’t mind making them food in return for their physical labor…although, I’m not sure they’d like my cooking… I have zero intentions of making traditional Burkinabe meals (like tot, rice, or beans) when I cook, and from what I hear, not being able to prepare good tot is a deal-breaker for most men here. 

So you might be wondering…what is tot?  Good question.  I’m wondering too.  Actually, I do know what it is…kinda…I’ve eaten it a few times now.  Tot (pronounced “toe” as in the 10 toes on your feet) is a substance best described as being similar to America’s mashed potatoes, except a little more blah-tasting.  It can be made from a variety of grains, such as sorghum, millet, or corn, and thus can appear in many different colors, but typically it’s white-ish and served with a sauce of some kind, like tomato or fish or “gumbo” (which is this nasty green stuff made of who knows what).  Tot is a standard food here, especially for “poor” people, and it’s eaten with the right hand -- never the left hand, which is the so-called “poop hand” …you don’t have to be a genius to figure out what that means…  It’s rather messy to take a piece of “mashed-potatoes,” dip it into the liquid sauce, and then scoop it all into your mouth without dropping any or dripping on your shirt, using only your hand (silverware is a luxury here), although the Burkinabe people have no problem doing this without making a mess, since they’ve been doing it since they were born.  I’ll admit I’m starting to like tot, as long as it’s served with an edible sauce.  My homologue’s wife made an amazing meal of tot and fish sauce for me when I visited my village, and it was by far the best tot I’ve ever had.  And I even ate it like a true Burkinabe – with my hands.  I mean hand.  Just the right one, of course.  But before my plate was dished up, my homologue asked me (in French), “Do you prefer to eat tot with your hand or with the spoon?”  And naturally I said, “With a spoon, please.”  He then laughed and proceeded to say, “No, today you are going to use your hand.”  He got a kick out of watching me make a huge mess as I attempted to use my hand to eat the tot and fish sauce, and he was very proud of me when I was somewhat successfully able to clean my plate, sauce and all.

                                                                                                                                                                     

So what else did I all do in my village?  I met a lot of people, that’s what.  The “tree doctor” (aka the head gardener who owns a greenhouse/nursery for trees), the “famille royale” (the royal family – they had HUGE solar panels in their courtyard for electricity!), other teachers, my neighbors, the police officers, owners of restaurants/bars/boutiques/shops, etc.  I rarely understood what anyone said to me, because they spoke Jula or Moore or some other random language, but I smiled and nodded, and they were happy with that.  For the most part, the majority of my 2 days in Lanfiera was spent walking around talking to people, with my counterpart right alongside me, doing most the talking.  And the whole time, everyone kept trying to feed me and/or offer me alcohol or “welcome water” (which of course I can’t drink because it’s not clean/filtered and I’d probably get sick and die… so I have to pretend to take a sip, then spit it out when they’re not looking).  Kids would run up to me and hand me weda, a fruit that’s best described as tasting like a Warhead candy, since it’s a combination of sweet and sour, and you have to suck on each segment of weda individually due to there being a large pit inside each segment.  And everywhere we stopped, someone offered to buy me a drink, and before I could say anything, there’d be a huge liter bottle of Brakina (the creative name for a brand of Burkina-made beer) in front of me and I’d have to be polite and drink it.  I had made the mistake of telling my counterpart on the very first day that, yes, I do drink alcohol.  I should’ve lied and said that I was Muslim or something and that it was against my religion to drink (this is a common and legitimate excuse in Burkina, since so many people are Muslim), so that I wouldn’t have had to drink all that beer.  Pretty sure I was drunk by 10am every day, with all the beer I drank.  As you can probably imagine, walking around the village wasn’t a very easy (or comfortable) task with several liters of beef in my system… and to top it all off I had to also find room in my stomach for all the food they kept offering me.  For example, on my first full day in Lanfiera, I had bananas and weda all morning, and then at 10am we stopped at a restaurant for what I thought was an early lunch. I had THEE best smoked/grilled fresh fish I have ever had and I can’t wait to go back and eat some more of it!!! It was SO good and HUGE…the fish was at least a foot long!  It was served with a tomato/cucumber/onion salad glazed with vinaigrette and was amazing.  And of course, I was given a liter of beer to wash down my fish.  We continued to wander around town, stopping for coffee at a little boutique around noon.  Then we went to my homologue’s house where I ate the tasty tot prepared by his wife, even though I was already completely stuffed from my early lunch of fish and beer.  After my tot, I was served a mango, and then my homologue brought me a large calabash (kind of like a bowl made from the bottom half of a dried gourd) of dolo, which is traditional home-made alcohol that has a taste reminiscent of fermented apple cider.  It’s not too bad.  Unless you have to drink multiple calabashes of it…like I did.  Anyways, after my dolo, it was about 2pm, and I was finally “allowed” to return to my (future) house and take a nap.  Thank God.  My stomach wanted to explode.  I pretty much passed out immediately upon lying down, and when I woke up 2 hours later, my neighbors brought me weda.  And then my homologue showed up with fresh, still warm Samsoa, which are little deep-fried balls of batter/dough made from beans, similar to little donuts, just not sweet – usually samsoa is eaten with a spicy seasoning or dipped in pepper.  I really don’t like the samsoa I’ve tried so far (though it depends what kind of oil it’s deep-fried in; some oils have weird aftertastes), but the stuff in Lanfiera was alright.  I figured with everything we’d eaten that day, the samsoa was my supper.  But no.  We went out to a restaurant for fish soup and bread…and more beer, of course…and after that I was taken to a bar and served some kind of toxic mixed drink that probably had just as much alcohol as sugar in it.  Don’t be surprised if I develop Diabetes while I’m in Africa…    By this time, it was about 8pm and time for me to go to bed.  As we walk back to my house, my homologue stops and says, “You lead, I’ll follow you.  I want to see if you know how to get to your house.”  What!?  Really?  In the dark?  I’m tired, probably intoxicated, there are no lights anywhere besides the moon, so I can’t see anything except for what my cell phone lights up within 2 feet of me, there are no logical paths/sidewalks for me to follow (I’m literally walking across fields, under trees, and through bushes), and even if it were daytime, I wouldn’t have a clue how to find my way.  Me lead?  Yeah right.  I started laughing and he just kept repeating, “No. You must try,” and he refused to take another step or even give me a hint as to what direction to go.  I don’t know how, but by some good luck, I managed to get within the general vicinity of my house, and so finally he pointed me in the right direction and I arrived safely at my door.  Time for bed.  But not until I first ate more food.  My neighbors had prepared me a huge pot of spaghetti and liver and left it sitting by my bed.  And yes, my homologue sat down next to me and made sure I actually ate it.  After all that, all of the enormous amounts of food and alcohol I had consumed within a 12-hour time span, I would’ve been happy if I never had to eat again.  But I still had another day to spend in Lanfiera…at least I now know that I won’t go hungry during my 2 years in my village!

To top of my exciting visit to Lanfiera, on my last night when my homologue dropped me off at my house, he also gave me a surprise.  Or rather, a scare.  He told me goodbye and that it was nice to meet me and how he looked forward to seeing me again in September, etc.   I found this conversation to be a little odd, considering I would see him the next morning when he took me to the bus stop.  And that’s when he dropped the bomb on me with his final words: “Make sure you leave early enough to get to the bus stop on time tomorrow, call me if you have problems…see you in September!”  Wait a minute.  He wasn’t going with me in the morning?  I had to get from my house to the bus station (aka a designated “spot” on the side of the main road) by myself?  And buy a ticket…by myself?  And speak French…by myself?  Great.  The next morning, I packed everything up bright and early and then sat outside my house in a chair, in hopes that my homologue would show up.  But he didn’t.  At 7:30am, I left for the bus stop, and fortunately didn’t have any trouble getting to it – it’s about a 5 minute walk from my house.  I saw a few other people with bags also waiting, reassuring me that I was indeed in the right spot and that I hadn’t missed the bus.  A bunch of kids ran to greet me and carry my bags and steer my bike for me, and some adults who I had met but didn’t remember their names greeted me and got brought me a chair to sit it.  After about 30 minutes, I saw the bus!  It was going really fast (typical for all vehicles in Africa, no matter how full they are or what the road conditions are), and as it approached, I noticed it wasn’t slowing down.  It drove right by me and I stood up and kind of freaked out a bit.  How am I supposed to get on a bus if the busses don’t even slow down enough to see me?!?!?  One of the adults who was waiting next to me and keeping me company, even though he wasn’t going on the bus, tried to explain in French something along the lines of that the bus would come back in a few minutes, but first it was going to a nearby village and then it would turn around to get me.  So I relaxed a bit.  I have a feeling my homologue had talked to this man the day before and had asked him to watch out for me.  Which is fine.  I’m glad he did.   Sure enough, the bus came back and I saw my friend Vida, who’s in a village that’s a 20 minute bus ride away from me, sticking her head out the window and waving.  Once I got my bags and bike loaded, I climbed onto the bus and plopped myself down right next to Vida.  She immediately told me how she saw me “freak out” when the bus drove by, and that she also freaked out a little bit and almost yelled, “Stop the bus!  That’s my friend!  She needs to get on!”  Good to know that there’s others looking out for me here, whether it’s Peace Corps friends or natives!