Homologue to the Rescue

January 28, 2012

I just removed another semi-dead bat from my house.  Well, I didn’t – my homologue did.  Bon travaille (good work), homologue!  I stood and watched…aka ducked and squirmed and squealed with fear every now and then when the bat flew directly towards my face.  I’ve had bat problems here and there, but generally the bats who share my house with me aren’t a problem.  Sure, I can hear them squeaking and rummaging around in the walls of my house, but they rarely leave the walls and fly madly around the inside of my house.  I don’t like the idea of there being bats in my house, but as long as they don’t bother me, I can deal with it and we can live happily together.  But tonight, this bat decided it wanted to bother me, and thus it got whacked with a broom until it dropped to the floor.  I opened up the door as wide as it would go (which was not very wide…Africa is definitely not handicap accessible), in hopes that it would just fly out and leave my house by its own choice…but it didn’t.  For some reason it kept flying circle after circle in my kitchen, rather than escaping into the outdoors.  Stupid bat.  If you woulda left like you were supposed to, my homologue wouldn’t have had to hit you.  My homologue swung at it with my broom too many times to count within the 5-minute ordeal, but finally he made contact.  It dropped directly on top of him, hitting his shoulder, and he kinda jumped back and made a little squeal in a low voice or some kind of noise displaying his fear/discomfort with the bat brushing against him.  But he immediately picked it up and threw it outside, where, much to my disappointment, it flew away instantly, meaning that it wasn’t dead, and there was a good chance it would try to return to its home inside my house.  Let’s hope not.  But if I have any more problems, hopefully my homologue will conveniently be at my house again to take care of any bat (or rat) issues.

My homologue had stopped by early this evening around 5pm just to say “bonsoir” and see what I was up to.  When he walked into my courtyard, I was actually in the middle of transplanting some trees: 3 papaya trees and 1 mango.  (I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they live and actually grow and don’t get eaten/attacked by hungry goats, chickens, lizards, dogs, and/or children.)  I was kneeling in the dirt, my hands covered in mud, packing dirt around one of the papaya trees, and when he saw this, his reaction was to laugh.  I’m not sure why everything I do is funny to the Burkinabe.  I mean, it’s not like I was even doing anything “oddly American” or weird.  I was planting trees.  Almost everyone here is a cultivateur (farmer) and plants stuff all the time.  So why is a white girl digging a hole and putting a tree in the ground so hilarious?  Or washing dishes?  Or getting water from the well?  These are all normal tasks that people do every day here…they shouldn’t find them amusing.  But whatever.  I finished planting the trees, washed off my hands, and chatted with my homologue.  We talked a little bit about school, and then he saw my pink little scissors (the kind that have a blunt tip and Kindergartners have in their pencil box).  He immediately asked if I had another, or, even better, one that was bigger.  I said yes.  He asked if he could borrow it – he wanted to cut open a tin can of tomato paste.  This situation was amusing/odd to me for several reasons:

1.       He didn’t have a scissors of his own at his house.  (That’s right, most people – even functionaire type people with some money -- don’t own possessions that they don’t use on a regular, almost daily basis.  Even simple things like scissors or hammers or tape, that we in America practically deem a necessity to always have on hand for easy access when situations arise that actually require the use of a hammer or tape…)

2.       He wanted to cut open a tin can.  (In Americaland, we use an invention called a can-opener for that.)

I questioned him on the ability to cut open the tin can with a dinky scissors, and he said it would work, making me think that he’s probably done this before.  He explained that he wanted to cut open the can and unroll the metal so that his math class could visually see the surface area of a cylinder: top circle + bottom circle + the rectangle that forms the body of the cylinder.  Good idea, especially considering there are essentially no teaching materials here.  I still wasn’t convinced my scissors would be successful at his task, but I gave him the scissors anyways.  I guess we’ll see what happens…