Enjoying the cold season

Greetings from Kongoussi, and a pre-emptive Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (or, as the giant lights at Espace Watal produly advertise year-round, "Happy Year") to you all. A quick synopsis of what you'll find in this entry. December 12: Independence Day (maybe?) in Burkina; continuing to be hated by other PCVs for having an A/C office; visitors to Kongoussi / rant about Burkinabé restaurants; Lonely Planet Guide to Kongoussi. December 15: Murder; butchery; going postal. If you only have time to read one, I would go with December 15.

December 12, 2005

Happy Fourth of July! That’s right - it’s Independence Day here in Burkina, which for some odd reason, they don’t celebrate on the Fourth of July like we do. Although, in true American fashion, they also don’t actually celebrate the holiday on the day they’re supposed to, waiting instead to celebrate it on some day when they can get off of work. So Independence Day was actually yesterday, but since yesterday was a Sunday, today is the day of celebration and, by extension, no work. Even more confusing, after doing a little research, I have no idea why today is Independence Day. Burkina (then called Haute Volta) gained independence from France on August 5, 1960, and I can’t find any major events in Burkinabé history that have happened on December 11. So maybe I should’ve gone into work today… whoopsie…
In other work news, I got myself a desk at the office. I don’t technically have a desk to myself, but between me, the secretary, and the four branch managers, there are two desks in the office - and the branch managers are usually at the branches, not at the central office where the desk is. So I more or less have my own desk, which is a huge step up from before, when I had to sit in the reception area (which consisted of a wooden bench) next to the teller’s window in the foyer of the bank. Oh, and did I mention, I managed to arrange for my desk to be in the one air-conditioned office in the building? URCBAM (the central office of the bank where I work) is nearly finished with the construction of their new office building, which looks a bit larger and quite a bit nicer (when completed, I think it’ll rival only city hall, the Catholic church, and the fancy new hotel for the title of Most Aesthetically Pleasing Building in Kongoussi). Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my own actual desk in the new building. And more importantly, I hope I get to remain in an air-conditioned office. The patron (CEO-like-guy) of the bank assures me that the style or material or something of the new building will make the whole thing almost as cool as an air-conditioned building (implying that most of the building will not be A/C-ed), but I don’t entirely believe him. From my perspective, people here seem to have a very skewed sense of temperature. Although it’s starting to get to me too - last night, I put on a sweatshirt (the last time I wore anything with long sleeves was the same sweatshirt, on the flight from Paris to Ouaga on August 2), and checked the thermometer - it was a frigid 77 degrees. Brrrrrrr. I think the air-conditioned office at the bank probably maintains a temperature somewhere between 85-90, but it sure feels nice.
I’ve had a bunch of visitors recently - I managed to have four visitors in a one-week span, which was a pretty good record. Rose came up for her site visit (Rose is the SED APCD - essentially my boss at the PC office in Ouaga - and has to visit every Volunteer sometime during their first three months at site). Karen, one of our two medical officers, also made her annual site visit. She brought with her some parmesan cheese (yay!) and a flu shot (less yay!). And Michelle (a Volunteer in some tiny village a little ways outside of Ouaga) came and visited one night, and Kara came down from Bourzanga the next. Allow me a minute to explain how restaurants work here in Burkina: there are usually two or three items available on any given day, and there are only about six dishes total that you ever find at a restaurant (Tô, rice with peanut sauce, rice with tomato sauce, benga, couscous, soup de poulet ou poisson). The chef makes up a big batch sometime early in the day, and they keep serving the same food all day long until it runs out. Thus, if you go to a restaurant too late in the evening, you may have only one item to choose from, or none at all. Kongoussi, luckily, has at least two places I know of where you can get food that’s not the standard Burkina restaurant fare. The problem is that you have to order well in advance, as Michelle and I learned as we tried to find dinner. Espace Watal, probably the best and most popular restaurant in town, has a surprisingly large menu. Of course, you would never know they even had the menu, since they have one written copy of it, and keep it locked in a drawer. They have several varieties of pizza, “coq au vin”, and even cheeseburgers. After several minutes discussing the menu with the cook, we learned that you really needed to order these things about three days ahead of time - the dishes all required food that wasn’t available in Kongoussi (like cheese), and the cook had to order the stuff from Ouaga. The other place in town that has a larger variety of food is a restaurant by the cultural center. The cook there, Janvier, can make quiche, pizza, poulet yassa (a Senegalese dish I’ve never tried), etc. Luckily, he only needs a few hours notice to prepare these dishes. On the downside, he wasn’t in town the day Michelle came to visit. Fortunately, he was back the next day, so Kara and I split a quiche and a pizza. I might try and work with this guy, doing some sort of advertising. There are plenty of people in town (mostly other white folks, but also some Burkinabé) who would be interested in eating these meals - if they knew it was possible to get them. I only know because Mike told me, and it took him a year of asking around to find this stuff out. And speaking of food, I’m putting on a decent amount of weight. I think I’m about back to where I was weight-wise when I arrived in Burkina.
In non-food news, I continue to explore Kongoussi, and am constantly amazed by what I find. A few weeks ago, I decided to try taking a different route to work, bypassing the main road in town. And I found some pretty amazing things on the route. In addition to a very impressive-looking mosque, I found a large cemetery. Many of the graves are above ground - wooden planks with sand and dirt in the middle - they almost look like sandboxes. The graves are marked with hand-painted wooden signs - the first one I inspected up close was for a man who had died within the past week - I didn’t inspect the signs as closely after that. But the most intriguing part of the cemetery is a building located adjacent to it. It has a large sign that says “Maison de Misericorde” [in English: “House of Mercy”]. Right next to that title is a large Israeli flag, and the word “ISRAEL” pained in large blue letters. Directly above this sign are three crosses. The crosses on an Israeli building confuse me a bit, and I’ve never actually seen anyone in or around this building, so I can’t really find out more about the place. On the other side of the cemetery is a large pond - as I pass by every morning (I’ve started taking this route to work regularly), there are always a couple of men down there making mud bricks in the pond. But there’s a peninsula that extends out into the pond, and in the middle of it is a large, natural arch - just like the ones you see in southern Utah. It’s absolutely huge, beautiful, and is just a few blocks from my house. It’s amazing what you find when you take the back route.

December 15, 2005

“En arrivant, nous avons trouvé trois corps.” Upon arriving, we found three bodies. “A côte du corps de CISSE Lama, il y avait quatre étuis de la pistole automatique 38 spéciale.” Next to the body of Mr. Lama Cisse, there were four shells from a .38 automatic pistol. I slowly recounted the scene to the gendarme, pausing every few words as he dictated my description. Tonight was the second night in a row that I’ve recounted the gruesome details of a murder to a gendarme. And I’m pretty sure there’ll be several more of them in the near future - it makes for a pretty fun and interesting evening.
So, as you can see, things are going well here in Burkina. So, to explain… I’ve started teaching some “formations informatiques” - computer training - at the cybercafé near my house. The sessions are one-on-one, and so far I’ve only had one student (although I have another starting next week). He’s some high-up guy from the local gendarmerie (in Burkina, the gendarmerie is the national force that lies somewhere between the police and the military), and he’s never used a computer before. He wants to learn how to do two things - (1) check and send e-mail, and (2) type up criminal reports. And he can now do both, albeit a bit slowly, but he’s progressing pretty well for being an absolute beginner. For our past two sessions, in order to teach him the basics of Word (as well as the basics of using a keyboard and mouse), he’s been bringing in old criminal reports, which I dictate to him and he types. So far, we’ve done two year-old murders, and he’s been quite pleased at the end when he gets to print off a report that he typed up, formatted just like the official reports that go across his desk all the time.
He’s getting a lot out of our sessions, which makes me (and him) happy. But I’m really getting a lot out of these sessions - first, it’s giving me some practice in how to teach “formations informatiques,” which I anticipate leading a lot of over the next two years. Second, it’s great for my French. I’m learning all sorts of vocabulary that I never learned in any French class. For instance, I can now form such sentences as “she discovered the dismembered body after noticing the unusually potent odor coming from the latrine.” I don’t know why Peace Corps (or Madame Rittenhouse, my high school French teacher) never taught us that kind of useful sentence. It’s also helping my pronunciation - as I dictate the reports to him, he’ll correct my pronunciation if it’s bad - I think he’s the first people to actually correct my pronunciation (everyone else just stares at me blankly, oblivious as to what I’m saying), which is incredibly useful. I’m also getting to learn about the criminal justice system here, knowledge which I hope to never need to apply. But if for some reason I ever do, it’s nice to know that I now have a friend at the gendarmerie.
And while my French vocabulary for homicide-related words continues to grow exponentially, I recently discovered that my vocabulary was severely lacking when it comes to words you might use at a barbershop. And as a result of this deficiency, I’m far closer to being bald then I’ve ever been before. Yesterday, after at least five months without a haircut (I don’t know when I last had one, but it was in the U.S., which puts it in at least July), I decided to get it cut. I’ve been putting it off, hoping to find another Volunteer to cut it, but that’s never quite worked out, mostly do to my own forgetfulness. Although there are plenty of barbers in Burkina (I pass at least half a dozen on my way to work every morning), they all know how to do exactly one male haircut - they pull out the electric razor and shave everything off. This wasn’t quite the look I was going for, so when I went to the barber yesterday, I explained (at least I thought I explained this) that I wanted it short, but not completely shaved. Demonstrating with my hands, I said I’d like it maybe 5 centimeters long. Apparently, all he heard was the word “centimeter” and not the number five. So I still have a very, very thin layer of hair. I’m not upset or anything - I kind of like it, actually - it’s much cooler, temperature-wise at least, than before. Also on the plus side, I should be able to get away with going another year before needing to do this again. The only bad part of the experience was after he shaved my beard (I hadn’t shaved in around a month or so), he poured something on my face that I really suspect, from the smell at least, was straight whiskey. Having never used an aftershave in my life, I was amazed at how much it hurt for a second or two.
I recently gained a new appreciation for the U.S. Postal Service. I had several things I needed to mail back to the states, a stack of about 10. I went to the Post Office and, needing stamps, went to the counter and asked to buy stamps for 10 airmail envelopes to the U.S. The clerk nodded, took the letters, counted them three or four times, and then pulled out a piece of paper where he started doing some arithmetic. Then he disappeared into the back room for a few minutes with the envelopes, and then came back and resumed the arithmetic. He continued doing arithmetic / journeying to the back room for several minutes, before finally disappearing in the back room for good. Then someone else - apparently the manager of the post office - came out from the back and invited me into his office, asking what I needed. I explained what I thought was a simple request - 10 stamps - and I even knew how much the stamps should be. Then he started doing some arithmetic, and after a minute or two switched over to a calculator. He told me how much it would cost (I’d figured out the 830x10 some minutes earlier), and I said that was fine. He then opened a safe, from which he pulled out a large folder, which he hunted through looking for the right stamps. Unfortunately, Burkina doesn’t have any one stamp for 830CFA, you need at least four stamps to make that sum - that’s what all the arithmetic was, trying to figure out how many of each denomination of stamp to give me. Even more unfortunate, Burkina doesn’t have self-adhesive stamps, and they certainly don’t have those cool things that USPS has that print some special label in lieu of a stamp. So I spent the next 15 minutes affixing the stamps to my letters. All in all, I probably spent an hour at the Post Office. Even with the ever-present line at the Claremont Post Office, I don’t think I ever spent more than 20 minutes in the building at one time. And now we’ll see if these things actually make it to the U.S…
That’s about all I have to write about today. Not sure when I’ll post this, or when I’ll next post - I’m going to be traveling a bit in the coming days. Next week, I’m going to try taking a bush taxi over to Ouahigouya to meet with some people over there about starting a cybercafé. And within a day or two after coming back to Kongoussi, I’m going to head down to Ouaga for Christmas. In the meantime, if for some reason you’re really desperate for more Peace Corps Burkina Faso blogging action (which I doubt you are), Kara (my nearest neighbor) has a blog at http://inbfbf.blogspot.com, which also has some links to some other Burkina PCV blogs.