Christmas, New Years, Tabaski

In this month's episode: Chris travels around Burkina to celebrate the holidays, then tries to finish the etude du milieu in three weeks, instead of the expected three months. Along the way, he leaves a trail of dead animals, ranging from mice to partridges, does a lot of "biking", and investigates the mysterious disappearance of a friend in town. Also, the last few paragraphs are all pretty nerdy, so you might want to skip over them.
Also: I went to Ouaga this weekend and picked up all the Christmas packages -- I've never seen so many Skittles in my life -- what a beautiful sight! Thanks to everyone who sent something.
January 7, 2006
It looks like it’s been about three weeks since I last wrote anything here. I’ve been traveling quite a bit, both for the holidays and for "work", and I’ve also managed to get a few productive things done here in Kongoussi.
Ouahigouya
Ouahigouya is the third largest city in Burkina, with a population pretty close to Green Bay, the third largest city in Wisconsin. (Interestingly, the second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso, has a population close to Wisconsin’s second city, Madison, while Ouagadougou and Milwaukee are both in the neighborhood of a million people. Weird.) It’s also by far the largest city in Burkina Faso to host a Peace Corps Volunteer, Giorgio (who attentive blog readers will remember as one of the two other remaining survivors from Minima). Giorgio wants to create a new cybercafé in Ouahigouya - the city already has a few, but they’re often crowded, and there’s definitely a market for more. So I visited him for a few days before Christmas to see what it would take to set one up.
After several hours talking to various people from the mayor’s office to the high school, we found two interesting things. First, one of the biggest cybercafés in town was run by a local high school. The place was incredibly popular, and students flock there every day between and after classes. Since it’s the cheapest cybercafé in town, students from other high schools go there, too. Furthermore, they’re churning out a decent profit - the monthly cost of the operation, including their 128K ISDN line and two employees, is under $300, while they bring in more than $400, netting at least $100 a month - a pretty good profit for a business around here. The second interesting thing we learned was that there’s another high school in town (with over 2,000 students, the largest high school in northern Burkina), which has a computer lab full of very, very old machines donated by a western development agency. Although decrepit (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Pentium I slowly chugging along with Windows 95), the computers work, and can run a web browser. After talking to the principals of both schools (who happen to be good friends, and also are both English teachers, although for our benefit refused to speak to us in English), it seems like we could turn the old computer lab into a cybercafé. Furthermore, we want to gear it towards the students, offering a reduced rate for students to encourage them. Even if it’s not as successful as the other high school’s cybercafé, it should still be able to sustain itself, and hopefully use whatever profit it generates to buy some new machines before the current ones die completely. And if we can get this up and running, there’s a lot of potential for some computer training and education at the place, too. All in all, it was a very productive and encouraging trip, and I got a delicious five-course meal and a good amount of beer out of the trip.
Christmas in Burkina
Before talking about my Christmas, I want to talk a bit about the holiday season here in Burkina Faso. In theory, everyone in Burkina is either Muslim, Christian, or animist. In reality, just about everyone is a mixture of the three - for instance, a man might go to church on Sunday and then come home to his wives. And it seems like every family has different policies regarding the consumption of alcohol (some Muslims refuse to drink, some hold quite the opposite view; most Protestants don’t drink, but there’s certainly some who still love their Dolo). And there are certain superstitions that just about everyone follows. Although it makes it difficult to categorize people as belonging to one religion or another, it makes for a pretty cool society, devoid of the religious tension you often find in the U.S. (there’s pretty much no proselytizing, either, except by the occasional European or American missionary).
The point of all this is that Christmas is not as big a holiday here as it is in the United States - here, New Years is the big holiday. Aside from the obvious religious reasons for Christmas not being as significant in such a syncretic society, there isn’t the gift-giving tradition that exists in the U.S., for the reason that people don’t really have the money to shower each other with gifts. However, there’s a two-week long period, starting before Christmas and ending a few days after New Years, when school is out, and just about everyone in the country seems to be on vacation (which is why you shouldn’t riding the bus the day after New Years - more about that farther down). In a very politically correct manner, nobody here says "Joyeux Noel" - it’s always "bonne fête".
Although Christmas trees are rare (I’ve seen one or two businesses in Kongoussi that have them - that seems to be about it), there is a cool holiday tradition which I discovered here. In Christian households, a few days before Christmas, the children construct a nativity scene outside the door to their family’s courtyard. Some of these nativity scenes are very crude - a foot-tall manger built out of rocks. Some are pretty complex, five or six feet tall and well constructed (I’m going to try and take some pictures and post them along with this blog entry). The scenes are always painted in white, making them very noticeable, and making town a bit more festive. I was pretty excited when these things started showing up around Dec. 22 or 23, since up until then, I had seen absolutely zero indications that Christmas was coming - it’s hard to feel like Christmas when there’re no Christmas decorations, no Christmas carols, and it’s 90 degrees, sunny, and dusty all the time.
Christmas and New Years
My Christmas, meanwhile, was spent in Ouaga. I spent two nights at the Peace Corps transit house, where about 15 other volunteers were staying - most of them the Girls Education volunteers from my stage (of the 10 people from my stage there, I was the only one not in Girls Education and Empowerment - but they’ve now dubbed me an honorary member). We made a huge Christmas feast, and despite my limited culinary talents, I somehow was made responsible for the main dish, lasagna (I handled the vegetarian one while Natalie made the meat-a-licious one). I was much more excited to be helping with the egg nog, which was quite tasty, albeit a bit heavy on the rum.
This was my first Christmas not spent with the family, which was a bit weird, but I talked to them on the phone for awhile, which was great. Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun, even if not particularly Christmas-y.
I had to come back to Kongoussi the day after Christmas, since my bank brilliantly decided to schedule some important meetings during the week between Christmas and New Years. Not really wanting to make two trips to Ouaga in the course of one week, I decided to go up to Djibo for New Years. The whole Bam-Soum (my province and the province north of me) crew was there - seven volunteers in all. Everyone was pretty tired on New Years Eve (most of them arrived the day before and had pre-partied on Dec. 30 - I was tired from the ridiculously long and pointless meetings at the bank - can you imagine sixteen hours of meetings over two days, which among other things, resulted in a 40-step protocol for buying paper clips? In French?), and we somewhat reluctantly stayed up until midnight and then crashed. The following night, however, we had a more festive evening - making our own tortillas, we decided to have a huge Mexican dinner feast - delicious. I took the bus back to Kongoussi on Jan. 2, as did everyone else in the country, apparently. On the ride to Djibo, there was a dearth of seats, and I was forced to sit on top of a bag of beans or rice that was sitting in the aisle - it was actually pretty comfortable. On the ride back, I got to the bus station early enough to get a seat, but there were a good 20-25 people stuck standing. (The next day, they ran two buses on the route.)
The Following Week
Since I arrived in Kongoussi at the end of October, I’m supposed to have been working on an "étude du milieu" - a background study - of my host organization (the bank, URCBAM) and the community in which I live (Kongoussi). This report is supposed to be completed by the end of the January, and although I’ve had two and a half months to start on it, I didn’t really make much of an effort to start until this week. The research for the étude consists primarily of interviewing people at the bank and around town, and this seems to have been a poor week to choose to start doing these interviews, as most people were out of town or in transit, finishing their Christmas and New Year’s breaks. And this week isn’t going to be the best, mostly because Tabaski, a huge Muslim holiday, is on Tuesday, so people will once again be unavailable - everything will be closed on Tuesday, and all but the most orthodox Muslims will be hungover on Wednesday.
This means that this week has been a bit frustrating and unproductive. I spent a lot of time sitting around at the bank not really doing anything. And I spent a lot of time trying to hunt down some people in town that I want to talk to. For instance, there’s a certain Mr. Harouna who I want to speak to, and three days in a row I went looking for him, only to be told he was "en congé" and that he would return tomorrow.
Luckily, after wasting most of the week, I felt productive yesterday and today. I have two new students for my "formations informatiques" - computer classes - at the cybercafé. They’re both younger, and quicker learners than the gendarme. But the class is a bit frustrating nonetheless - they’ve never touched a keyboard or mouse before, but both want to start e-mailing people. Trying to teach someone how to setup a Yahoo e-mail account when they can barely move and click a mouse is a bit trying at times, and the frustration is compounded by the fact that I only nominally speak the same language they do. Nonetheless, they’ve now got e-mail accounts, have e-mailed each other, and seem pretty happy.
I’ve also done a lot of work on the house over the past two days. I finally cleared out the last of Mike’s stuff - mostly a lot of old medicines and old magazines. The magazines disappear almost the instant I put them outside in the trash heap (within minutes, about half a dozen kids and one old woman were rifling through the stuff I’d tossed, taking almost all of it). The old medicines had to go down the latrine - it’s the only way to keep the kids from taking and eating them. I’ve also done a hell of a lot of dusting and sweeping (I bought a broom!), bought some new shelves, some pagnes to liven the place up a bit (and keep out some dust), and am working on assembling a couch out of some old foam mattresses.
And today I almost got to go rabbit hunting. My next door neighbor enjoys rabbits, and also enjoys hunting them, and invited me with him today. He knows a farmer in a village about 10km from here who does rabbit hunting, and we "biked" over there this afternoon. (On an unrelated note, Peace Corps prohibits volunteers from riding motorcycles like the one my neighbor owns.) Unfortunately, the guy wasn’t around, so we didn’t get to hunt any varmints. But I did get to see a lot of the countryside around here that I haven’t seen before. I got to see the other side of Lake Bam, and was amazed to discover an enormous church on a hillside over there - there’s a Catholic order in town that owns a huge tract of land, containing a school, a convent, and this massive church - I think the place is about the same size as the Catholic cathedral in Green Bay. It seems very out of place here.
January 25, 2006
So, I still haven’t uploaded my last entry, and really have no excuse for that, short of sheer laziness. Granted, I haven’t been frequenting the cybercafe very much recently - two reasons, really. First, I’ve started using the Internet connection at the bank - there are other employees who use it for personal business, why shouldn’t I? However, the more disturbing reason I’ve stopped frequenting the cybercafe is because the guy who runs it has disappeared. So, I know this guy (Oscar) fairly well - I’ve been teaching classes at his cybercafe, and am usually in there every two or three days checking my e-mail. So about two weeks ago, after I’d finished teaching one of my classes, he pulled me aside and asked for money. And not just a little money, but 200,000CFA ($400), which he explained he needed to tide him over until the end of the month. As patiently as I could, I explained that I didn’t have that much money (Peace Corps gives me something like 120,000CFA per month - why he needed 200,000, I don’t understand - seems a bit fishy). He was very apologetic, but I still went home that night kind of pissed - feeling a bit like the guy had been so nice and friendly with me just so he could get some money out of me eventually. At any rate, about two or three days later, he left town, and hasn’t been back since. I’ve asked around a bit, and no one seems to know where he went or when he’s coming back. Huh. I’m hoping that he’s just in Ouaga (his brother is a doctor there, and Oscar might be there trying to hit his brother up for some cash), but I really don’t know.
That’s really the most exciting thing going on. I’ve spent most of my time at the bank over the past week helping them design a new logo (ha! I’m now the resident artist at the place!). And last weekend, I "rode my bike" to Loulouko, a small village a few kilometers north of Kongoussi, along with a guy from an association in town. (In another unrelated note, as of about a week ago, Peace Corps Burkina Faso has a new moto usage policy, which allows volunteers to ride motorcycles / mopeds in some situations.) There’s a women’s group in Loulouko who is asking for funding from the Friends of Burkina Faso, an American group composed primarily of returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Burkina. The women’s group engages in maraîchage - market gardening. They have a huge tract of land, divided into parcels of roughly seven by fifty meters, and each woman in the group gets a parcel of land. The land is about 200 meters from the shores of Lake Bam, and they have a pump which irrigates the land. They’d like FBF to help them expand their operation at Loulouko, and help another group also start a similar setup. They’ve got a pretty good setup going, and the women are really into the work, and it sounds like it generates some much-needed income for them. They’ve asked for my help in, among other things, improving their composting techniques, which I don’t feel entirely qualified to do (my knowledge of compost is limited to my mom’s three large Darth Vader masks in the backyard).
Turns out I have another PCV neighbor. Anna, who lives in a small village about 30km away, recently discovered that, using some back roads, she can bike to my place in under three hours, and it’s closer than Kaya (the major city she’s been going to to stock up on food and other things not available in village). So she’s visited twice in the past month, and will continue to visit pretty often, so that’s cool. That now gives me two Americans within 50km!
I see I wrote about Christmas and New Years last time - I guess I should write about Tabaski now. Tabaski is, theoretically, a Muslim holiday. As best I can tell (I heard a few other, less plausible stories about the origin of the holiday), it commemorates when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac, and at the last minute called the deal off. But Abraham was now in the mood to do some slaughtering, so he killed a sheep instead. (However, I thought that Muslims traditionally traced their lineage to Abraham’s other son, which makes this holiday seem a little odd.) At any rate, the main things everyone does on the holiday are (1) not go to work (yay!), (2) slaughter a sheep, and (3) spend all day traveling around town visiting everyone they know, eating a little sheep along the way, and (depending on what type of Muslim they are) have a few beers. And I took part in all three of these activities - although I personally did not slaughter a sheep, I spent half an hour watching one being slaughtered, and I soon learned what those disgusting white pieces of mutton were that always come on the brochettes here are (here’s a hint - it’s not fat, like I had been hoping). The guy who did the bulk of the butchering offered me the testicles, saying it was the best meat (you wouldn’t think it, but offering someone goat or sheep testicles is a very generous offer - I’ll keep this in mind when Christmas shopping next year), but I politely declined. I also got to eat some pork (the only pork I think I’ve had in Kongoussi, despite the pigs that are always in the street) at the house of a Christian family. What better way to celebrate a Muslim holiday than by eating pork and drinking beer? At any rate, Tabaski is my new favorite Burkinabé holiday, easily beating the historically ambiguous "Independence Day" celebrated in December.
Speaking of slaughtering things, I finally got the mouse that’s been terrorizing my house for weeks. The bastard had the nerve to eat my precious cheese. Also, my neighbor has started bringing me home assorted wild game from his friend the hunter, so over the past two weeks I’ve cooked guinea fowl, a partridge, and a wild rabbit. I wasn’t wild about the rabbit, but the birds were pretty good, one of them making a delicious chicken-salad-like concoction.
And moving on to things that are not dead: every month or so I pull out my iPod to see if it’s still dead. Yesterday, I tried hitting the thing a few times first, and now it works! It even still had all my music on it! Guess I have to cross that off the list of Minima casualties, and perhaps also take Steve Jobs off my hit list. And while we’re talking about billionaire geeks who are no longer on my hit list, I should mention Bill Gates. He seems to be the most famous American in Burkina (everyone here knows Bill Gates and George Bush; the only other Americans they seem to know are Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan). Kind of interesting how different his reputation is here than in the U.S. Everyone here loves him because (1) he’s loaded, and they want to be him, and (2) he gives a lot of money to African aid. And while he may not believe in the concept of free software, everyone in Burkina does, which is why I think every computer in this country is using the same Windows product key - in Burkina, Windows is, more or less, a free product (as is Microsoft Office). I’m now running the French version of Windows (interesting side note for Pomona ITS folks: although the ubiquitous serial used here for Windows XP doesn’t allow you to install SP2, the French version of Windows used everywhere here does accept the Pomona product key, which I sadly still remember). I’m also now using the French version of Office, which is why some spelling mistakes probably creeped in here - not only am I now using the French keyboard layout, but the French version of Word defaults to the Great Britain English dictionary, not the American, so these mysterious "u"s keep showing up in words like labor. Not that I write that word a lot. But you get the idea.
January 27, 2006
Good idea: Taking an entirely oral language like Mooré and also making it a written language.
Bad idea: Using mostly Roman characters for the Mooré alphabet, but also making up two entirely new characters that, as best I can tell, are some sort of hybrid between Roman and Arabic characters.
Easy: Writing Mooré by hand (well, assuming you actually know the language, which I don’t).
Hard: Writing Mooré on a computer. Because some of the characters don’t exist. Even in Unicode, which includes thousands of characters from the Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets. Luckily, the lowercase nu in Times New Roman looks pretty similar to one of the letters (only in Times New Roman, of course, the Arial one is no good, and the character doesn’t exist in most fonts), and the Arabic Noon Ghunna also comes fairly close. Also, the lowercase Cyrillic Pe in Arial comes pretty close to the mysterious E-like character in Mooré.
So I spent most of yesterday creating a poster advertising a new service at the bank (it lets you access your URCBAM account from other banks in cities like Ouahigouya and Ouagadougou, where URCBAM doesn’t have any branches). After making the French copy of the poster, and getting the Mooré translations of the French phrases, I was told that the Mooré one would have to be done by hand. This sounded ridiculous to me - why couldn’t we do the Mooré poster on the computer, I naively asked. I spent the next two hours browsing through fonts in the Windows Character Map, trying to find these bizarre Mooré characters. And although the exact characters don’t seem to exist anywhere, I managed to find characters that were close enough, and the people at the bank thought this was amazing. (Interestingly, the French version of Windows comes with a slightly different set of fonts than the American version, including such fonts as "Akhbar", "Diwani", "Farsi Simple", "Gautami", "Kufi", and "Mudir", all of which contain neither Roman characters nor those two damn Mooré characters.) My next step is going to be creating some macros in Word to insert these characters (I had to copy each character individually from Character Map every time I wanted to use them) so people can start creating Mooré documents here.