I Spy With My Little Eye Something . . . Orange

The end of April is close at hand, and I feel this month has flown by in an instant. I have been steadily preparing for a training conference on maternal and child health that I have been asked to help organize in Ouahigouya starting on Tuesday. For the past several weeks, we’ve had to make multiple trips to Ouahigouya, as well as the capital Ouaga and another town named Gourcy, where our formatrice (the woman who will be conducting the majority of the sessions) works. The actual conference runs for three days starting the 27th and will focus primarily on nutrition and malnutrition as it relates to rural Burkina. It will bring together six volunteers and 12 village counterparts to discuss successes, challenges, and strategies for the future. If all goes well, it should really be advantageous to all the participants.

Unfortunately, I feel like I have not done many activities in village lately like I would have liked to do aside from my regular soap-making with the women, but I am certain once this is over, I will be able to direct my concentration back on my own projects. At least I can say I’ve survived my second April in Burkina with only a couple sweaty t-shirts as battle scars of hot season (which is more than I can say of my poor papaya tree). I would guess that I’ve drinking about 4-5 liters of water on average everyday, even more on those scorching 120° days and haven’t lit my stove save once or twice in the past three weeks. I’ve avoided the stove (which raises the temperature in my house a good 5-10 degrees) by changing my diet to that of a woodland creature. A lot of raw veggies or vegetable sandwiches – cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers make a great sandwich – plus as many mangoes as I can manage. I try to eat a bag of peanuts each day for the protein but every once in a while, I’ll supplement that with tuna or chicken packets from home. Every market day, I also buy something known as acheke (pronounced a-check-ay or a-keck-ay) which is made from cassava root, with a small piece of fish for lunch.

Last week we finally experienced, albeit a month late, that magical event known as “the first rainfall of the year.” Unfortunately, it occurred the same night as something known as “the first time I tried to sleep outside because it got too hot to sleep inside.” So when it started sprinkling around 9pm, I tried to ignore the droplets. I managed to last until around 2am, when it really began coming down, at which point I was forced to drag everything back into my stuffy house.

Speaking of wacky weather, I awoke on Thursday and looked out my screen door to see a sky completely orange. When I stepped outside, the air was saturated in red dust and a thick layer covered everything. I’ve added a couple pictures below to help you understand the sheer level of dustitude. It stayed comme ça for the rest of the day. The words on everybody’s mask-totting lips that day were “Sebgo waogame,” or “There’s too much wind” in Mooré. It took me much of the following day to remove the thin layer of dust that coated everything in my house. The wackiness that day was apparently felt by everyone, human and terrifying flying rodents alike. You see, my latrine was taken over Thursday by a small fidgety bat. I thought it might just be confused about the hazy sky, but evidently coming out during the day is a sign of rabies among bats. I wish I had known that then as I edged closer and closer to the creature to get a decent picture (see the shots below of my new, potentially-rabid friend), but a part of me did want to have a Bruce Wayne experience as it fluttered around me, but I rather not fall into my latrine to do it.

Below are the accompanying photos:

There are usually houses in the background

Hazy view of my CSPS

A layer of dust on everything, even my awesome blue plastic patio chair

The chauve-souris, in the flesh

About to strike

April Shmapril

So we have hit Burkina's most dreadful month. The month where temperatures reach their annual crescendo and where one cannot move without sweating. The mercury began rising through March, usually hitting 110ish degrees at its peak most afternoons. My house hovers around the 100 degree mark most of the day, only cooling down to about 90 in the early morning. Luckily, I am better prepared for the heat this year with a life-saving fan which I rarely turn off. Without that (and the power does routinely cut off), my house becomes an oven with no air flow and suddenly you're sitting in a pool of perspiration and wondering when it will come back on. Even still, I feel like I have handles this hot season much better than the last. Perhaps it is the fan, perhaps I have become habituated to the heat, perhaps we haven't seen the worse yet (I think all three are true, actually) but I am getting by fine. Je me débrouille.

But as life always brings the good with the bad, cushions the difficult with the easy, the hot season here also corresponds to our mango season. Yin meet Yang. Yang, Yin. The country is becoming inundated with these juicy, sweet fruits, and they make the heat slightly less unbearable each year. There are dozens of varieties of mangoes in Burkina, maybe more, and each brings something different to the table. Large or small, stringy or buttery, the subtleties in taste and texture make mango season a good time to be alive. Everyone has their favorite kind and their preferred method of eating. Some people eat the skins and all, others use a knife to cut the meat into cubes. I tend to peel back the skin with my teeth and then dive right in. My plan is start drying a lot soon, so that I can keep the mango goodness well past the end of the season (that is, if I can keep myself from eating them right away).

Last weekend, almost every volunteer (more than 100) showed up in Ouaga for the COS party, our ritual celebration honoring those volunteers who have reached their Closure of Service and are getting ready to head home beginning in June. It was a lot of fun to see all my friends living in other parts of the country with whom I rarely get to hang out. It is weird to think that another group is preparing to leave. Once they have departed, my group will become the new senior volunteers. For logistical reasons, our group's COS conference and party will actually take place in July, much much earlier than normal. It is far too early to consider the end of the road here in Burkina and the prospect of rejoining American society.

In work-related news, not much has changed in village. I am still actively working with the soap group I helped organize (they have made almost 20,000 cfa in a month and a half, i.e. a lot of fric), and I may expand to form a new group in a satellite village. I have also been asked to help coordinate a regional conference on maternal and child health for several volunteers and their village counterparts that will take place in Ouahigouya at the end of the month, so I've been fairly occupied planning the logistics. There's a lot of work still to be done but hopefully the effort put into it will show during the workshop.

Well, that basically sums up everything that's going on right now and my current place in this crazy world, taking life one day, one degree, one mango at a time.