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