I've been home for about 10 days and am just now getting around to posting a final update. After a two-day, 400-km bush taxi odyssey through southeast Mali (the story takes about 20 minutes to tell, but it's a good one, so please ask me if you're interested), I made it back to Ouaga with a half-day to spare, in which I bid farewell to my host family and friends before catching my plane to Montreal.
Since I got back to Ottawa on Aug. 23rd, I've had to write a short essay on my experience in order to claim my final credit for my degree. I've also been relaxing a bit, thinking a bit, and trying to fit my experience into the rest of my life. It often now seems surreal, like a world apart, and in many ways it's not a world I want to keep in touch with. I didn't make a whole lot of friends or ever really feel at home in Ouaga, so I'm not in a hurry to go back to that specific place, or to maintain intensive personal correspondence or phone contact with anyone I met there.
That's not to say, though, that I want to forget about my placement experience. While I was in Burkina, I saw enough of the depressing and distressing impact of things like government corruption, drought, and a lack of public health and education that I'm motivated to keep working in organizations (governmental or not) that focus on those fields. Since I've finished my degree and am not returning to school this fall, I'll be spending the next few weeks researching what's available in those areas, and hopefully stumbling upon some opportunities.
I'm also motivated to keep travelling and working abroad, to gain a perspective on as many of the world's individual places as possible. After all, I can't make any kind of generalization about Africa, the "developing world" or the world in general from a 14-week trip... there's much more to learn. Who knows? With what I've learned from this summer, maybe I'll be better equipped to truly appreciate and feel at home in other places I travel. It can't be a bad thing to be able to form a more honest opinion--not coloured by shock or homesickness--of places I visit in the future.
That having been said, there's plenty about Ouaga I'm looking forward to sharing, both in one-on-one conversations and in presentations or writing for a wider audience. So far, I'm headed to Kingston on Sept. 20 for my team's presentation to the QPID general meeting (anyone in town who wants to come is welcome... 5:30 in Stirling C). I will also be making a presentation to the St. Thomas BAC/ACW on a date TBD. I'm thinking of pitching a story to some local magazines, too, once I've finished all my project reports for QPID. We'll see what comes of all this. Hopefully sharing some of my photos and stories will give interested readers and audience members a better idea of what I saw, and will give me a better idea of where my summer placement will lead me next.
To wrap up the "blog phase" of the experience, I just want to extend a quick thank you to all the people who provided me with financial or moral support, who wrote me letters and emails, who read the blog, and who listened politely as I rambled and ranted about my summer once I got home. (Beyond the presentations, I promise to try to keep instances of "this one time, in Burkina" to a minimum over the weeks to come. :) ) There's no way I could have learned as much as I did this summer if you hadn't been there to help me out. Barka wusgo... merci beaucoup... thanks so much!
Barely 10 minutes remain on my expensive-but-finicky internet card, so this post--likely my last before I get back to Canada on Wednesday--is going to be a quick rundown of what I've been up to over the last few days, but might not have much in the way of substance. Sorry!
My second day in Bamako on Tuesday was a hectic but fun tour of the lovely Musée Nationale, the small but interesting Musée Muso Kunda (devoted mainly to displays of the dress of Malian women of various ethnic groups), and the point G lookout over the city. From Bamako, I took a minibus down to the port town of Koulikoro. My boat to Mopti was supposed to leave the dock at 10 pm and arrive in Mopti, a significant port and tourist destination at the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers, on Thursday afternoon. 30 hours later, after a full day spent in port fixing a mechanical problem, the boat finally left. Given my cramped, hot cabin, my ongoing digestive problems, the terrible food and my worries about being stranded on the Niger when I really needed to be heading back to Ouaga, I got off the boat in Ségou and planned to take the bus to Mopti the next day. I was lucky enough that one of my fellow passengers (and we got a chance to do lots of chatting and reading during our day sitting in port in Koulikoro) had family in Ségou; who generously put me up for the night on a mattress and mosquito net under the stars, and prepared me some kind of home remedy for my ailment that may or may not have done anything, but tasted good and was very kind. I was dumb and forgot to take a picture before I left the next morning, but I'm hoping to write them a proper letter of thanks when I get home.
So after a hot bus ride, I got into Mopti last night and spent the day in town today, doing a bit of shopping and wandering the streets and taking a pirogue (poled canoe) ride on the Niger in the late afternoon. Tomorrow I move on to the historic town of Djenné, and from there to Ouaga on Monday night. I hope to post again when I get home on Wednesday. Take care all!
"Em in Burkina" becomes "Em in Mali" this week, in my last full week of travel before I fly home next Wednesday. I got into Bamako, the capital, late yesterday evening after a 12-hour bus ride from Bobo-Dioulasso.
My Saturday in Bobo turned out to be a lot of fun. I packed a picnic, rented a bike from the market in the morning and, with the help of some directions from the tourist office, set out along the Ouaga road towards the village of Koro, 13 km out from the city. The village is built among huge granite boulders on the tallest hill in the region, to protect its residents from attack during a period of wartime several centuries ago. Most of it is still inhabited, which I found a little awkward--even accompanied by a trained guide from the village, I'm not all that comfortable as a tourist in someone's backyard. I've been told by many people, as well, that a lot of villages resent the Burkinabe tourist ministry's presence, particularly the fact that when a village becomes an official tourist site, the ministry sets up an official péage and takes 60 per cent of ticket fees back to Ouaga. There may be more visitors once a village is advertised through the national ministry, but not 60 per cent more, so many villages have opted to take down the official ministry signs and continue running their own tourism, keeping all the profits. Either way, I didn't wind up staying all that long in Koro, eager to feel as little like a voyeur as possible. Had there been an uninhabited and restored area to look through, or had I had the impression that even my guide enjoyed receiving visitors, I might have stayed a little longer.
I was surprisingly tired when I got back to Bobo, owing partly to my slightly ghetto rental bike and partly to the fact that my fitness has suffered a little bit from my sedentary lifestyle over the past three months. After a shower and a nap, I went out with the intention of swimming in a nearby hotel pool and wound up taking tea with a musician Nitha, Megan and I had hung out with the last time we were in Bobo. I went out with him and his friends that night to a cassette-release concert for the local hip-hop group les D-tenus, which turned out to be surprisingly tame, heavily--and annoyingly--sponsored by Nescafé, but a lot of fun. (Note to Nitha and Megan: it was poolside at Hotel Oabys, of all places.)
Sunday was devoted to the 12-hour bus ride between Bobo and Bamako, which was made much less pleasant by the fact that I must have eaten something weird again, and was forced to drug myself with that most dangerous of medications, Imodium, to have any hope of enduring the toilet-free bus ride without embarrassment. I had a pretty nasty reaction to its effects towards the end of the ride, though, and was a nauseated basket case by the time I got to Bamako. My very helpful seatmate put me into a cab and sent me on my way to the Catholic mission hostel where I'm staying until tomorrow. I'm the only woman and the only person under the age of about 35 there, which is a nice and slightly paternal change from the young and obnoxious artisans in Bobo. I had a long conversation over my breakfast of rehydration salts this morning with two NGO workers, one French and one Malian-born Swiss, about their perspectives on working in the region--one of those impromptu things that makes travel that much more interesting.
I was able to hitch a ride downtown with them, and am now in the slickest internet cafe I've been in on this trip: it actually has flat-screen monitors and Windows XP. After lunch (now that I'm feeling better), I'll hit up the tourist information office down the street, and plan to head out sightseeing around downtown once the worst heat and crowded bustle of the day has passed. Tomorrow evening I leave on a two-day boat cruise on the river Niger, and I should be in touch again on the other end, in the port town of Mopti, on Thursday.
I hope everyone is well at home... I'm never sure how to sign off these posts without sounding like I'm trying to be a minor celebrity or a know-it-all, so I'm really looking forward to the chance to have actual conversations (rather than one-way presentations) about some of the stuff on this blog when I get back. A la prochaine.
I've had ample opportunity over the past two days to really appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of travelling with friends, with a guide, and on one's own, and so far I haven't quite decided which I like best.
Let's start with the guide, a local resident generally trained and certified by the ONTB (Burkina's national tourism authority) who takes you around to various sites and handles things like moto rental, driving and conversations with village chiefs who don't speak French. Nitha, Megan and I had hired Amadou to take us around the Banfora area, which despite the repeated moto breakdowns was quite a lot of fun. He dropped them off at the bus station Wednesday night and then dropped me off at the internet at around 6:30. The plan was that he would take an hour to go pick up the one still-broken moto he'd left with a friend in the village, then come back with the good moto to pick me up, take me back to my hotel (also in a village about 7 km out of town) and discuss whether I would hire him again for the next day. Three hours later, in a driving rainstorm, he still wasn't there, his cell phone wasn't turned on, and no taxis operate in Banfora after 7:30, so I wound up calling the hotel owner to come and get me. I was not impressed.
The next morning I took my time getting up, since I hadn't planned anything, so imagine my surprise when I woke up to find that Amadou was hanging out with the hotel owner in the hotel courtyard, waiting for me with the good moto and some story about how the bad moto had fallen on him in the previous night's rainstorm--look how badly his heel was cut--and he'd valiantly still showed up four hours late, only to find that I'd already gone. No particular apology, just an insistence that he never falls off motos and that his cell phone switched off when it was drenched by the rainstorm. Since my plan for the day included no site further than 15 km from town along a main road, I figured I could get away with hiring him again out of sheer convenience, and wound up with no technical difficulties. We visited the SOSUCO sugar refinery, two small factories in town that produced dried mangoes and shea butter respectively, his own mother in the market for a taste of a local dish prepared with bean leaves and millet (quite good), a "vinery" where village women weave palm mats and baskets in cellar-like holes to take advantage of the humidity underground, and a village where women were making beautiful clay water gourds by hand.
I'll admit to having been uncomfortable on the final trip, though, because it basically involved following a village kid on a bike from compound to compound until we found someone who was working, and then paying to sit in their courtyard and watch them work. Like the voyeuristic Vieux Quartier in Bobo, where our tour guide was taking us into people's houses at mealtime, it seemed like an unnecessary invasion of privacy. I was glad to spend as little time as politely possible watching the pottery, beautiful as the technique and end products were. It's the kind of thing people should be able to show off in a less invasive way.
In the end, Amadou was hugely helpful for visiting the rural sites, but I was glad to hop on a bus to Bobo, Burkina's main tourist town, with the prospect of a couple of days to do as I pleased, on my own and at my own pace. Bobo by day is a nice place to wander, with lots of shade and a fairly compact downtown. I ran some errands in the market in the morning (paying waay too much for a gift--even after three months, I'm still somehow too nice to offer a low enough price to begin with, which means I usually wind up paying about twice as much as I should).
After lunch I wandered across the street for a courtesy "coup d'oeil" at the craft shop of one of the numerous and intensely annoying young men whom Nitha refers to as "fashion rastas" and locals refer to as "chasse-touristes"--they can be found either wandering downtown streets or hanging out in the city's trendy traditional music venue, and everyone seems to be an artisan with a charitable association looking to sell the same kinds of necklaces, sculptures and masks. I feel bad for the city's actual residents and artisans, because these guys give both a bad name by constantly trying to latch on to you, offering to be your guide, or inviting you out for a drink so you can "get to know each other." Thanks, but no thanks. Over the past couple of days, I've been honing my polite brush-off skills. This particular fashion rasta's brother, the actual owner of the shop, turned out to be really nice, though, and I wound up chatting with him for about an hour before heading to two museums (one on general local cultural history, and the other on Burkinabe traditional music) and then back to my hotel. It was really nice to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted to today, but the fact that I'm hanging out in the internet cafe at 10 pm brings me to a big advantage of travelling with friends: you can go out at night. As a single white woman, I'd be the prime target of fashion rastas and other lonely boys in bars and nightclubs here, and I'd prefer to spare myself the annoyance and potential safety threat and catch up on my reading and laundry at night instead.
I should note that I'm eating better in Bobo, for a better price, than I have anywhere else on this trip--I can feed myself plentifully on really good local dishes for the equivalent of about 12 dollars a day. Breakfas today was coffee, baguette and jam, lunch was delicious avocado vinaigrette and sheep stew, and dinner was guineafowl braised with veggies and a side of attieke. Mmm, mmm. Tomorrow I'm taking a short cycling trip along the highway to a nearby village that according to the tourist office boasts some nice scenery and interesting architecture, so I'll be picnicking, which promises to be just as nice. Internet time is running out... I will likely be in touch again on Sunday from Bamako, Mali, on the next leg of my trip.
So much has happened in the past week that I'm not even sure where to start, so my apologies in advance for what promises to be a disjointed description of events.
I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Banfora, a town in southern Burkina that is apparently the country's fifth-largest city. It's pouring outside, which is typical for this region at this time of year, although my last two weeks in Ouaga (with only two rain showers in 14 days) were unseasonably dry. I've just seen Nitha and Megan off to the bus station so they can head back to Ouaga to catch flights home over the next couple of days, and am now waiting for the guide we hired yesterday and today to come with the moto to take me back to my little hotel. After having been basically joined to those ladies at the hip for the past 12 weeks, it's alternately exciting and terrifying to think that for the next 12 days, I will be travelling solo in Burkina and Mali. I don't worry about my safety (and have never once on this trip been in a situation where I was concerned about it), but about how I will amuse myself and how I will rely on myself to get things done in a way and in a place I haven't before. It will be a learning experience.
For the past couple of days, though, the three of us have been trying to cram as much into our little vacation as possible. We took our leave of ANERSER on Friday after having our final evaluation meeting with the staff, cleaning out our office, and saying goodbye to the boys. I haven't really had a chance to absorb the fact that I won't see them again--not even when I go back on my last day in Ouaga to donate some clothes and toiletries, since at that point the centre will be on vacation so the encadreurs can take a much-needed break.
On Saturday we were busy taking our family out for a thank-you picnic, saying goodbye to the QPID Saponé girls as they headed out on their own travels, doing laundry, and generally tying up loose ends. Finally, on Sunday, we headed down to Bobo-Dioulasso in a convoy of 4x4s driven by the Saponé girls' NGO, Fondation pour le développement communautaire (FDC). FDC was heading to Bobo for two weeks to evaluate projects in that area, and were very generous in taking us down with them and in helping us negotiate a deal that allowed us to spend one night in their business-class hotel at a budget price. (I haven't had such a nice, hot shower under running water in 12 weeks, and I won't until I get back to Canada, I don't think.)
The next day we tried to move even further south to Banfora--really, we did. But then we ran into an ANERSER boy who had left the centre in our first month and was now in Bobo wanting to get back to Ouaga. We spent some time trying to convince him to find a social service agency in Bobo and put him in touch with some. Then we kept taking longer than expected at the bank and lunch and the market every time we narrowly missed a bus and headed off to fill the hour before the next one. After we missed the third bus, we decided to just stay in Bobo for one more night. We found a budget hotel, threw down our stuff, and headed out for an energetic and pretty visually stunning traditional dance and drumming concert.
We moved on to Banfora the next day (Monday) and checked into a small campement-style hotel near the lake just outside town. (There are very few natural lakes in Burkina, so this was a nice change from the dammed "barrages" we've found elsewhere.) In the afternoon, we hired a guide and some motos to take us to les pics de Sindou, a cluster of 100-foot-high sandstone rock formations rising mysteriously out of the Burkinabe farmland. The motos were a little shaky--one of them broke down on the way there, stranding us with a group of 8 children on the side of the road while our guide, Amadou, took the good moto into the next village to bring back a mechanic. When they say travelling in West Africa is a lesson in patience and flexibility, they mean it. It was worse on the way back, when one moto hit a rock and broke its brakes, and the other one lost its chain and spark plug within 5 km of each other. We wound up taking four hours to make the trek back from Sindou, alternately pushing the motos, riding them carefully on flat stretches, and holding my flashlight and Leatherman tool for Amadou as he made repairs.
This morning we were back on the road again with new motos to visit the chutes de Karfiguela, which despite our late start along another narrow, muddy road, boasted a spectacular view and some really nice swimming. We also visited a giant baobab tree that is sacred to animists living in the area, and that can seat at least 10 people inside its hollow trunk.
Tomorrow I'm planning to set off again with Amadou and a moto, either to visit more outdoor sites or to tour the SOSUCO sugar plant that's about 15 km out of town. Then I'll head back to Bobo for another couple of days, since there's lots to do there. For the moment, my Internet card is running out, and Amadou will be back soon to take me back to the campement, where I can catch up on sleep and reading in preparation for the two exciting weeks ahead.
CONFIDENTIAL TO THE JOURNAL: The letter made me smile--thanks so much! I got it on my last day of work. I will drop by for a visit at the end of August. :)
