I should have expected it, since my posts and emails have been so erratic, but the major questions from my parents concerned day-to-day life: what do you eat? What's your neighbourhood like? So this post will be what I hope is a not-too-rambling rundown of an average working day for Nitha, Megan and I.
We get up each morning at around 6:30, between half an hour and an hour later than the rest of the family (remember what I said about Burkinabè never seeming to need much sleep?). A couple of days a week, M and I get up at 5:45 for a short run around the gravel track at the local school with our 19-year-old neighbour, Maurice. Even at that early hour, I'm always sweating buckets when I get back to the house, and the family's 7-year-old granddaughter, Xavière, teases me for being bright red.
We shower, dress and have breakfast, which is either bouilli (an oatmeal-like hot dish made with rice flour) or baguettes with Nescafé. Nestlé has a monopoly on instant coffee in Burkina, as far as I can tell--no one seems to drink regular brewed coffee (even though the coffee in Burkina's Nescafé is grown in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire), and the word "Nescafé" is the actual word for the drink in restaurants and kiosks, much like we'd ask for Kleenex or a Band-Aid in Canada. Burkinabè also add a lot of blond cane sugar to the bouilli and the Nescafé (to the point that it's practically sugar water), although given how little sugar we eat otherwise, I don't think it'll hurt my health. More on that later.
After breakfast, we walk to ANERSER, five blocks away along dusty, unpaved streets crisscrossed by potholes and littered with garbage. The garbage is mostly organic kitchen waste and plastic sachets (the cheapest and most common method of selling drinking water, juice, bouilli, peanuts and almost anything else at markets and kiosks here) and dessicates pretty quickly in the dry heat. According to our "family sister" Rachelle, garbage collection in Ouaga takes place irregularly, whenever the municipality has the resources to come through with a truck and clear out the largest piles.
We pass a corner store, a tailor, two telecentres, a hair salon, one well-installed beggar, and a few other miscellaneous stalls and small businesses on the way to ANERSER. As we walk, people nod and smile hello, but just as often, we'll have children and sometimes even teenagers calling "Nasaara! La blanche!" and rushing out frome courtyards and shop doorways to shake our hands (often bypassing N, who is black, entirely). It often makes me extremely uncomfortable, for reasons I'll elaborate on in a later post.
When we get to ANERSER at around 8 am, we spend the first five minutes greeting and shaking hands individually with every person we can see in the courtyard, as is expected in Burkina. Burkinabè shake hands with people they know well by adding a mutual finger snap at the end, which is hard to describe and which I have yet to master.
Then we corral the younger boys into the classroom for literacy training--M's primary responsibility because she's paired with the teacher, Abou. It's always a challenge, given the tremendous variation in their levels and school experience. Some have been through several successful years of regular schooling, while others have struggled or have been to Koranic schools that don't teach French or Mooré literacy (and often require them to beg for their keep). Some students were at the top of their primary school classes, while others struggle with their alphabet.
Literacy (alphabétisation) ends at about 9:30 and we sometimes spend a few minutes helping treat the boys' cuts and scrapes, caused by everything from spills on the soccer field to accidents in the woodworking studio to (on rare occasions) fights with other boys. Then we do a game or craft from 10 until 12 (my primary planning responsibility, since I'm paired with Ludovic, who's mainly responsible for the boys who are too young to leave for apprenticeships after alphabétisation). M, N and I try to manage as best we can our lack of Mooré (not to mention other resources), which can make it difficult for both the boys to understand our explanations and for us to understand their side conversations and to arbitrate disputes.
We go home at noon for lunch, which is usually riz sauce (rice with some kind of meat, fish or vegetable sauce on the side), riz gras (rice cooked in sauce), rice with beans and oil, pasta with tomato and fish sauce, or to (pronounced "toe"--boiled round cakes made of millet flour and served with sauce). It's a very carb-heavy diet, even for a bread-lover like me--the sauce usually contains just enough meat to give it flavour, and the vegetables are heavily cooked, so the starch makes up the bulk of the meal.
We often supplement with daytime snacks: locally made yogurt in plastic sachets, small bags of peanuts (a local staple used in sauces or eaten on its own, but not usually ground up and spread on bread like we do in Canada), and fresh mangoes (currently dirt cheap and in season, and the only food item I've found that's much better here than at home). If we're really thirsty, we'll buy sachets of sugary tamarind drink for 50 CFA (just over 10 cents); mangoes are usually between 25 and 50 CFA. Yogurt sachets are 50 or 100 CFA, while imported French brand-name yogurt cups are 400 CFA and glass bottles of imported fruit nectar are 500 CFA (and thus rarely drunk by locals). Soft drinks are 350 CFA--Coca-Cola has a virtual monopoly, so Coke, Sprite and Fanta are always available, while locally made Brafaso is rarer. Beer (650 ml bottles of locally brewed Flag, Castel and Brakina) is 500 CFA.
Lunch lasts until 3 pm. Twice a week, I spend part of the break doing my laundry by hand in plastic buckets. I've also been trying to take naps during that time, as the family does, even though I almost never nap at home and have to force myself to do it here. The heat, the constant presence of people in the family's courtyard, and the challenges of my job mean that although I'm usually able to get up easily at 6 am (which also never happens at home), I'm uncharacteristically beat by 9 pm.
It's been getting easier to stay up recently--perhaps I'm adapting a bit. Perhaps it's also due to the presence between June 12 and July 16 of five interns from France, who have been able to lighten our load a bit. It would be overwhelming for the kids to have all eight interns, plus the regular encadreurs, there at a time, so the French girls fill in the weekends and the weekday blocks of time that the three of us couldn't take on. They've also taken over a couple of our existing weekday time slots, leaving us free for documentation and research. We're awkwardly staff-heavy, in a feast-or-famine pattern that seems to happen often in development organizations, but hopefully we'll be able to document enough games and set up a programming structure that will be manageable for the encadreurs to continue once we leave. That structure, I should add, will be a lot more modest than the one the eight of us are currently running as we test what activites suit the boys best.
We go back to ANERSER in the afternoons for games, meetings and a soccer program we're trying to get going. We leave again at 6 pm for dinner (drawn from the same general menu as lunch), and go back at 7:30 twice a week for alphabétisation with some of the older boys, who are in apprenticeships all day. The nights after our night courses, we often go home and lie around on the terrace with whatever family members happen to be there. Other nights (bolstered by Coke, in my case), we might head out to a maquis for a round of drinks and brochettes, and maybe a bit of dancing.
Burkinabè club music (usually either Burkinabè, Malian or Ivoirian, with occasional American hip hop) isn't as engaging as I'd expected, given the reputation of African music abroad as powerful and energetic--the same few bland songs are overplayed, much the way they are in Canada, except here the songs are 7 or 8 minutes long, frequently skip, and are punctuated by awkward commentary from the DJ. On the other hand, I have the impression there are some gems out there--on our third Saturday in Ouaga, the three of us went to the Maison du Peuple to see Alif Naaba, one of Burkina's major pop stars. The auditorium was stifling, making us thankful for the teenaged girls selling cold soft drinks and palm-leaf fans out of trays on their heads. The concert, though, was awesome--Naaba has a powerful voice, an enthusiastic following, and as a pretty impressive djembe drumer (the dejembe is a large drum held between the knees).
Another frequent nighttime activity is drinking tea Burkinabè-style, prepared in a small pot on a charcoal burner. It's steeped, boiled and steeped again for half an hour or more, then mixed with copious amounts of sugar and served in shot glasses to whoever happens to be around on the terrace. There will usually be two or three rounds of tea in an evening. Since we almost never eat dessert with meals, it's a sweet treat. I've been taught how to make the tea, although I don't yet know the process well enough to feel comfortable preparing it for a gathering of discerning Burkinabè (the job of tea-maker, or faquis, is usually also left to a man, for whatever reason).
The mattresses we sleep on at night are rectangles of cut foam with removable slipcovers. We sleep without pillows or sheets, although the bolts of patterned cloth (pagnes) we've been buying (as either wraps/shower curtains or raw material for clothes) have come in handy on the rare chilly nights. For the first few weeks, we slept outside in the courtyard with the rest of the family. We'd move inside at about 5:15, when Burkina's huge quantities of flies would wake up and start buzzing in our ears. (The family would usually start to get up at that point.)
Since the rainy season began, though, we've had to move inside under mosquito netting to avoid malaria, which has really helped me sleep by keeping out the noise of the flies and the neighbourhood in the early morning. (I should note, however, that although I've been bitten a few times and try to avoid it, I have yet to actually see a mosquito--the family claims there are lots of them, but I have a feeling anyone who's ever been to a Canadian cottage wouldn't be too bothered by the bugs here.) Right now, we use circulating fans inside, although the temperature is supposed to get gradually cooler at night between now and our departure--April is the hottest month in Burkina.
All in all, at the halfway point of my work term, I feel like it will all just keep getting easier. Besides the gradually dropping temperatures and our ever-greater understanding of how ANERSER and Ouaga work, we have a week off between July 1 and 9. We hope to use it to visit Ghana and see another side of West Africa. We're starting to make some friends, although Megan and I have found it a bit difficult because of the way we're often perceived by people we meet--I'll elaborate on this point in a later post. We've largely given up on the maquis, with their unchanging, too-loud music, and hope to take more small day trips and go to more concerts on weekends. We have the French interns at ANERSER for all but three of our remaining work weeks, during which we will likely try to scale back our programming to a more sustainable level and start writing final reports for the encadreurs on the work we've done.
So the long and short of this (very long) post is that although I will be happy to come home, I'm doing well, learning a lot and beginning to enjoy myself here. I hope everyone reading this can say the same of themselves, wherever they are.
posted by Emily @ 5:17 p.m.
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