The Road

I wake up to my alarm and the scamping of little feet. My alarm (which, quiet fittingly is set to the song of time from Oceania of Time, I programmed it in myself) has scared Tyler and Jessi's two new kittens, Gingembre and Noname (which I've tenaciously been calling Meatkat for the past couple days, despite dirty looks from Jessi and Tyler - they want to name him another kind of spice) and they go darting for cover in their favorite hiding/sleeping spot – in the shelves on top of the pasta packages. They are both so cute and it has been a lot of fun playing with them the last couple days. Chris, Andrea and I snuck up to their house under instructions from Jessi to surprise Tyler for his birthday. He awoke to find a full breakfast spread (including bacon!) laid out with three of us and Jessi awaiting him. And he had no idea that any of it was coming. Good work Jessi!

But now all that is over - it's 6:30 am I have to get my butt in gear and get down to the road to catch the bus back to Toma. After saying goodbye to Jessi and Tyler I hop on my bike and get down to the road. Just in time to... wait for thirty minutes or so while the bus driver decides that he has enough passengers (or has finished his rousing round of morning banter) to leave. My wait is broken only by the occasional passing of bikes or motos on the road. Almost everyone says hello.

After about 10 minutes pass by a see a girl coming up the road with a chair on her head. As I'm wondering why in the world a young girl like her would be headed out of town with a chair on her head she stops in front of me, puts down there chair and says that her mom told her to bring this to you. I look down the road and sure enough her mother is about a hundred yards down the road, smiling and wave to me. I wave back and yell thank you in French and local language. She just waves back.

After a few more minutes the bus shows up, laden with its usual cargo of people, bags, boxes and animals. I wave the bus down, and tell them I'm headed to Toma. About a minute later my bike has been hoisted up to the roof and firmly tied down and we're on our way!

The road is bumpy, but not at its worst and at least by the light of day the driver can avoid or slow down for the bumps. And in case you get car sick there are very frequent stops to load on more passengers and cargo. At each of these stops the workers on the bus wait until the bus starts moving to hop on, partly because you're never really sure when the bus is actually going to move and partly because they want to look cool. I've always wondered if they ever got left behind on accident doing that.

Today the most exciting part of the trip is when one of the Guinea fowl got out of it's cage on top of the bus and made a break for it, flying off into the bush. Immediately a gang of maybe ten men and boys go running after it, yelling insults at the guy who put them in their cage as they run. They're back in less than five minutes, bird in hand and before everyone has a chance to calm down from all the excitement we're off again! But this time instead of his normal slow start the driver just steps on it and the gang of last minute bus jumpers is getting left behind! I start laughing as they thump the side of the bus, signaling the driver to stop. He eventually does stop and they clamber back on, looking only slightly abashed.

Before too long the 45 km to Toma is passed and I'm back home. Time for a shower and a nap!

My Spring Break 2010 – With selected highlights

Toma -> Pô -> Ouagadougou -> Bobo -> Sindou -> Ouagadougou -> Togo -> Ouagadougou -> Yako -> Toma

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Pô

“Hey kid, what are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Good well then come help me.”

Suddenly the task of cleaning the computer lab seemed a lot less daunting with six student helpers. The place was so full of dust and so poorly organized that I had really wanted to just clean everything out of it right away but I didn’t think I could do it alone and Neal was in a meeting for the next several hours. I knew that the students at my school would leap at the chance to work in our computer lab and evidently it was the same here.

The lab had all of the essentials of a lab, computers, fans, electricity, as well as some perks, windowed glass and an air conditioner. Unfortunately the air conditioner hadn’t been working for some time and the glass windows were pinned open by some computers, resulting in a nice pile-up of dust. I put my small army to work, taking first chairs and tables, followed by cables, monitors and towers. Then came the least fun part – sweeping.

The room was covered in almost a centimeter of dust in some places. Being in the room while it is being swept out is like getting a really bad seat on transport on a really dusty part of the road – you don’t quite end up as red as you do after transport but you feel like you do. I send three unhappy kids in armed with ‘village’ brooms – a bunch of grass or straw tied at the bottom with a cord. Sweeping the household is traditionally part of girls’ daily chores so I had chosen three boys to do the first round. I opened the windows and turned up the fans, hoping to get them some clean airflow and let them go to work. A giant dust-cloud and a few minutes later and the lab looked much better. One more thorough sweep and it almost looked like new.

By the next morning everything was back in the lab, sorted according to operability and I was madly dashing from computer to computer starting installs, entering details, testing CD drives and swapping hardware. Somehow the two days I had allotted myself to finish with the lab had slipped away under the mountain of small tasks and now I was working all out – something I really hadn’t done much of since my last big programming assignment was turned in two weeks before graduation. It was exhilarating and the teacher who came in and out the lab didn’t really know what to think of Neal and me running around crazily. And then it was time to go – I had a bus to catch.

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Ouagadougou

The next morning I was most definitely not catching the bus I promised myself I would wake up for. In fact I wasn’t doing much of anything besides feeling the effects of last night. Besides a massive hangover I had some scrapes from a late-night run in with the pavement on the way back. I struggled out of bed and forced down a liter of water before plopping right back down. I repeated this a couple times before I felt I up to the eight-hour bus ride to the other side of the country. By this time it was lunch, and after learning the next bus out of town left at 2pm, I decided to stay for delivery. After a delicious BLT and equally good grilled cheese with bacon and tomatoes I had my stuff packed out and was heading out the door. I had thirty minutes to get across town but I wasn’t too worried – buses down make a habit of leaving earlier than five minutes to five hours after they are supposed to.

Still I was quite happy to see the taxi pull up that was dropping off some other volunteers. After explaining that I was a little short for time the taxi driver was off on a shortcut to the station, only stopping once to pick up someone headed the same direction. We pulled at 2:00 on the nose. The bus was doing the ritual last minute get-on-the-bus-we’re-leaving honking and I jumped out the taxi waving them down.

Up until this point I’d never met someone running any sort of transport in Burkina that wouldn’t at least try and squeeze one more passenger on. As the bus pulled out of the station after some yelling for me to get out of the way I was shocked. Despite the two-hour wait for the next bus I was overall very impressed by the bus company, Rakieta. They stick to their schedules like clock-work, their buses were cleaner than most I’ve taken in the states, they were comfortable and best off all had air conditioning! These were all firsts for me.

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More to come later but I wanted to get this first part up because it’s been forever and a day since I posted something!

Festima

The green leaves of the mask rippled in waves to the sound of the drum beat as the dancer’s feet flew, pausing only momentarily to strike the ground. Kicking up clouds of dust he made his way across the field, sometimes floating, sometimes bouncing but always embodying the pure rhythm of the eight drum players playing nearby. This is my first night at the mask festival in Deadougou and I’m blown away.

Hearing the words ‘mask festival’ I’m excepting to see someone wearing a mask parading around for everyone to see. I wasn’t expecting this – mask troupes from eight countries, hundreds of dancers, a wide variety of drums and whistles and of course a staggering variety of intricate masks and consumes.

The dance floor is a dirt patch about the size of a soccer field which is surrounded by people. The event offers three types of seating. For about $.25 you can stand in the sun and watch, $.50 buys you a seat under a shaded hanger while a dollar buys you a seat in the shaded, makeshift risers. We had decided that since this was a once in a lifetime kind of thing we’d splurge and get a weekend pass for the stadium seating.

What started out as a small group of people talking about going had surprisingly grown into a group of about twenty from all across the country. We were all staying together in two very crowded bunk house style rooms – two rooms each with sixteen beds, four windows and nothing else. The spoilt volunteers, such as myself, who were accustomed to a blasting fan all night long complained about the heat while the truly “HardCorps” volunteers had no problem.

The heat of the midday sun was an equalizer, drawing complaints from everyone. But mostly we watched. The masks costumes were made from everything from leaves and straw to reeds and leather. There were dancers on stilts, dancers doing back flips, dancers spinning for minutes straight. It was an awesome experience.

Taking pictures was supposedly forbidden without first buying a photo pass. We all chipped in and got one, giving it to the person with the best camera, Leslie. You can check out the pictures she took here.