Some of you have asked for a mailing address for us. We have set up a PO box (details to follow by email) It seems we have no street name although our house does have a number. Sam has nicknamed many of the streets - potato man street, donkey street, our street is the flip-flop street due to the amount of broken discarded flip-flops - I am actually wondering if there is some local unspoken custom where by people try to fill up the pot holes with their old broken footware......Our garbage is collected weekly by a donkey and cart which as a general rule seems to drop more garbage than transport it away. I have also noticed that piles of garbage seem to find its way onto the street outside my house during the night. I asked my burkinabe friend about this and she told me that this is from the people who cannot, or will not, pay for their garbage to be collected by the donkey, and naturally do not want to dump it outside their own houses, so they dump it outside the homes of rich white folks like me, knowing my standards are high so I will deal with it. HHhmmm.
But, we do have a very nice home. Our shipment arrived ( $7,000 and 4 months later) and I am delighted to be sleeping on real bed, and drinking tea out of my tea mugs is thrilling. Once again I must voice the deep respect I have for the hardship most Africans must suffer day to day, I would simply die if I had to live one day as most people here are living. I have slept only 6 weeks on a piece of foam shared with only one of my children, and then with the privilege of air conditioning (when the power is working), and I was pushed to my limits of endurance. The burkinabe have an expression here for people like me - Les enfant gate. A broken child. otherwise translated as weak or spoilt. I'm honestly OK with that.
Power cuts are regular, sometimes for hours at a time, but right now it is manageable, as it is cooling down as we approach the winter months - the temperature is going to drop as low as 80 degree's between now and Christmas, and then it will start to climb,and climb, and climb, and apparently thats when "Les enfant gate" will really suffer.
We had no gas in the city for 5 weeks. We had one bottle which we used sparingly, and when Gas arrived, Patrice, our house keeper went to find us a new bottle. I was mortified when he told me he had queued for 11 hours to buy a bottle. I was further mortified when he told me that if, he had paid $8 for it instead of $4, he could have jumped the queue to the front. $4 for 11 hours of time. I didn't tell him that we feel we must pay him considerably more than $4 in over time, to cover the hours he stood in line. God bless that man. He said some people queued for two days to get a bottle.
Food is another challenge. Expensive and often unavailable. I have not been able to find butter for 3 weeks now and have learned the hard way that much of the meat is inedible. Whole grains other than bread are almost non existent. Our diet is much less varied than anywhere we have lived before, but on a good note the kids are learning to eat what is put in front of them, and we have fresh locally picked fruit every day. There are actually some quite nice restaurants in town too, that we can escape to.
The rains have finished and the dust has already taken control. It seems that there are two types of people in Ouagadougou; Black people and orange people - those are the caucasians who used to be white. The dust is relentless, and when the harmattan starts, we will be inhaling it as well as wearing it.
We must still be diligent about the mosquitos despite the end of the rains. There are fewer for sure, but the mosquito's here carry the severest of the 4 Malaria parasites, plasmodium falciparum, and there is no messing with it. The mosquito's are tiny and virtually silent, it is a daily challenge to keep our home a mosquito free zone, but so far, so good. Of course every time someone so much as sneezes we go into panic mode......however we rest in the knowledge that as the elite privileged here we can access tests and medicine easily. For the Bailey family, At most, Malaria only needs to be a uncomfortable temporary inconvenience and not a killer. It is not so for most of Burkina Faso.
Two weeks ago the Locusts arrived. I kept telling myself that they are actually just grasshoppers which I have always found rather endearing in the past, however......These were absolute monsters of Old testament proportions. Esther and I stood in front of the bank one morning with several hundred of them between us and the door. The bushes all around us were literally shaking from root to tip, as they consummed every bit of vegetation in sight. I tried really hard to maintain a rational composure for my daughters sake, and with a "OOh look at all the grasshoppers Esi" we set off boldly up the stairs, at which point hundreds, no thousands, of the devil's took off in a swarm directly towards us. Oh my goodness, they were up my skirt, in my hair - I started jumping around like a woman possessed, arms flaying, letting out a wild demented roar, Esi was, well, a little freaked out to be frank. Bank security was amused to say the least. Thank the Heavens they seem to have left as fast as they arrived.
The french continues to be a huge day to day challenge. I managed to book myself tennis lessons by accident,( a conversation with so many misunderstandings it was just easier to nod and say "OK see you Tuesday at 5" than carry on...) and Richard tried to order a coke from a street vendor and was presented with 3 live cockerels to choose from. In all fairness to us, this is not normal French. It is spoken with a very strong African accent and often mixed with the local tribal language, Moori. The people are also unexpressive by nature and their mouths seem to work faster than their faces........ Communication with the folk working in my home has just become one huge, animated, over dramatisation on my part, as I try desperately to make myself understood.
We have done some venturing out into the countryside around Ouagadougou which has been interesting yet somehow not thrilling. As a land locked country bordering the dessert, with virtually no natural lakes, no mountains, and little in the way of natural beauty, this is no tourist destination. We must drive far to see Burkina's best natural attractions - abundant waterfalls in the West, 6 hours from Ouaga,(I sense an anticlimax ahead, after a year of frequenting the intense and awesome Vic falls in Zambia, still, perhaps after a few more months of this dry, thirsty land...) and Africa's biggest population of elephants at Nazinga park in the South. We are hoping to do some exploring around Christmas when the kids break from school for a few weeks. The Sahel will be an exciting trip also, although we might wait for next year for that one - I just can't imagine Esther being enthusiastic about riding on a camel yet....
The land is not beautiful, but as I wrote in my last post, the beauty is in the Burkinabe people. They are a peace loving, gentle people. There are many different tribes represented (one friend told me the number was as high as 60)The biggest being the Mossi tribe, and most people are still rooted in their animist traditions and superstitions over and above which ever religion they choose to be. But there is no hostility or animosity between tribes, and there is complete religious freedom.
We actually had the election this past weekend, but it came and went.........The current president has been in power for 23 years after his predecessor, a man called Thomas Sankara who is something of a political legend in West Africa, was killed in a coup. The word on the street is that the two men were best friends. There is very strong opinion about the current president, and less than 30% of citizens voted, with most people shrugging their shoulders and saying there was no point -" the outcome will always be the same, and now the constitution will be changed again, so that the outcome will always remain the same....." They are passive for now, but can even the most patient and peace loving of people stay resigned for ever? There are some who say a revolution is coming in 2015. African Politics - it is way over my head. The problems are so very complex here, and so very difficult to really "touch", when one is driving "around" the poverty with white skin and diplomatic number plates.....
Its amazing how quickly everything feels familiar and "unsuprising" in a new land. I no longer hear the sheep who lives over the back wall, or marvel at the skill of the half naked kids chasing tyres with sticks in the street, and seeing a 6 week old baby strapped to the back of its mother, riding on a moped, with no helmet (Obviously), no longer even raises an eyebrow. There is a very sad young man who walks around our neighbourhood completely naked every day. It all seems so normal. - Imagine that in Manhattan!
