Long time, no write

It supprised even me, to see that since november I haven't written a single word on this blog. For the month of december I feel I am exempt, due to travelling around Europe to visit family and friends, but for january, february, march and april? I apologise.

In an attempt to short-story some of what has happened during the past months:
- we moved into a new house (see pictures on the story under this one) and installed airco in the bedroom... absolutely brilliant!
- my office also changed locations, to a much bigger house, and I got an own office (alas without airco, so for now, during the hottest months, I've already moved in with a collegue who does have airco, aaah)
- I've started playing volleyball, and have found a dance-instructor to take classes with
- I made good friends with Tessa, a belgian volunteer sent to a village at 30km from my town by the same organisation as I work for. We have lots of fun, talk about everything, and I am very glad she is here now. This is us on Valentines day, I cooked for her, as we didn't have any amours around ;-)









- Johans brother Marcus came to visit us last week, and got me drunk on a sunday night! As if mondays are loveable as such..
- There have been some rough spots in my life the past few months, hence the radio-silence. But I'm trying to back on the horse now, so I'll try to get into the writing again. Please stay with me.

That's all for the moment, take care***

New house

Some people may know already, but since february we live in a different house. Check out some pictures of the place, new and improved! :-)


our new house, with lovely terrace


































an 2nd shower outside (lovely for cooling down under a starry night sky!) , our chickens and rooster which we inherited from the former tenant




a real kitchen... and, most importantly! a real toilet!! hurrah!!

Miracle

Every thursday, at 18h45: time for miracles.

Prepare yourself to meet your God!

Did you know that...

In following a friend of mine (lotte, ik pik even je ideetje hier, auteursrechten binnenkort te betalen in belgisch bier, ok?) who always sends great mails in this style when she’s out travelling, I present to you, the latest burkina did-you-knows!

Did you know that:

- fall has come to Burkina too: the leaves (or, well, everything) turns brown and yellow, and the light is different
- the nights are getting chilly
- this make me want to come home and celebrate Christmas
- I am coming home for Christmas, yay!
- I have a colleague who has made it a challenge to convert me to the Christian religion
- He hasn’t gotten very far
- We do have interesting discussions on homosexuality, the pope, hypocrisy and corruption
- He has decided that the way into my religious soul is music
- He may be right that if there’s a way, that would be it
- Johan is in Ghana right now, visiting his little brother Marcus
- They seem to be having fun: they were hungover yesterday anyway
- I am tired of Burkina beer
- That the beer here is almost exclusively sold in half-litre bottles doesn’t help
- There’s no pizza in Ouahigouya!
- My parents are coming to visit me here
- I am curious to see how they react to Africa, 30 years after they left the continent
- I went out dancing all night on Saturday
- I love that people love to dance here, men and women
- I had a great time
- I am speaking completely Burkina-french
- This apparently sounds ridiculous to native French speakers, me not being burkinabe
- I don’t care about that
- I am struggling with moore, the local language
- I feel like I’m language-saturated (after learning Swedish)
- This is a pity, because often I don’t know what people around me are talking about
- This is one of the hardest parts of being here
- There are a lot of things that aren’t easy here
- but some things are so much easier
- I am hoping for more visits from friends
- You are all welcome
- People here all called burkinabe
- They are super-friendly
- I feel like I really have some good friends here
- This is nice
- And this is enough for now!

What can you transport on a motorcycle?

can you imagine what people can transport on the back of a motorcycle? I dare you! Answer: just about anything! from refridgerators to an entire cow which has been cut into pieces!

Houseguests

Living in Burkina Faso means tolerating a certain amount of unwanted houseguests... ants, cockroaches, crickets, lizards... they all live in with me, but don't think they pay rent!

This week I painfully discovered I have new houseguests, ones I hadn't met before. I woke up in the middle of the night being bitten hard by something in my bed..ouch! Then it bit me again, double-ouch! I knew this was no little mosquito-bite or ant-bite. I turned on the lights and saw... a scorpion in my bed!!! Panic!

When I arrived here last november I thought scorpions were deadly. Luckily I had found out that this is not true, that scorpion-bites hurt a lot, but won't kill you. And luckily, Johan was with me that night, so I could make him suck out the poison. Imagine I had been alone and thinking I would die! This not being the case I was just bitten and hurting. All in all the bites didn't bother me all too much, the next day they were just red marks. I think the scorpion (which Johan killed mercilessly) was still a baby, it was smaller than usual, so I guess I was lucky. Still, I have hung up my mosquito-net and tuck it in tight now. Houseguests, fine, but unwanted bed-guests, no thanks!

Ouagadougou flooded!!!

Burkina Faso is known as one of the driest countries on earth. The rainy season, which lasts from about may/june to september/october, brings with it rains which often fall suddenly and heavily, but only come every two or three days. The rest of the year: not a drop! This is one of the reasons why I am working here: to increase the acces to water.

But this week, on tuesday september 1st, something quite the opposite happened: an extreme downpour plunged the whole capital Ouagadougou into the water. After a never-before seen downpour of 260 mm (whereas the total rainfall in one year would be about 600-700 mm) the entire capital was flooded. Water everywhere.

The city is not well equiped for this kind of weather, and thus about 150 000 people have lost their house and just about everything they own. Many poor people live in houses built with mud bricks, which melt like sugar in such extreme rain. And because of the speed with which the water rose many people did not have time to save their belongings. This is a hard blow to people who are already struggling for survival.

How come it's already friday, and still nothing has appeared about this on the news in Europe? Not important enough?

(picture: ocadesburkina.org)

check out this video on youtube

Birds

Yesterday I had gone to work with the motorcycle I had borrowed for when Johan was here this weekend. At lunch I came home to find some grass and leaves stuck under the saddle of my bike, which had stayed at home. I thought it was the neighbours kids playing, and removed the grass. In the evening though, it was there again... and today I have found out that there is a couple of small red birds planning on building a family under the saddle of my bike! What to do? I don’t have the heart to chase them away! I think I’ll borrow the motorcycle for a couple of weeks... :-)

Sleeping outside

People have been wondering about my daily life here. So I thought I’d share one of the biggest differences between my European and my African life with you. The past three months (april, may, june) have been tooooo hot for me to be able to sleep inside. My house is nice and cool during the day, but at night its an oven. Luckily, I have a roof terrace on my house, so for the past three months I have been going up there to sleep.

It took some time to get used to lying under a starry African sky, with the sounds of the neighbours turkeys (who appear to be night animals), my neighbours’ (who also sleep outside) snoring, their babys crying, the early roosters screams, and the mosques of Ouahigouya calling everyone to prayer at 4 in the morning. But at least it was cool and there was a breeze. And it feels good, to go to bed early and go up with the sun.

A day in the life...

I thought I might describe a normal, regular day of life here in BF. In some aspects, it doesn’t differ so much from all of your lives. Then again, other aspects do :-)

5h50: alarm clock, my neighbours making noise, cocks crowing, and the sun warming up the land
6h00: I get up, water my plants, eat breakfast and get ready for work. I am especially pleased that I brought with me a little italian espresso-maker so I can get my necessary dose of caffein
6h50: I get on my bike and ride to work
7h05: I arrive, and spend some 15 minutes talking with my collegues who arrive one by one
7h20: work, sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, usually because of the virus-problems we have with our computers, grrr
12h30: I get on my bike and defy the blazing sun to ride either to a local restaurant or home to eat
13h30: siesta, I usually don’t sleep (I get in a bad mood when I wake up from sleeping in the day) so I read, watch a tv series on my computer, or just lounge about a bit
14h45: I take a quick shower, and ride back to work
15h00: work continues
17h30: end of the working day, chat with some collegues, ride home, or to town to pick up some groceries
evening: either spent at home alone, cooking, reading or watching a movie, or in town with friends (this activity usually involves drinking beer, which really tastes SO good after a hot day here!)
22h00: bedtime (except if the beers got too good ;-))

Finally, rain!!!

Since I got here in November I haven’t seen any rain. Well, ok, there was some kind of dropping activity two or three times, but nothing worth calling rain, really.
Coming from Belgium, a country using its extreme rainfall as a touristic attraction (t-shirts saying “in belgium it always rains”, yes, they exist!) I shouldn’t complain, right?
But I guess the grass is always greener.... because god I am waiting for rain right now! Sick and tired of sunsunsunsun, sun all day. I think now I understand more fully the meaning of a “dry season”.
Today, finally, we got our first decent rain. Still only about 10 minutes, but anyway, rain. And I am ready and waiting for more! Whoever would have thought?!

L'eau de l'étranger

This weekend, someone was explaining me the right way of receiving visitors. When someone comes to see you, the very first thing to do is to give them something to drink. This is called “l’eau de l’étranger”, or the foreigners water. Only after having offered your visitor this is it allowed to inquier about the reason for their visit.
I found this quite illustrative of two important points: the nature of the climate here, which is sure to make you arrive thirsty. But also a simple but strong recognition of importance of water before all else.

Nasara

In the beginning I was here I thought I heard my name being called by all who I passed by. I heard sarah, sarah... It was so strange. Once, when children called out to me, I asked them how they knew my name. They just giggled. Then I had an idea. I looked up the word for ‘white person’ in Moore, the local language... and sure enough, that solved this riddle. Nasara is the word for white person, and the cause of my confusion.

the weather

Everybody keeps asking me if it's really hot here. The answer: yes. But it's also really cold sometimes. The past month the temperature dropped to 12 degrees some nights, and that's cold if the daytime is around 28 degrees. We slept with blankets, and sweaters, and huddled up. Desert nights can really be cold!
Then, suddenly, it turned hot, really hot. Bedtime temperature: 33 degrees. These differances are tough on your body, especially if you're used to slowly warming up after winter and gradually adjusting to cold when summer's finished (also known as spring and fall). Here, the heat jumps on you.
After the scorching week which followed the cold month of January, this morning I woke up to a whirling wind. The Harmattan has arrived. It whirls and swirls, lifting the red desert dust to taint the sky pink. Now and then a mini-dust-tornado passes by, its funnel lifting the dust, and plastic bags, and bits of paper, and everything else in its way, high into the sky.
One day I came home from work, and the area around my house looked like, well, yes, a hurricane had passed through: all sorts of garbage, leaves, dirt, dust, plastic... everywhere. It doesn't surprise me that this wind carries the red desert dust all the way to Europe sometimes. Next time your bike/car has a light red layer of dust, try to image where it came from and how it got there!

The colour in the picture is not off...the red is all dust...

A house and a boyfriend!

The 6th of December, I finally found a house. It was a long and tiresome journey in finding it, and then it was a long and tiresome journey to fill it too. Finding a bed, a mattress, a table, something to cook on/with, .... in a city where there are almost no stores (only a big open market place with small stalls) and almost no fixed prices (meaning having to haggle for every single thing you buy) is a challenge.
But I managed, and am slowly feeling at home here....especially since Johan arrived on the 28th of December! First we spent a week in Ouagadougou for holidays and some other arrangements, then I took him home with me :-)

Our house has two bedrooms, a large living room, a shower and a roof terrace (which may come in handy when the hot season comes and it may get too hot to sleep inside). It shares a cour (innergarden) with three other houses, but still has some private outdoor space. It is a nice house, but does present us with some challenges: there is no kitchen and the toilets are latrines (a hole in the ground) outside which we share with our neighbours. The toilets are just a matter of getting used to, but the lack of a kitchen is somewhat of a puzzle sometimes. We bought a gas cooker and two tables to resemble a kitchen counter, but there is no sink either, so washing dishes needs to be done in big plastic bowls. Why is there no kitchen? Because most people here cook outside, in the cour. They sit on a little stool and cook everything on the ground. Why is there no toilet? Because people here think its disgusting to have a toilet in your living room! Or how you can look at the same thing in completely different ways...

Take a look at some pictures of our house and our neighbours on the pictures page.

Crocodiles

Yesterday I was accompanying a group of farmers which came on a study visit. We went out to one of the villages we are working in to see how the farmers there were doing. There was more than that to see however.... while studying a waterpump at the edge of the water someone suddenly noticed a couple of crocodiles staring at us from a sand bank a few metres away! Welcome on of the aspects of daily working life down here!

Arrival

Here I am, in Ouahigouya and working. I have received many curious messages already: how are you? Are you all right? Do you like it? Is it hot?

Answers: Fine. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Ok ok, you probably all want to know more, right?

Well, I arrived in Ouahigouya Monday the 17th of November and started work on Tuesday. I am now still living in a hotel, as it seems to be hard to find a place to live. At least if you are a social person. By this I mean it is no problem to find a big house surrounded by walls, but finding a decent house which shares a “cour” (innergarden) with another family is difficult. As I don’t have any intention on locking myself away from the world here, I am persistant in my search. Sharing a cour will give me a chance to learn the local language (moore), an opportunity to understand the culture and make friends, and also more security. Hopefully something will come up soon…

As for work: fine. My colleagues are very very friendly, I am fond of them already! And for the short time I have worked here I already have a good impression of their methods and attitudes. So it is promising indeed.

As for the city: it is fairly small, very dusty, but quite quiet. As there is not too much traffic I can ride my bicycle around without too much trouble, which is nice and makes me feel free. The biggest problem are the many streets which do not have any lighting at night- don’t forget the bicycle lights!! There is a small motorbike waiting for me here at work, but I feel I need some quiet practice on an empty road before I go out on the road.

The people here are very friendly and helpful, very warm. So is the weather! Even though it is the cold season here now, it is hot during the day. The nights cool down quite nicely though, and I have even bought a small blanket!

So: so far, so good. I am happy to be here and am happy with the situation, even though I see some challenges ahead. But first things first: for now, I will settle for a place to live!

/Sarah