WOMEN'S CHOIR
L'eglise AD, SemagaSunday, May 17, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
so, what in the world is going on in this picture?
the building is one of semaga's local protestant churches. this shot was taken a sunday afternoon after the morning service. we waited for the photographer most of the day, and most of the congregation had already left by the time he finally showed up. either way, i'm in there somewhere if you look a bit.
click for a larger version!
Monday, April 6, 2009
"When the sun goes down in village, you have to get inside quick. Otherwise the phantoms and evil genies will get you." Dominique tells me this every night on the way back from the market. He is on the back of my bike and we are riding fast, because there isn't much daylight left.
"But, we planted a small forest today, Dominique," I reply, referring to the twenty so acacias we tried around our courtyard. "And the good genies live in the forests. The good genies will protect us."
He seems skeptical. "Besides," I add, "I know karate. And the phantoms definitely don't know karate. "
We've never talked about his age, but if I were to guess, I would say Dominique is about sixteen. He has other names in village. I call him le comique which is true because you will always laugh when he is around. He also goes by le pilote because he has his own personal airplane which he takes on occasion to The United States to visit my family there. He is planning a trip to the moon next week where he will open the first ever dolo bar in space. It is like this, how we talk.
At night after a dinner of To and sauce de baobab (like hard mashed potatoes made from millet with a sauce made from leaves gathered en brousse) we sometimes sneak out to sit on the concrete gravestone in front of our courtyard. The gravestone is probably the most expensive thing that my family owns. They had a solar panel once, but the kids broke it which means that the huge chunk of rock out front is again number one. Raphael comes over from his house and sometimes we talk about America and sometimes about math and sometimes about girls.
If the moon is full, no one thinks about sleeping and kids play soccer through the night with a ball made of tied cloth. An NGO came once to give a real soccer ball to the village. It popped the first day. I bought one a couple of weeks ago. It popped the first hour. My friend Bazogni talks about a time when they used to have a bunch of soccer balls in our village but I think he is just idealizing. He also says there was a time when there were trees and the harvests were abundant.
Bazogni is probably twenty five. Like most of the men in Semaga, he has worked seasonally in Cote I'voir in the cocao fields. Some of the guys here go every year and have lives and families in both places, moving between the two homes in a strange limbo. Everyone who does seasonal work owns their own moto and more than likely has a cel phone. The others ride around on borrowed bikes and don't make calls.
For fun, we go out en brousse towards the grove of baobab trees and throw sticks at their hanging fruit. There is a legend about the baobab, that years ago, the gods uprooted and turned them so that the branches are now below, and the roots, above. If you see one, you will believe. Getting fruit is harder than you think, and sometimes it's an all day affair. But my friend Opio can get probably five fruits on a good day. His record is eight. Everyone has a specialty in village. Opio's is the baobab fruit.
Odo's is radios. We call him le magicien because even though he can't speak french, he can fix anything electronic. Except solar panels. Odo lives about a half K away from my courtyard, right past Bazogni's house and the pump. If he works through the night, sometimes I wake up to blasting reggae at three a.m. when the wires cross correctly. The whole village knows when Odo has fixed a radio. It comes with the other news like who is getting married, who just had a child, who just died.
When someone passes away, a man will come to the courtyard and play his drum. His beat will tell the village who died and from what and when the funeral is. Inevitably, funerals are the social events of the week and are a joyous occasion with dancing and dolo unless the deceased was young. The whole village comes and dances and celebrates and people do impressions of the man or woman that passed away, talking and dancing and moving how they used to do. -- Paying homage to a life lived as a millet farmer, metal worker, or gardener.
These are the professions in Semaga. As a business development volunteer, this means I find myself working mostly with farmers on a day-to-day basis, as, in Burkina Faso, business is practically synonymous with farming. There is nothing else but the earth.
As my dad kindly observed in our family's recent Christmas letter, my work experience in agriculture beyond mowing the lawn is... not much. This means that I am learning new things every day. Which is nothing short of awesome. As volunteers, most of us are in a strange situation where we bring a completely new skill-set to our villages. Something so basic to me, like saving one's money, the idea of profit, etc. might be a new concept to the farmers that I work with, where as something so basic to them, such as planting millet, tilling the soil, is totally new to me. In that sense, work is a sharing of ideas. We are learning together.
Thank you to everyone that checks this blog from time to time for updates. Your support means a lot to me! My village, Semaga, is about 60 K from the closest internet cafe, so posts are harder to make than I had expected them to be. Know, though, that everything here in Burkina is going well and I have felt extremely welcomed in my community. If anyone is thinking of visiting, mine is the mud hut right after the grove of mango trees on the path in to town. Ask for Brekke.
"But, we planted a small forest today, Dominique," I reply, referring to the twenty so acacias we tried around our courtyard. "And the good genies live in the forests. The good genies will protect us."
He seems skeptical. "Besides," I add, "I know karate. And the phantoms definitely don't know karate. "
We've never talked about his age, but if I were to guess, I would say Dominique is about sixteen. He has other names in village. I call him le comique which is true because you will always laugh when he is around. He also goes by le pilote because he has his own personal airplane which he takes on occasion to The United States to visit my family there. He is planning a trip to the moon next week where he will open the first ever dolo bar in space. It is like this, how we talk.
At night after a dinner of To and sauce de baobab (like hard mashed potatoes made from millet with a sauce made from leaves gathered en brousse) we sometimes sneak out to sit on the concrete gravestone in front of our courtyard. The gravestone is probably the most expensive thing that my family owns. They had a solar panel once, but the kids broke it which means that the huge chunk of rock out front is again number one. Raphael comes over from his house and sometimes we talk about America and sometimes about math and sometimes about girls.
If the moon is full, no one thinks about sleeping and kids play soccer through the night with a ball made of tied cloth. An NGO came once to give a real soccer ball to the village. It popped the first day. I bought one a couple of weeks ago. It popped the first hour. My friend Bazogni talks about a time when they used to have a bunch of soccer balls in our village but I think he is just idealizing. He also says there was a time when there were trees and the harvests were abundant.
Bazogni is probably twenty five. Like most of the men in Semaga, he has worked seasonally in Cote I'voir in the cocao fields. Some of the guys here go every year and have lives and families in both places, moving between the two homes in a strange limbo. Everyone who does seasonal work owns their own moto and more than likely has a cel phone. The others ride around on borrowed bikes and don't make calls.
For fun, we go out en brousse towards the grove of baobab trees and throw sticks at their hanging fruit. There is a legend about the baobab, that years ago, the gods uprooted and turned them so that the branches are now below, and the roots, above. If you see one, you will believe. Getting fruit is harder than you think, and sometimes it's an all day affair. But my friend Opio can get probably five fruits on a good day. His record is eight. Everyone has a specialty in village. Opio's is the baobab fruit.
Odo's is radios. We call him le magicien because even though he can't speak french, he can fix anything electronic. Except solar panels. Odo lives about a half K away from my courtyard, right past Bazogni's house and the pump. If he works through the night, sometimes I wake up to blasting reggae at three a.m. when the wires cross correctly. The whole village knows when Odo has fixed a radio. It comes with the other news like who is getting married, who just had a child, who just died.
When someone passes away, a man will come to the courtyard and play his drum. His beat will tell the village who died and from what and when the funeral is. Inevitably, funerals are the social events of the week and are a joyous occasion with dancing and dolo unless the deceased was young. The whole village comes and dances and celebrates and people do impressions of the man or woman that passed away, talking and dancing and moving how they used to do. -- Paying homage to a life lived as a millet farmer, metal worker, or gardener.
These are the professions in Semaga. As a business development volunteer, this means I find myself working mostly with farmers on a day-to-day basis, as, in Burkina Faso, business is practically synonymous with farming. There is nothing else but the earth.
As my dad kindly observed in our family's recent Christmas letter, my work experience in agriculture beyond mowing the lawn is... not much. This means that I am learning new things every day. Which is nothing short of awesome. As volunteers, most of us are in a strange situation where we bring a completely new skill-set to our villages. Something so basic to me, like saving one's money, the idea of profit, etc. might be a new concept to the farmers that I work with, where as something so basic to them, such as planting millet, tilling the soil, is totally new to me. In that sense, work is a sharing of ideas. We are learning together.
Thank you to everyone that checks this blog from time to time for updates. Your support means a lot to me! My village, Semaga, is about 60 K from the closest internet cafe, so posts are harder to make than I had expected them to be. Know, though, that everything here in Burkina is going well and I have felt extremely welcomed in my community. If anyone is thinking of visiting, mine is the mud hut right after the grove of mango trees on the path in to town. Ask for Brekke.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)