Dealing With Disaster

This past Saturday afternoon, I drove out with our day guard to take a look at his place. He, his wife of several years, and their two year old daughter live as squatters in an outlying area of Ouaga that has not yet been subdivided into lots. People do this in hopes that when the area is finally surveyed and subdivided, they will have first dibs on the piece of property on which they have been living. For ordinary folks, this is the cheapest and probably only way they will ever have a chance of owning their own piece of land. Buying a piece of property that has already been subdivided is far beyond their reach.

The drawback is that it isn’t worth it in the long run to build anything permanent in the interim. When the surveying is finally done, it’s almost inevitable that they will have to break down whatever they have built in order to accommodate the new property lines. However, in the meantime, they do need a place to live and a way to have some privacy. Thus, houses and courtyard walls tend to be built of mud brick rather than cement block, minimizing the initial cost, and the subsequent loss when subdivision finally occurs (mud bricks cost 25 francs and cement blocks cost 200 francs).

When the torrential rains fell one day this past September, our guard’s place was inundated. Water flooded the courtyard and reached a height of several feet even in their house. Within hours, the water had soaked into the courtyard wall, softening the mud bricks that it was made of, with the result that it simply crumbled and fell. They were afraid that the same thing was going to happen to their house. The only thing that saved it was that our guard had had the foresight and resources to place it on a cement foundation.

Now he wants to do a similar thing with a new wall, building the bottom three courses out of cement blocks, and the upper part with the regular mud bricks. This will mean spending limited, hard-earned money on something that is temporary.  But as I said previously, they do need a wall that will provide some privacy for at least several years yet, and be able to withstand the coming rainy season next year. We’ll do what we can to help.

Hobnobbing With Diplomats

On Friday evening, I did something that I’ve never done before. I went to the Canadian ambassador’s place for an informal gathering of expatriates and Africans. Apparently they have these little get-togethers once a month here in Ouaga, providing people like me with an opportunity to touch base with fellow Canadians and other invited guests. However, this is the first time that I’ve received an invitation to attend. Kathy would have come with me, but she had another function to attend that evening.

The Canadian ambassador’s residence is in a ritzy new area of Ouagadougou called Ouaga 2000. There was a map attached to the e-mail invitation, but I ended up finding the place more by accident than design, driving around where I thought it appeared to be on the map (road signage leaves something to be desired here). After some time of doing this, I finally pulled up at a place that had a few vehicles parked out front and security guards at the gate. “Where’s the Canadian ambassador’s place?” I asked one of them. “This is it,” he replied. How often does that happen, eh? :)

Within minutes, I was inside the courtyard and made my way around to the back yard with its lawn and swimming pool. I purchased a booklet of tickets that would enable me to get drinks and food (hamburgers and shish-kebabs were on the menu that evening) and soon found myself talking to none other than the ambassador himself. I always find it interesting that here in Burkina, we can talk to diplomats and other highly placed people that we normally couldn’t get to within half a mile of back in Canada!

As I was getting my shish-kebab, I noticed a gentleman beside me struggling to understand what the lady behind the serving table was saying to him in French. Seeking to be helpful, I translated for him and a few moments later discovered that I was talking with the Australian High Commissioner for this part of Africa. He was up from Accra for a meeting with the president of Burkina that day. We ended up having a good little chat since he was familiar with the work of SIL in Australia.

I spent most of the rest of the evening talking with several folks from Quebec. It was a touch of home to hear that québécois accent again. Then it was time to go back to our humble hovel in one of the lower class suburbs of Ouaga. It might not be a big, fancy place, but it’s home sweet home to me.

No Sleeping Allowed!

One of my Burkinabè friends is a toll-gate operator on the main road that runs south of Ouaga. All of Burkina’s main roads have toll-gates where fees are collected from any vehicle with more than two wheels (motos, bicycles, and pedestrians are exempt), depending on the size of vehicle and the distance one plans to travel on the road. It’s not expensive. To go to the Kusassi region, I’ve got to use the road running south of Ouaga for 80 kms before turning off on a side road, and it costs me about 50 cents to do so.

Some of the toll stops have booths placed similar to those on toll ways in the United States. You drive up to one, roll down your window, pay the toll, and receive a ticket, all without getting out of your car. But not the one on the road south of Ouaga. Here you have to stop somewhere along the side of the road, get out, and conduct your business with a booth operator set back from the road on the passenger side of the car. Or you can get any one of the dozens of young men crowding around your vehicle to do it for you. For a small fee, of course. At the same time, a horde of vendors will descend on you, selling everything from bread, tissues, gum, matches, and phone cards to fruit, snacks, eggs, and locally baked goods. It can be quite intimidating for the uninitiated!

Once you have your ticket, you get back in your car, drive up to the gate, and give it to the toll-gate operator who then tears off part of it and hands it back to you before opening the gate and letting you pass through. It’s good to hang on to that stub, though, because at any given point down the road, you may be stopped for verification by the police who set up a checkpoint somewhere. If you’re caught without a ticket, you’ll receive a fine of about $4.00 plus the price of a ticket. No, I’m not talking from experience here :) My friend told me.

Toll-gate operators are required to do a 24 shift every three days. And they’re not supposed to sleep during this entire time. Unannounced checks are periodically conducted to make sure this doesn’t happen. Unfortunately, it happened to my friend last month. He was caught sleeping at 2 o’clock in the morning. The penalty? He lost his entire month’s salary! Ouch! That’s a pretty stiff penalty if you ask me, particularly in a country where so many people live virtually from hand to mouth. I suspect he won’t be doing that again for a while! Maybe I should have brought him back a pound of Starbucks bold as a present.

Nice To Be Back!

It was only when we went to use the phone in our house the other day that we realized it wasn’t working. There was a dial tone, but we couldn’t make any calls out, nor receive calls from anyone. Why our line was suspended was a bit of a mystery until we went to pick up our mail at the Centre. There, interspersed with all the other correspondence, were four envelopes from ONATEL, the national telephone company. Each represented an unpaid bill and progressively outlined the consequences of failing to pay, culminating in the warning of impending suspension on November 15. I thought we’d made arrangements to pay those bills during our absence, but there must have been a miscommunication somewhere. So we sent our services agent to pay the bill and arrange to get the line reconnected.

Our cell phones are back up and running after laying relatively dormant for the past three months. A colleague used them occasionally to keep our SIM cards and numbers active. I’ve already started reconnecting with my Burkinabè friends, especially my Kusassi colleagues.

The weather is relatively wonderful here in Ouaga this time of year. Warm days and cool nights. It’s actually enjoyable to drink a coffee on the front veranda in the mornings. The only drawback is the harmattan wind off the Sahara Desert that brings a constant, low-grade sandstorm to Burkina during the months from November – February.

For food and meals, we’ve picked up some basic supplies at the mini-market and hit some of our favourite economy restaurants for supper. We’re not yet ready to face the traffic and hordes of aggressive street vendors in the downtown area where the supermarkets are located. But we need to go there soon. Perhaps we’ll try being Sunday shoppers. Quite by accident earlier this year, we discovered that the supermarkets are open on Sundays, when both traffic and vendors are at their lowest point of the entire week.

I’m still on the lookout for someone I can commission to do a lot of our shopping for us. This is an activity that is often rather time-consuming and stressful for Kathy, but is something a Burkinabè with a moto could do for us quite easily, provided I can find someone both trustworthy and reliable. But in a country whose name means “the land of upright men” (men of integrity), this shouldn’t be much of a problem, right?

Back in Burkina Again

Our bio-clocks are out of whack again. Yesterday, we slept in until noon. Last night, I lay more or less awake until after 3 a.m. And this morning, we’d intended to arrive on our Centre in Ouaga to greet everyone again at coffee break time at 10 o’clock. But we didn’t make it. That five-hour time zone difference between central Canada and Burkina Faso is making itself felt!

Yup, we’re back in Burkina, having arrived on Sunday evening after over three months away. I must say that of all the times we’ve left home in Canada to go overseas, this was probably the hardest. In times past, the rest of our family either accompanied us or we knew we’d see them again in a few months. This time we’re on our own with no fixed idea of when we’ll be home again. In times past, we knew what we were coming back to in Burkina and were excited about it. This time, things will be somewhat in limbo for the next three months until we take up our new responsibilities in March. The past year in Burkina has been the most turbulent and challenging of our lives here, mostly due to internal, organizational politics, and the next three months don’t promise to be any better. We’ll see...

However, even in the short time that we’ve been back, we’ve seen small blessings to be thankful for. All our luggage arrived with us and we were waved through customs without even having to open a suitcase. A good friend and colleague came to pick us up at the airport and bring us to our house. Our neighbour brought us some rice and sauce for supper, as well as some food for the following day. Our house, which is normally full of dust and dirt that has blown in after even a small absence, was still amazingly clean after three months away. Just a thin layer of fine, red, dust that was easily wiped up. No termites had made it into our cupboards, closets, or storage room. The last time we were away for any length of time, they had completely demolished the shelves of one closet and damaged much of the stuff in it, as well as making significant inroads in our storage room shelves.

Well, I am eager to see my friends and co-workers again, so if I want to have any hope of seeing them before siesta today, I’d better get over to the Centre. Bye for now!

A Wonderful Experience

A wonderful thing happened to me a couple of days ago. I broke a tooth. So what’s so wonderful about that, you ask? Okay, I wasn’t happy about the tooth. But I was REALLY happy that it happened while I was still in Canada! Dental services exist in Burkina, but they aren’t nearly as advanced as in North America. Given a choice, I’ll pick an appointment at a dentist’s office in Canada any day.

Things have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, going to the dentist ranked up there with such experiences as getting called into the principal’s office, getting the strap, getting a licking at home, and having a bike accident serious enough to land you in the hospital. Except it was worse because you knew it was coming for days and weeks ahead of time. I couldn’t sleep for days before a dentist appointment! I knew there was a lot of pain coming and I was rarely disappointed. The needles hurt like crazy, the dentist often didn’t wait long enough for the freezing to take effect before starting to drill or pull a tooth, and my entire face was sore for days afterwards from all the stuff and activity that took place in my mouth during an appointment. My dentists were always men and they weren’t particularly sympathetic or gentle in their treatment of me.

This week’s dental experience was totally different. First of all, the dentist was a young Asian lady. I couldn’t have asked for a kinder, sweeter, gentler person! I hardly felt the needles (she thought it would only take one, but ended up giving me two more because my tooth seemed extra sensitive), she waited until things were good and frozen, and she did a great job of the tooth repair. I was really impressed. I tried to give her a smile when she was done, but couldn’t quite do it. With half my face frozen, it was hard to control the muscles on that side.

Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t totally painless. You guessed it... the bill :/

But it was worth every cent! :)

Only A Week Left To Go

We should have given ourselves more time before going back to Burkina. Upon our return from our orientation trip in the States, we crashed. We were exhausted! We’ve slept in nearly every morning, and often grab a nap in the afternoons too. We need to get well rested before we arrive back in Burkina or we’ll end up with malaria there. The anti-malarial medication that we take will protect us, but only if our own body defences are up and running in good form too. If we’re too run down and fatigued, no medication in the world will keep the malaria at bay.

We’re staying in a nice 2-bedroom condo that a friend of our daughter-in-law’s family is letting us use. It’s right in downtown Waterloo, and thus within walking distance of many essential stores and services. There’s a Starbucks for our morning fix if we need it (although we often prepare our own in the condo), a Subway sandwich shop for a quick & tasty bite of lunch, a Shoppers Drug Mart with post office for all our medical, postal, and miscellaneous needs, a public library with free Internet access, and a variety of ethnic restaurants (the Rude Native Bistro, Margarita’s Mexican resto, Ali Baba’s Middle Eastern resto, the Masala East Indian resto, the Viet Sun resto, and more) for when we get tired of home cooking (or are just too tired to cook at home).

The condo building has a pool and a work-out room. I’ve been making an effort to use the work-out room. I must have put on 20 lbs since we came home in mid-August! All those meetings and meals are starting to have their effect. For the first time in my life, I actually have a bit of a spare tire! Yikes! And my pants are getting tight! I can’t afford a new wardrobe, so I’d better put in my time in the gym.

A little more than a week left before we’re back in a plane and there seems to still be so much to do. We’ve got to get new International Driving Permits (which also require some passport-size photos to be taken), get our stuff organized and packed, get a few remaining supplies, visit some family & friends, and more. As much as we’d like to avoid it, our last week prior to departure is always guaranteed to be a zoo. There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to do it. So I’d better get at it. Talk to you later!