The Home Improvement Blues II

Oh, no! This would not do at all! I had just walked into our bedroom to take a look at the tile work that had been done on the floor on Saturday. I had suspected at the time that it was a rather rough-and-ready job. What I saw before me now confirmed it. Okay, I realize that I needed to be prepared to lower my standards for home improvement workmanship here. But this was totally unacceptable! I was not prepared to lower my standards completely to the floor! (Pardon the pun :)

Several rows of tiles were longer than others. Some tiles were obviously crooked. And as for being level, a drunken sailor could have done a better job!

I'm not normally a confrontational kind of guy, but I was ready to not let the tile layer set foot in our place again! Fortunately, the landlord arrived first. I showed him the work. I’m not sure he saw anything wrong with it like I did. However, I insisted that it not only looked terrible, but that the raised edges of off-level tiles would result in stubbed toes and torn floorcloths. No, there was no alternative but to tear up the 90 or so tiles that had already been laid and start over. And I wanted my friend John to do it.

John did an estimate on the spot. But when the landlord saw the labour charge, he walked out. This was highly unusual because normally people try to negotiate if they feel a price is too high. It was sometime later that he returned with another tile layer in tow. Ha! Nice try, but forget it! I stuck to my guns: it had to be John. I already knew the quality of his work.

Well, the landlord was only willing to pay a certain amount for the labour. I said, fine, I’d pay the difference. In my opinion, it’s better to cry once to pay to have the job done right than pay less and get a lousy job that will require costly repairs or redoing later on. An hour later, the pickaxes were flying and the lousy tile job was on its way out the door. Tomorrow, they’ll start doing it properly… I hope!

Into the Ouaga Suburbs

The roadway between courtyard walls was becoming narrower and narrower and I was hoping we’d soon arrive at our destination before we ran out of room to maneuver! A few minutes ago, we had entered a residential section towards the eastern outskirts of Ouaga where Harouna, our Muslim night guard lived. It was Sunday afternoon and we were on our way to meet his family, bouncing over a couple of kilometers of potholed road before arriving at this point.

Now when I say “residential section”, you can’t think of a paved street with houses, trees, and lawns like we have in Canada or the USA. This is a section of Ouaga that has not yet been officially subdivided into lots. People have come here, many from their native villages out in the country, and squatted on an empty parcel of land, constructing a small dwelling or two out of mud bricks and building a wall, also of mud bricks, around the buildings and some empty space to provide a place they can call their own, at least for now. This squatter approach has resulted in a virtual rabbit warren of dwellings of varying quality and zigzag dirt roads or paths of varying width. Some are only passable by bicycle or on foot. My fear was of coming to such a point where I could go no further, and couldn’t turn around either!

Finally, we were there. Walking into his courtyard, we stood in the shade of a couple of small mango trees while Harouna hurried to a neighbour to borrow chairs for us to sit on. Glancing around, we took in the small, tin-doored, four-room dwelling for Harouna, his two wives, his six remaining children, and his elderly mother, as well as the blackened semi-outdoor kitchen area, a roofless bathroom/shower area whose mudbrick walls were so eroded that they threatened to fall at the next rain, a small storeroom, and a paddock for a few sheep and chickens.

Soon the chairs arrived and we sat down. Harouna’s oldest wife had gone to the village to see her family, but his other wife and all the children, from the oldest at 15 to the youngest at 2, came up to shake our hands and greet us. His elderly mother was too infirm to come to greet us, but she dragged herself into view through an open doorway and waved her greeting from there. Almost immediately, we were offered some clean-looking water. However, its purity was questionable, especially in this part of town, and could make us very ill. So, as we demonstrated in so many of our presentations back in Canada, we accepted it with thanks but declined to drink any.

With the whole family sitting on small stools in front of us in the middle of their small, dirt-floored courtyard, and Harouna sitting on a 5-gallon plastic container for carrying water, we asked various questions and listened to answers while the children eyed us curiously and giggled, and Harouna’s wife busily continued her work of embroidering a piece of clothing.

Then it was time to go. Harouna had to get ready for his afternoon prayers at the mosque. But before we went, he wanted me to take a picture of the family. His wife quickly changed from her colourful blouse and skirt into a traditional Muslim woman’s black robe and head covering. The children jostled for a good position, with a neighbour child managing to join the group too. There was much laughter as I began taking pictures. I had to take several because someone put a hand in front of their face, closed their eyes, or looked elsewhere at the wrong time. There was even more laughter when I showed everyone the resulting images, especially when I zoomed in on each of the children’s faces in turn. Most had probably never seen a picture of themselves before! I’ll have to get copies printed to give to them.

As we headed back to our own world of more organized suburbia with cement-walled houses, steel doors, glass windows, gas stoves, electric refrigerators, running water, and air-conditioning, I couldn't help but marvel at the contrast! But that's the way it is here in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

The Home Improvement Blues

We’re still in the throes of home improvements in our little house in Ouaga. Things never turn out to be as simple as they seem at first glance. For instance, I went to replace the rusted-out screens on the screen windows and discovered that in fact I needed to replace the entire frames because the wood had rotted so badly over the passing years that in many places there was no longer any place solid enough to which to staple the screening!

In our bedroom, the cement coating on the floor was buckling, cracking, and flaking off in various places. After having the room painted, we decided to have the floor redone too. All we intended was another simple coating of cement, but our landlord happened by at about that time. An older Muslim man, he strode about the room in his long robe, looking at the holes in the floor, and said the he preferred to put tiles on the floor rather than just redoing it in cement. This may be his way of justifying a rent increase next year, but he’s the owner and paying for it, so who were we to say no?

This morning, the workmen arrived, two young men with pickaxes to chip away the remainder of the existing cement coating. The room is about 10’ x 10’ and this took all morning. After sweeping up all the chips, shoveling them into a pail, and throwing them out into holes in the road in front of our place, it was siesta time.

A few hours later, they came back with a couple of bags of cement. Earlier in the day, young men with donkey carts had brought a couple of loads of sand. Using this, they mixed up a batch of cement right there on the rough bedroom floor. Next, they began spreading a thin coat of cement on the floor, leveling it roughly with a small trowel and a 3-foot piece of 2”x 2” wood. After sprinkling on a few handfuls of Portland cement followed by water, they started placing the 12-inch square tiles on the floor. The piece of leveling wood was then used to make sure the tiles were roughly level. More Portland cement was then sprinkled into the cracks between the tiles, followed by water and wiped with a wet sponge. This all seems a little rough-and-ready to me, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all turns out…

In the meantime, we’ve rented an air-conditioned guestroom on the SIL Centre. For $20/night, it’s worth every penny!

The Cell Phone Blues

It’s incredible. The night we can’t sleep in our air-conditioned bedroom would turn out to be the hottest night of the year! Or at least the hottest since our arrival here two weeks ago! The first coat of oil paint went on the bedroom walls earlier yesterday, and as a result, the place absolutely reeked of paint thinner. So we spent the night on foam mattresses on the living room floor, under a ceiling fan that worked hard at trying to keep us from overheating so that at least we could get a few hours of sleep before morning. In 30 degree Celsius heat, that wasn’t easy!

Today, we went to get Kathy’s cellphone hooked up. To save the cost of having to buy two new phones here, we brought two unlocked cellphones from a former Rogers contract with us from Canada.

Burkina has a wonderful cellphone system: no contracts! This means no monthly payments and no getting locked into a 2 or 3-year jail term like we do in Canada, with hefty penalty fees for breaking the contract. Everything is pay as you go, probably a smart move in a country where most people already live on credit and cell companies will have a hard time collecting on bills anyway. So everybody has to pay up front. And recharge cards are available everywhere. Young men are selling them on virtually every street corner! At any intersection, I can simply roll down my window and buy a top-up card. How convenient is that, eh?

Competition is fierce. Four different cell companies are vying for business and offering sign-up deals right, left, and center. Consequently, many people here have two SIM cards, switching them as needed.

I got my phone going last week already, buying a SIM card from a street vendor and loading on some money for calls. However, when I went down to Zabré last week, something bizarre happened: I couldn’t get any reception there even though I was close to a cellphone tower that belonged to the company I was with. In fact, I couldn’t get any reception anywhere outside of Ouaga. We tried all the way home again, and it wasn’t until we’d entered the city limits that my phone began to show reception bars.

Today, once we put a new SIM card in Kathy’s phone, it too showed signs of limited reception. The cellphone company agent admitted this was indeed bizarre and recommended we take our phones to a cellphone repair company to see what they could do. That’s where we got the bad news: our Canadian phones work on a frequency that is somewhat different from the one they use here. Consequently, our receptivity will vary even in Ouaga, and will be non-existent outside the city. So much for our bright idea!

Well, live and learn, eh? I guess that next week, we’ll have to buy at least one local cellphone so that I can keep in touch with Kathy when I go down to the Kusassi region.

It's Been One of Those Days...

The meeting with the ANTBA Director went well. We gave him a rundown of what we and the Kusassi had done so far, and he told us how ANTBA intended to approach things from this point on, which was basically the same approach they’ve used in a number of other projects. However, it does not take the Kusassi Association into account, probably because the association is not yet a reality to be dealt with. It’ll be interesting to see how determined the Kusassi are about this. I hope they persevere! Their involvement will do much to extend the impact, scope, and duration of both ANTBA’s efforts and ours. If an organized and interested local group does not feel a sense of ownership of the work and is not involved in the decision-making of what is done and how, much of what we and ANTBA set in motion over the next years may slowly grind to a halt soon after both of us are gone. Now that would be a real tragedy!

We’ll keep you posted on what happens next :)

This morning, John the painter arrived at our door. This is a young man that I taught to paint over 10 years ago when we first arrived in Burkina (I hadn’t set out to do that, but I needed someone to help me with painting the place we were living in. He picked up the necessary skills and afterwards started his own business!) We had asked him to come by to do some repainting in our Ouaga house. Many houses in Burkina, if they’re painted inside at all, are painted with whitewash (called “foam paint” here). It’s cheap, but gets dirty really quickly. We’re getting it changed to oil paint. Easy to clean and durable. But first, you have to scrape all the old whitewash off or the new oil paint won’t stick properly. If that sounds like a real mess to you, you’re right. It is.

The first thing John and I had to do was go and buy supplies for the job. Before we could do that, however, I had to stop by the SIL Centre to get some money from our account to pay for the supplies. While I was there, I ran into one of the Centre’s Burkinabè employees that had fallen ill the day before. He’d gone to a clinic, where they asked him to get an ECG and an echocardiogram. So he’d come to the Centre again to find out where to go and if someone could take him. No one was available until tomorrow. But he looked so ill that I offered to take him. That took the rest of the morning because we had to go to two different places in widely separate parts of the city and wait in lines too. It was after lunch time before John and I got back home with the necessary materials.

That’s just the way things go here sometimes (and in Canada too :) You go to do one job, but it turns out that you have to do several other things first. And sometimes, your day just doesn’t go the way you planned at all.

We’re sleeping on foam mattresses on the floor tonight. Our crate with our new “mattress-in-a-box” finally arrived, but we’re waiting until the bedroom is painted before we set it up. In the meantime, our waterbed has sprung a leak. Rather than wake up in a swimming pool one morning, we decided to empty it and use foam mattresses for a few days. This turned out to be a good decision in more ways than one because when we took the bed frame apart, we discovered the termites had been hard at work on the underside! Such is life in Burkina!

Televised Chicken

We had a rather quiet weekend, except for the rooster crowing in our courtyard every morning, a gift from Pastor Emmanuel. We took to calling him “Stew” :) We finally ended up giving him to one of our guards as a gift, something they appreciate since meat in their diet is a rare occasion.

For supper on Saturday night, we decided to get some “poulet télévisé”, which translates literally as “televised chicken”! Haha, that’s not exactly what it is, but it’s close :) It’s roast chickens, up to 6-7 on a large skewer (yeah, they’re small chickens!), slowly turning in a large upright oven with a light in the back and glass doors on the front. That’s kind of a television, isn’t it? This makes them easily visible from the roadside at suppertime when it’s already dark outside.

The trick is looking for them while driving on a road that is full of other traffic. You need eyes all around your head to watch out not only for things going in the same direction that you are, but also going the wrong way or crossing blindly in front of you. In addition, many of these things, like motos, bicycles, pedestrians, donkey carts, and even some cars and trucks, have absolutely no lights on them at all! I told Kathy that from now on, she needs to come with me so that I can concentrate on watching the road. As it was, I nearly mowed down two cyclists, one traveling the wrong way and another cutting unexpectedly in front of me!

Late this past Friday afternoon, we had our scheduled meeting with our Director. Kathy & I weren’t the only ones there, at least for the first half hour. Hamadou had asked if he could come to the meeting to explain things from the Kusassi point of view. So the first half hour was spent with him and the Director discussing the Kusassi’s desire for the Scriptures and language development, their involvement so far, and the nature and purpose of the Kusassi association that is in the process of being formed.

Following this, the Director and Kathy & I discussed the planned involvement of the national Bible translation organization (ANTBA) in the work, and what impact the Kusassi association would have on that. While the potential for collaborative achievement is great, concerns were raised about some fundamental differences in approach between the two organizations. We’re not aware of any other case in Burkina Faso where a language community like the Kusassi are willing and determined to take charge of their own language development and Bible translation, and are organizing an association for the purpose of doing so. This doesn’t mean that they won’t be inviting organizations like SIL and ANTBA to help them where they need help, but they’d like to be the ones sitting in the driver’s seat. It is, after all, their language.

A cause for concern lies in the fact that the national Bible translation organization is not really accustomed to working with such a group in this way. We’re praying that they will see this as a great opportunity to help equip and empower a local language community to carry our their own language development and translation work. That’s the approach Kathy & I have been taking so far, an approach that is both taught and encouraged by our organization worldwide for reasons of dignity, ownership, and sustainability. However, not all organizations involved in language development and Bible translation practice this approach yet.

We have a meeting with ANTBA late on Tuesday afternoon (tomorrow) to begin discussions on the future of the Kusaal Project and our role in it. Please pray with us!

First Trip Back to Zabré

I really hate getting up while it’s still dark outside. I’m a night owl, so I don’t mind staying up till all hours, but I really hate getting up so early in the morning. However, that’s what I had to do yesterday in order to get down to Zabré, visit with Pastor Emmanuel and family, do what we had to do there, and then get home again before midnight.

After a quick coffee to get us going upon getting up so early, we headed to the outskirts of Ouaga and picked up Hamadou, who was waiting for us at the beginning of the road to Pô. Right before the tollgate a few kilometers further on, we stopped to buy some bread (baguettes) from roadside vendors in order to give to Pastor Emmanuel and family. City-made bread is a real treat for those living in small towns, villages, and the countryside.

The 100 km after the tollgate was covered in just over an hour. The Pô road is a good paved road, as is the turnoff to Manga… at least until you get to Manga. Then it turns into a gravel road that is absolutely pitted with potholes due to the heavy rains this year. The 75 kms from Manga to Zabré took us 3 hours to traverse, much of the time in first and second gears. It was awful!

But the reunion with Pastor Emmanuel and his family after 3 years of absence was worth it! How good it was to see these folks again! And how the children had grown! Wow!

After our joyous reunion, we were led into his humble abode for a cup of Nescafé and to catch up on all the latest news and developments. When we moved out under the tree later on, Pastor Emmanuel showed us the well and latrine we had given him funds to build during our absence.

And then it was down to business. With Hamadou reading everything out loud, we discussed the draft papers he and Pastor Emmanuel had prepared for the founding of the Association for the Development of the Kusassi People. Kathy & I were very impressed by what they had written. They had truly grasped the idea of having the Kusassi people in charge of their own language development and translation work.

After much discussion and a few revisions (and lunch), we all prayed together and hastened to be on our way again. Night would fall soon (at 6 p.m.) and we had planned to be on the road several hours already. Another fatiguing 3-hour trip over Pothole Road found us back in Manga, where we dropped off Hamadou for the time being. Kathy & I continued on to Ouaga in pitch dark. Night driving in Burkina is very stressful and fatiguing due to the fact that at any time you can come across animals, pedestrians, bicycles, motos, and donkey carts on the road. Sometimes the cars and trucks don’t even have taillights or running lights, so the chances of an accident go way up. Thank God we got home safely, although it was nearly 10 p.m. at this point. By then, we were really ready to hit the hay.

All in all, it was a great day.