Ouagadougou

We have been in Ouagadougou for a week with James, on the way to Togo where we shall spend a few months, Ouaga (as the cool kids – Jo - call it) for those of you who do not know, is the capital of Burkina Faso (Burkina), lying 300m above sea level, N12o, W001o (so yes, English time). Burkina Faso, according to our guide book, is the third poorest country in the world; although the internet disputes this. In any case, its list of assets (ignoring the population) is as follows:

Sand

Burkina is very hot, even though it is winter here and the locals complain that it is cold, reaching a meagre 35o during the day when they have to have siestas because it is too hot, wimps. Fortunately it is a dry heat. James was a missionary here for a few years, and so knows his way around. He eventually got fired for (the horror) planting a church.

The Burkinabe (as the people are known) are a very welcoming and friendly bunch. Their most obvious feature being tribal facial scars (so you can identify if any of your tribes children have been captured for slaves). Their ex-president, Tomas Ombati was described as the Che Guevara of Africa. As far as I can tell, apart from being a socialist he was not that similar. But anyway, he appears (unusually for Africa) to not have stolen everything that he could and to actually have done quite a lot of good for his people, probably why he was assassinated. One of his projects was to build a big market place (resembling a giant concrete Souk) to get the traders off the streets. This we visited on Friday, where James told the locals that Edd liked a particularly fetching and garish pair of trousers resulting in Edd being tailed by a mob of trouser waving locals. Needless to say we did not buy anything.

We also went around to a friend of James, Sam, who is a tailor. He is making Edd a shirt and Jo a dress, results still to be established but eagerly anticipated. Sam and his wife live in a small house in Ouaga and are dreadfully poor. We gave them wine and beer and boozed the night away. We also had our first taste of Pat, which is like Ugali in the fact that it made out of maize but is a little bit more jelly like. We must confess that neither of us are particularly keen on it but it is preferred to Ugali.

The next day we went to the church, to be met by the congregation, who were annoyed that we had not told them when we were arriving – they wanted to meet us at the airport. We then visitied two villages, located down small paths (which we travelled in our BMW 3 series taxi, squeezing 4 grown men across the back seat). In the villages James gave small talks to the crowds that gathered (a recurring question is ‘is it true that Christians are not allowed to drink alcohol – answer no, to much relief) and in one village we met the chief! We also started to find out that Berkinabe culture is much, much more complicated than European culture. For example, one is not allowed to sit on the giant pestle and mortars dotted around the place, or ‘don’t stand there, it is forbidden, it is a grave’. Again, the people were excited to see us, but it was hard to see so many children suffering from malnutrition, mainly protein deficiencies as they are too poor to eat meat often. A visit to the Carnivore would go a long way…

On Sunday we had a feast after church consisting of delicious chicken soup, along with rice, pima and rohm. Pima is an incredibly spicy pickle, which made my eyes water and earned Edd the epithet ‘Frenchie’ due to his extreme wimpyness, whilst rohm is the local beer, made of the corn husks and much stronger than it looked. James, Jo and I shared a cup, and my stomach was pleasantly warm for hours. The children dived on our chicken bones when we left. We are incredibly lucky in the West (a weird phrase seeing as you are mostly east of us!).

We were also invited to a group of women and children in the afternoon. They wanted a church to be built, but they also had many other requests (as white people are so rich). There were many tales of woe, most of the children were orphans and the women have been displaced (due to flooding) and some were visibly extremely sick. James declined to tell us all that had occurred and was visibly subdued afterwards. One could become a full time, fully funded social worker and not even scratch the surface here.

Monday morning dawned with James, bent double poking his head from his bedroom, and croaking ‘need help, get coke’. Which Edd thought was hilarious 7.00 am conversation, until he said he had spent the night being sick. One does have to enjoy the fact that Edd gets the wimpy ‘Frenchie’ nickname, but Butch there is the one who is ill. This meant that we accompanied Pascal, the eight language speaking teacher who translates books for fun to try to buy a computer so that he can type up his work (there are notebooks full of his work), whilst James slept. We failed in our task. Due to high import taxes the cheapest laptop was above $1,000, which Edd is far too stingy to pay.

One of the things about Africans is that they can be more innocent than us tourists. We got slightly stung by what can only be described as a cartel of shop owners, and whilst Jo and Edd were irritated (but not surprised), Pascal was shocked that people should be dishonest.

Anyway we have had a very good time in Ouaga, especially visiting all the restaurants. It turns out that being a French colony has its advantages as the food is fantastic! Pastries every morning and a good selection of European food for the evening. We have even tasted frogs legs which are great in garlic and butter.

We are off to Dapong in Togo tomorrow, so we shall see what the future holds then. Adieu for now.