Strive for Five

Some pictures from another market we visited the other day. I really like seeing all the different produce, it’s really impressive. It’s also fun, because my friend Laurent wrote his thesis in geography on market patterns in Burkina and Ghana, so now I get to see things in real life.

So many mangoes!

Now that I’ve seen these avocados, I feel like I’ve been lied to my whole life. This picture doesn’t even really do their size justice. I don’t know if I can look at our dinky variant the same way anymore.

 

Even apples, pears, and bananas!

Toubabou!

I’ve begun to adjust to having kids stare at me. One of the first Dioula words I learned was “toubabou,” which means “white.” It sounds almost singsong the way a lot of the kids yell it as I go by. Other times they call me “la blanche,” or proudly say “bonjour!” which I think must be because they’re learning French at school. It’s pretty cute, even though it’s totally weird to have people know you only as “white girl.” [Sidebar: All of my spellings of Dioula are going to be phonetic, since I’m hearing it without seeing it.]

The one thing that I still find hard to get used to is the way that everyone multitasks. For example, we’ll be sitting in a bar to conduct interviews, or just chatting, and people will walk through selling goods that they’re carrying. People at the table will stop and examine things (like clothing, or shoes), take phone calls (people really love talking on the phone), and carry on the conversation. It’s pretty impressive. I guess the way we spend all our time on the phone playing on the internet, they spend it on phone calls instead. 

It’s funny how quickly everyday sounds become background noises we hardly notice – at Penn State, it’s the [constant] chiming of the bell tower, and in Bobo it’s the Mosque’s calls to prayer. Amadou told me that about 75% off Bobo is muslim, although given the prevalence of beer and the fact that most women don’t wear any sort of veils, it doesn’t seem to be the hardcore variant.

  

I also learned that in Burkina, weddings are on Thursdays and Saturdays. Amadou said that often the official ceremony at the Mosque is Thursday, and the real party is Saturday (or it will be one after another on Thursday). Weddings are also typically in December/January and June. People will drive around the city honking their scooters (mobylettes), and the parties we drove past were big and filled with music and dancing. It looks like a lot of fun.

Brakina

… Is a Burkinabé beer produced near Bobo. The same company produces the local bottled water, Lafi. Lafi is pretty much my best friend, since apparently drinking the tap water would almost certainly make me sick. The main bummer with that is the fact that I can’t eat any raw fruits and vegetables if I don’t wash them myself … Which pretty much means that salads and raw veggies are off limits (given that I’m eating in restaurants, see previous pictures of the villa kitchen). 

Also, speaking of beer, I found this on my front “lawn”: 

It’s also funny, because beer and soda (Coke, Fanta) are kind of the social drinks here. Since I don’t like beer,  that leaves soda. So while living in France kicked my soda habit, living in Burkina is probably going to bring it back. Who’d have thought.

Last night I went to my first maquis, which is a bar/restaurant/dancing-on-the-weekend place. I had my first grilled chicken (with some sort of sauce that was delicious). It was really, really good. They also played lots of music that kind of sounded like French bachata, which I was then told is music from the Antilles (so I guess I wasn’t too far off). Some of the music is also a style known as “zouk” and there was also music from Mali.

To market, to market

On Tuesday we went to visit the marché des fruits et légumes (fruit and vegetable market) and the grande marché du centre (the main central market). As most of you know, I love markets. Especially the marchés aux puces around Paris. But this was a lot. Also, being white, the odds are good I'm a tourist. Everyone wanted to show me their carved masks and jewelry, which must be the big tourist market. I passed, because none of that is really my thing. It was pretty cool to see how huge the market was though, especially the parts where they sew clothes. There were bolts of cloth and pagnes everywhere, and tons of men working furiously at sewing machines. It was impressive.

I only took a few pictures at the fruit and vegetable market, since it was less crowded (plus, in my experience, people often get all up in your business when you take pictures in a market).