Chicken Sh*t

The title of this post, as you will discover, had both a literal and figurative role in my day yesterday.

But I'll come back to that.

First, Amadou took me out to visit his boss' farm, and we were given the tour. To get there, we followed a rough trail/road into [what felt like] the middle of nowhere.

Drove through some cattle, too ...

At first, I couldn't figure out why it looked so different. A cornfield, after all, is a cornfield. But then I realized that in most US cornfields, the mechanization of farming means trees are a nuisance. Here, they leave the trees in the middle of fields, because most of the work is done by hand anyway. [Disclaimer: I have constructed this logic based on the trees/no trees observation. I don't know anything about farming, so this could be all wrong.]

The farm was up kind of high -- here's looking out over some of the fields towards the hills in the distance.

They are growing lots of corn, some eggplants, tomatoes, lettuce, and piments (some kind of hot pepper, the dictionary says a chili). Here's a tiny chili plant:

Amadou even posed for a picture! The fabric he's wearing is called Basin, and it's very  fashionable and expensive. Designs are woven into it, and then it is dyed in all sorts of neat ways. It's also shiny, which is probably part of what makes it so expensive. I think it feels super uncomfortable, but Amadou assures me it isn't. (It's almost like that plastic-y paper that you sometimes see on labels and stuff -- I tried to tear a scrap to see if that's what it is. It isn't.)

Discovered this is the work of termites. I'm simultaneously impressed and horrified. Kind of looks like a sand castle? In a sense, it actually is.

The farm also has chickens. Lots of chickens. The chickens to eat were all white and in a separate pen (he said there were hardly any because most had been taken to market, but there were still a lot). These are the egg-laying chickens. SO MANY.

Here are a bunch of the eggs, to be taken off and sold:

This is where the post title comes in. The boss wanted to give me a gift : either a chicken, or eggs. My shock made me pause, while I considered my options ... I leave in two days and don't cook, but do I really want to have to carry back a dead chicken?

My hesitation was my downfall, because this was decided for me. Chicken it is. So the son went off to pick it out, and brought it back ... Feet tied, and STILL ALIVE. I don't know how well I covered up my mini-freak out (I'm no bleeding heart for animals, truth be told, but this is one step too close to the farm-to-table trend for me). So because I was too chicken shit to hold it (I mean, I held it for like 5 seconds while Amadou did something), Amadou had it like this while he drove.

The literal part of the chicken shit comes on our drive home. Because, you know, farms don't tend to be in the center of a city, we had a ways to go to get back into the usual part of Bobo. On the way, the chicken did its business ... Onto Amadou's hand. He seemed pretty unfazed and just moved the chicken out over the road as fast as he could and laughed. We were heading to a maquis for a "matinée dansante" (more in a second), and when we handed the moto over to be parked, he handed them the chicken. I thought this was because they were going to prepare it, but when we came out to leave several hours later, they handed it back to us. I guess they don't prepare chickens at this place. Amadou took it home with him, but he said today we'd give it to a restaurant to be prepared.

Anyway, on to the matinée dansante. It's basically a dance party in the bar that starts at like 4pm on Sunday, instead of late at night on Friday or Saturday. They played music from all over -- Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Sénégal, Congo, Burkina ... It was pretty fun. Everybody danced (including me, because why not).

Today is pretty much my last real day -- tomorrow I take an early bus to Ouaga, and then wait around several hours for my late night plane. I'll be back in Paris early Wednesday morning. I can hardly believe it has been a whole month!

American Cola

All the knock off sodas come from Mali. 

... But they're bottled under the authority of the Monarch Beverage Company (based in Atlanta, also tied to Coca Cola), so really I think it's more that we both produce the real brands, and the knock off version of the real brands. 

Caterpillars (and stuff)

Last night Amadou brought over the prepared caterpillars. You sauté them in oil, with onions (and I think he said tomatoes too). To be honest, they aren't half bad. The hardest part is the psychological struggle of knowing you're eating caterpillars.

On a more typical note, I discovered Youki (which is the Brakina beverage company's soda brand; the WPop of Burkina). America, we need to have a talk. Burkina has "Moka Café" flavored soda. WHY DON'T WE HAVE COFFEE FLAVORED SODA?! It's awesome. We should get on that.

Amadou also brought over some of the baobob powder that is used to make the jus de pain de singe. It's seriously just a yellowish powder. I tried to dump it in water and make my own, which turns out to be not how that works. Amadou just laughed at me.

En grève

Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The is the workers' union headquarters for the Hauts-Bassins region.

Surprise! Other money?

It took until my last week here for me to discover that there were other coins I had never seen --

25 FCFA and 10 FCFA. I asked Amadou how I had managed to get so far and not know this: he said these were introduced sometime around the 1994 devaluation, because things got so expensive that they needed a few smaller denomination coins (for example, a box of matches is 25 FCFA). There must not be that many in circulation though, because they don't seem particularly common either.

It's a bit hard to tell here, but they're allover gold (kind of looks fake).

While I'm back on the topic of money, here are the 100 and 500 FCFA pieces I didn't have around to post last time.

Monkey Bread Juice

Around when Ramadan started (Karem, here), Amadou asked me if I knew what galettes were. I have slowly learned that just because I know what something is in French in France, that doesn't mean I know what it is in Francophone Africa. So I hesitated, before saying that I knew what French galettes are..

It turns out in Burkina, galettes are these little fried cakes. You see tons of women making and selling them all along the roads -- apparently they're a Karem specialty, for breaking the fast at night. They are either rice-based or millet-based, and they're sweet, but not THAT sweet. And they're delicious.

Along with galettes, I also tried haricots nébié, which is some sort of beige bean. They were cooked in oil I think -- they were pretty good too.

The juices are the best though. I branched out with two new types recently: Bissap, and Pain de Singe. Bissap is actually hibiscus, which I've only ever ecountered in the form of perfumed shampoos (Meg and Gennie, remember that?). It turns into a dark red juice that is super sweet and delicious. I see huge piles of the dried leaves along the side of the big fruit and vegetable market, so at least now I know what it is. Pain de singe, after much googling, turns out to be the fruit of the Baobob. If you look up pictures, you'll see that inside the brown shell things, there is white powder (I guess the seeds are dried out? It's hard to explain). The white powder is then used to make a sweet juice. Honestly, it's another thing I would have sworn was dairy-based. It's thick and white, and has a slightly grainy taste -- almost like a pear. It tastes somewhere between an orange and a peach. It's really, really good.

I also caved and got a salad at one of my favorite restaurants here, Les 3 Karités. I had been super cautious, since everyone warned me about eating raw fruits and vegetables that might have been washed in local water. Amadou assured me that this place uses stuff to kill bacteria, so I figured I'd give it a shot. So far, so good, which is awesome because I am seriously missing salad at this point.

Triumph!

Be it known that today, July 16th, I officially triumphed over the neighborhood children's doubts -- 

we're officially buddies now. 

It began when Amadou came to get me, and I walked out to little voices yelling "Mooolly." Amadou couldn't stop laughing. I was proud of myself; I'm finally moving past toubabou.

Then a tiny girl (maybe two at the most) ran up to the motorcycle when Amadou was dropping me off after lunch and basically tried to climb on. So Amadou stopped and she grabbed my hand and clearly wanted me to pick her up. Obviously, I can't do that, so I went home. But then I came back to visit the kids. So it all started with me helping some of them to cook (cut up leaves and egg shells and sand and water, duh). There were races (and thank you very much, I can still run faster than almost all of the kids). There was a lot of tickling on all sides (these guys realized right away that they could tickle me back though, so props to them).

Then I got my camera so we could all take pictures ...

 

It was extra fun because the teenagers clearly wanted to talk to me too, but were too shy at first. Once I was out playing with the younger kids, it gave them a chance too. They wanted to speak English with me, so we did that a bit. Everyone is always curious about my hair (and I don't care), so I let them touch it. I told them that their hair is fun because they can do neat braids and stuff, and my hair won't do that.  Then two of them even braided my hair (I need to up my skills), but it still doesn't look as cool as everything people can do with their hair here. I think the braids and designs are so much prettier than the weaves people like to wear, but Amadou says that women love to copy women in Mali and Senegal, and "les meches" have always been a big thing. Hair is a big deal here, but the story of Africans and hair culture is a long one (as my friend Beatrice and her sister once spent a night explaining to me ...).

Papi was not amused.

This is one of my best buddies. I let her play with the camera, which is how we have all of these pictures of me looking like a sweaty hot mess (did I mention it's really hot in Africa?).

The little girl in the front on the left is Grace, my little buddy with the attitude. You should be able to tell who it is, since she's giving her best death stare to the camera-woman. The little girl I'm holding is the one who tried to climb onto the motorcycle with me.

I can't even tell you how happy it made me that they aren't afraid of me anymore. 

Seriously, best. day. EVER.