It’s 4pm and 28 degrees in our bedroom, where we’
ve just had the air con on for about 1.5 hours. The rest of the house feels like a sauna. In fact, I don’t need to moisturise my skin much here as the humidity is enough. We got up from our siesta about half an hour ago. Jon, who has always been a great napper, loves the daily siesta, and I am slowly taking to it. Not everyone takes a siesta here, and we don’t always, but it is a nice break in the heat of the day, especially if we have risen early to beat the heat.
It's 2 weeks into our stay and we have so much we could write. There have been ups and downs, especially for me. Mostly feelings of acute culture shock because everything is so different here; which is not a bad thing, it’s just that it requires more time to get used to. The heat is really intense, zapping our energy so that a trip to the market to get fruit is about all we can handle for a few hours. Once I realised that everyone sweats a lot here, and thus smells a lot too, I felt more comfortable! The heat is intense, and seems unbearable at times…and then we remember that we have the blessing of fans in the lounge room, air con in the bedroom, and a fridge - and our next door neighbours don’t have any of those. To them, we live in absolute luxury.
Our neighbours have become some of our first
Burkinabe friends. Pictured here is
Raqieta (pronounced ‘
Racketta’), whom I met on my way to the market the other day, as she was sitting outside her house and asked me if I wanted her company. Shopping with a local is much better as she tells me when I’
ve been given an inflated price by the vendors (there’s a ‘white’ price and an ‘African’ price). She’s helped me buy some fabric to take to the tailor to get clothes made. There are tailors (always male as far as we’
ve seen) everywhere in Burkina, perhaps as much as there are
boulangeries/patisseries in Paris.
Raquieta lives with 9 other people including her “uncle” (not her real uncle but somehow in the family) Jean, who is our night guard. All the children who hang around their house (some live there, some across the road) call out ‘
Nasara’ whenever we walk past. This means ‘white thing’ in one of the local dialects.
Burkinabe kids find us hilarious and fascinating, because we have pale skin and straight hair (they often line up to shake our hands). One girl even asked me if my hair was real – women here sometimes wear wigs of straight black hair so she assumed mine must be a wig too!
Last night,
Raqieta was making the African staple food, ‘To’ (pronounced ‘toe’) for her family. They eat this most nights. It’s a dish with corn flour and water that is stirred until it becomes thick like porridge, and is eaten with a sauce that’s similar to our gravy. Sometimes they have pieces of meat in the sauce. I took some photos of
Raqieta preparing the ‘To’, and of her family. They love getting photos, but we ask permission each time in case it offends them. There is a belief among many Burkinabe that when a white person takes a photo, they are going to take it back to their country and use it to make/raise money (so we can't just walk around town taking snaps). See photos of our neighbours and our house here:
So we tried our first real
Burkinabe meal, and it
wasn’t at all bad.
Raquieta brought some ‘To’ over to our place and stayed with us on our porch as we ate it. We got her to try some Vegemite and the verdict was ‘good’ – although Burkinabe are very polite so we don’t know for sure if she really liked it.
The food that we generally eat here is not too different from home in some ways. We just have to be more resourceful and adapt recipes because you can’t buy all the ingredients that you’d get at home.
Because many imported foods like cereal and
yoghurt are so expensive here, we’
ve begun making our own. Jon made a great batch of muesli this week, complete with dried pineapple, banana chips (yum!) and coconut shavings. I’
ve learnt how to make
yoghurt – because it’s so hot here you just leave the mixture to incubate on the kitchen bench for 6 hours then pop it in the fridge!
Unfortunately we don’t think we’ll be able to make our own ice cream. In the shops a regular brand from France costs about $20 a litre.
We get really cheap mangoes, tomatoes and
avocados from the markets – about 30 cents for a mango. The huge one pictured at the top of this post is a 'pineapple mango' – so it tastes like a combination of the two. We also have some mango trees in our front yard.
All salad and unpeeled fruit and veges have to be washed in a bleach solution here, and then rinsed in filtered water (because of all sorts of bacteria). The first time I did this I left the lettuce for too long (over 10
mins) and it tasted terrible! As a result we don’t eat much salad and prefer fruit that we peel first.
There is a meat market just 2
mins from our house. Every morning at about 8-9am meat that has been freshly killed arrives here and the butchers chop it up and sell it throughout the morning (and sometimes into the afternoon). The meat market is a huge shed with glass-less windows and no refrigeration. As such, we’
ve been told to only get meat there early in the morning before the flies get to it. Outside the meat ‘shed’ vultures wait patiently for the butchers to throw the scraps they can’t sell onto the ground. When this happens, 8 or more vultures nose dive from the roof of the house opposite and fight it out for their prize. They really are ugly creatures up close.
We ventured out one night in search of food as we
didn’t have the makings of a meal in our fridge. People operate open-air food stalls where you bring your own bowl and buy rice or
cous cous and some kind of sauce for about $1 all up. We’re not sure what’s in the sauce so haven’t dared to try it yet, but will do so when we can go with a local. They also sell a lot of dried fish from the coastal countries, which we’
ve been told to stay away from. The one time we have had fish here was in a restaurant and it was ‘safe’ – it was a type called ‘
capitaine’ in French (no idea what this is in English).
There is a man here who sells and delivers baked goods to many of the missionaries. We ordered from him this week and were so excited to discover his ‘German hamburgers’. These are white round buns with a filling of savoury mince and cabbage baked into the middle. I think they’re going to be a weekly lunch order for us.
We've been having power cuts most days around lunch time (but before siesta time!) so we keep lots of frozen water bottles in our fridge to keep our food cold. The cuts don't usually last more than 20 minutes, but can go up to 4 hours.
Casualties of the power cuts, to date, include a tub of yoghurt and some cheese.
Cathlin
fresh chill in the air! It was a wonderful feeling, to be cold.
