I am always secretly happy to meet dirty carls, because they're so...  I've run into a few in Africa; the latest is a newbie here in Burkina.  I have to admit her Jula's frighteningly good for someone who just started off in village. 

Carletonmuso!  I ka kene wa? (Carleton woman, have you health?)
-I'm fine.  What's up?
-How are the people of your village?
-Fine.  And your family?
-Fine.  You find that your village is sweet?
-It's very sweet to me.  And how is your work?
-No problems.  
-St. Olaf is bad!
-Ah, why do you wish to spoil my heart?  
-What did you say?
-Why... do you wish to... my heart...  spoil...?
-Oh- Why do I wish to spoil your very own heart?  Our ideas are very sweet and fine; St. Olaf ideas are bad.  
-It's not true!
-It is true, man!  

The best part of the Peace Corps thing is local language.  In a Tolm Wolfe book I read, the mayor of Atlanta says that it's not the money, the power, the attention that he enjoys about politics, it's seein' em jump when he walks into a room.  And I like seein em jump when I start talking decent Jula.  This is especially fun when I'm out of my own village and people don't know me.  

A recent trip between my site and Bobo, a nice 70k ride on a narrow bush trail, summed up the different versions of life that exist in this country.  Out in the bush, an old man in a dirty robe greeted me and asked where I was going.  He sighed on hearing Bobo, as if disappointed by my predictable answer.  Ala k'i nyuman don, he said, may God sweeten your arrival.  That's a poetic thing to say to a stranger, isn't it?  Much later as I entered Bobo and saw the crowds, dressed in filthy rags for work or stylin for hanging out and talking on cell phones, the thick fog of exhaust and noise, begging children and indifferent women driving motos, imported goods of all description for sale, good and bad food, everyone in a hurry, I was overwhelmed by the difference that exists between the life of that old man not so far away and the urban experience that his grandchildren are probably living.  There was a transition zone, where instead of millet plantations I rolled through wastes covered in blowing plastic bags, then the dusty slums on the edge of town, women balancing loads of illegal firewood that they must have walked a great distance to find.  I wonder how many generations have to live in the transition before they get The Burkinabe Dream- A moto and a cellphone for every man, gas and running water for every woman.  

As for me, things are good.  Later...

Hey Everyone,

Greetings again.  It's fun to realize that it's February, that I have only a few months left, and that I'll soon be heading back to the U.S.A.  Older, and not any wiser, but a master of many useless skills: carrying water bidons on a bike, scaring small children, eating any manner of foods (hot peppers, chicken livers, fish skins, caterpillars [well, only two], leaves, millet beer, the infamous Pomme d'Acajou, and the great staple tô), junior high math, bucket "showers," and showing up late to everything.  

I saw someone's Far Side calendar the other day, and noticed something I'd never seen before.  It's the one where the wolves are chasing the kid around a kitchen table and the floor has just been waxed, do you know the one?  At an earlier point of my service, back when I was puffed up with Peace Corps pride, I would have singled out the "newly waxed floor" for a profound and righteous commentary on something.  Now I just noticed that there's a jar with the fine print cookies sitting on the counter.  

School is going well.  I am getting to be competent enough at teaching that I am no longer the main roadblock to my students' education.  The huge classes, the lack of materials and equipment and staff, and the overly theoretical curriculum are now bigger barriers than my still-apparently-hilarious mistakes in French.  I have become more confident and friendly and learned my students' names, which minimizes discipline problems.  The school built a blackboard on the outside of my house so I can deal with the crowds of students who come to ask me questions, which is rewarding.  One student, a Coulibaly, actually laughed in delight when the points I had him calculate from a linear eq ended up in a straight line on a graph.  Why does that happen, Monsieur?  I am becoming impatient with the whole thing, though, and I think the junior high level is not for me if I continue teaching in the future.  

The other math teacher at my school, who at the start of the year accused me of incompetence and tried to have me teach just one class so that he could get the others and, coincidentally, the overtime pay, has now asked me to take over his tenth graders for a few weeks because he is "tired."   That's a small victory, not that I'm given to gloating, and it's fun to try the more advanced level with 96 students.  That is a hot room in the afternoons!

Village life is dusty but otherwise all right.  I am tired and lonely more often than I would like, but I still think my work is useful and that keeps me going.  Occasional gatherings of voluteers help too.  I met some cool Japanese in Banfora too, and they fed me pancakes with cabbage.  Hey, it was better than fried caterpillars.  I'm looking forward to the visit of some fellow Guinea exiles in March, to our last reunion and gathering in April, then to freedom in June.  

Travelling around the world doesn't really appeal to me now- maybe a few days in Ghana or Morocco, then a trip home to the ancestral cookie jar and the world of fluent English speakers and canoeing.

So have fun out there and keep me up to speed on all the cool and useful and exciting things you're living.  It's been great to get some emails recently.  

Later,
Will

I had visitors one day, and to my chagrin the neighbors killed a chicken for us.  They don't eat much meat, so I was very embarassed to consume one of their precious fowls.  Can't do anything but say thanks.  Tasty! 

A lake.


Aziz and his brother


Leaf sauce anyone?


Nere tree in summer (compare to the picture I took six months ago)


Omar, Fatim, and the tree of paradise


Map of Africa


My neighbor and his new wife at their wedding


Morning coffee

      We made the trip from Bobo to Conakry in less than two days.  The Kankan-Conakry leg took only 12 hours, better than I'd remembered, and I found myself wondering if some of those potholes hadn't been newly patched.  Less than two days later I'd had enough of pizza and airconditioning and decided to head back to my old site alone.  
     24 hours later I unfolded myself from the taxi in Kankan and tried to decide into which part of that great and dusty city I had been spewed forth.  All my clothes were red and brown with dust, I smelled of gasoline, my neck was skeptical about being straightened after switching between cramped positions for so long, I'd hardly slept, and my hat was gone.  I was still angry with the Syndicat boss in Conakry who'd sold me a ticket for a Kankan car and let me wait all afternoon for it to fill up before telling me it was only going two-thirds of the way, to Dabola, at which point "the driver will find another taxi and pay your way to Kankan."  The trip to Dabola went without incident, except that when we stopped to break the Ramadan fast I spilled my malaria pills (Doxycycline) all over the road.  I picked out all of the pills that missed the dog vomit and wondered if their antibiotic virtues were up to the little bugs of Mamou Roadside Grit.  We arrived in Dabola at 2AM to find an unsurprising lack of options for further transport.  There were only four passengers out of six for one taxi.  They argued for an hour until I got frustrated and gave up and crawled into the backseat to ignore mosquitoes and sleep.  Two minutes later they agreed on the price and the driver took our money.  He bought a few glass bottles of gasoline and poured them into the tank, the “tank” in this car being a plastic bidon in the trunk.  A flimsy iron tube passed through a hole in the cap and descended through a rusted-out patch in the floor.  The bit of plastic they lashed around the hole in the cap did not look sufficient to keep the gas inside, but was too tired to be impressed.  We eventually struggled into Kankan, but not before being passed by four other, cleaner, faster taxis.  

     I am sorry to say that all of this made me grumpy.  But later that afternoon I was headed to Tokounou on a bright yellow school bus from Michigan. To my new Burkinabé eyes, everything looked greener, wetter, brighter, and more primitive than I’d remembered.  The road was worse, either because I’m used to decent roads in Burkina or because it actually decayed since last year.  I didn’t know those school busses were capable of the clever maneuvering our driver pulled off to slide around and through all the potholes, pits of mud, and cows.  Sometimes everyone broke into applause.  I felt like walking the last bit so I descended at Nialenko and shouldered my pack. 

     I remembered all bends in the road.  I remembered a rocky point to the left covered in streams of guano.  I remembered the pitted section that the old man wanted America to fix.  I remembered the silence and the way it was broken by the hackings of vultures.  I wondered if I would climb the last hill and see a stream of white birds filling the valley in front of Tokounou. 

     A camion passed me and stopped and the men in back waved to me to climb up.  I waved them on and two minutes later it started to rain.  Soon it was a vrai Guinean rainstorm.  I stopped smelling like gasoline.  I didn’t see any huts in the field so I ran, awkwardly in my bulky pack and long pants, the last few k into town.  On the last hill I met Salet, one of the village fous, taking advantage of the downpour to “find” some peanuts in a field, and he recognized me and grinned and ran in with me.  (I like Salet.  He once gave me a plastic bag with a present of yams inside.  As I took it a giant rat jumped out and ran down the street, to general merriment.) 

So I arrived in Tokounou somewhat filthy, with my hair in my eyes, my spare clotes mostly soaked inside my now-heavy pack, accompanied by a crazy man.  Some of my former students were sitting under a shelter by an orange stand at the entrance to town.  They looked at me skeptically, and then started grinning:  Sékou Touré! I bara na!  I bara na!  I started grinning too.  Everything was fine.

I stayed in town for two days.  My hut had been relieved of all my stuff, so I stayed with my friend Moussa who fortunately hadn’t traveled.  It was great to see thirty people I hadn’t realized I missed, although I ended up having mostly identical conversations with them all.  I got to eat leaf sauce and bush rat.  I visited the top of the plateau and ran down the road towards Nafaji.  I fasted one day except for a sip of water in the morning.  I saw the papayas swelling on their trees and the green, green rice growing everywhere with the new appreciation that that don’t happen in Burkina.  Fog in the mornings. 

I discovered that the principal had stolen half of the things on my “will.”  I had, for example, left ten meters of fabric to old Mme. Traouré, who sold me peanuts.  The principal gave her four.  It was the same story with all the stuff on my list.  The principal himself greeted me tentatively and then got in a car to Kankan without telling me.  I wrote him a highly insulting letter, and left him my address in Burkina in case he wants to write back. 

Now I’m back in Bobo preparing to go to site until Thanksgiving.  I’m eager to do work again and there should be no shortage of it.  I might try to teach a physics/chem. class for some variety.  In all it was a long and educational and relaxing summer, especially considering that I work for the Executive branch of the government of the USA in 2007. 

Hope you are all well.  Thanks for all your letters and emails. 

Will

Greetings from Conakry.  Hope all's well.  
The last few weeks of summer vacation (from my arguably vacation-like job) are fading quickly, so I decided to take this last chance to use up leave days and see Guinea again.  We went to Bamako by bus and then took a 24-hour bush taxi ride to Conakry, arrived this morning.  I don't have time to write much but thought I would Officially Register my aliveness.  Dear Mom, do not worry.  Best-
Will

Having had several people ask politely about my mental health, I should explain that that weird entry about eating cake and the samurai consisted solely of song lyrics in English that I hear ceaselessly in my village.  No one understands them but they are played over and over again to the point where I will probably never forget them.  The alarming thing is that some of these songs, which at first irritated me, as they should anyone with two ears, have grown on me so that I now catch myself humming along.  I don't even laugh anymore at the guy who sings along with the samurai song, nodding seriously at the foreign words.  And I still have a year to go... I'm sure that you, gentle reader, will do your part to straighten me out once I get back home.  

Sarcasm seems to be beyond me.  Knowing that people generally take me seriously when I'm trying to joke and laugh when I'm being serious, I should also point out that this entry I wrote earlier today was not meant to be taken seriously.  I meant it as a spoof on Cormac McCarthy, who I am reading a lot of at the moment.  So take what I said but not the ridiculous way I said it.  I'm not sure that anyone but him can pull of his style, and even he seems to stretch it too far sometimes.  I finished the terrible Blood Meridian this morning.  I couldn't maintain the austere mood he was trying to impose because some of his madeup words are so inapt and unsuited to their purpose that I found myself laughing at the author.  As you were supposed to laugh at me, but  probably didn't, and instead maybe considered me with concern and pity.  

To make up for it, let me tell a story from today in a straightforward way.  This being a day when Americans abroad think a lot about hot dogs and fireworks, both seemingly hard to come by, we decided to create our own Americana in the form of an apple pie.  I elected to bike into town to look for apples, since I also needed to get a passport photo taken for my Mali visa.  

By the way, I'm going to Mali tomorrow with a small group to go hiking for a few days.  Three free months... I also understand why so many people are professors.   

Anyway, I soon came upon a red light.  It was a T intersection and I was coming along the very top of the T in a way that made the light irrelevant, so I followed a moto that zoomed through.  Suddenly I heard a whistle and a gendarme at the side of the road, a hundred yards on from the light, motioned for me to pull over beside him.  I knew what that meant.  There were two other gendarmes and one of them was talking to the man on the moto that had preceded me.  The one who had flagged me down was older and he had a belly and wore sunglasses and a stern face did not remove either.  The following conversation began in french:

Afternoon.
Afternoon, sir.
You violated the light.  That is very serious.  You will have to pay a fine.  
Yes, I admit running the light.  I can't deny it.
You need to give me 6000F [=$12].
Yikes, that's a lot... but if that is the law, I will have to pay.  
Yes.
You'll write me a receipt, won't you?  
What?  Oh, no, we are out of receipts!  We'll just have to settle this between you and me.  
Well, if that's the case, 6000 seems like a lot.  
All right, you can pay 2000.  
2000, that also seems like a lot.  I don't have it.  
We'll have to impound your bike.

I looked at him and shrugged as though I had nothing better to do than to accompany him to the police station.  Then I noticed that traffic was backed up and that the passengers of two taxis and a minibus were watching our conversation with great interest and giving the gendarme dirty looks.  I pulled out my secret weapon and switched to Jula.  

Do you speak Jula?  
Whaaaat?  Do you speak Jula?  
Yes, small-small.  Good afternoon!
Good afternoon.  
How's your family?  
Fine.
Your wife and children?
Fine.
Your health?
Fine...
Your work?
Fine.  He laughed.  Where did you learn to speak Jula?
In guinea, and near Banfora...
Ah, Conakry-Guinea?  They have a bad president, don't they...

The passengers on the bus were now gesturing at me and laughing and poking their neighbors with their elbows.

So, you see I'm a tubabu, but look- I don't have big money.  I do not have a car.  I have to ride my bike to go to town.  I am a volunteer.  I teach the little children in the junior high.  I teach math in 7th, 8th, 8th grade.  I think you can just let me go.  
Well...  [He was wavering.  The taxis had just left and he had watched them go with relief.] 
Yes, you can go ahead.  [he switched back to French now]  But... do you have a cellphone?  [I gave him my number.]

Well, goodbye.  I promise not to run any more red lights.  

And so I went on my way, wallet no lighter, wearing an aggrieved face but secretly happier than I would have been had I not been stopped.  And maybe I have an improbable new friend in the Ouagadougou Gendarmerie if I should ever need one, which I won't, Mom.  

Later I ended up eating baked beans from America and swimming in a pool.  But that is another story.  And maybe one day I will celebrate a Fourth of July without even a small bit of irony.  And certainly I'm now going to leave this computer, hopefully having given evidence of my sanity and lightness of spirit, and go enjoy more food and music and people.  

Best,
WHM

I come upon a vacant lot in the outskirts of Ouagadougou in the first unused light of day and circle it experimentally.  There is a rubbish of broken glass and plastic bags and peels and rinds of unknown fruits and other organic matter now unrecognizable piled at the edges.  Pitted red traces show where feet and bicycles have crossed the diagonal bearing improbably clean and immaculate persons through the dust.  The central rectangle contains as do all vacant lots in this country the two netless aluminum goals which in the late afternoon will become the subject of intense passion.  I am happy with the relative lack of incredulous eyes and pointing children and stay there running in circles as the delicate sky turns pink and rose and blue.  Two others come to run, one in a soccer uniform continuing through and another in shredded baggy pants and sandales who circles a smaller perimeter and watches me.  I become familiar with the locations of the newer items of refuse by their smell and by the localised buzzing of flies.  Ragged vultures of enormous size flap dully from their place of nocturnal revelry or abiding and circle ahead as if they already know what scraps the day will bring to them.  A girl in dirty clothes comes from nowhere and empties a plastic bucket into the edge of the pile.  I keep running in circles to expend my useless calories.  People go to work and to visit their friends.  An old woman on a bicycle keeps pace with me for a minute.  There is an ancient and defraying rice sack lashed to the back of her bike containing some small item of value to her.  I do not ask myself:  Where is she going with that?  Why does she bother?  I have lately happened upon Ecclesiastes and skimmed through it and dismissed it as something already known and observed.  She ignores me as though I am Fate's practical joke and not to be believed in.  As always I observe the poverty which surrounds me and regret it, though I did not make the world as it is, and as always the riposte sounds in my head: This may be unjust.  But it is not more unjust because she knows about it now.  And it would not have been otherwise had I stayed home to hide.  Maybe this is how it always shall be.  After a year I nearly believe it myself, that this state of things and the hardness of life are unexceptional and to be borne in silence, that efforts to deny or live in defiance of this law are dangerous and foredoomed to more spectacular failure still.  That what is fine and pleasurable in life can exist only on a background of such uncompromised knowledge.  Today's newspaper cries drought and the failure of agriculture in Alabama; Barack Obama swallowing a gnat; the release of Alan Johnston by the offices of Hamas.  It leaves out the outcome of that woman's journey into town, her use or sale of that article, and what she will do to translate that effort into food and shelter and comfort and land and sex and learning and strength and piety and pride not for her but for her family and eternal hypothetical relations and descendants like the grains of sand or the stars and even for me and mine.  Such impossible patient labors of people who do not think of themselves as remarkable and maybe are not. 

They are always excited when I come by and one of them will pretend to use his karate moves on me.  No doubt you can imagine the awkwardness and consternation I felt at that moment—how do you tell someone something like that?  I asked what the pills are for; apparently they are supposed to cure white spots that appear on the tongue.  I explained that the label said “do not swallow,” saying the words in English and then translating.  That didn’t work – they were dissolving them in their mouths, not swallowing them.  Finally I said that no, that wasn’t good either, that they had a certain use that I did not know how to explain, but that they were only for girls.  At this, one of three men who’d come to buy tea helpfully did a graphic pantomime demonstration of the intended use of the pills.  The woman nodded simply, got up, and made my sandwich and some tea.  We did not mention it again, nor have I seen either kind of pill since that day. 
            Why would anyone manufacture pills and write the instructions in two languages – not one copy in each language, but half in each, so that you have to speak not either but both in order to avoid poisoning your child?  And who sold her those pills, and what did they tell her?  The first question must remain a mystery, but to find the answer to the second you have only to visit any of ten thousand village markets within any nearby country.  You will find, among the thousands hundreds of stalls selling wrinkled vegetables, fabric, tools, and cheap imported goods, several specializing in Western drugs, or what look like them.  You can talk with a man whose life is an itinerary of village markets to which he travels bearing a pair of suitcases full of pills, tablets, and capsules in various containers.  He may not be able to read any of the labels, or anything else for that matter regardless of language.  But most of those ignorant or desperate enough to play this kind of roulette are themselves “unalphabetized,” so he can fake it, gravely hear out your complaint, your history, your symptoms, and select a kind of pill of a certain size and color, and ask a price several times what he himself paid for it in a secretive exchange in a larger city some number of years ago.  If the price is too high or you think he looks shifty, you can go to his competitor ten feet away, who may offer an assortment of ropes and carpenters’ tools in addition to his drugs. 
The world is complicated my friend, and it is dangerous to invoke powers you don’t understand.  Fortunately I don’t have to rely on either the suitcase drugs or the (more genuine) traditional healers.

2.  I went to look for cow poop because I wanted to plant some trees near my house.  I biked out to the place where they all go to drink in the afternoons and pulled out a plastic bag.  Then I saw three men watching me from under a nere tree so I went over to greet them.  I am proud to say that the following conversation, after the typical greetings and salutations, was all in Jula:
He:  What are you doing here?
Me:  I came to get some cow poop. 
He:  You came from Francie to get cow poop?
Me:  No, I came from Ameriki. 
He:  Oh, that's all right then. 

I started to pick some dry pieces up. 

He:  What are you doing?  That's interdite!
Me:  Really?  Whose is it? 
He:  It's mine.
Me:  OK, give me a cowpoop gift.
He:  Ha ha ha ha ha.

     When we got to customs at the Mali-Burkina border, we had to get off the bus and wait in a line with our bags open.  When I finally got to the front, the officer read my T-shirt.

He:  So, you're from Peace Corps Guinea?
Me:  Yes...
He.  There is some problem in Guinea, isn't it so?  
Me.  Yes...
He.  Well, you should not have left.  There is no peace in Guinea.
Me.  No, there is waaaay a lot of violence.  
He.  Your mission is not finished!  You should have stayed and made them have peace.  You have lost, I guess.

I finally understood, and threw back my head and laughed.  

Me (wiping my eyes):  Yes, yes, it is my fault.  It was me who was charged with choosing a new prime minister.  I chose Eugene Camara, and then everyone started rioting, so now I've had to flee...
He (relieved that I finally understood his joke):  Ha ha ha!  Well, go on through.  

He didn't look in my bag.  

So, see how Guinea has prepared me to appreciate Burkina:  instead of harassing me for an hour trying to get a bribe, he tells me a joke.  I could get used to this.  I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

We're in Ouagadougou (pronounced Wahgadugu) for six days of orientation, and then off to new villages to pick up classes two-thirds of the way through the year.  I don't know where I'm going or even what language they're going to start teaching me tomorrow, but, whatever, man.  It'll work out. 

And:
(1)  Birds in the sky above Kankan

(2)  Downtown Kankan seen from our old digs.  Fortunately we had relocated to outside the city before the January riots.

(3)  The pitted road between Tokounou and Kissidougou

(4)  The inside of my hut

(5)  The guitar-maker, his children, the first and second attempts at guitar.  Contrast the deadly serious and competent face with the evidence of the hole in the wrong side of the white guitar.

(6)  The road to Moregbedou

(7)  Fried plantains with Moussa

(8)  Ferry across the Niandan, 10k from my door, as seen from the far (western) side
(9)  Ibrahima and myself, holding Sidiki, in front of my hut

(10)  Griot and hunter in Sidikourouma

Here are some pictures.  We have:
(1)  Conde and myself and curious children in his village, Sidikourouma


(2)  The griot who sang our praises, with three hunters and kora

(2.5)  The stream down the hill from Sidikourouma.  This is the washing-clothes place; the filling-drinking-buckets place is upstream and uncrowded. 

(2.9)  My brother Sekouba and desertification on the plateau above my village.  This is why the air is full of dust seven months of the year.

(3)  A typical empty bush taxi in the center of my village, on the day I wanted to go to Kissidougou for Christmas.  It didn't have enough passengers so it never left.  Fortunately a passing car picked me and Moussa up.  A car like this could easily handle seven adults, maybe a few babies, a trunk full of gasoline bidons, and three feet of baggage lashed to the roof, topped off by some chickens. 

(4)  Hal and I at the National Museum of Mali.  Note the heavily irrigated grass.