Burkina

I left Niamey, the capital of Niger, last Sunday morning, October 26th. I painted some decent watercolors in Niamey, and came to know my host family a little better: uncle Mahumud and I discussed travel plans in sign language and diagrams, little Habibublai taught me some Fulani by naming animals I drew for him, and I got along in a formal, cordial way with Mr. Alzouma, the patriarch of the family. They took good care of me and set me up with their relatives in Tera, down the road in the western tip of Niger, another family that was really kind to me. They had at least ten kids, I couldn't count and neither could they.

West of Niamey, across the Niger River and across to Burkina the landscape became truly fantastic. Where before it seemed bleak, here it seemed majestic, biblical even. The land is hot and flat and dry, and small fields of millet and sorghum punctuate a vast backdrop of sparse green trees and dry grass. Sheperds tend flocks of goats and gaunt, wild-looking cattle, women gather firewood, people wash in the occasional watering hole, all of them dressed in billowing robes and scarves and headwraps. When you add to this a very religious people, with names like Ibrahim (Abraham), Issaka (Isaac) and Zara (Sarah) it really seems like you're two thousand years back in time.

(I should also say that while this part of the world is almost entirely Muslim, and life comes to a halt five times a day for prayers, it's not at all like the fundamentalist Muslims you read about in the paper. I honestly feel no animosity from them.)

From Tera I went on to Dori, in Burkina Faso. The speed of travel in Africa depends almost exclusively on the quality of the road, so this 100km stretch took an entire day. I waited four hours while passengers slowly gathered, and then took off in the back of a burly Toyota 4x4 pickup. It was by far the funnest ride I've ever had in my life, and it's a real shame riding in the back of a pickup is illegal in the States. We were crammed a dozen people and a goat in the bed of the truck, another dozen on the roofrack, and heaps of sugarcane and baggage strewn about. The 'road' was in fact a series of converging and diverging sand tracks, with plenty of potholes and ridges that left us flying all over each other for the rest of the day. We stopped many times, border checks, prayers, food, unloading and loading, and by nightfall I landed in Dori.

In Dori I reconnected with a Peace Corps volunteer I had briefly met in Grand Popo. Yaneth let me crash on her couch, and it was just really great to relax for a few days, to speak English, to have a conversation with similar cultural references, to find real vegetables at the market and cook food again, to let someone else take charge. I got to know Dori a bit, we visited an orphanage where she volunteers and played with the kids, and we took a trip to nearby Bani to see a series of mud-brick mosques built in the 1970s by a latter-day Islamic prophet.

From Dori I travelled with Yaneth to Ougadougou--the capital of Burkina Faso. Ougadougou is a surprisingly sophisticated city: big buildings, restaurants, traffic lights, traffic that's merely stressful and not terrifying, a city that somehow keeps the choas of Africa at bay (we did however see a crocodile in a creek just outside of downtown). We met up with a bunch of other Peace Corps volunteers, and I spent two days forgetting I was in Africa: We went out to western restaurants, relaxed and swam in the International School's pool, read English magazines, and visited Siao, a big, biannual arts and crafts and music festival. Morale was high among this group, they were kind to make room for me , and it was definitely a high point of the trip.

This morning I left for Ouahigouya, a depressing border town on the way to Mali.