Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Tengrela and Then Some

Written by Chad
We had our first of three weeks of In-Service Training in Banfora. Mayhem ensued.
The gang and I went to see the sacred hippos of Tengrela. Some of these pictures brought to you by Hayley. Thanks, Hayley. Here we are shoving off in the sacred boat.


Here we are on the lake overlook, lording over the sacred kingdom.


Behold this videographic proof of our fateful lakefaring exploits.



Here the hippos are either sacredly kissing or sacredly brawling:


Here's a sacred excerpt about the hippos taken from Anne's blog:
We were told, that despite the fact that hippos kill more humans than any other animal a year (apparently?), the hippos at Tengela have never attacked humans. How come, you may ask? Well, simply put, the hippos have an agreement with the Burkinabe villagers nearby that neither one will kill the others. Yes, I thought it seemed a bit far-fetched too, but when I was in a roughly-hewn canoe with six other people, rowing towards the hippos fighting in the water, I believed it, if only to diminish my fear! However, when a very old chief of the village dies, apparently it is acceptable to kill a hippo for the grand funeral. When I asked why the hippos don't get mad that the Burkinabe kill them when a chief dies, the response I got was that the hippos "just know" that the chief died.

Here's a picture of a pink chicken. Or maybe a baby flamingo. Not sure. It's not in any way sacred, but it was scared of me.


An American missionary family invited the gang and me over for a Mexican dinner in their beautiful home. Here is Anne reading bedtime stories to the little guys and gal.


I ate horse meat with a fried egg. You know what's next: I'm talkin bout you, dog meat.

1 comments
Monday, March 28, 2011

West African Whippersnappers

Written by Chad
You probably couldn't have guessed from our awkward middle school yearbook mugshots that Tana and I would one day be famous. Not pop sensation Justin Bieber famous by any means, but A-list stars among all the kiddies around our courtyard nevertheless. Stepping outside today is like stepping onto the red carpet, except instead of autographs we give out high fives. The thing is, though, we really haven't earned our celebrity. All we've done for three months is study the village's needs and act friendly to folks. Either way we're always surrounded by these little youngsters.


Take for example the simple act of taking out the trash. For reasons that elude me, kids go maniacal over our trash. Giggling hoodlums come barreling towards me in a hysteric blitz, grabbing from every direction. These are well-fed children, so they're not trampling over each other out of desperation so much as they're competing in a game. I imagine it's the same thrill as scrambling for candy from a busted piñata. Except, yeah, it's trash. After the dust clears, they flaunt their prized scraps of plastic and cardboard but often seem puzzled as to what to make of them.


Sometime in early January we baked a Dutch applie pie in our Dutch oven and in the spirit of the Dutch shared our creation with some courtyard kids. An ant colony smelled our picnic and called out the cavalry. And when one kamikaze ant came too close for comfort to my slice, I made an example of it with the bottom of my sandal. Inspired by this murderous act, Fatouma taught us the Jula word for ant by way of song: "Sukaromusa! Ting ting! Sukaromusa! Ting ting!" It was catchy. As everyone sang the mantra, we then jammed out with a percussion ensemble comprised of bottles, pans, and me beatboxing. Since that momentous day, children the village over have somehow learned this little ditty. Round our parts, this special anthem has surpassed that World Cup song by Shakira as the most popular tune around. It's nearly April and we haven't passed a day without the little minstrels singing "Sukaromusa! Ting ting!" Here's the sheet music transcription of the song to immortalize it for future generations and civilizations to discover:


Gone are the days when we could leave the house without hordes of youth flocking around our hips, rubbing our arm hair, holding our hands, singing us songs about ants. I used to egg them on by singing along until I realized hearing it recapitulated for all of eternity may be some kind of Chinese water torture for their parents. If I were a Buddhist monk, maybe I would see the Sukaromusa song as karmic retribution for my momentary lapse of goodwill toward insectkind. Perhaps the universe is trying to remind me of grotesquities of which human nature is capable. It's okay, though. I had to kill it. The ant was after my pie.

Hopefully by the end of November 2012, we'll have earned something greater than our shallow fame as foreigners in the eyes of these youngsters. And hopefully they'll discover a more entertaining pastime than brawling over our moldy banana peals and cheese wrappers. Also hopefully we can sell "Sukaromusa! Ting ting!" to Justin Bieber, it will climb the pop charts, and my village can get rich off royalties.


As a post script, I love how the girl's shirt says: "BIG LOVE IS THE BEST / NO WARS / ONLY FRENCH KISS / ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE." I wonder how many people here ever second-guess what the English means on the apparel they wear daily. For instance, is the bush taxi passenger fellow in the picture below really who his shirt says he is? I should have had him install high-speed internet in my village mudhut while I still had the chance.



As a post post script, Tana told me my Jula spelling of sukaromusa was totally wrong, so I fixed it.
1 comments
Thursday, March 17, 2011

Roll Up for the Magical Factory Tour!

Written by Chad
What if Tana finds herself plumb out of confectionery sugar halfway through icing my annual nine-layer birthday cake? Or what if we're having sea pirates over for dinner and realize last-second that stock is short on rum? Fortunately enough, our next door neighbor has the hookups. We're just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Burkina's largest and only sugar factory: Societé Sucriere de la COMOE (SOSUCO).


With over four thousand employees, SOSUCO is to Banfora what Hershey Chocolate is to Hershey, PA. So imagine our giddiness when last week we got golden tickets granting us entry inside the industrial megaplex. This birthplace of all sticky buns and lemon drops; this wonderland of tooth decay and type two diabetes. Today, you too can behold the secret world of imagination that is SOSUCO. Think of Tana as a clownishly dressed Willy Wonka and me as a sun-burnt Oompa Loompa, guiding you through the ten-step process of sugar production. Grab your insulin, cause here we go.


(10) I have reverse-numbered these steps for no reason. The journey from cane to cubes begins out in the fields where the workers unleash a raging inferno upon the unsuspecting crop. This is a technique borrowed from the Brazil, perhaps along with their cultural obsession for soccer. Here workers pile the chopped, char-grilled stalks onto freight trailers towed by John Deere tractors.

(9) Back at the factory, a crane empties all of the medium-rare stalks into the assembly line by lifting the chain beneath them.


(8) Here the cane is rinsed to remove residue from the burning. Maybe the sugarcane is enjoying this warm bath. Maybe it's about to forgive the company for burning it alive and decapitating it with machetes. But don't forgive them just yet, sugarcane. Unspeakable things are about to happen to you...

(7) At this point, the cane is threshed by a gauntlet of rotary blades (pictured below) into a coarsely shredded wood pulp. High upon this catwalk, one misstep could land a careless passerby into the throes of whirling blades or scalding molten sugar. Our tour guide Abdoulaye wore safe industrial attire and a hard hat while Tana and I in our visitor badges scaled the slippery catwalks in Kohls flip flops. Living life on the edge is just how we roll. And I'm thankful mom and dad taught me to walk really well back in kindergarten.





(6) Onward, the pulp continues through the pipeline, passing through six mills, each with one rotating cylinder on top and two below. The pulp is continually rinsed with recirculated juice. The goal here is to juice the living daylights out of the pulp, kind of like trying to squeeze those last few atoms of toothpaste out of an empty tube. The juice drips into a trough proceeding down the rabbit hole.

(5) Now that they've leached all the sweetness from the pulp, the byproduct is saw dust. It leaves the factory on a conveyer belt straight for the stockpile of furnace fuel. SOSUCO goes through 25,000 liters of water per hour pumped from a nearby mountaintop spring. If it helps you visualize the quantity better, that's the equivalent 25,000 one-liter cokes or one 25,000-liter coke per hour.



(4) The juice is decanted and refined through slowly spinning cylinders, filtering out the remaining debris and impurities. What remains is a syrup. The syrup runs through four more towering cylinders that boil it to different temperatures. It comes out as a paste called mesquite. For quality assurance, workers view the sugar crystals through a microscope lens.


In this room, the steam from these machines sugarcoats all the pipes and metalworks in a brown glaze. Dangling from all the machines are brown icicle-like stalactites. The air smells amazing. Inhaling it all the time, I bet the employees are on a perpetual sugar rush.


(3) Then it goes to the coolest part ever. While it's being spritzed with water, the paste spins around a centrifuge. You can open it up and watch the sugar crystallize, visibly changing color like a splash of cream in your coffee. At that moment a fleeting sense of appreciation for the miracles of science welled up in my chest, kind of like seeing one of those volcano science fair projects. It may have just been acid reflux.


(2) Then through a series of tubes (much like the internet), the wet sugar passes through a dehydration room, which looks like it got a light dusting of snow. As you walk through, the song "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" might pop into your head.


(1) The end of the tour is the packaging warehouse where the sugar meets one of two fates: cartons full of cubes or sacks of the granular variety.



We were allowed to eat as many sugar cubes as we could while inside the compound, so our impoverished eleven-year-old buddy Abu who tagged along shoveled as many as possible into his gullet. I dramatically handed a sugar cube back to my tour guide (like Charlie does with the everlasting gobstopper), but unfortunately Abdoulaye refused to show us the Wonkavator.


0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)