Friday, May 27, 2011

Memoirs of a Village Bride

It's your wedding day. You've waited sixteen long years for this day. Your family has been watching you twenty-four hours a day for the past week to make sure you don't run off with your ex-lover. But you've waited this long and you're ready to surrender your independence to a strapping older man who is also your first cousin. You spend hours getting ready, meanwhile all of the women in your extended family are buzzing around preparing mammoth proportions of rice for the hundreds of guests.

When you step out of your mudbrick hut, you see that half of your guests are dressed in the same fabric as your bridesmaids. People that you don't even know show up, and kids from all over the area are there for the free meal. They spend the whole time blowing on noisemakers and climbing on the walls. Let's not forget that all three town drunks have shown up for the locally brewed beer. Your hired entertainment (the town crier) is harassing your guests for money with his megaphone.

No, this is not a nightmare. It's exactly the way you always pictured your big day if you're from a small village in southwest Burkina Faso. After the civil ceremony at town hall, it's time to see what your new husband can offer you and your family. Bring on the parade of overflowing baskets of grains, peanuts, and corn floating atop the heads of all of the women in your family. The husband also offers a range of casserole dishes nested like Russian dolls. The bigger, the better.

Then it's time to dance the day and night and next morning away.


The hot dance of the moment is a slow shuffling in a circle while shaking your booty. When you do this dance, make sure your booty oscillates four times the rate of your feet. All the single ladies over forty try to catch the eyes of musicians as they inch past them.




After all that dancing, you're hungry.


But not all the food you receive is supposed to be eaten. The highlight of the night is when your cousins pour palm oil and sesame seeds all over your unclothed upper-half. Upon hearing about this matrimonial tradition, that odd American couple in the next courtyard, Chard and Tene, flee the party and hide in their house. The party will now shift for the third time today to another courtyard to enjoy the wedding band.


Sometimes, your wedding band will strike up an African instrumental remix of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands."



After two days, the party draws to close. As a bride in a cowboy hat, you will no doubt be charioted around the village on a moped and then off into the sunset.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Great Wall of Chana


A couple months ago, Tana awoke with a mystical vision haunting her slumber. In her dream, the clouds parted and the angels trumpeted as an unearthly voice bellowed: “If you build it, they won’t come.” We deciphered this cryptic prophecy to mean: if we were to construct a walled-in courtyard, we would be ridded of those free-roaming courtyard goats. And free from the daily toil of sweeping their droppings off our porch. Not only that, a courtyard would allow us to stargaze in our pajamas, plant a vegetable garden, and host the closest approximation to an all-American Super Bowl cookout. I just knew there was a reason I packed that “kiss the cook” apron. Anyway, we don’t get good ideas very often, so we ran with it. We figured having a wall between us and the elements would be a good investment in our future sanity.




Thus began a project so chockfull of production delays and miscommunications that it could have just as well come out of a modern-day bureaucracy, the IRS for instance. If a book existed on how not to get something accomplished, our courtyard fiasco would qualify as the feature chapter. For example, take the bricks themselves. First, the brick-maker dude ran out of water to convert clay into blocks. Then, in transit the bricks crumbled apart like cake. Then those demonic goats somehow scaled our five-foot brick pile and performed the Riverdance each night until daybreak. This was mere feet from our bedroom window. It’s some sort of in-built personality disorder of all goats to want to climb on everything—apparently you can take the goat out of the mountain, but you can’t take mountain out of the goat. After that ordeal, it rained and the clay dissolved into a sludge-like consistency. By the time the wall was fully realized a month and a half later, one hundred bricks had fallen by the wayside. What began as a simple commission had become a runaway train, though thankfully the end result wasn’t a train wreck. The finished wall and door looks amazing- see?



Despite the project’s general run-amokery, there were plenty of golden moments. To transport sand for cement, I accompanied Siaka on a wagon towed by his two prized bulls. Being the anglophile that he is, Siaka calls each of his pets Big Boy, which sounds kind of like “Beeg Bwy” in his French accent. Whenever a bull would become flustered, he would soothe it by yelling “Beeeeeg!” Talking the bulls down turned out to be important. From the moment I hopped on the wagon, both Big Boys decided to go full-speed ahead into the brush. They plowed over a helpless papaya tree and might have trampled a hut full of beer-drinking villagers had Siaka not chased down the wagon and halted them. After this little skirmish, our bull-drawn carriage floated elegantly through the village commons where I waved like Prince William at my neighbors. We stopped near Salif’s house and shoveled sand into the wagon, then back home. I got our adventures on video, but the camerawork is so Blair Witch Project-y that I hope it doesn’t activate anyone’s epilepsy.