1) It hit me when I was bike riding and noticed locals growing watermelons on power lines. Burkinabe are super resourceful. They take advantage of their surroundings with ninja-like ingenuity. Through the will to repair and preserve what's broken, a little muscle, and some elbow grease, miracles can happen. Who knew, for example, you can blow up a car tire with a manual bike pump? Ibrahim did. In the picture below, Salif has resourcefully converted his buddy's tailoring shop into an office.



2) I hope to the stars that no Oxford-league traditional English grammarians have made the trek to Burkina. Here they would encounter the most appalling bastardizations of a fragile language that should be uttered delicately. There exist phrases no self-respecting English-as-a-first-language speaker would dare speak: "Are you in top form?" "I speak English small small." "Bye bye (used in a formal situation between working adults, not toddlers)" Also, the French word for shampoo is shampooing.

3) I'm not sure - America might have been through a similar state of turmoil, what with the Occupy movement taking the streets and all - but it's odd to see so many strikes for so many different causes clamoring around town. We happened upon a farmer's strike in Banfora, protesting ranchers' cattle trampling their crops at which a lethargic group held a flag and marched anticlimactically out of town. Few people even noticed. Students used to strike constantly as well, even elementary school students (which meant they'd go around chanting nursery rhymes). There are striking sugar workers, cotton workers, army, police, you name it. It often results in vicious cycles: during the 2011 unrest, city law enforcement protested the government by looting an innocent third party - the merchants so the merchants burned down police stations.

4) Like it's no big thing, adults will scale two-story trees, risking life and limb to tap trees for alcoholic palm wine. They're sometimes accompanied by cobras and other snakes that love to roost up top to sneakily attack perching birds and dangle in the air to intercept passing ones. In some villages cityfolk pay children to climb trees and cut off the palm fronds for artisanal baskets and such.

5) It's so unsettling to have to share transportation with four-legged beasts of burden that it would throw any PETA spokesman into a hissy fit. One day I rode on a taxi with a bleating nightmare of 15 frightened goats tied up by the legs and dangling from the roof. Their cries sounding vaguely human. It was an hour-long rollercoaster with white hairs flying into the open windows and sticking to everything and everyone. I was with Tana's counterpart and together we listened to podcasts, which he didn't understand. Animals aren't the only thing to fear on taxi rides. Sometimes transport is stacked sky-high with other objects, foam mattresses for example.



6) I thought I had experienced every form of weather, save for acid rain before I set foot in Burkina. A modern-day dust bowl plagues our region on certain days. It's known as the Harmattan period and has the eerie calm of a blizzard and wreaks havoc on the population's respiratory systems.

7) Despite the hundred-degree weather, there's a dress code for men here - long pants. I tried to abide by it for my first year or so but have more recently fallen into a habit of wearing soccer shorts. I've noticed a strange phenomenon of 60-year-old village women "checking out" my knees as I greet them in passing. My eyes are up here, tanties.

8) The laissez-faire child care system of African villages was somewhat surprising. The complete lack of supervising kids means that I sometimes see little kiddos who live a kilometer away playing in the sandbox that is our front yard. Here's a little boy wearing a playboy bunny necklace:



9) Our neighbor Daouda helped us test our car battery by dipping his fingers into the sulfuric acid of each terminal and then sticking each acid-soaked finger into his mouth to taste it. I was ready to run for the defibrillators, but he walked away seemingly in good health. A few hours later all the kid spectators were chanting "N bina battery jii min" (I want to drink battery water).





11) Some of the more surprising restaurant practices include: (1) Washing glass out with a splash of coke or beer before pouring the rest in - it almost seems superstitious, like tossing salt over the shoulder. If a coke costs 400 CFA, then there you go, 20 CFA you've just thrown into the dirt. (2) In a land of questionable health codes, some restaurants (even the most popular ex-pat dives in the capital) are like race tracks for rats. I counted at least ten rats racing the circuit (or 2 rats doing 5 laps) while waiting for my pizza one night. Come to think of it, this gaping grotesquery could be turned into a lucrative gambling if they named the rats and invested in a ticket booth. (3) Tossing chicken bones onto the ground after dining is commonplace. (4) The customer isn't always right. During birthday party, my party became furious that the waitress had implied that complimentary side dishes accompanied our main course when they weren't actually free. The waitress and her manager refused to admit fault. Later, after an appeal to honesty, the manager dropped the cost of the side dishes. To make amends, she drove us to our side of town instead of a taxi while talking about how she helps orphans - it was uncomfortable and weird.
12) There's a strange need among strangers (a phenomenon almost entirely unique to teenage boys) to accompany me when I'm biking, riding in my wake or right beside me like we're old buddies trudging through some marathon. I'm not too into this, so I usually change speeds erratically, but they usually miss the cue and keep hanging out. Oftentimes I'll pass someone slowly plodding down on the road, and then all of a sudden they become possessed with a wave of competition and pedal maniacally on their gearless bike as if to prove something.

13) Oranges are green when grown in tropical climates and only turn orange when grown in temperate climates. I may need to audit a remedial kindergarten class in order to refresh myself of secondary colors and fruits.

14) I never thought we'd go out one night every year and watch sugarcane fields burn like it's fireworks.



15) The smell of armpit bacteria is surprisingly different here. In Burkina deodorant is a luxury for the rich, so I smell others' B.O. regularly. On long taxi rides when my seatmates have themselves a stretch, that's a recipe for asphyxiation. Has anyone ever died from a smell? Anyway I want you to experience this too, so When I get off the plane, everybody should immediately rush around me to waft it in, as it will soon enough be replaced by American armpit bacteria. I'll try not to bathe for a few days before my arrival so I'm especially musky.