Sunday, August 28, 2011

Lobster Death Count: 17

Written by Chad

This isn't just a post about three dudes visiting Ghana- it's also the gruesome account of seventeen lobsters being boiled alive by their hand for a single lunchtime meal. But more on that later. First, here's what our trip looked like:


We crossed the border from Togo into Aflao then proceeded to Accra, Kokrobite Beach, Cape Coast, Kakum Rainforest, Takoradi, Akwidaa, Kumasi, and then back to Burkina.

If Ghana has taught me anything, it's that I may need English rehab in 2012 before returning to the States. We've only been speaking French for 10 months, so I don't know why the transition was so awkward for us to talk in English to African people. Straight to the final hours of our week in Ghana, we kept accidentally greeting people with a Bonsoir or exiting taxis with a Merci. We considered carrying with us a "French jar"- the same concept as a "swear jar" but you throw in a penny each time you forget to speak English. We also said translations of French phrases that don't exist in English- for instance, wishing street peddlers better sales by saying "Good market!" (Bon marche).

The pace of our principal method of travel, the almighty tro-tro, resembled that of an asthmatic marathon runner. The vehicle would stop every few miles alongside these street peddlers for no apparent reason other than to delay our ultimate arrival. Occasionally a curbside man would present the prize of his morning hunt to us- a toddler-sized guinea-pig-looking creature that I'm guessing we're supposed to cook and eat. They're called "grasscutters" and definitely worth a google.

On other occasions, we would pull to the shoulder as merchant women would try hawking their wares from head bowls. There was one lady who grew frustrated that Luis and I weren't reacting to her local language sales pitch, so she yelled, "Lick my face!" which we later determined meant "Look at my face."

Our first destination was Accra, the capital city of Ghana. It's a vast, clean metropolis with all the modern chicness of the most happenin US cities. Words cannot express the rapturous emotional and spiritual experience of walking into a three-storey KFC on opening night. This was the universe's way of rewarding us for having suffered over 24 hours on the road. Here we belonged. And oh the anticipation as we waited in line, our hearts beating with blood soon to be filled with fast food chicken grease. As I stepped up to the cashier, she smiled as though we were old friends and in that moment an overwhelming appreciation for all of existence brought tears of joy to my eyes. Barely able to speak, I placed my order: "I'll have a chicken sandwich, please."

The cashier replied, "Here they are called 'chicken burgers,' sir."

"Oh, forgive me- one of those," I apologized as I received my tray. Ascending the stairs to eat our "burgers," we felt as though our souls were ascending as well- to a higher plane of deliciousness. As I gobbled down this palatable perfection, I wondered what could be better?


I'll tell you what would be better: going to Accra Mall and watching two Hollywood movies in a row. Thumbs up to "Horrible Bosses." The mall was the ying to our village life yang. Perusing the mall's Walmart-grade megastore "Game" balanced out our chi like some sort of Zen meditation. I gulped down some ginger beer and walked into a Mac Store where all the repressed memories of American gadgetry came rushing back in an instant. With wide eyes fixated on the glowing display, I spoke the product name like a kindergartener sounding out his first two-syllable word: "i. Pad." I wondered, in my ten-month absence just how far has American technology progressed. Flying cars?



That night we celebrated Doug's 23rd by pigging out on pizza at Mama Mia's followed by a night out on the town gambling. This means we went to a casino and watched Doug lose 4 dollars at a slot machine at which point he surrendered.


We fled the city just in the knick of time to hit up Big Milly's Backyard, an expat resort on Kokrobite Beach, where we would chill for two days. We never met the famed Big Milly (who we assumed would greet us with a bearhug, pinch our cheeks, and tell us we need to put some meat on our bones), but almost as good- we met dozens of Brits, Danes, Germans, Statesians, and more Brits. We would play cards and share stories with these people who liked to call us Yanks and there was much silliness.




Cape Coast happened next. Nearby Kakum National Forest exceeded expectations. My life in suburban Virginia hadn't yet exposed me to these rainforest thingies that everybody always wants to protect. As we walked atop some netted bridges that some Canadians built in the Eighties, the thought occurred that maybe it was me who needed protecting. From falling to my rainforesty death. Between vertigo-induced panic attacks, we listened for monkey calls, which according to our tourguide Ebenezer sound like the name of the park: "Kakum! Kakum! Kakum!" On our way down we saw a tiny yellow snake and a type of ant that allegedly can kill and devour an entire elephant. We also ate a cocoa fruit from which all chocolate is derived, though it tastes nothing like a Lindt truffle.








Continuing our westward trip all the way to Akwidaa Beach, we lodged at the Green Turtle. Had we visited a week later, we might have seen turtles laying eggs on the beach, but not this time. Tucked away on ten-kilometer "road" which might as well have been a minefield for all its craters, we held on for dear life. Here's a video of our tro-tro pogoing down the DMV's worst nightmare, trying its best not to lose a tail pipe:


It was in the seaside village Akwidaa that we murdered seventeen innocent lobsters and devoured their innards in a gluttonous frenzy. We paid slightly less than a buck per lobster. At some frou frou, ritzy bistro we might have had to dish out our paychecks for an entire two months to attain such quality dining.


After this pinnacle of gourmet dining, the next destination Kumasi had options such as "Baby Pee Eating Palace," but we didn't stop to ask what they have on tap.


After 13 days and 3 countries we returned to Burkina Faso, but before we left, Doug wrote the Ghana volunteers this dry-erase board note:

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Friday, August 26, 2011

Into Voodooland and Beyond

Written by Chad

These are my California buddies Luis and Doug. Two weeks ago we left our villages in the dust and made off to greener- well, sandier- pastures along the coastlines of Togo, Benin, and Ghana. We hit up Lome, Togo then Vogan, Togo then Ouidah, Benin then Grand Popo, Benin and onward to Ghana. Here's what that looks like:


After securing visas and all that red tape nonsense, we boarded a bus from Burkina to Lome. Luis befriended a shoe salesman who guided us amateurs through the border station.



It was nearly a twenty-hour trek and we passengers endured the same in-bus movie two and a half times. The road in northern Togo was so pothole-laden that at times I wondered why our bus didn't just plow on through the cornfields instead. Despite its bumpy highways, Northern Togo is gorgeous. The road follows a valley between a range of picturesque cliffs. At sunset our resilient bus scaled a mountain range and then careened wildly back down to sea level, seemingly without a foot being laid on the brakes.


Kind of like my college campus, Togo's capital Lome appears to be a city perpetually under construction, never quite ready for its postcard photo. On the boulevard you see three especially colossal bank complexes, shrines to the fiscal gods, that make all other buildings seem Lilliputian.

On our way out of town, our bush taxi slowly waded through an enormous puddle. While the children remained calm, I scrambled frantically to survive our imminent puddly demise. One hand prepared to pry open the window and the other hand searching my perimeter for a bucket to bail out our capsizing vessel. Despite my preparations, our taxi inexplicably drove through this watery grave. I may have missed the exact moment when Mrs. Frizzle swooped in and transformed the vehicle into a boat.



Our feet hit the ground in Vogan, a rural Togo town known for its market, and just our luck that Friday was market day. We sampled the local fare, including tofu, some sort of cornbreadish substance, and fresh coconut water (which is kind of a gross version of the real deal H2O and not to be confused with tasty coconut milk). I also binged on a West African chain of ice cream called Fanchocos and Fanmilks.




When we found the "fetish market" section where exotic animals are sold for voodoo spells, a kid immediately offered up a squirming chameleon. The selection was impressive: discounts on monkey heads and porcupine spines, rebates on jaguar pelts and warthog tusks, and money-back guarantees on alligator teeth. Nervously, I scanned the vicinity for a voodoo doll resembling myself, but fortunately no Togolese witchdoctors have made an enemy of me yet.




Walking across the Benin border was a breeze, but don't tell any criminal masterminds you may know. And then we caught three motos from the highway, shuttling us to Ouidah, self-proclaimed city of the slave trade. We arose bright and early to walk the 4k beachbound road where slaves were escorted in chains onto ships. Symbolic African animal statues now line the walk along with other attractions. We passed the site of the nation's annual twin festival. We saw an abandoned stilt village on the marsh (the preferred architectural style in Benin). Finally we reached the Point of No Return where slaves, many of whom seeing the ocean for the first time, were whisked away to colonies spanning New England to Brazil.


Ouidah also happened to be celebrating some sort of festival in which spirits of the dead roam the streets in a parade, accompanied by drummers and giggling children. A local assured me these are "good" spirits of the dead. Whenever the music crescendos, the spirits chase after the kids as all the little ones scream and disperse like in a game of tag.




Next we braved the perilous Python Temple, home to approximately twenty heavily drugged pythons. The curator showed us some broken bike parts in a hole with ground corn grain sprinkled over it. I couldn't understand what he said this represents, but apparently it keeps enemies away. Under normal circumstances the pythons hung on our necks might have regarded Doug, Luis, and me as tasty desserts. But whatever cocktail of sedatives and tranquilizers they laced the snakes' lunches with, these sleepy guys were barely able to slither.


I grew emotionally attached to one particular python over the course of our five minutes there, nicknamed him Severus, and briefly envisioned an elaborate escape plan. Were I only to liberate Severus from his oppressors and this Clockwork Orange-esque prison, he could once again realize his snakey dreams. But then as I stuffed him into my shirt, I considered Severus' drug rehab fees and the costs of separation anxiety therapy. Not to mention a curse would befall me due to the protective magic of the corn-grain-covered bike parts.

Next up after Ouidah, we arrived at Awale Plage in Grand Popo, something that easily belongs in Disney World. The staff all dresses like pirates with red bandannas and the grounds have bizarre topiaries, trellises, ornamental vegetation, and giant chess boards that give it the distinct feel of Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately a group of Cotonou high schoolers had booked the very last room, so rage welled up inside our hearts as we watched them check in. The resort referred us to the new apartment complex next door. We arrived at a building that cannot be called anything but a castle. We waited at a wooden table in a huge empty room until the proprietor arrived. He sat down with us as if us staying one night was some kind of important business ordeal requiring mountains of signatures and paperwork. We were the only guests that night so we slept at the top of the castle, ready to defend it from invaders. The next day Luis and Doug used bathrooms in other unlocked rooms, only to be walked in on by touring guests.



The next night we dined and dormed at the Auberge which to me resembled a beachside plantation house from Forrest Gump. There we chanced upon a fellow countryman, a Burkina-based director of photography who has had a hand in some of Burkina's most celebrated films. Our time in Benin taught us that Obama Beer tastes bad- maybe Tea Partiers can sell it during the upcoming campaign.


The next day we hitchhiked back to the border of Togo. There at the border we stood at our second Point of No Return- this time because our visas, unbeknownst to us, were marked "single entry." Would Doug, Luis, and Chad gain re-entry into Togo? Would they continue onward to Ghana? Find out in the second and final installment of this two-part vacation series. Actually if you've had the patience to read this, you've probably already read part two, since it appears above this post on the webpage. Just sayin.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .
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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Bush Taxicab Confessions

Written by Chad
I hope that sometime in my lifetime medical science can bestow upon humanity the same level of immortality that Burkina mechanics have achieved with bush taxis. A glance at their odometers would prove to you that each taxi is its own miracle of mileage. Their perserverity would put any 1980s Volvo to shame... if not for the glass splintering off of the windshields, missing seat cushions, doors held on by rubber bands and other eyesores, which the taximen seem to overlook as mere cosmetic trivialities.

Yes, the taximen are a different breed altogether from their fellow countrymen- a far cry away from those Toyota-sporting gentry and those Landcruiser-sporting Westerners. The taximen seem pretty apathetic toward modern automobile aesthetics, invariably sacrificing pageantry for functionality. If anything, instead of car shows, Burkina might have car freak shows. The vessels faring these open highways seem patched together from a mishmash of relics, like Frankenstein's monster. That's why in Burkina, junkyards are nowhere to be found- there's always someone willing to drive it.


The taxis somehow make up for their lack of showmanship and continuity of design with their interior decorating. Each amalgamation of car parts is adorned with its own unique array of oriental fortune charms on the rearview. The dashboard sports the kind of dangling doodads one might expect in a gypsy caravan or an ex-hippie's garage sale. Like some sort of shrine to the taxi gods, you'll find dirty stuffed animals, broken toy trinkets, and other dumpster divings glued or hanging in the front. To complement their pimped-out rides, taxi drivers (and all Burkinabe drivers, pretty much) carry key chains with tiny stuffed animals attached. No one can tell me why.

To complete the taxi's feng shui, really pulling it all together, the decorators seem to have sought out the only uncracked corners of the glass and attached stickers of their favorite Cameroonian soccer players mid-kick or heavily mascara-ed Middle Eastern models. If you're in the passenger seat, you might not be able to even see the road through all the window stickers. Often the bushtaximen will christen their beloved vans with a nickname as an American might do with a beach house. For example, we once rode in a taxi proudly named OBAMA where we met a taximan named Baby in his classy t-shirt/blazer combo.


I always find myself wondering: just what kind of dude chooses the bush taxi life? Like sea pirates, they forever roam, living meal to meal with the van as their home and the highway their mistress. For these renegades, not even a moment's consideration is paid to fastening one's seatbelt. But such is the fast-paced, risk-laden daily grind for these brazen youth. Jumping out of and boarding a rolling vehicle are base qualifications in their job description. They dangle their entire bodies out open doors, acrobatically slide through windows, climb onto the roofs with finesse. All while the taxi is in motion. We were startled on one occasion to hear the loud clack of a taxi dude's flip flops as he leapt like a gymnast off the roof onto the pavement and sprinted to the side door of the moving taxi. It unnecessarily resembled a chase scene from some Jackie Chan flick.

I take taxis into Banfora a lot, because Route 7 cuts through my village. Route 7 is a major road connecting Burkina's largest city Ouagadougou to Ivory Coast's largest city Abidjan. The commons of my village are right along the road where there happens to be toll plaza. Since Burkina's GDP is among the lowest in the world, it makes sense that here these village farmers would seize the toll plaza as an economic opportunity and develop around it. It's kind of like how on the Discovery Channel a complex ocean ecosystem in the arctic builds up around a heat vent. The toll plaza has become like a truckstop for cargo transporters, buses, and bush taxis, so village women sit roadside for 16 hours a day, hawking mangoes and cashews. To serve these saleswomen, a few tiny boutiques now line the road. There's also a few nearby straw huts for villagers and pilgrims alike to kick back and gossip while sipping palm wine or millet beer.


Anyway, a month or so ago the SOSUCO sugarcane factory workers protested their wages by blockading Route 7. As a result, traffic bottlenecked and came to standstill, meaning that tons of hungry bush taxis and buses idled beside my village. Sales went through the roof for these women, boutiques, and bars. It was like Black Friday. The moral of the story is: maybe you should think twice the next time you shake your fist at a traffic jam.

A month before the SOSUCO strike, I was dispatching myself again by bush taxi and hit a similar roadblock. There was a high school student strike outside Bobo-Dioulasso city limits. The students were huddling and chanting in the street fifty feet ahead. They had downed a tree to obstruct the road and were waving its leafy branches in the air like kids making believe with magic wands. The driver put his palm to his face and switched off the ignition. Soon everybody was off the bush taxi, save for me and a napping elderly lady. My iPod playlist and I waited about thirty minutes, then I left some money for the driver, and exited the taxi into the woods to circumvent the hubbub. I emerged on the other side, stuck out my thumb, and hitchhiked into the city with some attractive French women. Traffic Jam = 0. Me =1.

Tana and I have had countless other run-ins on Bush Taxis, anecdotes which I'll try to condense by way of bullet point:
  • One time a taxi with no seats tried to drive off with Tana on board but not me. She jumped off.
  • One time Tana had to sit on my lap on a crowded bush taxi, so now I understand the agony endured by every mall Santa Claus.
  • Often, taxis will leave Banfora and then immediately turn around and drive back into town so they can fill their empty seats- this wastes up to a half hour and makes me want to tuck and roll.
  • One time we traveled on taxi swarming with houseflies who came for animal carcasses in the trunk but stayed to repeatedly land on our faces and eyeballs.
  • One time I took a video of taximen trying to force a perturbed bull in a straightjacket into the taxi (perhaps a routine activity for them):


  • One time the president of my Union and I were sitting in the back seats we careened through road construction zone at light speed (I've delivered pizza and gotten my share of speeding tickets in my day, but this was something else). Every road bump felt like a double-bounce on a trampoline. Mahamadi and I were flipped into the air like pancakes.
  • Often you'll see ridiculous cartoony loads carried by buses and taxis. I once saw a pickup truck carrying three times its height in foam mattresses. It could have scraped the base of some low-flying plane.
  • One time after sunset I couldn't hail a taxi for an hour so I had to bike 15k in the dark. As luck would have it, I didn't have any one of our ten flashlights and the moon was on leave. Luckily about halfway through the trek, when the blackness became pitch, a little boy from my village emerged with a live chicken clucking in his bicycle basket. His name was Fassoum and he, like all Burkinabe, has uncanny night vision. So for the rest of that escapade, Fassoum was my guardian seeing-eye dog, shouting "Chaddy!" when I needed to pull to the shoulder and then saying "Allons-y" (Let's go!). When we were safe and sound, I thanked him for rescuing me with a Sprite.

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Monday, June 27, 2011

Scorpions, Crocodiles, Chameleons, Monkeys

Written by Chad
Oh my. We were minding our business watching a show on the laptop when into Tana's hand falls a harbinger of venomous death. For some reason her gut reaction was to squeeze it and as it wriggled away, she noted its squishiness. We then switched on the lights and searched for the squishy critter in question, only to find this dude:




Fortune was on our side that night. The insect from hell didn't quite get around to stinging us. Maybe in part because we drenched it in a dense fog of Rambo bug spray.


The picture above is a crocodile I spotted from my bike. A tear came to my eye in memory of the great late Steve Irwin. If he were still with us, he might have said, "By crocky, she's a beaut!"


Behold this questionably alive chameleon I also came across while biking. Not sure if he was catching some rays or on his deathbed. I didn't stick around to check its pulse, because in West Africa, superstition has it that if a chameleon sees you, you will die. Tana said if he was alive, he would probably be camouflaged to his red and rocky terrain.


On another night I was biking our car battery (how we charge our laptop) to Beregadougou, the next town over.


I was biking in the spot that this picture was taken from and I saw in front of this tree two grey, white-chested monkeys with long tails in the grass beside the baobab tree. Wild monkeys not twenty-five feet away. When they saw me, one stood on its hind legs and peered at me like a meerkat and the other ran into the bush, tail in the air. We have since returned countless times to this spot near the water reservoir, but we haven't made their acquaintance again. People here eat these little guys, so I tried to keep it on the down low around my courtyard. We think they were either green monkeys or tantalus monkeys.
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Thursday, June 16, 2011

The Cat Traps the Moon!

Written by Chad
It had just gotten dark and Tana and I heard a loud racket approaching our courtyard. All varieties of pots and pans and bottles being beaten as percussion instruments. Fifty kids from all across our village had formed a marching band drumline and were parading through every courtyard.

Like an ever-expanding conga line, more and more kids dropped their dinners, grabbed the nearest kitchen utensil, and joined in the noise-making rabble. The lady and I stood on our bed to see over the courtyard wall, confused as always about what was going on. Were they celebrating the end of the school year? No way, these kids weren't just having some fun. They were saving the world...



According to Burkina lore, the sun is a cat (jakmani in Jula) and the moon is like a mouse who is forever chased around our planet. But sometimes the moon wanders off the path, loses her way, and the cat catches her! Whenever jakmani catches her, you can observe the moon slowly being devoured. This is a lunar eclipse. So once the moon begins to be devoured, it's the duty of all village children to scare the cat into releasing the lost moon.

A villager about our age named Ibrahim told some elderly women that the story is not true. He said it was announced on the radio that morning that there would be a lunar eclipse. He went on to say that scientists can predict these phenomena years in advance. The old ladies were skeptical to believe this hogwash but realized Ibrahim was a huge liar when he said that it even happens to the sun sometimes.

Anyway, it was a close one this time. We trembled in fear, watching the cat swallow the moon. Then apparently after an hour jakmani was too much a scaredy cat to digest the moon, so he regurgitated her. All the while the village youth chanted and raised a ruckus. I don't know how they did it, but they pulled it off. Here's to you, kids. You saviors of the world, you.
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Monday, June 13, 2011

Peace Corps Extreme

Written by Chad


Things get pretty intense when you're a volunteer.


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Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Breaking Village News

Written by Tana

Pilfered Poultry Sounds the Alarm on Slumbering Smuggler

Sunday, May 29, 2011

An unsuspecting wife and mother in a quiet village in Banfora, Burkina Faso experienced the surprise of her life Monday morning when she heard the crowing of a rooster. This was not just any rooster, but one of several fowl cleverly removed from the courtyards of their owners during the wee hours of the night by a robber. Not so cleverly however, the robber, after his momentous effort to gather his loot, was exhausted and lay down for a quick nap in a cashew tree grove. It just so happens that this cashew tree grove is right beside the well where our heroine fetches water every morning. Upon seeing the guilty party surrounded by chickens and roosters that she recognized as belonging to her neighbors, she accosted him, but he fled the scene, startled. The chickens have since been successfully returned to their rightful owners. The perpertrator remains on the loose, but is considered unarmed and not dangerous.

Humanity Harrows Humble Hound Hunt Heroes

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

At 14:00, the able-bodied men of a small village in Banfora, Burkina Faso embarked on a hunt that would last five minutes. Taking up any arms they could find, including rakes, hoes, and long sticks, they took off running after what appeared to be a possessed canine. The chase continued along the edge of the paved road to the southern end of the village until it culminated in the eventual slaughter of the rabid animal in a large field just out of sight of the courtyard of the village chief. "I heard all of the noise and thought at first that people were chasing the chicken robber," reports local Peace Corps Volunteer and resident, McCoulibaly Tene. "But then I saw that the men were chasing a dog that was chasing a goat which made me think it was an animal sacrifice but then my neighbor said it was just a dog with rabies." Sources confirm that no humans or other animals were harmed by the maniacal mongrel, although it did scare many sheep and goats along its path of attempted destruction.


Village Leaders Come Together to Discuss Project Goals, End Up Discussing Philosophy

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

A meeting that began with the compilation of a report on the farmers' union's activities took a deep turn when one man claimed to be a sociologist and a philosopher. Having finished writing the report, the group that had assembled to accomplish a simple assignment became faced with the daunting task of explaining the source of true human happiness and whether man can be happy in the midst of persistent problems and poverty. Adama, self-proclaimed socio-philosopher, offered the idea that surface happiness comes and goes throughout the day but that true happiness cannot be the same for any two people nor can it ever be fully achieved as long as a person lives, as new problems arrive whenever old problems are resolved. Playwright and film director Omar posited that happiness results from the achievement of objectives as well as the resolution of problems, adding that complete happiness would require a "lack of problems." A health-sector Peace Corps Volunteer suggested that perhaps happiness means accepting problems while working to overcome or diminish them. The village chief and union president withheld commentary but listened attentively. The group concluded that for a person to be happy, his or her problems must be of lesser importance than his or her sources of joy. The group also considered ways to help villagers experience peace despite their problems, including writing a play in which a person with a terminal illness is able to accept her quality of life and inspire others.
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