I'm not always understood even in my mothertongue. Often when I approach some people chatting enthusiastically, I have this tendency to cannonball right in mid-conversation with some offhand comment. That's when the music abruptly cuts off with a needle scratch and everyone around the room's smiles fall flat, as if vacuumed into the black hole of my irretractable words. Then after the awkward stares of bewilderment, the people I interrupted explain, "We were talking about such-and-such, not about whether American Idol should do a spin-off for pets." This also happens in lots of other situations besides the incident above when I accidentally attended a Lamaze class.

Anyway, as if I wasn't already socially inelegant enough, our plane lands here, smack dab in the middle of Nobody-Understands-English-Land. Now I wear my social ineptitude like a scarlet letter on my chronically unshaven visage. On any given day in America there's a likely chance my mouth's sputterings won't make sense, but here it's a foregone conclusion. If conversation is some kind of exquisite ballroom dance, then in the States maybe I'm a wallflower with two left feet and in Africa I'm some kind of blind, paraplegic amputee... who's comatose. If you happen to be a blind, comatose amputee who happens to be reading this, please don't take offense until after the next paragraph (after which you'll pity me and drop the lawsuit). Also, wow, talk about a coincidence.

Anyway, having spent the first twenty-four years of my life greeting people with a simple hello, my brain isn't conditioned to greet people according to the time of day. I'm walking along daydreaming whimsically, then someone jumps out of nowhere and I panic: is it morning, afternoon, evening, or night? Since I think in the Queen's English, I have to translate my ballpark guess in a split second. My default impulse is usually blurting out "Ani wula" (good evening). Especially in the morning to the first person I encounter. Excuse me if I don't keep tabs on the sun's position every waking moment. The sun and I have an agreement. I stay out of his business, don't stare directly at him, and he doesn't burn my face off.

So today, as a friend--or complete stranger, depending--I'd like to impart to you some of the quirky nuances of communicating in West Africa. That way if you quit your successful job and move to West Africa, you won't be doomed on countless occasions to blunder as I have. First thing, you'll need to know the rudimentary nonverbals:

• You know how an American preschooler likes to wave--holding his hand up like he's taking an oath and flapping his four fingers up and down? That's how you beckon somebody here in Africa. Or you can yell Fozzy Bear's signature catch phrase, which in the local language of the Mossi people translates to "come hither."
• To beckon a dog in West Africa, make a clicking noise with the front of your mouth. To beckon chickens or chicks, make a side-mouth click. Yes, there's a difference- try it, you naysayer. To beckon computer mice, I'm not sure.
• To shoo away pesky animals, you hiss at them. It works, too. And although I haven't lab-tested it, I have a theory that snakes might interpret this as flirtation.
• Speaking of which, if you ever scratch someone's palm with your pointer finger while handshaking, this is the Burkinabe equivalent of brazenly making a pass at them or delivering a smarmy, innuendo-laden pickup line. One time we hired a tiny, old man to help clean our latrine, which by the way contained a bike tire tube and a dead chicken among other buried treasures. And when I shook his hand, I felt a palm scratch and thought he was hitting on me. Sadly, it turns out his index finger was just dislocated.
• To indicate that somebody is crazy: do an upside-down gun-to-the-head gesture with your hand, then in a single rapid motion rotate your hand away from your head. This one's tricky to describe, so I hope when you perform it, people understand. If they don't, please don't sue me- an amputee group is already waging class action against me.
• To indicate someone is a man, stroke your chin like a contemplating diabolical supervillain. To indicate someone is a woman, clench two tiny imaginary damsels in your fists and hold them to your chest like King Kong.
• To get somebody's attention, make a loud cartoony smoochy noise until they look at you. We hear these smooches all the time walking through the city. As an American, it initially struck me as something the drunk at the end of the bar might do, but in reality it's as neutral as a simple "hey."
• To hail a cab, put your hand parallel to the road and fan the ground like you're patting dirt.
• After hearing bad news, it is customary to put your hand on your face. Make sure it's your own face.
• Greeting everybody you see as if they're all your best friend might be interpreted as fake in America, but here it's the best way to gain acceptance. When you're greeting someone, you can show extra respect by holding your elbow with your free hand as you handshake. Oftentimes, people will hold your hand for the entire time you talk to them--don't panic--this is normal. If you're a woman, also flex your knees in curtsy-esque maneuver. If you don't feel like shaking people's hands across the room, nod your head as you shake your own hand across your chest. You can also show respect by touching your solar plexis right after the handshake.
• To inquire "where are you going," hold one arm out with your palm facing down and then rotate it facing up. Taxi guys, eager for passengers, always do this gesture to pedestrians.
• To alert someone to danger, snap your fingers.
• To warn your enemies that you're going to hit them, raise and lower your hand in the air while snapping.

If you decide quit your job and move to West Africa, nonverbals aren't the only thing you need to know, unless you plan to be a mime. Thus, we now turn to the Jula (Dioulla) language of Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania, and Cote d'Ivoire. And forgive me- I'd rather write about the oddball stuff than be a dullard who reports useful, pertinent, meaningful matters of consequence. So here's a crash course on all the linguistic trifles I could glean from a single week of Jula class:

• The word for bicycle negeso means "metal horse."
• Some of the Jula words for body parts make me laugh. Kunsigi, the Jula word for hair, is actually a combination of the words for "head" and "sit." Bolokunadenw, the word for fingers, means "children at the head of the hand." The word for knee kunbiri means "head that bends." The word for buttocks jukuna means "head of your back." Nyadenw, the word for eyes, means "face children." In summary, your body is covered in heads and children.
• The word for diarrhea is konoboli meaning "running stomach."
• The words for basic colors are really long: neremuguman is yellow and green is binkeneman, which means "healthy grass." They only acknowledge six colors and they don't have a word for purple or orange. This must make interior decorating a chore.
• The word for a tailor, fanikalanla, means "clothes covering person." Perhaps, the most satisfying word to say is butikitigi, which is a store clerk.
• When you see somebody drinking you can say "Ala k'aw wili ni heere ye," which means "May God help you stand up with health." When you see somebody eating you can say "Ala ka suma I kono," which means "May God cool the food in your tummy." At a wedding, you can say to the bride and groom, "Ala ka bolo ni seen boara," which translates as "May God get from your marriage many hands and feet." The hands and feet of the many kids you will hypothetically have.
• In the Jula language and tradition, all sisters of your wife are also your wives (Sorry, Sherry and Stacy). I'm also obliged to share Tana with my brother Ryan as she is also his wife.

Here the hippos are either sacredly kissing or sacredly brawling:

As a post post script, Tana told me my Jula spelling of sukaromusa was totally wrong, so I fixed it.

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.














(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.

Traveling alone, I hop on a packed charter bus from Bobo-Dioulasso to Banfora. There are 50 seats plus people sitting in the aisles. This guy opens a bag of chocolates and gives one to everybody on the bus. I take this gesture as a random act of kindness and forget about it until twenty minutes later he gets up again. He starts handing out tiny booklets for everyone to read. I'm assuming at this point he's some sort of a missionary. He starts talking, but I'm not in the mood to convert today, so I just gaze out the window and try to calculate the last digit of Pi.

Later, a few booklets eventually make it back to me, and I read the title- something about the marvels of urotherapy. Not sure what that is, so I open to the table of contents and skim through. So this is a booklet about the healing properties of urine? Looking at everyone's faces, they're all taking it seriously. It explains that since urine is actually blood filtered through the kidneys, it's the purest kind of liquid. It can be ingested or applied to the skin to clean out toxins. By passing through the digestive tract, urine gains valuable nutrients, such as vitamins and neurotransmitters. It says if you coat your skin in urine, you will sweat less. The taste is like vegetable broth with the fresh scent of hay. At this point I've been staring at this booklet for a long time, like a kindergartener taking more than five Mississippis at the water fountain. So I pass it back to other passengers.

The next stage of the pitch: The man unveils a bingo dotter filled with a green liquid. He had apparently dyed the urine green and added a minty fragrance to it. Bingo dotter in hand, the man walks row to row, asking each person if he can rub the scented green urine on the back of their necks. People are giggling and looking at each other, but I watch as most everybody complies. After making his rounds, he sells boxfuls of this scented green urine in clear plastic baggies to about half the bus. It's all about presentation, I suppose.

It reminds me of the guy in Tommy Boy who could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. But I think selling people your own urine is even more impressive.

The first time I heard about it on a radio program in the States. The segment was about some American dude who woke up in a train station in India with no memory of his own identity. He had no idea who he was or how he got there. The national authorities eventually found his name was David and got him the next flight home to his family. It was as if he was meeting his parents, his girlfriend, and (through photo albums and stories) his former self for the first time. It turns out that the same culprit responsible for his freak memory loss is the malaria drug that I take every Sunday. Small world.

The next time I heard about it, we were fresh off the plane and a second-year volunteer was lecturing us about the drug-induced schizophrenia we would inevitably experience: "This one girl woke up in the middle of the night, hallucinating that the ceiling was melting!" Hallucinations? I wondered whether this drug would wake me nightly in the wee hours to confront each of my greatest fears, one by one brought to life at the foot of my bed: ghosts of dead British children, horseshoe crabs, ventriloquists, crowded locker rooms. You know, the kind of stuff that horrifies all of humanity. I was prepared to voluntarily commit myself to the regional psych ward.

Thankfully, such hallucinatory night terrors have only haunted me once. In some sort of paranoid stupor, I awoke three times throughout the night believing spiders in my mattress were sucking blood from my back. I remember repeatedly bolting upright and brushing the creepy crawlies off my sheets, groaning at Tana to fetch the bugspray. I sat up each time (my go-to knee jerk reaction), half-believing it was true and half-believing the vision was false. After about fifteen seconds of vividly staring at these tricks of the imagination, all smoke would clear and I would realize I had been yet again deceived by the small white malaria pill called Mefloquine



Mefloquine isn't always psychoactive in a spooky way- while on this drug, I've had some of the most vibrant, dazzling dreams of my life. One night while snoozing, I found myself swinging from treetop to treetop in a rainforest by grabbing hold of the tails of multicolored snakes, the kind that don't bite and like to be swung from. Before Mefloquine, I've only ever achieved this quality and intensity of dreams after binge overeating at a Chinese buffet.

Way before the flesh-eating spider attack, I experienced three memorable hallucinations on separate nights. In the first, I sat up in bed, realizing I was somehow seated in a bustling airport terminal while people were hurrying past me on either side. The surrounding movements and commotion gradually dissolved to reveal the only movement around me was the wind rustling the mosquito net. Telle me, why again do I need that thing when I'm already sacrificing my sanity to be malaria-free?

During my second lapse of reality, Mefloquine convinced my brain that Tana and I had accidentally dozed off beside a swamp under a willow tree. Twice that night, I woke up and prodded Tana's arm, saying "We need to go home. It's gonna get dark soon." I was about to make a beeline for who-knows-where, until Tana talked me down like a hostage negotiator, and the swamp disappeared in a puff of smoke. Or maybe a puff of swamp gas.

The third incident was last night. I awoke, my eyes fixed on the ceiling, realizing that the neighbor kids in my courtyard had somehow fashioned a trap door in the roof above our bed. I saw their heads peering down at me. They had tied a rope around a box the size of a care package. They were lowering the box slowly towards the bed, Mission Impossible style. I swatted the box away with my hands. But when consciousness returned, the box turned out to be, you guessed it, that accursed mosquito net again. That net is the Roadrunner to my Wile E. Coyote.

Tana herself suffered some health problems resulting from Mefloquine early on, so after two months she switched to the daily pill Doxycycline. Before ending her stint as a Mef-head, she had one hallucination that was pretty trippy while we were still living with our host family. She saw a person looming over us, holding a tree branch with berries over our bodies. They were performing some sort of traditional healing on us. She remembers feeling perturbed that one of our host family members had broken in and was trying to heal us. Then she realized nobody was there.

By the way, you're probably really confused, because you thought this was an entry about illegal drug dealing. Sorry, the entry title is a typo- it's supposed to say "Dealing with Drugs." Having told you this, I expect you to read it all once more, bearing in mind that the subject is about coping with our government-issued malaria medicine. If you started reading this because you're an aspiring drug dealer, all I have to say is this: clean up your act, young man.