Monday, February 14, 2011
Chad & Tana Pig Out
Written by
Tana
Today's entry will impress some, depress others. It will undoubtedly make all of you stop reading our blog because you will realize that we just aren't suffering the way you all hoped we would in the good-old-fashioned Peace Corps tradition. In fact, we have been quite enjoying ourselves with the following dishes. However, please don't let this discourage you from taking us out to dinner when we get home in December 2012. We will be hungry from all this cooking we've had to do.
Grilled Cheese with Chick-Fil-A Sauce
Fajitas in bed with Sheldon
Pizza
Pizza with Me
Curry, not yet finished
Pepperoni Pizza Crackers
Monkey Bread
Monkey Bread Dough, Punched
Spaghetti Sauce
We may be excellent cooks, but don't be fooled. We never cooked this much back in the USA. We relied heavily on delicious and convenient fast food sources such as Arby's and Wendy's and Chick-Fil-A, and Chipotle and Jimmy John's and Dunkin' Donuts and Panera, if you can call that fast food. We do so miss the comforting, familiar faces of the good people who work in these establishments. Their name tags. Their paper hats. The way they always have change. That's right, here in Burkina, no one has change. They leave the restaurant and go next door to ask if anyone has change for a 10. And, believe it or not, the last McDonald's restroom you used was significantly cleaner than any public latrine in this country. (But probably only marginally cleaner than the latrine at our house.)
And now, because we feel so guilty from making you drool over our culinary achievements, here are some how-to instructions for those of you at home who would like to eat as well as we do here in our humble African village.
PRETZELS 101:
Step 1. Make the dough.
Step 2. Shape the dough into pretzels.
Step 3. Put the pretzels on an oven-safe plate.
Step 4. Put the cooked pretzels in an air-tight container.
APPLE PIE 101:
Step 1. Bake the pie.
Step 2. Let the pie cool for at least 2 minutes.
Step 3. Serve the pie with a fork.
Step 4. Your family members will be happy.
BENGA (BEANS) 101:
Step 1. Look at the little insect holes in the beans.
Step 2. Remove as many insects as possible.
Step 3. Boil the beans. And watch the remaining insects rise to the top.
Step 4. Add KC Masterpiece Barbecue sauce.
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Friday, February 04, 2011
Salif's Letter to My Parents
Written by
Chad
Salif is my local counterpart and one of the nicest guys around. After public school, he learned English almost entirely by teaching himself through books. He can speak French, English and the two local languages of Jula and Toussian. His helpfulness and communication skills have made my integration so much easier. Out of the blue last week, he told me he had decided to write my parents a letter. A couple days later, he handed me this to send it to my parents and share with my friends back home:
Dear Mom and Dad!
I'm sorry, if I'll disturb you with my letter, although that it is super, I think!
As God Almighty knows every day, how to resolve His things, contrary to us, the human body. I want here to tell you to be very happy, because your children, son and daughter, are in good hands. I don't know you! Neither you to me! But with God circumstances, we shall know each other one day.
Before I continue to speak about myself, let me tell you about my country Burkina Faso. The name Burkina Faso is Moore and Dioula, two local languages of the country and mean that the country of honor men.
BF shortly one state of Africa continent. BF is situated in the middle of West Africa, limited to the northwest by Mali republic, southeast by Niger republic and the south by Ivory Coast; Ghana; Togo; and Benin republics. BF is a French colony, we speak Francais as official language, we took our independence August 5th, 1960. It's first president was: Maurice Yameogo, followed by others like General Lamisana; Saye Zerbo; Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo; Capitaine Sankara. Actually the president is Blaise Compaore. It was during the revolutionary man Capitaine Thomas Sankara that the country took the symbolic name Burkina Faso, otherwise the name was Haute-Volta according to the French colonial. The climate of BF is tropical, it is very hot all the year round. We have two seasons:
- dried season from October to April
- rainy season from May to September.
BF is a poor country. Our economic based on agriculture and breeding animals as: goats, cows, horses, donkeys, hens... Products of agriculture are: meal; corn; sesame; peanut; bean... But this agriculture is only for food and not industrial at all. I've already said that BF is a poor country but were very proud to be Burkinabe, the inhabitant of Burkina Faso, because no war, no discrimination in Burkina Faso. There is only hospitality and brotherhood in Burkina Faso. Chad and Tana are here to confirm that I'm speaking to.
Then, Mom and Dad, we shall be such happy to receive your visite in Burkina Faso land. Imagine how will be your astonishment! And your Happiness!
Let's get back to the subject in hand: I'm Salif. Aged 28; Hight: 1.70 m. I went to school, but without no qualification, I was jobless and decided to work in O.N.G. which produce and sold some fruits as mangoes, oranges, cashews... It was in this case, I was chosen by my villagers, to work and to lead with Chad as he was also a good boy.
I get married and have a small daughter. My wife name: Orokia; she is still at school. Whenever and wherever I like to be with Chad, he is always sympathetic and funy!
Chad and Tana are living in Banfora district, a town situated at the south of BF. Their village is 15km from Banfora on the national road route 7 to Ivory Coast. In this village, the weither is better than the rest of the country as Ouahigouya at the north of BF. The village is at the heart of the "waterfalls area," so we have many trees, water and the greenery is all the year round.
Although the poverty, the villagers are such proud of their village because security is guaranteed. No war, no discrimination, no dangerous animals. All is better to the better of the possible world.
Chad and Tana, they are in their own country here! In BF, we've brotherhood and even "peoplehood," I tell you dear parents! For another time, I'd like to finish my letter by greeting you and the America's people. Mom and Dad, guess how will be my happiness to receive your own answer to my letter! Good-bye! See you soon! May God bless us! And I welcome you to Burkina Faso!!!
Sign:
Salif
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Home Sweet Hut
Written by
Tana
Here are the blueprints to our non-air-conditioned, non-running-water abode, in case you want to plan a heist.
Our porch with a straw-mat lattice to give us some shade while we sit and do Sudoku.
The living room and somebody who thinks he's cool.
It's reasonably cheap to get quality custom furniture here. The carpenters in our village made us these, a kitchen table, and a shelf for the shower.
We hung up the pictures you sent us. You can click on the picture to enlarge.
Here is our kitchen, complete with a canteen, a desert fridge, a water filter, and a stove.
We store water in this barrique that I have to transport on my head from the nearby well with the help of our neighbors.
The scrub bowl and the rinse bowl.
The volunteer before us, Amanda, left us a humongo bed frame and the only real mattress in a country of foam mattresses.
The bathroom has a hole in the floor for water to escape. We brought a solar shower and had a shelf built for convenience. To use the latrine, we have to leave our house and walk a ways.
Here's your room, the guest room. Your accommodations include one bed, one water filter, one candle, and one mosquito net. We always have our staff place complimentary mints on your pillow each night.
The length of the hall is perfect for practice triple handsprings.
Special thanks to Carol, Janet, Jeannie, Pat, and Bob for the care packages! We love everything and are trying to pace ourselves so we don't eat all 2 tons of it this week. Bob, those parmesan packets you smuggled from Papa Johns taste amazing. Rest assured that the jail time you may have to serve is well worth the yumminess.
FIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRREE!!!!!!
Written by
Chad
Who could have foreseen the horror that would befall our village's beloved sugarcane plantation that fateful January evening? The towering plume of smoke. The shouts of children going berserk. A cataclysmic brushfire of doom raging outside our window. Would Tana and I escape the jaws of fiery death or perish in a burst of flames?
Ending spoiler: Okay, so we weren't in any imminent peril at all- it was less a catastrophe and more a spectacle. I just wanted to add some over-the-top action for the eventual animated Disney movie adaptation of our blog. Needless to say, we, the titular heroes, broke away unscathed and have lived happily ever after. That's not to deflate all the drama though, since the fire was pretty freakin huge. And it led to the demise of a field near and dear to us. RIP, Fieldy McFieldington.
Just the day before, we were lounging at the edge of the Fieldy and sipping Coca Cola from glass bottles. Looking across the sugarcane plantation is a lot like looking at the ocean from a beach chair. The wind sweeps across the rolling acres, almost like waves. Sometimes I can almost see a dolphin fin emerging out on the horizon. Actually that's not true, but what I'm trying to say is that it's very pretty, if you're into that treehugger nature-is-beautiful kind of stuff. Which I may or may not be, depending on whether that will diminish your respect for me.
Not only are the fields aesthetically pleasing to the eye, they're tasty too. Neighbor kids sometimes bring us cane stalks as gifts that they sneak from the fields. Even though it tastes really good, it takes way too much general effort to get to the edible part. My guess is that you expend twice as much energy tearing the stalk apart with your teeth, fingernails, and knees than you gain from the subsequent ingestion. The process is simple to understand but difficult to master- just savagely attack the stick with your entire body and soul and repeatedly bludgeon it against the concrete. After all this toil, more than the taste itself, biting into the sugary core instills a sense of achievement over nature. It's the same achievement that cavemen may have felt after skewering and barbecuing a mastadon or an American might experience after carefully assembling the meat, cheese, and crackers of a Lunchables. Of course, Lunchables isn't quite the same full-body workout as sugarcane.
By the way, you don't actually eat it- you just kinda gnaw on it. It's like sinking your teeth into wet plywood. You can't swallow the splintering little woodchips and must therefore spew them from your mouth with all the elegance of a vomiting beaver. Eating sugarcane is one of those things you do for the journey, not the destination, I guess. Anyway, back to the action.
It's not half as gratifying to yell "LE FEU!" in French as it is to yell "FFIIIIIRRE!!" in English. When we looked out the window and saw the huge red wall of flames, it was the same feeling conjured up by all those natural disaster movies a couple years back. We were clueless as to why there was a ten-foot fire. Maybe this was how Mrs. O'Leary felt after her cow kicked the lantern. The surrealness of it all was only enhanced by the fact that a happening of this grandeur should occur on 1/11/11, a date just begging for a happening.
Some of our younger neighbors met us on the porch and accompanied us to the edge of the fields set ablaze. They explained to us that this happens once a year. In early January, the SOSUCO Corporation that owns the plantation uses controlled fires to help harvest the crop. Burning the stalks, it turns out, somewhat helps the laborers circumvent the aforementioned hassle that stands between the village kids and their sugarcane fix. As we all watched, the president of the mango union at which I work told us that he thinks it's not the most environmentally sound practice with the smoke pollution and all.
The principal reason they scorch the fields is to kill off insects, weeds, and animals. This is fortunate for the village kids who stand at the edge of the brush to intercept all the little critters scurrying out of the fray. Just when the mice think they've reached safety, they scurry straight into the kids' hands. You should see the children beaming so proudly, each showing off his dead mouse carcass as if it were an Olympic medal. Even seemingly innocent girls merrily join in the slaughter. Some of the kids will make a tasty meal out of the mouse meat. Others just like playing with dead animals. And who doesn't?
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Death-Defying Expedition of Wonderment & Discovery
Written by
Chad
Even though mankind follows the seven-days-in-a-week rule, our sister village across the gorge has market every five days. So, each time we correctly calculate this clumsy interval, we go through our market day routine: rise and shine, slurp down our instant coffee, trade out our pajamas for dress casual, and kick open the double doors. Time to embark once again into the throes of danger, to scale the canyon, to buy carrots.
As we make our way out of village, we greet women wearing multi-gallon bowls like hats and kids kicking ragged balls in the dust. We shout our Jula greeting "ani sogoma" to everyone within earshot. Oftentimes, a neighbor waves us down, waylaying our galavant with an invitation to kick back in hammock chairs and sip some tea.
Here, tea parties are not rendezvouses solely attended by little girls and their teddy bears. It's adult men who crowd around their meticulously maintained tea sets, pouring an intensely potent Chinese blend into shot glasses. Once brewed, the teapartiers repeatedly pour it from one cup to another, aiming to maximize frothiness. The ultimate mark of a Burkinabe renaissance man, I've learned, is his proclivity for producing an excessively frothy brew. The target ratio appears to be 75 percent foam to 25 percent tea.
Exiting the village, we tread through a papaya grove and past a big termite mound, coming face to face with the half-mile-wide gorge. At the precipice you can look across from either side and see the stone buildings and tin roofs of the adjacent villages. Looking down, it's all treetops. This marks the ideal spot for the hundred-foot zipline I've been dreaming about, should they ever decide to convert the gorge into an amusement park. A zipline or maybe a bungee jump.
The farther you descend into the belly of the canyon, the more tropical greenhousey it gets. The creek in the middle, surrounded by an orchard of banana trees, is passable in winter by way of a two-log bridge. Come rainy season, however, if you're not Michael Phelps, it's best to just bike the three-mile detour. Down in the ravine, women are always washing their clothes. The hodgepodge way they lay out their clothes to dry makes it look like somebody's hamper exploded.
We saw a snake down here last time, but it saw my muscular physique and wisely fled the confrontation. It was hardly the life-flashing-before-one's-eyes kind of safari moment that one leaves his birth continent to chase. But wait, stay on the edge of your seat: by night there is danger afoot in the gorge! The creek is home to a band of nocturnal hungry hippos who consider the nearby cornfields an all-you-can-eat buffet. Tana and I are in talks to assemble a hippo-watching troupe. We will scale trees on summer mornings and train our binoculars on the depths of the creek. Just as birdwatching enthusiasts call themselves "birders," history will know us as "hippers."
Not to mention, there are these giant komodo dragon-esque reptiles called monitors. Modern-day dinosaurs. Tana was lucky enough to see one at a restaurant in November. Her local counterpart and mentor Ibrahim is to monitors what Steve Irwin was to crocodiles, minus the Australian accent. When Ibrahim captures a monitor, an entire family can eat from all the meat. Ibrahim has vowed to let us sample this delicacy following his next hunt. That's an especially awesome bullet point on my bucket list.
The ascent to the destination town involves climbing narrow red clay footholds. Pretty steep and not yet wheelchair accessible. Market is about as busy as Wal-Mart on Black Friday. It's a sea of people cramming through a tight labyrinth of unlabeled products. To avoid head trauma, you have to limbo under the protruding sticks of the vendors' wooden huts. At times it feels like traversing the tubes and ball pits at a McDonald's playplace.
All around you are tons of unidentifiable meats and colored powders in baggies. Products of all shapes and sizes and species. A table full of dried anchovies reminds me of the fishhead on my plate the other night that I respectfully declined, citing lack of courage. They also sell rocks here you're supposed to eat (especially pregnant women, we're told). I might as well try that while Uncle Sam's footing my dental bill.
Wow, I just realized this entry is way too long. I promise I'm not trying to punish you for caring about our whereabouts and whathaveyous. I just need to stop having thoughts, that's all. Maybe take up a hobby like widdling figurines out of soap.
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