9-22 Weekend in Pobe

September 22, 2009
This past weekend, we left Ouaga again in groups of three with a professor. Lizzie, Brian and I went with our professor, Helene Lafrance, a quebecoise librarian at Santa Clara, to visit her daughter who happens to be a peace corps volunteer in a village called Pobe in Northern Burkina Faso. We rode the bus from Ouaga at 530am and arrived at the Northern town called Ouaigouya (sp?). As my friend Meghan says, Ouaigouya is like everything you hate about Ouagadougou. As we waited for the car to pick us up to bring us to Pobe, we remarked on the startling number of vultures in the air, on buildings, and walking along the streets. Adamah, Pobe’s richest man and consequently its only owner of a car, picked us up in his twenty-five year old white Toyota Carina II (to be precise). If I ever need a car, I am searching for this one. This little car went through 2 feet of water, across the savannah, and made the two and a half hour trek from Ouaigouya’s dusty holey roads to Pobe countless times. At one point while crossing a small river (seriously), we were surprised to discover a hole in the bottom of the car that water seeped through.

When we arrived in Pobe, we looked like we had had a spray tan. Our faces were covered with orange dust from driving with the windows open. If you look at a map you will notice that Burkina Faso is landlocked and the border between north and sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara actually ends in Northern Burkina, very close to Pobe, so even though this is the rainy season, it was hot and dry and dusty.

We arrived at Helene’s daughter Emilie’s home. She lives in a two room mud brick house like every other house in almost any village in Burkina. Emilie has been there for one year now and has one year left. She is working on a project for women’s empowerment, which is really frustrating because culturally women have few rights. Pobe is predominantly Muslim village so there is a lot of polygamy (Adamah has three wives) and even though she is supposed to be working with women, very few have been educated, so she can’t communicate with them. The main language of Pobe is very rare and dying out so the Peace Corps taught her another local language in training instead so she has to learn this language by herself. I think it’s frustrating for her and she has ended up doing a lot having to do with education and she is trying to get a library in the village. We visited the school where she ended up teaching last year. In some classes there are 150 students to one teacher. It’s hard to imagine learning in that environment, and that’s probably why as the years go on, fewer and fewer kids return to school.

Emilie’s friend and neighbor, Sita, showed us around the village. He was absolutely amazing. He took us to these huge ponds that form during this season to see if the crocodiles were out. Yes crocodiles. When we got there, we saw no crocodiles but kids were playing right by the water and Emilie said that people swim in it all the time. Sita explained that the crocodile is their totem (sacred animal spirit), so it would never hurt them. Apparently Sita once wrestled a goat out of the jaws of a hungry crocodile because he really believes it would never do anything to hurt him. Maybe it wouldn’t.

The next day, we woke up early and Adamah drove us to visit a Taureg family whose son Emilie had met at the market one day. From what I know about the Tauregs, they are a nomadic people who used to all live in Mali until their rebellion at the end of the 1980s and had to flee the territory they normally occupied. There are many in Burkina but they don’t consider themselves as Burkinabé. So were drove to see them. We were on the road and suddenly Adamah took a sharp left into the bush and then we saw about 20 camels and a few brightly colored patchwork tents. They served us tea and we talked to the young man, Ibrahim, the only one who spoke some French and Moore. He then asked us if we wanted to help them with the morning milking…of the camels. I have never milked any animal, but now I’ve milked a Taureg’s camel. Then they saddled one up and we all got to ride them one by one. It was such an amazing experience and our visit with the Taureg family has been the highlight of my stay so far.

Later that day we realized that the next day was the last day of Ramadan so buses wouldn’t be running as frequently. The thought of hanging out with the vultures of Ouaigouya was too horrific. Luckily there were rumors of a bus leaving at 1pm that we decided to hope for. That night there was a huge thunder and lightning storm like I’ve never seen before. Rain on a tin roof makes it sound worse that it really is but this rain was deafening. We looked outside and saw a lazy river running through the town. Lizzie and I were imagining ourselves stranded on the roof the next day but Brian, who is from Seattle, thought we were crazy and he was right. The next day it had all been soaked up.

It wasn’t the last day of Ramadan for Pobe (because they hadn’t seen the moon) so Adamah could drive us back to the vulture capital of the world. We got the bus at one and we were home by 6. It was an amazing weekend.