I am just about through my first week in Diebougou, and
finding it all rather a strain still, largely because the heat is oppressive
and I have not yet found my internal thermostat, so day, evening, middle of the
night – all too damn hot! There is a
moment at about 5am when I go to check for the first time in the day, along
with all the neighbours, if the mains water is running – usually it isn’t –
when I feel like a normal human being, rather than a sweaty lardy cake.
For most of the tiny number of houses here, large buckets
and drums must be filled when the water is on.
For the majority of residents of Diebougou, there are collection points
and for some of my neighbours there is a well, which they draw from every morning
with buckets. This is poor Africa writ
large.
I am getting the hang of talking here. Genders do not seem to matter. Simple synonyms work if the original choice
of vocabulary fails to get a response.
The accent is almost as deplorable as the Canadian one my colleague
speaks with. I shall come back
incomprehensible. Dommage.
Yesterday I spent 8 hours in a car travelling to a team
meeting to the far South, and then even further south to see an installation of
the magic device which will save West Africa with much help from Luxemburg, the
EU and Bill and Melinda Gates. This is
known as la plate-forme multifonctionelle and is an 8 stroke diesel motor. Given to women, put in villages, and run by
them it provides electricity, or pumped water, or husking or milling or
soldering, or it provides recharging for mobiles which can be sold, or powers a
bakery, and frees them from some of the enormous number of hours they would
have to spend otherwise doing these things by hand. No use giving it to the men, who do not do
these things anyways. A programme is
rolling out – has been for some time – and is just hitting my area of BF and
one of the things I shall be involved in
is gathering stories of success and promulgating them. The BF term is vulgarisation – I prefer
médiatisation. VARENA Asso, my NGO, is
the agent for the South West. Voilà, my
mission.
Even here, there is a local baker preparing what appears to
be French bread – it is more like pain de mie in baguette form, but hey! I am not arguing! I am living off that, coffee, pasta, rice and
vegetable dishes I make. I have my nice
lady at the market who now gives me extra tomatoes – like I need the support! –
as she sorts out the best carrots, peppers, potatoes and onions for me. Lovely green beans. I must ask lovely Kadi at work where I can
get reasonably fresh meat as otherwise, not quite sure where the protein will
come from. The eggs are too plentiful to
be anything other than Chinese battery farmed and I am careful of my stomach. There are sheep, goats, pigs with piglets,
chickens and turkeys wandering about the streets – someone must be doing some
fresh butchering somewhere! But the
appetite is small on account of the heat, which is a shame as I quite like the
discipline of cooking for myself in the evenings. The frequent power cuts make the fridge a
convenient water cooler rather than a serious mechanism for preserving fresh
food.
If ever you wondered about the need for plastic carrier
bags, a trip to any BF town or city would tell you they are a curse upon our
planet. As there are many foraging
animals, no morsel of food goes uneaten.
Paper is burned. Plastic bottles
and tins are recycled with enthusiasm.
Black plastic carrier bags litter every street side and mix in with the
empty water sachets as a sort of perversely coloured polythene snowstorm. Once I am a little more acclimatised and less
conspicuous I shall take pictures of all this – and the fabulous recycled
products. Oh, and the fabrics – not the
batick and tie dye, but the printed ones with lozenges saying Jésu, priez pour nous with a glorious
holy picture. Everyone is wearing
them. But presently, Simon and I as the
new whites in town are pretty conspicuous.
There are a few old French nuns, and that is it as far as whites are
concerned. Visible? Hell yes! So no camera for now.
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