Some Suggested Reading!

Life in Burkina moves slowly. Nobody is ever in a rush to get anywhere or to finish anything. When you get somewhere, you get there. When you finish something, you finish it. There’s no hustle and bustle like back home. There’s no need to rush. There’s no pressure. Burkinabe just live and that’s life. This is one of the most difficult cultural obstacles for volunteers. We’re so used to having schedules and deadlines, places to be. So what does one do with all of this free time? There are a few options. Sometimes I study the local language, brainstorm future projects, or spend time with my neighbors. A lot of the time, I read. In one month, I’ve almost read ten books. Back home, I never had time to read like that. There were always other things to get done. In village, when its pitch black by 6pm, I’m in my hut by myself by 7 or 8pm reading with my headlamp for a few hours.

I recently read The Poisonwood Bible. I really enjoyed it because there were so many familiarities in the author’s descriptions of village life in the Congo. I found myself wishing I could have described the cultural sights as well as Barbara Kingsolver. So, I thought I would recommend it to my friends and family because she has a way of saying things so much more beautifully than I can! I wanted to point out some of the commonalities between my village and the one depicted in the book…

“…all the world’s a stage of hard red dirt under bare foot- where tired thin women in every thinkable state of dress and disrepair poke sticks into their little fires and cook. Clumps of children stonethrowing outflowing rush upon terrified small goats, scattering them across the road so that the goats may tiptoe back and be chased again. Men sit on buckets and stare at whatsoever passes by. The usual bypasser is a woman sauntering slowly down the road with bundles upon bundles balanced on her head. These women are pillars of wonder, defying gravity while wearing the hohum aspect of perfect tedium. They can sit, stand, talk, shake a stick at a drunk man, reach around their backs to fetch forth a baby to nurse, all without dropping their piled-high bundles upon bundles. They are like ballet dancers entirely unaware they are on stage. I cannot take my eyes from them” (P31).

“The cloths are brightly printed and worn together in jangling mixtures that ring in my ears: pink gingham with orange plaid, for example. Loose-joint breaking-point colors, and whether you find them beautiful or find them appalling, they do make the women seem more festive, and less exhausted” (P31-32).

“The women wear a sarong made of one fabric, with another big square of a different fabric wrapped over the top of it. Never jeans or trousers- not on your life. Bosoms may wave in the breeze, mind you, but legs must be strictly hidden, top secret” (P43).

“We see village women constantly sweeping their huts and the barren clearings in front of their homes with palm-frond brooms…” (P60).

“’Ko ko ko!’ which is what people in Kilanga shout in someone’s doorway when they come visiting, since generally there is no door to knock on” (P75).

“Cooking meals here requires half the day, and cleaning takes up the other half” (P76).

“From everywhere within walking distance, every fifth day, people with hands full or empty appeared in our village to saunter and haggle their way up and down the long rows where women laid out produce on mats on the ground. The vendor ladies squatted, scowling, resting their chins on their crossed arms, behind fortresses of stacked kola nuts, bundles of fragrant sticks, piles of charcoal, salvaged bottles and cans, or displays of dried animal parts” (P88).

“’Fire’ meant gathering up a pile of sticks in a village that had already been gathering firewood for all the years since God was a child, picking its grounds clean of combustibles as efficiently as an animal combing itself for lice. So ‘fire’ meant longer and longer forays into the forest, stealing fallen branches…Every small effort at hygiene was magnified by hours of labor spent procuring the simplest elements: water, heat, anything that might pass for disinfectant” (P92).

“There seemed to be no food to speak of, even on a market day when everybody came around to make the tallest possible pile out of what they had. It didn’t seem to stack up to enough sustenance for the two dozen families in our village…”

“After we first arrived, the children congregated outside our house each and every morning, which confused us. We thought there must be something peculiar, such as a baboon, on our roof. Then we realized the peculiar thing was us. They were attracted to our family for the same reason people will pull over to watch a house afire or a car wreck. We didn’t have to do a thing in the world to be fascinating but move around in our house, speak, wear pants, boil our water” (P104).

“Women, usually, carrying the world on their heads: a huge glass demijohn full of palm wine, with a calabash bowl perched on top like an upside-down hat; or a bundle of firewood tied up with elephant grass, topped off with a big enamel tub full of greens. The Congolese sense of balance is spectacular” (P107).

“Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married…And the younger girls- if they are too young to be married and too old to be strapped on someone’s back (which is not a wide margin)…” (P107).

“The little babies take one look and burst out crying” (P108).

“Also sometimes we’ll see a witch doctor with aspirins, pink pills, yellow pills, and animal pieces all laid out neat in rows on a black velvet cloth. He listens to your ailments, then tells you whether you need to buy a pill, a good-luck charm, or just go home and forget about it” (P108).

“On other days when there’s no market, people just congregate in the main square for one thing and another: hairdos, shoe repair, or just gossiping in the shade. There’s a tailor who sets up his foot-pedal sewing machine under the tree and takes their orders, simple as that. Hairdos are another matter, surprisingly complicated, given that women have no real hair to speak of…If they’ve got an inch or two to work with, the hairdresser will wrap sprigs of it in black thread so it stands up in little spikes…”(P109).

“He has scars all over his face. Not accident scars, but thin little lines, the type that some of them here get done to them on purpose, like a tattoo” (P125).

More to come… J