And the smells. In the morning, just when the sun is rising. The night leaving the dry shrubland soil. Something warm and soft, welcoming.
Or when the sun is setting, the rich smell of the depressions. Wild herbs, something not quite like thyme, and sometimes the edge of a distant fire.
I might be a geographer, basing my professional expertise on my eyes. But my feelings are ruled by my nose.
And later, for dinner:
Vegetable stew on onions, pepper, garlic, tomatoes, cabbage, green peas and groundnut paste with rice, and deep fried tofu brochettes that we’ve started buying from a girl who sells them in the street.
(They are all over the place here, the women selling different kinds of food from buckets – deep fried bean dumplings, deep fried plantains, deep fried fish. It is very rare with tofu, though, so when we accidentally drove past one, the whole car went into a frenzy and we now even have her number, to get the tofu delivered to the hotel. They marinate it in some kind of sauce that very much reminds me of pesto. It’s delicious. Anything high on protein tastes heavenly now, after almost four weeks of a basically vegan diet.)
Sitting on the floor cutting vegetables into a pan. Crying like it was the end of the world from the extremely potent onions that they have here. Cooking the food on the gas stove in the corner of our hotel room, camping style (I remember we had the same kind of gas bottles to cook on while camping during the excursion in Namibia, all those years ago), and then sitting down on the floor for an episode of Community with Elli and Desiré while eating. The deliciousness of almost anything edible after a full day of fieldwork. But also: the quality of the vegetables here is amazing. Another nice routine that soon won’t be anymore.
While walking home from the market together with Elli, with bags full of tomatoes, onions and cabbage, I was struck by the feeling that I wasn’t done. We had just bought deep fried aloco with sauce (plantain in English, or food banana), a new favorite discovery of mine, and I got that nostalgic feeling that I get, of missing something even before I’ve left. It is something that comes over me sometimes when I’ve stayed for a while in a place, not really lived, but still long enough to have developed routines.
And I felt: What have I done here? Worked. Been under house arrest. Walked to the market. To be honest, Ouahigouya doesn’t have that much more exciting things to do, unless you want to get drunk on millet beer, but still. In three days we’ll leave, and I might never come back. Ever.
I’m Swedish and Finnish, so I guess melancholy is something that comes to me as easily as breathing.
I spent the rest of the walk home taking photos of completely unremarkable landmarks, just to remember. And to show you. This was my life for the almost four weeks I spent doing field work in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.
Repairs taking place on Ouahigouya’s main street (?).
Elli on our street, outside our hotel.
The hotel/guest house has some kind of research twist to it, and on the wall around the compound, different kinds of edifying messages have been painted. This slightly vandalized one wants to stop female circumcision.
The wifi area, where I’ve spent many evenings defying the mosquitoes, making cut-and-paste-maps and trying (and mostly failing) to Skype with Sweden.
Elli, prepared to leave for the evening weightings of her lysimeters (the bag is mine, stolen at the high school fair from a high school that I didn’t want to go to [Kärrtorp], and now through many twists and turns, it has become Elli’s fieldwork tool bag – quite an adventure for an ugly gift bag, to be sure), in front of the door to our room. Home.
It is funny, with the market here. It covers several blocks, and is partly made up of wooden stalls where they sell vegetables and other food, but also of rows of permanent cement structures. What makes it funny, is that about half of the market is made up of establishments dedicated to selling parts of or entire motorcycles or bicycles, or to repairing them. Everyone drives a motorcycle here, even the fine, made up women in tight-fitting dresses and perfect hairdos.
The rest of the market sells everything from shampoo to dried fish, vegetables, mountains of colorful flip-flops and imaginatively patterend fabrics, as well as tailors in tiny stalls sowing away at (what I imagine to be) amazing dresses for the fine women on the motorcycles.
At every corner, a woman is sitting with a pan over a flame, deep-frying bean or millet dough dumplings or plantains.
And picking up the leftovers from both fast food makers and vegetable sellers are the resident sheep.
I might only be imagining things, maybe I’ve just gotten used to the heat, but it feels like it has gotten slightly colder here since we arrived. At least at night. The temperature in the evenings is actually quite comfortable, and at night I have to sleep in my silk sheets, not on top of them like in the beginning.
According to the internet, this is what should happen. We’re moving into the dry season, and up here in northern Burkina, that is characterized by slightly colder night temperatures brought in by the dry, Harmattan winds from Sahara. Days still stay hot, though, so it’s not a complete rest from heat.
I have been sitting in the wifi area at the hotel all morning today, since seven, and managed to make maps of my transects using Google Maps, despite the internet being uncommonly uncooperative today. Now I have five extremely ugly maps sketches drawn on high resolution satellite images. I don’t know if the villagers are going to understand a thing from them, but the plan is that I will go back and ask the them if they agree with my interpretation of the landscape types in their villages. At least, it feels good that I’m attempting some kind of feedback. If it leads to something interesting for the villagers, or only makes them confused, we’ll have to see.
I’ve listened to four albums with Bright Eyes while map making. I probably haven’t listened to them since I left my teens behind. Somehow it felt suitable now, Conor’s desperation, the roller-coaster internet connection and my cut and paste map making on a porch in the Sahelian heat.
I’ve managed to develop a pretty nasty rash on my hips. It looks like a conglomerate of mosquito bites, but why would a bunch of mosquitoes bite me on the hips, and nowhere else? And how would they even get there? Most of the time I’m wearing pants, and when I’m not, I’m inside a mosquito net. Bed bugs leave similar bite marks, but they wouldn’t concentrate on the hips like this either. And Elli has no bites. I just can’t believe that my hip blood would be so much more delicious than the rest of me and the whole of Elli.
No, it’s a rash. Itchy and red. Right in the spot where my bag hangs while we’re walking through the villages. Tablet, GPS, camera and water bottle. Those are rubbing my sweaty, dirty pants into my hips, giving me the nastiest rash I’ve ever had.
Oh, the life of a field working masters student.
I walked home from the market today. We went there by car, but then Elli needed to go back to Reko to measure her lysimeters, and I decided to walk.
Young men tried to talk to me in their mooré-heavy French, and I just smiled and walked on. I bought guavas and deep fried millet dough dumplings. I took some GPS-points in the city – the market, the bus station. As references, for my maps. I bought a cold soft drink called Africa Cola from a man who asked for my name and said I was beautiful. The coke tasted like Pepsi and had been produced in Ghana. I think I’m going to start buying that now, here, instead of the Coca Cola Company drinks that have taken over the world. The Africa Cola/Lemonade/Pineapple drinks are in such cute little bottles, too.
I’ve missed the kind of freedom that walking gives. Being able to go to places on my own. Knowing where I am. Making my own decisions about my whereabouts. My physical presence in space. We’ve been so busy working, though, that there hasn’t been any time to explore.
But now, walking home from the market, it felt like some kind of normalcy. And I hadn’t realized just how much I had missed it.
(Even though all this attention from men is getting on my nerves. It is limiting my freedom and the space in which I feel comfortable to move, and I don’t like it. It’s not like I’m particularly attractive, not here, in my big hat and dirty hair in a braid. The Burkinabe women are so much more beautiful, in their tight fitting dresses of West African fabrics and imaginative hairdos. People here are Muslims, but you wouldn’t be able to tell on the women. So why can’t these men loitering on their motorcycles on street corners just let me be? The frustration of the day.)
One of my last days in La Paz, Natalia and I bought all the fruits that we had been eating while we were there, and took photographs with them. We had a fruitoshoot.
Now, with the little assortment of fruits that I came home with from the market, I felt I wanted to repeat the exercise of taking still lives of edible things.
I bought lots of guava. Amazing fruit. I love the tartness. I’ve been shown the trees in the villages too, but there has never been any fruit in them. The kids eat them, my guides have told me. And they’re perfectly right to. It’s a delicious fruit.
Seedless, Burkinabe papaya, of course. I can’t get enough of papaya.
And also, Helena made me buy this thing, called a pomme cannelle, or sugar apple. Looks like a dragon’s egg, if you ask me (maybe I’ve been watching a little bit too much of Game of Thrones in the evenings here…). But, when I opened it and tasted the white flesh around the big black seeds, I realized this was just a small sibling of the chirimoya that Natalia and I developed a kind of love-hate relationship with back during my days in Bolivia. A very sweet fruit, tastes almost like pink bubblegum. Great to flavor milkshakes with. I was lucky with this specimen, too, I think. The chirimoyas in Bolivia were often over-ripe, having an aftertaste of decadence and rot. This Burkinabe sibling, though, only tasted sweet.
Combined with some home-roasted groundnuts and a piece of bread, this made for an awesome lunch.
They have street artists here too, painting on boring walls, giving more color to the cityscape.
Elli and Desiré left early this morning to go do infiltration measurements in Reko. Me and Helena slept in, until seven. Such a nice, slow morning.
Helena was going back to Ouagadougou today, but before she took the bus we decided to take a walk through Ouahigouya, just to have seen something of it. And I was surprised of how fast it was to walk from our hotel to the market, a distance that I’ve only gone by car before. I guess it took so long by car, because of the crazy motorcycle and bike traffic here. You can never drive very fast in the towns. But walking is fine (if you can handle the heat, that is).
We saw the local movie theater.
And Helena bought bread at the bakery where we’ve started to buy our lunch and breakfast bread.
And then we reached the market.
I loaded up on fruits, and Helena had me try some local fast food – deep fried millet dough cakes with groundnut-pimento powder on. It didn’t blow my mind, but most things deep fried will always work with me.
Then Helena caught the bus, and I walked back to the hotel to work. I like the market, though, and now that I know that it’s possible to walk there, I’ll definitely do it again. We’re not here only to work, after all. We should explore some on our own, too. They told us so at the MFS grant course that me and Elli had to take. And who am I to not heed to such a recommendation?
Katja Malmborg