I wake up at 6:00, an hour and a half after the roosters start to crow, when the light around our vaulted three-room house begins to turn from a deep, cool blue to the ever lightening yellow of dawn. I open all of our metal windows with a resonating clink to allow the yellow-blue infusion to begin to flow in. Finally, I open our south-facing metal double doors which always feels like waking up for a second time. Kellynn puts a pot on to boil, and I start to stretch. Sun salutation. Downward dog. And others that I make up (or just don’t know the names of) that just feel good. The water comes to a boil and I make a cup of Nescafé or tea, take a sip and then do some abdominal workouts and pushups. I figure now is as good a time in my life for all realms of self-improvement as ever. After this we’ll make some oatmeal with the leftover water or sometimes cereal with powdered milk. Today I go for a peanut butter and jelly, a throwback to stage days with my host family. I take my anti-malarial Doxycycline and feel the suppressed parasite retreat in dismay to the dark regions of my body. Sipping the remainder of my drink, I try to learn some Mooré. My usual goal is to learn two verbs and two nouns and ideally use them in some fashion during the day. Today’s verbs are: n bao (to search) and n geta (to see, to look at). The idea of course is to trick people into thinking that I speak Mooré.
By the time 8:00 rolls around, one of our counterparts stops by to say hello, ask about our night, health, family, sleeping habits, etc. We then sally forward together into the world of my village to meet people, explain what the hell we’re doing here, and begin to form an idea of how life works. This morning I go out to the huge barrage (man-made lake) in the north of town to do some real work with my homologue. All the members of my association (all 2000ish of them) do some form of gardening around this body of water during this season.
It’s still surprisingly cool at 8:30 and I’m enjoying my somewhat lost bike ride through the sparse up-town. I pass many people on my circuitous trek making their way to their boutiques, their stall in the marché, or whatever their day holds for them. I follow the many with dabas attached to their bikes figuring that this is a good way to find the barrage. I greet everybody I pass: “Nye yibeoogo.” “Yibeoog kibare?” “Laafi.” This is a shortened version, appropriate for passing people on bike, of every greeting here. If all else fails, just say, “Laafi.” If that gives you weird looks, a simple, “N ba” if you’re a man or “N sa” if you’re a woman will calm those waters. Through the trees I finally spy water and head for my homologue’s plot. The barrage here is a green oasis with rich, beautiful-smelling black soil and vegetables everywhere. It is onion season right now and I almost get a sense of walking through a lush American lawn as I make my way through the planches of first-year pépinières.
This morning I am helping him plant a column of plots to be planted with some half-mature onions to ripen into that edible thing we know and love. We both grab a daba, which is the all-purpose, universal gardening implement of Burkina. It is a beautifully simple tool comprised of a forearm-length club with a hoe-like blade jammed into the fat end. What we are using is more correctly termed a “pioshe” (pick-axe) due to its slightly narrower blade, but it’s still a daba in my book. We stand above the compacted dirt and my homologue, being, in addition to a cultivator and the treasurer of our association, a protestant preacher, says a prayer in the still cool light of the morning. “Wẽnd” means “God” in addition to being a truncation of “sun,” both of which seem appropriate in this case. And then we start to work. At first it feels great to work like this again. The easy give of the slightly damp soil under the sharp blade and efficient force of the daba, the repetitive rhythm, the clods of earth between my toes, the soft breeze all pacify my earth-bound heart. We finish our first plots neck-and-neck and start on the next. And then that earth-bound heart begins to beat. My arms are instantly sore in strange new places and I can feel blisters forming on my hands. I try ambidextrosity and alter my technique, going after smaller bits at a time and allowing the daba to do more of the work which seems to help. For a while. I am halfway through my second planche when my homologue, in good nature, compliments me on my style from the end of his, a good five meters ahead. He asks how farmers work in the states and I tell him we have big tractors and huge multinational corporations who care more about making a profit than feeding people (Just kidding. I can’t actually say this in French). He says that there are a total of two tractors in the province and that they are hardly used. “Here,” he says, “The heart is the engine.” He tells me to rest which I do gratefully as he finishes my planche and begins another. The morning passes like this, with him doing twice as much work as I until I am so weak that I’m beginning to worry about getting on my bike. He thanks me for the help and repeats his advice about strengthening the heart. I wobble away homeward with a stop at the marché to buy things for lunch and dinner.
Yesterday was Christmas and we took an unexpected break from fêting with the pastor’s family to go meet the chef de village, the chef de terre, and the Imam, all Muslims. A strange but beautifully integrated Christmas. One of my favorite things about this place is how tolerant people are. Muslims fête with the Protestants. The Protestants fête with the Muslims. The Catholics drink and nobody cares. Intermarriage is common, etc, etc. All of these men were very kind and welcomed us to their village. Near the end of our meeting with the chef de village, a big white rooster with its legs tied together was handed to us and Kellynn’s homologue explained that this meant he liked us. A lot. A white chicken is considered good luck, and a rooster is typically not given away- they’re usually hens. As honorable and hospitable as all of this was, we had no idea what we were expected to do with it. Upon questioning, our mentors told us to make some soup. Aha. I thought long and hard about this cock, now residing in our outdoor shower, and stayed awake that night with horrific visions haunting the darkness but resolved that, in accordance with my desired future pastoral life, wanting to honor the gift and to better understand the daily lives of the Burkinabé that I would kill the thing tomorrow. This decision did not come free of reservations. I had never directly killed anything larger than a wolf-spider before, and certainly nothing that I would later clean and eat. But this, I tried to convince myself, was another good reason to follow through. How many people go their whole lives eating meat for every meal and never have to take responsibility, even just by acknowledging the fact, for the loss of life they have necessitated? Though I don’t eat much meat, I have definitely been guilty of this for the majority of my life. And so it was decided.
i pull out my handy Storey’s Guide to Country Living and look up poultry. Apparently, the best way to kill a chicken is to hang it upside-down for a minute which puts it to sleep. It is then inserted head-down into a hanging cone. One opens the beak and “pierces the brain” through the roof of its mouth. The head should be immediately removed to facilitate bleeding. Viola. This does not strengthen my resolve. But then, with that fleeting forced, dream-like lack of interest that it takes to jump off a 40-foot precipice into water I stand up, put the book aside, and select a knife, a small, brand-new hunter’s knife that I received almost exactly a year ago for Christmas. It is sharp, but I decide to sharpen it anyway for good measure. I lay out some plastic bags on the porch for the butchering, Kellynn puts some water on to boil, and I head toward the shower. The cock is cornered against the back wall and after a few misses, I lunge and succeed in grabbing its feet. It calms down a little when I hang it upside-down, but I discover with dread that chickens here are used to this treatment and with curled neck it stares up at me with a blinking red eye. So much for opening its beak. I cast about for an idea (wringing its neck or clubbing it with a rock would occur to me only later) but nothing comes. With a slight sickness curdling my stomach I proceed around our house where the rebar reinforcements for our cement fence stick out in such a way that they seem like they were made for this. I lift the cock’s feet over the rebar and it starts to freak out, whatever minimal calming effects of excessive blood flow to the head now lost. I manage to hang it and surprisingly it calms down. It seems at that moment resolved to its fate, as am I. We regard each other with this understanding, this position of predator and prey. I try to rally but nothing happens. I can’t do it. The knife is gripped in my hand as I wait for another moment of conscious release. I wait. It comes. The words, “I’m sorry” spill out of my mouth as my hand goes up and I slice quickly at the throat. Nothing happens. Skin was not made to be broken. The spell, however, is and now with determination I grab the flesh on top of the rooster’s head and begin to cut the throat with necessary pressure. The red eye bulges and the mouth opens but there is no sound of protest. There is no struggle. The skin breaks and there is blood, less than I expected, but it’s on my hands and the wall and the ground. Only after the head is laying in the dust does the body do a little jumping, twitching and then is still. I watch the life fade and try to see the point where life ends and death begins but like everything it is indistinct, a transition. I turn around and see about ten adolescent Burkinabé girls staring at me through our gate. I am filled with a raw emptiness that cannot be described at the thought that such a personal act had witnesses. After closing the gate, I sit down on the porch and let it all happen again and again in my mind.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in the mild frustrations of plucking and cleaning and degutting all of which took longer than expected and had the progressive effect of turning this thing that had been brooding in my shower an hour before into something one might find shrink-wrapped in a grocery store. At one point, the headless, featherless bird emitted an unearthly final crow as a result of well-placed pressure on the breast. I nearly shat myself.
This has been one of the strangest, and yet one of the most real days of my life. I certainly learned a lot, not only about proper daba technique and the best way to degut a chicken (Hint: NOT through the neck) but I also caught a glimpse of the daily life of these people, really, of most of the people who live on this planet. Subsistence agriculture and death. What an invaluable day to understanding the people who will be my neighbors, coworkers, friends and community for the next two years. To surmise; it’s fucking hard. But it’s connected. It’s literally down-to earth. It’s beautiful and it’s tragic.
Some pictures of our home!
