How Do You Say, “Yin and Yang” in Moore?

The past two days have been a study in duality, and a test of my nerves. I awoke yesterday morning out of an intermittent sleep, still a little damp. A dust storm had woken me up around midnight the night before followed quickly by a deluge of rain. After running around grabbing my things outside, throwing them blindly into the house, closing the curtains and shutting the door, I lay down on my bed and listened to the storm hammer out its violent mixed-meter music on my tin roof. Not wanting to get too far away from the dream I’d been having, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off. Then I felt a drop on my forehead. I opened my eyes to more darkness and the beginning of a light spray from above. Apparently my roof was not designed to withstand this much water. At some point, somehow, I fell asleep. Now I got up and stretched. Lifting my arms above my head elicited a strange, foreign pain in my armpits. I felt around and found a cartilage-like lump surrounded by loose swollen flesh under each arm. After a short bout of sleepy confusion, my limited knowledge of human physiology led me to the tentative conclusion that my lymph nodes were swollen. I had been sick the week before and felt that this made sense, though darker prospects came to mind. I called the medical officer who told me to take 800 mg of Ibuprofen with every meal to reduce the swelling, keep an eye on it and call her in a few days to rule out the most benign possibilities.

 After a quick, distracted breakfast I set out for a meeting with my association. I arrived ten minutes late to an empty office, which is not unusual. After another ten, our accountant showed up and said that the meeting had been cancelled. The consultant was not able to come due to the flooded roads and would have to reschedule. So, unsure of who was going to show up anyway, we had to wait as a slow trickle of association members came to the office just to be sent back to the fields they’d come from. I took the opportunity to add to my comprehensive contact list for our association, a rather lofty project consisting of amassing names and phone numbers of all 2000 plus members, which would ideally prevent such communication problems in the future. Part of me was glad to not have to sit through a meeting as I was now free to go help my homologue in his field. He would be planting beans today.

Leaving the accountant to inform the late-latecomers, I headed out to the bush. My homologue met me at a bridge and I followed him further down the road. Almost immediately I heard a squeak and a sharp pop and felt my bike veer. I stopped and looked down, hoping for jammed gears. What I saw instead was a broken quick-release. The screw had snapped in half. Deciding to deal with this later, I left my bike with some friendly cultivators and we headed to the fields together. “I’ve never seen this much rain!” my counterpart remarked, jolting through rocky streams and getting stuck in the wet sand. “It’s a gift.” “I must have brought it with me,” I said, thinking of the fires currently engulfing my home state.

We made it to the spot and found Philip’s wife, Wendende, sitting unhappily on a donkey cart. We greeted each other and as I reached the limit of my Moore, the couple began to talk and argue. I heard something about “tomorrow,” “rain,” “cultivate,” and “kids,” but wasn’t sure about their connection. So I used the time to take in my surroundings. It was an amazing day, a cool breeze circulating the humid air under the graciously mostly overcast sky. All senses were alive; the high multi-layered mingling of bird song; the sweet heavy smell of rain and some kind of spring bloom; the familial, earthy feel of other cultivators in the distance; the green, the GREEN, everywhere. It was truly beautiful. Suddenly Philip said, “Okay, let’s go,” and started walking back. “Wait…what? Why?” I asked, perplexed. He replied, “It’s too wet to sew. We’ll come back tomorrow.” This is something I never thought I’d hear here. All we’d talked about since I arrived in Burkina was how dry the past few years had been, how terrible the harvests were. Now it seemed we had the opposite problem. This morning the Chef de Village, a member of our association, had told me that the water level in the dam was higher than expected and that all the rice he’d planted would die as a result. No good. For everything else though this rain is a God-send—assuming that it lasts through August and that people can actually get their seeds in the ground.

We retrieved my bike and wheeled it back the 2 kilometers into town where we found a blacksmith who soldered the quick-release back together. Upon trying to refit it, however, we discovered that the axle had snapped as well. In the Burkinabé’s typically hurried helpfulness, many hands were set upon my wheel, ball bearings went flying, and parts got switched around before I knew what was happening. After a short while everyone admitted that they had never seen a quick-release or a hollow axle and that we should talk to the bike guys in the marché. I probably would have cried at this point had it not been for Philip, who led me to the bike boys and when they also didn’t know what to do, patiently helped me reassemble my back wheel, though still broken, and walked beside me back to his house, pushing his motorcycle the entire way. “We have a saying in Moore,” he said. “Rise early if you want to get your work done on time. You never know what will happen on the way.” I thought about this as together we ate the Tô with Baobab sauce and Pork that Wende had made, each of us pondering this strange, frustrating day. My only positive thought was that I really have a family here, that I have a Burkinabé father and mother that truly care about me. It really means a lot. This however did not prevent me from labeling the day as a fail, locking the gate when I got home, getting drunk and watching Arrested Development until my computer’s battery died.

The next day I woke up weirdly refreshed, ready to right the wrongs of the yesterday. The first good sign was that my armpits were no longer sore. Always a good thing. I put on the coffee and, today being a grande marché day, made a huge shopping list. After breakfast I headed out on foot, saying hello to all the strangers who come into Titao on Fridays and aren’t used to seeing me around. Because I was early, the place wasn’t too crowded yet and I made my way easily through the milling Friday shoppers. I found everything I needed; a new, regular axle, a number 15 wrench, extra ball bearings, grease, bananas, even eggs, which I hadn’t seen here since my second week at site. Feeling good, I stopped at my neighbor’s house for some samsa, a delicious fried dough ball made with onions and bean flour. These I ate and then went about fixing my bike. Due to my never having repaired or seen the inside of a bike axle before, this took some time before I figured out the theory behind it and got my bearings (pun points!). It took a few test rides and adjustments, but I finally got it in riding order.

Now able to get about town easily, I went and visited each of the four elementary schools in town collecting the permission slips for a camp some other volunteers and I will be doing in Ouahigouya in July which I had distributed earlier that week. I met two of the boys that will be going who seemed bright but reasonably shy in front of their director and a strange American. One of them had recently received the highest mark in the entire province on his Certificat d’Etude Primaire (CEP), the test which allows one to move on to middle school. Bon Travail, kid!

With all four permission slips collected, I chatted with the director who had read me some of his slam poetry before, M. Sou. I asked him how the poetry club was going. “Unfortunately, with summer vacation, the work in the fields, and some teachers and kids returning to their villages, it’s on hold for the summer,” he said. “We’ll recommence next year.” He told me that in the meantime, what he really wanted was to work on his slam, to find some musicians, a guitarist or balaphone player to accompany the poetry. This sounded amazing to me, like folk rap where the words and music are tied only by feel, not flow. Always on the lookout for new waves and surprises in music, I was about to suggest myself as his man for the job when the words “sustainable development” popped into my head like a subliminal warning from training. I mumbled something about hearing one of my neighbors playing guitar sometimes when suddenly I thought, fuck it. I’m here for a year and a half. Why shouldn’t I be selfish and start a crazy band? “I play guitar. Do you want to play a little tonight?” I asked. “Pourquoi pas?”

Back at my house we sat outside in the fading light and I played him a few of my songs, finding them hard to explain in French. He seemed impressed. Then he read me one of his slam poems entitled, “l’herbe n’est pas toujours verte chez le voisin,” which we turned into a kind of slap-happy shuffle. I was really loving playing music with someone again, feeding off someone’s energy and contributing my own. We also tried a slower, sadder one called, “un preservatif pour ma sœur,” (a condom for my sister) about the social taboo surrounding the discussion of sex in Burkinabé society and how it leads to the augmentation of such problems as HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy. I was amazed. I had never talked with a Burkinabé about this kind of thing before. Here was a leader, a social deviant who wanted to shock, to shake things up, to encourage change by creating music and art. An African punk-rock-art-folk-slam band. Never thought I’d see the day. The additional beauty of it is that this could be considered a project. This is VRFable. This is WORK. I love the Peace Corps. We played until dusk, discussing recording possibilities and playing on the local radio station in the near future, until Monsieur Sou said goodnight and headed home.

To top off this day that more than made up for the day before, I made myself a four-egg veggie omelet with vache qui rit. That night, I dreamt of how we would sound with the resonance of a balaphone and djembe behind us.