Day to day

I emailed Krystle, formerly with FAVL, or Friends of African Village Libraries, about the possibility of someone swinging by and picking up the books that I had brought for them from Paris.  To my surprise, two young men showed up today asking for me at the SIL Library : Rahamane Nanema, a program officer for FAVL, and another FAVL employee, Sangare Djibrul.  They informed me that FAVL will be opening another 20 libraries this fall!!

Me at the SIL Library with Rahamane Nanema from FAVL

As you may recall, from a previous blog, FAVL was started by Michael Kevane, associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University using Peace Corps volunteers to train nationals to run libraries in the small villages of four African countries, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda.  If you visit his website you can learn about the amazing things they are doing on the village level. They believe that everyone should have the opportunity to pick up a book and read, and are working to create a community of readers whether they are school children, adult learners and others committed to reading.

Books for FAVL

Here's and interesting looking title Michael Kevane contributed to, but given the Amazon price, I'm not going to rush out an buy it anytime soon--$151.86. . .

And a couple of weeks ago Michael spoke at a Webinar at San José State University about his experiences with FAVL in Burkina Faso entitled  New Challenges. Establishing Public and Community Libraries in Rural Africa: A New Movement.  FAVL just put it on their website today.  If you're interested in watching it, the video is about 45 minutes long.

Click here to listen to the Webinar


On totally different subject, I always get questions about what I'm eating and the availability of  food here in Burkina Faso.  Although I've covered this before somewhat, I'll mention it again for those who missed my earlier posting.  Actually there are quite a variety of fruits and vegetables in the markets, and I'm not exactly bereft of anything.  In abundance now are onions, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and potatoes, as are mangoes, cashew nuts, and even pineapples.  I mustn't forget the wonderful juicy strawberries, but they are grown in small quantities, are expensive, and intended for rich foreigners like me. 

Groceries can be bought in several different ways as well. There is the market (like the one right around the corner from the SIL Center), individual stalls along the streets, tiny shops, small grocery stores and larger ones with lots of imported products, particularly from France and Lebanon. Simple African fare might include tô (a pulp made from crushed, cooked millet, sorghum or corn), foufou (using cassava, corn or semolina flour) or rice with a sauce. That sauce might contain some meat (usually mutton, goat, chicken, beef or fish), but would likely be heavier on the vegetables, such as carrots, cabbage or onions.  In a food stall, the simple food might look like the photo below:

 Not very appetizing, I'll admit, and not even that appealing to my taste buds.  Piment, or hot pepper sauce, can be added to spice it up a little.  Again, as shown below in the following photo, another simple meal.

Grilled meat on skewers is also very popular (beef, mutton, fish), as is riz gras (rice cooked with onions, tomatoes and meat) and chicken bicyclette (a grilled chicken dish).  Since Ouagadougou is such a cosmopolitan city, dishes from the Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal (like thiéboudienne or poulet yassa)
are easily found.  Below is a restaurant serving placali, an Ivorian dish of cassava cooked into a paste served with okra sauce.

This photo is of a Senegalese restaurant not far from the SIL Center.  There is also a nearby stall that sells Senegalese dishes, notably grilled fish, that opens after dark.

And here you can see a dish of rice and veggies as served in a small restaurant we visited in Nouma, La Paillotte.

Even better is this very tasty fish dish from another enterprising small restaurant in Koudougou, shown below.  Service was painfully slow, however, and it took us an hour before we saw what we had ordered.

But if you have been reading my reviews in TripAdvisor, you know that there are also some very varied and good restaurants here in Burkina Faso.  There is even Japanese, Korean, and Turkish cuisine here in Ouagadougou.

Japanese restaurant in Ouaga

One of the restaurants I recently visited was the restaurant in The Rec Center, which used to belong to the American Embassy.  For those hankering for American-style hamburgers and fries, a strawberry milkshake or a club-sandwich, it can be found there.  Also for a $30/month membership fee, a swimming pool is available, along with tennis courts, and some gym equipment in the fitness center, not to mention a collection of donated English-language books in the "library" adjacent to the restaurant's dining area, for those desperate for reading material in English.  The only negative is that I would need a car to get there . . . 

The Rec Center restaurant

Tonight I am going to a new Korean restaurant which Fina has discovered, along with Stuart (who just arrived from the village of Obiré near the Ghana border on his way back to Maryland), and a couple working on the Turka language, spoken primarily north and west of the town of Banfora (which I visited 2 years ago).