Leaving Ouaga

My time here is coming to a close and I find myself trying to tie things up, and planning my trip back to the U.S.  Friday I had lunch with Janet Guizzetti  and her husband Don (see the photo two postings ago of Janet in the Mediathèque Municipale), along with Fina and Martine.  They served us a wonderful salad nicoise, pictured below, perfect for a hot Ouaga day.  

The Guizzettis have finally gotten their water tower installed, which insures that they will have water even when there are water “cuts,” and they also have a back-up generator to curtail the power outages that have become all too frequent lately.

Above the water tower is visible through their front screen door.  Janet is pointing out the Moringa tree that is Africa’s “miracle tree”.  They have discovered the nutritional virtues of this tree, that actually thrives in hostile climates like that of Burkina Faso, so are determined to get the word out to others that might benefit.





Moringa Tree

Thursday Fina jokingly took me to “Hawaii” for lunch.  We ate at at the Waikiki  Restaurant across from the Royal Beach Hotel with the painted palm trees along the outer wall  surrounding it.  A “beach hotel” in a land-locked country?? . . hmmm . . . As I said once before, Africans are always “aspiring”, and describe things as they want them to be, not necessarily how they are. . .

We had “panini”, which I don’t recommend as the sandwich had the appearance of French bread flattened with a press of some sort, but was otherwise just an ordinary sandwich—nothing special.  The atmosphere, on the other hand, was very pleasant, and it was close by to the Center, so very convenient for us.

Royal Beach Hotel from the Restaurant Waikiki

Panini???!

Meanwhile Martine and I have been working hard together in the library, trying to get her up-to-speed, no pun intended.  Martine is probably the slowest-moving person I have ever met in my entire life.  She is somewhat of a perfectionist, is afraid of making mistakes, which she makes anyway, and what takes a normal person about 5 minutes takes her at least 1/2 an hour . . .  She is also a very lovely person, and very sensitive, so much patience is required . . . and much practice, practice, practice . . . and she can pronounce the names of most of the local languages correctly, which is more than I can do!

Saturday Fina took me to the latest fantasy store in Ouagadougou--Orca Design.  It looks like it is a chain based in Dakar, Senegal, with stores in Benin, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, and of course, Senegal, as well as Burkina Faso.  Huge and Ikea-like in size, and a mix of Marlo, Ikea and Target inside.  It was surreal visiting there after leaving the open market of Dassasgho, but it is conveniently situated just across from the Mediathèque Municipale and down the street from one of my favorite grocery stores, Bingo Market.  A lot of Italian furniture for the expat community and the growing Burkinabe middle class   . . .  I was quite amazed because it was quite a visceral shock, being so alien in many ways. 

Orca Design from the street

Orca Design interior

Sunday Martine had Mary and me over for a late dinner—late because of Mary's crazy musician's schedule.  It was pitch dark and I have no idea where we went, except it seemed a long way to ride on a motorcycle (Martine rides a motorbike to work) and we hit a fair number of potholes along the way.  She lives in a small, sparsely furnished house with two siblings (and has at least one sister and four brothers).


Monday passed quickly, and it is bittersweet having to leave without the new website inaugurated.  Our remote linguist and webmaster, Lukas Neukom (now in Switzerland), doesn't want to put the library's catalog on the old SIL website because it is really out-of-date, and the new website, sadly, still awaits approval.  Over the past three years I have added French language subject headings to some 1500 books, added contents notes to literally hundreds of individual journal issues, and given local language titles to several hundred  more SIL and ANTBA publications, which were formerly in French only.  The catalog is now bi-lingual, and accepts the West-African characters and diacritical marks. There is also a public-access catalog for the students, and they seem to be able to find what they are looking for. In addition, I have trained three people to work in the library and to use the software, and two no longer work at SIL!  Time passes so quickly, though, and in just a few hours I  will be leaving Ouagadougou, flying 21 hours (via Paris) back to Washington, D. C., and back to my other life. . .