Week 3

It seems that everyone has something to sell.  You have likely seen the stalls that line the streets, and the wandering peddlers and the women that thrust bananas, strawberries, dried mango or cashew nuts in your face as you leave a store.

 

Bags for sale

 

Flip-flops for sale

 

A fruit and vegetable stand

  
 

A pineapple stand on wheels

Plastic ware

Phone cards or re-charges for sale

Here are some creative products which I bought recently, the first photo shows very sweet macarons made with egg whites, sugar and coconut.  The second shows items made from the moringa tree that I mentioned in a post last year. I bought some tea and shampoo, but had to hold off on the hand cream as I didn't have enough money on me.   If they can, the vendors will try to get a local store to take on the product, but if not will just sell it through friends. 

The moringa oleifera leaf and seed have some promising medicinal properties and the tea I bought is supposed to fight against fatigue, anemia, and constipation according to the label.  I didn't know that constipation was a problem here as the opposite phenomenon seems quite common. . . At any rate, there is a small grove of slender moringa saplings that someone has recently started here at the SIL Center near where I am staying. . .
 

Macarons African-style

Moringa tea and shampoo

young Moringa trees

And below are some lovely items I found at a private crafts fair--the Fulani hat was only 3000cfa which was more than 3 times less than it was in Barani last year at the horse festival [FECHIBA] near the border of Mali!  It will hang on the wall in my basement "Africa room".

Basket, earrings, spoon, leather jewelry box and Fulani hat [on top of the fabric for the International Women's Day on March 8]

I've mentioned that the weather is warming up--well the power outages are starting as well.  I was having dinner with friends yesterday evening, and we sat by candlelight and battery-powered lanterns because of the lack of power.  They had a back up generator for such emergencies, but it is so loud it would have been impossible for us to have had any kind of dinner conversation over the roar.  Tonight it went out when I was taking a shower, which was interesting, as I didn't have a flashlight handy, and if I have the air-conditioning on at night during an outage, it shuts down completely, even if the back-up generator is started seconds later. . .


This week SIL has scheduled a Branch Conference and a Spiritual Retreat here so my work in the library has been limited as I have been attending the sessions.  I did talk with a Senior Literacy and Education Consultant from SIL, however, who splits her time between Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso.  She doesn't really work on the country-level anymore, and wasn't familiar with Friends of African Village Libraries.  Since FAVL are more than doubling their presence in this country this year, having just had brand new books delivered to 20 soon-to-open libraries earlier this month, I thought they were worth a mention.

A group of us spent some time in the park where I have been done my occasional walks for exercise, the  Parc Urbain Bangr-Weoogo. 
If you click on the link above you can get a feel for it.

They're not kidding about crocodiles

Here's one that had disappeared
 a couple of hours later when
 I passed by a second time

Water hyacinths take over the riverbed

It was also sad saying good-bye to Ruth Huerlimann, who will be leaving Burkina Faso for her native Switzerland after spending more than 35 years here living among the Gouin people, learning and analyzing the Cerma language.  She was mentioned by me in an earlier posting in this blog some four years ago, when the Cerma New Testament was published in 2012.  I had shown a photo of boxes of the books being unloaded from a large truck.  It was the year that I broke my hip in Ouagadougou, and missed the dedication ceremony as a result. . . a very different year than I imagined.  

Ruth Huerlimann with Paule Assoua

This year I plan to make up for this earlier disappointment by attending the Showalter's Kaansa New Testament dedication ceremony in early March--stay tuned! There will be three people from my church, the National Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., in attendance other than myself, including my friend Angela, who will be coming from Dakar's Ecole Renaissance des Sourds.  As I mentioned in this blog several years ago, Angela Bednarczyk, former instructor and designer of instructional materials at Gallaudet University, has been working in Sénégal for several years at a school for the deaf in Dakar.


Since my mother doesn't really "do" email, and my sister Karin is no longer there to print out my emails or blog entries for her, I sent her an actual letter Monday.  It will take a minimum of 2 weeks--maybe 6 to reach her. . .  I sent her cards from France before I left and even those took longer than I expected, so I am hoping she at least receives it before I return!

Bougainvillea