Eating out

I said that I was happy when there were large groups staying here because I could take my meals here and not worry about cooking.  Well that depends somewhat on the group.  Large groups of Africans, with few or no Europeans or other westerners means African cuisine, and a little goes a long way in my book.  I love the crudités--the raw vegetables and fresh fruits. . .  On the other hand, there is a limit to how much rice, pasta, and the national dish--tô--I am willing to eat.  Fadoul, the chief cook at the center, whom I have mentioned before, gave me a huge bowl of tô with a bitter herb sauce containing a chunk of meat (probably beef), as a treat to take home for dinner.  It took me three days to finish off what was supposed to be a single meal.  Understand that tô has a taste somewhat resembling semolina, but it is has the consistency of cold mashed potatoes laced with gelatin to harden them further.  I tried cutting it up in cubes, then cooking them in a bit of water to try and soften them up, with limited success.

tô, the national dish of Burkina Faso

and with the bitter herb sauce added

It is no surprise that when anyone invites me over, or suggests that we go out to eat somewhere in a restaurant, I jump at the chance!  I did make a mistake at Simon's restaurant the other day, though.  Instead of giving us a menu, the waitress just rambled off the day's options and I selected one at random, not knowing quite what it entailed. It turned out to be a green tô-like substance (or something certainly resembling tô laced with some green sauce) cut into cubes. I think she called it gaooré and it was possibly soaked in moringa, which is very healthy, but not particularly tasty. I had to eat a huge plate of the stuff along with chunks of beef on skewers. A wrong choice.  On the other hand, most of the people around us appeared to be eating rice and sauce of some kind so I suppose at least this was something different. . .

 

So because of the security problem, we have been advised not to go out at night, which means visiting fewer restaurants in the evenings.  In fact, it means that there is not much to do after dark, and it gets dark quite early, around 6:15 pm despite the near 100 degree temperature during the daytime. . . It is hard to believe it is not "summer" like it it in the US.  So there is reading, watching YouTube videos, surfing the Web or other Internet-related activities, or occasionally being invited over to someone's home.

So I had been reading whatever is at hand. In fact, one of the books I read recently, D'un regard, l'autre :  Médecine et anthropologie, une expérience au Burkina-Faso, relates the experience of Frédérique Albert, a young French medical doctor and anthropologist, who recounts her experiences in Burkina Faso first as a young doctor, and later as a student of anthropology at a Catholic medical clinic near Kongoussi, some sixty miles north of Ouagadougou.  Her study of her patients and their medical problems shows how the Mossi (or 'Moose' she calls the people group found around Ouagadougou) understanding of sickness and disease as very different from our western one, as they try to integrate some western notions with their traditional beliefs.

Scottie Griffin, who chairs the "outreach" committee I serve on at the National Presbyterian Church emailed me about an upcoming webinar on "Asylum Seekers in the USA" hosted by IAFR (the International Association for Refugees) which I signed up for.  I was amazed that despite an "unstable" wifi connection, I was able to  participate via Zoom (videoconferencing) with very little difficulty except for the initial hook-up.  Much of the applied discussion centered around a specific project called the Jonathan House Ministries, which works expressly with asylum seekers in  Minnesota. 

Given the unsettling situation along the eastern, western and northern boundaries of Burkina Faso, there has been much discussion at SIL about displaced people from various language groups as well, and how it affects their work. Someone here mentioned their recent encounters with some Hausa speakers, a language group generally associated with Central, and not West Africa, although there are Hausa speakers in Togo, Bénin, the Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Ghana, spreading basically as a trade language from a language family different from most of the languages spoken in Mali and Burkina Faso. On the other hand, I recall my trip last year to Mali where I met Greta, from Louisiana, at the SIL Center there. As she was longer able to work in the north where the concentration Songhai people live due to security concerns, she finds herself meeting with Songhay speakers in Bamako.

Well I do get out occasionally.  Friday three of us women visited a cute little boutique called "Umoja" in the relatively nearby "Zone du Bois" neighborhood, which sold better quality, although pricey-er local souvenirs. I bought myself a reversible bucket-style sunhat and a little pouch to use for some of my my "African" jewelry.  I have been planning a short trip to the Abidjan this coming week to visit the SIL facility/library there, and thought that they might come in handy.  The hat also looked promising as something I could also wear while hiking, so I was quite pleased with my purchases.  I noted that both were "made in Burkina Faso" as some of the items there, notably the handbags, were made in Sénégal.