Construction Sites: Quick Recap and photos

I got back to the house about an hour ago after spending the past three days at construction sites for major roads. I plan on writing more later, but I do have some pictures and a few mini stories to write down before I PTFO after a long day of travel. 

I went to three construction sites in different parts of the country The first was near Ouaga and not large on the map. The second passed through both Dedougou and Nouna in the center-west. And the third part was in Banfora, quite near the border with Cote D'Ivoire. 

This was a shot I snapped while driving outside of Ouaga - very dry and dusty terrain in this pic, but it was very cool to see the landscape change completely as we drove south and west towards Banfora, which is much more tropical. I put an artsy filter on it to try to mitigate the fact that it was taken while driving 100 km/h on a bumpy road. 

I am going to experiment with jumps here, so... after the jump, there are more photos and exciting details about today's lunch. 

Some photos for Monday

I got a request today for more photos and can actually oblige! 

Today, we had a huge rainstorm, which was pretty exciting (for me. and probably many farmers). Though it's rained somewhat lightly twice already, tonight's storm featured drenching rains, lightning and thunder and high winds.  Apparently, as the rainy season intensifies, I can expect to see a storm like this every few days. 

I took some pictures of my 'hood as the storm approached. This was after the first cracks of thunder: 

This picture is also indicative of the peculiarity of Ouaga 2000. This is the view as you step out of the front gate of the house where I am staying. On the other side of that lot is another large house. But in between it's a totally deserted patch of dirt where the donkey is allowed to go to town.  

The next picture was five minutes later: it felt practically like nightfall at 4:30 in the afternoon. I was really taken aback at how quickly the clouds moved in and at how violently the rain came down. 

This next photo is maybe my personal favorite (well, it's a photo of a newspaper ad I saw while waiting in a hotel lobby). The 5th annual Ouaga marathon is this weekend, and this is the ad for the race. Note that the leader is wearing jorts. The winner gets, surprise!, a moto. 

That's all I have for now. I will probably be silent for the next few days - I am heading on a trip to construction sites in southwest Burkina till Thursday afternoon. I am really looking forward to it, and I hope that the trip will result in some good pictures of different parts of the country, and of me using a jackhammer or something. I am hoping to partake in the Ouaga marathon cheering squad as well, as one of my coworkers is running it. 

Le Weekend

This weekend marked the first weekend that I had time to myself to enjoy Ouaga, which was a good thing, but in a new city, it can be daunting to fill up 48 hours with things to do when you know very few people and very little about how to get around. Fortunately, my colleagues invited me to a few social events so I did not feel totally overwhelmed by the stretch of time. I started the weekend out by taking it easy and reading and watching a movie. 

I am reading The Power Broker, which is one of those books I have been meaning to read for a while. I think I sputtered out at page 50 on my first attempt, and I feel really accomplished to be at p. 150 and going strong. Caro's writing is great, and the research he must have done is amazing, but it is a lot of book. After reading for a while, I turned on the TV and The Interpreter was on, which is a political thriller involving an assassination attempt on the corrupt leader of a fictional African country. The movie had a few dramatic twists and turns,  but it was also amusing because you could see the lengths they had to go to to find camera angles that hid the significant height difference between Nicole Kidman, who played a UN interpreter with a shady past, and Sean Penn, the Secret Service agent tasked with protecting the leader.  

Having been exposed to the military TV network for a week, I find it oddly fascinating. There are a handful of channels that have general themes - family, news, sports - but play programming from all networks with only a semi-fixed schedule. The news channel rotates between Fox, CNN and one of the main three networks so as to broadly cover the political spectrum. So we are all just takers for whatever AFN decides to play. They do reliably play the Daily Show and Colbert, and wrestling. Obviously, I am glued to the TV for the latter. There is an angry, red-headed wrestler named Sheamus (deliberately misspelled), who is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.  He wrestles in kelly green shorts and his hair is a ludicrous shade of red.  The second best part about the network is the ads - all military PSAs. While some of them carry important messages, they will at times be amusingly juxtaposed. There's an ad on what to do if you want to send mail immediately followed by an ad warning about the dangers of drug use. 

Saturday, I did house stuff (I was hoping for laundry, but alas, Saturday there was a water outage) and made it to my first Ouaga grocery store. It had a lot of French brands, but it was noticeable that there were significant gaps in the inventory (basically out of cheese, and there has been no skim milk for weeks apparently. The cheese is the real travesty).  Other than that, it was a pretty standard grocery store. I have yet to go to the grand marché in Ouaga, but I'm pretty sure I am still too green to go into the grand marché and not totally be a) pickpocketed or b) totally ripped off. 

Saturday night was poker night, hosted at the house where I am staying and featuring a lot of American ex pats. I have not played much poker before, but it was a 5,000 ceffa buy in (~$10) so I googled the instructions and tried to figure it out. I lost 1,500 ceffa, but was not the first person out and considered it a success. One of the guests brought a bottle of "BBQ" brand red wine to the party, which was an interesting taste experience. Apparently, it's a French wine where they introduce barbecue spices during the wine making process, and it came in a bottle that looked like a large Kikkoman bottle with a plastic cap.  It tasted like red wine with the aftertaste of Lay's barbecue potato chips. Needless to say, I switched to local beer but kept my wits about me to as to better attempt to win my colleagues' money. 

Sunday, I went for a run at 8 AM, and discovered promptly that 8 AM is way too late to run in Ouaga and I should stick to runs starting much closer to dawn. It was already excruciatingly hot. I hydrated and recovered and went to a barbecue at the house in Ouaga 2000 where two other colleagues are cat, chicken and turtle sitting. The guests were all young ex pats in Ouaga, and it was great to meet new people and connect with one of the girls that a friend from HKS had put me in touch with. It was also super, duper hot. I had this week been feeling kind of smug that the weather wasn't that bad, but that was probably because I spend no more than 20 minutes at a time without air conditioning. Lesson learned. 

Some Scattered Thoughts

I'm rounding out my first week in Ouaga and my first week of work, and actually have gotten the chance to see the centre-ville area and go into a market, so I feel slightly less ensconced in a bubble than I did earlier in the week. Some observations after 5 days in Burkina that may or may not be earth-shattering and that probably are obvious to people who have spent time in West Africa: 

1. Lizards - there are lizards everywhere. There are tiny ones in the house, large ones on the outer walls, and medium sized ones that scurried away from my feet when I was out running yesterday.  There is one who has consistently been perched on an outside ledge of the embassy cafeteria every day at lunch. I am totally fine with this - lizards are great. They eat mosquitoes, and they are scared of you and scurry away, and they are way less gross than either flies (I still shudder when I think of the Cambridge Fly Massacre of 2013) or mice (3944 Pine). I keep trying to snap a picture but the little guys move so fast. 

2. Working in French - I am in the process of doing a lot of reading in French, and I attended several meetings and calls this week that were conducted en français. It's humbling. I have really let my French go since graduating college, and I was never the best speaker to start, so it's mentally tiring to get back in the game and it's really frustrating to not remember words that you know you once knew.The bright side is that people in Burkina Faso are way less snotty about spoken French accents than Parisiens and are very forgiving of grammar mistakes. But I regret that I skipped the business French course in college in favor of a film course as it really would come in handy now. I spent the day looking up the business jargon used in management reports. I know know the words for "framework" "milestone" "disbursement schedule" "working group" and "org chart" (organigramme, a word I fund rather cute and fun to say - if I one day start a flow-chart stamped graham cracker company called organi-graham, you'll know where the idea came from). 

3. Motos - This one was well detailed in the guidebook: the primary mode of transport in Ouaga is motorbike. The shoulders of all major roads are packed with them, and they contribute to the rather dangerous traffic conditions in the city (though motos are by no means solely responsible for those). What the guidebook did not share was the ridiculous amounts and forms of cargo that are carried on the back of these little bikes. I have seen motos carrying mattresses, motos carrying several bales of hay, one today carrying at least a dozen large clay flowerpots and one carrying a passenger who had several two by fours balanced on his shoulder. What people manage to fit onto the back of these bikes and how they manage to balance and make it through traffic and around the traffic circles of Ouaga is a feat of human ingenuity. 

I definitely have more things that I have randomly thought of, but I am le tired and am heading to bed soon. 

I leave you with the view from my office building today. 

Ouaga 2000

As promised, I have a bit more to say on Ouaga 2000. My only real exposure to Ouagadougou thus far has been this part of the city, so I am looking forward to seeing more of the city this weekend when I am done my first week of work. 

Ouaga 2000 is a modern subdivision of Ouagadougou, located southwest of the central part of the city. The development was started on the eve of a French summit in 1996. It was apparently the city's first attempt to really engage in any form of coordinated urban planning, and that in the past the planning process had been much more haphazard. So this neighborhood(the term is a stretch as it's fairly spread out and disconnected) features streets in a large grid pattern and many of the more luxurious homes and hotels in Ouaga. However, for every large home that has a well-kept pool and flower beds, there are just as many empty lots or buildings that seemed to have been abandoned halfway through construction, which gives certain streets an eery feel. There are also a number of extremely large and opulent (at least from the outside) government buildings that I have on more than one occasion mistaken for fancy hotels before reading their signs. 

The central landmark of Ouaga 2000 is the Monument to the Martyrs, which is the large tower pictured above that serves as the center of a giant traffic circle. It has lots of mirrors on it and looks vaguely futuristic.  

Everything takes on the faint reddish-tan hue of the soil, not helped by the dust constantly kicked up by motos, so my view of the monument is a lot more orange than this picture. Apparently as the rainy season continues, more trees and flowers will bloom so I picked a good time to be here despite the heat and occasional humidity. 

On the Ground

I'll start from the very beginning (a very good place to start). I had an uneventful flight out of JFK and arrived in Paris on Saturday morning. I hopped onto the RER to meet my NYC roommate and soon-to-be MBA graduate Ursina for a quick day trip into the city during my 8 hour layover. I got off at the train at the Notre Dame metro stop and realized I was in the middle of some sort of Catholic Youth march or pilgrimage. There were hundreds of Catholic kids and young adults in hiking gear marching past the cathedral. I still haven't figured out what they were doing exactly (I think Sunday was Pentecost so maybe something related to that?) but I haven't had reliable internet on which to figure out this pressing question. Catholic diversion aside, lunch and catching up with Ursina were great. 

I arrived in Ouaga on Saturday night and immediately stepped off the plane into the intense heat, even though the sun had gone down 3 hours before my flight touched down. I made it through passport control, which was somewhat overwhelming, and I was grateful I had made the call to get my visa in the US rather than wing it. I also was grateful that I am working for the US government this summer, as I had an embassy "expediter" who could come through security and help me through the lines etc. Waiting for my luggage, I met up with my boss, Molly, whose house I am currently staying in and who was on the same flight from Paris after a week in D.C. for work.  

When we got to her house, she showed me my room and bathroom, and then offered to let me call my parents on the vonage phone... but the internet was not working, apparently because the power was quite irregular in the week she was gone, which had burnt out the wires (or something. Science!). The internet was only just fixed this morning, which helps explain why this blog has been so boring for the past few days. 

I got all settled in and promptly slept for 11 hours, waking up at 10 on Sunday AM. Molly was also jet lagged and sleeping in, and her two kids, Fatou-Mary, age 7, and Allioune, age 9, had the run of the house.  I decided to get in their good graces by proposing a game of Chutes and Ladders, which I lost. We then played more board and card games for another few hours, many of which I also lost. It's funny to play with little kids because they get so into the games, but these two also needed to work on their poker faces. We played "Old Maid," and you could track who held the old maid based on their joy or devastation after a card was picked.  

Sunday night, I went to a small dinner party with three of my colleagues from MCC. It was a great way to meet them and get a little bit more of an idea of what to do in Ouaga, what to see in Burkina and of course what to wear. Burkina is a more liberal country than many of its West African neighbors, but women are still expected to wear skirts that come below the knee (other countries in the region require full shoulder coverage and skirts or pants to the ankle).
The hosts were cat sitting for the head of the MCC in Burkina, who has a very lovely house in Ouaga 2000 (more on that later) with a pool and a chicken coop. When we walked through the gate from the car, someone pointed out that there was a chicken seemingly cooling itself in a pool. I wondered aloud whether chickens can swim, as it looked rather tenuously positioned on the step of the pool, and, while I am no great interpreter of chicken emotion, I thought the chicken looked kind of uneasy. We thought nothing of it, but yesterday, sadly, my colleagues awoke to find a drowned chicken in the pool. May she rest in peace.

Dinner was great (Ali and Chris, two former peace corps volunteers, cooked delicious spanish food for us) and I returned home ready to start work. 

I have more to say on the start of work and such, and I still haven't had the chance to explore too much. Thus far, I will say that being with a government agency and with people who have lived here for quite a bit of time gives me a much more limited perspective (or at least a different one) on Ouaga than one would get either as a tourist or working for a smaller organization or NGO. I am looking forward to starting to work in a Burkinabe office(today and yesterday, I am working out of the US Embassy) and to seeing a little bit more of the city than the ex pat section I am currently living in. 

I don't have any pictures just yet (I obviously missed a great chicken photo op), but you were warned about the quality of photography on the site. 

The Final Countdown

I'm introducing this blog to share my adventures in West Africa.  I have exactly 24 hours before my flight takes off from JFK, and I am in the midst of packing...so naturally I took the time to create a blog rather than fold clothing or do any of the more serious to-do's on my list. Fortunately, the school made me get vaccinated well ahead of time so the important stuff has been checked off the list. I definitely have more reflections to share as I think about leaving for 10 weeks in Burkina Faso, but those will have to wait until all the ankle length skirts, anti-malaria pills and sunblock are packed away. 

Going forward, this will hopefully be the place for random updates on my life and internship as I spend the summer in Ouagadougou. I will probably write out Ouagadougou way too often and encourage my readership to say it out loud when reading the blog because it's so much fun to say. 

The picture is from my jaunt down to D.C. on Monday to get my visa from the embassy and stop in to get my official security badge. Here's hoping that I will fill the blog with more interesting pictures going forward. 

*Writing out the title made me a little sad that I will not be able to binge watch the new Arrested Development season over Memorial Day Weekend, but I am confident I will find other ways to occupy my time.