About boys (and passion for traveling in Africa)

In contrast, a number of kids running after you in a village feels very relieving compared to men usually following you in Ouaga, some interested in selling things, some seemingly convinced that every white women must be interested in Burkinabe male company, (including for life time which is to be spent preferably in Europe or US.) (I’m sure it’s not a representative sample for Burkinabe population)
Arrived in Tiebele, a small picturesque village close to the Ghanaen border, it feels great to see smiling, friendly, genuinely and childlike interested faces around you. Of course the kids know where the “auberge” I’m heading to is, they even live next door and will accompany me explaining details of their school life, presenting the newly acquired vocabulary in Spanish, introducing me to cousins, uncles and friends. Beautiful landscape, pictursque red road with enormous baobabs on both sides strengthen the impression of being in a better, different part of Burkina, in the Africa that travelers love.
Due to distraction by other activities, the crowd of kids around me gets smaller and I reach my auberge in a company of Jhone and Micareme, who will stay a very loyal company for the rest of my stay. They look younger than they really are, maybe because they are really skinny, they know a lot about their village, are extremely clever (proud of being the first and second student in their classes of more than 80 students) and funny. They have tons of ideas about what we can do in the village, enormous patience and enough fantasy to interpret my French.

We walk around the fields and watery meadows to the pond, where local kids try to catch some fish – I hope they will be lucky to catch enough for themselves as - similarly to my little guides - they seem so much in need of protein. I ask them what they like to eat – they look surprised and explain that here people eat what they can grow (and if they can grow). Close to their home it’s too dry to grow rice so they eat millet. I made a similar mistake again when they were showing me names of different fruit in the local language and I asked what fruits they eat. “Here we don’t eat such things” was the answer followed by a shy grin.

We pass through the colorful market hidden in the shadow of old trees and head towards the “royal court”. Doesn’t it sound unusually in the context of this African village? It may be a clear sign of my ignorance, as I was so used to imagining something like a castle of European kings behind “royal court” that it takes me some time to get used to the fact that the geometrically painted huts surrounded by similarly painted wall, next to a big hill on which the wombs are thrown right after birth to secure protection, is a royal court. But it is one, and a very charming one. That’s where the family of the “chief” lives. With its 300 people it’s really intergenerational. Apart from grannies who look like 90, peel nuts and don’t like being taken on pictures, there are youths listening to some kind of noisy modern music, right beside the sacred symbols on the wall and tiny but autonomous kids, part of them decides to follow me making their own bizarre show the other completely ignoring the stranger. The huts are lovely and sophisticated – different shapes of huts are for different phases of life. Unmarried men live in round houses, young married couples in rectangular and kids with old women in houses in 8-shape.

Leaving Tiebele took me ages… I got up early and turned down all opportunities of an afternoon ride back to Ouaga because I wanted to be back early to pick up a friend at the airport. I spent about 2 hours waiting for a “bush taxi” to come, although it was a market day and they were supposed to arrive and leave “all the time”. I waited another hour on the bush taxi (that finally arrived) to get full enough to leave but before I was given a chance to see this awaited moment I realized I would get out faster if I waited for a bus leaving in the afternoon (which I didn’t want to take originally because it was definitely too late). When, instead of the awaited big bus, a small minibus arrived, I thought nostalgically about the option of the big bus that once seemed so much too late. Squeezing passengers that would fill a big bus and luggage that would fill a truck into a small bus seems firstly completely undoable to an European, in Africa only somewhat lengthy and uncomfortable enough to count tickets and go through the list of passengers’ names 1000 times, hoping that someone will disappear. But no one would disappear, everybody would fit in (or rather “out” when on the roof) and I would feel so happy that as a foreigner I was given the place next to the driver and not even a child to keep on my lap but just a plastic bag with eggs. After half an hour ride, I saw the car of the travelers passing by whose offer of a ride I turned down last evening as “definitely too late and hence complitely impossible”. We joked that if I will not succeed to get out they will pick up the “losers of the race on the road”. And they finally did pick me up, which allowed the man squeezed between the wall and an overcrowded bank in an area that can hardly be defined as space for anything could have a proper seat.

During the trip to Tiebele I finally stated sharing the passion of many of traveling in Africa. For:
1. Wonderful landscapes and the sky full of stars. “Showers” without running water or doors but with the most wonderful view and flowers all around you.
2. Joy about simple things. Whether it’s the fact that the bush taxi does leave after 1,5 hours of waiting in the hottest sun, an exchange of addresses with kids, their smiles when you give them something small – this simple happiness about a moment is so refreshing…

I shall dedicate this blog to Jhone and Micareme - let it be my first letter to you even if given no internet connection in your village, you will be the last ones to read it. But we agreed that the connection will come soon and that you will go to college and learn English, haven’t we?