Goutes le arc-en-ciel

Patiently, we wait in line outside the bakery. It's just after dark, and Levy and Leontine, who I'm now working with at the MCC bureau in Ouagadougou, have been kind enough enough to give me a ride home. We aren't the only members of the daily mass return home who have taken the time to stop on the way to buy bread for the evening meal. This is when many people do some of their shopping.

It might be because the refrigerator count per person in Burkina Faso is significantly lower than that in the United States. It may be the relative lack of big personal vehicles in which to haul large loads of food. It might be simple cultural preferance. Whatever the reasons, shopping for food is done more frequently in urban Burkina Faso than in the U.S.

My diet has revolved around rice, macaroni, cuscus, sweet potatoes, and a thick corn-based paste called to. Most of my meals have had as a main dish one of these foods with a well-seasoned sauce made from spinnach, or onions, or beef with broth, or fish, or mutton. Some meals have included a salad (cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, eggs) or a fruit for desert (pineapple, mango, banana, watermelon...). Breakfast has been tea with sugar, and a scrambled-egg sandwich.

My main drink has been water, the drinking of which, given the heat, has become quite a hobby of mine. Another new-found favorite is called degue. Milk, sugar, and bits of millet are stirred together to create a rather ugly mixture that one sips and then chews/swallows. Burkinabe tend to make their sugary drinks violently sweet. The last time I drank degue, I discovered a large undisolved chunk of sugar at the bottom of my glass. I ate it.


Other food stuff:

- Corn (on the cob) is often cooked over coals, and eaten slightly burnt. The taste reminds me of popcorn

- I ate a catepillar a few days ago. They're cooked with onions, or tomatoes, or whatever else. There's a reason I had only one.

- a treat I've had several times is sugar-coated peanuts. Yum.

- My little host sister, Nema, likes the catepillars. She dislikes watermelon. Works out well for us, I guess.



The MCC bureau wasn't untouched by the flooding. A few inches of water covered the floor last Tuesday after the rain. Cleanup included paging through bottom-shelve books and notebooks to help them dry, and dismantling a water-logged computer so that the individual parts could dry. Reassembled, it somehow worked fine.

There is a concert (today, I think) to raise money for the people affected by the flood. As is most often the case, it was the poor who were hit the hardest. Those with mud brick homes for instance, were the most likely to be among the people now living on the floor of local schools. I won't make it to the fund-raising concert. This afternoon, I'm going to another concert to see my big brother Arsene perform with his band. They made it through the last round of the competition. They're good. I'm excited.