In Burkina Faso, life stops when it rains. The clouds gather, the drops start and suddenly the roads are empty of all bikes and mopeds. Off to the edges of the nearly empty streets, you see everyone huddled under whatever shelter they can find.

Maybe you see a few pedestrians, really desperate to get where they're going- nearly all of them slogging through the mud wearing a garbage bag as a poncho, or a small plastic bag as a hat.

The rain is noisy. It falls hard, pounding down on metal roofs and the hard-packed ground.

But other than that, everything is strangely quiet.

All the normal noises of the neighborhood are gone. The deafening hammering of the metal-smith's workshop down the street completely stops. The voices of the dozens of the children that play in the street just outside your front gate have vanished. The tailor's shop courtyard nearby, usually full of whirling pedal sewing machines and chatting, joking, arguing appprentices is silent.

It may rain for a few minutes.. or a few hours, but while it does, time stops. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. And that makes sense. The rains are usually hard and blinding, making it impossible to safely travel. Even in a car, visibility can be reduced to nearly nothing.

And most of life's daily activities in Burkina are carried out outdoors. Places like mechanics' garages, tailors' shops and carpenters' workshops might have a small shack or some kind of shelter, but certainly not enough covered space for everyone to work out of the rain.

Even in homes, not much can be done. A kitchen , for most Burkinabé people, is simply a corner outside with a fire and a branch or rock to sit on. No tables, no countertops, no cupboards, no roof.

Everyone rushes to shelter- maybe first pausing to get all the drying laundry and other vulnerable items gathered up and out of the wet. At our house, our guardians Salif and Rasmane would run to grab the patio furniture and pile it up next to the house, well under the terrace roof and out of the reach of the driving rain that would sometimes seem to fall nearly sideways.

People do what they have to do, then wait for it to pass.

And it always does.

It stops suddenly, like someone turing off a fire hose. Then the big West African sun pops out and everything seems to dry out in an instant. Cooking pots go back outside, the laundry is re-hung on walls and across shrubs, commuters get back on their bikes and mopeds and the smith's apprentices start hammering away again. The chairs are once more nicely arranged on the patio. And everything goes on like usual until tomorrow, when it will rain again.

The rain here in France is so...strange. It's hard for me to get used to gray and drizzly skies for days on end. I feel like everything should just stop. But it can't. This is Europe. If everyone stopped moving the minute rain fell, doom and disaster would result. At least, I guess so...

I took a "rain day" yesterday. I had decided that the rain wouldn't stop because it wasn't getting the respect it deserved. Maybe a moment of silence and stillness was all it wanted from us?

I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do any laundry. In fact, I didn't do anything terribly useful except for cook a couple of meals. I played games with the kids, read a novel, surfed the internet and watched tv on my computer. It was, in fact, a great day.

It did not, however, stop the rain.

So, today I'm back to rainy days, Euro-style. It's nearly noon and still pouring rain, but I've already been to the dump with a load of bad junk, the recycling center with my good junk, the public treasury to pay the water bill, the store to buy cat litter, etc. I guess that's how they do it here. But I miss the strange peacefullness of the Burkina rain...

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This morning, we sat around watching the rain fall. “West African television” I call it as we sit in our locally made (out of sticks and goat hide) garden chairs out on the covered terrace.
The trees whip around and the rain pours down in sheets. It’s violent, but not really vicious like a bad storm back in Nebraska. And it makes good watching from a nice, relatively dry terrace.

The power was cut, so there was nothing much to do but sit and watch the rain come down. It was a nice way to spend a Sunday morning.

It’s 1 pm now and still raining, but much more gently. I bet the farmers are really thrilled. Everyone is so anxious to get the crops in this year. Belts have gotten beyond tight to crushingly constricting as the price of food here (and worldwide) has risen so dramatically over the last months. These days I notice women walking the dirt roads of Ouaga, selling pale yellow cakes from baskets balanced on their heads. These cakes are made of neere powder (from neere tree pods). It’s considered “famine food”- cheap and not very tasty. It’s what you eat when there’s nothing else. This it’s the first time I’ve seen it being sold in the streets of the capital city.

So, everyone is waiting for the rains and the new crops to start growing. And certainly the rain will be a good boost for the local market gardens. It’s been weeks since there was any cauliflower and the green beans are very tough and stringy. Tomatoes have gotten super-expensive.

I was writing up the household menu this morning. I plan it four weeks at a time on a big calendar and then post it on the side of the fridge. A month of salads (lettuce or beets or leeks or whatever), a main dish, sides and desert. I never dreamed that I’d be so organised, but it’s the only way to manage a household here really well. It allows you to order your meat and fish ahead of time and hunt down all the ingredients that you need. Anyway, as I did the menu for June, I was struck by all the stuff that we don’t have right now (like broccoli, cauliflower, decent green beans, etc) and things that have gotten really dear. Cabbage is still a good value. But it’s hard to build your menu around cabbage day after day.

I am SO going to love living in France again and having constant access to all kinds of good food for my family. One of the things I really adore about living there is going into the village of Boege on Tuesday morning. That’s market day and the stands are full of gorgeous seasonal vegetables and fruit. Our neighbours two houses down from us have a stand and they are always sure to clue me in on what is good and hold back choice things for me. Raspberries, endive, asparagus, plums. Heavenly!

Here in Ouaga, we have mangos. At least there’s that. In our yard, we have two trees full- plenty for us and our workers. There’s even enough for the guinea pigs and the turtles, all of whom adore the fruit. The vitamin C is good for the piggies and the turtles seem to find it a tasty change from lettuce.

Speaking of animals, Cleo the Cat is definitely going back to France with us. She’ll get her blood test this weekend and then get her ID tattoo. Lucky girl!

The twins are spending this afternoon making passports for their favourite stuffed animals. Valentine is helping them make visa stamps. It's all looking very authentic.

More on the 1^st Communion tomorrow…

The air is Ouaga was exceptionally humid yesterday and I had the hair to prove it, which was particularly sad because it was the day that I HAD to get my pictures taken for my French passport.

Getting this passport was a big deal. Mine was stolen about five years ago and I have been trying to get it replaced ever since. But this situation that should have been easily remedied quickly turned into the stuff of nightmares. The people renting our home in France “misplaced” a box containing all our important documents-including the ones pertaining to my naturalisation years ago. And requests to the French Administration at Nantes yielded the news that they had never heard of me – all my records there were lost, as well!

Every attempt to fix this situation failed for four years, but about a year ago, JP found someone here at the Embassy in Ouaga willing to help me. After many letters and much to-ing and fro-ing, yesterday I got the news that they had all the papers they needed and I could get my passport replaced.

My question is this: why do they still have to use photos on passports? This is 2008. I’m all for finger prints and retina scans. My fingers are quite slim and I feel that my retinas are probably super photogenic. But no - I had to make a trip to a local photo shop and have the dreaded ID pictures taken.

Resigned, I went to a place that the French Embassy recommended. It was near the municipal stadium and located in a nice new building. It even had a waiting area with seats! It boasted digital cameras and a viewing screen for approving the pictures before printing them! Very posh.

I paid 3000cfa and went into the studio area. The photographer sat me down on a small, unsteady stool made of very shiny, very slippery red vinyl. I am thinking that the seating must at least somewhat explain the odd expression I had on my face in the first picture he took.

Another problem was that my hairstyle (such as it is) does not, apparently meet with French Embassy standards. The pictures have to show both of your ears. So, I had to gather up my frizzy hair and shove it behind my ears, which are not small and dainty. They don’t stick out, but I don’t consider them to be two of my finer features.

I fussed with my hair a bit, then he took the first picture.

Looking at the television screen nearby, I saw a particularly careworn 89 year old woman with tiny pig eyes, Albert Einstein hair and an expression of extreme dismay on her blotchy face. Judging from the ears, she also apparently had some elephant blood in her ancestry.

Oh wait. That was me.

We tried it again.

And again.

I made the photographer keep taking pictures until the receptionist from out in the waiting room started poking her head in the door, wondering if we had ducked out for a romantic lunch together.

“That one is good. I like that one. It’s really nice. Perfect!” the photographer said after the 20^th attempt. The words were flattering, but said in a tone of voice that held desperation and potential violence.

I told him to print it.

Maybe it isn’t that bad, I told myself. Maybe it just looks scary because it’s blown up on the screen. In a smaller format, it might look completely normal!

He printed the pictures, trimmed them and handed them over to me.

Well, I thought to myself optimistically, These could be useful eventually! If I have him take me in profile now, I can use them as my mug shots if I’m arrested for shoplifting Metamucil when I’m 90.

Ever practical, I stuck them in my purse. Then I headed over to Photo Luxe. It’s where we usually get our ID pictures done. I didn’t care what the Embassy “recommended”, I was going to have to keep this passport for years and I didn’t want to look like a depressed, elderly elephant pig on it.

At Photo Luxe, Moussa took my picture. One picture. Click. No fancy TV screen.

Out in the crowed, dirty, no seating whatsoever waiting area, we waited a few minutes and then Moussa ripped off the plastic covering so he could place the sheet of pictures in front of a fan to dry.

I had a look. It was not bad. I looked very serious, rather smart and quite “severe teacher about to ask you to recite all the countries of South America, including all major cities and principal exports”. I can live with that. Shooting for “completely hot sex-goddess supermodel” would only lead to bitter disappointment and tears.

As for the humidity in the air? Well, we waited all day for the Mango Rain, but all we got was the Mango Spit. Mango Spit contains little actual water and much dirt. It does not give you any desire to go out and frolic in it, even if you haven’t seen precipitation since October. So, the day was a bit of a disappointment, weather wise.

It was midnight when the real Mango Rain came. It poured down for about an hour and cleaned things up nicely. When I woke up this morning, everything was cool and freshly rinsed.

So, that’s done. The dry season will really set in now. Things will heat up dramatically and there won’t be another drop of rain until June. I miss weather. All we have here is climate.

BTW- As soon as I got home, I ripped up the first set of pictures and threw them in the bin!