The Seventh Annual Winyé Mask Festival was held on Friday and Saturday in Boromo- a small town just about two hours' drive from Ouaga. I was there as usual, friends and family in tow.

I intend to write more about it, but not today. This morning, I once again blog to you from an internet café in downtown Ouaga. The server I'm on at home has been completely down since Thursday night. No internet, no email, no nothing.
So, if you have sent me an email lately, now you know why I haven't answered. Sorry. I am hoping that this will get fixed soon.

As for the Festival- all I have for you right now is a few pictures. Click on them to see a larger version of each )
I'll be posting more soon (in the next few days) in the Photobucket album.

Here's what the people of Burkina Faso eat as a last resort: Neere powder cakes. I mentioned it a post or two back and some people that read about it were very curious.
The neere tree(or Locust Bean tree in English) seedpods are gathered and opened. Inside are the small black seeds that are saved and fermented to make the popular soumbala seasoning that goes in almost every Burkinabé sauce. But surrounding these seeds is is a sweetish yellow powder. This is removed, crumbled and pressed firmly into a half a gourd. Then it is popped out of the mold, retaining the dome shape. There's no other ingredients to these "cakes"- not even water and there's no cooking involved. The powder is said to be rich in vitamins A, B and C. I certainly hope it is, because a lot of people are using this a filler in their diet these days. Rice and other grains have gotten so expensive, even city folks are going back to the "wild" foods from out in the villages.


One "cake" costs about 6 cents US (25 fcfa)- quite a good value if you are really hungry


How does it taste? I kind of like it. I think it tastes vaguely like chestnut flour. The texture is a bit creepy, though. Kind of like biting into sandy styrofoam. Valentine spit it right out. Lucky we can still afford rice!


Anything interesting happening soon-ish? Funny you should ask. Yes! It's once again time for the Winyé Mask Festival! I will be taking off on Saturday morning for Boromo and coming back Sunday. Knowing me, I'll manage to pack lots of adventure (more like disaster, but hope springs eternal..) into my short stay. The kids will be coming along for the fun, as will neighbour Tony, his daughter, a friend of Valentine's and some of my pals from the US Embassy, including the Ambassador and her husband. Should be fun!

When JP had asked when we planned to get to the mask festival, I’d said « Oh…around 11 or so ». “No, no!” he told me “Show up at 10:30. I’ll be there and if everybody shows up on time, it will start earlier.” Luckily, I ignored him -not that I recommend this as a technique for building healthy marriages, but it does cut down on aggravation.
As you can guess, it didn't start anywhere near on time. We got to Oullo at 11am and JP’s field team wasn’t even there. The dance site was inhabited only by a few bored village kids, a couple of sad chickens pecking at dirt and a short American guy with a big camera. An academic interested by “Performance Art”. I was a little afraid for him. He looked like he needed a Starbuck’s Grande Latte Big 'ole Superchino, or whatever the heck they sell, plus maybe a copy of The New York Review of Books. Poor thing.

Our kids had quite a time, as news of their arrival in the village spread. Soon the Land Cruiser was surrounded by children. The girls retreated to the roof rack to escape the crush and get an overview. Until the masks showed up, we were the best entertainment in town.
When JP and his team finally arrived, it was nearly noon. The dance area was being sprinkled with water to help cut the dust. A couple of guys arrived pulling a big handcart piled high with benches from the school.
As all this went on, the mask dancers were to the west, in the forest getting sewn into their costumes. Once you are in it, you are stuck for the day. You can’t eat or drink until it comes off.
They arrived in procession at about 12:30, the griot musicians playing their drums and whistles. They paraded around the dance floor a few times. The masks were organized into groups: buffalo, antelope, beauty (designated by a woman), “The woman has no house” (which doesn’t look like a woman at all), Kalé (the clown mask that gets to mock all the others) and the tall “mosque” masks. There are many other types of masks, but they had performed the other two days of the event and weren’t there Saturday.
The dancers found spots in the shade to sit down and the griots tapped out another complicated rhythm. The antelope recognized their signal and two of them stood up. It became evident that one was a very experienced dancer and the other a neophyte. Often, one of the mask “handlers” would grab the younger mask by the shoulder, make him stop dancing and get him to watch more carefully what the older dancer was doing.
There was dust. Lots of dust. Which is good, kind of. That’s one of the functions of masks- to cleanse the earth of impurity. But at a festival, they don’t need to emphasize that function. Hence the water. But that water that had been poured on the ground before the event had evaporated in about five minutes. I thought of the other American woman that had planned to come along, but had backed out at the last minut because her asthma was acting up. How right she was. Due to the dust, I spent the whole time sucking on my inhaler so hard that it's amazing it didn't lodge in my throat. " US Citizen Dies in Freak Ventoline Mishap at Mask Festival" the headline would read.

That’s it for today. Alexa is home with her old heart ailment. It had looked like her medications were completely controlling it, but it has been recurring lately. She had trouble with it at school yesterday and ended up sleeping all morning.
And as she was so unwell yesterday, I checked her blood sugar, just to see if that old problem really was not a factor. She was somewhat high….
So, fun as this is, I have other, more pressing duties.

I’ll update tomorrow, for sure.

How about a few more pics?Here are JP and I enjoying our status as VIPs. We have chairs!!

Here are the twins and Zoe exploring around the village. The small round huts are for grain storage.
When these dancers arrived on the dance floor Mallory said "Look! Here come the cheerleaders!" She particularly admired the white tassels.
Actually, they are from a lineage that is not allowed to own masks. The story is that ages ago, the founder of the lineage was trying to return home from his fields, but a mask kept blocking his way. He finally got frustrated and shot some arrows at the mask. since then, the bush fairies don't allow the family to own any masks.

A cute little friend that the twins found in Oullo

I can't seem to write today. So, here's some pictures from our mask festival adventure.
Worth a thousand words, right?Here is the scene as we drove into Oullo. People running last-minute errands before the ceremony begins.
A few friends we made. They were very interested to meet the twins.
A couple of mask dancers resting in the shade.
This is NOT a bunny rabbit. It is a viper (python) mask

I think I have already established my «AdventureGal» credentials beyond a doubt. I live in a place that most people can’t pronounce and have fought off malaria in the hospital no less than twice. I got through the riots and car-burnings when we first arrived here and have been to no less than seven Winyé mask festivals. Did I really need to see another? What did I have to prove?
Well, what I did prove was that huge amounts of dust do make asthma worse (I’ve got to remember that one) and if your car is a piece of crap, you should maybe not drive it through the less inhabited expanses of West Africa
After last year’s fiasco, I had no great desire to go back. I even started getting sick with a bad cold on Tuesday. It seemed like a message from the mischievious bush fairies. "Stay away or you're in for a replay of last year, you miserable loser" was their exact wording.
But a nice Fulbright prof staying here for a few months wanted to experience a mask festival with her two daughters. These are the American twins that are in school with my twins….So, I thought it would be “fun” to go together. Even my pal Tony from next door decided to come along and bring his three year old.
So, we set off on Saturday morning at about 7am. My car took the lead and Tony was right behind us. His truck needs a repair to the steering and tends to shake distressingly when forced over 100km per hour. (Why not repair it? Good question. The part has been ordered for months and just never shows up) And my Toyota? Well, I have a deep and not completely unfounded fear that the left front wheel might just fall off at any given moment. It happened once already, on a trip back from the north of Burkina. The thing is supposedly repaired now, but that is a term used very loosely here. It wasn’t exactly the blind leading the blind, more like the badly injured leading the grotesquely maimed. But we figured that the odds were low that both cars would break down. We took it slow and the trip up went quite well. The four twins sat on the back bench seats in the Land Cruiser and had a great time. They like to play lots of role-playing games (not like their big brother’s D&D) more along the lines of: “Let’s all be orphans? Like really, really poor? And we have no home, just an old blanket?” If the tentatively proposed scenario is accepted, they all rush to assign themselves good parts. Mallory invariably complicates things, as she almost always insists on being some kind of animal. In this case, the others maintained that the tragic orphans were much too impoverished to care for a pony or even a smallish cat. Mallory finally gave in, thought a moment, then announced: “My name is Amber. I’m nine months old. And I bite!”. She sounded disturbing- just like a child in a 12-step program for demonic offspring. Next up would be the little boy from “The Omen” saying: “Well, I’m Damien. I’m 10. And I’m the Antichrist”

G. and I chatted, the girls played. We stopped once near some shrubs that had more than the average amount of leaves for this time of year. Little Zoe needed the cover, as did G. Then we went on another hour towards Boromo. This part of the trip Zoe spent in a complete, frantic panic. Tony later told me that he had quite a time trying to drive and decipher what his over-excited three year old was trying to tell him. He finally worked out that she had seen G. get out of our car, but hadn’t seen her get back in. She didn’t know Gina well, not even her name, but was quite beside herself that we had just taken off and left some poor lady stranded out in the bush. Maybe Zoe thought it was the start of some sinister trend. Who knows who would be left behind next? Makes a person think about drinking a lot less water, that’s for sure.

We got to the small hotel in the center of town at about 10am. This year I had reserved early, so we weren’t forced to stay in the nightmarish place that we did last year. To our surprise, we found that the old Relais Touristique had made (gasp!) improvements! The rooms all have air-con now!!!! And (get this) the rooms all have a TV! Granted, it only gets two channels. And the channels mostly seem to play cheesey music videos. But still!
Now, I’ll admit that the bathrooms still close with just stained curtains, rather than doors, and the rooms are still only about 9’ x 9’, and the water is still cut most of the day. But at least they provide a bucket now, so you can keep a reserve on hand. So, it’s actually quite improved. It’s now achieved the level of a very scary, extremely primitive Motel 6. But for the middle of Burkina, it’s pretty great. So, we happily and quickly unloaded our suitcases and got ready to head over to the small village of Oullo, which would be the site of the day’s ceremonies.

More to come……..