I've been trying to phone Aisha all morning. And I've been wondering about Yvonne and her children, too- but she has no access to a phone. In fact, I've been worried about everyone in Ouaga- especially my many Burkinabé friends whose simple mud-brick homes stood little chance of surviving the terrible rains of Tuesday, September 1st.

Yesterday I didn't even turn on my computer or television, so I only found out about this disaster this morning. My Facebook page was full of news from many friends in Ouaga- lucky friends with internet access and sturdy homes - though there was flooding and lots of property damage everywhere.

In just 10 hours, over a foot of rain fell. Houses collapsed, cars floated away and bridges washed out.
The only bright spot is that there seem to be relatively few death reported- only five so far. The downside is that with 150,000 left homeless and this year's food crop damaged, there may be lots more suffering ahead for many people.

Here are a few photos:
This one was taken the morning of the 1st, just outside the ISO gates, very close to our old house.

These cars floating away were photographed along the Blvd Charles de G. It's the road we'd take every day to get to school and work.

This is also from our old neighborhood:

Here's one man try to keep the water out:

Here are some pictures from the next day. They show what happens to mud brick houses when it rains too much, too hard.
One of the deaths was caused by a collasping house. Luckily, it seems that most people managed to escape their homes before they fell in.


(NB: These were taken by Alice and Pete- friends from Ouaga. They are lovely people and doing all they can to help out in this difficult situation.)

Burkina Faso is already a country with many issues- education woes, poverty, corruption. The government is trying to meet the challenge of this disaster...That's what the Burkinabé press reports, anyway. But they have little/almost no money, no experience (the last flood was in 1919) and lots of other problems to deal with.
I really fear this flood will be responsible for even more hunger and disease in an already difficult environment.
In the meantime, I try the phone again.
And I wait.

Burkina Faso has been on my mind a lot lately, as you may have guessed from my last post. It's not only the rain that keeps it constantly on my mental radar. There's also the fact that JP is still there, nearly at the end of a one month research stint.

And Aisha just called a couple of nights ago, to see if I'd "forgotten" about her.

The answer to that question was "no", of course. When JP left France he had one duffle bag almost completely full of little gifts and letters for Yvonne, Aisha and other people I'll certainly never forget.

Knowing people there seems to be the only way to get any real news of the country, that's for certain. There's little to be had online, anyway. If you google for some news of the place today, for example, you'll find out that the president of Burkina just named a new army Chief of Staff.

It's very hard to find anything about the news I got last night from JP: There were riots yesterday in the marketplace in the center of the capital city. You only find an article about this if you search with both the words 'Ouagadougou' and 'marché'- so basically, you have to already know the news in order to find out any news- if you see what I mean. And you have to speak French, of course.

As for the news I heard last night- here's what I know: The Rood-Woko market (where I bought most of our household odds and ends when we arrived in Ouaga) caught on fire and was badly damaged in May of 2003. It was an ugly thing- Sankara's graceless modern replacement for the old colonial-era structure. But at least the new cement box was huge and provided shade and shelter for many, many small merchants. Built in 1989 to hold about 2000 traders, by the time we arrived in the country (1999) there were about 5500 present.

It was chaotic and overcrowded and noisy. It smelled like dust, rotten fruit, Oro brand insect spray, blood, spices and a million other things.

The lower level was the basics: cheap polyester clothes from Asia, pagnes, shoes, hair supplies (it was the go-to place for wigs and extensions). And just after the wigs was the meat market, buzzing with big black flies and full of huge, scary machetes -my least favorite place.

Upstairs you could find the touristy arts and crafts and fancier fabrics. In the southwest corner of that level was my favorite place: the bead merchant stands with baskets and buckets full of nothing but brightly-colored beads of every kind.

Getting through the market was not for the faint-hearted. You had to duck under beams, squeeze up crumbling cement stairs nearly completely blocked by the goods of traders who'd set up their shops ON the steps and then hop over the many jerry-rigged electrical lines hanging like 220 volt spiderwebs everywhere.

Crazy as the place was, it was the center of life for thousands of people. This in mind, I had thought the Burkinabé government would make a heoric effort to get the place running again quickly. But the clean-up and repair dragged on for years. It was only just re-opened in March 2009.

And, unfortunately, things haven't been going very well. It's badly organised, the merchants claim, and inaccessible. Business is slow. It's nothing like the dynamic and lively place it used to be.

One real sore point is the presence of a great number of machine-gun toting police officers. This , in fact, was the cause of Thursday's riots. They chased a young man through the marketplace and he died while trying to escape them. The people in the market reacted by burning some of the officers' motorcycles.

There's other news, too. For the last months the crime rate in our old neighborhood has been steadily rising. The robbery at our house last year was just one of many more to come. And now purse/backpack snatchings have become a huge problem, as well.

Good news? There's not so much. Even the climate has gone funny. Out in the Winye villages, where JP does his research, the rains have come late and people are worried for their crops. The people are blaming the Earth Priests, who carried out the proper sacrifices, but too late in the year. They were disorganised and the ceremonies didn't take place at the right time. They admit that the lack of rain is their fault-how could they do otherwise. They're very sorry, but the damage is done...

The kids are on holiday for two weeks. So, while I have no shortage of things to blog about, time is the problem. I have been keeping busy.
One project has been to teach my girls the basics of sewing. I got out the old machine my mother in law gave me years back and we went at it, producing a couple of dresses for the twins' favorite toys:












Those were just made from scraps, but I have been spending lots of time in fabric shops, getting material for various projects.
Here's the costume I designed for the twin's dance recital coming up next month. I didn't sew it myself, as there are great local tailors that can do it lots faster than I can. They will be made in five different colors and worn at the big show at the CCF


And here's another design. Valentine wanted a Renaissance Fair costume. (Yes, they are catching on in France!) We had a tailor sew most of the costume, but I did some modifications at home.












Best of all, thanks to support from my friends and family back in the USA, I have been able to help my handicapped friend Yvonne improve her simple home. The mud brick walls were caving in, making it dangerous for her and her children. Now they have a cement brick wall!
And the new gate is wider, making it much easier for her to get her wheelchair through. Here's the before and after:

Things here are quite calm. As I wrote to a friend earlier today: “you can unbate your breath now”.
Yesterday the curfew went into effect and the city shut down. The first things to close were all the gas stations, so lots of people got stuck without a means of transport. And a taxi ride that normally cost 30 cents cost $1.60, a huge price for the average Burkinabé that lives on a dollar or day.
But the curfew was lifted early this morning and the gas stations reopened. So, I went out on my day’s errands. My first stop was out in the shanty town at the east end of Ouaga. I visited my friend Yvonne there. I mentioned her a bit before in this post. She is a parapelegic widow with three small children. She is a really interesting person and amazingly cheerful in the face of her very difficult life. I stopped by to bring her a few things for Christmas. Last Christmas, all she could give her son as a gift was a bottle of orange soda. Kevin was really happy, as that’s a special treat to him. But when you think about the shower of gifts so many wealthier children get……..Anyway, thanks go out to my father and my pal Barb for their contributions. I was able to give Yvonne some fabric, a few toys for the children, some money and a bag of candy. I also had a sack of rice for them. Seven year old Kevin got the biggest smile on his face. It still amazes me to see a child get so happy about a bag of rice. It brings home so clearly how well they know what it is to be hungry.
In asked Yvonne how things had been in her neighbourhood during the attacks. She said that they hadn’t heard a thing, as they are so far from any police station or public building. But many of the escaped prisoners came to the area, hoping to hide and steal from easy marks. As the homes are just flimsy huts and there are no electric lights, the population is very vulnerable to crime. Yvonne was very worried, as she is alone, can’t walk and has young children. If you are the praying type , please pray for her and especially her younger son (just 1 year old), Jacob, who is ill. If you don’t pray, just send generic positive vibes. Can’t hurt.
Then I went to the VAO to check on things and then on to the Papiers workshop. Business taken care of, I went downtown. I got some food shopping done without the place being evacuated, so that was a nice change of pace!! But the normal food shipments have been delayed, so the shelves were pretty empty and many things are scarce. There's not much in the way of dairy products around, for example. I did manage to get some butter and sour cream, which was quite a coup.
But we still have a problem here in Ouaga. All the police have gone into hiding. I did not see a single cop the whole time I was out. What I did see (and feel, unfortunately) was huge traffic jams. And even worse, there is also that problem of those 600 prisoners lose on the streets. The word is out to be on the alert, as crime is exploding. Many motor bikes have been stolen and houses robbed, as my friend Yvonne mentioned. It hasn't been too bad here in the Zone du Bois, though. I guess it's harder to steal from rich folks that have cement walls, guardians and
electric lights in the street. The criminals prefer to steal the cooking pots and meager pagnes of the poor, as it’s less risky.

Just about an hour ago, I heard a series of loud bangs and ran out of the house with my heart pounding. “They started again??!!” I thought to myself. I listened and the sound repeated. Fireworks. Who on earth wants fireworks now?? I would have thought we were all fed up with explosions by now. I heard enough to last me a lifetime. I guess I have a mini-post traumatic stress thingy. Loud noises make me very jumpy today..... I am NOT looking forward to New Years’ Eve this year, when the Burkinabé love to light firecrackers. Luckily, they are too poor to afford many!

There was a full eclipse over the desert on the 29th of March. Mary Lynn saw it in eastern Niger. I had thought of getting her on here as a guest blogger, but she had so many emails to catch up on, I didn’t have the heart to ask her to do any more work.
So, you’re stuck with me.
She signed up for the trip over a year ago. A hard-working lawyer with a passion for travel, she knew she’d better stake out her claim to some quality vacation time. Perhaps March in the Teneré was not the ideal choice, as the temperatures are at a maximum then, but there was an interesting expedition being planned to get a good view of the full eclipse. She’d gotten a taste for the African desert two years ago on a visit to Burkina and decided to really experience it.
Chris, who was leading the expedition, is an experienced adventure traveler and had managed to gather a group of 12 from all over the world- South Africa, Italy, England, Poland, Mexico……..Mary Lynn was the only one from the United States.
This diverse group set out from Agadez in early March with their Tuareg driver/guides and 3 four wheel drive Toyotas. They spent 15 days making a big loop around the Teneré. They drove long distances frequently punctuated with stops for digging out a vehicle, changing a tire or making some other repair.
The photos Mary Lynn took show a surprisingly varied landscape: huge dunes of pale yellow sand, featureless plains, forests of eroded rock arches, hills of white marble streaked with blue, and rock formations covered with prehistoric paintings.
The eclipse itself was very dramatic--as the sky got darker, the temperature plummeted. Then one by one stars became visible and the moon became a black disk in the sky surrounded by the thin yellow rays of the solar corona.
About five days later, the desert phase of her trip was over, and Mary Lynn caught a bus down from Agadez to Niamey. After a night there, she got another bus to Ouagadougou.
Her stay here was pretty calm. It was a chance for her to unwind, and enjoy sand-free food. She was quite a good sport and very gracious about following me around as I took care of my daily stuff- Papiers du Sahel, school runs, grocery shopping, etc.
I also took Mary Lynn to visit Yvonne, a woman that I have known for a few years. She has had many trials in her life- crippled by polio at age three, orphaned shortly after and left to live in the streets alone at only eight years old. She now has twin babies, just born two months ago. You can see them in the picture with Mary Lynn. They are called Jacob and Elisabeth.