How I Spent My Summer Vacation

As a Math teacher in Burkina, I get a whopping 5 months of summer vacation. This coincides with the rainy season. Rainy season softens the usually hard soil making this an ideal time for planting crops. Most of the kids at my school come from farming families so their hands are needed in the fields during this time. Left with nothing to do, I took the opportunity to skip town and see a little of West Africa. I started the summer in “Dogon country”. Dogon is most notable for its ruins of eccentric cliff dwelling communities high in the mountains and for it’s proximity to Timbuktu- letting you know that you’re in the middle of nowhere. It was not so unlike Burkina, although we did learn that women in these communities are relegated to “menstrual houses” when it’s that time of the month. These “menstrual houses” are dark, dank, depressing round houses which were empty at the time of our visit but are presumably full during the dark moon.

As a side note, did you know that in the absence of artificial lighting and the birth control pill, women have a natural tendency to menstruate during the dark phase of the moon and ovulate during the full phase of the moon? Hence the 28ish day menstrual cycle (There are about 29.5 days between new moons). I guess people are more amorous on well lit evenings. In a world where people are dependent on natural lighting, the evening of the full moon would make a great “date night”. The idea is that the cycle of the moon and the menstrual cycle line up to favor conception on these nights. It would have sounded like a sketchy theory to me before I got to Africa. Now that I’m here I can really appreciate how dark it is and how different the night feels during varying phases of the moon. Doesn’t surprise me at all that behavior (and biology) could be ruled by such a thing. The science to support this theory is weak, but speaking from my personal experience I’m a believer. If you’re interested, look at the Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle#Menstruation_and_the_moon. But I digress.

After this jaunt through northern Mali, we came back through Burkina, took a break for a conference in the capital city Ouagadougou, and then went on a 2^nd trip passing through the southern part of Mali and on to Guinea. Getting there was about 90% of the battle. Overland transportation in West Africa is a grueling test of patience and endurance. We began with a 14 hour bus ride from hell to get from Bobo-Dioulasso in southern Burkina Faso, to Bamako, the Malian capital. Taking the advice of other volunteers who have traveled in his region, I didn’t get any visas. As promised, in Mali the $20 bribe was cheaper and easier than the $100 and several days it would have taken to get the appropriate stamps in my passport. The Guinean embassy in Mali was my last chance to get a Guinean visa. Here I learned that the visa would cost me about $140 and a day. I chose to pass on this formality since my traveling companions already had visas and it was going to hang our trip up several days. So I went with the bribery method which, in hindsight, was a mistake. Transportation across the Guinean border involved stuffing 10 (yes TEN) people into a station wagon for 7 hours during the hottest part of the day. The border crossing was different from Mali in several ways. Most notably, the immigration officers were neither drunk nor good humored. After considerable intimidation (of me by them), the officers refused to speak to me. The transport driver finally negotiated a bribe of about $60, but the officers didn’t give me an entry stamp on my passport. I was really nervous about traveling in Guinea without this stamp because Guinea has a lot of “barrages”. These are check points on the roads at which transport vehicles are stopped and documentation and identification is checked, usually for everyone in the car. I was worried that I was going to have to pay a lot in bribes since I had no entry stamp in my passport. As luck would have it, during the time of our trip the transport drivers were protesting these check points. The drivers claimed (probably with good reason) that these checkpoints were a ruse for extortion. It seems the drivers would pay bribes when the paper work wasn’t up to par. The few times that we were stopped, our drivers just blew right by the officers presumably “in protest”.

Guinea is a country with a lot of problems. The issues between transport drivers and military are really the tip of the iceberg. When we finally reached the capital in Conakry (after another grueling 24 hours of transportation!), we found the students on strike. This time they were protesting (surprise surprise) government corruption. There is a general feeling of chaos in this country as if all hell could break loose any second. Infrastructure is atrocious. The educational and healthcare systems are a joke. The cities are filthy. I was reminded of that joke: You know you’re from Philly when you go to New York and notice how clean it is. Once back in Burkina, I marveled at the relatively clean streets, organized border control, and reliable transportation. You know you’ve been to Guinea when Burkina seems to run like a well oiled machine. It’s all relative I guess.

Pics: My feet in the forground of a very large rock; waterfalls; foneo fields all in Guinea.