BF Journal: 9/22 - 9/30

Update on old content:  First up, I am getting sick of NOT holding baby goats.  I will fix this situation as soon as possible.  I am unsure how safe it is for me to do so, but I getting pretty tired of seeing them and not being able to smother one.

I mentioned going to a village market in my last post.  While there we snapped  a couple photos.  

 

 
On the way back we saw an interesting sign just outside of Bobo.  A Star of David + Swastika?  It gets weirder…

Should I visit this village?  Maybe the Illuminati are involved with happenings there.  I am on to you Obama/Jay-Z.

9/22

Last night we went to a local bar(ish) place (mentioned in the previous post).  We saw the musicians from our party there.  I tried millet beer (average quality but extremely cheap) and watched people dance to the beat of a báláfòⁿ (the xylophone-like instrument you saw in the last pictures/video post). I trying to get better at the tones.  They are probably wrong on that word.

The caterpillars got cooked and we ate some.  Here are some pictures for you.  

9/23  

Fairly uneventful.  I went swimming at night.  It was nice until I remembered that I was swimming in a pool at a hotel… during an Ebola outbreak.  I killed two flies today.

9/24

The only cool thing I did today was go the hotel bar with Jeff and Dasha after dinner.  And order a four cheese pizza + a Johnny Walker.  I felt somewhat American for an hour.

9/25

I went to a factory to learn about how people make soap out of the butter made from a Karite tree.  The products (soaps, skin care, shampoo, etc.) smell fresh and are made from natural ingredients.  I can hear the hipsters stampeding toward West Africa now.

9/26

Today’s trip brought us out 3.5 hours to Sideradougou.  The road we turned onto after Beregadougou was junky, but the countryside was pleasant to look at.  Tall trees littered the roadside.  Backs of leaves glimmered in the afternoon sun and flashed in our eyes.  Passing quickly in the 4x4 gave the sense of riding through a chandelier forest.  Scores of people on the side of the road prospected for gold.  We arrived shortly before nightfall and settled in before the next days work. 

9/27

I spent a lot of my time in a hot vehicle studying French.  We left Sideradougou to check out a village two hours away called Owo where everyone speaks Dogosé.  The village is medium sized but remote enough that everyone growing up there learns Dogosé.  I met people who speak French, Jula, and Dogosé, which means the linguistic situation is similar to Turka.  This is another contender for my first language.  I noticed intervocalic velar elision (also present in Jula), some doubly articulated labiovelar consonants (k͜p  g͜b), but only rising and falling tones (only two tones is not what I expect from a Gur language). However the distance from the house in Bobo (5.5 - 6 hours drive) will make village visits a hassle at best.

9/28

I went out on my own with Minkailou and a Dogosé informant to do some gathering of plants and names.  This is something that I will happily do for Jeff to help him out, but it doesn’t particularly interest me.  We traveled a way from the village to find a river to look for plants that grow only near water.  It took us some time and by the time we got there and collected a few specimens, we had to turn back.  The ride back was peaceful.  The sun sank as we drove and herds grazed as we passed.  Everyone was beginning to relax for the evening in every village we drove through.  Everyone waved and children yelled the seemingly obligatory “tubabu” (white person) at me.  We passed to quickly that their voices felt like part of the scenery.  We were glad to get back to our host village right before meal time.  Kids watched some bad movie with Jeff as I wrote and studied.

9/29

Today was fairly uneventful for me.  I mostly read and studied some French.  I watched goats and sheep parade by me all day.  Tiny lizards scampered up and down walls.  The sun chased me and caused me to shift positions several times.  The breezes were welcome but infrequent.  I may have lost weight sitting and sweating.  Even the flies thought it was too hot today.  I have no idea how many cups of sugar saturated tea I drank.  By the time the tea gets to the third brew (each brew adds more sugar), you can practically chew it.  I brushed my teeth vigorously tonight.

Bats and crickets chirped melodically through the evening into the night.  Swarms of moths and mosquitoes circled the lights.  And I typed furiously, sick of reading for the day.  I contemplated which language I will settle on soon and how this will change my day to day life in Bobo.  The selection of a language will likely affect the course of my academic career for the rest of my life, and I know so very little about the languages I have to choose from.  I wonder about the details of coordinating with a consultant and how precisely I will arrange village trips.  I wonder if my time spent on taking notes in Jula is wasted effort since I am picking it up very slowly.  I wonder a lot about the coming weeks and getting started on my primary reason for being for being here.  I wonder what unforeseen challenges will arise.

9/30

I traveled back to Bobo in the early afternoon.  Nothing extraordinary to report for today.  We will see what adventure tomorrow brings!

BF Journal: 9/17 - 9/21

9/17

I skipped the last day of the conference and got some study time on French and a little Jula elicitation.  It was nice to have the house to myself. 

At night we had a party because the Russians were leaving.  We had a local band over for a couple hours and it felt like half the neighborhood showed up.  We had people from Burkina Faso, Mali, Russia, and the U.S. at the festivities.  It eventually turned into an international dance party.  I have pics and a video for you.  

Dinner before the festivities

Warming up

Playing

Vydrine dancing with the musicians

Minkailou's picture of us toward the end of the video, the cameraman is on the right

Jeff with neighborhood kids + one of the students

For the video, please excuse the camera work and one-day editing.  I basically threw it all together last minute and it was my first time using that camera.  I had to make it low quality as well for uploading. Keep the video small, it looks like garbage if you make it big.

Do not judge me on whatever awkward Pinocchio-esque nonsense I am doing.  I dance like a worm with knees.  Or maybe a cricket with Parkinson’s disease. 

Do pay attention to Jeff’s and Vydrine’s dancing at the end.  Yes, Jeff put money in Vydrine’s pocket, like an exotic dancer.  

Did Vydrine just win Burkina Faso?

9/18

We picked up a nonlinguist (herein referred to as Dasha) who will stay with us at the house for a couple weeks.  She was not among the students who stayed with us for the conference but she was at the party.  She works on a project finding Arabic manuscripts with local languages written in Arabic scripts.  Some of the pictures of manuscripts that she has collected are incredibly intricate.  Here are a few examples.

We (Jeff, Minkailou, and me) plan to visit the plateau in a few days to do some more plants/animals for Jeff.

9/19

Today was fairly uneventful.  It rained, I went to the supermarket, and I studied.  Try to remain in your seats.

9/20

Dasha and I went to see some waterfalls and natural geological formations that everyone calls the domes.  After a 90 minute bus ride and we were in Banfora.  From there we biked roughly 15 k to the falls.  It took us longer than we expected to get there but it was worth it.  I have some pictures of the falls and the domes for you.  I went swimming at the base of one of the falls but nobody took a picture of it.  Before setting out on our bike ride, Dasha mentioned that she had never seen 70 SPF sunblock before.  When we got back she asked me how I got a little red with sunblock that was so strong.  Yup, a Russian person is making fun of how white I am.  This might be a never-before-seen level of whiteness.  Here are some pictures from the trip.

Dasha, my travel buddy

Me on the footpaths up to the falls

Much of the path was littered with corn and sugarcane fields

...along with tropical trees

The waterfall from the bottom

From the top

Great view, huh?

Care for a swim?

Right next to the rushing water

Us with our guide

The domes from a distance

A bit closer

View of the domes from one of the midsized ones

View of the road, woods, and farmlands from a high dome

The domes from a high vantage point

Toward the end of the sight-seeing

We made it back 30 minutes before dinner.  Afterwards, Oumar, Zaki, Wamara (Vu’s consultant), Oumar’s woman, and I piled into the 4x4 to go dancing.  None of us danced but I did manage to almost get through two beers before going into a zombie trance until I hit the sack.  Dasha was smart enough to stay home and sleep.

I made contact with a Jula instructor who is from California.  It was only by email, but I hope this ends up being easier than my current method of attempting to do fieldwork-like elicitation with Zaki.

9/21

In the morning Wamara left to go back to his village.  Zaki, Dasha, and I made our way to a market outside of Bobo (I will put the name in here later).  We got there as people were arriving and setting up.  We bought some caterpillars for tomorrow’s dinner.  I will try to remember pictures of this tomorrow.

After a quick rest at the house we three went back out to a local venue to see the same band from the video.  We drank millet beer and watched people dance.  I finally ate some dog.  To be honest, the meat was average.  I would eat it again, but will not go out of my way for it.

The War of the Flies rages on.  No decisive victories yet.