Border - Ouga
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2004
1
3
8
Trip End
Ongoing
Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
1st town in Burkina Faso was Po, where I got off and stayed for a couple of nights. As I was told so many times, Francophone Africa has a totally different vibe from Africa entirely. The poverty is greater and more immediately apparent. Burkina Faso is a land cursed by geography. Everywhere in central Po the buildings were made of mud, sticks, corrugated iron, general rubbish. Virtually o-one spoke any English. I speak no French. Let the party begin. The 2 days I spent in Po felt like 2 weeks. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Within that time I managed to: ascertain that my hotel was in fact a brothel, ascertain that the 'cooks' were in fact prostitutes, have drinks with the lieutenant colonel of the Burkina Faso national army training headquarters twice (the village lives in awe/fear of him, he never has to pay for his meals), discover the joys of kola nut, be threatened by a drunk guy holding a dead mouse and talking to it (this was in a Goronousi village 5kms from town, he eventually gave the dead mouse to a little girl who took it home to eat). The poverty in the villages is harsh. Just outside Po, in the village Tikele, when they saw me they begged for food, not money.
Lesson learned in the bush just outside Po:
first the termites ate the wood
then the ants came and ate the termites
then the lizards came and ate the ants.
Anyway, now I'm in Ouagadougou, the capital, where I don't really want to be and no intention of coming to, but alas some transport didn't work out and blah blah blah, I ended up here anyway. Went out to get something to eat at dusk with two American girls who were staying at the same place as me on my first night here, when some guy rips a bag off one of the girls, runs through 2 lanes of traffic, jumps into a sewer canal and runs off. As if that wasn't bizarre enough a guy walking close to us whips out a gun, starts screaming and jumps into the sewer chasing after him. Thieves are not taken to too kindly in West Africa, and its not uncommon for someone who is caught stealing red-handed in a market or other such public place to be mobbed and beaten to death. So when us, a guy with a gun and half the neighbourhood on bikes and motorbikes joined the chase I was uncertain of the consequences. After an hour or so of running around the city (where the soil is soft with the feathers of sacrificial chickens) we gave up and reported the whole thing to the police (turns out the guy with the gun was an undercover cop). The police station was all about semi-automatics and knives behind unlocked doors, crazy amounts of gasoline everywhere and the cops arriving with vast quantities of beer just as we were leaving.
Seems like half the city has been or is in the process of being demolished, no one can tell me why. "It's because it's growing so fast." a Swedish girl who lives here told me. To me it seems like the government has decided that the entire city is a mistake. They're wiping the slate clean...'lets start again from scratch'...
Had two nightmares about being swallowed by a star, coming towards me like a giant white headlight.
"Je ne comprends pas."
In us all, the same disdain.
