Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Letter From Kevin
The following is an email I received from my good friend Kevin Sweeny, only days before I returned to Burkina Faso:
I arrived in the capital on Tuesday afternoon, I woke up Wednesday morning and needed to visit the market downtown to pick up a few things. Once downtown I noticed that it was much busier than normal and a lot harder for me to find a cab.
Back at the infirmary, which is inside the Peace Corps office building, I noticed a sign on the door from the US embassy stating,
"THERE IS CURRENTLY AN ARMED CONFLICT BETWEEN POLICE AND MILITARY DOWNTOWN. GUNSHOTS HAVE BEEN HEARD THROUGHOUT THE CITY. ONE MILITARY OFFICER HAS BEEN KILLED. THE US GOVERNMENT STRONGLY ADVICES AMERICAN CITIZENS TO AVOID DOWNTOWN OUAGADOUGOU AND SURROUNDING AREAS."
Hmmm....that explained why it was tough to get a cab. But there are often warnings of this sort in Ouagadougou (the capital), usually over-cautious, so I didn't really give it all the attention it deserved. Burkina Faso has been a very stable and peaceful country since 1987 (at least relative to the rest of West Africa) and the culture looks down on direct confrontation, so I just assumed that things would be fine if given a little time.
I returned to the infirmary, and my friendly Peace Corps nurse told me that me test results showed I had Giardiasis, which was easily treatable. She gave me medicine and told me that I could leave the infirmary and stay at the Peace Corps house, just down the road. I asked about the situation downtown and was told that things had quieted down a bit and seemed like there was nothing to worry about.
I got back to my room, packed up my bags to head over to the PC house, but then discovered a copy of A Christmas Story sitting by the TV. Deciding not to break a long-standing holiday tradition, I popped it in and sat down to enjoy one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time. Once the movie was over, I grabbed my bag and started to walk out of the now empty PC office.
It was around 6:00 at night, and the office folks had all headed home, except for our country director. As I was walking out I heard her run out of her office and ask who was there.
"Kevin," I replied.
"Are you going back to the house?" She asked.
"Yep."
"OK, tell whoever is there not to leave tonight. Stay around this area. Apparently the fighting has started up again. I just got off the phone with Malcolm (a volunteer), he's stuck at a bus station downtown where there is fighting going on all around him. We're trying to figure out how to get him out of there, but in the meantime we can't have anyone leaving the area."
"Wow. OK."
I walked the short distance from the PC office to the PC house and told the 10 or so other volunteers that were staying there. Minutes later Malcolm walked through the door, really shaken up, "That was the scariest shit I've ever been through!" The bus from his village dropped him off downtown and as he was leaving the station, he heard a bunch of gunfire and had to run back into the station. After a couple of minutes, things calmed down, and he was able to catch a cab. While driving back to the house, a military officer pointed an assault rifle at the cab and demanded that they stop. The officer then went to the passenger sitting next to Malcolm, placed the barrel of the assault rifle against that passenger's head, and demanded to see his ID. The passenger fumbled a bit, the officer got angrier by the second. The passenger finally found his ID, showed it to the officer, who then told the cab to turn around because they couldn't stay on that road. Malcolm, understandably upset by the situation, got out of the taxi at a safe place and called someone from the Peace Corps staff to pick him up.
It was now about 7:00 at night and a group of us were getting hungry. I asked Malcolm if he thought is was safe for us to head to a restaurant just down the road to grab some food and a couple beers. He said yeah because most of the bad stuff was going on downtown, about a 15-minute drive away. So four of us, Malcolm, Giorgio, Jake, and I, headed down to the Desert Rose for dinner.
So there we were happily drinking our beer and eating our meat on a stick, when the waiter comes to us and tells us to hurry up. They were closing the restaurant early because of the events. Jake and Giorgio still had most of their beer left and insisted on staying until they finished it. Malcolm and I insisted that this was a bad idea and I provided an analogy about when a rainstorm is about to arrive in Burkina.
A lot of volunteers here have had the experience of one of our local friends telling us to go inside because it's going to rain or because an insane dust storm was about to descend and us not heeding the advice because it didn't seem like the weather was going to change. "It's just a little wind" or "it's only sprinkling a little" are our typical responses. Usually, though, the locals are right and torrential rains or insane dust storms ensue and we get soaked or blinded by the dust.
I mentioned that our not leaving when everyone else was seemed very similar to this. Everyone had a couple of laughs at this comparison but continued eating and drinking outside. I haven't mentioned that, other than in the best restaurants in the city, Burkinabe restaurant seating consists of plastic chairs and tables and is outside. At any rate, my comparison, when locals leave, you should follow, would prove to be accurate.I sat there thinking to myself over and over again, go home, leave, get out of here. My gut instinct has proven to be remarkable over the past 28 years, this time was no exception, I should have listened to it. I looked around and noticed shops closing, traffic dying down, restaurant staff quickly folding table cloths, gathering tables and chairs. "OK seriously, let's get going boys," was the last thing I said before seeing a woman who was sitting on the street grab her baby and sprint away from the road.
I stood up, ready to announce that I was leaving and I'd see them back at the house. A second later, traffic stopped and we heard the sound of a motor-bike (the transportation of choice in Burkina) honking its horn incessantly. I was facing the major thoroughfare, Charles de Gaulle, and saw the silhouette of two men on a moto with assault rifles their hands driving on the wrong side of the road laying on the horn. I watched them until I saw they were slowing down to turn at our corner.
As soon as they turned at our corner, I dove behind a table. I heard shots go off and yelling "EVERYONE INSIDE, EVERYONE INSIDE!" At this point I army crawled from under the table to hide between a row of motorcycles in front of the restaurant, where I could make a run for it as long as these guys dressed in camo didn't see me.
They saw me.
One of them went the opposite direction, toward the restaurant, the other walked quickly toward me, gun drawn. "What are you doing?" he yelled at me.
"Nothing, nothing," I said back.
"Get up!"
I slowly stood up. So this jerk with a big gun, dressed in camo, yells at me to get up and, "Allez chez vous," which is French for, "Go to your house." Interestingly he used the "vous" form of "your" instead of "toi", where "vous" is the more respectful and formal form. I reflected for a moment on how this was nice of him and then calmly, but quickly, got the hell out of there.
As I was jogging away I looked behind me and saw Malcolm being shoved in his back by an AK-47 into the restaurant along with the Frenchies and what I thought was Giorgio and Jake. I turned again and kept jogging to the house, when the sound of assault riffle fire turned my jog into the best sprint I could manage while carrying the giardia parasite in my gut.
As I was sprinting back to the house I was able to engage in a cultural learning experience, yet another to add to the now millions I've amassed. Apparently, a white guy running from gunfire in Africa is hilarious to everyone not white. As I was sprinting away from then men in camo, firing kalashnikov assault rifles, I couldn't help but to overhear groups of Burkinabe laughing hysterically and pointing out that the nasarra, aka white guy, was running away from gunfire. What was even more interesting to me, culturally speaking, was this guy sprinting away from the gunfire, who was right next to me, having a hard time keeping up because he too was laughing at me.
Once back at the house I saw the PC country director discussing the situation with some security guards. She asked me where I was and I told her a quick version of the story you've just read. One of the security guys then says that he was going to get them, to which the director replied, "Be careful out there. Don't put yourself in trouble!" in a very leading-lady sort of way, as he was leaving our courtyard.
I went inside to splash some water on my face and to check my boxers (everything was OK). As I was walking back out to the courtyard I heard Giorgio's voice, which brought a little bit of reassurance as I had no idea what had happened to him, or the others, after the gunshots were fired. He told me that he took off in a sprint once he saw the guys with guns but hadn't seen Malcolm or Jake. Luckily it was only a few minutes before the other two got back to the house and recounted the story of what happened to them. They didn't run. When the guys with the guns rolled up they did what one of them was yelling, which was "EVERYONE INSIDE!" and they went inside the restaurant. One of the French tourists wasn't moving fast enough and so the armed man kicked him in the back and knocked him to the floor. Once inside, people were telling Jake and Malcolm "this way, this way," and showed them to a back door that led into the alley. They went out the back door and ran home the same way I did.
They told me that while they were running, people were laughing at them too.
We continued to hear gunfire in the streets, which seemed to come from all around, for the rest of the night. The gunfire continued to get worse and worse. It sounded like there were major battles going on, with thirty seconds of automatic gunfire followed by another twenty seconds automatic gunfire coming from another direction. We began distinguishing the types of gunfire we heard. Some of it was clearly automatic, some of it wasn't, some of it was incredibly loud, more than hand held weapon, and then we began to hear what sounded like mortars and explosions.
I went up on the roof of the house to see what was going on and saw explosions and fires in the distance. Then the power cut off. The fighting seemed to get worse for a while, but then began to die down. And then, after a short while, the power came back on again. It seemed like everything was calm, with only sporadic individual shots going off, and so I went off to catch some sleep.
The next morning I was more than a little curious to find out about what had caused this eruption. I walked down to the office and hopped on the internet. I was able to find out that the police and the military don't really get along, and haven't for a long, long time. The military thinks of the police as their "little brothers" and don't feel the need to abide by trivial "laws" such as stopping at traffic lights, not shooting people, and in this case, and the reason for all of the violence – not giving up good seats to a concert they had free tickets too.
I'm not kidding, this is the reason I can now say that I sort of know what a war zone sounds like. A couple days before all this happened there was a concert here in Ouaga. Some non-uniformed soldiers wanted to get into the concert for free. OK, not a problem. But then they wanted the best seats, which was crossing the line for the police. It turned into a big argument and sadly the police shot and killed one of the soldiers, three other soldiers were wounded.
The ridiculousness that followed was the military retaliating for one of their own being killed. On top of scaring the shit out of everyone in the city, the military also burned down a police station and shot up another. The cherry on top of this garbage sundae is that some idiot soldiers then went to the city jail and released 600 prisoners. Cute.
As I'm writing this all is calm in the city now, and I should be able to get back to my peaceful little village tomorrow. Don't be too worried by this exceptional event. I still feel that Burkina is an incredibly safe place to live and I'm fairly certain that this was, and will be, a one and only type of thing while I'm here.
I know that the tone of this was a bit light. But to be honest I've never been more scared in my life. It was a moment, while horrible to experience, that makes me really appreciate the good things I am blessed with. That being said, I'll be thinking about all of you this Christmas. Please know that even though I don't get a chance to talk or write to you as much as I'd like, you are definitely a part of me here.
…
This email was edited in small parts but is essentially untouched and is a good indication of the situation that I was coming home to. Things, as he said, did start to calm down. Though there were several days when it could have gone either way. While the free tickets were the apparent spark to this fighting, it was not the sole reason. It was merely a spark tossed upon a gunpowder barrel of pent up hostility and instability. Things are safe now, but it would be naïve to think a similar scenario is impossible of happening again.
I arrived in the capital on Tuesday afternoon, I woke up Wednesday morning and needed to visit the market downtown to pick up a few things. Once downtown I noticed that it was much busier than normal and a lot harder for me to find a cab.
Back at the infirmary, which is inside the Peace Corps office building, I noticed a sign on the door from the US embassy stating,
"THERE IS CURRENTLY AN ARMED CONFLICT BETWEEN POLICE AND MILITARY DOWNTOWN. GUNSHOTS HAVE BEEN HEARD THROUGHOUT THE CITY. ONE MILITARY OFFICER HAS BEEN KILLED. THE US GOVERNMENT STRONGLY ADVICES AMERICAN CITIZENS TO AVOID DOWNTOWN OUAGADOUGOU AND SURROUNDING AREAS."
Hmmm....that explained why it was tough to get a cab. But there are often warnings of this sort in Ouagadougou (the capital), usually over-cautious, so I didn't really give it all the attention it deserved. Burkina Faso has been a very stable and peaceful country since 1987 (at least relative to the rest of West Africa) and the culture looks down on direct confrontation, so I just assumed that things would be fine if given a little time.
I returned to the infirmary, and my friendly Peace Corps nurse told me that me test results showed I had Giardiasis, which was easily treatable. She gave me medicine and told me that I could leave the infirmary and stay at the Peace Corps house, just down the road. I asked about the situation downtown and was told that things had quieted down a bit and seemed like there was nothing to worry about.
I got back to my room, packed up my bags to head over to the PC house, but then discovered a copy of A Christmas Story sitting by the TV. Deciding not to break a long-standing holiday tradition, I popped it in and sat down to enjoy one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time. Once the movie was over, I grabbed my bag and started to walk out of the now empty PC office.
It was around 6:00 at night, and the office folks had all headed home, except for our country director. As I was walking out I heard her run out of her office and ask who was there.
"Kevin," I replied.
"Are you going back to the house?" She asked.
"Yep."
"OK, tell whoever is there not to leave tonight. Stay around this area. Apparently the fighting has started up again. I just got off the phone with Malcolm (a volunteer), he's stuck at a bus station downtown where there is fighting going on all around him. We're trying to figure out how to get him out of there, but in the meantime we can't have anyone leaving the area."
"Wow. OK."
I walked the short distance from the PC office to the PC house and told the 10 or so other volunteers that were staying there. Minutes later Malcolm walked through the door, really shaken up, "That was the scariest shit I've ever been through!" The bus from his village dropped him off downtown and as he was leaving the station, he heard a bunch of gunfire and had to run back into the station. After a couple of minutes, things calmed down, and he was able to catch a cab. While driving back to the house, a military officer pointed an assault rifle at the cab and demanded that they stop. The officer then went to the passenger sitting next to Malcolm, placed the barrel of the assault rifle against that passenger's head, and demanded to see his ID. The passenger fumbled a bit, the officer got angrier by the second. The passenger finally found his ID, showed it to the officer, who then told the cab to turn around because they couldn't stay on that road. Malcolm, understandably upset by the situation, got out of the taxi at a safe place and called someone from the Peace Corps staff to pick him up.
It was now about 7:00 at night and a group of us were getting hungry. I asked Malcolm if he thought is was safe for us to head to a restaurant just down the road to grab some food and a couple beers. He said yeah because most of the bad stuff was going on downtown, about a 15-minute drive away. So four of us, Malcolm, Giorgio, Jake, and I, headed down to the Desert Rose for dinner.
So there we were happily drinking our beer and eating our meat on a stick, when the waiter comes to us and tells us to hurry up. They were closing the restaurant early because of the events. Jake and Giorgio still had most of their beer left and insisted on staying until they finished it. Malcolm and I insisted that this was a bad idea and I provided an analogy about when a rainstorm is about to arrive in Burkina.
A lot of volunteers here have had the experience of one of our local friends telling us to go inside because it's going to rain or because an insane dust storm was about to descend and us not heeding the advice because it didn't seem like the weather was going to change. "It's just a little wind" or "it's only sprinkling a little" are our typical responses. Usually, though, the locals are right and torrential rains or insane dust storms ensue and we get soaked or blinded by the dust.
I mentioned that our not leaving when everyone else was seemed very similar to this. Everyone had a couple of laughs at this comparison but continued eating and drinking outside. I haven't mentioned that, other than in the best restaurants in the city, Burkinabe restaurant seating consists of plastic chairs and tables and is outside. At any rate, my comparison, when locals leave, you should follow, would prove to be accurate.I sat there thinking to myself over and over again, go home, leave, get out of here. My gut instinct has proven to be remarkable over the past 28 years, this time was no exception, I should have listened to it. I looked around and noticed shops closing, traffic dying down, restaurant staff quickly folding table cloths, gathering tables and chairs. "OK seriously, let's get going boys," was the last thing I said before seeing a woman who was sitting on the street grab her baby and sprint away from the road.
I stood up, ready to announce that I was leaving and I'd see them back at the house. A second later, traffic stopped and we heard the sound of a motor-bike (the transportation of choice in Burkina) honking its horn incessantly. I was facing the major thoroughfare, Charles de Gaulle, and saw the silhouette of two men on a moto with assault rifles their hands driving on the wrong side of the road laying on the horn. I watched them until I saw they were slowing down to turn at our corner.
As soon as they turned at our corner, I dove behind a table. I heard shots go off and yelling "EVERYONE INSIDE, EVERYONE INSIDE!" At this point I army crawled from under the table to hide between a row of motorcycles in front of the restaurant, where I could make a run for it as long as these guys dressed in camo didn't see me.
They saw me.
One of them went the opposite direction, toward the restaurant, the other walked quickly toward me, gun drawn. "What are you doing?" he yelled at me.
"Nothing, nothing," I said back.
"Get up!"
I slowly stood up. So this jerk with a big gun, dressed in camo, yells at me to get up and, "Allez chez vous," which is French for, "Go to your house." Interestingly he used the "vous" form of "your" instead of "toi", where "vous" is the more respectful and formal form. I reflected for a moment on how this was nice of him and then calmly, but quickly, got the hell out of there.
As I was jogging away I looked behind me and saw Malcolm being shoved in his back by an AK-47 into the restaurant along with the Frenchies and what I thought was Giorgio and Jake. I turned again and kept jogging to the house, when the sound of assault riffle fire turned my jog into the best sprint I could manage while carrying the giardia parasite in my gut.
As I was sprinting back to the house I was able to engage in a cultural learning experience, yet another to add to the now millions I've amassed. Apparently, a white guy running from gunfire in Africa is hilarious to everyone not white. As I was sprinting away from then men in camo, firing kalashnikov assault rifles, I couldn't help but to overhear groups of Burkinabe laughing hysterically and pointing out that the nasarra, aka white guy, was running away from gunfire. What was even more interesting to me, culturally speaking, was this guy sprinting away from the gunfire, who was right next to me, having a hard time keeping up because he too was laughing at me.
Once back at the house I saw the PC country director discussing the situation with some security guards. She asked me where I was and I told her a quick version of the story you've just read. One of the security guys then says that he was going to get them, to which the director replied, "Be careful out there. Don't put yourself in trouble!" in a very leading-lady sort of way, as he was leaving our courtyard.
I went inside to splash some water on my face and to check my boxers (everything was OK). As I was walking back out to the courtyard I heard Giorgio's voice, which brought a little bit of reassurance as I had no idea what had happened to him, or the others, after the gunshots were fired. He told me that he took off in a sprint once he saw the guys with guns but hadn't seen Malcolm or Jake. Luckily it was only a few minutes before the other two got back to the house and recounted the story of what happened to them. They didn't run. When the guys with the guns rolled up they did what one of them was yelling, which was "EVERYONE INSIDE!" and they went inside the restaurant. One of the French tourists wasn't moving fast enough and so the armed man kicked him in the back and knocked him to the floor. Once inside, people were telling Jake and Malcolm "this way, this way," and showed them to a back door that led into the alley. They went out the back door and ran home the same way I did.
They told me that while they were running, people were laughing at them too.
We continued to hear gunfire in the streets, which seemed to come from all around, for the rest of the night. The gunfire continued to get worse and worse. It sounded like there were major battles going on, with thirty seconds of automatic gunfire followed by another twenty seconds automatic gunfire coming from another direction. We began distinguishing the types of gunfire we heard. Some of it was clearly automatic, some of it wasn't, some of it was incredibly loud, more than hand held weapon, and then we began to hear what sounded like mortars and explosions.
I went up on the roof of the house to see what was going on and saw explosions and fires in the distance. Then the power cut off. The fighting seemed to get worse for a while, but then began to die down. And then, after a short while, the power came back on again. It seemed like everything was calm, with only sporadic individual shots going off, and so I went off to catch some sleep.
The next morning I was more than a little curious to find out about what had caused this eruption. I walked down to the office and hopped on the internet. I was able to find out that the police and the military don't really get along, and haven't for a long, long time. The military thinks of the police as their "little brothers" and don't feel the need to abide by trivial "laws" such as stopping at traffic lights, not shooting people, and in this case, and the reason for all of the violence – not giving up good seats to a concert they had free tickets too.
I'm not kidding, this is the reason I can now say that I sort of know what a war zone sounds like. A couple days before all this happened there was a concert here in Ouaga. Some non-uniformed soldiers wanted to get into the concert for free. OK, not a problem. But then they wanted the best seats, which was crossing the line for the police. It turned into a big argument and sadly the police shot and killed one of the soldiers, three other soldiers were wounded.
The ridiculousness that followed was the military retaliating for one of their own being killed. On top of scaring the shit out of everyone in the city, the military also burned down a police station and shot up another. The cherry on top of this garbage sundae is that some idiot soldiers then went to the city jail and released 600 prisoners. Cute.
As I'm writing this all is calm in the city now, and I should be able to get back to my peaceful little village tomorrow. Don't be too worried by this exceptional event. I still feel that Burkina is an incredibly safe place to live and I'm fairly certain that this was, and will be, a one and only type of thing while I'm here.
I know that the tone of this was a bit light. But to be honest I've never been more scared in my life. It was a moment, while horrible to experience, that makes me really appreciate the good things I am blessed with. That being said, I'll be thinking about all of you this Christmas. Please know that even though I don't get a chance to talk or write to you as much as I'd like, you are definitely a part of me here.
…
This email was edited in small parts but is essentially untouched and is a good indication of the situation that I was coming home to. Things, as he said, did start to calm down. Though there were several days when it could have gone either way. While the free tickets were the apparent spark to this fighting, it was not the sole reason. It was merely a spark tossed upon a gunpowder barrel of pent up hostility and instability. Things are safe now, but it would be naïve to think a similar scenario is impossible of happening again.
