Burkina By Bobby

Spiky hair. Look at all that spiky hair. Holy God, there is so much spiky hair.

This is the internal dialogue I have with myself as I entered a nightclub on Chicago’s North Side this past December. All the girls were made up and wearing black pants; the guys were nearly as made up and wore colorfully muted dress shirts. Surely this was omnipresent before I left? What with all the talk of the modern man, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and so on. If anything, the novelty of the metrosexual was waning, wasn’t it? … Or did it transcend the novel to become normal?

Either way, I hope I am not mistaken for a metro-phobe – far from it.

Before leaving for Burkina Faso to join the Peace Corps I had shopped at their stores: Express and Banana Republic - I even owned square towed, ankle length boots with zippers. Zippers! Hell, I even had a metrosexual over to my house. His name was Mark. Is that something a metro-phobe would do? So I am no bigot, I mean... I have metrosexual friends.

Flaming metrosexual friends with leather wrist accessories.

Sure, I might have had the occasional dinner of pizza bagels and dry Apple Jacks with a Keystone Light, but that was the exception to the rule. I’m no dilettante to the art of knowing how to appreciate the finer things. So, why was I so taken aback by this posh scene and the legions of spiky haired young men? My first impulse was to blame the uniformity of it all. Sometimes an outsider unfamiliar with the dressing habits and cultural insularity of these people, might miss the nuance and perceive uniformity where it doesn’t exist.

But, I couldn’t be an outsider. These peop … Oh- My-God. Look at me using phrases like “these people”; perhaps spending two years away from my young, urban and professional friends has made me an outsider and what’s worse, insensitive to their culture. “THESE PEOPLE” are exactly that: People. Choosing a Metro-American lifestyle makes them no better or worse than you or I - If it is even a choice in the first place?

If you are asking yourself, “Bobby, Why are you writing about this and is it going anywhere?”

Or you’re concerned that this is one of those ‘Gee… things are different in America and isn’t that strange because I’m American and it shouldn’t be strange, but it is strange, and gosh - isn’t that funny?’ blogs.

Fear not, astute reader.

You see, that world I visited in December is the world to which I am returning. My friends and their friends are those urbane and well dressed bankers, analysts/ or whatever other (two years past entry level) position one holds after college. While I am proud of the work I have done and I think it is important, I have worn flipflops to work for the last two years and my appearance reflects a different social scene than most young 20 somethings.

In Short, I look like a disheveled Meg Ryan with a beard.

Fitting in is not the most important thing. I have an appreciation in being unique and apart from the rest of the crowd. However, I imagine that this appreciation is seriously tested when you show up to a job interview and are greeted with the plastered on smile and questioning eyes of a recruiter who is wondering why this bike messenger didn’t leave the package at reception.

All returned Peace Corps Volunteers make this readjustment, although with varying degrees of success. This ‘readjustment process’ is a popular topic of conversation among volunteers. We discuss what we hope to do, what will be tough to get used to and somewhere in that conversation we pay homage to the two legendary volunteers who left Burkina Faso a year before we arrived. Even though we never met them we know and applaud their story of “readjusting” to life in the United States.

Upon their return to the States these volunteers’ families or friends wrote to Elle magazine and told about ‘their arduous service of helping alleviate abject poverty in Burkina Faso.’ To paraphrase the article “These brave women went out each day in the hot African sun armed with little more than their wits and greasy sunscreen.” We find out later that this led to clogged pores, split ends and some sun damage. The girls were then assisted in the readjustment process, and then the article essentially becomes a makeover story that we have all grown so accustomed to.

It is this point in our conversations, after recounting the awe-inspiring lore of these volunteers, that the guys will lament the fact that this sort of thing couldn’t happen to them. It’s a pretty bold move for a guy to write into a magazine like Elle or Cosmopolitan and request a makeover and most of us decide we lack the nerve. We resign to the fact that we will not grace Oprha’s make-over chair or the pages of the magazines that the female volunteers leave strewn about our transit house.

But this must be the narrow view! Surely, those guys with waxed chests and hair full of wax pomade are evidence for the existence of similar publications for men … They must be getting this advice from somewhere. While they might be misconstruing some of the things that they are reading, magazines from Esquire, GQ, Men’s Health, to magazines like Playboy, FHM, and Maxim all offer advice directed at a gentleman’s upkeep.

It would be nice to get into one of these magazines - To write a short article on what it is like to readjust to the fast paced, highly stylized United States of America after living in its antithesis for two years. Also, it would be nice to get a new suit and a haircut before I step into that interview. But even if I don’t grace the pages of Esquire magazine or go down in the annals of Peace Corps Burkina history, this transition is going to take place.

If it is similar at all to the transition I made when I came to Burkina Faso, it will be similar in the sense that I will hold onto some beliefs and ways of doing things and I’ll let others go in exchange for a new approach. I have been trying for a long time to enumerate exactly what it is that I picked up or let go in Burkina. Each individual ‘way of doing’ something seems trivial by itself, but accumulated over time they form a pattern. Amenities become less important I become lower maintenance and more grateful for what I have; becoming more adventurous, trying things for the sake of assimilation, accepting and trying to understand the things I can’t change, appreciating different methods of reasoning, while having conviction in my own methods.

When you amerce yourself into a new culture, little by little, the ‘way you do things’, begins to influence the ‘way you see things’ and I suppose this is tantamount to changing as a person. I always cringe when I hear someone say, “such and such experience was life changing and made me a completely new and different person.” I do not believe that someone can be separate from their past. No amount of time in West Africa could undo the lessons learned from my parents and 13 years in the public schools of Peoria, just as living a faster paced life in Chicago will not replace or overshadow growing up from ages 21 to 24 in Burkina Faso. In the end, making sense of how all these experiences and ideas work together is what it means to readjust.

It will be interesting to see what I pick up and what I leave behind, when I transition back to living in the States. I imagine that I will have stopped blogging about Africa by the time I realize what has actually changed. So, feel free to write an editor of one of those fashionable male magazines and maybe we can read my story in Esquire detailing what it feels like to have spiky hair and how strange it is to readjust to my former life in the States because it is so different from West Africa and … gosh - isn’t that funny?

During my Freshman year of college the Fighting Illini went to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. I went to this game and I learned a lot about life: Beer can be sold in 70 oz bottles, you can usually judge a guy’s creepiness by the amount of bead necklaces he has, and that losing in the least important BCS game is about the best the Illini will ever do.

In adition to these life lessons, I learned a little bit about the southern/Louisianan culture. Two nights during our trip we stayed with the grandmother of my friend Adam. She was a very nice and hospitable women who, in the spirit of Mardi Gras, baked us a cake. This cake was special because the baby Jesus was baked inside. I think the origin of this tradition is French and it worked its way into New Orleans/Mardi Gras culture via that lineage.

In any event, whoever gets the baby Jesus, wins! I am still a little unclear on happens when you win, but be sure that you do win. I don’t know how I feel about baking hard ceramic things into cakes, breads or other pastries- and the baking of the Christ child is another thing all together. Leave it to the French.

I bring this up because lately I have been wondering how pervasive the French influence of baking things into cakes and breads has been on her former colonies. In Burkina Faso, for example, they occasionally bake rocks and pebbles into their bread. This is somewhat disconcerting because one doesn’t expect there to be a rock baked into the baguette when he puts it into his mouth and begins to grind with his molars.

I have recently done exactly this, thus breaking one or my molars. I am only thankful that it wasn’t a ceramic Jesus.

I wish that I could say that this is the first time that I have ever eaten rocks in Burkina Faso, but unfortunately I have done a very similar thing only one year earlier, though that time it was a plate of rice. Finally my lifelong careless attitude of eating food without checking for rocks has caught up with me and landed me in the dentists office.

Which brings me to the title of this entry - I don’t want to propagate negative stereotypes of West Africa, but if you have the pre-conception that West African dental care might be less than stellar, this entry will do little to dissuade you. Let me preface - my account is probably prone to exaggeration as a fair amount of time has passed between my first traumatic visit to the dentist and writing this blog, but I proceed.

It was exactly like the Dentist’s office in the Little Shop of Horrors… No,no- in all seriousness, the actual dentist office, reminded me of a place I might go in the states. The chair was a bit aged and looked like it might have come from the 1980’s but this is only speculation as I am not abreast on the past or current fashions of dental equipment. It wasn’t the appearance of the office that was alarming, but the dentist’s assistant. The first thing that I noticed when he came to get me from the waiting room, was his dingy white apron splattered with a considerable amount of blood, seeing as he was a dental assistant and not a surgeon’s assistant.

I didn’t think too much about it, because this dentist was arranged by Peace Corps, and surely they will not have chosen an incapable person. I entered the room and sat down in the chair. After making small talk and my explaining my situation to the Burkinabé dentist, she went to work. She opened my mouth, looked around and began to ask me questions. This was the first time that I had ever done the awkward open mouth talking in French and I think that it might have compounded my problems. Eventually we were reduced to: “Does this hurt?” and “Aghhh”.

In the course of her questions she discovered that I cracked an old filling and some of the tooth on one of my molars. This would require drilling and then a new filling. I have done this before, and do not have an unusually low threshold for pain, so I had no reason to be concerned. She then tells me that she is going to shoot me with a local anesthetic. She prepares her needle and pricks my gum. She then pulls it out and said she didn’t do it correctly and makes several more goes at it before she injects the local anesthetic. That was a little unusual and painful, but in five minutes or so, it will set in and you wont be able to feel anything. “The worst part is over,” I thought to myself.

I thought wrong. Instead of waiting, she dove right in, picks, drills, dental gadgetry we probably outlawed at the end of the 19^th century. This would proceed in ten second spurts.

Drill, Drill, Drill

“Arghhh”

“Dose that hurt?’

“OUA HAA”

(three seconds elapse)

Drill, Drill, Drill

And so continued for 30 of the more trying minutes of my life.

The anesthesia eventually kicked in and it wasn’t so intolerable. After she finished she gave me a sucking candy. I wiped the tears away from my eyes and thanked her. When the anesthesia wore off I could feel that I had recently been to the dentist. I think it was during this period of feeling sorry for myself, I swore I would never eat rocks or visit the dentist in Burkina Faso again. Sadly, I failed at both.

Happily, my last dental visit in Burkina Faso has been scheduled for the August 30^th.

It is official. I will be finished with my Peace Corps service in one month. I should be finished with all the paper work and ready to leave Burkina Faso, by the last week in September. While I will be leaving Burkina Faso in late September I will not be returning immediately to the United States of America.

I, along with four other friends, are going to take advantage of the fact that we all currently speak French and are accustomed to living on a couple dollars a day and see some of the other countries in West Africa.

Current plans are subject to change depending on election schedules and political events. But as it stands we are going to travel to the following countries:

Mali: We may head up to into the Sahara, see a friend who is working for an NGO, make our way to Timbuktu down to Bamako and into Guinea

Guinea: Working our way through the green hilly inland of guinea we will then travel to either Liberia or Sierra Leone. This depends more on time than security as both countries are currently politically stable.

Liberia: This is the Biggest question mark on the trip

Sierra Leone: We will either enter from Guinea or come up along the coast from Monrovia (Liberia) This is the biggest attraction for all of us. From Here we will continue along the coast through Guinea and then onto Guinea Bissau

Guinea Bissau: This is supposed to be one of the most beautiful countries in West Africa and it is politically stable though the Economist reports that it might be well on its way to becoming Africa’s first Narco state!!!

Senegal: This is supposed to be one of the most developed countries in West Africa, so hopefully we will be able to recharge after crossing all these countries by land on bush taxis

The Gambia: This is a sliver of a country within Senegal, but again is supposed to be one of the most beautiful countries in West Africa and is one of the most highly anticipated countries on our list. After passing through The Gambia we will be back in Senegal

Morocco: I will fly to Morocco from Senegal and then continue onto New York and Chicago after spending a bit of time checking out Casablanca, Fez and maybe Marrakech

So there you have it. I plan to be home by Thanksgiving so this is all pretty ambitious for 9 weeks of travel. It is pretty likely that plans will change slightly and we will cut some things out in order to see West Africa without it having it be a race against time.

I will write more on this later, and I hope to post some short blogs as we travel. Check out a map or some information on some of the countries and let me know if there is anything that I should be sure not to miss. Most of our planning is coming through our Peace Corps networking and West African guide books, but it is always good to hear from other sources.