Burkina Faso
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Tuesday, September 15th, 2009It’s quite possible that my heart is still in West Africa.
Yes, life is good here in Guatemala. I love this country. I love speaking Spanish (far more than I will ever love French). I love the music here, the food, the culture. There’s lots to do and I have tons of friends in the [...]
Africa = the perfect traveler’s bootcamp
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009Warning:
Travel Snobbery ahead. (You know, how you get some travelers together and one will say “I’ve been here, it was incredible,” and another will reply “but I’ve been here, and it is more incredible!”) I try to avoid this as much as possible in my blog, but today I’m going to jump headfirst into a [...]
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with excerpts from my research.
Thursday, May 21st, 2009Man: The way you look at polygamy is the way we think when we look at your culture on television and see two women or two men getting married. It’s scandalous! We don’t understand!
Woman: We intellectual women fight for the liberation of women, but in our homes our husbands still try to maintain their authority. [...]
Cultural relativism… revisited yet again
Monday, May 4th, 2009My second last day in Ouagadougou in 2008, I learn from a neighbor that a good Burkinabe friend of mine has been sustaining a big lie for the past two years.
In 2006, he was the best bud to me and the two other Canadians in my project team. On our first night in the [...]
Romance… or just “sampling the local fare?”
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009Last week, during one of my daily sessions perusing the Lonely Planet message boards, I received an interesting message. A forum member had read about my time staying with a local family in Ouagadougou, and sent me a bunch of questions. Among the mundane (“how did you find the family?”) was a very… interesting question: [...]
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
One afternoon in Ouaga I go to meet Dabson and “Mr. Baobab” at Zaka. They are not there when I arrive so the waiter (who now knows me) seats me at a table in the shade and says that my friends will be back in an hour. I order a Coke, and because I don’t [...]
M.A.S.H.
Thursday, November 6th, 2008I am writing a ridiculous travel novel, just for fun. Well, right now it’s just a dozen or so jumbled memories disguised as fiction through composite characters, but it feels good to write. Here’s a page I just wrote.
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When I get home later the same day, Adjara and Mariam are sitting outside my door. [...]
Sapone and bye-bye Burkina
Thursday, June 26th, 2008This month has gone by very quickly, but I also feel like I’ve been in Ouaga for quite awhile. I leave on Friday morning for Ghana. There, I’ll spend two nights on the beach in Kokrobite, and the last night in Accra before catching the flight to NYC. My mom is coming to meet me [...]
A (not my) Big Fat African Wedding
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Last Saturday I was invited to go to a wedding with a friend (Ouaga’s least annoying musician/artisan rasta type.) I wasn’t really sure whether I should accept or not, since I wasn’t entirely sure that “I want you to come to my home and meet my family” wasn’t code-word for “I want you to come [...]
“Polygamy” or “Trying not to Judge”
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008I am learning about polygamy through two channels: my host family, and my research. In the family, polygamy is weird in how not weird it is.
I didn’t really get the whole situation straight until recently, because it’s sort of hard to figure out who’s who in a Burkinabe family. Why? Well, in West Africa [...]