When I was in Ouagadougou in 2008, I made a friend who liked to go by the name of “Dabson.” In actual fact, his real name is Yacouba, but he likes to go by “Dabson” because it sounds more rasta.

One of my favourite places to hang out in Ouaga, unfortunately, is the total tourist trap of Zaaka. It caters to young foreigners like myself, so you’re likely to see dorky white volunteers in ugly clothes eating overpriced food and watching djembe players every night of the week.

I liked it for a couple of good reasons, however. First, the Lonely Planet is right and it really is an oasis in the chaotic streets of downtown Ouaga. Downtown is hot – and I mean hot like you’ve never felt before – and overflowing with people, some the type that will follow a lone white girl for miles. It’s overwhelming. This chaos is part of the reason I love Ouaga, but part of the reason it drives me crazy sometimes. Zaka is a calm courtyard dab smack in the middle of downtown, and it allows some moments of peace.

Second, the service is actually very good.

Third, it’s an easy place to meet people, even if they are stoned, white-girl crazy rastas. Some are annoying but some, like Dabson, make me laugh.

My brother and I actually met Dabson while we were coming out of an internet cafe one day, a place where “artisans” like to linger to ambush tourist with their wares.

Dabson didn’t have your typical batik, necklaces or elephant statues.

Nope, he had an enormous wooden picture frame in the shape of Africa with two GIANT bull horns coming out the top.

“Bonjour jolie blanche you want to buy my piece of art?”

Now normally, respect is in order at almost any point of traveling. But in this moment, faced with quite frankly the ugliest craft we’d ever seen, my brother and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

Dabson giggle sheepishly. “This is pretty ugly,” he admitted.

That’s how we met Dabson the rasta, the only Burkinabe I’ve met that’s pulled off – or even tried – that indie/hippie/bohemian look that you’re much more likely to see in San Cristobal de las Casas or Vancouver.

After my brother left Dabson and I became buddies, and I even went to his brother’s wedding. (Unfortunately, he and his family were hoping I’d be his new white girlfriend, but that’s another story.) My friends and I often went to see him sing at Zaaka, which I’d recommend to anyone hanging out in Ouaga. (He’ll even serenade you.)

But no story makes me laugh as much as the one that went to confirm something interesting I’d observed about the Burkinabe: they don’t keep track of their age. Know other people’s and their own age is not considered remotely important.

So I’m sitting in Zaaka one day chatting with Dabson, and to make conversation I ask him how old he is.

“20,” he says.

A week or so later, I’m making conversation again and I ask him what his birthday is.

“April 3rd, 1980,” he says.

“I thought you said you were 20?” I asked, confused.

“Yeah, sure, I’m 20.”

“No, you’re 28.”

“No way.”

We debate this for a bit, and I finally pull out the calculator on my phone to prove my point. “Look. It’s 2008. 2008 minus 1980 is 28.”

He looks at the calculator, flabergasted.

“Wow. I’m really getting old.”

2. The time. No, not the literal time (we’re on the same time zone in Mexico City, after all.) I’m talking about all the time people have. I worked about 35-40 hours a week, and most of my friends had similar time commitments. Still, it seemed like people always had the time for things in Xela. Time to stop and chat, time to sit in the park and do nothing, time for a spontaneous dinner party. Everyone in Mexico City, myself included, seem to be really busy. Of course, I’m sure that the capital is not representative of the country as a whole, but I will still always fondly think of Guatemala as a place where people are moving slow enough just to hang out.

3. The tortillas. What, you say? Surely Mexican food is better than Guatemalan food! Okay. Yes, Mexican food is much better than Guatemalan food. Guatemalan food isn’t bad per se, it’s just nothing to write home about. But man, are the tortillas better in Guatemala! They are thick with a rich, earthy flavour. Here in Mexico they are thinner and just sort of lackluster. (I guess in Mexico they can afford to be so-so since they are filled with such amazing things.)

4. Salsa. Plain and simple. My dancing shoes seem to be taking an indefinite hiatus.

5. Politeness. Again, don’t get me wrong. People in Mexico City are certainly polite. But it’s nothing compared to the uber-politeness of Guatemalans. Kiss on the cheek, every time you see someone. “Con permiso” whenever you pass someone on the sidewalk. An extended round of “Que tenga buen dia… gracias… que le vaya bien” whenever you leave a store. Etc, etc, etc. These sort of things really grow on a person in 6 months.

6. The disorder. “How can you live in such chaotic and disorganized places?” my mother always asks. It’s simple: I am a very chaotic and disorganized person. So being somewhere crazy, where the chicken buses spew black fumes, where markets spill over onto the road, where loud merengue is blasted on store speakers, where “Guatemalan time” means showing up at least an hour late… these things make me feel at ease. They calm me. It’s nice, being able to match my inner chaos with that of the outside world.

7. Colours From Mayan women’s beautiful huipiles (woven blouses), to the peeling paint on houses and stores, to the pimped-out designs on chicken buses, Guatemala gives the eye a lot to play with.

That said, I need to wean myself off academic writing. Even when I write fiction, I think I sound too much like an essay. It’s going to be hard to train away six years of university writing, but it will be worth it to sound less dry.

Since I don’t have many stories about my life at the moment, I thought I’d scour my brain for some funny memories. Best to get them down in writing before I forget them completely. This particular anecdote is from Amman, in August 2006.

So for the third or fourth day in a row I’m aimlessly wandering the streets of Amman. It’s a great city for wandering: lot of hills, windy streets and long staircases that weave past homes and backyards. I’ve wandered into a neighborhood near the Citadel, and have decided I’d like to find a shop or two to look for souvenirs. The streets are quiet.

Now, here’s the thing. I’ve traveled through a few Muslim countries by this point, so I obviously know that people pray five times a day. I’ve learned the signs that it is that time of day – the call to prayer on a mosque’s loudspeaker or, you know, people getting down to pray. I know to be respectful and get out of the way. But at this particular moment, I don’t see any such signs and I don’t have a watch with me to know what time it is. So I continue wandering around.

I finally see a store across the street that looks like it might contain jewelry or art. I walk over, and pull the door open wide.

Right in front of the door, facing right towards me, are six or seven men on the ground praying. All of them look up at me, annoyed.

I freeze in embarrassment. Then, slowly, I back away through the door, and shut it softly behind me. Then I flee the scene of the crime.

Lesson learned: When traveling in a Muslim country, if the streets are eerily quiet in the mid-afternoon, don’t be a dolt and go barging into a store.

We had already taken sex ed before, so we already knew the drill. Two years ago, our teacher had split up the boys and girls, and caused fits of giggles when she showed us a condom and made a tampon expand in a jar of water. Only two months ago, boys and girls together, our hip young teacher had told us that if we wanted to “get into someone’s pants” we had to be comfortable enough to talk with them about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. At the time, we never heard about any of our peers having sex, except the girl in another class who was dating a sixteen year old.

Three young adults climbed on stage, all good-looking and wearing trendy clothes. The brown-haired woman – tall, beautiful and modelesque – started the tirade. True love waits. Sex has too many consequences. It’s irresponsible. It’s for making babies. We’re too young. We don’t know any better. It won’t be special until later.

“I’m a virgin, but I’ve had boyfriends before,” the young woman told us. “A year ago, my boyfriend at the time invited me over to watch a movie. We didn’t have sex, but it definitely got hot and heavy and I even took my pants off. After the movie, I slept over in his bed. The next morning, I felt awful about myself. I didn’t have sex but I knew I had gone too far and that made me uncomfortable. I know that if I had actually had sex, I would have felt a thousand times worse.”

The one guy came forward then, grabbing his microphone confidently. He had spiky blond hair and wore baggy jeans with Airwalk shoes. Probably hand picked for his ability to look cool and relatable to teenage boys, he fit the part perfectly.

“I have something to tell you guys,” he said. “I am a virgin, and I’m proud of it. You might think it’s really weird for a guy my age to be a virgin, but it’s not. I know that when I meet the right girl that I waited to share sex only with her.” He jumped off the stage suddenly, ran through the aisle, heads turning as he went. A the back of the gym at the emergency exit, he swung the metal door open and the bright outside light flooded the room. “Hello world,” he yelled out the door. “I am twenty-one, and I am a virgin!”

I don’t remember whether people laughed or cheered, but I do remember what came next. The third performer, a curvy Southeast Asian girl in a low-cut top, finally took her microphone. “I’ve had sex before, but I wish I hadn’t,” she started softly. “But I decided a couple years ago that abstinence was still important to me and I would wait until marriage to have sex again.

“Think of it like this. If you were dating someone, and they gave you a beautiful necklace, that would be pretty special, right? But what if you found out that your boyfriend or girlfriend had given the same necklace to lots of other people? Wouldn’t that make the necklace less special? Sex is like that too. If you have it with lots of people, it becomes less valuable, less special for when you want to share it with someone you love.”

I am stooped over my cell, about to win the high score when the waiter taps me on the shoulder. He is holding a baby. “Can you hold this for a minute?”

I reach out and take the little boy. As I always feel when I hold babies, I’m afraid of breaking it and I awkwardly try to support the neck. The waiter laughs and walks off.

“Uh,” I say.

But the waiter has disappeared into the kitchen and doesn’t come out for some time. Meanwhile, the baby has started staring at me with big, somber eyes. Not remotely disturbed at being in the arms of a strange nasara, he reaches out and grabs my nose. Admiring his adorable tightly curled hair, I hold him close to me. Like most women above a certain age, I can feel my biological clock screaming. I marvel that babies the world over have the same comforting smell. I’m a little afraid he’s going to pee on me, but he doesn’t.

I sit there with the baby for about half an hour when a young woman comes in. She’s one of the street vendors who loiter outside Zaka. She walks right over and takes the baby from me.

“Thank you,” she says, and walks out without further explanation.

_______________________

When I get home later the same day, Adjara and Mariam are sitting outside my door.

“Ca va?” I ask.

“Ca va!” they both chirp in unison.

I go to open my door, but then Mariam produces some paper from her pocket. She has other ideas. “Can we play the game with the future?” she asks.

Remember that game M.A.S.H.? If you are around my age, you probably played it in grade four. It’s the game where you write down prospective husbands (some boys you like, some that are gross), jobs, number of kids, cities and so forth, and then through a complicated counting technique you predict your future. “M” means mansion, “A” means apartment, “S” means shack and “H” means house.

Anyways, I taught the girls a week ago and now they are hooked. I would think that telling the future more than once might sort of invalidate the results, but these never get tired of it.

“OK.” I sit down and pull out a pen. “Who wants to go first?”

“It’s my turn,” Mariam says.

We go through cities, number of children (Adjara makes me put down “100”) and then we get to husbands. Mariam pauses, and then lists: “Suleyman, Etienne, Adama and… Lamine.”

Adjara pokes her. She says something in Bissa, which I can’t understand but roughly estimate to mean “you can’t marry your brother, stupid.”

Mariam laughs and replaces Lamine with the two-year-old down the street. We then turn to jobs, and she lists her usual doctor, lawyer and President of Burkina Faso.

I then ask Adjara “What two other jobs should we put down?” In M.A.S.H., the person getting their fortune told writes down three jobs they want, and their friends write down “embarrassing” ones. Usually, in Canada, we’d write down “garbage collector” or “toilet cleaner” but these never seem to spark any giggles from Burkinabe girls.

“Clown?” I suggest. They give me blank looks.

“No… Smelly fish vendor! And… second hand shoe vendor!” Adjara suggests, and Mariam laughs.

“Alright.” I begin the counting process, and Mariam’s future emerges. She’s going to become a doctor, marry her neighbor, live in Canada and have two children. They are all going to live together in a mansion.

Sometimes, I don’t know whether it was a good idea teaching them this game. But they’ll want to play it again. Tomorrow, Mariam will be a lawyer and Adjara will be president. The next day they’ll be a judge and a university professor. They will choose who they marry, and they’ll live all over the world.

I realized that I had not felt so peaceful since being in Sapone, since the nights I’d spend lying on a bench, staring at the stars, and marveling at the quiet. I started to think that I needed to be “away” to find calm. After all, the only similarities between Nalunega and Sapone (asides from the slow pace of village life) is that in both places I was entirely out of my element, almost as if I was totally far away from myself. Maybe this is why I’ve become a bit of a “travel junkie” – I only seem to have any inner peace when I am separated from everything familiar.

I was only on Nalunega for two nights, so I don’t really know about the social fabric of the Kuna, so I don’t want to make any grand, sweeping generalizations. The only real sense that I got was that the people felt intrinsically connected to the islands, and were content and proud of who they were. This is not to say that I didn’t notice hints of problems, especially of gender imbalances and alcohol problems, but I don’t want to comment on something I have no real knowledge of. All I know is that the people on the islands contributed greatly to the peace that I felt.

The day actually started out horribly. Maybe a bit of mild culture shock was setting in, but I probably just got up on the wrong side of the bed. In the morning, our boss told the three of us that there was room for two in one vehicle, and one in the other, so we’d have to be split up. I was secretly hoping that I could get some alone time, but I didn’t want to offend Danielle and Linda so we drew straws. I ended up in the back of a pick-up truck with Danielle.

I was angry about something, and the truck was driving so fast that we were boucing around and knocking against the metal railings. I felt sick to my stomach. We arrived at a village somewhere and descended from the truck. We entered another village classroom, to now familiar whispers and giggles. The children got back to work. They looked hungrier than usual, and their clothes were dirty. The girls were beautiful and most sat quietly at the back. I felt useless, and panicky too. The room seemed to get smaller and smaller, so I excused myself and walked out into the bush. I was upset, and wanted to throw up. I walked out of sight of the school, dropped to the ground behind a tree, made fists in the earth and tried to vomit. I couldn’t understand why they had brought us to this country. We were complete wastes of money.

Danielle walked up behind me.

“I just want to be left alone. I’m trying to throw up.”

“Well, you can’t just sit out here by yourself. They are asking after you.”

A man from FDC approached us. He told us that if I wasn’t feeling well I should go back to Sapone. I tried to explain that I was just carsick, and that the same thing often happened to me back in Canada (which is true.) He didn’t really believe me, but he agreed that we didn’t have to go back, as long as we moved to another village where the driver was in case we needed to make an emergency drive home. (We had already learned by this point that whenever a white person is remotely ill, Burkinabe people will figure that it must be malaria.)

Ten minutes later, we were picked up and driven to Nabdogo.

These three kids might as well be called the Three Stooges. The boy on the left is five-year-old Tidi. The little one in the middle is his three-year-old sister Alindi. They are two of our neighbor Mme Ilboudo’s children. The girl on the right is four-year-old Aleah, the little sister of my friends Ruth and Zaki. Tidi, Alindi and Aleah were always together, getting into trouble. Although all the kids knew that the boss at FDC didn’t let kids on the compound, they would always sneak in anyways. Usually they’d be lingering by the side of our house, and we’d be clued in to their presence from all the giggling.

These kids loved empty water bottles. Well, the kids loved any objects we could give them, because they’d make toys out of anything. But water bottles seemed to be the material of choice, because they could make shovels, wheely-things on sticks, rattles, and more. So when they saw us, they’d usually make the following request: “Nasara, je demande bidon!” (White person, we ask for a water bottle.) One of the few things they could say in French, really.

When I think of kids in Burkina Faso, I will forever think of these three first. Like kids should be, they were cheerful, impish, energetic and friendly. I got so used to walking to the market with their repeated catch phrases “Nasara bon-jou!” (“Hello white people!”) trailing me as I went, that when I left everything felt so quiet.

I’m ashamed to say, I don’t think we ever knew this man’s name, even though we saw him almost ever day. Everyone basically knew him as “le guardien.” Of the three security guards for the FDC compound, he was there most often and definitely the only one who looked like he could really kick ass. During our first week in Sapone, when the other two girls seemed to be going through some substantial culture shock, I was content as could be and not really scared of anything. Except this guy. He terrified me. He had what seemed like big, sharp teeth, and he patrolled the property armed with a slingshot and an intense glare.

Two months later, it made me laugh to remember that I once felt this way. The guard was the father of two adorable children, Leo and Alidi. When we saw him out working the fields on his “days off,” he’d laugh and wave at us with his wife. He didn’t speak a word of French, but would always be happy to listen to us try and speak Moore. When I gave him a photograph of Leo that my mother had printed and mailed me, he was overjoyed and asked me to take this portrait.

This is one of my favourite photographs that I have ever taken. For the first month and a half of the summer, it was still the dry season and all of the other village men were off working in Ouagadougou or Cote d’Ivoire. Until the rain started an farming began, the guard was pretty much the only “local” man we knew. This photograph captures the generalized “essence” of the farming men in the village of Sapone: quiet, strong, somewhat fierce, proud, and gentle.

This is Chantal Ilboudo. She lives with Mme Ilboudo, her aunt. I never did get her complete story, but I surmised that she must be an orphan. Chantal is 10 years old, but looks and acts at least 16, most of the time. She’s older than Mme Ilboudo’s five children, and it seemed that she did all the babysitting. It was a rare sight to see her without the baby Karim. Her hands are huge, covered in rough callouses from all her chores.

Chantal was my introduction to a voiceless group in Burkinabe society – girls who don’t go to school. She will probably never leave Sapone, and will probably never learn French. She will probably get married young, and have five children before the age of twenty-five.

On my last night in Sapone, Chantal and her school-going friend Sidonie came to visit me. Chantal sat beside me, and wrapped her arm around mine. She mumbled something in Moore. “Elle ne veux pas que tu pars,” Sidonie explained.

This is Dorcas, the daughter of Helene, the woman I still write letters to and who lived next door to us. Dorcas’ father is a Protestant minister, and her mother does not work. Her family was visibly better-off than the Ilboudos and their other neighbors. Dorcas and her siblings looked healthy, and her older brother and sister went to high school, which is much more expensive than elementary school.

I often called Dorcas my “favourite kid,” despite the fact that she was quiet and didn’t seem that impressed with us. Sure, she’d come and shake our hands like all the other children. But when the other kids laughed hysterically at our silly white-people antics, she’d just sort of sigh and keep silent. She was so quiet that her mother confided that she was worried that Dorcas would be shy as an adult!

I decided that Dorcas was not actually shy, though, just soft-spoken. In many ways, she was the boldest of the kids. She used to climb the tree next to our house every day, going high enough to spy on us. (In fact, she broke her arm falling out of this tree.) She was always the fastest to run out and greet us, and whenever the older kids asked her, she would sing us an entire song without faltering.

Dorcas started school this year. By the time I hopefully go back next summer, she will be nine years old with two years of French classes behind her. I hope I’ll get to actually talk to her then.