Satiri: hot but homey

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After a week of rushed training in Ouaga I was sent off to my new site, Satiri, a village 45 km north of Bobo-Dioulasso. My Guinea friends were off to their villages as well - Dr. Jen near Kaya in the North, and Will to Sidéradougou in the South. Will and I stopped for a night in Bobo and had a few hours to buy everything that we would need to move into empty houses. The next morning I was taken by PC car north on a dusty dirt road that is “soon to be paved.” Eventually the road forks, the main branch headed north toward Dédougou and the other branch headed northwest toward Bala and Hippo Lake. Satiri sits at the crossroads.

Satiri is a town of about 3500 people living in tightly-packed mud houses. The only actual streets are the roads to Bobo, Dédougou, and Bala. The village off the main road is a labyrinth of sun-scorched, crumbling mud bricks and dusty courtyards. The land is flat, dry, and exposed, the only shade provided by robust mango trees that are just coming in to season. Other vegetation is dead, scrawny, and so coated in dust that the entire village is monochromatic beige.

Satiri’s location is also a transit point between Bobo and some major cotton plantations. Cotton is one of Burkina’s largest industries, the major company being Sofitex. You can get a job picking cotton for them at 300 CFA (about 60 cents) per day. Huge Sofitex trucks roll through the village regularly, piled high with sacks of cotton. They kick up thick clouds of dust that cause people to drop what they’re doing to cover their faces and turn away. Dust coats everything - you can’t sweep the floor enough and all dishes, clothes, and books need to be stored under dust covers. After traveling by car, your skin, hair, and clothes are saturated with the stuff. Fortunately, there is work being done on a paved highway that will pass just outside of Satiri. If it is ever finished it will provide quick, easy transport to the city and will direct the trucks out of the village. The onset of the rainy season should help the dust too.

I moved into a house just off the main road, on the fork toward Bala. Like other houses, it is made of mud bricks and shares walls with the houses around it. A rectangle of connected houses encloses a courtyard with a well, a cooking hut, and a mango tree in the middle.

The courtyard is home to the Traoré family and relatives/friends, around 25 or 30 people in all. Monsieur Traoré is deceased, leaving his eldest son, Tidiane, as head of the courtyard. Tidiane is in his twenties and lives next door to me with his wife and two small sons. He has been very welcoming to me, making sure I have water and inviting me every evening to eat a dinner of tô with him. We sit and chat as I try to swallow giggly handfuls of the corn muck without gagging visibly.

As head of the courtyard, Tidiane has never been to formal school, only Arabic school to study the Koran. He now takes classes to learn to read and write in Dioula, the local language. He’s a great soccer player and his teammates love it if I show up to watch them practice. He dreams of moving to France to play professionally. In the meantime he has no job, nor does anyone in the courtyard. I do not know where money comes from to feed everyone in the courtyard, likely a wealthier relative in the city.

Tidiane’s wife, Karidjah, is my age (her ID card says she was born “around 1984”). She also had little or no schooling but still speaks some French. As Tidiane’s wife she is the head woman of the courtyard; the others must defer to her. Her demeanor was a bit standoffish at first, but lately she’s warmed up to me. She will often sit with me under my hangar to chat about anything and teach me phrases in Jula and Bobo. Her two sons are about 4 and one and a half, and she insists that she’s done after them. “Two is enough! There’s no money to feed more kids!” I’m proud of her for that - in most African families the philosophy is “have as many kids as possible, that way it’s more likely that one of them will become rich and support you.” Little consideration is given to the fact that raising the child requires money.

The other courtyard residents include two tenth-grade boys, a ninth-grade girl and her son, and a handful of other women with a host of small children. The tenth-graders are studying hard for the standardized test this June, and they come to me regularly with math, physics, and chemistry exercises. The test determines whether they will be allowed to continue school. It’s a difficult test to begin with, and the process is often riddled with corruption. There are a limited number of spots in the lycée (high school), and these are often available for clandestine purchase by rich kids who don’t pass the test. Some test centers will allow or encourage cheating. In the end, the odds are stacked against any honest student in the village. I have hope for the students in my courtyard, though. They’re taking initiative to prepare and they catch on to things quickly when I explain them.

Most of the little kids are curious about me. As I sit outside reading, they study me and whisper to each other while inching closer and holding on to their brothers and sisters. Some of the littlest ones are still baffled and terrified by my abnormal coloring. They’ll see me, look nervous for a moment while they decide what to make of me, and then inevitably start bawling and reaching for their mothers.

The women of the courtyard spend all day, from before sunrise until after dark, working in the courtyard. They pound corn for tô, cook, wash clothes, scrub dishes, manage the kids, fetch water, and prepare food products to be sold at the market. They work together, in the shade under the mango tree, chatting and joking around. I’m always welcome to sit with them and learn some Dioula (only a couple of them know any French), but they’d never let me touch any work. I tried pounding corn in a wooden mortar and pestle once - an athletic activity that occupies much of their time. I slammed the wooden pestle down all of one time before it was snatched away from me in a burst of laughter. Enough silliness. White women don’t pound corn - if anyone saw that they’d think the family was mistreating me. I’m also not allowed to get my own water - I had to give a kid a bucket and then follow him just to find out where the pump was.

The inside of my house was just finished. The mud walls and floor look like dark concrete, topped by a corrugated tin roof and no ceiling. The front door goes into a salon, and off to the right is a small hallway with a bedroom and shower room. The shower room is a concrete stall with a floor sloped toward a hole in the wall, so you can take a bucket bath and let the water drain. Also a great way to let mice in, I’ve found. There is a private pit latrine outside with a lock. Each room of my house has a small window with screens and metal slats like shades. I will probably paint the walls white to reflect more light. It took a while but I managed to get some furniture made: a wooden table and set of shelves, plus a bed, table, and two chairs made of bamboo. The bamboo furniture looks nice and was cheap to have made. For about $3 a local artisan will go out into the bush, cut down some bamboo with a machete, and make you a comfortable chair. I also have a foam mattress that I bought in the city, but it’s too hot to sleep on it right now. I sleep on a cot instead.

I’ve arrived in “the beginning of the hot season,” which lasts until the rains start in late May. It was hot and dry in Mali, but at least it got cooler at night. Now it has become more humid, making the heat more uncomfortable. It still won’t rain much for a month or so, the humidity just means that it stays hot at night. This time of year everyone sleeps outside, indoors is just too unbearable. Even outside at night it is often ninety degrees with no breeze, and sleep becomes impossible. There was one day last week when it rained and cooled off and was wonderful! Oh how I’m looking forward to the rainy season.

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