Satiri, Bala, elections

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For the last month I’ve been back in Satiri teaching. It’s still hot, but it must be getting a little better because I’ve been able to sleep at night.

We’ve even gotten a little rain! After just a couple of showers, everything became instantly greener. The harmattan dust was rinsed from green leaves, mangoes ripened to yellow-orange fruit, and the flamboyant tree on the corner bloomed with hundreds of small red flowers.

The villagers call these the “mango rains:” a little drizzle every week or two, just to rinse the dust off the mangoes. In a few more weeks, the real rains will come. In the meantime, mangoes are in season. The tree branches are weighed down with the fruit, which reaches softball-to-football size. People tie long poles together, reach high up on the tree and knock down the mangoes, then collect and sell them on the side of the road. They are cheap and always delicious. The mango tree in my courtyard has small mangoes right now. The kids nibble on them all day, always sticky with the orange juice.

Just outside of Satiri, work continues on the goudron, the paved road. A dirt platform has been erected and leveled and is ready for tar, but who knows when that will come. Giant bulldozers roll past my house constantly, stirring up clouds of dust. Sometimes a truck passes though pouring water on the road to keep the dust down, turning it to mud and blocking off my courtyard with a bog-like strip of quicksand.

At the same time these machines are working on a barrage, or artificial lake. It will be a reservoir during the dry season and will also be seeded with fish for food. Currently Satiri receives frozen (in practice, half-melted) ocean fish that comes in on a train from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. It’s not bad but a bit pricey. Fresh fish will be a welcome culinary change as well as a source of income for local fishermen.

Satiri even has a water tower (not in use), and a few faucets around town (also not in use). One of the taps was right across the street from me, ready to bring running water to the village. However, one of the bulldozers made a wide turn and “tapped” it, leaving a pile of crumbled concrete and mangled pipes.



At school, things continue as usual. I discovered that our school had an old ditto machine and that I could make copies of tests. So I gave it a try with my 7th grade class of 106 kids. I wrote two tests, A and B to cut back on the cheating, and handed them off to the principal, who brought them to the secretary at the Prefet’s office. She typed them and the principal came back with some carbon sheets to be copied. He showed me how to fill the machine with alcohol, feed in one sheet of paper at a time, and turn a crank to spin off copies one by one. I made the 110 copies just in time for the test.

It seemed to work out alright until I got into class and passed out the sheets. The kids were baffled and panicked by the strange sheets with the purple typing. On some copies the ink was smudged or the paper was misaligned so parts were unreadable. The secretary who typed them had made some errors and some of the numbers were wrong. I ended up writing half the test on the board anyway. Yet still a hand shot up everytime a student found something illegible, and I ended up with 106 kids each asking the same four questions over and over again. The class started with a good half hour of confusion. I’ve decided to let the purple ditto machine go back to collecting dust.



I took a weekend trip to Bala to visit Jon, a neighboring PCV math teacher. Bala and Satiri are only 9 km apart, but have very different atmospheres. Bala, away from the main road, has more of a close, laid-back village feel. Satiri, as capital of the prefecture, has government offices, a health center, and Inspectors’ offices. Satiri is on a major road and has constantly-passing semi trucks. This all gives it a busier, more confusing feel. Differences in social classes are also more visible between the well-off government workers and the poor farmers. Going to Bala is like getting away to the cottage for a weekend.

Satiri is also mostly Muslim, while Bala has a larger Christian population. Bala is therefore free from those Islamic “no-drinking, no-eating pork” rules. Very popular is locally-made millet beer, called dolo. Women grind millet (a small round grain) into a pulp, mix it with water, and boil it for hours until it tastes sweet. It is then left to ferment for three days before it is served in hollowed-out gourds to Christians after church. Dolo is an important part of any celebration; a wedding or funeral for an important person can involve up to a week of dancing, drumming, and dolo. But people can be found consuming the beverage any day and at any time of day.

Besides dolo, Bala has great pork and a good restaurant. The women there cooks fish, guinea fowl, and makes osé sauce, a type of leaf sauce that almost makes tô taste good.



It is election time throughout Burkina. On May 6, voters will elect their representatives to the national assembly. There are 20 or so political parties in Burkina, and each person casts a vote for one of the parties.

To gain support, representatives of the major political parties are traveling across the countryside holding “meetings.” Satiri is large and privileged enough to be a stopping point. Meetings usually involve generator lights, loud music, dancers, costumes, some political propaganda, and lots of cadeaux - t-shirts, hats, paagnes, tea, sodas, buttons, etc. Gifts are a necessary part of any campaign. For the villagers, it is worth going to a meeting for a party you don’t support, just to get the free stuff. And you wear the t-shirt not so much to show political affiliation, but because it was free and you managed to get one.

The mayor of Satiri is from the party UPR (Union pour la Republique), the most popular party in the area. Most people I talk to are voting UPR for that reason, or because they share their last name with the head of the party.

The next most popular party in the area is CDP, the ruling party and the party of President Blaise Compaoré. I was out of town, but apparently CDP held the biggest and most impressive meeting in Satiri. The Administrative Minister of CDP came back to Satiri a few weeks later to speak with everyone who works at the schools, the inspection, and the health center about how we should educate the illiterate villagers to vote CDP instead of UPR. I expected some explanation as to how this party would be better for the villagers than would UPR, but didn’t get it. To support their cause they left eighty dollars to buy beer for the fonctionnaires afterwards.

In general, when I ask people about the election or which party stands for what issues, etc, they sigh and wave their hands and say it doesn’t work like that. People vote for the party that gives them the best cadeaux and holds the best meetings. So the party with the most campaign money then has the greatest ability to buy the votes they need. Interestingly, the party in power, the one with the most access to public funds, seems to have more money than anyone else to spend on cadeaux. Not to suggest that anyone in an African government would be so corrupt as to skim off public funds, of course.

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