Hardly a chance to get to know Ouga and I’m off to Bobo-Dioulasso.

From learning Mooré it is now time to learn Doula (language spoken in Bobo):

Ani sogoma (Good morning)
Ére sura (how are you?)
Éré (good)
Somoro do(How is the family, your health?)
Okakané(everything is good)
Ani quie (Thank you)
Édense (your trip?)
Insé (thank you at end of salutation)


This morning I ate an incredible meal, an omelet on a baguette with vegetables and an oil onion sauce, at a little stand owned by Madi. Madi is probably one of the most genuinely nice people I have met in a while. He is very friendly and open to talk about life. He spoiled us with his cooking and his hospitality.
At 2 o’clock I caught the bus to Bobo. For 5 hours I watched the countryside slowly transform from a dry, flat landscape to a lush green landscape with small rolling hills. Intermittently we would stop and women selling all sorts of goods from sesame snacks to bags of onions would crowd around the windows and doors of the bus to sell to the passengers. There was a lot so yelling back and forth, negotiating the price, but in the end everyone seemed happy, not that I really understood much of what was going on.
Arriving in Bobo, Claire-Élyse (EWB volunteer) and Giselle her colleague and present family came to pick me up. When going to visit someone it is customary that you bring a gift of food, so I had brought some bananas and apples (and probably got ripped off in doing so), but I surely didn’t want to arrive empty handed.
For dinner I finally got to taste “tô” a small millet paste made into a mushy cake type mass that you eat with “soup” (sauce). You pick up a piece of tô and dip it in the sauce. Tô is a traditional staple food here in Burkina. It really doesn’t have much taste, but soaks up the taste of the sauce. The next morning I had the chance to eat “bouillon” which is boiled cereal (millet, corn or rice), it is a soupy consistency with a slight bitterness of lemon, you eat/drink it like porridge with sugar, it pretty bland as well.
Bobo (or what I have seen of it) is a big city a little like Ouaga. There are more trees and greenery (which also means more mosquitoes!). It seems busy but less rushed than Ouaga. Tomorrow Boris will arrive and we will start to look for somewhere to live and try to understand our surroundings.