Fada to Nakaba

Fada to Nakaba

Sup Internet, I’m Doug and I live in Nakaba, the next host village for the bike tour after Fada! Nakaba is a sleepy lil hamlet with a population that approximately doubled with the arrival of the bike tour. Nevertheless, it has quite the reputation among Volunteers as “the sexiest site in Burkina,” which I am now hoping to reinforce by forever linking these two search terms in Google results. Nakaba. Sexiest site in Burkina. Nakaba is the sexiest site in Burkina. Sexy Nakaba sexy

I guess all the dudes and ladies on the tour biked to from Fada to Nakaba on Friday morning? They all showed up at the turnoff to Nakaba from the main paved road at around 10 AM, and they were all on bikes, and they were all talking about the bike ride they just completed, but I hate to assume anything! I was not with them for this theoretical ride because I was busy chez moi assembling sandwich ingredients for a Delicious Sandwich Lunch. The one ingredient missing was bread, which 1) is probably a pretty important ingredient when it comes to sandwiches, and 2) cannot be found in Nakaba. As Lady Fate would have it, however, moments after I met the bike tourists on the main road and explained our breadlemma, a car literally filled with enormous loaves of bread pulled up alongside, the driver even looking at us expectantly.

It was a bread miracle, we all agreed, and (accurately) presaged an excellent stay in Nakaba.

I led the 21 (!) bikers down the winding 5k dirt road that leads from the main paved highway to my house, which is located inside a large courtyard that also houses the community health center for Nakaba and several surrounding villages. As everyone was settling in, the prefect and gendarme captain for our commune were nice enough to stop by and welcome everyone. We all feasted on sandwiches and then kicked back for a bit until the afternoon’s activities started.

Knowing for several months that the bike tour would come through Nakaba, I had long puzzled over how to best capitalize upon the talents and enthusiasm of twenty-odd PCVs, since such a gathering in little old Nakaba has surely never happened previously and may never again. I struggled to come up with the perfect activity that would make best use of my fellows’ skills while benefiting the community and celebrating the impetuses behind the bike tour, but to no avail. Finally it came to be a week before the tour’s arrival, and realizing that a decision, any decision, had to be reached so that planning could begin, I somewhat feverishly settled on “DANCING yes we can all DANCE together”

The manner in which this somewhat abstract idea manifested itself was this: on Friday afternoon, we PCVs met up with large group of Burkinabe children lured by the twin enticements of candy and strange-looking foreigners. We split up into six groups, each one composed of a mix of local kids and PCVs, and each one given a village-life theme such as “farming,” “soccer,” or “food preparation.” The groups were then assigned the task of creating a dance based around their theme. Some groups had difficulty at first, especially those with smaller children who spoke little French, but after a few icebreaker games for teams to get to know each other begin bonding, they were all off on their choreographic mission at top speed. After an hour of planning and practice, a good number of community members had wandered into the health center courtyard to see what all this dancing fuss was about, including several previously invited local officials and traditional drummers. We gathered everyone in a shady area, talked for a bit about the bike tour and its goals, introduced all the riders, and then got dancin’.

Each group’s performance was accompanied by drumming and punctuated by raucous applause.

The “construction” team’s dance featured the building of a human pyramid, the “household chores” team revealed the fluid beauty hidden in the everyday acts of sweeping a courtyard or pumping water, and the “child care” team used interpretive dance to capture the life of a child from birth until adulthood. After all dances were complete and duly lauded, we explained one of the messages behind the performances—that although each theme corresponds to a specific gender role, such narrow partitions of life and labor are a fallacy, as demonstrated by the mixed genders of dancers in each team. The men dancing in the “household chores” team could sweep a courtyard (through dance!) just as well as the women, and the girls on the “soccer” team scored just as many goals as the men. This conversation completed, we moved on to determining the winning team (the “farmers”) via audience applause, handed out treats to the participating kids, and then cleared out a circle in the crowd for more dancing. Now is when the traditional drummers really let loose, and it was a rare treat to see dancing Americans and Burkinabe alike trying to keep up with their furious rhythms.

We danced until dusk, then headed back to my place for chow, which was massive amounts of rice and chicken prepared by one of my neighbors. The host of anti-mosquito nets erected in my courtyard made it look like a refugee camp, or like a band of gypsies had moved in, and wow I’m not sure of EITHER of those images are politically correct. All was well and sleepy until around 1AM, when a cloudburst sent everyone scuttling their tents and scurrying for shelter. The rest of the night was crowded but uneventful, unless you count a very loud snore as an event, in which case the night was extremely extremely eventful.