I Have Arrived

Finally, finally I had that moment. The other day I finally felt it - I have arrived.

Funny, I had been in Burkina for over three months. I had watched my friends experience moments of their own. I had heard countless versions of this in Africa, this is crazy, what am I doing?, where are we? Many of my friends had already reported profound moments when they were looking at the stars the fileds, the markets, the animals, and suddenly thought, felt, realized - I am here.

So, here is mine. Simple.

I was on typical, terrible Burkina transport. We had gotten to the station before 1pm to catch the camion (truck) leaving at 2. It left around 3:30. I bought our tickets by crawling under the vehicle itself (seriously) where the guy running the service was escaping the midday sun with friends. We waited at first in the middle of the road (no seats and/or standing room at the "station" which is in reality the smack-dab-middle of the market on market day). The once-a-week market in Djibo draws villagers and visitors from the region within 100K of radius of the city. The truck is being loaded to the brim and over for 3 or 4 hours with sacks of rice, flour, corn, and millet; and also mattresses, bags, buckets, bikes, sifters, and fish. And oh yea, on top, people.

So ultimately, maybe five people wind up sitting in the cab of the truck. Everyone else - which could be 30, 40, 50 people - litterally climbs up the side of the truck* and sits on the stuff. The truck is probably 10 feet deep. I climbed the truck by putting my first foot on on the wheel, my second foot on the lower ridge between the cab and the cargo. Then I took a third step somewhere higher and finished with a graceful (ha!) shimmy/hoist.

When we leave there isn't even enough room for someone to WALK down the middle of the market-on-market-day-street. Somehow people just move or something as the 8 or 12-wheel truck starts to go. We stop at the outskirt of the city two minutes later. We pick up more stuff and passengers as women float around the perimeter of the truck with platters or fried dough, fried fish, nuts, cold drinks, and gateux balanced expertly on their heads. If you want to buy something, you snap or hiss, you drop money down, they toss your food up, and you hope for the best!

We get five minutes out of the city and we know it is going to rain. They stop the truck. The guys break out a tarp and start trying to get it up above us. They are rubbing the smelly, filthy heavy truck-tarp over mine and my friend's heads etc. I am sitting alternatively on a mattress, a stack of buckets, my vegetable-filled backpack, the bar on the top of truck, or a rice sack filled with pointy, uncomfortable who-knows-what.

They tell us to move. We have no where to go. The filthy tarp once again gets rubbed all over my head and eventually strapped down next to me. I am essentially spearing my section up to create breathing room with a crooked neck and stubborn head.

Its raining. We wait. It slows up. We start moving again. We cross a 100 meter section of the road completely submerged in at least a foot of water.** We get a flat tire. Its dark and I can't see or breathe under this tarp. I can only smell - fish, flour, rice, exhaust, human bodies - and hear - Fulfulde, Moore, Koranfe, maybe Dogon, and French. Thankfully they need to move the tarp to get to the tire changing equipment as well as the spare tire. In fact the spare tire is underneath all 10 feet of the piled-up stuff right in the middle of truck. An hour or so later, they fix the flat. Thankfully it has stopped raining and the have also removed the tarp.

We're on the road again for another 20K. It has gotten dark. Then we are stopped by the armed police. The officer mounts the truck with his rifle slung to his back and proceeds to check every single passenger's identification card except us. He chastises the guys running the truck about putting their foreigners on the back of the truck with everyone else. What does that say about Burkina? This is how you represent our country and treat our guests? He tells them that next time we should be put in the cab of the truck.

So I got home 40K later, at 8:00pm, in the dark. But as far as I'm concerned here is the point:
To get what I "need", I've got to make this same trip every week. Sure I can bike the 40K in the morning or the day before. But if I am transporting anything large I'll have to jump on this since it is the only way to travel to my village on a Wednesday and Wednesday is the BEST day for transport during the week. (Wow, right?) But forget about me - I got bumped, rained on, smothered, stabbed in the butt (by metal on a bucket), chastised by the armed police, and thrown fried dough (the good thing!) - but the Burkinabe vendors living in village really MUST make this trip every week. And they really MUST deal with this stuff in the same way that you/me/we take the orange line subway in DC, Paris, or New York. Or hop in our cars to go to the supermarket or bagel store in New Jersey.

So, long story short, this trip struck me. Then I did it again the next week. And it wasn't even a bush taxi.

Post Script: I found out one week later that my friend and fellow traveller this day, Mac, did NOT arrive in his village 50K away that night. The truck got another flat tire, he spent the night practically sleeping in a Burkinabe man's lap, and arrived at 3:00PM the next day. Here's a link to his blog.


*We did not use a ladder although sometimes there is one attached to the truck.
**We have discovered that in Burkina they do not build bridges. Honestly. Where there is a lake or barrage they rather lay concrete down at a lower level than the water so it flows constantly over it. I don't know what to call these structures. How about reverse bridges since they go down instead of up?