|
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 04:59:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Hannah Koenker <hannahkoenker@yahoo.com>
Subject: yovo yovo bonjour
hi, i'm fine. we made it to mopti and were turned away at the pc house cuz they were having a big new years bash. this was good because we got to stay at macs refuge, a little b&b run by mac, an american born in mopti to missionary parents. he spent pretty much his whole life there, growing up and then coming back to do missionary work. he speaks bambara and dogon and cooks like a madman - for breakfast we had pancakes and yogurt and fruit salad and maple syrup, all we could, it was so good. yum. a super nice guy too. We stayed in the tuareg room and even jumped in the pool. brr!
dogon country was great too, we hooked up with a french woman teaching kindergarten in abidjan and her dumbshit guide. he wasn't a bad guide, i mean, he didn't steal from us or anything, or starve us, but he was super ignorant. not even dogon. learned all his guide stuff 'in school'. i asked about marcel griaule, the ethnographer, big dogon scholar, and he said uh, yeah, well, we didn't learn about him in school.
but it was beautiful and we met nice people and slept on roofs and bought indigo cloth and hiked and watched sunrise and celebrated new years calmly, just like I wanted. getting out we got lucky and managed to get a bull cart from tele to bankass, then get a car from bankass to koro, breaking down on the way four times and arriving just in the nick of time to get on the big bus to ouahigouya. the burkina pcvs and the canadians had had lots of trouble and had been waiting overnight for that same bus. we got all the way to ouaga that night, slept, and got back on a bus to togo. now we're in kara, hanging with the pcvs here, who are awesome. we got in all dirty and tired - I crossed all of burkina without taking a shower - and they were killing fruit bats with slingshots and grilling them up. they tasted pretty good, like chicken liver.
we are hanging out today and leaving for lome tomorrow. we'll have a whole day there to see friends of a friend of jennys and erin brown and spend the last of our west african cfa, which is useless in gabon. i have bought a lot of stuff - but only one blanket! rokia made fun of me for buying so many last time. :) the family is well, makane is a cute baby, very smiley, and it was really hard to say goodbye. We even tried to change our tickets but to no avail. We saw cherif, who is just as animated as ever, and met the new students, who had just got in and were a littl overwhelmed but happy to be there. i took jenny to see toumani and habib and habib recognized me and came over to say hi, and gave me his new cd, since I mentioned my tapes hadn't arrived in gabon yet. Quel sweetie! we said hi to my friends at artisanat and bought tuareg stuff - we got these kick-ass bottle openers, they are really snazzy. we had fun bargaining with them too and joking about being kidnapped to the campement and riding camels and helping the tuareg women feed their families. i guess you had to bethere.
- can't wait to get
back home and pick up my mail and packages! Were gonna get some lunch now and walk around - kara is a neat city and we are having tons of fun. what a great vacation.
love,
hannah
=====
-----------------
Hannah Koenker
hannahkoenker@yahoo.com
www.econ.uiuc.edu/~hanko/
|