Written by: Christopher Elliott
Started: 12 August, 1998; Finished: 12 April, 1999

When you meet Americans or Europeans in the Republique de la Cote D’Ivoire (RCI) of West Africa and ask them what they are doing there, Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) or journalist is more than likely the answer. Sometimes you can even meet a Fullbright Scholar. But, if you take those same people and ask them why they are there, you won’t hear the same thing twice. I, myself, had four explanations as to what brought me there that sounded reasonable - not only to others, but sufficiently to myself that I had dipped into my med school loan money to make it happen. I wanted to learn French, see and study exotic infectious diseases, visit a college friend serving in the Peace Corps there, and surf West Africa. Nevertheless, I found myself wondering what I was getting myself into, prior to departure, and whether or not I also was running away from some part of my life in New York. In many ways the trip turned out more successfully than I had expected, and I accomplished even more than I had originally set out to do. However, there was more to the experience than the previoulsly mentioned justifications which I only planned on using at coctail parties anyway. What that “more” is is what I hope to figure out by writing my story.

On June 15, 1998, I arrived in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire. In preparation, I had been taking French night classes at Hunter College, because French is the official language for most of West Africa. At the airport, I didn’t see my PCV friend, Jon Burns (JB), who was supposed to meet me; but I managed to communicate enough to step outside, fend off people offering me various services (taxi, guide, etc.), and change money. I decided to make one more pass by the crowd to look for JB and then grab the nearest taxi if I didn’t see him. He was not there, and it turned out later that he had been told erroneously by some other PCVs, also expecting visitors on the same flight, that it had been cancelled. There was some dispute amongst the taxi drivers over who had dibbs on me, and a scuffle broke out with much tugging of my bags (surfboard included). Flattering though all that attention was, NOBODY TOUCHES MY SURFBOARD! The struggle got rough enough that a gendarme (military policeman) ran over, shoved me and my board into the nearest cab, and told me to get out of there.

The driver and I managed to find the PC Hostel in the “swanky” quartier (zone) of Deux Plateaus where I was welcomed with surprise, joy, and embarassment by JB and many of his PCV friends who were all in town for some meeting. I had hardly put my bags down before I was handed an enormous plastic mug of what was to become my beer of choice in the RCI, Bock Solibra. Then ensued the funniest game of charades in which I have ever taken part. JB even managed successfully to act out a ringer I threw in, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, but I wasn’t until the teams were boys vs. girls that things got epic. The bottle opener that the PCVs used was a large wooden penis that was originally used for condom education in villages, so it was no wonder the topics turned sexual. Still, the girls should have known that we were cheating when we threw in the fictional movie, My Vagina Says, “Hi!”, for one of them to act out. No one got it, but the attempt was admirable and damn funny. Anyway, that’s how “Could you please pass the penis?” and “My vagina says, ‘Hi!’” became everyday vocabulary around the PC Hostel.

One night that week at Pierre’s, the local dive bar that showed World Cup Soccer games, people bought us beers ‘till 4 AM when a former PCV, named Angus, impressed them with his fluency in the local language, Dioula. Another time, Angus and his wife, Anita (also a former RCI PCV), took me with them to a shanty town hut where potent palm wine, known as bangui, was served. The stuff ferments vigorously in the tropical heat from the moment it is bled from the tree and can be as rough on the stomach as it is on the mind if it has been sitting very long - like a day. You drink it from coconut shell halves and pour the last bit on the ground, because at 25 cents for a 750 ml bottle, you can afford to share a bit with your ancestors. You also get a lot of it bought for you, especially if you are foreign, because everyone is so pleased that you have vices too and are open to trying some of theirs.

The only other event of interest that week was on my 6th morning of waking up and thinking “Oh my God! I’M IN AFRICA!” I shuffled into the bathroom to take care of business. Number two, that is, which is always an adventure in West Africa, because their idea of a source of fiber is a squishy, ripe mango. After I was done, having just finished my first year of medical school, I neurotically peeked into the bowl, just to make sure everything looked ok. However, this morning, unlike the others, I couldn’t believe what I saw. All my rationale told me that I couldn’t be seeing what I thought I saw. I mean, HOW THE HELL COULD I HAVE CRAPPED OUT A FOOT AND A HALF TAPEWORM AFTER ONLY HAVING BEEN IN AFRICA FOR 6 DAYS?! “Jesus!” I thought, “I’ve always been such a lucky guy. This can’t be happening to ME!” I was kind of freaked out and felt a bit violated by the alleged parasite, so I left the evidence in the toilet while I took a shower, calmed down, and thought about my next move. Scientific method was the only way to keep control of things, I decided. I got a ziplock bag, inverted it to use as a glove, and fished the offending strand out of the toilet. I wanted someone to examine it so that I would know exactly WHAT I was dealing with and how I could KILL it if there were any more still inside me. PCVs have seen or had pretty much everything, so I decided to swallow my privacy and consult a few of them to see if they had ever seen anything like it. Apprehension and curiosity mounted as PCV after PCV denied familiarity with anything remotely like it - until I showed it to my trusted friend, JB, that is... JB had seen the likes before all right. In fact, he admitted that he had deposited one just like it in the toilet that morning himself... RIGHT AFTER HE HAD FINNISHED FLOSSING HIS TEETH WITH IT! Well, off the top of my mind, I can’t think of a time I was more relieved to have just been an idiot, and I welcomed with relief the redness flushing over my face as I went to flush the first ever documented dental floss-tape worm out of existence. I was still too busy being grateful to the higher power I had been bargaining with during the incident to mind all the shit I took for it afterward.

After a week of what I would soon reminisce on as luxury in Abidjan, JB and I headed seven hours by bus and converted pickup truck north-east to his village, Essiekro, near the border with Ghana. If you look for it on a map, the nearest big towns are Tanda and Bondoukou, in that order. Tanda gained notoriety in February of 1998, because a PCV stationed there was killed in a mugging attempt. Ironically, JB had been restationed to his new site near Tanda due to some unresolved security issues in his first village.

JB had one of the nicer houses in the village, though there was still no electricity or running water for miles. Soon we settled into a slow paced life of reading and writing on the porch and busying ourselves with normally trivial affairs, such as hygiene and keeping fed. JB lived in front of the school, so children would rush over in multitudes at recess to watch us doing whatever we were doing and wait to see if JB would get out his guitar and play them a Beatles song. Every few songs, he would ask for a volunteer to sing to us before he would play another. After much shoving and pushing, a reluctant kid would be volunteered. I was so impressed with the bravery of the first kid that I decided to sing too. The kids liked the Carlos Vives and rugby songs I sang for them, because they could more or less follow the choruses, despite not understanding Spanish or English. However, “Shamma Lamma Ding Dong” was by far their favorite for the dance routine I did with it. We even taught about forty of them the Hokey Pokey one day, but the game fell apart into laughter after “You put your butt in...” I think we may have gained a reputation as the best babysitters in town, because more and more children kept showing up each day. We also couldn’t walk around the village without greeting and shaking hands several times with everyone we passed. One day the chief and one of his advisors even stopped by the porch to greet us. The chief was a very regal looking man with strong cheek bones that gave him the resemblance of either Julius Caesar or the Terminator exoskeleton. It was the first time in Africa that I really felt respect was commanded of me. JB told him that I didn’t have an African name yet, so the chief gave me his own, Yao Adingra. Yao means you are a male who was born on a Thursday, but I’m not sure what Adingra means. On another occasion, we were given a chicken when we visited a Guinea Worm infected village and gave them water filters. All in all, my most memorable posessions from the RCI were seemingly also the most trivial: a name, a chicken, shared bangui, and a pair of “Friend Mole” flip flops.

After ten days at JB’s site, we headed back to Abidjan for the PCV 4th of July celebration and for me to try and set up an internship at an infectious disease clinic. A former RCI PCV who lived and worked in Abidjan had offered to let me stay with her, since the hostel was full. Her name was Michelle, and I was soon the envy of the male volunteers; because, in addition to being generous, Michelle was quite attractive and vivacious. Another former PCV (served in Haiti), named Leo, now managed a CDC AIDS epidemiology collaboration project in Abidjan, Projet RetroCI, and let the PCVs throw a huge 4th of July party at his house. Leo was also generous, and he even paid for the beer! He also introduced me later to the Ivorian doctors at the Projet who let me shadow them for a couple weeks (Bath N’Guessan, Joseph Ezoua, and Fabien Diomande). The PCVs really went all out for the party, and some of them even had vinyl outfits tailored for the occasion! Most of the time I resisted my own urges to “perform for the crowd” at the parties and enjoyed seeing JB in his own element rather than in mine for a change. I did; however, insert his name in the place “your partner” and ad lib’d every time I read a Cosmo sex advice column out loud in public. The final party of the week was the best one though, because it was for my 25th birthday. It started at a lagoon-side, sand-floored bar called the Nand Jelet (means “little child” in Senofou) in a small village called Blokosso with a great view of Abidjan across the lagoon. Blokosso was one of my favorite places near Abidjan, because it was steeped with traditional culture and custom but had all the amenities of the big city just next door. Afterwards, Michelle took us to a funk bar, called Crystal, in Treichville (another cartier of Abidjan) where we took over the dance floor until 4 AM.

After all the PCVs had gone back to their sites; Michelle; a South African photo journalist friend of ours, Christine; and I decided to spend the weekend at the beach. As luck would have it, Michelle was a co-renter of a beach community on the isolated end of Assini with paiote huts for us to stay in and even a place to cook. We stuffed food, drink, my surfboard, and ourselves into Michelle’s car and eagerly left the hustle and bustle of the capital. Along the way, we stopped to buy fresh mangos, pineapples, and bananas from an elegant-looking Ivorian cross dresser, known affectionately by the ex-pat. community as the fruit-man-lady, who had a roadside stand outside the town of Bonoua. For $5 we could leave our car in a guarded lot and take a pirogue (canoe) across the lagoon to the isolated peninsula where our paiotes were on the other side where the ocean was. During the day, we would watch fishermen fight their way in and out of the sea in their dugouts or cast their nets from the shore while we sucked on fresh, juicy mangos and pineapples and lazed about on bamboo recliners. I even paddled out to surf from time to time; but in the eight or so West African surf sessions I had, I never felt safe enough to relax and fully enjoy the experience. Though I had been in bigger surf before, the currents were uncommonly strong and unpredictable, some even going straight down. The Ivorian coast faces due south and gets hit head on by storms coming from the Cape of Good Hope. That makes for very short periods between waves, summations of many swells coming from different directions, and a lot of close-out breaks. An American journalist had been swept out to sea at our very beach only a year before. His body was found several days later washed up on the shore in Ghana. Even the athletic and seaworthy African locals were quite respectful and mindful of the ocean. Some told me tales of mermaids they had seen and how the waves would become large and powerful in the days following a goat sacrifice. On one of my visits to Assini, the water was thick with some kind of sea moss giving a mystical appearance of dark green ink even to the white water. It was kind of eerie being surrounded and clung to by such thick, dark, amorphous stuff. Even when I got out, my pockets were filled with it. I am probably one of only a few who has surfed Assini, as I never saw another surfer in the time I was there - but not surprisingly.

Now, if my math is correct, we’ve covered three of the four goals of my trip. That leaves studying exotic infectious diseases yet uncovered. Merely summarizing what I saw while following doctors at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (C.H.U.) Treichville would not be a complete description of what I experienced, since dealing with infectious diseases was part of every day in West Africa, not just the ones I spent in the clinic. Potable drinking water no longer went unappreciated, all kinds of vaccinations were needed before going there, I was frequently covered in near toxic quantities of DEET mosquito repellent, and my dreams were much enhanced by the neurologic side effects of my Malaria prophylaxis medication. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until one night in JB’s village that I realized how medically vulnerable we actually were.

JB and I were sitting on his porch one night when we saw a light staggering towards the house. A drunken looking man made his way over to us and silently gestured towards his leg with his lantern. A bloody rag was slipping off his knee around which it had been tied and a small fountain of blood pulsed from a small hole above his shin. I had seen much worse in my days of Ambulance driving, but JB and I didn’t exactly have all the resources of an ambulance available to us in his village. Therefore, this injury was more than we could handle. As much as I felt obligated to help the man, there was no way I was going to come into contact with his blood considering the astronomical HIV prevalence in the RCI. We had no gloves, no antiseptic, and no bandages either; so we took him to the sage femme’s (midwife’s) house to see if she could help. Thus far, I had been careful NOT to identify myself as a medical student to any villagers for fear that they might assume that I was more medically qualified than I really was and put me into situations that were over my head. The sage femme, literally “wise woman,” was a very respected authority figure in the village, and it soon became apparent that she resented any advice we gave her for helping the man. It turned out the man had accidentally stabbed himself with the tip of his machete while working in the fields that morning. He hadn’t stopped working, because he wanted to take advantage of the fact that the previous night’s rain had interrupted a rather worrisome drought. Later that evening, when the bangui had stopped the pain but not the bleeding, he came to us for help. Judging by the spurting, he had knicked a small arteriole. The sage femme immediately went to stitch the wound and only after much protest from us did she sparingly pour some alcohol over the cut first. After putting in three stitches she gloated triumphantly, “See! Now the bleeding is stopped. You didn’t listen to me, but now you see you have to put the stitches in first or the bleeding won’t stop.” Then she gave the man some water to wash the copious dried blood off his leg. We returned to JB’s house in disgust hoping that no infection had gotten into the wound in the ten hours or so that the injury had been exposed. A lot of good those extra hours in the fields would do the man if an infection, trapped inside by the sutures, spread to the bone and cost him his leg. My sleep was troubled that night by the realization that if anything ever happened to JB in his village (or me for that matter) requiring medical attention, he would be at the mercy of the same proud, and largely untrained, hands.

Like the experience just mentioned, many of the most potentially serious medical situations I saw in the RCI were frustratingly preventable. Despite the Ivorian doctors being very well trained (by western standards) with all the latest French medical books, they had little of the technology and funding assumed available by such texts. Compounding that frustration were bankruptcy of the medical system and inability of the patient population to pay for medications themselves. As a result, it was common at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire: Treichville (C.H.U. Treichville, the hospital at which I volunteered and arguably the largest public hospital in West Africa, its rivals being in Dakkar, Senegal.) to see people in serious medical emergencies from normally easy-to-treat conditions that had become completely disseminated or gotten out of control by the time medical attention was sought. One baby I saw could have been treated for malaria for $1.50 if it had been diagnosed and the proper medication administered within a week of onset of the fevers. Not having easy access to medical help, the parents had tried treating the fevers themselves. By the time they were concerned enough to journey with the baby to the hospital, the malaria had killed so many blood cells that the baby was anemic and required a very expensive blood transfusion on top of an already costly hospital stay. Additionally, screening blood supplies for anti-HIV antibodies only catches tainted blood from people who were infected OVER three months prior to donating the blood. Considering that HIV prevalence in Abidjan was estimated at 14% a few years ago, the risk that a blood donor has contracted the deadly virus within three months of making the donation is significant. Many meningitis patients required similarly expensive hospital stays and medications, because it was too late to treat the infection with the more affordable antibiotics. Another baby was in risk of brain damage from a measles-induced fever, because it had never gotten its free vaccination. An AIDS patient came in half paralyzed from a toxoplasmosis brain cyst, because a “prophet” had told him to stop taking the prophylactic antibiotics given to him for free by the Projet. One man had full blown tetanus throughout his body, because a “healer” had spread some sacred mud (that apparently also contained some sacred Clostridium tetani) over open abscesses on the man’s chest. A man with crippling elephantiasis on one leg said that he waited five years before seeing a doctor. By that time it was too late to treat as the tissue damage was permanent. It was sadly ironic that he hadn’t been able to manage the cost of a trip to the hospital until AFTER he was crippled by the disease and unable to work or earn a living.

Other diseases were not so treatable and were frustrating for biologic complications rather than socioeconomic ones. It is still not understood why a type of Leukemia known as Burkitt’s Lymphoma is so prevalent and so commonly linked to Epstein-Barr Virus in West Africa. Many of the Burkitt’s Lymphoma patients had to live, not only with the cancer, but also with disfiguring oromaxillary tumors protruding from their mouths. Even scientific breakthroughs, such as the elucidation of the basis for Sickle Cell Anemia prevalence in Africa, were little consolation or help to the children that suffered from it anyway. Another condition I saw, Ulcers of Bruruli, had only been discovered in the last fifteen years. Caused my Mycobacterium ulcerans (same family as the notoriously difficult to treat TB and leprosy causing organisms), the disease affects mostly children and kills all of their cutaneous and subcutanteous tissue in the affected area. The only treatment is to surgically remove all the affected tissue down to the level of the underlying muscle. I admired the dedication of Bath, Joseph, and Fabien; the doctors I shadowed; in the face of such overwhelming medical challenges. On a lighter note, at least I never met a doctor who had seen Ebola or knew anyone who had despite the RCI being one of the places it is found. Mercifully, that that particular pestilence seems to have been blown out of proportion by western journalism.

My experiences at the C.H.U., and in West Africa in general, affected me more emotionally than I expected; perhaps, because they magnified some of the issues I thought going to Africa would help me escape. Many times I felt a sense of helplessness or loss of control of the environment that surrounded me. I struggled with outrage at suffering I saw and perceived as easily prevented as I realized how untrue that perception was. Much of what I wanted to suggest or advise was not practical, if it was even correct at all, in the context of the culture I was trying to understand. I could not blame a mother for not getting her baby vaccinated, just because I had always been aware of the importance of vaccines. And who was I to tell anyone that the doctors at the hospital knew more medicine than the seers and prophets they looked to for guidance in their villages? How could I come to such a different land and presume, after only a few weeks, to know “the answers” to solve things I saw that disturbed me - or disturbed my sense of control? The further I pondered the puzzles of the West African life I saw around me, the further I realized that my search was leading more to fuzziness than clarity. I did not have solutions to the conundrums of my life in New York either; and, for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t ok for me not to have “all the answers.”… I didn’t even know what the questions were.

The problem of making free time from my daily routine at the C.H.U. to find the questions and look for answers was solved for me, sooner than I expected. On Wednesday, July 15, Michelle and I were dropping a friend from the German embassy off at home after a night out with ex-pats., and we came in for some water. The water was cold; and, despite the warm tropical night, I shivered. On the drive back to Michelle’s, I felt tingling wash over my body along with a slight headache. By the time we got home, I had a fever of 102 degrees F, so I went to bed. The rest of the night was spent in and out of hot flashes, cold flashes, and lethargy. After having fallen into a feverish sleep, I was awakened by the scream of a strange girl standing over me. A moment of confusion ensued until I figured out that she was Michelle’s roommate, Lauren, whose room I’d been staying in while she vacationed in Mali, and she figured out that I was “that guy” that Michelle had told her about. Lauren was kind enough to sleep with Michelle while I tried to go back to sleeping my fever out. The next morning, I only had a slight fever, so I went to a local diagnostic lab and paid $20 to get my blood checked for parasites. It turned out that, despite having taken the strongest Malaria prophylaxis medicine available, I had the most common, but also most virulent strain of malaria causing parasite in my blood, Plasmodium falciparum. My fever had gone down, because the parasites had gone back into hiding in my red blood cells and were no longer exciting my immune system. In two days they would multiply enough to burst their host red blood cells again and overwhelm my body back into fever. In preparation, I took a heavy dose of a medication called Fansidar that is so potent that you have to wait eight days before taking a second dose, if it is needed at all. Unfortunately, Fansidar is also a very harsh medication; so I ended up staying home for four days with lots of time to ponder my conundrums. Two days later, just as I was starting to think the Malaria was not going to come back, an intense and heavy fever overtook me within minutes as a flood of newly multiplied parasites broke out of their host red blood cells. One Malaria fever being experience enough for a lifetime, I went to bed and tried to fall asleep before it got worse. About an hour and twenty minutes later, I still was awake and could no longer remember the lyrics to songs I had been going over and over in an attempt to put myself to sleep. Ten minutes later, I fully regained my coherence. I took a shower, and the fever was gone. That was some kick ass medication!

Once the parasites were gone, the medication set its focus on kicking MY ass and wreaked havoc on my bowels and subconscious. It was true that the malaria prophylaxis medication had given me some pretty weird dreams, but the Fansidar achieved a whole new level of neurologic side-effect. Not that I minded, maybe my bizzare dreams would help me figure out all those important questions and answers of life which I sought.

Like I said before, I think a major factor that distorted my perspective was the heightened feeling of loss of control I had in Africa. Now, I’m not claiming to ever HAVE had control of the world around me, no one ever does; but my grasp on my own security seemed to be slipping more frequently, faster, and farther than my comfort zone would abide. Currents in the ocean startled and overpowered me. My frequent dreams about family or former relationships drew issues and emotions out of me freely that I had long suppressed or denied. When I was ill, even my own body seemed foreign and non-compliant to me. The abundance of adjustments to be made unnerved me at times to the extent that I would feel embarrassed. After all, I wanted to be open minded and excited about all the differences in Africa to be learned from, taken advantage of, and faced - not scared of them. On that note, I remember sitting on the beach after one of my surf sessions and thinking to myself, “It is entirely up to me whether this summer is incredible or unbearable.” I knew which alternative I WANTED to choose but wondered if I would find the will to do it.

Often it was not until AFTER I had faced a new experience that I was able to distill excitement from the mixture of emotions the event had stirred within me. On one such day, I put one foot in front of the other to go explore Blokosso with Christine. I had promised myself to do it ever since my college friend, Susanna, who had lived there for a year while on a Fullbright Scholarship, gave me a list of interesting people to track down there. First I went to track down the divine seer, “Le Divin,” whom I was curious to meet. Susanna, being an adventuresome person, had visited the Divin’s consultation once out of curiosity as well, and had a fascinating experience. It’s a great story too, but it’s Susanna’s to tell not mine. Anyway, all I had to go on was “Ask for the Ebrie woman behind the new Mme Bedie Maternity Clinic.” Wandering around the back alleys of Blokosso, I soon found out that just about everyone was Ebrie (a tribe) and that no one had ever heard of someone who could see the future. Disappointed, Christine and I headed toward the soccer field behind town to watch Susanna’s mask carver friends; Jean-Paul, Francois, and Herve; practicing their art in a hut there. About half way there, we were crossing a big refuse dumping area when a little girl caught up to us and panted, “The old lady is waiting for you.” We followed her back to the alleys, where she led us to a house where we found the Divin curled up on a mat in the doorway. Nearby, her children and grandchildren were tending to chores. I remember being fascinated by her face, but I do not remember its details. She awoke at our arrival, and her son came over to translate between French and Ebrie. Through her son she explained that God had given her a gift to see when people are sick and that, for some things, her way of healing (with herbs, bark teas, etc.) was better than that of doctors and that, for other things, doctors were better. For example, she said that she had seen once that a pregnant, European lady’s baby was turned dangerously and sent the lady to the hospital. They say that the lady returned to thank the Divin after the hospital had confirmed what she had said and had scheduled a caesarian section. Her abilities had been in her family for a long time, and no one ever knew who the next Divin would be. Apparently, another son of hers had been a Divin too, but he had died mysteriously in a nearby village where he was working. Oddly, my meeting with the Divin is one of the few experiences I forgot to record in my journal, so I do not remember as much about it as I would like. I do remember being impressed with her open-mindedness towards western medicine and her description of her medicine and mine as being part of the same continuum. She even offered to train me in herbal medicine, but warned that one cannot learn to see what she is allowed to see. God must choose you for it, just as he gives everyone different abilities. Such a mixture of Christianity and Animism seemed to be more the norm than the exception in West Africa.

Le Divin was not the only healer I met in Africa. Michelle’s night guard, Abdulai, sometimes showed up to work late, because he had been busy “healing” some of the local construction workers. One day, I decided to break the ice with Abdulai by offering him one of my razors. Michelle had noticed that he would fish them out of the trash to shave his head with every time I threw one out. Abdulai was a friendly older man and thanked me in his strange accent of French that I never could quite figure out. When I asked him about his medicine, he told me that it had been passed on to the fist born son in his family for as long as he could remember, that there were no women healers, and that the men healers knew about all the medicine for women too. He lamented that traditions were fading though and that there weren’t any lions for him to kill when he reached manhood, as his father and grandfather had done sans fusil (without guns). He also told me about something strange that happens when you lie with certain women and they cough an evil spirit into you and about the Bram, or something like that, where someone wrote something very important down a very long time ago, long before Mohammed. It’s too bad I only understood about a tenth of what he said, because he seemed very excited to tell me about many things and appeared to be very knowledgeable of a culture that was being forgotten. Abdulai also had a very interesting circular scarification on his face that made him look old and wise and, perhaps, a little sad.

While I was having my own cultural experiences in Abidjan and Blokosso, JB was in his village or upcountry somewhere else working on water sanitation projects. After he finished, he came back to Abidjan to blow off steam at the US Rec. Center and then join me in traveling to Burkina Faso, a country to the north. I had dreamed of visiting the Burkinabe capital city, Ouagadougou, ever since 5th grade geography, because its name was so magical to me. Our first stop upcountry was in Korrhogo, a town famous for painted tapestries. Outside Korrhogo, we stopped at a PCV, named Keri’s, village only to find that she had gone into town to meet us. We caught the last cargo truck going into town for the next two days about five minutes later. It was so overloaded with villagers taking their wares to market that we had to ride on the roof frame. Then it started pounding rain, and we had to get off the frame so the tarp could be put over and we hung off the back precariously. It was kind of fun, and we jokingly taunted nature to hit us with her best shot. She did, and we were soaked by the time we got to town. In Korrhogo, we woke up early the next morning to climb Mt. Korrhogo before traveling on. It only took us about 20 minutes to get to the top, but we still had a good view, since the surrounding area was so flat.

After Korrhogo we passed through Ferkesedougou and crossed the border into Burkina Faso. That night we stayed in Banfora. The next day we hired a really cool Senegalese guide, named D’Jalo, to take us to Le Dome (a rock formation of stacked mud layers similar to those found at Sindou), Le Cascade de Karfiguela (a waterall), and Lac Tengrela (a lake) for about $20 between the two of us. After climbing all over Le Dome, we at a lunch of bread, sugar cane we purloined from a field we had passed along the way, and mangos. Then I made mango rind boats and sent them over the falls while singing the theme song from The Land of the Lost. When D’Jalo took his hat off, we noticed that wide, irregular patches of his head were shaved. He explained to us that, in his religion, it was a way of telling your ancestors that you were having a tough time. We didn’t push for any further explanation. On leaving the waterfall, JB got really bad diarrhea and had to go en bruce (in the woods) armed with only a piece of a cement bag in which our bread had been wrapped. D’Jalo and I went on a bit and ended up meeting a group of Swiss tourists whom I asked to wait until JB was done before continuing. They lent me some TP for JB, and everyone looked a little bit embarrassed, especially when JB came back and asked whom to give the TP back to... and no one wanted to take it! JB had a sense of humor over his predicament though and advised them, “Il faut pas marcher en bruce la bas. C’est tres sale!” (“Don’t walk off the trail over there. It’s very dirty!”) For whatever reason, JB and I couldn’t stop laughing about it later when we took a boat out on Lac Tengrela and saw two huge hippos from a safe distance.

That night we traveled on and stayed in Bobo D’iolasso at the Protestant Mission. Across the street in a bar called, La Cabana, we had some beers and listened to some really great D’jembe players. They demonstrated the calluses on their fingers by holding a cigarette by the cherry. We got weird vibes when the kid bartending told me that his sister, who had joined us, wanted to sleep with me though; so we went in early. The next day, we moved to the Hotel La Renaissance for $5.50/person/night and rented the owner’s moped for about $6 to check out Le Mare de Poissons Sacres (sacred fish pond) about 12 km outside of town. Near the pond, we joined a group of Burkinabes who were going to sacrifice a rooster to the fish. An old man led us into a small canyon where a waterfall filled a big, murky pond that seemed to have no outlet. Chicken feathers were everywhere and there was even a goat skin from a previous sacrifice. The old man cut the chicken’s neck and let the blood drain over a stone altar. Then he gutted it and let the Burkinabe who was making the sacrifice feed the intestines to some enormous catfish who appeared out of the muddy water. It is said that the fish may grant your wish if you make a sacrifice. That night we ate road chicken in town and drank beers with a Burkinabe who said he had worked in Bouake (second or third biggest town in RCI) for the last five years and was helping us fend off the many vendors and children who came by to sell or beg. He offered to drive me to the bus station on his moped so I could buy our bus tickets “before they sold out,” but I declined. Then he invited us to a wedding party where he was supposedly playing in the band. We asked why he wasn’t there already, since it was 1 AM. He answered that the party went on 24 hours a day for a week. Then some French friends we had made stopped by and the guy told them he had been teaching in the French school in Bobo for the last 5 years and invited them to the wedding party. JB and I warned them that this guy had already changed his story several times in an attempt to get people to follow him into various dark parts of town (bus station, where the party was, etc.). It bothered me probably more than it should have that, after all the good things I had heard about Burkinabes, I kept meeting the ones who might be just a happy to rob me or prostitute their sisters to me as they would be to drink beers together.

On our way from Bobo to Ouagadougou, we stopped in Boromo to look for elephants in the nearby national park. We left our backpacks at the desk of the Hotel Relais and rented a moped from someone on the street for $4. Since we didn’t have enough money to pay the park entrance and obligatory guide fee. We drove up the highway and “took a wrong turn” into the park. Unfortunately, despite checking several watering holes, we didn’t find any elephants, so we took pictures at the elephant crossing sign as the next best thing. Then we caught a bus to Sabou to see the Lac des Crocodiles Sacres (sacred crocodiles). It was pretty touristy and for a few bucks they lured crocodiles out of the lake with a live chicken tied to a rope. After everyone had had their picture taken with the biggest crocodile, they would taunt it some more until it was finally fast enough to catch the chicken being dangled before them in its jaws. I wondered why the crock didn’t just eat the man on the other end of the rope, but I recently heard that a PCV from Morocco actually WAS bitten there a few months ago. She is reported to be ok though.

From Sabou, we tried to catch a bus for the final stretch to destination Ouagadougou, but none stopped. We finally got a ride in the back of a truck along with a young Burkinabe guy who kept asking me for $20 after I had struck up a conversation with him. When we got out in Ouaga to catch a cab, the young Burkinabe got out with us and told the driver that he was going with us. Then he asked if we would put him up in whatever hotel we were going to. We told him that we couldn’t and caught a cab without him. That night we stayed for $5/person at Le Fundation de Charles Dufour, a hostel started by a Frenchman from which all the proceeds went to a nearby orphanage.

The next day, we had set foot outside our hostel for about twenty seconds before we were surrounded by four kids demanding for us to pay them to be our guides and to donate money for “their junior high school tuition.” We told them that we didn’t need guides and advised they spend their energy petitioning people in government to provide more funding for education for everyone rather than petitioning tourists to pay for it. “You see,” we continued, “We would love to give you money, but, in doing that, we would be doing you a horrible disservice by making you dependent on the whimsical benevolence of tourists. We would much rather see you become strong and independent by learning to get along without the charity of others.” They followed as we talked and walked briskly past the Central Market from which many vendors were emerging and heading our direction. The kids turned out to be persistent debaters and weren’t half bad either. At least they were not like the kids in Bobo who, when we didn’t want to buy their D’Jembe drums, demanded to know why we didn’t like black people or their music. The Ouaga kids did follow me into a bank when I stopped to change money though, and the guard never even stopped them. Consequently, I decided to change money back in Abidjan instead of making myself any more of a target in Burkina. For the rest of our stay in Ouaga, JB and I ended up steering clear of the market as we were hassled quite a bit, even by Ivorian standards, every time we were within a few blocks of it. Michelle had explained to me the socioeconomics of paying kids to be your guide once. If you pay them between 50 cents and $5, depending on the kid and the location, they will keep all the other kids from picking your pocket at bus terminals and markets and show you where to go. If you don’t, you have shown disrespect for the system, in their eyes, and you are fair game for pickpocketing or robbery. It worked the same way with hiring a guard for your house, as Michelle had found out the hard way when her empty house was burglarized a few weeks before I came. I don’t know why I was so tired of playing the free handout game by the time I got to Ouaga. Perhaps, the tourist rule (where tourists pay more for everything than an African and are always supposed to hire guides) had been abused so often by the Burkinabes we had met on our trip that our enthusiasm for experiencing their culture was dwindling. I wish I could say I had been more open minded, especially since one of the nicest people I had met in the RCI, Abdulai, was a Burkinabe. Unfortunately, by that point, JB and I were more or less in agreement that experiencing more of Burkina Faso was not worth the harassment it would cost us. As a result, we never visited what is rumored to be one of the coolest central markets in West Africa.

I did; however, want to let my friends know that I had finally made it to my dream destination of Ouagadougou, so we headed toward the post office. We had spent fifteen minutes bargaining postcards down to 50% more than the Ivorian price, when the young Burkinabe from truck ride the day before showed up out of nowhere asking for $20 again. He claimed that the truck (which did not even belong to anyone he knew) had broken down and needed gas. We laughed out loud in amazement to one another over how this guy had been able to find us in the biggest city in the country. Then we escaped into the post office, where the guards did stop the mob of kids following us, and wrote our post cards in peace. Next we caught a cab to a nice Italian restaurant where the peace and quiet was worth the $10 we each paid for our meal. Rested, we went out and bought music from a nice tape seller and then played Final Lap in a Ouaga video game arcade. I beat JB in France, but he beat me in San Marino, because he handled the hairpin turn better than I did. Our heated competition gathered the usual audience, and we were beginning to feel like rock stars with devoted and demanding “fans” waiting everywhere we went. One of our “fans” told us the Ouagadougou means “respect” in More, the predominant ethnic group and tribal language in Burkina Faso. That night we were punch drunk from the ups and downs of our travels, so we went to a favorite bar; Maquis 1,2,3 estomac; to unwind. There we had an obnoxious and nonsensical conversation in English with some drunk guy who joined us but at least bought his own beer. He didn’t seem to follow any of what we were saying, but he kept nodding and adding emphatically in broken English, “White woman very good!” To end the night, JB treated me to dinner at a nice French restaurant run by nuns, called L’Eau Vive, where reformed prostitutes serve you. I had the antelope, and it was excellent.

Burkina was reputed in the PCV travel files for having some of the friendliest people in West Africa where Ivorians were even more notorious for rudeness than New Yorkers. While we had met some wonderful people on our trip and visited some amazing places, JB and I reminisced in wonder at how we had become so ridiculously targeted everywhere we had gone in Burkina in a way that we had never been in the RCI and wondered what we had done wrong. Our train ride from Ouaga to Abidjan that was supposed to last 24 hours turned into a 44 hour trip on account of extreme pouring rain. Luckily, we had brought lots of food on the train with us.

Back in Abidjan, we treated ourselves to milk shakes at the mall and beers at Pierre’s, where the owner was known for opening bottles with the twist of a broom handle under the cap. The next day was souvenir day, since I was leaving the day after. We skipped through the normally-stressful Cocody Market in Abidjan, laughing about how much less we were being harassed than we had been in Burkina. We also stopped by Blokosso for lunch at the Nand Jelet. Then we stopped by Le Divin’s house to give our regards and continued on to find Jean-Paul, Francois, and Herve carving in their hut. I bought a nice Dan runner’s mask from them and we discussed the masks they were working on and my impressions from my stay in West Africa before wishing each other well and saying our good byes. That mask hangs on the wall above me even as I write these words. My good bye party was also at the Nand Jelet that night. Afterwards, Christine showed me her photo portfolio, and I was amazed at how well she had captured living moments from her own South African history. The next day, JB and I ate egg sandwiches for breakfast and said “good bye” to Alisand and his family, who owned the street stand where we often ate. Next we stopped at the local Bangui Bar for a farewell taste of the local poison. Some artisans to whom we were telling jokes bought us two more bottles as cadeaux (gift) and probably would have bought more, but we faked like we had a big meeting with our patron (boss) and shouldn’t drink any more. On the way to the airport, we stopped to visit another journalist friend I had made, Anthony and watched the end of a soccer game from his balcony, which overlooked the stadium before bidding each other farewell. At the airport, true to Ivorian style, my departure was colored by a few requests for cadeaux and lots of cutting in line. Nevertheless, I was already nostalgic when I got on the plane. My summer in the Cote D’Ivoire was one of the most challenging adventures I have ever undertaken and also one of the most rewarding. I still tell people at cocktail parties of the four goals I achieved when they ask about my experience, but now I realize, eight months later, that there is no fair way to summarize it.

-Christopher Elliott, 11 April 1999