Sweat and Spirits
The best part of my day, consistently, is my ride to work. I know that sounds strange, mostly cause I’m going to work. But there’s a reason. I get on my bike at quarter to eight, and ride through Zaare, which means “welcome” in Gurune, up the hill to the main road, and then along the sidewalk to the Social Security building where the CENSUDI annex is. The ride along the main road is downhill, and in the morning, before nine am, is about the best time of day. The air is cool and the breeze blows just enough to give you a sense of weather that’s not just heat. The dust is low, usually, when the night’s wind is calm. And I ride into town, and in the distance lie the Tongo hills.
These hills aren’t big, and they’re only 15 or 20 km away, but they have started to mean something to me. I think there are two reasons. The first is that they’re landscape. I mean, rolling hills and trees are great, but in a flat savannah drama is important. Actually, I think almost anywhere drama is cool. It’s what makes for powerful landscape; it’s what makes for power centres. Hard and jagged, particularly when living in the soft and rolling, means power. The second reason is more personal. Every day, as I ride to work, I imagine, for one single moment, I am riding heading from the ferry back to Victoria, with the Olympics as my backdrop. Now, this is a personal fantasy, I will admit. But it’s a nice feeling, to see everything totally unfamiliar around you, and yet to find something that reminds you of home. It makes me feel a little more at home.
We went to the Tongo hills today. Vanessa, Bailey, Gideon and I hopped on bikes and rode out of town, towards these dust-shrouded hills, deciding that the best course of action would be to ride in the hottest, dirtiest, directest-sunlight time of day.
Gideon took us by his family home, in a village that only vaguely sounds like the English pronunciation Winkongo. In fact there are some crazy guttural/glottal sounds that I can’t even try to replicate speaking, let alone on paper. That’s the job of a linguist. We met his father, and his father’s wife, the senior brother of the family, Gideon’s half-brother (ie brother) and his half-dozen young cousins.
We then rode into the hills, towards a town called Tinzugu. There is a small tourist business in these hills, set up around the chief’s house and a shrine. Standing on a rock that once provided the overhang for Tinzugu’s school, we looked down on the maze that was the chief’s house. John told me a few weeks ago about this place (and exagerrated a little). This is the legendary 500-family house. Actually, it’s about 300 people, built around the chief’s eighteen wives and their children. It’s a twisting, turning knot of a compound that was quite an impressive feat of navigation for anyone passing through.
We continued on to the shrine, a small cave set into the rock hillside of one of the peaks. There are rules to entering the shrine. Clothing, above the waist and below the knee, is not allowed. Because of Tinzugu’s small but important tourist industry the shrine has allowed white women to enter the shrine wearing their bras, if they pay to sacrifice a guinea fowl. So both Bailey and Vanessa did. Originally the shrine played a role in bringing rain to this area, as the nearest water, the White Volta, is probably somewhere between five and ten kilometers away, over rocky harsh landscape. There is a borehole in town, now, so this is less of a concern. These days the shrine is used to solve problems. A big problem takes a donkey, a small one a goat or a fowl. The shrine itself was a circle of oil painted on the wall of the cave, a huge pile of guinea fowl feathers, and offerings left by visitors, some so old no one remembers who brought them, or what their significance might be.
And we climbed back down, and biked back out of the hills. Biking back I started to realize that although I was getting sunburned pretty badly, I wasn’t actually hot. One more moment of appreciating sweat. I’ve never noticed, before being here, how well it really does regulate body temperature. A thin film of water on the outside of the body and even the slightest breeze will keep you feeling cool and comfortable. The key is just keeping enough liquid in the body to sustain that constant output of water. So I drink about 4 litres of water a day.
I just barely made it back to town before a flat tire got me. I got it patched and went to get some sausages and beer (a 35km bike ride definitely made me feel like I deserved it) at a spot near my house, where I bumped into some other Canadians I know, and my friend Alex. I sat for a while, and after dark got on my bike back to Zaare, my other favourite part of the day. Coming down the hill off the main road into the village the air starts to cool, and as soon as I leave the pavement it’s drops significantly. The air in the village is noticeably cooler, and the stars more visible for the lack of streetlights. So under a skyful of stars and a slight breeze I return home.