Burkina Couture

They might not have much, but Burkinabes do have their fashion, and they get into it. The general idea is the louder the better. Clothes generally fall into one of three categories: traditional African, pagne (pronounced panya), and western clothes that were clearly sent to Africa via aid organizations. 

Traditional clothes are usually pretty classy as long as they're clean and not too tattered. They are made of locally fabricated cloth in solid blues/greens or with stripes, and the better-off get them embroidered in colored thread. Traditional and pagne clothes are almost always custom made by local tailors for $2-$10, depending on whether or not it's embroidered and how many frills you add. Pagne fabric is widespread throughout Africa. It's medium-weight cotton that doesn't stretch, printed with bold, vividly colored designs. I'm not sure if someone was trying to get a laugh when they designed that fabric or if they were just really high on drugs, but you find bizarre things on them. Sometimes they're classy, but then sometimes, you get pagnes whose principle design looks like a bright red Frankenstein hand repeated over and over and over on a poison-green background, or pagnes that are a drawing of a tree with dollar bills falling off of it. Women like to mix pagne fabric that they're wearing, so there's one bold neon-colored design on their shirt and another clashing neon design on the bottom. At least I don't have to worry about anyone judging me for not coordinating my outfits. Finally, there's the foreign aid clothes. I've seen people walking around wearing T-Mobile outlet shirts, and one has to wonder what journey that shirt made to end up here in the middle of nowhere.

Some memorable things that I've seen people wearing on the street on a normal day:

• An old man wearing a Santa hat
• A big buff guy wearing a fuzzy powder-blue Hello Kitty hat
• A quiet young guy wearing a shirt that said, in sparkly letters, "WILL NOT SHUT UP"
• One of the other teachers at my school wearing, as a dress shirt, a dark blue janitor shirt (it says "Janitor" next to the breast pocket)

A regular favorite is one of the other teachers from my school who tries to look as European as he can. He probably owns more pairs of skinny jeans than anyone else in a 20-mile radius. He's usually pretty sharply dressed, but sometimes I just have to wonder. Lately he's taken to wearing a beaded bracelet that has little black beads interspersed by white beads with letters on them, like I would have used to make jewelry with my name on it as a kid. I spent awhile trying to figure out what the letters symbolized, until I gave up and asked him. He told me "oh, they're just letters. It doesn't say anything." On Saturday, he saw me wearing my sunglasses from America for the first time, and he loved them. He wanted to wear them, and when I pointed out that they had a flower decoration on the side so were clearly meant for women, his response was that he would still wear them in village where no one would know the difference. Later he asked for them again, and he put them on his leg and just sat there looking at them for awhile before he gave them back. Gotta love Burkinabes.

Unrelated: my mango tree came loose from its support one day. I think it has body image issues.