Thursday, September 25, 2014

Professor Moses

Last March, near the end of the school year, I was told that we were getting 2 new professeurs at our village school. The Burkinabe government is weird like that--rather than sending teachers before the beginning of the school year, they just send them whenever they feel like it, even if it's only a month and a half before the end of the school year. Frankly, I wasn't that excited about it when I first heard. What if the new teachers were lame? I liked the teachers that we already had, and I enjoyed hanging out with them every afternoon into the evening under the neem trees by the teacher lodging at the school. I felt like 2 new teachers thrown into the mix were going to mess up whatever good dynamic we had going. 

I was pleasantly surprised, though. The state sent a new French teacher, Moïse (the Frenchified version of the name Moses) and a new English teacher, Benoît, and they both turned out to be some of the friendliest, most honest and likable people I've met since I've got here. Within a week of their arrival, it was hard to imagine ever having sat under the neem trees without them. Almost every evening, I found them there, a group of teachers chatting and laughing and complaining about misbehaving students, Benoît brewing tea (which is a long and elaborate process the way they do it here), and Moïse at the center, making everyone laugh and letting them know how much he liked them. Once a week or so, he prepared riz sauce arachide (rice with peanut sauce, a traditional burkinabe dish) and he always insisted on giving me a big portion. I never had the heart to tell him that the sauce was too heavy, and I ate it all anyway because he was so eager to share it and take care of me.

Professor Moses near Banfora
I saw Moïse and Benoît a couple of times during the summer, and we kept in regular contact. Moïse was anxious that we should hang out in Ouaga as much as possible before he went to his hometown of Banfora for the month of August. He met my friends Sophia and Athena when they came to visit, as well as several of my volunteer friends, and everyone was immediately charmed. Nobody could help liking him. He always asked for people's email addresses before they left so that he wouldn't risk losing contact with his new friends, even if they were probably never going to be in the same country again. Unlike almost any other male Burkinabe teacher, he was actually cheerful and positive about Burkina Faso, and equally rare, neither he nor Benoît ever tried to hit on me or any of my friends or act weirdly toward us for being women.

The last time I saw Moïse was a week and a half ago, when he was here for the school's administrative meeting to prepare for the October 1st school opening. He was his usual enthusiastic self, and he talked excitedly about all the things that were going to happen this school year. It was already like old times: he was telling me about how he wanted a girlfriend so he could fall in love and get married soon and was asking me to suggest promising candidates, and he kept throwing in random English phrases at the same time to try to improve his language skills. He was also going on about wanting to organize a dance party for the teachers that he was prepared to DJ whenever we were ready. Later, he said that as a teacher, he is only allowed to miss 10 days of school per year for personal reasons, but he told me that he was going to take a few of those days in December just for me so we could get beers in Ouaga one more time and so he could see me off at the airport when I leave. (It sounds like he was coming onto me, but he really wasn't, he was just that kind of person.) The day after the meeting, he went back to Ouaga to hang out with his friends and mother for a last two weeks before he had to come back to my village for the school year.

Fast forward to 8:00 this morning, when I got an odd phone call from Benoît. All he said was, "did you hear?" I said no, what? There was a long silence, which I thought was caused by a reception problem, and then he said that he would call me back, and hung up. It made me worried, but I tried to brush it off. An hour later, Yacouba, the other English teacher who lives next door to me, found me and told me.

Yesterday late morning Moïse went to visit his friend, a guard at a post office, which also functions as a small bank/safety deposit, in Ouaga. They were hanging out outside when a pair of braqueurs (robbers) came and held them up. Evidently the robbers hadn't even bothered to cover their faces, and they shot Moïse and his friend on their way in. Moïse was killed on the spot, and his friend is still in critical condition. The robbers took a little money out of the post office and left, and they still haven't been caught. They weren't even able to get that much money out of the whole operation. (Article in French about it here.)

I am so crushed. Everything about it is so wrong. It still hasn't really hit me that it actually happened, even after hearing about his burial this afternoon. He was only 28. Of all my friends here, he has to have been the most full of life and the most excited for what lay in the future. He only finished his Master's degree last year, and he hadn't even been paid a single franc yet for the teaching career that he just started. I can't even imagine how devastated his family must be. The worst part for me is thinking about how afraid he must have felt in the last moments when he saw the robbers pull up and take aim. And for what? The whole thing is totally meaningless. I can't shake the mental image of him lying bloody on the ground out of my mind. So upsetting.

How are we going to start classes is less than a week without him? He was supposed to come back here in 3 days. I can't imagine a gathering of teachers without him and his Bella ringtone that got stuck in my head all the time.

He's not the first person among my friends and family who has died, but he is the first to go so young and unexpectedly. I was sad about the others, but at least I could comfort myself knowing that it was a relief in its own way for them after having survived long lives/fights with illness. But this is just, nothing. Nothing but a loss, and an empty hole in all his friends' lives.

For some reason, ever since maybe a week or two into our friendship, he started saying to me "but I will miss you when you leave!" I thought that was a weird thing to say to someone who you've only become friends with recently and who you will be around for at least another 8 months (supposedly). He said it all the time though, at least once a week. In the end, though, I guess I was the one who should have been saying it. I wish I could be that kind of person who immediately liked and cared about everyone I met, and who wasn't afraid to tell people all the time how great I genuinely thought they were or how much they mattered to me. But that wasn't me, it was Moïse, and now it's gone forever. I feel so lucky that I got to be friends with him for the few months that we knew each other. I don't believe in afterlives or reincarnation or whatever, but I wish there was some chance to see each other one more time so I could say goodbye and tell him that I'll miss him too.