Ne y taabo

That's Moore for happy holiday. For this past taabo, I went back to Sapone to visit my host family from training. It was good to be back. It was the first time I had seen any of them since August, and everyone seemed to be doing well. Christmas is a big deal here. It's the biggest holiday of the year for Christians, and my host sisters made me promise from the time that I left in August that I would come back to celebrate with them.

Fabrice and his nativity scene

I arrived on the 24th in time to go to the evening Protestant mass with my host mother and her grandson Fabrice. They told me that if I felt tired at any time we could leave. It was my first time attending a church service in Burkina, and it wasn't really what I was expecting, but I liked it! It was held in a small square room with cement flooring and walls and plain wooden benches. When we arrived, the light weren't working so it was lit up by a kerosene lantern. (They got the lights running later, but I liked the lamp light better.) Women and men sat separately. There was some guy leading songs in Moore along with accompaniment from another guy at a drum set, and they did a lot of the call-and-response kind of songs you might imagine. People who felt inspired clapped and danced, not least of all my host mother, who was shakin' it in the aisles. I really liked the guy who led the songs--he got really into it. If all church services were like that, I'd go just for the music.

After an hour or two, the music ended, and another guy came in to start preaching. One man preached in Moore, and another man next to him translated into French. It was getting pretty late by then, and Fabrice and I were both getting pretty sleepy so we left not long after.

The Christmas spread

The next morning, the 5 daughters arrived from Ouaga and beyond. There are 6 daughters in total; 2 are still in high school and the rest are grown up. The 2 high schoolers were there when I was at training, but during the school year it's just the youngest plus Fabrice. The father is blind and doesn't work, but the mother is a government development worker, and as such the family is quite well-off for Burkinabe standards.

The day started with Fabrice putting the finishing touches on his Christmas nativity scene in front of the courtyard. My family didn't have one last year. Fabrice built it out of mud, and he was so proud of it. It will stay there in front of the house, "joyeux noel" and all for the rest of the year until he repaints it for Christmas 2013.

The daughters, with intermittent help from the mother, spent all morning preparing the food. On the menu were:

• Salad
• Pasta
• Rice
• Green beans
• Chicken
• 2 kinds of fish (grilled and fried)
• Peanut butter cookies and banana bread that I brought
• Sodas and 1 bottle of red wine

Nothing too exotic. Whatever they put in the garlicky mayonnaise sauce for the salad and pasta was like crack. I couldn't stop eating it. We started eating a little after noon and never really stopped eating for the rest of the day, or the next morning. The family exchanged a few dishes of food with neighbors, but I didn't try any of what they brought over. But they were SO EXCITED about that banana bread.

Later in the evening, all the girls put on the new dresses and jewelry they had gotten just for Christmas and asked me to take their pictures. They went nuts about getting their pictures taken. In the end I took more than 50 pictures with every possible combination of the girls and their parents.

The family

In the end, it didn't feel that much like Christmas to me, but it was a nice holiday. They don't exchange gifts besides giving candy to kids, which I much preferred to the excess of the US. There was no Christmas tree or annoying songs that stay stuck in my head until March. It was just a religious holiday where everyone in the family gets together...and eats a lot. Which is fine by me.

The day after, my friend Matt and I biked and bush taxied to our friend Royce's site, just a little further down the road toward Ghana. Impressions: they have great bananas! And nice restaurants! And her house is way bigger than mine! (I still like my house though.)

It was interesting being back in Sapone after 4 months' separation. Some things had changed--the gas station had been redone and looked like it had come straight out of '50's America, which is a big step up from where it was before. When I left last time, the city government was saying that my host family's house should have electricity before Christmas, but the poles that were supposed to hold the wires still stood empty. Maybe they will be electrified by Christmas of next year. Anyway, I think nothing changed so much as my perception of it.