This was the month of “village iron chef” aka people who teach and live in Ouaga go out to villages and cook food mostly to entertain Peace Corps friends. It was fun and it was tasty. This trip’s highlight was not the cooking however but the 43-mile bike ride through the Sahel on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

Our whole route was a dirt road with little cover (desert) but with villages maybe every 15 miles. We stopped twice, once in Mani where we got some of the best yogurt I’ve ever had. Apparently the “polls”, (spelled for ease of pronunciation) the ethnic group that lives in the north of Burkina as well as some other countries, make some dang good yogurt. I’ll save you from having to wonder -- a sachet of yogurt and half an orange Fanta was not the best choice for a mid 40-mile bike ride snack in the desert. No real problems though until we were roughly 12 miles out from Tatarko when the Harmattan winds decided to pick up. So for about the last 10 miles or so we were riding straight into a head wind. Happily the dust was not bad at all so there was no problem with seeing or breathing.

In Tatarko we stopped and had a lunch of what was pretty much the saltiest rice I’ve ever had in my life. The resto was just beside a video club spot. Explanation time: When someone has a TV or something of that sort at a bar or what have you, they place one large speaker outside of their establishment and turn it up as loud as humanly possible. People here LOVE kung-fu movies. SO, the end of our biking day was met with really salty rice and really loud kung-fu sounds. I was dirty, sweaty, salty from being sweaty, dehydrated. My butt hurt, I couldn’t think and on top of that even if I would have been able to think I wouldn’t have been able to hear myself over the clashing of swords and kung-fu sounds of hands moving rapidly. All in all it was a good trip. It always feels good to do something physical, especially when most of my days are spent in classrooms.

Ben Roberts

Teacher, English Language Institute, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso