[:nl]2 October 2016
1
Eugenie has arrived yesterday in Ouagadougou and will be home in Bobo Dioulasso today.
Unexplained Traditions:
We are starting to be very active with honey. Buying raw honey from the beekeepers, conditioning it for sale in Burkina. This means honey is transported from the villages to Bobo and then transported when sold. I am not sure how we came to this conversation with the person conditioning honey, but he told me that transporters refuse to take honey in the truck, bus, car unless a bit of the honey is put on one of the wheels. I have asked all around but nobody so far can explain why.
In asking the question, I also learned that it is the same with peanut butter and that he you want to transport a mortar you have to put a coin of 5 FCFA inside???
Some other saying / traditions have a meaning.  For example, that it is dangerous to go into the eggplants patch at night. This is only to prevent that people steel the eggplant. Also sometimes the owner of fruit trees puts a spell on them (often materialized by some string on the tree). If you steel a fruit you cannot get away from the tree and turn around it until the owner comes to free you.
Visit of new village FON
We have identified 2 new villages who are looking for support for infrastructure. We visited the first one, Fon, on Wednesday. It is about 80 km from Bobo Dioulasso. The main ethnical group is the Toussian. In Fon there are a total of 8 different ethnical groups. Reasons for a lot of people to come and live there are the fertility of the land. The farmers seem to have bigger fields (10 to 15 hectares per farmer) in average than in villages where we are active (5 to 10). For the rest the needs are the same as in our older villages. Their main objective is to find funds to increase the capacity of their primary school. They have only 3 class rooms with around 80 students per class.

Women and men of Fon


3

Peuhl woman with children


Odile also with child


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
6
In this village they have an artesian well. The water is coming out of this well the whole year round without the help of a pump. Today it is only used for household needs. Several institutions have looked at it for developing it, but none have finalized anything.
Proverb of the week:
If you treat your child as a king, you will be the first one to pay taxes
Si vous traitez votre enfant comme un roi, vous serez le premier à payer des impôts
There is no god like one’s stomach; we must sacrifice to it every day
Il n’y a pas de dieu comme son ventre ; nous devons lui sacrifier tous les jours
Amitiés,
Hervé
 [:]

Blijf op de hoogte van onze ontwikkelingen!