More odds and ends

Well Silke is off to a conference in Burkina, followed by a side trip to Germany, where her husband will join her, so I won't see them again until I myself return from Ouagadougou at the end of February. The plan is for Ezéchiel and me to take a short trip to SIL-Mali mid-February, and then for me to then visit SIL-Burkina for a week.

It is amazing how Silke and Martin have connected with people wanting to maintain or improve their German. Here the they are with a young woman who has studied German at the University, and wants to teach it, so she practices with them when she can. I love the matching outfits that the two are wearing. There was an African couple at the church we attended a couple of weeks ago with similarly matching outfits, but I was hesitant to ask them to pose for a photo.

Martin and Silke in their matching attire

Last Saturday a number of us helped them move across the hall to another identical apartment facing away from the road. The street noise and car exhaust was apparently getting to them and finally an opportunity to move occurred. They will also be facing away from the noise of a maquis that seems to have popped up behind the Pain-Bro stand I mentioned earlier.  For those unfamiliar with the term, a maquis is a sort of small informal restaurant found in West Africa, notably in the Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, that serves African fast-food, and is more of a gathering place than anything else, often with a television, and loud music in the evenings. They may be "unofficial" and operate somewhat clandestinely, known only by word of mouth.  Then again, it could have been coming from the Université of Abidjan, whose main campus is really very close...

As for the move, everything went smoothly except for the problem of the dining room table not fitting through the door, even with the hinges removed, and no amount of angling seemed to help... Heaven knows how it made its way into their apartment in the first place... 

The new apartment

Meanwhile, I continue to hear disturbing news from Burkina. Apparently, the government is proposing handing out arms to civilians so that the can better fight off the jihadists, which will likely escalate their problems to a whole new level. A very good  article from the BBC site was featured on Facebook (should you wish to read it).  The CMA church I attended was disturbed enough to pray about this decision and for the people of Burkina Faso this past Sunday during the service.

And I must mention power cuts. The are supposed to be rare here, but they are occurring with increasing frequency. In fact, there was an exceptionally bad one yesterday.  In the photograph below you can see my room in semi-darkness around 6:45 pm. At a little before 5 pm the power had gone out, but not just for a few minutes or an hour as before. I went for a half-hour walk, expecting the problem to be resolved by my return, but no such luck. These outages are becoming daily occurrences, or even more frequent than that, but this one went on until 6:50 am the following morning! I understand there was some major mechanical failure in the Riviera Golf section of Abidjan where I am staying ...

Unfortunately, there is not much to do when there is no electricity to power the lights, run the A/C (or even a fan!), and there is, of course, no Internet. And I have no candles... as it never occurred to me to buy any.  Fortunately, my laptop was able run for a few hours, and I had a flashlight app on my phone. I could read, but I didn’t want to run down the battery on that same phone because I didn't know how long the outage would last. I had gas for cooking, but I had no interest in cooking in the heat …   

In Ouagadougou there is a back-up generator (because outages happen frequently there), but here in Abidjan these power failures are just starting to become frequent… so there is no backup generator in this building.  I did learn, the following morning, that a battery-powered lamp was available for my room, so I have requested one!

my room in the semi-darkness

My new lamp !

That afternoon I had two visitors to the library that spoke the Ebrié language, one of the some 78 languages spoken in this country. They wanted to know the history of the people that spoke it. Now SIL only works in some of the languages found here, and Ebrié isn't one of them, although the Center did manage to have a book containing the four Gospels, and a copy of the New Testament in that language.  But thanks to a Catalan (!) website [thank you, Google Translate], I learned that 

"The Ebriés (or kyames) are an ethnic group that is part of the Akans and live in the Abidjan region of Côte d'Ivoire, where they represent 0.7% of the population ... [Their] historical origins are to be sought near the lakes in the Ashanti region of Ghana, but [the people] had to go south after the 18th century after fighting a neighboring tribe.  Originally called Tchaman or Achan (two words meaning "the escapers"* in their language), after a military defeat their neighbors [the] Abouré [tribe] renamed them Ebriés, which means dirty. That is why the Ebriés renamed [the] Abouré as [the] Koroman, meaning dirty people."   


Actually I think the Catalan site more or less cribbed the info from Wikipedia, and that the latter's information comes from a citation I saw there and elsewhere, but did not have access to. That reference was to René Bouscayrol's article entitled "Notes sur le peuple Ébrié," found in the Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique noire, Volume XI, Issues 3-4, July–October 1949, p. 382-408.  Another source cited was Jame Stuart Olson's The Peoples of Africa: an ethno-historical dictionary (1996), but since Mr. Olson's dictionary just has short entries on a single page, I suspect he used the above article as well for his source material. 

The Peoples of Africa sample pages screenshot shows entries are short

 *Another source says they were originally called the Tchaman or Achan people, both of which mean "the chosen ones" in the Ebrié language." Hmm ...


 Now you know !