Chemins

There are two routes to school from my house.

Both start the same way: leave the thoughtfully but incompletely graveled front yard of the house, turn right to avoid the drainage ditch and mango tree that frame the property line, and pass by the neighbors’ kitchen, avoiding dishes, chickens, and children. The route continues uphill past a house under uncommonly rapid construction, a briqueterie, and then meets the paved main road. I turn right onto the main road.

Following traffic along this arterial, I pass three cell phone credit-recharge stalls, two breadmongers, one military hospital not yet built, a semi-communal garden, and five potholes. Veering left I leave most of the speeding taxis and motos behind, trading potholes for people bathing and waving, wide-ish shoulders for a leaky foliage roof. Children yell out fouté (white person). I descend through the residential carrefours avoiding dogs and goats. Each house is different. Several are yellow, but each with a different sort of concrete arabesque adornment. Precast concrete columns frame in porches and terraces of all shapes. Eating and cooking areas are covered with low thatch roofs. Nearer the school where our daily training sessions take place, women and midsize children surround a faucet that spouts cleaner water most mornings.

If I instead cross the main road, I cross a formidable water bar (our bus had much too long a wheelbase to traverse it successfully the day of our arrival here, but we crossed it anyway) before the road passes the Tostan Convention Centre. Climbing upwards and southwards around the convention centre, the residents of a couple well-shaded houses stare and/or give salutations. I circumnavigate their livestock. The road has no holes and the asphalt unfatigued, facilitating a rapid summit of the hill and even speedier descent. On wet days the knobby front tire of the bicycle throws specs of muddy water onto my trousers. The mosque is bright but empty at half past seven. The route descends past the rice paddies, currently drained to facilitate planting.