When we left off at the end of Part 1, you were watching David's brothers and cousins wash my truck.
We walked back up to David's family compound and found the village chief and deputy chief waiting for us under the shade tree (only one for several hundred yards), along with some other people. I sat down and David's oldest brother made the introductions.
When my turn came I brought out one of the bottles of schnapps and presented it to the chief. He sent for a cup and cracked the seal on the bottle, poured a libation on the ground to honor the ancestors and then had his cup filled to the brim. He tossed it back like it was cool water on a hot day (which it was - around 100, I figure). Now, I lived and traveled for years in Eastern Europe with the hard core vodka drinkers and I have seem people drink strong spirits before. But a Russian will usually screw up his face after knocking back 100 ml (two average shots) of hard vodka. The chief just drank down a cup full and smiled - NO reaction at all - and passed the cup to his deputy. This cup must hold at least 4 or 5 shots!
The chief is in the center, David's oldest brother on the left, and the deputy chief is on the right. His hat looked like a large mushroom.
The first bottle of schnapps barely made the rounds, so I sent David for a second one. The chief opened it and had his share and started to pass it, but David's mother grabbed the bottle and said that the rest was for the women. So I got a third bottle out and proceeded to watch the chief get plastered, along with most of his court. I declined to drink since I was driving.
Then we all piled in the pickup (about 8 people) and drove to the closest village. There we stopped to try some "pito" - a kind of local beer made from fermented sorghum.
This attracted a pretty good sized gathering of kids since not many obroni (white people) stop in this village for anything, let alone to drink pito under the village shade tree. The bartender/pito lady is in the back row holding up the calabash in her hand.
The next day, we drove out to the river and walked across it (it's the dry season now and the river is low) into Burkina Faso. No one asked for passports or visas. Then we came back to Bawku and I gassed up the truck.
Next we drove about 15 miles to the border with Togo. There the border crossing formalities were a little stricter, but everyone was polite and they let me across for a short visit to Cinkasse, the closest Togolese town. Some things like Chinese motorcycles and Thai rice are much cheaper in Togo. So I stopped in a local shop and bought a 50 pound bag of rice for David's family.
The second day, we took the rice, two more bags of corn (that David bought in the Bawku market) and a big bag of millet that I bought in Bawku back to his compound. The village chief presented me with a goat as a gift.
We immediately christened the goat "Lunch" (since
the plan is for some Mexican style cabrito grilled on my charcoal
brazier back in Accra one of these days.) No one has explained this to lunch
yet. As I write, he's out in the back yard happily munching on mangoes, cut
grass and cabbage leaves (from my garden).
Voilà Lunch...
(Thanks to David and David's cousin for taking the pictures so
that I could star in my own story).
End of Part 2
Click here to go on to "Back from the Northland - Part 3"
