Roses are red, violets are blue and oranges are green

On Wednesday, I left for my first mission; I traveled with the team to visit two HIV counseling and testing sites in Bouaké and Daloa, with an overnight stay in the capital city of Yamoussoukro.

Some highlights of the trip:

Agouti, or bush rat. While driving to Yamoussoukro on Wednesday, we passed by many roadside villages, selling fruits, vegetables and textiles. One boy held a giant dead rat (or agouti) by its tail, hoping to sell it to passerby-ers. On Thursday, we lunched in Daloa, where a guy on our team had ordered agouti and urged me to try it. Repulsed from what I had seen earlier, I declined, but after further insistence, I reluctantly gave in and tried a small piece. It looked and tasted a bit like a mix of pork and beef. Not a fan. On our way home, we passed the same boy selling his agouti.

Oranges. My coworker wanted to buy some avocados from one of the fruit sellers from the side of the road. So we stopped the car and she bought a bagful of avocados. I saw some oranges and decided to buy some. For two bags, it was 1,000 CFA, which translates to roughly $2. Seeing that it was very reasonable, three of us bought 2 bags each. It wasn’t until I arrived home to unload the oranges that I realized each bag held about 50 oranges. Oops. Since a carton of orange juice costs about $9 at the supermarket and I’ve got 100 oranges, I will make orange juice, orange marmalade, orange-themed meals, orange cakes, orange scones, orange-scented room deodorizers and so on. I might even have a few left over to give away.

One interesting thing about oranges in the tropical area is that oranges are green (on the outside). Almost all of my oranges are green, but ripe. After a quick google search, I found that oranges are indeed green in tropical areas. Colder temperatures destroy the green pigment and turn the skins of the oranges orange.

Basilique de Notre Dame de la Paix. Within three years and 300 million US dollars later, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny had built one of the largest Basilicas in the world in the late 1980s. It closely resembles St. Peter’s in Rome. It also has elevators and 7,000 individually air conditioned seats. While I did not get to enter the church, it was indeed a beautiful sight to see. You do wonder about corruption and wastefulness of the government, especially since that Catholicism is not the major religion of Cote d’Ivoire (a large majority are either Muslim or Christian). All I could think was: That money could have gone to the poor, create better education systems, better health care, and so on.

I did not get the chance to enter the basilica, but was able to view it from a distance, and even that was breathtaking. I am told that the basilica now belongs to the Vatican.