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Guédyo was the village where Rocheline was born. It's also known as Ottawa - the explanation being (as far as I could understand it) that the village was founded by two separate groups of families (one from Soubré district, the other from Gagnoa), hence marriages are allowed between theses two groups who then become brothers-in-law, which in Bété is 'Ottowi', and so they changed this to Ottawa so that it would have the same name as the Canadian town. The Canadian ambassador had supposedly visited the village, filmed it, etc.

Welcome To Ottawa - Population 300

Ajcairns
2005-11-04 20:53:21

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it out with André, François, the village chief, and few of his other cronies (all these guys are in their fifties and sixties). I've never seen a bottle of whisky disappear so fast. The same for the second bottle we'd brought - we were going to give it to Rocheline's grandmother, but Mathieu advised us she'd only get drunk and start saying and doing stupid things (I suspect this was only half true, and that it was also about jealousy and about keeping it for him and his cronies). Supposedly there was also the tradition that I should offer a case of beer to my father-in-law, which I did one evening, a couple of days after we arrived. I was a bit surprised getting up at about 8 a.m. the next day to find that they'd drunk it all that morning (12 one litre bottles)!

Another day about 11 a.m. I was just sitting around in the courtyard in front of Mathieu's house, when André and François came along and asked me to come with them for a drink somewhere else. So off we went down the road a bit to one of the places that sold beer. I suppose you could call these places maquis, but really they were just someone's house with a few crates of beer inside and a table and chairs outside in the shade of trees or of a terrace-type roof. The guy who owned this particular place was from Burkina Faso and had tribal scars decorating his face (about half the village were from Mali or Burkina Faso). André, with typical exuberance, has this way of opening a beer so that the top flies off making a sound like the cork popping off a bottle of champagne. He also likes a head on his beer ("Il faut que ça mousse"), so pours the beer like some Arab pouring tea. We shared about five beers between the three of us, and also some coutoucou. Needless to say I was fairly half-cut before 12 noon.

These older guys all had fields to work in, but they seemed to spend a lot of the time just sitting around chatting, listening to the radio, or ...