Fishing in Poverty Bay, Burkina Faso

I was a bit surprised a few days back to receive a SMS from one of my neighbours suggesting to go 'a la paiche du dimanche'. I guessed he meant 'la pêche' but I had to double check this, as he is still in the process of learning how to write French, and we sometime misunderstand each other.
I had not thought, fishing was a local hobby in a Sahelian country... But sure enough, you can fish here, and I'd soon find out there were the professional kind of fishermen, complete with stools and knee high wellies... and our kind...
Mazou had it all sorted for the coming Sunday. At the crack of dawn, he was at our door with two fishing rods made of bambou, a can of juicy worms and a noisy P50 to take us there...

Direction a reservoir some 20km south of Ouaga, we drove through Ouaga 2000 - aka the posh ghost town, passed the graveyard and stopped in the non-lôti of Nangrin, a shanty town, where his family lives. Here we had a nescafé and a bit of bread and carried for a few kilometers on the dirt track. This was the loveliest part, with the contrast of the red track and green mango trees under the rising sun.

Soon we got to a huge reservoir, where a couple of people were fishing on canoes, but most of them were sitting by the water, where we joined in. It is a serious business, so serious hardly anyone took any notice of me, except for when I caught my one and only fish, and decided to put it back, as it was a beautifule blue and silver colour and there was hardly anything to chew on it.
There was a coffee break at noon - had it been England, we would have opened cans of lager, France a red bottle of wine, but the conversation would have been the same, sharing stories of catching huge fish, coming face to face with a cayman... I could have happily called it a day, but the plan was to move with the sun to another side of the reservoir. Despite staying for another two hours, it was too hot and we hadn't caught quite enough to feed my friend's family, so we bought some fish off another guy to have a decent meal that night and said our goodbyes.

At dinner, I quite happily gave my share of fish and kept to rice and sauce, not feeling so hungry after starring all day in murky polluteed waters, and seeing the poor fish agonising on bits of black plastic bags. They also look far too tiny to be eaten, it would have been the decent thing to put them back in the water for a few more weeks, so they could grow and reproduce themselves, but here one can't be choosy, as even the heads and bones will be saved, dried and used to fragrance the stew.
No matter, how far you travel, it seems that people are the same sometimes, I was quite sure, on that same Sunday, my friends in Navotas in the Philippines also went fishing with the family barge... If they in Manila or us in Ouaga could just remember to look after our planet a little bit, not like the three fishing brothers Gruff...