Rain at last!

On the weekend we received the first rain of the year in Ouaga. After weeks of sunshine and 50°c temperature, finally the sun was hiding behind the clouds and Ouaga was covered with droplets of water. But let me tell you, when it rains, it rains hard. As we were quite excited at the beginning we started abit of dancing in the rain. After getting fully drenched and feeling cold (for the first time in Africa), and laughed at by the neighbors, we decided to get inside and watch the rain from there. Just when it had finally stopped, Guillaume and I took a ride on a motorbike that we had borrowed from a friend to go around the neighborhood. Of course we weren’t quite lucky with the day we had chosen for this activity as we had to stop afew times for the rain to slow down to be able to continue. Nevertheless, it was one pleasant weekend.

Simple yet pleasant moments don’t just happen on the weekends. During the week, I often find myself smiling about something really little but pleasing. I guess one thing that I really really enjoy here is the human connection/interactions. Back home, when I get on the bus or in a cab I am either listening to my music or minding my own business. I rarely know my neighbors and don’t usually say hi to people on the street. Well, here is quite a different story. All neighbors know each other and pay visits often. In the morning and at night time you always here people saluting one another. There is all sorts of conversations while you are on the bus or in a cab. Every morning when you arrive to work, you say hello to all co-workers and they do the same.
Maybe another way to put this is that here it seems like you are always part of a bigger group and there is never only you. Whereas back home we are more focused on our individual lives. If my neighbors don’t see me here for a day, they will be concerned and knock on the door to see how I am, whereas how many times have you heard stories of people dying in their houses and nobody noticing till weeks later??

Well, sometimes the visits do get out of hand and you find yourself locking the door so that you can be alone for awhile…So of course this sense of community and less individualistic approach has its own down sides. If you are the eldest or the richest in the family, you are obliged to provide for others and that can include immediate and extended family members. Its simply expected. My co-worker is always concerned about what he needs to put aside at the end of the month to send to his family in the village.

Regardless of the downsides, I do enjoy the visits from the neighbors, salutations on the way to work and the communal approach that is so evident in the African lifestyle. There is really not much to share, but as they say “vous êtes invités” to what there is to share.
pic: me and neighbors

Mission in the East

This was my time to explore the eastern part of Burkina while doing a pre-etude pour reseau d’adduction d’eau potable. Thus the main objective of this mission was to do a pre-study of villages who had demanded a water system. As background information, Burkina’s current situation with respect to access to water is quite harsh. In this landlocked country, in most areas woman have to walk for kilometres to reach a pump. Then, using their physical force they fill up their containers and carry them on their head all the way back to their homes. En plus, there is no guarantee that the water is treated and will not cause diseases. In fact, according to the World Health Organization 80% of all diseases in Burkina Faso are caused by unsafe water. So to tackle this problem, our famous multifunctional plateform is also used to install a small system for improved drinking water. But to actually implement a system, there is a whole process that needs to be respected, village submits a demand, if accepted pre-study is done, then feasibility study, then creation of management committee and finally implementation… Assuming all stages of the process go as planned and there is a monitoring that goes along with the steps, the population can eventually have access to drinkable water. I do say ‘assuming’ because there is all sorts of glitches that can happen in each stage and this is what makes development complex. While everything sounds perfect on paper and in theory, the story is otherwise or not as perfect in the field. For example in one village the members of the management committee seemed to be all relatives (sisters, uncles..) of the person responsible for creating the committee!! Or another interesting note was the monitoring staff who don’t get out there in the field often enough to follow the work that is being done. Well, you might think, as I thought, they’re just lazy or irresponsible and a solution could be to fire them and hire hard working individuals. However, as I realized during this week, there are deeper causes for such behaviours. As an explanation for the monitors behaviour listen to the following: In rural areas and outside of larger cities, a common activity for “gang thieves” is to stop cars on the road to obtain cash and their other belongings. Sometimes it can get rough and people might loose their lives because of it. For that it is often recommended not to travel at night and in most offices driving after 6pm for work purposes in not permitted. I further realized that the rate of this activity in the eastern part of Burkina is quite high and the reason why I learned this is because one of the monitoring staff was held by gun point on route during the same time I was in the region. As I listened to her story I could better understand why she and others would be less enthusiastic about getting on the road to do their job. So I learned that poverty has more than one dimension. I can work on a solution that targets poverty in terms of lack of access to drinking water. But in the process of applying the solution, the results can easily be affected by other dimensions of poverty, poverty that encourages young people to point their guns at you.
On the positive side, it was very interesting to visit some villages with MFP installed in them and hear from the women how this project is benefiting their lives. So despite the glitches and the complexity of it all, there is positive change which is encouraging. A +

Trip to the south, PO

This posting will be rather short as it was only a short weekend spent in the South. The small city of PO is close to the Ghanaian border with cooler weather and more vegetation. Approximately 50km from PO, there is an ancient village called Tibiélé. It’s a village of animists and indigenous beliefs are quite evident. It is famous for its architecture with sacred zones and historical images on the walls. The story goes back in the day where tribal conflict was number one cause of death in the region. Thick walls and small entrances were created for protection
against outsider attacks. Each symbol, line and shape on the wall and of the building units represents a different meaning and still to this day they are created in the same manner. Here are some pics:
Courtyard of one house, passageway of another
View from the roof
Kitchen with natural light