Burkina Faso

This last week was an amazing adventure into a completely different African country and gaining a new perspective on life. Burkina Faso has the dubious honor of being in the Top 5 poorest countries in the world. The people however are the friendliest and most accommodating I have ever met. You might even say they are loyal and friendly to a fault. It actually got frustrating after a while with how there were several guys who would just walk around with us showing us things when we wanted to just explore things on our own. This process could have been made easier if I knew any French. Ghana is surrounded by francophone countries so any country I would have visited there would have been the same issues. Although the people were friendly to a fault it is by far preferred than to feeling unwanted and just a target. To get to Ouagadougou I took a bus from Accra which took a total of about 27 hours including the ridiculous 6 hours we had to spend outside the border because it wasn’t open yet. Once we got to Ouaga we took a bus directly to a village called Dori. This took another 4 hours. Needless to say, I was not anxious to get back on a bus any time soon. When we arrived in Dori, there were several people at the bus stop including donkey. In rural Burkina, taxis are either in the form of donkey and cart, or the back of motorcycles. Trying to find a hotel was interesting as all of the numbers in the guidebook did not work, but we found someone who showed us one. I made friends with a man named Ibrahim who I asked if he knew where to find someone who could take us on a camel trek. He told me that he could! I set up for the next morning that we would go for two days into the Sahel. We left the next morning after I bought my very own Sahelian turban to wear in the sun. I looked pretty awesome if I say so myself. Riding the camels the first day was a rather uncomfortable but debatably fun experience. We stopped in a tiny village that I couldn’t pronounce for what we thought was a short break but turned into nap time, lunch, tea time, dinner, fire, and bed time. There were a few highlights of this village and Burkina. The tea that we were served about 3 times a day was amazingly delicious and at night the stars were easily the most numerous and brilliant than I have ever seen them. The two planets, Venus and Mars (??) were both right next to the moon and we saw countless shooting stars and one huge meteor which we saw hit the atmosphere, bounce and break up in a visible fire. That night I slept on a “bed” which left me with bruises in the morning as it was essentially sticks. The next day the camels seemed much more comfortable and it was a great ride to two different villages where we got to play with some kids and drink more tea. There was a development garden run by the Peace Corp that we stopped at and it was an interesting co-op of foreign workers and local women who were learning how to gain better yields in the very arid climate. Back in Dori that night we wandered around to look at the market and to just see how the town was set up. We met a few guys who wanted to show us around which led to some interesting places as their English was “small small” and our French was “petit.” One of my favorite sights in the town was this little old man who was a silversmith. He was sitting on the ground pounding on silver wearing a pair of ridiculous glasses that were the size of his face and about an inch thick.
One of the facets of Burkina which was amusing was the use of concrete bags for wrapping almost everything. The men would roll desert tobacco using concrete paper while market women would wrap vegetables or millet cakes in concrete paper. I just had to ignore the health implications and just go with it. The tobacco that they had was simply in piles everywhere and you could buy a lot for about $1. Virtually all of the men in Burkina smoke and I had to try one of their rolled concrete cigarettes. Definitely an interesting experience and I figured that I was in the middle of the desert, why not just leave everything behind and just do as the locals do for a few days??
The next morning we let Dori for Ouaga and spent the rest of the day in Ouaga just being lazy and eating. While the entire trip was extremely fun and a great learning experience it was very physically and emotionally draining. While it hurts to see anyone suffer from hunger and need, the kids are the ones that tear your heart out the most. When every ten minutes you are confronted with kids begging for food you have to make some very hard choices. Realistically I simply could not give all my money away as I still had to get home but the times I wanted so badly to give them money there were so many kids that it is impossible to give them all a little. I had to make the decision countless times to give nothing rather than leave most of the kids with nothing. By the end of the trip I was just exhausted because its crazy how having kids break your heart constantly is so physically draining. There was one beautiful instance at the Ghana- Burkina Faso border than was so amazing it was completely pathetic. There were two small boys that asked us for food and we had some bread, we gave them a loaf of it and instead of the two boys fighting over the bread they calmly and in a mature manner split up the bread, not only into two pieces but into about 8 and gave pieces to the other small boys in the area. The way these kids looked eating these small pieces of bread made me feel so happy but on the verge of tears because of the extreme reality of the situation.
All of this poverty made me wonder why the Burkinabe stay in Burkina when there is so much drought and poverty and inability to find clean water. I think it all comes down to the ancient and personal ties to home. Regardless of how hard life is if you have nothing, you have to have pride in where you are and defend it even though it is a losing battle with no rewards. Their land and identity is seemingly all they have left so why not hold on tight. The trip home was much faster as we were able to cross the border early without waiting. Getting back into Ghana was in itself a shocking experience as it seemed incredibly lush and green when we got into the south and Accra seemed like an extremely western city even though it really isn’t.
Apologies for such a long and disjointed entry. I’m sure I am still leaving out so much but it was such a perception altering experience. Please leave comments and especially questions if you have any. See all of you soon!! (I leave Ghana this Saturday for the states)