Strawberries and vultures

I’d never really put strawberries and Burkina Faso together, and kind of thought I’d imagined it when I drove past women selling small pink things by the side of the road. But apparently the missionaries introduced strawberries and grapes to Burkina and now they grow really well. Slightly random. Delicious find tho!

Burkina is hot hot hot. And orange. And dry. Everything I own has now turned orange, including my feet, and my lips are constantly cracked no matter how much I try and rescue them with magic 8 Hour Cream.

I’ve just got back from 3 days in the field visiting projects a few hours north of Ouaga. It’s been so interesting to get out of the capital and get an insight into rural life. Unlike Dakar where you sit in traffic for hours trying to get through all the suburbs until you finally escape the city, you only need to drive about 20mins outside Ouaga and it immediately feels really rural, with traditional mud brick houses and straw huts to store grain.

I always find it weird being on dead straight roads, prob because it’s so unlike Britain ! We drove for at least an hour on a tarmac road without turning one corner. The Harmattan (wind that blows from the Sahara ) that comes in Feb/March makes everything really hazy, almost foggy, so upfront the road disappeared quickly into the horizon and behind there was just a big cloud of orange dust from the car. We left the main road and drove for another hour or so on a dirt road that becomes impassable in rainy season. Apparently after the rains, crops grow and the whole place becomes green again. Right now I can’t imagine anything ever growing there. It’s so barren.

Once we reached Boulsa, the provincial ‘capital’ I realised why I couldn’t find it in my guidebook. With donkeys, dirt roads and few concrete buildings, it felt more like a big village than a town. Our projects are a further hour’s drive from Boulsa and you feel a million miles away even from Ouaga, let alone London .

The project I was visiting was a Water and Sanitation project which basically means lots of latrines and water pumps! It’s quite a complex process building a water pump as I’ve been finding out. First you have to stick electric cables in the ground to check the resistance to the current. If resistance is weak it means there’s likely to be water conducting the electricity. Then you drill a hole, sometimes 80m deep, to see if there really is water. The project staff were telling me it’s an amazing sight when the drilling takes place and the water suddenly shoots up out of the ground and the whole village erupts in cheers knowing that water has been found. Would love to be there for that. Finding water isn’t enough though. You then have to check the pressure and pump continuously for several hours to check the pressure stays consistent. Once you’re happy that there is enough water, you then have to send a sample to be checked for arsenic. It’s such a complicated process and in this region, there is only a 61% chance of finding drinkable water underground.

One of the water pumps we visited. Not the best picture but you get the idea!

On our last day while visiting another water pump we met an old man from the village. He told me that they used to use a well to fetch water but in recent years the water from there had started to get dirty. Apparently wells only have a certain amount of water. You have to dig much deeper underground to reach a permanent water source. He said that since they have been drinking the water from the pump, he’s noticed a lot less people complaining of stomach problems, especially children and fewer cases of diarrhoea. We chatted to him for quite a while in the searing heat until he invited us back to his home. There we met his wives and at least 15 children.

When we first turned up the women ran away, but then they came back laughing having changed their clothes as they said they were too scruffy to receive visitors! The kids took a big shine to us and to my camera, finding it hysterical to see themselves on the digital screen. We were invited to sit down under the straw shelter and eat peanuts. We were surrounded by hens and baby chicks, who kept pecking at my feet.. As we left, the old man gave me a live chicken as a present. Very humbling to see how grateful they were for the waterpump and how generous they were to me.

We carried on till we found what I guess was a little restaurant by the side of the road. Altho they didn’t actually have any food to sell us so not quite sure how it’s classified as a restaurant! Anyway we gave them our chicken and they killed it and cooked that. So we had a meal of grilled chicken and more grilled chicken.

Lunch! (chicken not child)

Slightly surreal eating lunch surrounded by a flock of vultures intent on devouring whatever was left on the bones that we threw away. Not the most relaxing meal given my total bird phobia! And I thought pigeons were bad. Fortunately (for us at least), half way through lunch a truck hit a goat on the road and I think that made the vultures’ day. We were just discussing how every animal has its uses and how vultures do the ‘cleaning’. The flock swarmed the road-kill and literally within 20 minutes the dead goat was nothing but a skeleton.

They are serious birds.

No wonder they freaked me out.