Tomorrow will mark three weeks since my departure from Detroit/Ann Arbor. Crazy to think that we're well past the half-way point and will leave for Senegal on Sunday. I must say, Burkina Faso has been enjoyable, but we've really exhausted our usefulness and are wondering what we'll be doing in Senegal for two weeks.
Since my last update, we've gone to the northern part of Burkina to watch focus groups being conducted. Quite an experience, including village visits (less than 12 km from the border with Mali) and driving through quite a sandstorm on the return trip. That last event was pretty incredible. All of a sudden, I looked out the far window of the truck to see a dark brownish grey wall, stretching from the ground to the sky, slowly moving toward us. Driving through that was amazing, and I wish I'd taken a picture of the sand enveloping the sunshine and sky behind us.
People's resilience continues to amaze me. The villagers we met with are living incredibly close to the poverty line...
As you may have guessed, we decided not to go to Niger. The recent political instability presented us with several less-than-desirable yet not unlikely scenarios. First of all, there were the obvious safety precautions. The last president was killed in a military coup, and protesters (last week? a week before that?) were met with repression that left several people injured. Additionally, there was a protest scheduled for the middle of our 10 day trip. Over 10,000 people showed up, which (if we'd ignored the state dept's advice to stay indoors) would have made travel more difficult. Lastly, we have been able to see the Burkina Faso team move from the project's initial phase of interviewer training to the data collection/recording phase...seeing this linear progression of our project is pretty invaluable and should allow us to provide insight and guidance to the other teams.
Lastly, we've had the most incredible storms here the past few nights! I have never seen anything remotely like this. At ~4:00 am, the sky opens into a downpour of rain and almost constant lightening. Needless to say, these storms add additional blackouts to the more typical daytime rolling blackouts. The lack of air conditioning is well worth the opportunity to see something that amazing...now if only our window didn't leak. :-P Also, who would've thought that 93 degrees could feel merely "comfortably warm?!" I feel like exhibit A for climate change adaptation. :-)
Hopefully you're enjoying the pictures and updates. I'll be able to load more photos when my internet connection is a bit faster and more stable. (if you'd like to look at the album, click on the slideshow to the right of my blog updates...it will take you to a Picasa album that you can look through!) Enjoy!