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The Paris airport has a beautiful bathroom and we ready ourselves for our first day. It is about 7:00 in the morning, we’ve been traveling for around sixteen hours now, and some face washing and eyebrow plucking is needed. This is, after all, Paris.

Our van-taxi driver gives us a lot of information while zigging and zagging relentlessly through the heavy traffic. “There was a strike last week,” he says, as he dodges through a gas station on the side of the freeway to get around about eleven cars. “It makes the traffic very bad.” He is a teacher and tells us that he taught in Morocco for years. I settle back into my seat without a seatbelt and soak it in -the streets of Paris, the cab driver who has traveled the world as a teacher, and my exhaustion, which is beginning to marinate the very inside of my bones.

We reach our hotel street after some more driving in which cars narrowly miss us and we careen through narrow streets. Jessie and Cindy and I just laugh. The driver finds the end of our street and then reverses all the way back to our hotel. “We drove too far and missed it,” he jokes, a likely excuse in case any French policeman wonders why we are driving down the street backwards.

At the hotel, they look at us in shock. “We’re early,” Jessie says.

“You certainly are, if you’re checking in,” says the hotelier. We are a little sheepish. They take our bags, though, so that we can run around luggage free, and I feel as though the weight of a thousand hours has been lifted from my sore shoulders.

This is our first test. All we have is a scrap of the address of a restaurant that we know exists somewhere in Paris. We are supposed to meet some people there. We begin a marathon of map-gazing. No one on this side of Paris knows anything about the other side of Paris. We can’t find the street. When we ask a taxi to take us there, he waves us away. Oh dear.

Thomas Granier is the Program Director at the Association La Voûte Nubienne. Antoine Horellou is the Director of Development. These two men and their program are the entire reason that we are traveling to Burkina Faso. They have kindly put together a tour for us of the Earth Roofs in the Sahel program, in order for us to see firsthand the need and the solution. We are ready to dig in and do some good now. Sometimes, though, you need to figure out the best way to do the good you want to do. Which is where Thomas and Antoine come in.

Thomas has been working on getting people in Burkina Faso better living conditions, heart and soul for ten years. He’s literally dedicated his life to doing good. Jessie and Cindy were able to meet with Antoine when he came to the Bay Area to receive the association’s TechAward. They were very impressed. And thus, we wind our way through Paris to meet with them.

Eventually, after some coffee, we are a little closer to finding it. We now have figured out the general area of Paris that contains the street, although we have yet to locate the street on an actual map. We head for the Metro and throw ourselves at the mercy of the Metro ticket operator. He takes pity on us and tells us which trains to take. Underneath the street, we are in the very guts of Paris. We head off, reasonably sure of our direction.

There are points when we must look like three American mice trying to get through a maze. In switching trains, I lead us back through the turnstile, which was a bad choice, since we are not supposed to leave. We try to get back through the swiveling bar a few times, with no avail. Again an operator takes pity on us. Finally, we reach our destination, the restaurant that Antoine directed us to.

There is a sign that I can read. It says that the restaurant closed for repairs the day before. We look at each other in disbelief. After a whole morning of puzzling our way through Paris, the restaurant is closed. Again, we can only laugh.