If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.

The following is another excerpt from the story of our travels to Burkina Faso.  Read along as we brave the Metro in Paris, become red with African Dust in Burkina Faso, and climb rickety ladders to reach rooftops.  Our intent?  To learn more about Earth Roofs in the Sahel and to see for ourselves the life-changing effect of this program. If you’re reading for the first time, you can see the other entries here.  

On our first morning we wake early to morning sounds; chatter in languages we don’t know, birdsong and motorcycles. Light floods into my room. Today we will drive to Boromo.  Salif, the hotel manager, has prepared breakfast for us, and we find ourselves sitting and enjoying instant coffee and baguettes with jam made from papaya, orange, and guava.  He tells us that they make the jam there, at his hotel.  Nescafé becomes our new morning friend quickly, despite our Artisan coffee rituals at home.

It’s time to go.  We settle into the jeep and then pick up Zalissa, who is coming to Boromo with us.  We are glad to be driving for a long time, since it is the first daylight look that we have of this country.  On the way we see young boys selling phone cards, and girls selling the baguettes that seem to be one thing that has remained of French food culture in this previous French Colony.  We move quickly along the highway, slowing for villages along the way.  The shops that line the sides of the road are small and all the buildings we see have the tin roofs that are so problematic.  The sheet metal is hot, we know, and very loud when it rains.  We will learn more, as we go, about the demerits of the sheet metal.

I see bicycle tires hanging on trees, as though they are for sale.  There are stands with food spread out on blankets. We’ve been told that the crops are bad this year because of rains that were too heavy, destroying the fields of grain and corn.  Thomas has said that many people could die, if there is not enough food.  It is a stark reality, and as I pass the fields, I would will more food into them, if I could strain my muscles enough to do it.  However, it is not possible to create ears of corn on empty stalks by willing them there.

We pass large trucks filled with scrap metal, and people on small motorized bikes.  Cindy points out what I later learn is referred to as a “bush taxi”, a van which has been stuffed with people and things until it can’t be stuffed anymore.  There are people hanging on top as the van roars along.  We exclaim over one man who seems to be holding to the very top on with his fingers and toes. As adventurous as I know myself to be, I feel thankful for this car that Thomas rented for us.

Women ride along the road on bicycles with colorful dresses on and babies tied to their backs.  Other women walk with bundles of sticks on their heads, or large heavy buckets, or great bowls filled with millet.  Their dresses are bright flashes of color through the windows of the car, against a mostly brown landscape.  There are trees, in the Sahel, but there is more dirt.  The dirt along the road is very red, and when another big vehicle rumbles toward us, throwing dust over everything in its path, our driver, Suri, motions to us to close the windows.  We roll them up and sit in the immediately cloistering heat until the dust clears, and then we thankfully roll them back down.  The air feels good on our faces.

I find myself thinking a lot about economy, as we drive.  I see no factories, there are no bustling cities here.  There are plenty of small villages, small shops selling gasoline and diesel out of recycled alcohol bottles, young girls with sesame snacks who push them into the car, hoping we will buy some, when we pause.  There are children, everywhere, there are fields and there are the small brick houses with the sheet metal roofs.  There doesn’t seem to be much room to improve, in this country.  The choices that we have in the West aren’t available here.  Would you like to go into this industry?  Or that?  The luxury of choice isn’t always at arms reach.  This is the third poorest country in the world.

What would you do, if you wanted to create a new product here?  A brand new market?  What would you do if you looked around and saw men in poverty, unemployed or young and unable to move into a field of work that will prosper them?

You might sit inside on a hot day and look up.  And realize that the answers are all right there, in the need for better living conditions, for roofs that actually shelter the people living beneath them, in the creation of a marketable trade.