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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.

It’s been a long time since I wrote about our life-changing trip to Burkina Faso. Wow. A lot has happened, and I find myself with my family in Canada, rather than in Sacramento, getting ready to fly to Turkey within a matter of weeks, en route to our new life in India. Not only that, but we had some pretty major losses in the last few months. You know about our friend Jason passing away. I guess it makes sense that writing took a back burner for a minute there.

But I just don’t want to stop writing about what we experienced in West Africa and about the incroyable program that AVN has facilitated there. Also, Jason really was the heart and brilliance behind the trip that Jessie and Cindy and I took to Burkina Faso, so let’s keep writing about the difference people are making on a different continent. Here we go, after a long pause.

The last part of our trip that I wrote about was meeting Minata, one of AVN’s entrepreneurs. I wrote about how a woman came out dancing, when we arrived, how Minata exuded strength, and then, how, surprising us, she jumped in our car to journey with us for a while. This is what happened next.

We are headed to a village called Oualou. (Pronounced Wa-loo, like Waterloo without the “ter”) But being the travelers that we are, we are dying to look at a little local craftsmanship, so we stop to check out the hand-thrown pottery that Tcheriba is known for. A few ladies have their wares spread out by the side of the road, on sheets in the dust. There are rows and rows of beautiful thick brown pottery; dishes and ornaments and tea sets. Cindy and Jessie begin to look at one lady’s pottery, while I look at the neighboring display. It is hard to choose, knowing that they probably all need the business. I buy a tea set and a bunch of other things. (Not really considering that all of this is coming in the car with us all.)

However, we are in a hurry. We need to finish seeing the villages we are supposed to see, before heading to Safane to spend the night. So Séri (the director of AVN in Boromo, remember?) tells our translator that it is no problem, we will simply leave the pottery here, and when we come back through they will have it packed in a box for us. Thinking of other places I have traveled, where possibly the vendors would deny ever selling me anything if I came back to pick something up, my jaw drops a little. Jessie and Cindy and I look at each other. And we leave with the others.

(Later, when we drive back to pick the pottery up, it is pitch black outside. The women are standing and waiting for us with a box packed up with all our pottery and a large quantity of straw, to keep it safe.)

In Oualou a large house rises out of the brown earth, striking because it is covered in black and white rune-like writing. It is beautiful, a home with two earth vaults, and when Cindy asks Moctar about the writing and what it means, he shrugs and says, “The women do it.” We are not really enlightened about what the writing means, but it sure is lovely. The owner of the house is not here.

We take a little tour of the home, and once again I am struck by the simplicity of the furnishings. Actually, I should say, there are no furnishings, other than a sleeping mat on the floor beneath a rolled-up mosquito net. People in Burkina Faso have so little. The overall feeling in the house, though is calm and cool, at the end of a hot day. The earth roofs have kept this home from the attack of the brutal Sahel sun.

Zati was the entrepreneur who built this house, with his team of masons, and he asks me if I would like to take photos of the back of the building. While we are back there, I spot a large pile of the empty karité shells, the nut whose oil is used to waterproof these earth homes against the monsoon. Of course I have to take a photo.

We sit outside in the late afternoon sun, chatting and asking questions. The owner of the home comes back. He is a tall, striking man in Muslim garb. He and Zati sit on a rug and exchange greetings of blessing. They laugh and chat, and we hear a little about how this man loves his home (it is obvious, the only home in the village so carefully painted) until a third man approaches them. I notice with interest that the man is carrying a chicken behind his back. (!)

He says a few words, and then whips the chicken in front of him and presents it to Zati. It is a gift for Zati, the man who built the vault style home of this man. Jessie has heard since then (although we had a small inkling) of how large-hearted a gesture this is. To give a man a whole live chicken is an incredibly generous way to honor someone, since livestock is so valuable.

Zati laughs as he takes the chicken, and we all laugh and clap with him. I turn to Moctar and ask, “Will the chicken be coming with us now too?”

He laughs and nods. “Yes. The chicken will come with us now also.”  And now, after seeing another example of a man’s life changed by improved housing, we all hop back in the car… with the chicken.