Mali

So this isn't strictly related but, I recently visited Burkina Faso again (albeit only briefly on the way between Ghana and Mali). However, although an enormous failure in terms of producing goods for my PhD, the trip has resulted in a video...



I recommend having your sound turned on. I find the images far less emotive in the absence of music!

Video - to make up for my lack of retrospect!

Ghana and Home

Its all gone very fast. Today is the 12th March and in 15 hours we have to be at the airport to catch the plane home. Barring delays in Ouagadougou and Tripoli we should be home tomorrow morning. It better be summer in the UK by now!

After spending 4 days in the East of Burkina Faso doing the last of the interviews we headed for a whistle stop tour of Ghana to find Accra, Linnet, Hannah and the beach. We thankfully found all four and it was well worth the trip, despite the hours spent on coaches getting there and back. I am attempting to add photos from the East and Ghana to some more slideshows on the right hand side (I am struggling though for some reason). Once they are up I will also do some retrospective updates just to round things off propoerly. I don't want to miss out any of the exciting tales just because I've been too busy to update for the past two weeks...

Now that we are back in Ouaga we have realised that the hot season has crept up on us and it is HOT! Yesterday a roadside thermometer read 49 degrees C. I'm not sure it was that hot but it was certainly hot. It is 7.15am as I write and it is already way too hot.

Work Progress

I have realised that the content of this blog thus far has focussed more on the fun we are having and less on the things we are finding out in suport of my Ph.D. This post will hopefully change that. Albeit only briefly.

The greatest contrast we have seen was that between the southwest of the country (Banfora area) and the north (Dori area). In the southwest there are large sugar cane plantations, waterfalls and generally more green things. By contrast, located on the edge of the Sahel, northern towns are very sandy with little vegetation and not much in the way of agriculture. With the year in this part of the world split into a wet and a dry season, people need to grow enough food during the wet season to tide them over for the year. However, people in the north are unable to do this. Even in the years of 'best' rainfall, people only have enough food to get them through to the end of March (with the wet season starting again in May and the next harvest in September). Due to the lack of rain (and therefore no prospect of market gardening) there is very little in the way of employment in the north during the dry season. As a result, migration is a necessity for many people to enable them to earn enough money in the dry season to purchase the food they need to keep the family going. Unless a year's rainfall (and therefore harvest) have been particularly bad, 2 or 3 sons from each family generally migrate somehwere to earn money that they send back to the family to buy food. During those years when rainfall is really bad, older men and "even women" may also migrate in such a way.

By contrast, people in the southwest tend to migrate not because they have to in order to have enough food (although this may still be the case some years) but because there is little work during the dry season and so little opportunity to earn money. The large majority of people migrating from locations in all the regions of Burkina Faso that we have visited go to Cote d'Ivoire. People form the north also head to the southwest but Cote d'Ivoire seems to be the promised land of plantation work and pennies.

On our most recent visit to the East of Burkina (Fada N'Gourma) we were struck by the nice feel that the town had. The east is little mentioned in terms of migration within Burkina, either as a place of departure or arrival. It seems that it is a nice place to live as the land is fertile and they have bins in the town (a rare thing here). So people migrate to there from nearby. However, there seems to be a cut-off distance where the investment neccessary to travel to Fada is such that one might as well head to the southwest where the soil is more fertile and the harvest more secure.

I think thats enough on migration for now. One village we visited in the east had the unenviable position of being able to look at the pylons carrying electricity that they could not use from the dam that they could not use for watering their crops as it was needed to generate the electricity that they could not use.

Don't worry, mission successful...

We had to get up at 3:30 am but it was worth it...

Slight change of plan now. We are off to do a few more interviews in the East of Burkina Faso tomorrow morning before heading to Ghana after that. Another early start tomorrow!

Bonjour! Having spent just over a week in the two northern towns of Dori and Djibo - on the edge of the Sahel - we are back in Ouagadougou. We managed to do some good interviews while we were away although the trip was somewhat hampered by sand and the strong Harmattan wind. It was difficult to get anywhere by bike in Dori due to the deep sand and the dust carried by the hot wind was a bit demoralising at times. As a result we worked fast and were able to flee the sandstorms in favour of returning to the capital. We are now in Ouaga for the week before hopefully heading to Ghana for a week at the weekend. Our passports are with a very stroppy lady at the Ghanaian embassy as I write and she will hopefully have seen fit to give us visas by the morning. As for this week, I am writing up all the interviews and we hope to continue the search for an elephant at some point! New photos in the top slideshow on the right and I will update some more soon with our adventures of the past week.