Today we've had a very indulgent day. Probably in stark contrast to the next two weeks. We started off with brunch at someone's very nice new house in the suburbs of Ouagadougou. Followed by a swim and sunbathe at the swimming pool of the International School close to where we are staying. We've packed our bags for the next two weeks and, as we need to be able to carry evertything on our bicycles, have not packed much! Probably no updates for a couple of weeks but I hope you are all well.

So it looks like the bullet point thing in the last post didn't work. Each bullet point became a paragraph. I may update some more tomorrow before we leave for two weeks. After that, I imagine there'll be nothing more said until we return to Ouaga and electricity and the internet. I just had to put this post up so that there was a picture at the top rather than text...

Issues

Today is the day of the blog. On Monday we are leaving the capital to travel by bus to a rural area to the West of the capital. We are staying there for a week before heading to the south-west in search of more interviewees. The village we are staying in next week has no electricity and definitley no internet so I may not take my computer with me for the next 2 weeks. I am therefore filling 2 weeks worth of silence now. However, to make this less of a mass of text, I am going to go for some bullet points highlighting some of the of our experiences:

- Mosquito Nets. Mike gave up on his last night and slept for the first time without it. There are not many mosquitoes around but those that there are seem to like biting me. So, I've kept mine up. However, last night when I got up in the night I got confused about whether I was using mine or not. The result enabled me to commiserate with a fish being fished.

- Supermarkets. Although we are trying to live cheaply and so eat what is easily available at the markets, some things we can't manage without. Our first issue was breakfast cereal. We caved in there after just a few days. Today we had to buy squash. We keep feeling like we have got to the point where we can't drink any more water without some flavour. However, things in supermarkets are all imported and so horrendously expensive.

- Supermarkets. Because things in supermarkets are imported and expensive the clientele there is usually of the wealthier persuasion. As a result, all the street sellers congegrate there. Mike is well practised at ignoring them but I feel rude doing so. I need to get over this though as it could get expensive. I was vaguely interested in a book one guy was selling and that was a fatal mistake. I ended up with about 10 people crowding round me trying to sell me things. Next time I'm just going to run.

- Safari. It seems the best place to see elephants is a park called Nazinga. However, to get there and drive around when there you need a car. The guide book says that you can theoretically hire a car at the park quite cheaply but in reality there never actually are any. However, the book does go on to say that you are amazingly allowed to go into the park on bicycles! I don't think there are many lions in this particular park so tha main danger is the elephants. I've heard however that they are very small and docile creatures and that if they extend their ears it means they are pleased to see you.

- Dust. The harmattan winds have started blowing early this year apparently. The locals are not happy. Everything gets very dusty very quickly even when the winds are not blowing. The poor lady who cleans the guesthouse every day has a terrible challenge. I was mysteriosly ill the other day and coldn't stay awake for more than an hour at a time. Sana tried to blame it on the distance we had cycled that morning. Not wanting to accept defeat in the cycling stakes (we'd only done about 10 miles!) I am blaming it on the dust according to another person's theory. It's either that or a brief tropical disease!

Wildlife and People

One of my aims while in Burkina Faso is to see an Elephant. Obiously my work takes priority. But, if I happen to see an elephant while accidentally looking for interviewees in a National Park it couldn't hurt! In terms of wildlife that you can see every day, things are not too exciting in Ouaga. There are a lot of gecko-looking things, one of which lives in the cupboard in our room and makes a loud clicking noise in the night. There are also other lizards that can make themselves quite tall and run on long legs that I think are called margooya (that's what the name sounds like anyway). As you can see from the picture, we have also seen a Crocodile. There is an urban park in Ouaga that is about the size of Hyde Park in London. The park is mostly just forest which people can pay a small fee to go and enjoy. However, there is also a lake/marsh area in which there are crocodiles. thus, about a mile from the central district of the capital there are crocodiles that seem to live pretty much wild. Also in the park there are apparently lots of antelope living in a large fenced enclosure. We've met a guide (who doesn't speak much english but likes saluting us) who is I think going to take us to see the antelope at dawn one morning.

Other than animal-life we've met lots of friendly people. Most people we interview want to know how I can help them to move to the UK. A lot of others however just want to help us. We met a man in a shop who is on a mission to put us in touch with anyone important in Burkina Faso. He is ringing me later about arranging a meeting with the National President of the Cattle Herders Association. We've also met a nice lady whose husband works at the American Embassy. She's invited us to visit their house at some point and there is even a softball game organised for one weekend which we can go and watch! Mike asked if we could take part but she didn't seem to think we would be up to the standard. Maybe its going to be like the American little leagues you see on films.

Life

As you may have gathered from the last post, life here is pretty different to back in the UK. One startling similarity is the bike shops though! The photo above is a bike shop we came across in a village outside the capital. Once you get inside it feels and smells just like a bike shop in the UK that hasn't been sorted/cleaned for a few years. The thing to do here is to pay a mechanic to pump up your tyres whenever you need air for your bike. As we are going off into rural areas we thought we would buy a pump. As everyone pays someone else to pump their tyres I'd thought a pump would be expensive. In fact it was only about 50p. I think it is more of a status thing. If you have to ride a bike here you are apparently telling the world you are not that successful. However, I guess if you are paying someone else to pump up your tyres you are also telling that to the world!

One thing we've found that is still very different is this whole thing of eating. There is a local dish called To (probably not spelt like that). It is just ground millet mixed into a paste and then somehow set into a weird white tasteless jelly. Tastlessness is one thing, but the texture is horrible. And they they tend to serve it with the weirdest tasting sauces! A local dish I do quite like however is Dege (also probably not spelt like that). It is again millet, I think, but mixed with sweet milk. It is quite good although the place we first tried it was special to say the least. Sana, our translator, took us to the canteen at the university where students can get government subsidised meals. The meals should be 600f but are reduced to 100f (about 15p). The surroundings are appropriate to the price. You first of all have to queue through a weird rusted metal structure that is a bit like a maze of the gates used to contain angry cattle at a market. Then, once you've survived this, you go through a very tight space (maybe a fat test to see if you deserve the food) into a room that was once painted white but is now mysteriously marked with red patches (feels a bit like a slaughterhouse). Once you've made it this far you emerge into an area where you are faced with a high metal wall with tray-sized holes. If you are lucky enough to stand at the right hole (and you have the magic piece of metal they will exchange for a tray) you get given a tray of food, but no cutlery. Once you have your food, you can then proceed into the eating area which feels just like a prison dining area only with many more flies and people holding plastic bags through the bars that are the walls asking for your leftover food.

Having said all that, it was good of Sana to show us student life in Ouagadougou and to respect our budget enough to take us there. I think the fact that we've said that we will pay him more at the end if we can means that he is keeping a tight hold on our purse strings!

Hello! As you can see from the photo above, we have carried out our first pilot interview. I'm sure you can spot Mike amongst all the interviewees, but Sana (our guide/translator) is sitting in the front row, second from the right. The interview went well but we found that 10 people was too many. Also too time consuming if they all want me to be pen pals with their children!

Apart from preparing and doing interviews we have spent a lot of time preparing logisitics for our forthcoming travels. Someone told me before I left that you can only really get one thing done per day in West Africa. Although on some days we have maybe achieved 2 things in one day, this testament is proving pretty accurate. When we first arrived I couldn't bear the sitting around and waiting for hours on end. Now however, I find I can sit and wait for hours without any bother...and the time flies by!

Apart from such time-based acclimatisation, it has taken us (or at least me...I'll ask Mike) some time to adjust to life here. At first we struggled to find food because we couldn't tell which places were trying to sell food and which were not. Although I think my French has improved a bit, it is difficult to buy fried banana from someone when they don't speak French either and I have no clue how much it should be. We managed to work out it was 5 francs for one, but then I didn't know if that was one serving, or one banana chip. As a result, the old lady thought it a bit weird that I gave her 10 francs, hoping to buy one portion each for Mike and I.

I feel like I have far more to say but I can't remember it now and I doubt anyone has read this far down the page. One thing that has struck me so far though is that people are very keen to have their photo taken (and for you to send it to them) but they don't liketo smile for the photo. Very strange for me having been brought up to smile for endless photos for the last 24 years.

Mon sac, it's back!

My bag made it to Ouagadougou! I didn't really believe it would work but the bag managed to work its way from the depths of Libya's carousels to me. Probably not that interesting to most of you but it does at least mean I now have clean underwear.

Hopefully future updates will be slightly more meaningful. At the moment though, the prospect of smelling better is too exciting not to write about.

Ouagadougou

Hello everyone.

We've made it to Ouagadougou! Just a quick update to say that really. We had fun on the plane watching American films that had been blurred and edited to stop our minds from being corrupted by them. Afriqiyah Airways was very impressive until they lost my baggage. So, only a quick update as I have no charger for my laptop and I smell too bad to sit in one place for too long. It is pretty hot here but not yet stifling. Soon it will be apparently!

Lord of the Rings

I thought I should provide a bit of background as to why I'm spending two months in Burkina Faso. I'll try and be quick however in an attempt to avoid that glazed-over-eyes look people seem to get when I start talking about my PhD. The aim is to make an agent-based model of how changes in climate affect migration of people in BF. If you are not in the know (as I wasn't until I started my PhD), an agent-based model is a computer simulation where the actions of individuals (agents) affect the behaviour of all the other agents in the system, producing interesting and unforseen outcomes. As that makes no real sense, here is an alternative description.....

In one of the Lord of the Rings films where they have a huge battle scene with many angry characters fighting as they do, rather than draw (or CGI) each of the characters fighting, they made an agent-based model. For each character made, the film people assigned a set of rules of behaviour that would define their actions. So, if an Orc was running into battle, his rules might be "if opponent smaller than you, fight them" and "if opponent bigger than you, run away". So each set of characters had rules of behaviour that led to a big fight. In essence, the aim of my PhD is the same. I need to find out the rules of behaviour that lead people in Burkina Faso to leave their homes in search of a better life. Hopefully the rules I find will be a little more subtle and end in less bloodshed.

p.s. The precise details of the Lord of the Rings stuff might be a little sketchy but I'm told its true!