When Hannes was here the other day, we spoke about Burkina Faso. Because, have I told you, I’m going to Burkina Faso for ten weeks in mid-October to do field work for my master’s thesis. Hannes was there last summer doing field work for his bachelor’s, and talking to him about public transport and the political situation and speaking French, something released in me. I started feeling excited.
I started talking to a doctoral candidate and a researcher at the SRC in the beginning of the year about joining their project on landscapes, ecosystem services and livelihoods in the Sahel to possibly do some remote sensing/GIS stuff, and in March or so we agreed that I would use satellite images to try to scale up the ecosystem service mapping that the doctoral candidate (the admirable Hanna) has done on a couple of villages in central-northern Burkina Faso. Of course, groundtruthing is required on site to check if my satellite image classification has been successful.
In May, my scholarship application got accepted, which means I have the funds to go, together with my classmate Elli. In June, I bought the plane tickets, set to leave in mid-October, doing field work until mid-December, and then I will go to Liberia to spend Christmas with my mom, possibly going through Ghana for some sightseeing.
But all through this, I have not felt any excitement. It has all been an endless list of must-do’s. When most of the planning got settled, in April, I was so busy with my double course load and everything else that was going on, so I only had time to make sure everything got done. No excitement. And then the pressure kind of held on, all through May and then into the traineeship and living arrangements and mom coming and what if the classification method that I’ve chosen doesn’t work and I don’t speak French for fuck’s sake! How the hell am I going to survive? (To be honest, I do understand quite a lot. I did study French for six years, after all, and I took a French course in the spring and have been tuning up my vocabulary with flashcards all summer – but, you know. Whenever there’s a slightest reason to worry…)
But now, after having talked with Hannes about his field work experience in Burkina Faso, things don’t seem so much like chores anymore. I went to aerobics at the Skarpnäck sports field, and while jumping around there to Miley Cyrus, I started thinking about how I should test out my groundtruthing method and where, and before I knew it, I had worked myself up into one of those idea flows that I get sometimes, I was sweating and doing sit-ups and singing along and coming up with method testing procedures in Stockholm and solutions for the potential lack of reception from enough GPS satellites in the Sahel.
I’m going to Burkina Faso in two and a half month. I’m so excited!
A Landsat image of parts of the study area in Burkina Faso. This is my raw data. This is what I will earn my master’s degree on. Pretty, isn’t it?
Katja Malmborg 