So, when we landed, an hour late, our temperatures were checked as soon as we entered the airport, next to large signs informing us about the symptoms of Ebola. The lines to the passport/visa-check confused us, and we ended up standing last in three different lines until a border police took pity on us and our EU passports, looked at our nice visas, and just waved us into the hot, chaotic luggage waiting hall which became our first experience on Burkinabe soil. And people had so much luggage, it’s crazy, and all of them were standing so close to the luggage rolling thingy that it was almost impossible to see anything. Elli got her bag quite fast but mine took forever and I started thinking about what I would need to buy in case my bag took longer than a couple of days to find its way to me – but then it arrived and we could go out into the sunshine where Line, my supervisor, waved at us from behind all other waiting family members and friends of faraway travelers.
It was a nice afternoon, despite our exhaustion. After a short rest, Elli and I sat down on the porch of our guesthouse together with Line and talked about our projects and plans for field work and other practicalities while sharing a bottle of Burkinabe beer and enjoying the afternoon sun glimmering through the trees in the small guesthouse garden.
In the evening, we were invited to dinner at a reseacher’s house. He got his Ph.D. in Sweden, but is now back here, working with agroforestry and remote sensing. A really good contact to make for me, and I worked really hard on staying focused while he explained some of the particularities of remote sensing in a semi-arid region like Sahel for me. I’ll try to meet up with him again later on, when I’m not all fuzzy in the head from two days of airplane strain.
We slept like babies.
Katja Malmborg 