We all packed ourselves into the pickup truck together with the backpacks and shovels and infiltriometers and kitchen equipment and started the journey northward. Elli and I, the translator Desiré, a soil science PhD student, Maurice, who was coming to help Elli get started, and the driver of course. What felt like half the day was spent driving around Ouagadougou, though, looking for PVC pipes and gasoline for the gasoline cooker and then we stopped by one of the very few vegetarian restaurants in Ouaga. Elli was so happy. They even had grilled tofu on sticks, brochettes. A really rare treat in this meat obsessed country.
Once we got properly going, though, things went smoothly. The driver, Theo, drove fast but safely, the national road was in excellent condition and outside the window the landscape slowly became slightly less green, the trees slightly farther apart and the outside temperature slightly higher.
When we arrived in Ouahigouya, the third largest city in Burkina Faso, we just checked in at a guesthouse for governmental employees and researchers, and then we left again to go visit Reko, the village where Elli will be doing all her fieldwork.
Hanna, the SRC PhD student whose work we’re both building our studies on, worked a lot in Reko when she was here and has continued to be in contact with them. It’s as if the village has adopted her, so when we arrived, both me and Elli were welcomed like family by Madi, the CVD (the president of the Comité Villageois de Dévelopment). He had been measuring rainfall for Hanna, and he was so happy to see the photographs that I’d brought of Hanna and her baby and husband. He gave us a bag of newly harvested groundnuts.
It was very nice, being welcomed like that. Here, we had a village where they already liked us, where they were used to our weird scientist ways and where they cared about us, because of our connection to Hanna. I think things will go well here. I will not be working in Reko at all, but still. Visiting Reko the first time gave me a good feeling.
Katja Malmborg 