cooped up and crazy

The news of the day have been:

The president went out and said that the government was dissolved, but not the parliament, and that the military wasn’t in power at all. Then he offered to lead a new interim government until November next year, when the elections should be held as previously planned.

This was not good news, and it was feared that more protests would follow.

Then, just after lunch, the president went out and declared that he would resign, and then he was seen driving south in a long caravan of 20 cars. The commander in chief of the military declared that he was the leader of the interim government instead, and that elections will be held in 90 days.

People went out on the streets and celebrated. Storage facilities for the only Burkinabe beer were looted here in Ouahigouya, and people were drinking beer and drove around town honking.

Burkina Faso’s president of 27 years is not the president anymore. What everyone was demonstrating for has finally happened. Hopefully, this means that things will go back to normal. Some people are saying, though, that the commander in chief is too close to Compaoré and that the opposition isn’t content yet. Having the military in power never feels quite right. We’ll see. This evening, though, everyone just seems happy.

I realize that I’ve just been part of a historic sequence of days here in Burkina Faso. That these, hopefully, are the first steps toward creating democracy in this country. And a part of me really thinks that it’s cool to be here. This could be history in the making, after all.

But then another part of me is slowly losing my mind from sitting here, cooped up in a hotel, without knowing when we will be able to get out of here. I have my work to worry about – all this time here has meant a lot of reading of scientific articles, which in turn has led to me realizing there are so many things that I still don’t know and won’t have time to consider for my thesis, and how will it ever be any good if I can’t even get out to do my fieldwork? And at the same time: having constant access to slow internet, seeing people’s lives go on on my Facebook feed while few seem to have time to answer to my whiny cries for attention. I know that people care, and that they are worried, and that I shouldn’t read anything into the emptiness of my inbox, but I can’t seem to help it.

This is what being cooped up turns me into. Needy and paranoid. My very selfish reflection is: I need this coup d’etat to end now, so that I can get back to my villages, to my sweaty transect walks and moments of rest on tree trunks in the shadow of a homestead mango tree.