While walking home from the market together with Elli, with bags full of tomatoes, onions and cabbage, I was struck by the feeling that I wasn’t done. We had just bought deep fried aloco with sauce (plantain in English, or food banana), a new favorite discovery of mine, and I got that nostalgic feeling that I get, of missing something even before I’ve left. It is something that comes over me sometimes when I’ve stayed for a while in a place, not really lived, but still long enough to have developed routines.
And I felt: What have I done here? Worked. Been under house arrest. Walked to the market. To be honest, Ouahigouya doesn’t have that much more exciting things to do, unless you want to get drunk on millet beer, but still. In three days we’ll leave, and I might never come back. Ever.
I’m Swedish and Finnish, so I guess melancholy is something that comes to me as easily as breathing.
I spent the rest of the walk home taking photos of completely unremarkable landmarks, just to remember. And to show you. This was my life for the almost four weeks I spent doing field work in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.
Repairs taking place on Ouahigouya’s main street (?).
Elli on our street, outside our hotel.
The hotel/guest house has some kind of research twist to it, and on the wall around the compound, different kinds of edifying messages have been painted. This slightly vandalized one wants to stop female circumcision.
The wifi area, where I’ve spent many evenings defying the mosquitoes, making cut-and-paste-maps and trying (and mostly failing) to Skype with Sweden.
Elli, prepared to leave for the evening weightings of her lysimeters (the bag is mine, stolen at the high school fair from a high school that I didn’t want to go to [Kärrtorp], and now through many twists and turns, it has become Elli’s fieldwork tool bag – quite an adventure for an ugly gift bag, to be sure), in front of the door to our room. Home.
Katja Malmborg 