It’s my namnsdag today. A strange tradition, really, this Swedish one of making every day of the year the ”name’s day” for two names. Today, one of the names is Katja. I have met no Swedes today, though, who could wish me a good namnsdag.

Instead, I’ve been to Tanlargo. The watermelon village. This village is also small, and as it turns out, the people are not mossi. Instead, they belong to a people called Sonray who wandered in from Mali a long time ago and settled in a couple of villages in the Kaya area. They speak their own language, and had names that made Desiré laugh when he tried to spell them out for me. In the end, we had to look at their identitiy cards. Of course, they spoke mooré too. A bilingual village.

The most prominent thing in this village was the river that ran through it, and the big depression lying on both sides. There, they grew watermelons. One melon had accidentally been picked without being fully ripe, and they gave me a piece to try. It was like eating pink water, fresh, not tasting very much, but still refreshing, especially in the midday heat.

A recent development with the river, according to my guides, was that it had started to overflow more aggressively during the last ten years or so. The CVD said he thought it was because of the population increase, which had lead to an increase in land converted into fields. Previously, there had used to be buffer zones with bushes and other natural vegetation next to the river, to slow the water down, but now, after a heavy rain, everything just flooded.

There was an area south of the river that had used to be fields, but now had turned into a huge expanse of barren soil, heavily eroded. Beautiful, in a way, how the water had carved its way down into the soil, creating a sort of badlands in miniature – but mostly tragic, of course, how drastically land can degrade.

When walking past a field where a group of people were working, we were asked to join them for lunch. It became the second time I got to try tô. This time, the taste was less disagreeable, possibly not spiced with that putrid thing, but it was still slightly sour and the consistency still like old porrige. For sauce, they had a quite salty thing made out of the leaves of a weed that grew everywhere. The taste was okay, but it was slimey. I guess I’m a bit too European to properly appreciate the real village food here.

At the end of the first walk, when we returned to the school where we started, the village chief was waiting for us. He invited us to eat with him too, and this time it was spiced rice with small pieces of fish in it, more for the taste than for actual protein intake. That, I had no problems at all to eat. For dessert, they cracked open a water melon, freshly harvested from the field. It might have been the heat and the situation, I don’t know, but right there, I felt like that was the tastiest watermelon I had ever eaten.

The afternoon walk ended up by a small hill behind the village, full of different sized, deep holes. The woman, one of the afternoon’s guides, told me that it was a traditional place for dyeing fabrics. A man was standing by one of the holes, pushing a pole up and down in a dark purple, viscous liquid. It smelled like rotten eggs, but next to him several pieces of cotton fabrics were hanging to dry, intensely black in the setting sun.

The woman told me that the black color comes from the leaves of a tree called gare, after several days of treatment. And then she showed me the tree, not fully grown, but still with the tiny, tiny leaves. Amazing, how something so little and green can turn into something so intensely black.

In the backseat on the way back to Kaya, the dark fast approaching outside the car windows, I sat caressing a new kind of gift in my lap. A huge water melon. And, of course, with a bag of unpeeled groundnuts by my side. A good day, indeed.

Before internet crashed again, I managed to see a photograph that Kate had uploaded on Facebook of her pale face and red nose, and some comment of her now returning to the winter (from Uruguay to New Zeeland, I presume), and no tan for her due to thesis work, or something like that. That got me thinking of my own body, and the way my work here has put its mark on it.

Of course, there are all the weird, itchy rash spots I get in places where I’ve sweated alot.

I’m outside in the sun all day, but wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a hat has greatly limited the amount of skin that gets exposed to the elements. My neck has had to take most of it – exept for the skin right on my spine. That is still quite pale, thanks to the braid that I make of my hair every morning.

And the other day in the shower, I noticed how my right wrist is a shade darker than my left. I couldn’t figure out why, until today. While walking, I noticed that I carry the GPS machine in my left hand, in front of me. That means that left wrist and hand are in the shade from my shoulder most of the time. The right hand doesn’t get that protection, hanging as it does by my hip.

Oh, how all these weird small details accumulate.

I’ve treated myself to a room of my own here in Kaya. I could have done like in Ouahigouya and gotten one big room for both me and Desiré to share, but no. With the intense work schedule I have here, I decided I needed the privacy at least a couple of hours a day.

So, here I am, sitting stark naked on my bed, drinking carbonated lemonade. The internet isn’t working, as it hasn’t done anywhere, not since the wi-fi crashed at Chez Tess on Thursday. Only sporadic pulses with the mobile broadband that Elli and I bought. I know people have messaged me on Facebook. Today: Josh and Emma. Sweethearts. Lara has urged people to take care of the food in the SRC Master’s cave fridge on the Facebook group. My couchsurfing request got accepted, so now I have somewhere to stay in Tamale, Ghana, when it’s time for me to head south. And Elli’s supervisor has wished me me good luck with my fieldwork and asked Elli to take it easy after her illness. Small glimpses of cyberspace (and home), but never enough to send anything out there. Only recieve. Oh well. It doesn’t really matter. A few more days can still pass before people start getting worried for me back home, I’m sure.

I have an episode of Game of Thrones prepped. An entire papaya to eat. And no one around to force me to put clothes on. I’m doing quite alright.

A papaya with a baby!

I did the first transect walks in the Kaya area today in a village called Zanzi. It was a small village, situated in the valleys between a chain of small mountains that suddenly just appear in the otherwise quite flat landscape when driving along the Gourcy-Kaya road.

Due to the mountains, this place was something quite different to the other villages where I’ve been. They farmed millet on the mountainsides, and it the places where the mountain fields were in fallow, they were covered in golden grass that gave the hills such soft textures. It almost felt like something Mediterranean, climbing up and down those hillsides. The Harmattan has started blowing for real now, too, so there was a constant, dry breeze.

The afternoon walks are the best. When the heat has started to subside and the light has turned soft orange. The smells come out then too: the dry earth, the harvested fields, the mint-and-thyme-smelling weeds. And we walke past two bulls, standing in a field, one licking the other’s hump. Such a nice image, of care. It made me happy.

And then there was the old man of Zanzi. Delege Abouleh. A former CVD, but now just the man who knew stuff, whom everyone turned to when there were some issues regarding the farming. He welcomed us when we came to the village, he set up a meeting with all the men that mattered, he introduced us and he waited for us after both walks, wanting to hear if I had gotten everything I needed. An incredibly sincere, warm man, I just wanted to stick around to take part in this field of positive energy that he surrounded himself in.

That, the interesting landscapes, and the amazing people, is what I am here for. What makes all the sweating and dirtiness and bad sleep and bad food and exhaustion worth it in the end. That is what I will remember, when I leave here.

I left Elli in Ouaga, healed from her malaria but still not quite well, and went back to Gourcy to do the feedback sessions with the villages there. Three villages in a day meant the day became very long, and we ended up sitting in the dark, talking with the village elders in Tarba. The stars came out, with a brightness that they rarely have in Europe, and that gave me a chance to tell them that some of the stars actually were satellites – possibly even the satellite that had taken the pictures that I was showing them.

Sleeping alone in the uncomfortable bed in a mold-smelling room in Gourcy wasn’t easy, and at first I couldn’t fall asleep. And once I did, I dreamt nightmares and woke up in a cold sweat. And, of course it wasn’t just because of the absence of Elli, I was also feeling stressed about the intense days I had ahead of me, and other small bits and pieces that together didn’t give me a very collected state of mind. But NOT having Elli there made all those other things ten times worse. I did not get up with a smile that morning.

Today, we drove from Gourcy to Kaya and visited three villages on the way, asking them if they would help me and give me guided tours of their villages. I managed to keep a straight and friendly face in the villages (it wasn’t hard, the people are mostly so lovely and sincere in the villages), but in between meetings I was deteriorating fast. The nightmare, lack of sleep, stress, the constant bumping into the car roof and window due to the new driver’s quite careless driving style, gave me a terrible headache. And I thought: What the hell am I doing here? I don’t want to be here! Let me just go home!

But that wasn’t an option. I put on my headphones and put on some Tallest Man on Earth. Found a painkiller and swallowed it down with some Burkinabe ripp-off Fanta. When I had listened to all my the Tallest Man, I went on to some Nina Ramsby and Martin Hederos, watching the mountains pass by outside the window. There are actual mountains here around Kaya, as opposed to the very flat landscape around Ouahigouya. Quite beautiful, once the wonders of paracetamol kicked in.

And in the last village, we met the CVD on his way back from the fields, transporting an incredible load of animal fodder in a wagon behind a tiny little donkey.

When I told my name in the village, Nakombogo, every man under the trees (and they were quite a few), started repeating it, almost like a mantra, chanting it like there was something magic about it. Katia Malbor. And they thanked me for choosing to come to their village, and blessed my work, and said that they would help me with whatever I wanted when I returned.

And I suddenly realized that things didn’t feel quite as bad anymore.