Safari in Burkina

Baboon at Nazinga Park.
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Today is March 11^th….. man, we haven’t posted in over two months! Don’t worry, we’re doing fine. :) We’ve just been a little caught up in doing our mandate, working our butts off trying to finish our projects. It wasn’t always easy, but we’ve made it this far, and now we finally get time to travel!! Benin, Togo, Ghana and Morocco, all in the next month and a half. We’re storing our possessions at a friend’s house (our Oxfam supervisor type, Francois), taking the bare minimum, and leaving sometime next week to Benin. There we will meet with Hugo and Julie, friends we met in Montreal, and move on westward to Ghana. But before we go, we still need to take care of a few things…

Elephants, the biggest attraction, at Nazinga Park.
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Right now, I’m sitting in our bedroom, while Jan and a bunch of our friends are outside on the porch playing cards (asshole to be precise :). I found out today that I had Typhoid Fever. Oh!! I had been feeling worse and worse in the last week, and finally decided to go to the clinic today (i.e. Jan convinced me). I had my blood tests done, and was actually relieved to find out I had a sickness. I was feeling like serious s***, and it’s good to know where it’s coming from!! I (or anyone here actually) didn’t expect anyone of us to get Typhoid Fever! We all got the shot, and mostly we fear malaria, four out of ten of us having gotten it. But I guess I needed to be original or something, and chose Typhoid as my sickness of choice. :D It isn’t that terrible because if treated, it completely goes away with no problems. So again, Mom, don’t worry. :)

I found out today that I had Typhoid Fever...

Marge and Jan in front of their hut at Nazinga Park.
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Symptoms: severe headache, high fever, complete loss of appetite (and inability to keep food in), major stomach pain, myalgia (severe muscle pain), fatigue… if untreated, can lead to stomach infection, holes in the stomach and even worse (up to 30% death rate, IF untreated). Aie! At the risk of being totally cliché, I did think of the people from all these poor countries (including Burkina) that can’t afford any of the luxuries of western medicine. You see the serious repercussions of that every day here. For example, many people here have Polio, a disease with dramatic consequences but completely avoidable by the administration of a routine vaccine. The rural population, which constitutes over 80 percent of the total Burkinabe population, rarely has any access to medicine. The good news is that in many villages, “Mutuelles de santé” are being set up. Basically, it’s a type of private health insurance policy. For a relatively small amount of money (5 Canadian dollars per month), anyone can “insure” themselves access to treatment when needed.

Marge and Francois at Nazinga.
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On our recent trip organized by Francois (our only Oxfam trip), we saw a small theater piece made by villagers that aimed at convincing locals to subscribe to these health “plans”. We went to a local association about an hour and a half away from Ouaga, where we were greeted by a large group of woman all dressed in pretty colors. These women were all part of the association, which was building schools, organizing literacy programs for adults, helping with crops, and organizing a “Mutuelle de santé” to help out the villagers from the area. It was very refreshing to see people from here get organized, making a difference. Again, it might be cliché but things are pretty basic here. What we were doing (writing computer code for the government) didn’t really make us feel like anything concrete was being done to the poorest people here. On top of it, there is only so much an outsider can do to help here.

Our whole group of Oxfam volunteers at Nazinga.
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It’s really cool to see people working together to improve their conditions, cause the government sure won’t. President Compaore was elected last November, but during his campaign gives food and t-shirts as props to a mostly uneducated population to get them to vote for him. He has so much cash he drives 2 different hummers, and spent like 10,000,000,000 FCFA (about 20 million Canadian dollars) for his campaign. He does very little to help the population, which more often than not lives in extreme poverty conditions (i.e. less than a dollar a day). Not always easy to swallow…

Classic house in Tiebele
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On the trip, we also got to do a small safari in the Nazinga national park. While sitting on top of a 4X4, we go to see some elephants, waterbucks, facochere, and pintades pentads, all running in the wild. It was quite the surreal experience to see these huge elephants not more than 15 meters away, doing their thing. We were all so exhausted from spending two months working hard that this was a welcomed break. We later moved on to Tiebele, a village famous for its architecture and traditions. The sights were absolutely beautiful. Houses were all hand decorated by the woman of the village, and we had wonderful guides that took us trough it all step by step. Tiebele is a matriarchal society, where grandmothers are the most respected and important members of the family. The village is deeply rooted in its ancestral traditions, as men still produce poisoned arrows for the long gone tribal wars, areas of the village are reserved for the chief and his family, chicken sacrifices are a daily activity and a big mount of sand at the entrance of the villages is used to dispose of new born placenta in order to ensure a blessed life. Seeing all this was really great, and quite the change from the crowded, busy and polluted streets of Ouaga.

Very nice guided tour of Tiebele
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What awaits us now is a few more days in Ouaga. Just enough time to get healthy, pack, say our goodbyes, and we’re off on our 20 hour bus ride to Cotonou, the capital of Benin. We’ll try to chronicle our adventure as often as possible. :)