Rural visit

I will let others speak about some of our other meet-ups today. Let me write briefly before we head to eat dinner after a long day. We left the confines of Ougadougou under the  arrangements of a former MSU visitor in the 2011 exchange, Francois Bado, who has been President of the Centre D'Etudes Economiques et Sociales de l'Afrique de l'Quest Association Internationale. Our drive beyond the city gave us views of determined agriculture done primarily by women and their children. Everything by hand. No long handle rakes or hoes or shovels we're talking the little ones. Yet large areas under cultivation. They need to be blessed by right amount of rains. There are goats, and more goats, and even more goats...no kiddin'!! Big pockets of unproductive spaces between those little  clusters of huts and some block or mud huts.

Kids are excited to see vehicles and wave at passers-by even as they tend goats, drive a donkey cart, or simply sit under a tree to escape the heat. It was toasty for us Michiganders. The soil is rusty red, and stony and hard from the baking of the heat. Farmers need to loosen the soil by hand, typically building rows up. Some sort of corn or maize is visible, but very young stages. The few market areas we passed are down sized versions of the spread out variety we see in Oagadougou. Traffic on the roads was greatly reduced and speeds much higher for travel. Saw buses and vans loaded to twice their height with all kinds of things to move, as well as some big stake trucks loaded with people (workers) moving along the road.

The speed of movement, except on the motorscooters and bicycles is slowere than home, but given the unrelenting warmth (and this is their cooler rainy season) it's quite understandable. One must pace themselves to sustain oneself. Different trees, plants, birds and other natural settings. we could see some hills in the distance but the land we visited was very flat and uniform. More later on our visit to the Women's Center, the big damn, the little village, and the granite sculpture park by others in the group.  Oh yeah cameras ran out of juice for some of us so look for pictures later. Glad to be traveling with such easy going curious folks and with our guides John and Amy who have made this an incredible journey. we leave for Senegal tomorrow afternoon. Too many memories to record here of Burkina Faso, but we're all changed by the experience...for the better.