back to Ouagadougou - again.

It’s been an eventful few days. The totally frivolous, eventful thing was that my garden is all done; well, everything is planted. From pile of mud (first photo) to a donkey cart with topsoil (second photo) to yard filled with baby plants in 3 days (third photo). The gardener comes 1-2 times a day to check on everything because it’s so new. By the time we arrive back from Ouaga, the sparse ground cover should start filling in a bit. I may need to get another few bushes for the front yard though – it doesn’t look as filled in as I was thinking it would. I have 4 papaya trees, 2 banana plants and a plantain, a cherimoya, a pomegranate and 3 pre-existing mango trees. And a large vegetable garden – too large for a single person. I suspect I will be feeding Maimone’s family with all that!

We had another meeting with the Director of Pediatrics, Dr. Nacro on Saturday; he seems like he is very passionate about working for the kids of Bobo Dioulasso – and passionate about his frustrations about some of the problems in the system here. In fact, much of what we talked about was that; we hardly had a word in edgewise to present our ideas about our work. He made a comment that I think will make him good to work with from a North American’s point of view – basically, he said “People say I’m impossible to work with, but I tell it like it is – even though that’s not what’s done here in Burkina” – but I’m glad to have a colleague in a key area that will openly communicate with us. Often what happens if you annoy people is that they won’t tell you that you’ve done something wrong; but you just find that it gets harder and harder to do anything. Dr. Nacro wants to keep that from happening to us, which is nice.

I stopped at the internet quickly just before heading home and discovered an email from Dr. Sanou, the Director of Hospital Services, who is turning out to be another of our key contacts and allies. She was going to organize some meetings in Ouaga for us, but we hadn’t heard when yet. We discovered Saturday afternoon that they’ve been organized for this coming week!! So we had a bit of a scramble to arrange transport (we’re trying a private car / driver hire this time), accommodation and things like canceling Dioula class and finding someone to feed Leah’s cat. But despite the last minute scramble, we’re glad we’re heading back there this week – the sooner we have those meetings, the sooner we’ll be doing clinical work.

So, at 7am Monday morning, our driver, Soliman, picked us up, and we ran errands and by 9:30 were on the road, in plenty of time for our 3:30pm meeting (after all, it’s a 4 hour drive in a private car). Or so we thought. The first sign of difficulties was at Boromo, about half way to Ouaga… we pulled off to a gas station, and Soliman did something under the hood, and within 5 minutes, we were off… stopped again at a toll booth just outside Boromo, and it was clear that the car was overheating. We stood in the shade and made small talk with the toll booth guys (one of whom is a huge Fifty Cent & Tupac fan), and 20 minutes later got on the road again… 20 minutes after that were pulled over to the side of the road overheated. So, back to Boromo where they fixed the fan but were unable to fix something else… so for the next 4 hours, we drove about 45 minutes at a time, no faster than 50km/h, with frequent overheating stops. At one stop, some village boys brought us water for the radiator… they didn’t speak Jula or any French, really. One little boy (about 6yrs) was attired in a pair of shorts, so worn that there was literally no bum in them… he always stayed so he was facing us, not wanting us to see the gaping hole in the read. It was a relief to finally get to Ouaga and get to our hotel rooms. Somehow, though, the hotel rooms at our new hotel are not all equal – I have a deluxe room complete with bathtub… Dana’s room the hot water didn’t work and is half the size, Suzanne had to change rooms because her cold water didn’t work, and Leah’s air conditioner was marginal… I feel a little guilty about that! But last night we had one of the best meals since arriving in Burkina Faso. I had lasagna that was truly wonderful, in a lovely courtyard setting.

Today’s meetings were really interesting. It was day 1 of a 3 day workshop on the development of a plan of pediatric HIV treatment for Burkina Faso; until now, kids have largely been ignored from the HIV planning. So we are really excited to be part of this forum even though we are totally new here. There are no other NGOs present at the meeting, even though there are several providing HIV care in Burkina. Today was a series of presentations on the status of pediatric HIV treatment here. In fact, they have a clinic in Ouaga that follows a very similar model to the COE clinics, which is interesting. We are going to try to spend more time with them to see what they are doing.

Anyhow, I have work to do yet, so I’ll sign off here.
More later!
Laura