First relative on Mark's side to visit BF

Last Monday evening we were thrilled to welcome our niece, Lucy, and her friend Helen from the UK at Ouagadougou international airport. As 3^rd year medical students they will be working with our friend, Dr Ken Elliott, at the Djibo surgical centre for a couple of weeks gaining bit of a different experience in medicine. We hope to show them a bit of the wild life of Djibo if they have the time.

Work in progress

Over the past few months we have been busy raising finances, purchasing land, making bricks, finding reliable builders and getting the construction under way. Here is a snap shot of how it's been going.

Making cement bricks in our yard.

Getting ready to build the compound wall.

Wall complete, digging the foundations and starting the house.

And the walls go up.

We are hoping the building will be complete within two months so that Jodoma and his wife can move in before the end of the rainy season.

Back on the road again

After being off the road with our car since April we are finally mobile again. One of our friends from the FIA well drilling team was able to come up to Djibo and fit the broken part from the steering rack. To most people this may not sound that exciting a subject to be writing about on our blog, but believe me, for the Gibsons, it's very exciting to be back on the road again after three months of being without a car.

Timbuktu Comes to Djibo

Over the past three weeks much of my time has been spent working on the Tuareg migration here in Djibo, helping with aid distributions, feeding information to the UN and other NGOs, and working with ADRA ( www.adra.org ) in getting help to those who need it most. The more time I've spent working with the refugees the more complicated it seems to be. There is said to be approximately 1000 refugees in the Djibo area alone with more on their way. A large percentage of these are women and children and since their arrival two of these women have given birth following their four week journey to safety. One lady had to use someone else's makeshift tent to give birth in as she hadn't had time to construct anything of her own since reaching the refugee camp.

Over the last few weeks we have been able to get £3000 of aid to the most needy, but this will only last for a very short period of time. Unfortunately the Burkina government does not have any budget for this sort of emergency so we will just have to wait and see how the situation develops.

Malian refugees are setting up camp around Djibo

Returning from Ouagadougou last Sunday we passed what look like a makeshift camp about 15 km south of Djibo. Some officials from Djibo seemed to be in discussion with the inhabitants accompanied by the local Gendarme. We were soon passed by their small convoy as they sped towards another makeshift camp just 10 km up the road. The residents of this camp, however, we knew. This was our Tuareg friend Muhammad whose village we often take our visitors for camel rides.

Prior to us leaving for Ouaga two weeks earlier Muhammad had mentioned the imminent arrival of Malian refugees and now he appeared to be playing host to quite a number of them judging by the newly erected tents. The following day I took a trip out there to find out what the situation was and listen to some of the stories of these refugees. Over the past several months news has been filtering through of a Tuareg uprising and the fighting that has been going on between the rebels and the military. It's near impossible to get a clear picture by listening to one party and I've heard of atrocities that have been carried out on both sides, but one thing was quite clear. These people had fled their homeland of Timbuktu in fear for their lives.

Over the past four weeks these families had been travelling over 500km on foot with very few possessions. One lady who had arrived on foot was about 9 months pregnant and a number of the children were now malnourished. The UN and the Burkina government are in the process of gathering information in order to decide what they will do. In the mean time our friend Muhammad has been left to play host to around 20 families each consisting of between 5 – 10 children per family. It has been estimated that there are up to 600 refugees in the Djibo are, many of whom are still hiding out in the bush, scared to come into the open lest they get sent back by the authorities.

We are expecting that the UN will eventually bring aid to these folk, but we are wondering how we might assist with their immediate needs. Up to now we have managed to get 12 100kg sacks out to them but this won't last long. Do pray that God would give us wisdom as we seek to alleviate some of their distress and as we feed information to the UN in Ouaga to hopefully speed up the process so that aid would reach these folk sooner than later.

Also see http://www.voiceinthedesert.org.uk/weblog/

Bricks

Some of you will be aware that we have been raising money to build the SIM pastor here in Djibo a house. Well, the work has begun... by making the bricks. Normally one would buy bricks in the town, but due to their very poor quality we have decided to make our own -- or should I say I have employed certain individuals to be responsible for the production of bricks. As we have quite a bit of land around our house we have decided to have the production line in our yard which is very interesting for our youngest, and today saw the arrival of the sand and gravel lorry (which nearly took the gate of its hinges on its way in and then lost the use of its forward gears whilst in the yard) and the first hundred bricks we produced.

We will aim to keep folk up to date on the progress but we promise that this will not become the main focus of our blog for the next few months as most people don't find brick making as interesting as our younger son does.

Air lifts are generally for emergencies only

We had a friend in the house today to keep an eye on Sam as our usual house help wasn't around. Now Sam has a few favorite videos one of which is called "Come Outside" where this lady flies everywhere with her little dog, pippin, exploring various aspects of every day life such as where the rubbish goes, moving house, how the post works etc. Very educational. This one episode which Sam insisted on watching with our friend was about hedgehogs. No problem with that one may think. After all, we do have hedgehogs here in Djibo so nothing too out of the ordinary their you may say. Wrong, a few minuets into this enlightening treat and a look (and sound) of amazement came upon our friend as this eccentric lady with the plane (and little dog) took a hedgehog out of her garden and flew it to the vets to fix its broken leg. The idea was beyond comprehension for our friend why someone would take a prickly vermin, airlift it out of a village and take it to a hospital exclusively for animals which, incidentally, was way above the quality of any of the facilities here for the human residents. Come to think of it, the idea is beyond me as well.

I did try to explain the best I could to our friend that a lot of people where I came are quite mad when it comes to animals. I do believe that his look of bewilderment was quite valid and my explanation didn't really change the expression on his face.