Thursday, June 07, 2007

Oh no, I've scratched the car!

10:09 pm | Edit Post
It didn't take long to get out of Djibo and soon my Fulani companion and I were heading in the direction of the Mali border. As we sped along at about 20 kph we found the road deteriorating rapidly, well, the word track may be more of an appropriate description looking at it from a western perspective. As we drove on, most of the landscape appeared rather baron with the odd areas of vegetation following the paths of the dry river beds and from time to time we made our way through the trees winding this way and that as the branches melodically moved over the paintwork of our new vehicle making a sound like fingernails being scraped down a blackboard. As I thought about this I passed comment to my Fulani friend saying, "if this happened to a car where I come from it would need to be repainted". He let out a sigh and then said "Na hayni de" which reads in English "wow, amazing". He then went on to describe how some previous missionaries had got their vehicles seriously stuck in mud in one of these river beds when they weren't so dry.
Now the aim of our trip was to survey Fulani villages in the area north east of Djibo and one Fulani camp we visited (and they are probably not alone in their experience) had to travel over 10 km to get to the nearest water pump, and that is a long way to carry water on your head in temperatures of 50 oC +. One of the more major settlements of that region we passed through did have a pump, but it was broken, and as soon as we stepped out of the car one of the first comments that was made was; "Min dumdi" (we are thirsty). They too would probably need to travel some distance for water or resort to hand dug wells where the water would be far from clean. Most of us take something as basic as water for granted, and yet for many in this part of Burkina clean water is not easy to come by.
As my friend and I got back in to the car he pointed to a small cluster of clouds that had began to form and related it back to the time when his missionary friends got stuck in the mud. "the clouds were just like those ones when the rains came suddenly and swamped us" he said. On hearing this I suddenly felt an urge to return to Djibo as I didn't have a winch to get me out of muddy situations, neither do I posses one.
On our return I reflected on our trip and felt we succeeded on what we set out to do with our survey work. Although it may be a while until we can raise the funds for sinking wells a number of the villages we visited certainly met the criteria. It was certainly worth scratching the car for.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great story, mate! Who did you go with??

7:00 pm

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