Finding your way…

(Version française plus bas)

‘Where is the Pengwende Centre?’… ‘you walk down this way, until you are tired, then you turn this way…’ with many hand gestures signaling left then right, or was it right, then left?
‘Which way is it to Réo?’ ‘You drive down this road and when you get to thingy, you go left…’ ‘Thingy?’ ‘Yes, you know the circle thing…’ ‘The round-about?’ ‘Yes, that’s the one!’ We always get there eventually, meeting so many people in the process.

We had invited some friends for a drink one evening, I thought I gave rather good directions considering there are no street name or house number 'you leave the tarmac road, taking the path leading to the high school and it is the fifth ‘six-mètres’* left, after the pile of wood, and then you look for a grey metal gate at the end of the six-mètres'. But I needn’t have bothered, as we soon found out, it was enough to tell people to leave the tarmac road and ask the first child they met, where the Nassara** lives. And they’d take them straight there.

All this changes slowly however, paved streets and road signs start appearing… Since last Sunday, the Ouaga 2000 interchange is opened. It’s the first in Burkina Faso and the first one people here will see, unless they have traveled to Abidjan or Accra. I am proud to say I was there on day 1! We went in the evening with Marguerite. It was the place to be, everyone was is anyone came, drove around two or three times and went home, feeling they’d traveled to L.A.! This magnificent interchange cost no less than 10 billion CFA francs, was it really a priority in a country where there are so many mud tracks and tiny roads, where trucks and buses barely miss each other whizzing down pot-holed ways? There are so many enclaved villages, especially during the rainy season … But we should be happy for the president of the Faso, Blaise Compaoré. This will enable him to reach the presidential palace in no time now… Two police officers are on duty by the new interchange this week to provide information and help confused drivers… carts are prohibited, but yesterday morning, one could see a farmer and his donkey, a little confused, trying to regain the safety of the mud track below…

** White person in Mooré
* Mud track