Ouagadougou

Our Ghanaian visas are only good for 60 days at a time, meaning at some point we need to leave the country and re-enter in order to legally remain in the country. Thankfully, Navrongo is only one town away from the Burkina Faso border. Unlike Ghana, which is one of the fastest-developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Burkina Faso ranks second to last on the Human Development Index. It’s much poorer, and significantly less stable. Earlier this year, in fact, members of the military revolted and fired off guns in the streets of the capital, Ouagadougou, and parts of the North remain “forbidden” to Americans (an Embassy worker actually used that word when talking to us). Apparently there’s some al-Qaeda-related-things up there, but I’m just upset it complicates my plans to go camel riding in the Sahara desert. Anyway, following a quick stop in Navrongo in which we learned that no one had even read our IRB proposals yet, we headed up to Burkina for the weekend to stay with Ceci’s aunt in Ouaga.

In retrospect, we should have suspected that any journey beginning with the phrase “Let’s just cross the border and hope for the best” was bound to have a few difficulties, but that’s just what we did. NHRC dropped us off at Ghanaian border control at 2 pm, which I will consider the start time for our supposed 2 hour drive to Ouaga. While waiting for our paperwork to get processed, we watched the news of Gaddafi’s death on a TV in the waiting room. With seven African soldiers all armed with AK-47s. It was pretty surreal. Border control told us we had to walk across the border, which isn’t so much a line as it is a half mile demilitarized-zone. We weren’t even sure we were IN Burkina already... until we reached a burned-out mud hut with a sign proclaiming Burkina Customs. Inside, we met Wongo, a friendly Burkinabe National Police Officer who proposed to Ceci and then negotiated our passage to Ouaga with a cab driver. We didn’t know this would be an issue half a mile down the road, when our cabdriver got in a heated argument with the taxi union about his rights to drive us (apparently, we were supposed to pick up a taxi at the station, and this guy had cheated by getting us at the border). Wongo was called and the matter was settled, but not before we’d spent an hour and a half on the side of the road. After a somewhat dramatic departure from the taxi stand, we pulled over to the side of the road to get gas... out of an old wine bottle...? It was like filling up a car in a zombie apocalypse movie, he siphoned it out using a hose and spit gasoline out onto the road and everything. We finally got moving again, only to get a flat tire. There really is no end to our bad travel luck in Africa thus far. Anyway, Wongo was very helpful, calling once on the road to make sure we weren’t being trafficked and again when we got to Ouaga to talk to the guard at the house and make sure we arrived safely.

Burkinabe gas station

Ouaga is a very strange city, and very different from Accra. In general, it was actually cleaner and well-paved, leading us to question the picture of Burkina I described earlier. We hypothesize that Accra just developed too fast with too little planning, but I don’t actually know enough about either city to say for sure. Ouaga also has a distinct French flair, complete with bakers in chef hats selling baguettes and French desserts. We stayed in a predominantly American neighborhood located close to the Embassy, filled with private drivers and security guards and better housing than our so-called 5 star resort in Elmina. Ceci’s aunt Pam invited us to an Embassy Halloween party on Friday night, and insisted we dress up. Having not brought costumes overseas with us, Ceci and I split one of Pam’s “government sheets” and put together some pretty sweet togas. Which we were wearing when we met the deputy ambassador later that night and he wanted to hear about our research. Picture to come!

We returned to Navrongo this afternoon, calling first to let Wongo know to expect us at the border. As per Pam’s instructions, Ceci executed our first (of many?) African bribe and gifted him a bottle of wine as a present for looking out for us during our trip. With any luck, we’ll finally have our proposals back this week, but in the meantime I’ve got plenty of med school apps to keep me busy!