The trip was good, the car was packed to the brim, but at least the roads weren't terrible until the last stretch! (Better roads than I experienced in Kenya..) We broke up the trip by spending a night in Fada which is 3 hrs from Ouaga. You can find Fada on the map (Fada'ngourma is its full name); from there we went to Diapaga (also on the map) almost at the Niger border, and then went another hour or so south to Mahadaga! There are some awesome cliffs out here; before descending into the valley on our way in, there was a great lookout and we could see really far, all the way into Benin (the country south of here)!
Dale and Flo are great. The books on development Matt wants me to read are great - the kind of thing I want to learn about. Working with engineers is great too... for example - there was an old house that the mission was considering tearing down, but instead Dale and Matt spent a couple thousand bucks at Home Depot to finish filling up a crate that was headed to Mahadaga with solar panels. Now that rundown home is a toy, i mean, tool shop. Pretty much any tool plus a decent supply of bolts and screws and stuff. Even a milling machine and some stock aluminum lol. How can an engineer fix problems without the toys.. uh.. tools... to do it? If only I could find anything in there....
Oh and I mentioned that we hit a biker while leaving Ouaga? Hate to bring it up again, but in Flo's defense this is what the roads in Ouaga look like. Actually scratch that, they might be crazier than this can even depict.
But Samuel Eto'o (or well... a guy wearing his jersey) and his bike were thankfully fine. Which brings me to another point. To quote Dale... Eto'o and Drogba are demigods here. Barcelona, Chelsea and Inter are everyones favorite teams. I've only gotten around to playing soccer a few times here but so far my lowly American skills have held their own (yeh im surprised)! There are games played not far from my house every Saturday and Sunday so I'm definitely gonna hit that up soon.
Be sure to click on that pic of the road to see it up close, and imagine yourself in a car trying to drive at a decent speed. Also remember that they do drive on the right side of the road here. We just happen to be in the middle.. well probably because of something like that guy standing in the donkey cart in front of us.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jason. I appreciate the kind of defense of my FIRST EVER driving experience in Burkina. Figures it'd be the Female who pokes fun of me and the guy who actually is nice about it. I feel a bit betrayed. But, anyhow, you pass one of the first tests on being a good missionary...learn how to get along with your missionary colleagues!;)
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