Burkina By Bobby

Before coming back to Burkina Faso in early January I had a fair amount of family and friends ask me whether or not I was ready or even wanted to return. My standard line at the time was, “Sure, I am actually excited to get back – I only have nine more months left.”

Oh, how misplaced this excitement was.

While I am trying to reign in the melodramatics, I feel comfortable saying that it was the worst homecoming I’ve ever experienced and it was the toughest January to date. I understand that I am still relatively young and I am sure there will be Januaries to rival this one…but man… it was tough.

Now, it is April, more than two months have passed and I can look back at January with a smirk. The things that conspired to put me in a funk have passed and I can now look at the absurdity of choosing to come home to such a rotten situation.

To begin- it is necessary to understand how The United States of America are, and more specifically, the Great State of Illinois is- the most amazing and wonderful place to be. I will take time to elaborate on this point when I come home in October, but America is home and there is no place like it.

In addition to having family and life long friends that are unconditionally there for you…It is clean - The streets, people, buildings… everything is remarkably clean. It is structured, there is order, there are fixed prices, people are generally safe and secure, and people are also free to do as the please. Almost as important, the food is amazing. There is an endless amount of choices with each ethnic option represented within a 15 minute delivery radius. There are Burritos as big as your Head and innovations such as Irish Nachos, this is truly God’s county. In three weeks time, I easily put on 15 pounds – I was inspired.

So, now there is the contrast of this glorious situation with that of the circumstances that awaited me shortly after I got off the plane. The place is dirty, the uniquely pungent odor is everywhere. After being greeted by friends we haggled with an irritating taxi man for five minutes before we agreed on an acceptable price. While in the car I learned a very close friend was being forced to leave the country for violating a policy while she was entertaining friends from America. I also learned that only a couple days earlier that the main bus company between Ouagadougou and Fada (my home) had been held up at gunpoint at 9am in the morning and a passenger was fatally shot.

Upon arriving at the house I learned how the country had been going through tumultuous times. Policeman fighting the military, prison doors near where we live in Ouaga were ripped off the hinges and 600 prisoners escaped. I heard stories about volunteers watched tracer fire from the roof top. Even more disconcerting was one volunteers story of negotiating a chaotic scene that was essentially described as a fire fight. And then, I learned that the girl I was dating was no longer dating me.

(Enter the blues guitar solo- here)

All of this was completely reversed from the calm, happy and contented situation that I left in mid December. It was as though I had come home to a poor replica of the place that I left.

That was, in essence, the end of the Homecoming.

But rest assured that it wasn’t all gloom and doom. In fact, it started looking up as soon as I reached my home town of Fada. As I walked home long faced and unhappy, I opened my gate to find closest friend Michel welcoming me back to Burkina Faso. I couldn’t help but smile and when he told me I had gotten fat and truly resembled an American – I was truly on the road to realizing that is wasn’t all that bad. Michel had been through all the same things that I had been, the political problems were happening in his country, I have yet to negotiate a problem as serious as Polio, and he has lost friends to worse places than the United States.

So now, I can look back and smile at being the caricature of the down and out. Three months on, things have normalized, political problems have settled, security has been restored and friends are doing well in America. It's tough to wrap this entry in a way that doesn't smack of the clichéd wisdom of a Hallmark Card. But it is true: the tough times passed - and things got better.

(Enter conflict resolution music from, Full House - here)