Maybe some of you have been concerned that the long blog-silence was caused by my kidnapping and subsequent murder at the hands of Sofitex agents? Ok, Norbert Zongo, I am not. It would have made for an exciting story, though. But the explanation is far more banal.

The 13th through the 16th, I spent any free time I had editing another short film. ( It’s alarmingly addictive) Then on Saturday night, there was a rainstorm, as happens so frequently in the rainy season and it knocked out the phone lines in our neighbourhood. Now, this “rainy season” happens every year, at exactly the same time. And every year the phones go down several times because of it. And the phone company seemingly is oblivious to the fact. You’d think that, even if they couldn’t improve the equipment ( by not making the cables out of cystallized sugar, for example), they would at least hire extra repair techs for the period. It took four days of near-constant begging to get somebody to come and fix our line.
Then, when phone service was finally back on, the internet server was having trouble, kicking me off every five minutes. So, I found other, non-internet things to keep busy with.

The weekend was also occupied by guiding Severin through the intricacies of Powerpoint so that he could do a presentation at school. He chose “garbage”, which is kind of cool, in a strange way. Here are some of the pictures we took . I thought I’d share them. How many people know much about trash in Ouagadougou?

Most of the trash in Ouaga is collected by women that drive donkey carts. It is supposed to go to intermediate collection sites like the one above. But it often ends up dumped elsewhere.

The sign reads: "It is forbidden by law to dump trash on this site, punishable by fines." I'd say most of the trash in Ouaga ends up at places like this.

Now you know.

I can’t promise good blogging in the near-future. Or even bad blogging, full of pictures of trash. We are heading to the USA, people! We leave on Tuesday.

Mallory’s thoughts on the subject, as confided to me recently: “When I talk to Grampy on the phone , he asks me if I’m excited to come see them and I say “yes” like this, all calm. But I really want to yell like this “YES! YES! YES!” because I’m so happy!!! But I might scare him.”

I am excited, too. But hopefully not in a scary way.