Donated drilling. Woot!

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Heya everyone
I hope everyone is doing super. Things here are getting busier and busier. No May 2-4 here so I was back to work today after a relatively relaxing weekend. I played a little hookie from work on Sunday afternoon to take a long walk in the local forest/park with the interns. It was nice to get out and explore and take in some fresh air. I got horribly sunburned, but it was worth it. After that I hung out around the guest house for a bit and then went out for quite a nice supper with our VP Exploration at a Vietnamese place in town. I tried duck for the first time, which it turns out is RED MEAT (?!), and it was really tasty. At the restaurant, we bumped into a human resources guy (another expat) who works for another mining company in town, so we all ate together and had a great chat. He even suggested that I come by their site and talk with the environmental team since we all work in the same region and deal with the same issues community-wise. Always good to put heads together.

As for work more specifically, it looks like I'm gonna be managing the 3 well projects entirely rather than just sort of overseeing them. It turns out that the NGO we were working with locally was treating us as a bit of a cash cow and charging us much more than necessary for the work they were doing, so we're going to do it all in-house instead. Now, I believe I've already mentioned that I'm the only member of our "social" team in the company, so that pretty much means it falls in my lap to build these wells. Should be an interesting challenge!

Gonna head out into the field on Sunday for a couple of days. I'm doing the preliminary meetings in 3 villages, where I'm meeting the village chiefs (yes, they actually exist) and get to talk about how we can work together to make some good things happen for everyone. Karen Markle, if you're reading this, I took your advice and also had a meeting booked with the women elders of the village to discuss women's issues seperately from the meeting with the village chiefs. From what I understand, women's issues up there (particularly access to education) are something that needs to be addressed, and that seemed like a good way to get the ball rolling. So there you go! 😊

I also got in touch with a local water-related organization to discuss with them the finer points of well implementation (since I have no experience in this and am not an engineer!), and they said that they will help with some technical expertise. They also provide training for people to go into the villages and teach people hygiene and sanitation practices (they teach the teachers, you know?), so guess who's first in line for that! You guessed it. 😊 So as you can see, I'm in this thing up to my elbows now with no sign of getting out soon.

A small victory I would like to pass along is that I managed to convince one of our drilling companies to donate their drilling services for the 3 wells we're doing. The drilling itself takes up about 70% of the cost to build one of these things, so this is really great for the project. I was pretty proud of myself! Woot!

Anyway, that's the word for now. Since I haven't posted any pics in awhile, I thought I'd include these of the flowers at the guest house. I promise to take tons in the field so you can all get a glimpse of Burkina Faso rural living!

Until next time,
-Brownie

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Photos

Purple Flowers
Don't know what they're called, but they're nice!

Pink Flowers
You may recognize these, I think there was another pic of them previously.

Garage
The garage. Not much else to say about it.

Jonas
Meet Jonas, one of our watchmen. Don't let his youthful looks fool you though; he's 23! And he's married with a kid!

Comments

[roselle]

those pink flowers....if you pick a single flower (not the whole bunch) with the stalk and all, and suck the bottom of the stalk/stem, you'll have honeydew in your mouth!!! pretty cool eh!?! (yes i've done it....no they're not poisonous...try it!) xoxo

[Hans/Frans]

Crazy eye?
is it the crazy eye man?