Chasing goats out of the kitchen, looking in every shop in town for a stick of butter, asking the Touareg man outside my front gate to please move his camel so I can get my car out of the driveway- it’s all in a normal day’s work…if you’re an expatriate Mom making a life for her family Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.  And there’s more of us than you might think!  There are moms here who are aid workers, teachers, researchers, businesswomen and  missionaries.  There are even a few SAHMs to round out the group. What we all have in common is a sense of adventure.

Admittedly, moving to a small, impoverished  West African nation may not be everyone’s cup of tea (or gourd of millet beer, as the case may be).  I sure didn’t set out in life with the idea that I would one day move to a place that most people can’t pronounce.  Growing up in Nebraska, I thought that moving to Chicago sounded exotic!  But in 1999, I found myself living in the French Alps, with a French husband and four very small half-French children.  I was an archaeologist and my husband was an anthropologist.  Perhaps the two seem like they would go together well as jobs, but in fact they are far less compatible than you might imagine.  Archaeologists tend to camp out in isolated locations, digging up artefacts all day.  We deal with dead people, mainly, trying to guess at what they got up to when they were alive.  Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have to be around actual, living people.  They follow them around the village asking things like “So, during the enthronement of the Earth Priest, exactly how many guinea fowls should be sacrificed?”

See?  Completely different modus operandi, requiring completely different environments.

So, after much discussion, I opted out of the “working” world.  Way, way out.  We would move to the middle of Africa so that my husband could pursue his research full-time.  I would take care of the kids and be an anchor for them while their dad spent lots of time out in isolated villages asking the inhabitants crazy questions.  The idea was that he would eventually write a book.

Welcome to Ouagadougou!

I was a bit worried about moving to Burkina.   But maybe it would be ok.  It was only supposed to be for two years and my husband had already spent lots of time there as a researcher, so he knew the country well.  And  I spoke French already, which I thought would help. Though Burkina has literally hundreds of dialects, French is the national language.

We got off the plane at 4 am.  I remember it vividly.  The air hit me like a hot, damp, not particularly clean towel.  We lined up with all the other moist, miserable people waiting to get into the terminal building.  I was holding one of the twins, still asleep, but already showing signs of the heat rash that would plague her for her first few years in Africa.  My husband was holding the other twin and trying to convince our three year old son not to lay down in the bright red dirt of the runway for a little nap.   We were both also juggling enormous carry-ons stuffed with baby-gear and feeling demolished after the all-night flight with four small children in tow.

Inside the low, brick terminal, all the voices seemed to blur into an incomprehensible mass.  As soon as I reached the customs desk, I realized that it was not an illusion- I couldn’t understand a word anyone said, but they were supposed to be speaking French!  I toyed with the idea that the oxygen supply on the plane had been compromised and I had sustained neurological damage.    But no, I wasn’t drooling, so my brain was probably ok.  It turned out that my French was the problem.  I’d learned it in France and it was virtually useless here.  I had to start getting used to “ français à là burkinabé” –a whole new accent and vocabulary.

Figuring it out

So, when we arrived, my husband had his dream job waiting for him and I had four disoriented children to manage, plus a slight language barrier.  The initial adjustment was quite a challenge.    I had never been a “super mom”, but I’d had aspirations. Now they were pretty much shot to heck.   How can you bake cookies if there’s not a stick of butter in the whole country?

But of course, my kids didn’t need any mythical “super-mom”, they just needed me.  We didn’t bake cookies a lot, but we had lots of wonderful adventures  – riding camels in the Sahara, seeing Winyé mask dances,  getting chased by enraged elephants.  Well, maybe the latter was more of a “complete disaster” than a “wonderful adventure, but still..

One of the biggest adventures of all has been getting to know Burkina Faso.

It’s a desperately poor country.  The United Nations just classed it as 173rd out of the 174 countries they evaluated for the quality of life index.  As you may guess, daily life here put me in a face to face position with people dying of malnutrition, HIV, malaria and hosts of other terrible problems. And  I wasn’t sure what I could do to help.  I doubted that anybody had a life or death need for an archaeological consultation, but I had to figure out something useful to do.  It was either that or move back to France.

Getting busy

Because of work visa problems, I looked for volunteer work.  And I figured that drawing on my “mom” skills, rather than my archaeological expertise, would be more pertinent, so I looked at hospitals, orphanages and various aid institutions.  I found that there are the most opportunities to make a difference as a volunteer in small, grass roots organisations.  So, I worked for a year at a small orphanage.  But by the following year, I had set up my own project- a nutrition program for  malnourished children.  And as that apparently wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I set up a second one, called "Papiers du Sahel"- a recycled paper- making center for disadvantaged women. 

So, in the end, life found balance for us here in Ouagadougou.  The kids settled into the local French school.  My husband wrote his book and got it published.  And me?  I’ve got a blog, a paper project, and a family to take care of.  It’s been eight years now and I’m still here.  I never expected to have a life in Africa, but I’m finding that it suits me pretty well.    

So, that’s my expat story from Ouagadougou, a place not many people can even find on a map.  And I know lots of other stories.  Stories much like mine, from moms a lot like me- women with goats in the backyard and camels in the driveway.