The sweet and bitter part of change

Facebook memories is quite an amazing feature. Some days you’re just screening through your homepage and suddenly see a photo or post you published on the same day some years ago. And it brings incredible emotions; happiness, sadness or you just read what you wrote five years ago and can’t believe that it’s you who wrote it. 

This same thing happened this morning. I came across a post that held a lot of emotions. The photo I posted just before leaving my office at CTA two years ago to start a new chapter. It was a bittersweet feeling. Happy to start something of my own, live in the same country as my husband, but sad to leave all the good memories I created and shared while being in Netherlands for three years.  The decision was taken and there was no going back. I held back my tears, took my four suitcases and headed to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Burkina Faso is a special country. All brown from the sky, but with people who are very kind and welcoming. With all honesty, I came here in 2015 for two weeks and loved the country. But coming on holidays and living here is not the same thing. In the first few weeks itself, you start to see the challenges. My biggest one (in 2015 and still today) is Internet connection. A task that used to take me five minutes now takes an hour or the whole day when it’s really bad. Then of course there is poor electricity, administrative slowness and poor to average service everywhere. Not to mention that no one respects time. I rarely find a person who is on time for an appointment. Nevertheless, I have tried not to focus on all these and keep myself busy into work.

True that we have received many awards since last year, but you really have to struggle to get things done. Very often you hear people saying that you need finance to start a business. But for me, finance is not the biggest problem. If you have a good idea to solve a real problem, funding will come. But when you work in an environment where you have sh*t banking system, crap Internet, and other poor services, at some point you are just fed up. And I said to myself that I would stop complaining, but I can’t help it. Inoussa (my husband) often tells me that they will take back my Burkinabe Nationality if they hear me complaining. But I really don’t mind them hearing me because it’s just reality.

What would make me happy is to see good roads in the country. You can have a nice house and a car, but what’s the use if you open your door and there are just red roads with holes all the way to the main road? I would be happy if the thousands of children who are begging on the roads were at school. I would be happy if clinics/hospitals would care first about the health of the patients instead of taking money before consulting with the doctor. I would be happy if there were initiatives to help people set up small and medium enterprises so that they stop selling random things to you in the car at the traffic lights.

Today, this post is more bitter than sweet. And yes, two years later, I am still here despite all the complains. I don’t know if I see myself living here my whole life, I still cannot project that. Life is a hustle, and nothing comes easily. All you need to know is where you are going and do something to get there.  The rest, time will tell!