Here are some pictures of my neighbourhood. As you already know, Burkina Faso is a really poor country. All of residential roads and "side streets" are dirt roads, with the exception of a few newly-built paved main roads (imagine these as the equivalent of a highway in Canada). The neighbourhood I live in is pretty rustic. Most houses look like the few that you can see in the pictures - small brick buildings surrounded by a low fences... some have electricity, some don't. So it goes without saying, my house stands out a lot... and everyone in my neighbourhood knows where the chinese guy lives.

For a long time I felt like my house stuck out like a sore thumb, until I visited a district called Ouaga 2000. It's basically a suburb of Ouagadougou that is being heavily developed for residential purposes... But the houses are gigantic mansions - they're bigger than any house I've ever seen, two to three times bigger than any house on The Bridle Path at Bayview+Lawrence. It's CRAZY. I'll have to take pictures next time, because I just can't describe it in words. And it's not just 5 or 10 houses, it's an entire district full of these houses. The oddest part is that you come out of a very poor area of the city, and then all of a sudden you're hit with all of these mansions. So from what I've come to understand, the rich here are very rich. And if you're wondering whether they care about the rest of the country, well I haven't found that answer yet. I know that many rich people in the country are muslims, and they donate a lot for the development of the country... so maybe. I'm going to keep looking into this.


A view from outside my gate. The building on the left with the roof is like a convenience store that sells very random but useful things (there are many of these types of stores around the city).
















This is the street I live on.















This is my house from the outside.