Everywhere, dusty 8 year olds making money to help feed their families. Girls sell baskets of fried snacks (like the doughnuts with chili oil I bought for breakfast), boys sell chewing gum, tissues and cotton buds or individual pens. Older boys graduate to selling cheap Chinese boxer shorts and belts, or polyester sheets which they carry like a freshly folded pile of laundry on their heads or draped over their shoulders like superman with too many capes. Older girls? They sell or are sold themselves. I pass huge billboards at the border and smaller ones outside the hotel warning that children are not to be sold.
In Ouagadougou a young man called Ali tries to sell me golden tree and makes me laugh enough to hop on the back of his Yamaha scooter for a drive around town. It's so decrepit a piece falls of where my leg brushes against it which he simply adds to bag of fallen pieces. We zoom into the night and narrow uneven backstreets loud with young men and makeshift bars (made from a collection of crates or plastic chairs gathered round a generator and a stereo). He casually points out the prostitutes but as they're the only females around and the only women in town with bare legs you can't miss them. Dozens of Togolese and Nigerian girls on one corner, an alley reserved for the Burkinabe girls, and just visible in the near dark a group of Central African girls who I feel are almost young enough to be my daughters. Ali also introduces me to the West African gas station: a makeshift collection of planks and empty gin bottles filled with petrol smuggled over the border from Nigeria and sold for 400 CEFA (50p) a litre.They're everywhere. Manned by 2 or 3 teens sitting all day and most of the night beside the busiest, dirtiest roads, filling up tanks through short lengths of garden hose and plastic funnels. It's a dripping, dirty, business, with little profit and a constant risk of going up in flames.
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