If you ever visit the West African French-speaking country of Burkina Faso, you’ll likely visit its most popular vacation city Banfora. Traveler's guides know Banfora for its natural wonders: the Waterfalls of Karfiguela, the Domes of Fabedougou, the Peaks of Sindou, the Sacred Hippo Lake of Tengrela, and the relics and ruins of ancient civilizations in such villages as Loropeni. The scenery around Banfora is lush and gorgeous: sprawling sugarcane fields, mango and papaya trees everywhere, and plentiful waterfalls cascading down from the cliffs. The local arts scene is thriving: balaphone music performers, traditional dance troupes that tour Europe, creative painters and craftsmen, and even artisan cobblers who make designer shoes from tire rubber. Top that off with the fact that Banfora has some high-quality hotels to boot—Hotel Canne a Sucre, for instance, synthesizes fruit jams and distills over ten flavors of homemade rum.

I don't know what the term "en brousse" means to you, but to people who speak French it means "in the bush," as in multiple bushes, as in "out in the wilderness." Though I claimed to speak French, I didn't know what it meant last December when we were told the pet dog we were supposed to inherit had run away "en brousse." That was the tall tale they fed us when in all likelihood it was our adopted dog that fed them for dinner. Yesterday after ten months the opportunity finally arose to safari out into nature to see our tiny border villages. However, doing so would mean venturing even farther away from those precious, sacred amenities of modern society.

Though we don't have electricity or running water like you dwellers of suburbia, we're still close enough to it for peace of mind. The paved road in our backyard is a safety net. Just knowing that a couple miles away, an empty wall socket and a shower are ready and waiting for us, that's what keeps our neuroses at bay. That unequivocal promise that I could take a timeout from this two-year camping trip and delay going off the deep end until sometime later in adulthood. So I guess we're wedged somewhere between the two worlds of urban poshness and rural isolation.

In West African culture, if someone says you live "en brousse," then they're probably making fun of you. It's a touchy phrase. And that's why it's a peculiar quirk of PC culture that volunteers gain more social capital the farther their mudhuts are from the comforts of civilization. In general, the more rugged and physically taxing their journey is to buy mozzarella cheese at Marina Market, the more honor they stand to reap with city-slickin' volunteers. Sociologists call this the Mozzarella Accessibility Hypothesis (MAH). And of course a special pedestal is occupied by volunteers who must pedal 20 miles or more to reach the closest paved road. To reign supreme on this throne and be the "en broussiest" of them all, one must always be prepared to describe one's trip from village to city as outlandishly as possible, listing each life-threatening peril, comparing self to Bear Grylls or Indiana Jones, and slipping in a few trailing zeroes to the total hours spent in transit.

You can well imagine that our paved road access disqualifies us from such "en brousse" bragging rights. Though we may be living the country mouse life, we are usually seen as city mice by those truly surviving out in the wilds. That's why yesterday, although we feel welcome in our village, we weren't sure how we'd be received by the chiefs and councilors of these four satellite villages. Tana and I would be piggybacking on the two motorcycles of Salif and Ibrahim, riding through Paul Revere-style to publicize an upcoming HIV/AIDS theater campaign. We would try to get the blessings from all the big cheeses and avoid being eaten by the buzzards.

Before plunging deep into the jungles, we stopped at Burkina's version of an Exxon or a Wawa--a roadside stand that looks like a bunch of wine bottles, except instead of wine, gasoline. After the tanks had downed an irresponsible amount from a bottle of white, we paid the attendant some grant money and were on our way. We cruised through miles of sugarcane fields, winding underneath the mountain cliffs. We jetted past a spot where I had once seen a half-mile high waterfall on a joy bikeride (I'll try to return for some pictures next summer when it's rainier).

Our first of four stops is a village that shares the same name as ours with "#2" appended to the end of it. I'd tell you, but we're not supposed to post its name. As the tale goes, SameVillage #2 used to be united with ours under one name, but in the 1970s the big ol' government struck a deal with the land chiefs, converting all the fertile land in the middle of it into industrial sugarcane fields (See SOSUCO). All the locals got in exchange was temporary employment and ten years of tax incentives. This controversial deal closed schools for 10 years, impacting literacy of certain now middle-aged locals. It also created a rift in residences, forcing everyone to relocate to either #1 or #2.

So when we arrived at a schoolyard in #2, all the elementary schoolers on recess stood by in fascination. We must have looked like half-dressed astronauts with planet-sized space helmets as we struggled to wiggle them off our noggins. I was awestruck at just how many kids live out here, and the kids were just as surprised that our kind would visit them. It was National Teacher's Day, so naturally all the teachers were absent and the school director was forced to teach 4 grades in 4 classrooms all by his lonesome. Before we left, the school director called them in. And as we stood in front of their dozens of wide-eyed, open-mouthed stares, the teacher asked, "Can anyone tell me what 'volunteer' means?"

Our motos had to hydroplane through a brook to get to the next village, even deeper into the vast forests and grasslands. This second village Sikanadio was much more cozy with fewer denizens. As we waited outside its only convenience store for the chief and the councilor, I noticed a nearby house had a gigantic satellite dish. When I handed the councilor our letter of request, his eyes focused intently as he held it upside down.

The third village down the rabbit hole was Fandjora, known for its occasional migratory elephants. In 2008, we're told, a hungry elephant herd hiked all the way from Fandjora to our village to munch on sugarcane. SOSUCO tried to drive them away, perhaps to save their product but more likely to prevent elephant diabetes. Fandjora will soon host a nursery of thousands of mango trees to be planted by my organization UPPFL/CO and Oxfam that hopefully the elephants will not discover. Fandjora is also famous for sitting on a vein of valuable minerals, most notably gold. Unlike most other villages, it's patchily populated with clusters of settlements sprawled out over miles and no municipal hub to speak of. We zipped past the trailers, trucks, and generators of Australian gold mining companies such as GEODRILL. According to health clinic records, when the goldmine first opened, for some reason the local incidence of STDs skyrocketed.

The Fandjora councilor showed us some educational murals that Amanda (the preceding volunteer) had painted near the school. In the 95-degree heat this venerable community elder wore a cotton ski hat with a puffball on top. When we handed him the letter, he spent five minutes reading it out loud to us. Ibrahim looked over his shoulder and couldn't resist correcting his pronunciation. The councilor was only interrupted when he darted off to chase some wandering poultry out of his hut. You can tell PETA that this is one of the underpublicized problems of free-range chickens.

Finally we continued onward to our last destination Serefadougou. Though it took Ibrahim dozens of tries to kickstart his moto each time we set off, the ride thus far had been carefree, for me anyway. Meanwhile as she held on for dear life, the laws of physics were not kind to Tana. She was forced to call upon stomach muscles she never knew she had, contorting her posture to avoid spooning Salif or flying away like untethered cargo. Her only respite from this ab workout was while closing her eyes and "pretending to be on a jet ski."

At a fork, given the choice between (a) the slightly longer but more sensible beaten path or (b) off-roading a more direct path through the shrubs, we foolishly seized the day and charged full-speed into the great unknown. This narrow path cut through a field where every row of green beans was a speed bump. We forged into a muddy flood plain where Ibrahim's moto kept stalling out, forcing us to hop off and wade in soaked sneakers. Each time Ibrahim unsuccessfully revved the engine, we braced ourselves for Murphy's law to kick in. We would be stranded out here like lost boyscouts and those Fandjora elephants would surely trample us on a sugar rush. Fortunately his moto held strong and we found salvation.

Like a surprise party of strangers, we suddenly popped out of the bushes into a confused Serefadougou family's courtyard. When we chatted up the councilor, a normally smooth-talking Tana found herself fumbling to speak with this tall, hunky local celebrity. And oh how the tribal scars on his cheeks complemented his facial contours. We repressed laughter when he introduced himself as though greeting Martians, "I am Moussa and I come from a place called Serefadougou."

At long last our duties were fulfilled. On the homeward trip, the grim reaper finally paid a long overdue visit to Ibrahim's motorbike. Old Faithful broke down next to a watermelon patch, not a mile from our village. Lucky we weren't still "en brousse." I stood aside and watched him rev it endlessly for ten minutes. Then I got bored and started playing on my phone.