We landed in the West African city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on a Monday night in late January. We had left Halifax 31 hours earlier and were tired and anxious. The 32oC air was filled with a hot smoky smell as we walked from the Air France Airbus 330 to the terminal. We later learned it was the smell of the Sahara desert, 1,200 km to the northeast. To put in context, that would be like smelling the Atlantic salt air while standing at Trudeau airport in Montreal.

Our experience in Ouagadougou with our Rotary Club colleagues is an enlightening, hair-raising story, but it will wait for another time. The real story started when our group—Robert Earle, a pharmacist and head of our team; Bob Johnson from Nova Scotia Power; Scott Lynch of Global TV; and me—met up with a group of remarkable people who work for Etruscan Resources Inc. of Windsor,
N.S. Our new friends MaRo, Maryam, Rudolph, and our driver, Albert, are all employees of Etruscan and became an integral part of our lives during the two-week, life-changing West African voyage.

A couple days after our arrival our group headed out with the Etruscan team to a village called Youga, near the Ghana border. The pavement ends 150 km outside Ouagadougou, 70 km later the dirt road ends, and after another 30 km the four-wheel-drive path ends in Youga.
We were met by the women of the village, then the elders, and toured the  “medical clinic,” where no Westerner would want to receive care, as well-intentioned as it is. The real heartbreak began when we went to the “school” the next morning. Two tiny classrooms house about 140 students each, with eight children jammed onto broken benches that were designed for two. No scribblers, pencils, glue, erasers, or mathematical tools. Only stubs of chalk, a smattering of text books (for the teachers, not the kids), and some slate attached to the wall for a blackboard. There was no running water, no latrines, and no playground.

We were dumbstruck. Many of the students are unable to have a bowl of rice for lunch because their families can't afford the equivalent of $3 per year it would cost. Yet many of these children walk barefoot to school, up to 10 km each day, several with distended stomachs from malnutrition.

In my passable French I  asked some of these kids what they really wanted—a basketball court, soccer pitch, what? The answer surprised me because what they really wanted was simple: to have contact with Canadian kids their age.  These kids, although they knew they were poor, were simply happy. And all they wanted from us was access to friends in Canada. No one in our group had ever seen anything so grim, and we were all deeply humbled by the experience.

We talked a great deal about how these kids and their families compared to ones in Canada. They have absolutely nothing and yet are able to find true and simple happiness. We have so much but often can't find happiness because what we have is never enough.

I learned much about myself on this trip and a couple of things changed for me almost immediately, especially in my professional life. I realize that my business plan is about my customers, my employees and their families, my suppliers, and my shareholders, and I will not be distracted from those goals.

I am now more focused on achieving them than I have ever been, and I will continue to go to West Africa with Rotary and Etruscan.