In recent years, Burkina Faso has been featured in international news outlets for the burgeoning conflict in the Northern Sahel region. While the press coverage of the mounting violence is an important and objective truth, it is insufficient as a means of understanding the full lived reality of the peaceful and generous Burkinabé, well-known across the West African region for their remarkable degree of cultural and religious tolerance. There are nearly 70 different ethnic groups living peacefully amongst one another and religious holidays that are celebrated by all community members, regardless of religious affiliation. In the southwest corner of Burkina Faso, off of a stretch of paved road near the Ghanian border, there’s a little village called Tioyo, made up mostly of the Lobi ethnic group. I had the immense privilege of working for and with the community of Tioyo on development projects, but mostly I was their daboulo ker (Lobiri for white woman) for a year and half.

My very presence in Tioyo as a daboulo ker—and sudden evacuation—raises difficult, but important questions about the position that we occupy as “white” Westerners in these spaces, the inevitable imperialist gaze inherent in taking such images, while also challenging the sustainability of development and how essential these Peace Corps programs really are.

I have no clear answers to these questions, even three years later. This project is a work in progress as I continue gathering images from my sojourn in Burkina Faso and thinking through the questions of ethnocentrism surrounding documentary work, particularly as an outsider, and the impossibility of creating any kind of objective document. For now, these images serve as an alternative representation of Burkina beyond conflict. Above all, this project is an earnest love letter to a resilient community that welcomed and trusted me—and a means through which I’m trying, still, to process a profound sense of loss.