Small World?

A motorcycle speeds along a deserted highway. In the village ahead, there are children playing soccer. A farmer loads his cart with sorghum. A woman stacks watermelons into pyramids on her road-side table.
"That's the road to Kaya," my host mother says, waving her hand toward the television. The comment surprises me, and I'm distracted from the commercial long enough miss what has happened to the cart of sorghum. One of the children kicks the ball in the direction of the table of watermelons. As the motorcyclist swerves around the cart that has rolled onto the road, the ball knocks one of the watermelons off the table, directly into the cyclist's path. The bike screeches to a halt inches from the stray melon. Disaster has been averted, thanks, presumably, to keen handling and highly effective breaks. The cyclist removes his helmet to reveal a broad smile. He is fearless. He is unfazed. He is driving a Kaiser.

This commercial hasn't stuck in my head because I'm trying to decide what motorcycle is right for me, or even because I've now seen the commercial dozens of times. It sticks with me because of my host mother's comment. It was the first of several TV-watching events that make me feel like Burkina Faso isn't terribly large.

• I've now seen my host brother Arsene (who isn't famous or anything) on TV.
• Twice.
• The weekend after watching a movie in a local theater for the first time, I met one of the actors.
• Some of the footage of last month's flooding was taken on roads that I have now been on myself.
• The motorcycle commercial isn't the only example of my host mother being unexpectedly familiar with the setting of a television broadcast. Several weeks ago, after watching a documentary special on traditional housing, Madam Ba (I call her maman) told me about one of her friends who lives in the village in which the documentary was filmed.

Inspired in part by this growing sense that anything filmed in Burkina Faso was in fact filmed just across the street, I've gathered some information about exactly how big Burkina Faso really is. Here's what I've found out about Burkina, along with some helpful comparisons.

Land Area:
Burkina Faso: 105,869 square miles
Colorado: 104,100 square miles
Kansas: 82,282 square miles

Population:
Burkina Faso: 15.3 million (about .23% of the world's population)
Florida (the 4th most populous state): 16mil
Kansas: 2.7 mil

Note: The pop. of Burkina listed here is a 2008 UN estimate. The populations of Kansas and Florida are taken from the 2000 census.
I'm uncertain of how current my statistics concerning land area are. I hope, for reasons of accuracy, that the size of Kansas, etc., has remained relatively stable in recent years. :)

For more fun stats on Burkina Faso and other countries, you can check out the United Nations Human Development index here: http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_PSE.html
This index uses educational factors (including literacy rates, rates of child enrolment in school), health factors (including infant mortality, life expectancy), gender equality factors (is the literacy rate of males 200% higher than that of women?), and economic factors (GDP per captia, etc.) to rank the "human development" of 182 countries.

Additional fun "human development" facts I've gleaned from the above site:
- Burkina Faso is ranked 177 out of the 182 countries in which data was collected.
- Of the five countries whose human development is ranked lower than Burkina's, 4 are also in West or Central Africa. The fifth is Afghanistan.
- Of the 24 countries listed as having "low human development," 22 are in Africa.
-There is a single country (Rwanda) in which women hold more than half (51%) of the seats in parliament.
- In the overall development listing, Israel is ranked 27th, while the Occupied Palestinian Terrorities are ranked 110th.



I'm not used to going back and editing/adding to my posts, but I noticed another fun bit of information I'd like to share.

- Of those nations ranked in the top 23 for overall human development, there are only three in which women hold fewer than 20% of the seats in "parliament:" Japan (12%), Ireland (15%), and the United States (17%). I checked other sources for exact numbers of women in congress. It's actually more like 17.2607879924953%). But I respect the UN's choice of significant figures.

- Incidentally, according to Wikipedia (sometimes I'm research-lazy), "The global average for female representation at the parliamentary level in 2007 was 17.0%." We're keepin' up with the pack!