As a journalist in his homeland of Burkina Faso, a former French colony in West Africa, Louis Oulon reported on political corruption, the lives of prostitutes and street children and inhumane conditions in prisons in his country.
Since coming to Eugene, where he will live for the next four months, Oulon has watched Fourth of July fireworks in Alton Baker Park, ridden a bike for the first time in 13 years and thrown a Frisbee for the first time in his life.
At his current residence, a large home nestled in the hills east of the University that he shares with 10 other international students, he sat on a white couch watching his beloved French national soccer team beat Portugal in the World Cup playoffs and discussed his life.
As Zinedine Zidane, the French player who scored the winning goal, ran circles around the Portuguese defenders, Oulon cheered him.
“He is the teacher,” Oulon exclaimed in his thick French-influenced accent. “When you try and guard him you learn things.”
Oulon is at the University as part of the Humphrey Fellowship, a U.S. Department of State program designed to bring professionals from the developing world to the United States for training. Oulon will live in Eugene for four months developing his English language skills before he moves to Maryland to work with other professionals in the journalistic field.
Oulon is a warm man who laughs easily. He neither drinks alcohol nor smokes cigarettes; his ethnicity is Kasena, he is of the Roman Catholic minority in his country, and he has two children, boys aged 1 and 5. Both share their father’s love of soccer, Oulon said.
His father worked in the government, giving him access to education. He now has a house and drives a car – luxuries unheard of for most Burkinabe. More than 80 percent of the country’s inhabitants work as farmers, a difficult profession because of frequent droughts and political instability. The 34-year-old has witnessed his country undergo seven coups and one war, and during the summer months drought often chokes the arid soil. These factors, in combination with the nation’s negligible industrial output, have made Burkina Faso one of the poorest countries on the planet.
Most citizens also lack access to education. Radio is the most popular means of mass communication because most of the country’s almost 12 million inhabitants cannot read or write. Access to electricity is also limited, adding to the popularity of battery-powered radio.
“It is easy, it is cheap and it is independent,” Oulon said.
In the face of the hardships his countrymen face, Oulon speaks with a deep-seated patriotism. He said his country is a beautiful place with a diverse climate and exotic wildlife. Burkinabe are friendly and are willing to open their homes to strangers in need, Oulon said.
He has traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, Africa and the United States, and in his home he is a respected public figure. Beyond his duties as a reporter, he sits on the Economic and Social Council, a board of professionals that advise the government when relevant issues arise.
At the fireworks Tuesday he sat and watched the large display burst above and the smaller displays sprout dramatically around the city.
“It is beautiful,” he repeated.
After the fireworks had finished and the crowds began to file out of the park, Oulon stood off to the side of a drum circle booming and talked about his career.
His stories push boundaries – no one had attempted to write about prostitution in the primarily Muslim country before him.
“They don’t like talking about sex,” Oulon said.
Beyond challenging rules for acceptable discourse, he experienced considerable difficulty in meeting sources.
“It took me six months to be able to speak with them,” Oulon said.
Many of the prostitutes he interviewed called him after the story was published and begged him to retract it. While conducting interviews he was often threatened by pimps who said they would beat him.
For all the danger he faces on the job, Oulon is modest. He describes another story when he followed the lives of several children living on the streets of Quagadougou, the nation’s capital city simply as “risky,” even though many of the children used drugs and carried weapons.
Once a group of them threatened him with knives and he had to run for his life.
Covering another story he went inside a prison to examine allegations of inhumane treatment and bad food he food the food to be completely inedible.
“If you don’t have someone to bring you food you can die,” Oulon said.
As part of the investigation Oulon spent the night in a cell and contracted a skin disease after only one evening.
The dangerous aspect of his line of work comes from other sources as well. In 1998, government security officers assassinated newspaper publisher and editor Norbert Zongo for investigating government corruption.
In this atmosphere, Oulon broke a story that the government of the Ivory Coast, the country bordering Burkina Faso to the southwest, gave a Burkinabe opposition leader money to challenge the current administration.
He recounted the story riding down Oak Street on a bicycle and as he spoke his voice grew strained.
“Sometimes they kill you,” he paused then trailed off. “Sometimes they kill you.”
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