IRON VILLAGE: The Mossi Village of Dablo in Burkina Faso 

The village of Dablo is quite typical of the lively, busy, creative rural farming village of much of West Africa. People spin and weave cotton, brew millet beer, form and fire pottery, smelt and forge iron, dance and sing, and enjoy life. Airfare from Iowa costs about $2500 through Paris, but I am sure you can do better than that, especially if you purchase your ticket to Ouagadougou in Paris instead of in the United States (so many people fly back and forth between Paris and Ouagadougou that the airfare is not very expensive). If you stay in a tiny rural village and ask a family to give you a room to sleep in and to feed you you could get by on $25-$50 a week. If you stay in a hotel in Ouagadougou it will cost you $150 a day just for the hotel. Meals in Ouagadougou can be cheap or expensive depending on whether you eat them in a local restaurant used by Burkinabes, or in a European-style restaurant mostly used by white people. All of this should be pretty obvious. If you live like a Burkinabe life is inexpensive, if you live like a European it is much more expensive. I arrive at the airport in the evening from Paris, check into a hotel (the Splendid Hotel, recently bombed by Al Quaeda) and stay for a day or two until I am ready to go out to one of my villages. While I am in Ouagadougou I spend a lot of money, but as soon as I get to a rural village the cost of living drops dramatically. Some villages have electricity now, so that you can actually use a fan and have electric light. Most of the villages I visit do not have electricity, and so the only way to stay cool at night when you're trying to sleep is to soak your sheets in water and lie in bed until all the water has evaporated and the sheets are dry. I have a lot of friends who drive me around in their own cars, including into rural villages. I pay them quite a lot of money, 10,000 to 20,000 CFA a day. You can do much cheaper if you take local buses and other local transportation. On the other hand if you're going to do that I hope you speak French.