Ayana.

Sixty kilometers separate Niamey from Kouré. Ayana covers them several times a month by moto-taxi, on unpaved roads for the last stretches, with a backpack that weighs just enough: Zoom H5 recorder, field notebooks, spare pens, extra batteries. The trip takes an hour and a half if there are no closures. Sometimes there are closures.

The Tillabéri region has had security problems for years. Armed groups, military checkpoints, tension that doesn't show up on maps but is present on every trip. Ayana passes the checkpoints with her Centre Culturel documentation, answers questions in French or Zarma depending on who's asking, and keeps going. She always keeps going. Twelve years on that route means you've decided that what's at the end of the road is worth the hours of dust and the nerves at checkpoints.

What's at the end of the road are voices. Elders, midwives, herders, guides. People who were there when the giraffes of Kouré nearly disappeared and people who were there when they started coming back. The route is the part of the work that nobody records.

When you arrive at a Kouré community, nobody switches on a recorder. First, tea. Three rounds served in tiny glass cups that burn your fingers: the first bitter, the second softer, the third sweet. The host brews it on a small stove, pours it from a height to make it foam, and the protocol is to have no rush. Skipping the ritual kills the conversation before it starts.

Ayana spent her early years not fully understanding it. She tried to cut it short. It didn't work. The communities of Kouré have their own rhythm, and that rhythm isn't up for negotiation. Trust comes with time, with repeated presence, with sitting and accepting what's put in front of you. Sixty-seven sources over twelve years. That's sixty-seven people who decided that what they were saying would be in good hands.

Sometimes she leaves with an hour of recording after a full day. Sometimes she leaves with nothing. And each recorded hour requires between three and five hours of night-time transcription, alone, headphones on, in the archive room of her apartment in the Plateau neighborhood. She falls asleep with the pencil in her hand. At quarter past two she wakes up, jots down three words, and carries on.