Ayana.

Ayana leaves Niamey for Kouré several times a month. Sixty kilometers by moto-taxi, the last stretches on unpaved roads. She carries a backpack with just enough: the Zoom H5 recorder, field notebooks, spare pens, extra batteries, memory cards. Nothing more than necessary. Every gram counts when you're on a two-stroke motorbike along red dirt roads and the trip takes an hour and a half if there are no detours or road closures.

The equipment is simple. The recorder is reliable and portable. The notebooks are for context: who's speaking, where, at what time, what was said before switching the recorder on and what was said after switching it off. Spare pens because the Sahel heat dries them faster than normal. No tripods, no video cameras, no heavy gear. What Ayana records are voices, and voices weigh almost nothing.

What weighs is time. Twelve years of project. One hundred and eighty hours of accumulated testimonies. Sixty-seven people who sat down to tell what they remembered about the giraffes of Kouré, the drought, the agreements with conservationists, the first calves born under community protection. Each recording has a metadata system that cross-references source, date, location, topic, and relationship with other testimonies. Ayana designed that system herself, after returning from a master's degree in Alexandria where she learned UNESCO standards for archive management.

Sometimes she comes back with an hour of recording after a full day of travel and waiting. Sometimes she comes back with nothing. The three rounds of green tea that have to be drunk on arriving at each community are not a formality: they're the time trust needs to come alive. The first round is bitter, the second softer, the third sweet. Ayana learned that skipping the protocol kills the conversation before it starts.

Sixty-seven sources over twelve years. That means sixty-seven people who decided to trust that what they were saying would be kept with care. Herders, schoolteachers, midwives, traders, guides. The recording that changed the project was Bibata's — a midwife from one of the communities — who told the story of the giraffes' recovery from the perspective of the women. That recording has a weight that isn't measured in megabytes but in silences: those of the Ouagadougou audience when they heard it for the first time.

Each recorded hour requires between three and five hours of transcription. Ayana transcribes at night, with headphones, in the archive room of her apartment in the Plateau neighborhood. Metal shelves, external hard drive, notebooks sorted by date. At two in the morning, pencil in hand, she falls asleep for fifteen minutes. She wakes up, jots down the last words, and carries on.