Ayana.

When the offices at the Centre Culturel Oumarou Ganda were reorganized and Ayana ended up in an interior room with no windows, she stopped writing. Three full days. On the fourth, without asking permission or telling anyone, she moved her desk out to the hallway and set it by the stairwell window. Nobody said a thing.

She needs to see outside to think. It comes from biology — the West African giraffe can see what's happening around it before any other animal — and in Ayana it translates into a physical need for high ceilings and horizon. Her apartment in the Plateau neighborhood, third floor, has large windows. The archive room where she transcribes at night has a metal shelf, an external hard drive, notebooks sorted by date, and a view of the neighbor's roof that's just enough to keep her from feeling enclosed.

From that window she watches Moussa, the building's electrician, who leaves a glass of bissap at her door without knocking. She watches the street empty at midnight and fill up again at six. She watches the red harmattan dust settle on parked cars between November and March. And she keeps transcribing.

Ayana has spent twelve years recording voices that would be lost if no one documented them. A documentary filmmaker for oral heritage at the Centre Culturel in Niamey, she coordinates an archive project in Kouré — sixty kilometers to the southeast — that collects how local communities lived alongside the last giraffes of West Africa and took part in their recovery. From fewer than fifty individuals in the nineties to over six hundred today. That story is told by the herders, the midwives, the guides. Bibata, the main source, told the whole thing in Zarma and changed the direction of the project.

One hundred and eighty hours recorded. Sixty-seven people who trusted that what they were saying would be kept with care. Each recorded hour requires between three and five hours of transcription. Ayana transcribes at night, headphones on, at two in the morning, pencil in hand. She falls asleep for fifteen minutes. She wakes up, jots down the last three words, and carries on.

The elevated perspective is not a metaphor. It's how she works: from above, with a view, cross-referencing testimonies like drawing paths on a map. Her metadata system connects source, date, location, topic, and relationships between stories. She designed it herself, after returning from a master's in cultural heritage in Alexandria where she learned the standards and decided that Niger deserved to apply them.