Some time ago I found myself in search of happiness again.

I think that happiness has always been my silent goal and, as many, I often thought to know how to reach it.

But then I met Shui, a Chinese homeless living in London, and something changed.

Shui eats and learns computers at the Whitechapel Mission, and we started talking after he left a flyer in my mailbox. I was really hit by the mixture of his serenity combined with his story: at sixtyfive he's not anymore the owner of his clothing and sleeps in the streets. Years before he was a successful lawyer but then everything changed suddently, like in a fairy tale, for some wrong choice. Nevertheless his joy of living the instant with lightness, without any fear of dying tomorrow or losing what he already hadn't anymore, without the need to convince himself to be Zen, was really disarming. We said goodbye eachother and I immediately understood that a serious search of happiness was going to restart from scratch.

I think that the enigma of balancing the difficult relationship between desires, success, happiness, real needs and responsability affects almost everybody, and if Shui reached his perfect equilibrium simply by accepting his life, for me going beyond him was necessary to find my own solution. So I set in mind to go and see the ones that our society considers the poorest, the most unlucky and the most troubled people of this world.

If this was the goal, Burkina Faso had to be one of the best fitting places, but soon after landing with my sweet Sarina and our friend Giorgio we had the suspect to be completely wrong. So as time passed by we met people, made friends, visited a bit of the country, exchanged knowledge and had fun, and after few weeks we realized that all those people were not at all the most unhappy in the world. They didn't even look being the more happy, but probably it was so because happiness among ingenuous people like us implies the presence of a meter to compare oneself to the others. Nevertheless who doesn't have any shoes can't even imagine to have a happy-meter, and so we found that their need of happiness was fulfilled by a widespread and very strong serenity, like descending from a sublte resignation merged to a little utopia for a better tomorrow. Serenity for just being there, in place of anxiety for wanting the unpossible unneeded.

The photographs that follow are my portrait full of gratitude of the bittersweet poetry that we found in the eyes and the gestures of the people we had the luck to meet in Nedialpoun, Koudougou, Gorom Gorom, trying to show the better face of a country that few have visited and consider a very nice place to be in.

So thank you Burkinabés, marvellous people who stayed with us unvoluntarily revealing the mistery of their inner secret world. A world that can't probably be told, but can certainly be lived.