Barka Wusgo

(note: Barka Wusgo is Moore for Thank you very much)

This post is long overdue, but seeing as I am a firm believer in the adage "better late than never" I would still like to get these thoughts out before late turns into never. All of you likely know this by now: I am back! I decided to leave Burkina last summer, and I got back to the good ol' USA last September. My delay in blogging can thus no longer be blamed on the uncertainty of African cyber-postes. So what caused this hiatus if not for a faulty connection? Did I run out of things to write about as soon as I set foot back on American soil? Did I, gasp, unintentionally leave my writing inspiration in a small village of mud-huts, mosques, and tea?

I sincerely hope it is not the last, but somehow my departure from Africa gave me an aversion to blogging. Each time I sit down in front of my computer, ready to log into blogger to "officially" announce my return, I am unable to do it. I think somehow that this announcement makes it too real. It means that I really am back. But I am not sure I am ready to let go of my time in Burkina. Even now, nine months later, it is difficult to get these thoughts out because it feels as though by releasing them, I am releasing Burkina.

So, you might ask, if I'm so unwilling to release it, then why did I leave? What happened to 27 months? I wonder this myself from time to time. I could go on for pages if I were to explain all of the reasons I left. Bureaucracy, inefficiency, futility, humidity...I am only kidding about the last one. It takes much more than humidity to make me waver in my convictions, and surprisingly enough, I actually miss the heat. I longingly remember the intense warmth and brilliance of the relentless African sun, and remember the liberating feeling of not worrying about carrying an umbrella for 10 months straight because the rains only come two months out of the year. I digress. No, it was not humidity; my leaving was a result of factors far more significant than the heat.

Although I have been back for months, I still remember vividly the immediate effects of reverse culture shock. I remember how nice and surprising it was not to hear the constant buzzing of flies, or the whine of a malaria-carrying mosquito in my ear. I remember being overwhelmed by the immaculateness and sterility of all environments, the bursts of flavor in the food, and wondering why people were in such a rush to get where they were going. I remember French sneaking out as I tried to ease back into American conversation, and holding myself back from greeting everyone in sight, as was customary in my village. I also remember the stacks of complicated paperwork associated with a persistent medical condition, a souvenir from Burkina, and thinking that I had filled more papers in one day in the US as the entire year in Burkina. As wonderful as it felt to be back, I desperately missed the simplicity and easygoing nature of life in Burkina.

During my waking hours, as I shivered in air-conditioning, and struggled to come up with words in English, and stories of my time in Africa that would not shock or disgust my family, I missed Burkina and I missed my friends. During my sleeping hours, I went back. Every night my dreams would take me back to my little Sahelian mud-hut, on top of my sand dune, and my neighbor would greet me in Sonrai with a big beaming smile, and all of her adorable, yet filthy, little children would gather in my courtyard and rattle off excitedly in Sonrai. I never learned enough Sonrai to carry on a normal conversation, but we were still able to communicate in a rudimentary way; I always knew that she was pleased to see me, and vice versa. I would travel back to Gorom Gorom, and sit at Banguia with my friends, drinking Biere de Brakina out of a huge glass bottle, and, miraculously, even when it wasn't cold, it always tasted so good. I would sit and drink tea under the shade of a huge tree, playing cards, or just causer-ing (chatting), and when we ran out of things to say, just enjoying the silence that somehow never felt awkward.

Of course all of my Burkina memories are idyllic, because like Joni Mitchell wisely said, "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Yes, it obviously takes removal from a situation in order to miss it, but more importantly for me, it took removal to begin to understand it. The poverty that I became so accustomed to is appalling to think about now that I am no longer there. I got used to hearing about and seeing people and children that I knew die from malaria, and meeting child after child after child who could not and would never learn to read, and watching food prepared with the dirtiest fingernails I have ever seen, and then watching people eat it (who am I kidding, I ate it, too). I began to see all of these activities as normal and inevitable. It would still register as sad or frustrating, but the urgency that I used to study these problems with was gone, replaced by a different feeling that I cannot pinpoint. At some points it seemed that this feeling was habituation. At other points, it felt like hopelessness. Overall, however, I think the feeling was a new and disarming sense of understanding.

Living in Burkina gave me a new understanding of the problems faced by developing countries. Not the deep understanding that comes from growing up with and spending a lifetime facing them, and not the understanding of how to fix these problems, but an understanding nonetheless. The urgency that I experienced came from my misconception that there is a quick fix to these problems, and that as soon as I arrived on the continent, I could solve them. I naively and arrogantly thought that because I knew how to cure malaria, how to combat malnutrition, and how to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, I had all of the solutions to their problems. I soon realized, as one might expect, that the problems and their solutions are far more complicated than I was able to wrap my mind around from across an ocean. Along with the realization of the complexity and interconnectedness of these problems came the realization that I had absolutely no idea what to do about them.

My shift in thinking went something like this: I knew that malaria was a problem that could be prevented by mosquito nets and could be treated by inexpensive medication. But I did not anticipate that people might not want to sleep under a mosquito net, even a free one, or that malaria does sometimes seem to go away without a strong dose of medication and people might be willing to chance it rather than spend 500 cfa on it. I knew that condoms could prevent HIV. But I did not anticipate that there might be cultural aversions to condoms, or that women could not decide whether or not they wanted to use a condom. I knew that malnutrition could be the result of a lack of food. But I did not anticipate that there might be plenty of food, but not enough of the right kind, and a lack of emphasis of quality versus quantity, or that the order in which people eat, ie: men before children before women, has an influence on malnutrition. I also knew that poverty was at the root of all of these problems...But I did not anticipate the extent to which it ties into and is fed by every single previously mentioned problem. I urgently thought that solutions existed but were just not being implemented, but I found that it is just not that simple.

The understanding that Burkina gave me has stayed with me. Every book and article I read about developing countries, every report, every picture I see, I examine with this new lens. I no longer see things as black and white, with clear cut solutions that are just not being implemented; Burkina taught me that there are nuances to poverty and development that I cannot begin to understand without experiencing them, that there are no panaceas, and that it takes real time and investment to even begin to search for solutions, let alone find them.

I cannot explain how invaluable this lesson is. Leaving Burkina was a sad and difficult choice for me. Not because I did not get to "save my village" as one volunteer used to joke; I know now what a ridiculous concept that is. It was sad because I know that Burkina still had so much to teach me, so many more lessons in store for me. I, sadly, feel as though I got so much more out of this experience than I felt I was able to give.

I am now fully back in the swing of things in the US, living in New York, and seeking lessons of the institutional variety. I am pursuing a Master's Degree in Global Affairs at New York University, specifically studying development. These lessons are a bit more formalized than those I learned in Burkina. But both are still incredibly valuable to me. I seek further education because I know that I need more information, more skills, a sharpening of my analytical abilities, and much more. With these, I am hoping that I will someday be able to give back to Burkina (not to mention other countries like it) even just a small fraction of what it gave to me.

Although I feared that formalizing my return would in some way release Burkina, I now see that I can no more release Burkina than I can unlearn the lessons it taught me, or erase it from my memory. It can never be released, rather it is woven into my history, and through reflection, will continue to shape my outlook on life.

Burkina was both my teacher and my muse for a time. I am eternally grateful.

Time Traveling

My first impression of a movie theater in Burkina Faso was in my host village of Rikou. It was a small television hooked up to a car battery and a few rows of wooden benches, set up outside under the hangar of a boutique. Several nights a week, villageois would pile into the hot and sweaty area, cramming as many people onto one bench as they possibly could, and enjoy a Western film dubbed into French. Somehow, it never seemed to matter that people were sitting literally on top of each other, and sometimes on the ground, or that it was often difficult to see the screen due to moths and mosquitos swarming about...it was simply an opportunity to get lost in another time and place while still sitting in a small African village.

It was in this little "movie theater" where I saw my first film in-country: Invasion USA. In the film, Chuck Norris singlehandedly saves the United States from an alien attack. Riveting. At one point during an action scene of the movie, an adolescent boy turned around and excitedly asked us if America was really like this. Where to begin...?

Volunteers, starved for Hollywood entertainment, have come up with their own version of the Burkina Faso movie theater involving laptops and portable DVD players. Sometimes groups of five to ten people will gather around the tiny screen to watch a movie and escape from daily life for a little while.

Several weeks ago I walked into the living room at the hostel and a group of people were watching Back to the Future. I joined the crowd on the couch and, because I have seen the movie so many times, proceeded to zone out and let my mind wander a bit. During Doc and Marty's voyage back to the American West, I began to entertain the thought that there were some interesting similarities between life in Burkina Faso and this snapshot of America in 1855...the dusty unpaved roads, no electricity or running water, the oil lamps, non-motorized transportation, people riding on horses (although here it is donkeys, not horses)...the list goes on and on. It is clearly a stretch to compare Burkina Faso to the Robert Zemeckis version of 1855 America, but I was very surprised at how familiar some of these scenes were. Continuing to let my mind wander in this direction, I was a little amused at the thought that I am able to travel back in time without using the De Lorean time machine, but simply by hopping on a bush taxi and going back to village.

My time travels to village are full of many of these stereotypical aspects of primitive life. Walking through Saouga, there are women cooking in pots sitting directly over fires, people collecting water from pumps or wells, and looking off on the horizon, you can see people bent over working by hand (what tractors?) in the fields they depend on for their livelihood. Entertainment is found in simple activities, like simply sitting around chatting, and during the Fete de Tabaski, the music for the village dance was provided by a man drumming onto an upside down metal bin, accompanied by a whistle.

As the Peace Corps is primarily about cultural exchange, volunteers share many pieces of American culture and technology that may be unfamiliar to Burkinabe. To some Burkinabe from larger cities, our iPods and digital cameras are old news, but to some they are almost frightening. One of my neighbors tells me stories about her village friend who is very curious about the technology that she brought over from the states. She describes how his eyes grow very wide in disbelief at her explanations of various devices. One day, he apparently could not take any more of this and shook his head at some electronic device saying, "Ahh...les Americains. Vous allez nous tuer" (You are going to kill us).

Despite the feeling I sometimes get that I live in 1855, I am often reminded that it is still the 21st century. The same courtyard where I find a woman cooking over a fire might have a man talking on his cell phone. Or on the way into Gorom, a moto will go zipping past women walking with baskets on their heads, or men rolling in on a donkey cart. It is strange to feel like I am simultaneously living in the past and the present.

I recently went on a time traveling excursion even more drastic than the trips back to village, to Dogon Country in Mali. I did not know much about it before I left, aside from the what other volunteers who have visited say about it ("pretty sweet..."), so I was not exactly sure what to expect.

We arrived in Mali around 3 in the afternoon and immediately began hiking to the first village where we spent the night. We hiked alongside a huge cliff that continued, I am told, for more than 150 kilometers. The village at the base of the cliff was not unlike villages in Burkina: people engaging in the same daily activities, speaking in local language, women selling goods carried on their heads, and men sitting in courtyards drinking beer mid-day. Surprisingly, the biggest difference I noticed was that the villagers were so used to tourism that they hardly batted an eye at two white girls wandering through town.

As soon as we looked up, however, we realized that this was not just like the villages that we had grown accustomed to in Burkina. There were houses built, literally, into the side of the cliff. Our guide, Omar, who had grown up in Ennde, one of the villages at the base, took us up into the cliffs to explore the houses, telling us stories as we went. He told us that the villages in the cliffs were built by Dogon people hundreds of years ago. They built their homes into the escarpment as a defense against their enemies. They could see people coming from miles away, and Omar told us that they remained safe launching attacks from their homes on the cliff.

The huts looked just like the ones on the ground, with bedrooms, graineries, cooking areas, and anything else you would need to make a village run. We wandered through the structures, looking at the various paintings on the walls, pottery, and slabs of rock that Omar told us were beds. There was even, yikes, a graveyard built into a cave. Omar told Caitlin about it while I was still wandering through an old hut, and she mischieviously told me to look into the opening without warning me what I would find inside...you can imagine my surprise when I came face to face with a cave full of human skeletons.

It was a whole different world sitting hundreds of feet off of the ground...and it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

It was sort of surreal walking and climbing through houses that were hundreds of years old while carrying digital cameras. And seeing a little old man tending to one of the small gardens about halfway up the cliff, hearing Omar greet him and talk in local language, then hearing Omar speaking in French on a cell phone to one of his friends in a bigger city.

It is a strange and interesting mix of both a modern lifestyle, and traditions that have continued for hundreds of years. And it makes it both easy and impossible to forget that we never left 2007.

Robin Hood

"Amy! Amy! Time to get up. People from the bureau are here."

"Huh...?" I roll over groggily, rubbing my eyes. "Not ready to get up yet..."

"Sheila (the Administrative Officer) is downstairs waiting to talk to us. Let's go."

Suddenly I am wide awake. Damn. Last night was not just a bad dream.

Around 3:00 am this morning another volunteer came back from a late night at the bureau, grabbed a towel and headed off to take a shower before finally going to bed. He walked into the bathroom, turned on the light, shut the door behind him...and turned around to find a Burkinabe man hiding behind the door. After the initial shock of seeing something completely unexpected wore off, he began shouting "Voleur! Voleur!" ("Thief! Thief!") and pursued him into the hallway. The shouts woke me up just in time to hear loud footsteps rapidly approaching the area where a large group of volunteers were sleeping.

I lifted my face from being buried in my pillow, confused by all the shouting. The man burst through the door and sprinted right past my bed, with the volunteer close behind, followed immediately by another volunteer that had woken up quickly enough to also start chasing. Without contacts or glasses, I am completely blind, and all I could make out were three figures shouting and running frantically towards the staircase. I thought I had woken up in the middle of some sort of riot. I screamed. Several other people screamed. Chaos ensued.

"What's going on?!"

"Who was that?!"

"Are you okay?!"

Despite only going to bed a couple hours before, we all woke up very quickly. After a moment, the volunteer who chased the Burkinabe came back up the stairs, visibly angry.

"Check your stuff, guys. That was a thief."

I remember thinking to myself that there was no way the thief could have gotten anything from me because my bags were all right next to my bed, where I had been soundly sleeping just minutes before. Nevertheless, I picked up my purse and rifled through it a little just to be sure.

Wait a minute...where is my camera? Damn. And where is my wallet? Damn, Damn. And where is my iPod? Damn, Damn, Damn.

All around me were murmurings of relief at discovering that nothing was taken, or cries of "my iPod is gone!" Or "my money is gone!" Some of us began to wander around to check on people who somehow managed to sleep through the ruckus.

We all convened downstairs, still in our pajamas, and waited to find out what to do next, still a little in shock over what had just happened.

"Someone call Congo (the Safety and Security Officer)."

After a few minutes, we had all settled down and were sitting in our common area, waiting for someone from the embassy to show up. Many of us were even joking around and laughing a little...mostly out of relief.

The security officer sent by the embassy was a short Burkinabe man, dressed in a large yellow raincoat. He asked few questions; he mostly just wandered around shaking his head. When we described how the thief had gone up the stairs to our second floor where people sleep he made a surprised face and said, "ce n'est pas vrai!" (it's not true!) Then we told him how the thief had come into people's rooms while they were sleeping and he again said, "ce n'est pas vrai!" We assured him, yes, sir, "c'est vrai."

Collectively, the thief got away with a large sum of cash, around $1000, both in American dollars and CFA, three iPods, one camera, and some other small electronic devices.

He managed to take something else though...a feeling of security. Volunteers spend so much time here that it is only natural to let your guard down a little and start to consider these surroundings to be like home. But many of the things that he took were close to sleeping volunteers. My purse, for example, was on the floor literally right next to my bed. There were two people sleeping next to an outlet where some electronics were stolen. Items were stolen from bottom bunks of beds when there were two people sleeping on the top bunks. And the volunteer who found the thief had one of my worst nightmares realized...walking into a dark room and finding someone who is not supposed to be there. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. And all of this happened with a guard at the door to our courtyard.

The silver lining in this cloud is that the thief, although bold enough to enter our bedrooms, was not carrying a weapon. He did not attack anyone when he was found, and even though he was backed literally into a corner, he merely ran away.

None of us could go back to sleep after all the excitement, so we stayed up for a while, chatting and trying to unwind. We surmised about what he was going to do with our stolen items, and quipped that he now has a salary for the next several years. Someone jokingly said something that stuck with me regarding how other Burkinabe might look at the incident..."He is like Robin Hood. He robbed from the rich to give to the poor." This is obviously not the case, as we are clearly not the "Prince John" or "Sheriff of Nottingham" type. And in fact, most Burkinabe strongly condemn theft against anyone. Thieves here are not necessarily arrested, but if they are caught, they are beaten if not by the police, then often by other citizens. However, the idea of a Robin Hood type thief gives me a point to consider to put this incident into perspective.

Although by American standards we are living like paupers, it is impossible to deny the fact that in Burkina Faso, even our meager salary makes us very, very rich. This is exemplified by the fact that our conversation eventually turned to how we would go about replacing these stolen items. It is an inconvenience (albeit a large and costly inconvenience)...but it is possible for us to do. Many Burkinabe will never see an iPod or a digital camera. I do not at all condone what the thief did, but I can see how, as the old saying goes, "when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose..."

With that said, though, many Burkinabe who have nothing would never resort to stealing. Crime rates here are very low, especially considering the violent crime rates of some of Burkina's neighboring countries.

Burkina in Moore translates to "Men of Integrity". I find that most Burkinabe uphold this title. Even in the wake of the incident last night, I consider myself very lucky to be in a country where poverty has not destroyed integrity.

Highs & Lows

More than four months have passed since my last blog. Four months...so much has happened that I am not sure where to begin filling in the huge blank space. Rather than trying, and inevitably failing, to describe everything, I will instead try to condense four months into a game called "Highs & Lows".

The name itself is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case you have never heard of it, you play by choosing the one highest and one lowest point of your day and sharing them. It is not exactly a game of skill...or really necessarily a game at all...it is usually done at summer camps, or with a family around the dinner table, or facilitated by a teacher at the end of the school day. While it may seem a bit elementary, I cannot think of a better way to describe the roller coaster of experiences of the past four months.

Because I still claim to be an optimist, I will start with a high point. At the end of February, I finished my three-month étude and headed off for our month long In-Service Training (IST) armed with project ideas and high expectations for what the next several months had in store for me. I hoped that IST would provide me with insights into how to start a successful project in a small village...However, my high point was immediately followed by a low point when I discovered that IST was, pardon me for being blunt, completely useless. One full week was dedicated to theater training...one week, eight hours a day, dancing around a room and learning how to make different facial expressions. Seeing as how my village neither has nor is interested in starting a theater group, I failed to see how this was relevant to my work. I sought extra guidance from my program director, showing her a specific project that I was interested in starting, and her only advice to me was "Don't bite off more than you can chew..." It seems as though she has no interest in supporting me in anything other than Acting 101.

This low point was, unfortunately, followed by another low point of returning to village. Having finished the only task assigned to me, the étude, I came to the sudden harsh realization that I had: absolutely. nothing. to. do. In a village of my size, there is the big problem of having very few French speakers...meaning a very limited number of people to collaborate on projects with. I continually approach the same few people I am able to communicate with and ask if they would be interested in starting one of the many projects we discussed during the étude period...and I am continually met with shrugs of disinterest. I figured that once I pinpointed the problems to work on with the villagers, they would be eager to start to work on them, but I was sorely mistaken. After my counterpart at the CSPS left Saoga, citing the reason that "Saoga n'est pas interessante..." the already small number of French speakers shrank to literally only a handful. Left with only frustration and, most of all, boredom, I decided to seek out a new high to pull me out of this slump.

My new high point came about through travel. I went on several small trips, starting in the Western region of Burkina to visit volunteers in other villages. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really liked their villages. Although I tend to lose sight of this in the face of frustrations with my own village, I really do enjoy the simplicity of life here, and especially the warmth and friendliness of the people.

Immediately following this high point, I took a trip to Ghana with six of my closest friends here. I was absolutely shocked at how developed it is. Crossing the border was like entering a different world, a world of education, cleanliness, running water, and electricity. I had heard the comparison that Burkina is to Ghana what Ghana is to America, but I did not believe it until I actually saw it...although Ghana is still in Africa, it is drastically different from Burkina. After spending ten days in a big city and beach induced high, I should have anticipated that the next low would be loooow. And it was...

I returned again to find Saoga unchanged and seemingly unreceptive to the idea of change. I assumed my former role as observer at the CSPS, trying to educate or help out where I could, and wondering if the work that I anticipated doing would ever be possible. The unwelcome realization that I am not making any sort of difference in Saoga finally hit me. Baby weighing and vaccination sorties are interesting and all, but they are things that occur with or without me there.

As if this rude awakening was not enough of a low, I received news that sunk me to an even lower low point. Two of my closest friends were going home. Other volunteers provide the only support network we have here, so losing two friends (on the same flight, no less) was a huge blow to morale.

Faced with this new low and knowing that a high point was unlikely to be found in village, I decided to go back to Ghana. The trip was absolutely amazing and was just what I needed to bring me out of the funk of the last low. However, when I left Ghana, I had to say an extremely difficult goodbye that brought me right back to where I was at the beginning of the trip.

Back in Burkina, less than thrilled with the idea of returning to village, I decided to re-evaluate what I was doing and try to figure out how to make these "lows" that I experience in village less low...or better yet, turn them into "highs". The reason I came here in the first place was to, as trite as it sounds, make a difference (or as some might say, to "save my village..."). I remember feeling several high points during staging from working on successful projects, and the rewarding feeling that came from giving a sensibilization to a receptive and participatory audience. It was the wonderful feeling that came from actually feeling useful and being able to do something. I wondered if it would ever be possible for me in Saoga...

In a last ditch effort to figure out what to do, I traveled to another health volunteer's village to get an idea of how her CSPS functioned and what she did there. I was blown away by the differences. There were motivated people working at the CSPS, four nurses in training who were also ready and willing to work, and many villageois who spoke French. I left her village for Ouagadougou to speak with my program director, on a new high, that perhaps I could still do something here after all.

I felt, after seeing villages in other parts of the country, that I could be much more useful, much more productive, and much happier in a different environment. While I struggled to make Saoga both a home and a working environment, it just was not right for me. For these, and many other reasons, I requested a site change. My program director said that I presented a fair case, and after reading the letter explaining my reasons, she said that she was definitely "inclined" to give me a site change..."Howeeeever"...with a new group on its way in, another program director out on maternity leave, and two other site changes in the works, she just could not do it.

It was an all new low for me.

The realization that I am stuck in a village that I do not feel I can do anything in is the lowest point I have experienced in the past four months. All I could think leaving her office was, "Now what?" After a great deal of reflecting and questioning and just plain thinking, I think I have found the answer to this question...but I am not ready to divulge it just yet.

My current plan for this question of "now what?" is to simply take things one day at a time. So far, the plan has been a success. I have had a great time in the past few weeks; traveling, visiting other volunteers' villages, spending time in my own village and preparing for the summer school coming up in August. The pressure and stress I felt from being in village has lifted and I am able enjoy simple moments, laughing with other volunteers, looking out the window on transport, sleeping under the stars, or drinking tea and having "causeries" with villagers.

Living happily in high moments makes it easy to forget about the lows.

The road to the Sahel is paved with good intentions

It is public knowledge that Burkina Faso is a poor country. It is also no secret that some areas of Burkina are alarmingly even poorer and less developed than others. In the far north, tucked away from the capital city, paved roads, and many natural resources, the Sahel desert region where I live is one such less developed area.

While poverty is rampant everywhere in Burkina, the naturally occuring conditions of the Sahel region make life just that much more difficult. The hot season is hotter, the dry season is drier, and the rainy season brings about more destruction than relief, as the water just sits on top of the sand, causing severe flooding. In terms of planting and harvesting, the land is less arable, meaning that it produces fewer nutritious foods (which I personally hate because it means that I have to travel 50 K to find an apple) and in order to find even enough shrubbery for livestock, herdsmen have to travel deep "en brousse" every day, often traveling for hours with no water.

Perhaps it is because of these difficult circumstances that the Sahel is such an attractive region for foreign aid donors. Signs of international institutions and NGOs can be found everywhere, from the smallest villages, like my own, to the larger city in the region, Gorom Gorom. On the road from Saoga to Gorom, one of the first signs of civilization, after several miles of the endless expanse of desert, is a bright clean white sign put up by the UN to advertise its work here.

In Gorom itself, there is a large field in front of Banguia, the restaurant I go to every time I am in the city, that is filled with huts set up by the UN to house people whose homes were destroyed by the flooding last year. It has been almost a year since the last rains in the Sahel, and people are still living in these huts, constructed from a combination of a straw like substance called secco, and the bright blue tarps bearing the UN logo, which stand out in stark contrast to the muted colors of the rest of the city's housing. I am not sure what will happen to this little UN refugee camp during this year's rapidly approaching rainy season, as most people have reset up their lives in these huts and have made no effort to rebuild their homes.

The UN is not the only international presence here. There is an NGO called Amurt with an office close to the hospital in Gorom. I would be lying if I said I had any idea what they do here. Catholic Relief Services also appears to do work here, as I occasionally see white vans marked with the CRS emblem on the side. Although I am sure they do something helpful, I again would be lying if I said I knew what it was.

Perhaps the reason I am unfamiliar with the work of these organizations is because I am only in Gorom for a short time about once a week. I can provide much more detail about foreign aid drawn by Saoga, which comes mainly from the two biggest influences here, which are Programme Alimentaire Mondiale, PAM (known to you probably as World Food Program) and Unicef. They both work with my CSPS to combat malnutrition in children.

PAM comes once every three months to donate materials to make enriched porridge for children deemed to be malnourished. Every Thursday morning, there are nutritional consultations in the maternity building of the CSPS as part of the procedure to distribute the donated food. The accoucheuse and I weigh and measure infants and pregnant women to determine who is eligible to receive the food. This is one of my favorite activities, because I get to hang out with babies all morning, but it can also be heart wrenching when I see the condition of some of the children and young expectant mothers who clearly do not get enough to eat. What makes this all the more heart breaking is that PAM has very strict guidelines for the distribution of the small amount of porridge: there is only enough for 40 children, 5 pregnant women, and 5 breastfeeding women per three month cycle. Because of the scarcity, the selection criteria indicate that food must only go to severly malnourished children, so babies that barely tip the scale as moderately malnourished are sent home emptyhanded. What further complicates this system is that many women know they will only receive food for a very sick child, so some purposely keep their babies underweight to ensure that they receive the porridge. These same women often do not even give the porridge to their child, but use the entire three month supply in less than a week to feed the rest of their family.

Unicef's program here also focuses on malnutrition, but is implemented very differently. They donate large quantities of a fortified enriched substance made with peanut butter and cocoa called "plumpy nut", which is handed out in 500 calorie ready to eat packets. There is no monitoring system; instructions are to simply hand it out to malnourished kids. We are able to give away a lot more this way, but it is tricky trying to make sure it ends up in the right hands. Because it is very tasty, and because children rank at the bottom of the power hierarchy here, one can often find a grown man munching on a bag of plumpy nut in lieu of giving it to his five year old child.

Other various NGOs have donated items to Saoga over the years; some have been more productive than others. One of the teachers just told me about an Italian NGO that came a few years ago to work with the school. They were here for a day. They brought several boxes of notebooks. The parents of the few kids who were in school were ecstatic because they did not have to buy notebooks for almost two years. Now, however, the notebook supply is dwindling and the NGO is nowhere in sight.

I am not trying to be critical of these foreign aid efforts. The organizations at work here have the best of intentions to help, and fortunately, they often do. All glitches and technical problems aside, they manage to make a difference to some people, as I am sure the woman who correctly administers porridge to her sick child can vouch for. I do not doubt that these organizations have good intentions, I merely wonder about their sustainability. What is going to happen to the bright blue tarps and the people living under them during the rainy season? And what happens if PAM is unable to make their shipment next month?

There is another sort of attempt at foreign aid in my village that you might be more familiar with...me. I did not bring food supplements, nor housing, nor notebooks...it is just me. I have high hopes, and yes, the best of intentions, but no resources to speak of except for two hands and a head overwhelmed with ideas. All I have been able to do thus far is to lend a helping hand at the CSPS and try to teach through sensibilizations - basically just information sharing. I do not doubt the sustainability of what I am doing here, but I do have serious doubts about my effectiveness. I worry that I, too, have become an example of a well-intentioned but ill-executed foreign aid program.

The ideal solution, it would seem, is a sort of balance between these two types of aid. I am here on the ground, trying to figure out what people need, with little to no way of delivering it, while organizations based in the western world have the means to deliver practically anything, but only swoop in every now and then with what people in their offices percieve to be village needs.

By way of example of this, Saoga, while it is very appreciative of the help from PAM and Unicef, does not consider malnutrition to be their biggest development problem. It is not even considered to be the biggest health problem, as malaria kills more people per year than malnutrition, but I digress. The biggest problem related to development, as determined by the villageoise themselves, is the existence of a large sand pit located between the village and the road (I use the term road loosely). Each year during the rainy season, this pit fills with water, rendering it impossible to leave the village for a full two months out of the year. People cannot go to the Gorom marché to sell their goods, they cannot take their animals en brousse, and more importantly, as the CSPS is on the wrong side of this sandpit, the 7000 people in satellite villages have absolutely no access to health care during this time. Peace Corps, knowing about this problem, has declared that it will be mandatory for me to leave my site to collaborate with a volunteer in another part of the country during this time frame, because my site will become simply too dangerous. If there is any sort of emergency, they would have no way to get to me. The road to Gorom also floods every year, so they are planning to evacuate the four other volunteers in the area as well.

Something as simple as paving the sandy and gravelly road to Gorom would be a start, or something even more simple, like a functioning boat could help people get to the CSPS in Saoga, but alas, this region suffers from the same flooding problems every single year with no relief and no solution. With all the organizations at work here, Peace Corps included, why is it that no one has addressed this problem?

I have had many conversations with people of my village to discuss what can be done about their flooding problem. I have vowed that I will do all that I can to help them find a solution and work with them to put it in place, but as of right now, I still do not know what that will be. I do not know how to build a boat, nor do I have the resources to do so. I also worry that merely providing a boat or something similar will perpetuate the unsustainability of foreign aid programs. I have jokingly discussed swimming lessons (even though I myself barely know how) but if someone is sick I doubt they will want to do the backstroke over dirty, sandy rain water. I also do not know if it is possible to fill in a sand pit, or to pave it...? And if so, there is again the question of where the resources will come from. I am wide open to suggestions...

I have found one of the biggest problems of this village, but I am worried that I will be unable to deliver what they need to overcome it. I have good intentions to help here, and I know the rest of the international organizations here do as well, but for the moment, with no resources, I am stuck on the best way to help.

For now, even in stuck mode, I am just trying to pave the road to development with something more concrete (no pun intended) than good intentions.

Meeting Minutes

It is 9:55 am. I am sitting under a hangar at the alphebetization (literacy) center in my village, empty as usual, waiting for villageois to start arriving for the 10 o'clock community meeting, called by my counterpart. So far, it is just me.

10:05 rolls around. I get up and begin looking around for any sign of the people who said they would be attending. The literacy center is close to a pump, so I step out from under the hangar to greet the perpetual crowd of women gathered at the pump,

"Or keeni baani!"
"Aminata! Materkeni!"

They all look at me curiously as if to say "why are you sitting at the alphebitization center all by yourself?" Still no sign of the meeting attendees.

10:15. The six year old daughter of the village accoucheuse, Sabine, skips over and joins me. "Tantie, qu'est ce que tu fais?" I explain that I am waiting to start the meeting to talk about village health and the Microplan for 2007. She nods and says that she will wait with me.

10:30. I have taught a laughing Sabine the song about a "Petite Poisson" that I learned in 8th grade French class. She happily sings and makes the bubbling fish noises that go with the song "gloup! gloup! gloup!" I sing with her, keeping one eye on my watch and one eye on the entrance to the alphebetization center, willing people to show up.

10:45. Sabine and I are joined by a third party. Not someone who is there to take part in the meeting, but her friend Mikhail. Now the three of us are singing the Petite Poisson song. I am silently cursing "l'heure Afrique."

It is now 11:00. My counterpart pops over to see if I am still there. Yep, still waiting. He says that he will come back in a few minutes to see if anyone has shown up. Apparently being on time is not even a priority for the person who is supposed to be running the meeting. I continue to wait.

11:10. Sabine, Mikhail and I have moved on to the "Frere Jacques" song. I am teaching them the english version. They are adorable. I begin to ponder the idea of only inviting children to village meetings.

11:15. A man who appears older than time itself hobbles into the alphebetization center. He is draped in a long buubu and a turban, despite the 100 degree weather, and uses his staff to step up onto the platform where the meeting will be held. He leaves his sheep waiting outside the hangar. It is the village imam. The first person has arrived.

Shortly after the imam's arrival, around 11:30, a group of turbaned men arrive from across the field. Now that one of the village leaders has arrived, men begin showing up in masses. I stand up to shake the hand of every person that walks through the door. Sabine and Mikhail get bored with the talk of goats, sheep, cows, and harvesting that is taking place among the men, so they wave goodbye and skip off. I realize that my counterpart, the person who originally called the meeting, is not there, meaning that I am the only representative from the CSPS there. The men look at me expectantly, "are we going to start anytime soon?"

I realize that I cannot kill time with a group of men by singing a song about fish, so I try to make small talk in whatever limited Sonrai and Fulfulde I can muster. As all they ever really want to talk about are their animals, I find this surprisingly easier than I expected. I breathe a huge sigh of relief when the translator finally walks up.

11:45. My counterpart shows up, no apology or explanation for his tardiness, and the meeting begins. I have asked my counterpart to give me just a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting to present myself and my role in village. I explain that I am there to talk about village health problems that I would like to work on, and that I need collaboration from them and cannot do it on my own. I cannot see anyone's expression because their mouths are covered by brightly patterned cloths wrapped around their heads, but I take it as a good sign that they are all nodding and grunting in what I hope is agreement.

It is now noon and stomachs are rumbling over the talking. My counterpart has begun his presentation about the health center's microplan for the new year. He takes the term "micro" too literally I think and begins to go into far more detail than is necessary about CSPS functioning. People are starting to get bored. One man, blatantly not paying attention to the meeting, summons a child to go buy tea.

12:30. Even I am bored. I am no longer sure what my counterpart is talking about. Two men are making tea in the back row and noisily stand up and move around to bring me a glass. I find it slightly amusing that I am not the least bit bothered that they are interrupting the meeting to give me tea.

12:45. People are no longer even pretending to pay attention. The translator has begun to shorten 15 minute speeches in French into one minute bursts in Sonrai. I notice only one man who appears to be concentrating on the meeting, staring intently at his hands. Wait...nevermind. He is not bent over in concentration, but hunched over in a deep sleep.

Around 13:00, I try to motion to my counterpart that it might be time to wrap it up. The men have already long given up on the meeting; some have begun to regather their animals outside the hangar and shake everyone's hand in farewell.

13:15. Meeting over.


Although it is easy to see the humor in the situation a few days removed from it, it can be extraordinarily frustrating when trying to make progress and working in these kinds of conditions. I wish that I could say that the elements of this meeting - namely the lateness and the apathy of participants - are an anomaly, but alas, my counterpart tells me that this is what a typical meeting in village looks like.

I am passionate about my work here, but it would appear following this meeting that the people I am trying to help are much less so. My perceptions from this encounter tell me that people here only begrudgingly attend meetings called for their own benefit, and while I can try my best to get them to attend and try to convince them that it is important, I cannot force people to care about their own problems.

So you might be wondering, why am I presenting meeting minutes if the meeting was seemingly useless? Was anything actually accomplished?

Of course the answer is yes, otherwise I would not be writing about it. All failed experiments at least result in a learning experience.

Lessons learned:
-Meetings in Burkina Faso will never start on time.
-No meeting can start without the imam or other comparable respected male village member.
-Detailed presentations about complex health problems do not translate well in a local language and will put an audience to sleep faster than you can say "paludisme."

I was able to meet up with one of the French-speaking meeting attendees a few days after the meeting to get his thoughts on what went wrong. I asked what he got out of the meeting and he shrugged. "You want to work with us on problems, right?" I eagerly nodded. He said, "All right, then let's have a talk."

We proceeded to talk for more than two hours about Saoga's failure to develop, and what he sees as the sources of problems. There was no set timetable for our discussion, no fancy flip charts, no discussion of "micro" plans, just honest conversation about an old man's worries about his family and his village. I did not say much during our conversation, just listened, occasionally nodding, or asking questions. I learned more in just 15 minutes of this conversation than I had learned in the entire almost three and a half hour block spent at the failed community meeting.

I learned that people are not apathetic about their problems, they are just unsure of what to do about them, where to proceed, and who to turn to for help. While this uncertainty unfortunately lends itself to a so-called failure-to-launch, it does not necessarily mean that they are unwilling to do anything, just that they might lack direction.

I also learned, most importantly, that a community meeting is not necessarily the best way to "launch." This might sound obvious, but people rarely respond well to someone talking at them about their problems (this seems to explain why they do not think it is important to be on time to these meetings) but can provide a lot of insights if they are engaged in a dialogue.

Three and a half hours of checking my watch, singing about petite poisson, and twiddling my thumbs proved to be worthwhile in the end. Because they taught me that discourse might just be the path to productivity.

The Third Gender

Peace Corps volunteers are an enigma to the Burkinabe. We carry around big packs all the time not on our heads, but on our backs; we drink water from strange bottles called nalgenes that make the water appear to be multicolored; and we slather ourselves with sunscreen that many Burkinabe think is "whitening cream" (one woman asked me if she could use it so that her skin would be white like mine...I had to explain that it is not to make my skin white, but to prevent it from turning red). We are indeed a strange sight here...but in the smallest of villages in Burkina Faso, like the one I live in, it is not my appearance that is the most bewildering, but my blurring and even crossing of the extremely rigid gender lines. Gender roles in my village, and many small villages throughout Burkina, have a slight resemblance to the invisible lines drawn at middle school dances. "Girls on one side and boys on the other..." Women spend their entire day, from the first crowing of the rooster around 4 or 5 am, right up until the moon becomes the only light for miles, at W-O-R-K. They have an endless list of chores and tasks that make me tired just thinking about them. They pound millet for literally hours on end; they prepare all of their family's meals with their faces directly over a fire that chokes me just standing close to it; they scrub their laundry using only their hands, no washboard; they sweep their sand floors hunched over using bundles of straw for a broom; they make countless trips to the pump, filling impossibly heavy bidons of water that they lift and carry effortlessly on their heads; they work in vegetable gardens that they plant and cultivate completely on their own, yet still work in the fields during the larger cultivating and planting season; and they do all of this and so much more when they are pregnant or have a baby strapped to their back and five screaming kids at their side. Men, on the other hand, have a slightly different daily task list. While their wives (I mean "wives" literally because men in my village can have up to four wives according to the rules of the Koran) are busy running the entire village, men right now are participating in the "repose" season. As I live in a village of herders, some men in village spend the day with their animals off "en brousse" which entails taking the sheep or goats out to find food, then finding shade and relaxing until they are ready to herd them back home in the evening. The rest of the men in village sit under trees or hangars drinking strong green tea and having "causeries": french for "chatting." They salute people who walk past these causeries and in typical African greeting style ask how their day is going, how their animals are doing, how their family is doing (in that order), how they are feeling during this "froid" season, how they slept last night, etc...salutations are the bulk of verbal communication. Occasionally one of the men will doze off and people will continue to talk around him until he wakes up and rejoins the conversation. When they run out of tea, they will send a child to the village boutique to buy more, along with cigarrettes and charcoal to keep the tea hot. They do not seem to notice the women busy at work around them, as they are too deep in conversation, or too deep asleep. While it is the women who carry the bulk of the family responsibilities and work load, the decision making is left entirely to male members of the family. There is no sort of power struggle between men and women, women are simply expected to be completely subservient to their husbands. They are often promised to men two or three times their age when they are only 12 or 13 years old. One girl in my village is only 10 but already has a husband lined up for the moment she reaches the "procreation age." She had no say in the match. Women have no say in practically any decision directly affecting their own life or health. When a woman is pregnant or goes into labor, cultural norms dictate that she is not allowed to seek a doctor's or even a village midwife's help without her husband's permission. Because he holds the power to make the decision, husbands often prefer that their wives give birth at home to avoid paying doctor fees. I do not think it is necessary for me to explain what kinds of problems this can lead to... Coming from a country where women have fought and won against this kind of oppression, I have a hard time being culturally sensitive to this aspect of Burkinabe culture. While I try to tactfully argue with Burkinabe men that women deserve to be given more respect, and indeed have earned respect through their hours of backbreaking labor to keep the village afloat, it is difficult to do so without being offensive. There have been several instances in which I have had to bite my tongue and fight hard against the urge to spew a string of obscenities telling the men what I really think of their attitude towards women. One such instance occured last week on a visit to a satellite village to distribute medications to combat "filariose" or elephantitis - spread through the same mosquito that spreads malaria. I sat under a tree with a member of the Coges, the local health group that works in conjunction with the CSPS, and placed two, three, or four small white pills based on height in the outstretched hands of people of Ouresso. A large group of women had been waiting patiently, most of them with their children, and they had just gotten to the front of the huddle (there is no concept of a line here) when a group of adolescent boys showed up and shoved their way in front of them. I bristled and said "les femmes etaient ici premierement!" but the Coges member just handed them their medications and said, "en Afrique les hommes sont respectes." The women were completely unfazed by the incident, as they are used to this kind of treatment, but I could not shake this sense of injustice. These same women go back to their houses and prepare food for these boys, clean for them, and take care of every behind-the-scenes aspect of their lives, yet the boys can offer them only the disrespect of cutting in front of them in line. Being a female volunteer, I was a little concerned about my own treatment, as I would not stand for a Burkinabe man telling me how to go about living my life here, but I now know that I should not have worried. Female volunteers are not treated like the females here, but constitute an elusive "third gender" that fits somewhere between the male and female dichotomy... Female volunteers are respected by men because of our American status, and can interact with them on the same level as the other men in village - meaning that if I want to sit and "cause" with the sleeping and tea drinking men, which no woman in village would dare do, I can. However, there are slight exceptions to this seeming unconditional respect: very traditional village elders will not even shake my hand because I am a woman, so without trying to be disrespectful, as that will surely get me kicked out of village, I just try not to spend too much time with them. I discovered another exception when I went to mosque for the fete de tabaski: my double X chromosome forbade me from sitting near the men, so they placed me, somewhat symbolically, right in between the group of men praying up front and the women praying behind them. Right between the two groups in this third gender role seems to be the ideal place to be for me. I am given respect and my opinions hold a great deal of sway, but I am able to use the fact that I am female as a way to try to bridge the gap between men and women in village. Interactions between men and women seem to be very one-sided, as a woman would not dare voice her true opinion to her husband, but women quite bluntly lay out their opinions to me, for which I am extremely grateful. I am able to hear their point of view while at the CSPS during prenatal or nutritional consultations, or even while pounding millet and working in the gardens with the women (okay, okay, so really just working in the gardens and observing the millet pounding...I am terrible at pounding millet) which helps me to better understand women's needs in village and how they are or are not being met. In the very same day, I am able to hear the point of view of the men sitting and drinking tea, and even in some cases, relay information that I have heard from the women. I am working currently with a man named Ishiaka in my village to try to restart a village savings and credit club. It has been in village for years but has never been fully functional, as you cannot have a savings and credit club with neither savings nor credit. I recently proposed the idea of expanding the club to include women, as many women in village had expressed the desire to engage in small commerce. He sort of mulled this over, and has not yet said yes or no or really anything, except a contemplative nod...but the fact that he did not directly reject it gives me hope. The attitudes about the inferiority of women have been here much longer than I have, and I know that it will take much more than just me to make any sort of real change for women in Burkina. But perhaps in my village society of "girls on one side and boys on the other..." an intermediary of the third gender variety can start to get people dancing.