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.