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.