Something that I've found to be interesting when I travel to other countries is how easy it is for me to connect with other young Americans with respect to cultural knowledge. Whether I'm in France, Japan, or Burkina Faso, when I meet other American recent college grads, coming from anywhere in America, there is so much information that we share, even down to the finest details. For example, we can discuss the same episodes of the same TV shows, the same actors, and the same news stories or opinion pieces, and it's like we're picking up from where we left a previous conversation even though we've never met before.
It's especially true when it comes to internet culture. I can start conversations already assuming that references to things that seem like weird bits of niche culture, like Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog or individual xkcd webcomics, will be appreciated. It's weird to think that they're catching references to the same snippets of culture that I consumed with college friends and roommates late at night while clustered around a glowing computer screen in the living room, things that felt so personal and unique to my experience at the time. When you add all that to the fact that the situations in which I meet those people (as Peace Corps math/science education volunteers, on organic farms, youth hostels, etc.) is already pre-selecting them to be like me in a multitude of other ways, it can get really weird how much I share with someone from the opposite side of America who I'm randomly meeting for the first time on the opposite side of the world.
Which leads me to speculate on how true that can be somewhere like Burkina. If you're a young Burkinabe with no TV, internet, movie theaters, or newspapers, can you have that kind of instant connection when you meet another Burkinabe? What would you talk about? The only way that most villageois get any kind of news or other media is over the scratchy, static-filled radio, accessed through their cell phones in the evenings, if that. News broadcasts are enough to communicate basic facts, but could 2 young adults from opposite sides of Burkina really bond over a shared childhood news broadcast the same way that I could share episodes from Gilligan's Island with someone from America? (Actually, in my generation, Gilligan's Island is probably just me...thanks Dad.) They couldn't sing the same Jingle for Goldfish or talk about the same weird Geiko ads, and they couldn't talk about how they always used to ask their parents to buy them Lunchables meals to take to school because they thought they were cool even though they were actually gross.
The only thing I can really think of that somehow makes it across village boundaries is music and celebrities. Pop music in Burkina's center-north is the same as pop music in Burkina's east, south, and west, as well as in most of the neighboring sub-Saharan African countries. And I come across posters of Beyonce and 50-Cent every trip to the market. But still, is it really the same?
Not only are the Burkinabe separated from each other in terms of media, they are also divided by ethnic group and language. There are over 60 languages spoken in Burkina, and while the ethnic groups coexist quite peacefully, the language barrier puts a real damper on conversation. Yes, they learn French in schools, which serves to unite them somewhat. In that vein, I guess another thing they share is the standardized school curriculum, although those parched textbooks are hardly fertile grounds for the roots of friendship. (That came out more poetically than I meant, excuse me.) Even with the French, though, there are few people who make it past 4th or 5th grade here, making their French shaky at best, and it is only the educated that would be able to connect meaningfully with someone coming from elsewhere.
I guess it comes back to the pre-selection of whom one meets. I am a young, liberal, educated American from a large metropolitan area meeting other young, liberal, educated Americans from large metropolitan areas. Maybe I couldn't do the same thing if I met Americans who were not from that same demographic. Maybe 2 Americans from another demographic group, even if it's the same one, could not connect in the same way. They definitely couldn't talk about the same internet memes. In the same way, maybe 2 young educated Burkinabes from metropolitan areas could share cultural knowledge in the same way. It's just that that demographic group represents a much smaller slice of the overall Burkinabe population than it does the American population. Still, I want to know. What would they talk about?
The other day I was listening to This American Life and they talked about how 17th and 18th Century European women would murder children in order to be hanged, because committing suicide was way worse. That part was irrelevant, but they quoted the diary of a girl (in Germany?) who moved 16 miles when she got married. She wrote all about the completely new customs and mannerisms in her brand new foreign land, and how it contributed to her isolation and depression. Enter baby.
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