Friday, December 27, 2013

Hello from Morocco

Erg Chebbi sand dunes
Unrelatedly, a picture that I took last year and then forgot to post of one of my student's tests. Usually students have to write their test answers on lined paper (not directly on the test), and some students get really into making them look fancy. Here's an example. Is this a good use of test-taking time? I'm not sure, but at least this kid still got 20/20.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

I want that you study

This year, in addition to teaching one math class with my students from last year, I took on an English class. I thought it would be a fun change of pace, just something different to do. I have 41 English students, making my English class less than half the size of my math class, and most of the students are in their late teens/early 20's. Classroom management is a breeze. I say "be quiet" and...then they're all quiet! It's like magic. The oldest student, to my knowledge, is 29. I met him last year, and I thought he was like 17 at the time, because why else would he still be in high school. Then I found out that he's a lot older than me. Awkward.

Anyway, teaching English has been challenging. Part of the reason that I specifically asked to teach Première, aside from the smaller class size and the ease of classroom management, is that there's no set curriculum. The students are supposed to have already mastered all the major points of English grammar, so at this point, they're just supposed to be reviewing and expanding their vocabulary. Of course, this being Burkina, the kids actually have no mastery of English grammar or vocabulary and struggle with the most basic things, like the difference between "his" and "her." Anyway, I figured that at least I'd have more liberty: I could freely adapt my lessons based on the needs of the students, without having to follow something irrelevant.

While I do appreciate the freedom, it's been a little scary, especially because the students have none of the basics. At least if we had a textbook, we could work our way through it and I'd have some way to measure progress. As it is, I just kind of make up lessons based on what they need, and I hope that they're learning something. I didn't really know what I was doing at the beginning of the school year, so the first several lessons were pretty rough. My teaching didn't really match their level initially, plus none of them had ever been taught by a native English speaker before, so they had a really hard time with my accent. I think it's gotten a lot better; we've established a routine to the way that classes go, and I can feel their faith in me as a teacher grow with each class. (Nothing worse than trying to learn from someone you don't have faith in.)

Still, I feel like I'm just treading water a lot of the time. We can spend an entire 2-hour class period going over one grammar point over and over again, and at the end they'll appear to have gotten nothing out of it. For example, I noticed that in their homework, a lot of them were writing things like "I want that you go" instead of "I want you to go," so I spent 3 hours in class last week going over that sentence structure very carefully with them and then practicing it over and over and over and over. Then, for homework, I had them write very simple sentences using that same structure, only to find that at least a third to half the students just wrote "I want that you go" again. (Except now some of them wrote "I wanna that you go." Not better.) Am I actually accomplishing anything? My goal for this year is for all of the students to master basic sentence structures and agreement between nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but that's looking like an awfully high goal right now.

I guess at this point, the biggest persisting problem is that I don't have a lot of faith in what I'm doing. It's not that I think my teaching is inadequate, I just think that it's pointless that the kids are studying English. When are they ever going to need it? Unless they manage to leave the country to go somewhere English-speaking, which is highly unlikely even for high-school graduates, they're never going to need it. Burkinabes point out to me that the students might someday use English to talk with foreign aid workers or to read labels on medications or something, but that seems like a totally lame reason for studying a language for 7 years. Any foreign aid worker worth their salt in Burkina will already speak French, and you'll figure out the medication labels if it's that important whether or not you speak English. How can I convince them to make an effort to learn something that they're being forced to study but that they'll never need? (Notice that I say they're being forced to study it, not forced to learn it.) One might argue that my job is to make the subject relevant and exciting for them, but I'd really rather see them learning about science or computer skills or entrepreneurship or anything else.

Lest I sound too hopeless, I will point out for my benefit as well as yours that the kids have to study English anyway, whether it's me or a Burkinabe teaching them, so at least I can make it more interesting for them. Plus, I have my secondary projects, so not all is lost. Still, it's an uphill struggle, and it's hard to make it up that hill when the students and my own self are pushing back down.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Duck-day

To celebrate Thanksgiving yesterday, I got together with 3 other volunteers (my sitemate Katie, Zach, and Kristen) and had a big meal at my house. I've never seen a turkey within 100 miles of my village, but instead we got ducks, which are really kind of better anyway. My school's parents' association gifted 4 ducks to me as a thank-you for the library and other activities, and we also had mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, popcorn, tofu, ginger cake, coconut macaroons, and pumpkin pie. Somewhere around 20 Burkinabe friends came over in the end. After this, I will never complain about having too small of a kitchen again (that's probably a lie)--we pulled off dinner for 24 people with a grand total of 3 square feet of counter space and 2 gas burners and no refrigerator or separate oven. Take that!

Something I look forward to next Thanksgiving: not starting off with live birds.

Zach prepares to earn his Thanksgiving meal
My pumpkin pie, next to the oven
I was so proud of how this pumpkin pie came out. I didn't think it would come out that well. It did. Thanks Grandma for the boxed pumpkin you sent me.

Plucking and gutting (guess who got to clean this up afterward)
Burkinabes arranged themselves into an audience so that they could awkwardly stare in silence at the Americans
The White People Show
Commissaire, my boutiquier (shop owner) and generally a heavy-hitter in the community
The explanation behind the outfit- the red tank top is made out of a traditional Mossi fabric. The Mossi are the dominant ethnic group in my region. It depicts a bird delivering a letter, and it's supposed to symbolize peace, or something. The wrap on the bottom is traditionally woven and dyed fabric. When Burkinabe women dress up for cultural events, they wear the two together.

When Burkinabes get behind the camera
In my English class on the morning of Thanksgiving, I asked each of my students to write 3 things that they were thankful for. Most of them wrote things like "I am thankful for my boyfriend because he bought me some clothes." or "I am thankful for my wife because she gave me a kiss." (??) One of my personal favorites was "I am thankful for pawpaws and watermelons because I like them."

The girls. (Look in the background, how big my trees are getting!)
Personally, I am thankful for my students, and for all my village friends who have my back. I'd also like to appreciate all of the people at home who have kept in touch with me and encouraged me over the past year and a half. You guys are the best.

Pie?

Saturday, November 23, 2013

More portraits

Here are a few more of my more favorite portraits I took of my students and others at my school. 4e is short for quatrième, the equivalent of 7th or 8th grade, and they're my math students. 1ere is short for première, the equivalent of 11th grade, my English students. They all look so vulnerable and innocent in film. (As always, click to enlarge.)

Sophonie (4e) and Larba (1ere)
Mohamoudou (4e)
Adama (4e)
Maxime, Colette, Zakaria, and Felicité (4e)
(I don't know the kid on the left's name, oops) and Adama (4e)
Zabré (teacher in the middle) with 4e students
Patrice (1ere)
Youssouf, my top English student, and Noufou (1ere)
Larba (1ere) - I like this picture because of the awkward hands
Président, Basile, Surveillant, Proviseur, and Jean

Friday, November 8, 2013

Burkina Favorites

It's sometimes easy to get bogged down by the negatives when reflecting on life in Burkina. It's friggin' hot, there are flies everywhere, everything is inconvenient, blah blah blah. In the spirit of Thanksgiving approaching, I would like to take a few moments to appreciate some of my favorite things about Burkina, in no particular order.

My students. I was concerned when I started teaching that I just don't like people enough generally to enjoy/excel at teaching. At the start of the new school year, though, when students came back to my village after scattering to their satellite villages en brousse (in the bush) for the summer, it really made me appreciate how much I've come to care about them. Even for the individuals who were the most disruptive and generally exhausting last year, I was still glad to see them again. I really want to see them do okay. I think that teaching has been a good exercise in sympathy for me; every day each student comes to class with so much obvious personal baggage, and each of them has such a small hope of anything besides extreme poverty in their future. But they still manage to be so radiant, and they try so hard. I really hope I stay in touch with at least a few of them after I leave Burkina; hearing that even one of them has risen beyond their childhood would be such a boost.

Inexplicably attached, except to the ones that whine too much

The sense of community. Integrating into the community was one of the things that freaked me out when I initially arrived at site, but now I appreciate the system more. Everyone is so closed off from strangers in America, but here, I can be assured that pretty much anyone I approach on the street would be happy to put down whatever they're doing to talk to me (unless they're scared of white people, in which case they'll just run away/pretend I'm not there). I've written about it before in other blog posts. I never even talked to my neighbors in America, and it would have been weird if I just knocked on their door one day and tried to hang out with them. But everyone is actually a part of the community here, for better or for worse, and they all know each other and look out for each other. There's comfort in that. Likewise for the sense of community among volunteers.

The sky. Burkina's sky is so much more present and powerful than America's at every turn. At midday, it's violently bright and blue and hot (the verb that Burkinabes use for the sun rays is that they "hit,") but at sunrise and sunset it's suddenly so gentle and pastel and golden. There's this one 15-minute period every day right after the sun sets when the sky turns golden pink, and it gives this special peach-colored glow to everything the light touches. It's hard to describe, but it's a really special moment, where all the mundane objects that blinded me all day suddenly become warm and soft and welcoming. The quality of light was never something that I took a second to think about in America, but there you go. And then at night, when it's clear, there are so many stars. I can sit there and stare at them for hours at a time. There are just so many of them. And the lightning storms! They were everything that I hoped for when I was coming to Africa. How many things can I say that about?

Thursday, November 7, 2013

IMDB review of a Burkinabe movie

By "Hot 888 Mama":
I did not learn anything about BF while going to school K-18. However, I once had a computer Mah Jongg game in which the backs of the tiles were the flags of various countries, which is how I first came across the name "Burkina Faso." At the time, I thought this was a cool name for a country, and I still think so. Unfortunately, I don't know what these two words mean, and this movie doesn't tell, either. Worse yet, it is in French, so one has to decipher subtitles to try to understand it. Further, all the characters are black people (making racist comments about white people now and then), and their names are not French (like "Pierre" or "Marie"). They are simply strings of letters impossible to pronounce, and not as short or predictable as even those long names you see in the credits of all the Thai movies out nowadays. For instance, the doctor who bandages Mocktar's leg injury is played by an actor named Ngonn Dingainlemgoto Alram Nguebnan! [...] Watch this if you want to see what life in the 1100s was like.

HILARIOUS. America!! (She's college educated, too!)

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Recent goings-on

I'm overdue for a post about the new school year; in the meantime, here are a few recent pictures. The explanation behind the last 3 is that I offered to my 8th-grade math students to take their pictures, an offer that was met with overwhelming enthusiasm. I need to print out $70 worth of photos the next time I go in to Ouaga. Here they are:

Before prayers on Tabaski with Alimata; color matching was unintentional
My favorite of the student portraits
with my posse
with another one of my posses
Unrelatedly, today was a partial solar eclipse over Burkina Faso. There were all kinds of announcements about it over the radio, and the information was wildly misinterpreted in different ways by all my Burkinabe friends who listened to it. Most of them assumed that it would get really dark during the eclipse (it didn't) and that uninformed villagers would think that it was the apocalypse (they didn't). The radio also warned about not looking straight at the sun to avoid harmful rays, which they interpreted to mean that all sunlight during the eclipse would cause blindness and other strange effects. Their advice was to go into my house the whole time and close my shutters. When I drove through Ouaga at noon, there was maybe 1/4 of the normal traffic and street vendors out, and my usual 7-day-a-week bush taxi took the day off. The funny thing is that solar eclipses are, for the most part, really pretty boring. I got to observe it in the shadows, anyway, and someone on the other bush taxi had a pair of special eclipse viewing glasses, so I could observe it directly. It will be the last time I see one of those in awhile. At least it cut back on the traffic.

A final note- we met the fundraising goal for my library last week, meaning that I'll be able to start the project next week. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who helped us out!! Every dollar is a lot of money in Burkina Faso, and my community members and I are really grateful for each of them. (In case you're curious, by the way, I'll get a list of the names of everyone who donated, but I'll never see the amount that any individual donated.) You are all the best, and I am so lucky to have friends and family at home who are so supportive and generous. Thank you!

Monday, October 14, 2013

Happy Tabaski

Bush taxi eventually loaded with ~40 rams
Tomorrow is the Muslim holiday of Tabaski. Rams are to Tabaski as turkeys are to Thanksgiving in America. Happy Tabaski season, friends.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Books for Abdoulaye

Front and center
While the US government spins around in circles over ridiculous arguments about money allotment, think about my student Abdoulaye. Abdoulaye is a 15-year-old 8th grader. He's a quiet kid, but every trimester since arriving in middle school, he has been the first in his class. He hopes to study abroad in Canada or America someday before coming back to Burkina Faso to be a teacher, or maybe an economist for the government. For now, he belongs to a poor family of subsistence farmers in my village, and he spent all of his summer vacation helping his family work in the fields. The entire family lives off of less than $20 a month. He would be the first person in his family to hold even a middle-school diploma. As it is, anytime he wants to know something, he has to ask a teacher or other adult, and is thus limited to what they know and what they take the time to tell him. My village has no library or other publicly available repository of information, and the nearest one is in Kaya, the regional capital, which he can get to only by a 20-mile bike ride on a terrible road.

I am raising money for a library at my school. If you think about all the necessary basic supplies at your local high school--pens, paper, books, a computer, a printer and photocopier--out of those things, all we have is...pens and paper. We already have a library room with bookshelves, but the only books in it are useless cobwebby out-of-date textbooks that the school didn't have any other place for. With this grant, we will go a long way toward having an adequate setup for a school that's beyond the 17th century.

Some things that grant money will go toward:
- 400 books for the library
- book label cards and library membership cards
- a solar panel and electric hookup
- a laptop computer
- a photocopier (can you imagine a school without a photocopier?? I can)
- a printer
- tables and chairs
- pedagogic materials (books or other supplies) for teachers
- a hand washing station outside the library to promote hygiene and book maintenance
- materials to paint a mural with a world map and other artwork on the outside walls

The school has already chosen a librarian and has set aside money for his training, which will be done through an NGO called FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries), as well as his first year's salary. With the backing of the mayor's office, we hope to broaden the base of financial support for the library in the coming years to ensure its growth over time.

Books at the library will include textbooks, of which there is a serious insufficiency at the school, as well as picture books to encourage literacy in French, English, and local languages; African and other literature in French and local languages; dictionaries; reference books; and books with relevant career-related information on topics like agriculture, animal husbandry, and masonry. The library is primarily for the school, but it will be open to the entire community as well. We will seek input from students and interested community members before we go to purchase books. With the backing of the parents' association and the mayor's office, the collection will grow in the future to better meet the community's needs.

To do all these things, we need to raise $6,096, and that's where we need your support. We can't get started until we raise that entire sum, and if we don't, you'll get all your money back. Once we do get it, expenses are very closely monitored, so you know it's all being used exactly as it should be. Donations are 100% tax-deductible and come with a guarantee of warm fuzzy feelings from having measurably improved someone's life.

Think about what a difference this will make in the lives of Abdoulaye and his 700+ classmates. Not only will his school function more smoothly, but he will also suddenly have access to a huge range of information that he could never dream of now. For the first time, he will have books available to him that he can read out of sheer personal interest. If he wants to improve his English, he'll be able to look up words in a French-English dictionary, which he couldn't buy in village even if he had the money for it. Plus, he'll have a lighted space to study in the evenings, whereas many students are currently forced to do homework by firelight after dark since the village has no electricity.

In America, we can argue about spending money on the military, or on a new car or a new pair of designer shoes. On the other hand, is there any doubting the value of a library that will serve the future of over 700 underprivileged students? It's hard to think of spending more meaningful than that.

UPDATE: fundraising goals met. Thank you everyone!!!

Monday, September 30, 2013

Crocodile lake

Burkinabe mythology states that because humans and crocodiles share the same spirit, sacred crocodiles won't harm humans. Burkina has two lakes famous for their sacred crocodiles, one in a village called Bazoulé and the other in Sabou. My brother Jeremy came to visit me for the past two weeks, and we went to Bazoulé to investigate. Do the crocodiles really know not to eat humans, or are they just too full from all the chickens that tourists keep feeding them to bother with larger game? You'll have to answer that for yourself.

You can sit on grandpa crocodile
You can pick up his tail, too
More Burkinabe mythology surrounding crocodiles: the crocodile was once an underwater animal like the fish. He wanted to come out of the water to sun himself on land, but he didn't know how to walk. A pig taught his crocodile friend how to use his paws. Upon mastering the art of walking, the crocodile ate the pig. To this day, crocodiles are ungrateful and continue to eat pigs.

A bad day to be a chicken
rawr
The lake is right in the middle of the village's fields, and crocodiles roam around and through the rice paddies where people work. There are over 100 crocodiles in the lake, and kids run right up to the water to look at them. Ultimately, the crocodile lake was similar to many situations in Burkina--moderately dangerous, but you'll probably be okay, but there's no safety rail. Don't get eaten.

--

Coming soon: I ask you for money!

Friday, September 20, 2013

Science Camp

Last week, I saw a group of 80-pound preteen girls each demolish the most mountainous plates of rice I had ever seen. Then they went back for seconds. Then they looked through a microscope for the first time in their lives, after having studied them and memorized the names of all their parts over the past school year without ever having had the opportunity to see the real thing in person. 5 volunteers and I had organized a science camp for 7th and 8th grade students, and 36 girls and boys spent 5 days learning the scientific method and doing hands-on experiments covering topics they learned about in their science and physics class, but never got to observe for themselves.

Mountainous plates of rice
Session topics included optics, circuits, ecology, dissection, astronomy, and water purification methods, among others. Students also had an hour each day to work on a science fair project, in which each group was assigned a question like "how does fire change air pressure?" They received assigned materials, such as a candle, matches, water, and a container, and they had to figure out how to use the materials to demonstrate the principle, then present it to the rest of the participants on the last day.

Jean doing "Science"
The whole thing went amazingly smoothly. I was impressed by the quality of the students, especially the girls. Class participation is normally dominated by boys, but the females really took charge this time. Each volunteer brought a Burkinabe counterpart, another science teacher from their school, with them, and for mine, I brought a physics/chemistry teacher from my school named Jean. I knew Jean was really motivated, but still I was impressed at how well he did with controlling classrooms and giving clear explanations that combined with student participation.

Field trip
In the end, I think the students really appreciated the opportunity for hands-on learning, which is a huge departure for the style of education in Burkina that focuses on rote memorization and note taking. For me, it was a huge relief to work with motivated students in manageable class sizes. It was an inspiration for the coming year. Classes start in less than 2 weeks, so here we go!

Frog dissection

Chicken dissection/dinner preparation



Friday, September 6, 2013

Speed Bumps

I recently came back from a trip to Ghana with several other PCBF (that’s Peace Corps Burkina Faso) volunteers. On the whole it was a nice trip, the best part of it being the time spent with people I like in a place nicer than Burkina. We had to change our plans several times at the last minute because of national safety and security concerns, which ended up shortening the trip considerably, but still, 3 days on the beach is better than no days on the beach.

Volunteers who preceded me in Burkina talked up Ghana, a lot. It was described as “where Burkina will be in 50 years,” “Burkina, but done right,” “Africa’s success story,” etc. It’s true that it was way nicer than Burkina. I didn’t see the villages much, but even smaller cities that we drove through were much nicer than Ouagadougou, and the amount of construction suggested that they’re continuing to develop rapidly. Ghana reminded me of Costa Rica in a lot of ways, as far as I imagine/remember it from 12 years ago. At the same time, after hearing so much about Ghana, I was starting to imagine some wonderland where everything worked right, but the reality is, it’s still West Africa.

Local fishing village
The West Africa deal hit me, literally, pretty shortly after we crossed the border. The 5 of us traveling together took a big bus (air conditioned, well-maintained, and not overbooked: my dreams come true), and we took up the entire back row. Sitting in the back was fine and dandy until we arrived in Ghana, when we hit the speed bumps. I’ll say it: West Africa does not know how to do speed bumps. They had 2 varieties in Ghana: big speed bumps reminiscent of hippopotami in both dimension and aggressiveness, and “rumble strips” that felt like someone had knocked over 3 large telephone poles and decided to leave them in a row on the street. The driver slowed almost to a halt for every speed bump, but even so, the hippopotamus speed bumps actually knocked my butt into the air on at least 3 occasions. We left Ouaga at around 9 am, so we were in Ghana, speed bumpin’, from around 2 pm until we arrived in Kumasi at 1 am. They had speed bumps in every city and village that we passed through, which in the end meant another set of them at least once every 15 minutes for the whole 11 hours.

Something that I reflect on from time to time is where Africa would be right now if not for colonization. Ghana made me think about that particularly, since the general consensus among West Africans seems to be that the English were the best colonizers. On their own, would West Africans eventually have unified themselves into some society better off than today’s countries? Or would they have continued like many people in rural Burkina, concerning themselves with nothing more than farming and millet beer, and living essentially in ignorance of anything more than a day’s walk away? In the end, was slavery and subjugation worth it as a price for Westernized development?

In terms of concepts that Europeans introduced to Africa, Burkina only seems to have gotten the “what” without the “why” or the “how.” It seems like Ghana got the “what” and the “why” down—they have speed bumps, and they were placed logically to slow people down. The “how,” though, was still lacking. Westerners came in and told the people what they had to do so they could be a part of their kingdom, then left.  But as for teaching why and how to use those tools to keep moving forward? In the end, West Africa is just left with a bunch of horrible speed bumps.

Puppy

Other observations of Ghana: they are really into funerals. Every village that we passed through had a huge display of coffins on sale. Not only did they have your run-of-the-mill fancy coffins; there were also coffins shaped as roosters, rockets (to shoot you straight to heaven) (?), bibles, cocoa pods, and much more. I’m sure you could get one custom made if you wanted. Also notable were the names painted on all shop fronts and on vehicles. Memorably, “Satan Lies Enterprises,” “Jesus is King Spaghetti,” and, on a taxi, “What a Mother!” 

Jeanine, Natalya, Norm, Mariko, Matt, Steve, Christina, Royce.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Getting around

One of the most terrifying things for me at the beginning of my stay in Burkina was transportation. Within village I can get around by bicycle; most Burkinabes prefer to travel by motorcycle, but I’m not allowed to ride on them because of Peace Corps rules. That leaves me with the options of taking a taxi for travel within Ouagadougou, and for longer voyages, bush taxi or bus.

 Starting with taxis because they’re the smallest: taxis in Ouaga are identifiable by their forest-green color. I believe that most taxis are old cars that got thrown out of more developed countries because they were too broken down to be resold or to pass smog. They often lack inner paneling on the doors, and frequently one or more of the door handles doesn’t work, so you either have to pull on a wire to open the door or you have to reach through the window to open it from the other side. In most cases, the shocks on the car were probably gone before I was born.

 Once you get in the car, prices are negotiable. 300 francs (60 cents) is the going rate per person for a short trip without any turns; each turn that you make adds about 100F to the cost, and rates go up accordingly after dark or if you want to put a bicycle in the trunk. Taxi drivers will also pick up other passengers along the way. Usually the most they’ll take is 4 passengers sitting in the back and 1 or 2 in front, although I have taken taxi rides with other volunteers where we fit 9 passengers into one regular-sized car. How did that work? 2 people in the front passenger seat, 4 people squeezing into the back seats, 2 people on their laps, 1 the last person lying contorted on top of everyone. (We could have fit more people if anyone had sat in the trunk…) The funny thing about that situation was that no Burkinabes even blinked as one white person after another poured out of the car, like something out of a clown act.

My bush taxi, inside view

The next step up in size is the bush taxi. Bush taxis are usually small buses or large vans, and in this case, they are almost always obviously rejected vehicles from other countries. There are 2 bush taxis that run regularly between my village and Ouaga, both for 1500F ($3) in each direction. They both leave village at 6:45-7am, and then leave the gas station where they park in Ouaga around 1pm. They’re unmarked, so you just have to know which bush taxi you need because there’s no sign. If one drove from Ouaga to my site in a private car, it would probably take about 1.5 hours, but in bush taxi, a fair estimate is 3 hours to get to Ouaga and 4 hours to return to village.

Why so long? First of all, they break down all the time. They also sometimes stop randomly to pick up passengers. More than that, though, it’s because bush taxis are the only transport to my village for both passengers and commerce, meaning that pretty much anything that can’t be produced in village got there on the roof of a bush taxi. Things that I’ve seen on the roof of bush taxis: bikes and motorcycles, suitcases, large furniture, mattresses, 100-pound sacks of rice, 20-pound boxes of pasta, 20-liter containers of petrol, sheet metal, gas tanks for cooking, insulated carts for selling cold beverages at the market, live chickens, goats, sheep, and fully-grown cows, and much much more. If you need to transport it, they will find a way to attach it to the bush taxi. I really want to see how they get the live cows strapped onto the roof. Maybe the only thing that I’ve never seen tied to a bush taxi is another bush taxi, but you can bet that it’s happened somewhere. Incidentally, bush taxis generally follow the same rule as regular taxis, which is to say, there’s always room for one more person, even when you’re already at twice the vehicle’s capacity.

The bush taxi I take the most often is staffed by 4 men, whom I refer to as Gold Tooth (the owner), Goofy Smile, Ninja Turtle, and The Black Diamond. With the possible exception of Gold Tooth, who as the owner doesn’t do so much heavy lifting, they are all extremely ripped. I have seen Ninja Turtle just stand around with a table held over his head in one hand while he waited for someone to finish strapping other stuff to the top of the car. The last time I went to Ouaga, I saw Goofy Smile and Ninja Turtle carry at least five 100-pound sacks of rice each on top of his head to the bush taxi, then lift it up over his head to Black Diamond, who reached down for them and secured them in place. And when they needed to put twenty 50-pound jugs of petrol onto the roof? Ninja Turtle handed them to Goofy Smile, who tossed them like basketballs up to Black Diamond. (Danger? What’s danger?)

Bush taxi on a medium-load day

It used to bother me that the bush taxi made so many long stops for unclear reasons, but it’s something that I’ve kind of gotten used to now. And I appreciate it in a way; since I know all the staff, I can call them to tell them that I’m coming so they’ll wait for me, and I can count on them to watch my stuff if I want to leave it on the car while I walk around. Maybe they’ll even intervene if other passengers try to hassle me. 

For long-distance travel between major cities, large bus companies are the way to go. The buses are usually not too broken down, sometimes have air conditioning, are not overbooked, and are faster and cheaper than bush taxi. Bo-o-oring!

A final heart-warming bush taxi story: when I was returning to site recently, we were about a mile from my village when the driver spotted 2 little girls between 4 and 6 years old waving their arms by the side of the road. They had been working in the fields with their families all day and were too tired to walk back, so he stopped to give them a free ride. The girls got on, and the bush taxi started to pull away when someone shouted to stop again. I looked out the window and saw a tiny 3-year-old girl with chubby cheeks sprinting from the opposite side of the field, chasing after us. Her eyes were wide, her head tilted back, and her arms were pumping frantically. The bush taxi stopped again, and Goofy Smile loped out to meet her halfway across the field and carried her back on his shoulder, smiling goofily. It’s easy to complain about the long waits and general terrible quality of transport, but at the same time, when I saw the out-of-breath little girl clinging relieved to Goofy Smile’s shoulder, I had to appreciate the system. It’s not a system of transport of anonymous passengers; it’s transport of friends. No little girl left behind.

Cows on a bush taxi

Friday, June 7, 2013

Tomorrow's Child

There are a few foreign NGOs operating in my village, but of all of them, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is one of the most active and most visible. They're an American NGO, and they have a couple of projects in Burkina right now. One of them is called Beoog Biiga (Mooré for Tomorrow's Child), and as it happens, I am in one of two provinces where they're operating.

Most of CRS's staff in Burkina is Burkinabe, and I've found everyone that I worked with to be exceptionally motivated and competent. They have one individual called an animator in each department. (Burkina is divided into regions, which are divided into provinces, which are divided into departments, which are divided into villages.) Our animator is named Mamadou, and he's great. We went to a training through CRS together in February, and after that, I helped him to give a related training to local parents' associations about things like children's rights and gender-based violence. It went well, although he kept trying to get me to lead it all in Mooré. Yeah, right. 

Soap mixing
What does Beoog Biiga do? It's a joint project with CRS and the USDA to reduce malnutrition in primary-school age children in the Bam and Sanmatenga provinces. They supply school lunches for all the primary schools that they work with, and they installed nice hand-washing stations at each school and trained students to use them. Beyond that, they work with parents to try to increase student retention, especially with girls, and they teach students about better health and hygiene practices to improve their attendance. Finally, they do microfinance projects with women to help them support their families.

When I told Mamadou awhile ago that I was teaching some women from my village to make soap, he was really excited and asked me if I would do the same thing with the women he was working with. It finally happened last week. He did a 3-day training module for women mentors at a nearby primary school. It's for a new program that they're organizing, where each woman is assigned to 5 or 6 female students to make sure that they are keeping up their attendance and their grades and to help them resolve family issues. I went with Katie, another volunteer from the same department, and her friend Michael, who had come to visit.



We got there on day 2. We helped to lead sessions on protection of victims of violence and on children's rights. The third day was a celebration for the women to show what they had learned to the community. A bunch of CRS staff from Ouaga came, as did representatives from local schools and village administration. The women performed a traditional dance and song for everyone, and then each woman was presented with a new bike to use as mentors. I gave a presentation to everyone about the process and benefits of soap making, and then someone else gave a presentation on mentoring, and then someone else demonstrated the improved cookstoves that one woman learned to make that halve the amount of wood needed to prepare a meal. There were also a bunch of long winding speeches that had to be repeated in French and in Mooré in there, plus a skit demonstrating the role of the mentor.

The actual soap-making didn't come until the end of the day. The process isn't difficult, just there is a lot of waiting time in between steps. We mixed the soap, made of lye dissolved in water, mixed with shea butter, coconut oil, and perfume. It had to sit for a few hours to harden to a consistency that it could be shaped into balls, and we had to leave before it was done because it took over an hour to bike back to my site from the village. The women seemed excited about it, though, and several more have asked me since then if I would teach them to make soap too. Success!

Michael, Mamadou, Katie, and Mariko
Overall, I'm really impressed with CRS's organization and competence. Their staff members have been extremely kind to me. I feel lucky to have them, because it makes my work as a volunteer a lot easier.

More pictures here.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Burkina Couture

They might not have much, but Burkinabes do have their fashion, and they get into it. The general idea is the louder the better. Clothes generally fall into one of three categories: traditional African, pagne (pronounced panya), and western clothes that were clearly sent to Africa via aid organizations. 

Traditional clothes are usually pretty classy as long as they're clean and not too tattered. They are made of locally fabricated cloth in solid blues/greens or with stripes, and the better-off get them embroidered in colored thread. Traditional and pagne clothes are almost always custom made by local tailors for $2-$10, depending on whether or not it's embroidered and how many frills you add. Pagne fabric is widespread throughout Africa. It's medium-weight cotton that doesn't stretch, printed with bold, vividly colored designs. I'm not sure if someone was trying to get a laugh when they designed that fabric or if they were just really high on drugs, but you find bizarre things on them. Sometimes they're classy, but then sometimes, you get pagnes whose principle design looks like a bright red Frankenstein hand repeated over and over and over on a poison-green background, or pagnes that are a drawing of a tree with dollar bills falling off of it. Women like to mix pagne fabric that they're wearing, so there's one bold neon-colored design on their shirt and another clashing neon design on the bottom. At least I don't have to worry about anyone judging me for not coordinating my outfits. Finally, there's the foreign aid clothes. I've seen people walking around wearing T-Mobile outlet shirts, and one has to wonder what journey that shirt made to end up here in the middle of nowhere.

Some memorable things that I've seen people wearing on the street on a normal day:
  • An old man wearing a Santa hat
  • A big buff guy wearing a fuzzy powder-blue Hello Kitty hat
  • A quiet young guy wearing a shirt that said, in sparkly letters, "WILL NOT SHUT UP"
  • One of the other teachers at my school wearing, as a dress shirt, a dark blue janitor shirt (it says "Janitor" next to the breast pocket)
A regular favorite is one of the other teachers from my school who tries to look as European as he can. He probably owns more pairs of skinny jeans than anyone else in a 20-mile radius. He's usually pretty sharply dressed, but sometimes I just have to wonder. Lately he's taken to wearing a beaded bracelet that has little black beads interspersed by white beads with letters on them, like I would have used to make jewelry with my name on it as a kid. I spent awhile trying to figure out what the letters symbolized, until I gave up and asked him. He told me "oh, they're just letters. It doesn't say anything." On Saturday, he saw me wearing my sunglasses from America for the first time, and he loved them. He wanted to wear them, and when I pointed out that they had a flower decoration on the side so were clearly meant for women, his response was that he would still wear them in village where no one would know the difference. Later he asked for them again, and he put them on his leg and just sat there looking at them for awhile before he gave them back. Gotta love Burkinabes.

Unrelated: my mango tree came loose from its support one day. I think it has body image issues.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Sucks to be a woman in Africa

This morning, while zoning out as someone gave a talk about malnutrition in Moore, I watched a pair of 3-year-old girls playing in the dirt next to their mothers. They were really cute. They both had chubby cheeks; one had droopy eyes that gave her a permanently sleepy countenance, and the other was already so beautiful, she looked like she should be in commercials. They were both wearing little skirts. At one point, one of the girls sat down on the ground facing me. It was kind of impossible not to notice the lack of underwear, but it took me a second to realize what I was seeing, or rather, not seeing. Why did something feel wrong?

Female excision is a widespread practice around Burkina. It is slightly less common in large cities, but most people that I've asked about it in my village estimate that at least 95% of the woman living here have some degree of genital mutilation. Type I involves removal of the clitoris only; Type II involves removal of the inner labia, and Type III means everything is cut off and all that is left is a small hole for peeing and having babies. I think the girls I saw had Type II.

Excision is technically illegal in Burkina, and there are regularly campaigns to educate the population about why it's a bad practice. Signs at my health clinic depict an old woman with an angry face holding up a razor blade while a terrified-looking naked girl races to her mother. (Public health signs here are a lot more graphic than law in America would allow. I guess they have to be, given the sub-25% national literacy rate, yikes.) The reality, though, is that parents/senior family members are almost always responsible for their own daughters' excision. The age at which they do it depends on the region. In a book I read about the Ivory Coast, it happens the night before a woman gets married (double yikes), but here I think it usually happens before the girls hit 7 or 8.

Why do they do it? Whenever I ask people, all they say is "it's tradition." I estimate that my village is about half Muslim and half Christian, so it is clearly not just a religious question, nor is it limited to any one ethnic group. I gave a series of sex ed classes to some of my students this spring, and on the pre-test, one of the questions was "true or false: excision facilitates childbirth." A lot of students, girls and boys, thought it was true. The answer is, of course, a resounding false. When I told them so, several of them got upset and said I was wrong, trying to argue with me. But in fact, third-degree excision causes such a risk of delivery complications that the women are forced to travel long distances to hospitals in major cities when it's time for labor because the facilities here aren't adequate to deal with them.

Other arguments for excision involve preventing promiscuity or infidelity on the woman's part, as if that were the real problem. Some people suggest that having a clitoris will make young women want to become prostitutes, and I once heard a man say that uncircumcised women would be "insatiable." (Uh, why would the men not want that, then?) Oddly, I once heard about a man saying that the reason that men need mistresses is because their uncircumcised mistresses satisfy them more than their circumcised wives ever could.

Other side effects include risks of HIV or other infection from unsanitary blades, leading to sterility or death. Since it's not being performed by doctors, there's the general risk of the agent doing a bad job and causing wounds that won't heal or that cause pain into the woman's adult life. Plus, depending on the degree, it can cause tearing and re-injury during intercourse and childbirth. Oh mah god, cringe.

If national law and campaigns aren't enough to change the tradition, what is? The law doesn't accomplish much on its own, because really, how are they going to enforce it. During the sex ed lessons, one 16-year-old boy said he thought that a man can't penetrate an uncircumcised woman, so excision is necessary for the propagation of our race. Clearly, then, education is not going far enough, either. Other students as old as 20 or 22 were shocked when I told them that excision is not only not practiced but extremely maligned in pretty much all developed nations. If this country were actually serious about recognizing this as a human rights violation and putting an end to it, then surely even Burkina could do better than this.

At the end of our lesson about excision, we asked the students to raise their hands if they thought that a practice that causes pain, infection, sterility, infidelity, and death and gives no apparent benefit to society should be stopped. Most of the students raised their hands, but somehow, 4 or 5 boys sat still. When asked why, they said, "I'm not a woman. It doesn't affect me." That, my friends, is why this country remains stuck in the 1500s. Sucks to be a woman in Africa.

Friday, May 10, 2013

School pictures

This was my last week of regular classes for the school year. I gave a test today, which I'll return on Monday, and that will be it! It went by quickly. I still remember how awkward that first day was.

I took some pictures for the end of the year. First, the pictures of Cinqieme A. The grade level is called Cinqieme (written 5e), which is like 7th grade, and the school divides it into 2 classes of 82 students. I couldn't fit them all into one frame, so there are 2 pictures of each class. 5e A is the class with most of the bandits.

Cinqieme A, part I

Cinqieme A, part II

Pretty good photobomb. This is Abdoulaye, who got the highest grade in his class. I did not see that smile coming.

Next, 5e B. 5e B got some of the highest grades of any class in the whole school this year.

Cinqieme B, part I

Cinqieme B, part II

5e B kids. Issaka, the kid in the blue and white Unicef shirt, is one of my all-around favorites. He knows it, too. Ibrahim, the little kid in the front, is one of the weirdest...I just don't know. Other kids complain about him farting a lot. I think he does it on purpose.
Girls are a lot more photo-shy than boys here, apparently.

A picture from the mayor's inaugural ceremony a few weeks ago. The 3 boys in the front are my students: Larba, Hassami, and Pascal. Larba is one of the brightest kids in either class. Notice the Lakers jersey.

I still say that I'll be glad when I'm done with teaching at the end of my service here. Part of it is that I feel like I just don't like people enough to make it my job. But I sure like some of those individuals, though.