Tuesday, March 19, 2013

School pictures

Today was our conseil de classe, the end-of-trimester teacher meeting. For some reason, the Burkinabes don't seem to like taking breaks during 5.5-hour meetings. Oh well. We took advantage of the occasion to take some pictures:

Most of the school's teaching/administrative staff

With my Moore teacher Elodie. She needs to work on her photo smile; otherwise she's quite pretty


With my counterpart Jean--maybe my favorite Burkinabe

Serious Scrabble playing after the conseil

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Some thoughts on polygamy

Being in Burkina has made me realize how virulently anti-polygamy Americans are. Polygamy is legal in Burkina Faso and is fairly widely practiced; in theory it should be limited to Muslims, but I know of Christians who do it too. Reactions I've gotten from Americans on the topic have ranged from laughter to "...oh." to "DISGUSTING" and "so wrong." Coming from the other side, trying to explain to Burkinabes why Americans hate polygamy so much has been an interesting challenge.

Why do we hate polygamy so much? We say it's anti-feminist, and it disagrees with our general notion of marriage as between a man and a woman. (At the risk of offending readers, I won't try to bring in parallels to reactions to gay marriage...) I think its image is of a big chauvinistic man collecting objectified women for sex and/or excessive babies. If my husband is spouse enough for me, then if he really cares about me, I should be enough for him too, right?

Whatever your views may be on the issue, the fact is that I need to pick my battles here, and there are a lot more horrible things that this society does to women than to marry more than one of them at a time. I'm thinking about excision here specifically, which is practiced on at least 95% of the women in village. There are also the more mundane things, like the amount of work that women have to do compared to men, and their general lack of power or worth.

In any case, I do not see polygamy as the root of any of those problems, and at its best I can see its value in their context. Men are only supposed to take more than one wife if they have the means to fully support a second plus the children she will have, and they are supposed to love and respect all wives equally. The reality is that a lot of men here don't have the means to support even one wife, so if you have someone who can support and be good to two of them, I can see how it would benefit the women. Which is worse, being the only wife of a terrible husband, or the second wife of a good one? Further, having more wives means that when one woman is unavailable for whatever reason, there's still the other one to sleep with, so it lowers the chances of extra-marital affairs and HIV risk that comes with it.

Well, you argue, if his wife is in a late stage of pregnancy or whatever, that's no excuse for the man to be amusing himself with other women, and that's offensive that society is building things to support that. But that's the reality of the relationship between men and women here. For us, (or at least for me,) marriage is supposed to be a partnership between two equals who will support and trust each other, but for them, the ideal is much more basic. The man is supposed to provide housing, food, protection, and social standing for their wives, and the women are in turn supposed to take care of all household labor and make a lot of babies. It sucks, and it's changing slowly, but in the meantime I can see where polygamy has its place when it's done right. Development is not about changing everything in their practices at once to make them conform to what Westerners do; it's about taking small steps that make life a little better, even if those steps are in a different direction from our own.

Not that polygamy is done right most of the time, or even half the time, but how many monogamous Americans get marriage right, either? (Hah, it always comes back to that.)


Some practicalities of polygamy that I hadn't thought about before: what do you call your husband's other wives? How does the paperwork work, legally? The other wives are called co-spouses, and whether they get along or not depends on the family. I once heard someone saying "your first marriage is out of duty; your second wife is the one you marry for love." Uh, whatever. When people get married legally, they have to specify whether it's a monogamous marriage or whether there will be possibilities for polygamy in the future. If a man gets a monogamous marriage and decides later to take a second wife (hawkward) they have to get legally divorced and remarried as a polygamous couple.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Recent events: FESPACO and Women's Day

Mostly just an excuse to show off pictures of my new stuff.

Typical table setting at my house, featuring the new calabash.
I've partaken in a few events going on around Burkina lately. The first one was FESPACO, which is Africa's largest international film festival, taking place in Ouagadougou once every two years. I happened to be in Ouaga at the same time for a training, so I got to stop by some of its events.

I only saw one movie, a Moroccan film called Les Chevaux de Dieu, or Horses of God. It was based on real events of a boy born in a Casablanca slum, and how a series of unfortunate events in his life eventually led him to become a suicide bomber. The movie didn't come with any kind of description besides its title and its country of origin, so it was a little more intense than I was expecting. Still, it was quite good. It was also the first time I'd been to a movie theater in Ouaga. The screening took place at the French Cultural Center in a big open-air theater. It was pretty cool, except not temperature-wise, because I was sweating the whole time even though the movie didn't start until 6:30 pm.

Accompanying the movies during FESPACO was a big international artisan fair in the city. Last fall there was an international art fair called SIAO that I wasn't able to go to, but supposedly it was pretty similar. It was a little overwhelming how much stuff they were selling, but I got some nice things that I'm really pleased with. I wish I had taken pictures of the event, but I was worried about getting pick-pocketed so I left my camera at home. Pictured are the carved calabash bowl and the new dress I got there. I also got a green dress outfit, a bronze bracelet and ring, and fabric to make a shirt with. I saw a lot of other things that I really liked too, but I had to cut my spending after awhile, especially since they bump up the prices at those kinds of things. I hope there will be another fair like that before I leave the country.
Gender-themed English club. SEX
March 8th was International Women's Day. It's a national holiday in Burkina, so we didn't have class. The day before, we had a women's day-themed English club featuring some interesting discussions with some of the kids.

Women's Day outfit
For Women's Day, everyone who can afford it celebrates by buying the special pagne fabric that they come out with annually and getting a new outfit made. I liked the holiday because everyone was well-dressed. Also, in a reversal of the normal gender roles, men are supposed to cook for their wives. I thought there was also going to be other stuff organized around my village by the mayor's office, but it was kind of disorganized this year. In the end, I just ended up getting drinks with the tanties (aunties) from my village, or the Big Mommas as I call them, who make up the narrow slice of women that really have any social power in Burkinabe society.

The tanties/Big Mommas
Later in the day, I had some interesting discussions with some of the other young teachers from my school. Turns out that a lot of men who I thought would have at least moderately progressive views were still a lot more traditionalist than I imagined. Maybe "traditionalist" isn't exactly the word I'm looking for. Just plain ol' anti-feminist. Anyway, it's not easy to be a Burkinabe woman. Respect to the tanties.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Teaching in Burkina

Besides the myriad other challenges to integrating into my village, something that continues to stump me is the cultural regard toward teachers, and how I, as a secondary-level teacher, am supposed to interact with my students and my community. Most of my best friends in village are other teachers, and I spend more time with them than I do anyone else. Where does that put me in terms of my community?

I guess the biggest day-to-day question is how I'm supposed to interact with my students. As a student in America, I always regarded teachers as not being like normal people in a way, like they weren't supposed to exist off of the school campus. It was weird if I saw them at the grocery store, for instance. At the same time, teachers acted personable in class and told jokes and talked about their family. But it's kind of the opposite here. Generally, a lot of teachers are very unpersonable and unsympathetic in class. Part of that is undoubtedly due to class size; it takes a rare personality to be able to manage 80 14-year-olds in a cramped classroom and be loose and friendly at the same time. But part of it is just the culture.

At the same time, it's a small village, and you can't help but see your students outside of school everywhere you go. I think all of my students know where my house is, even though I never told any of them. I guess it's not that hard to find the white person when there's only one white person in the whole village. Sometimes they come over to my house in the late afternoon to ask questions, which is something that would never happen in America. Also, I am apparently at liberty to make students do things for me outside of class, like pump water or run errands for me. I asked the other teachers how it was supposed to work with the kid who pumps my water 4 days a week, and they said it should be "an honor" for him to do things for his teacher, so I don't need to pay him or act particularly grateful. But that just feels weird. I pay him $2 a week, which doesn't sound like much but is a small fortune by village standards, and I always thank him, but still I always feel a little weird when we interact. Also,when I go to class, the students are supposed to run up to me before I get to the classroom to carry my bag and anything else I have for me. A lot of times, 2 or 3 of the students run up and fight over who gets to carry it. Weird...but whatever.

On a different note, something I tend to forget is the fact that the other teachers at the school are not there purely as volunteers for the development of their country, so I can't expect them to selflessly give up their time for projects the way another volunteer would. In America we often complain that teachers deserve to be paid more because their work furthers the future of our nation; on the other hand, here, teaching is one of the highest-paying professions anyone can aspire to, so it's kind of not as noble. There are people that go into teaching solely for the money and not because they particularly care about kids or the future. In talking to other volunteers, I've heard too many stories about teachers that steal money from their schools or who overreport the number of hours that they put in to get overtime pay. I am really lucky with the teachers at my school for a number of reasons, not least that all of them seem to care enough at least to be honest. At the same time, sometimes I feel impatient that they don't all go the extra mile on projects even if they're not paid. They are some of the most educated people in the country, and I feel that that gives them a special responsibility to help others as well. But I have to remind myself that for some of them, it's just their job, and they have a right to only give 100% at their work. I should stop judging them.

3 lycée regulars that I can always count on to hang out with me: Bakyono (French); Moumouni (history/geography); and Zabré (math/biology).
I find the way that the government arranges the distribution of teachers around the country a little odd. Teachers don't get to pick where they'll get sent, and while they can indicate a preference for the next year whenever they fill out paperwork, ultimately the government can put them wherever they want at any time. Generally the most desired posts are in large cities, so it tends to be the younger and less experienced teachers in villages like mine. For me, I am fine with that. I can't judge the quality of their teaching, but for the most part my teachers seem really motivated and excited to help their students. The fact that teachers can get moved around like that, though, means that they tend to leave the village frequently on weekends and during breaks, especially for those whose spouses live out of town. (None of the married school staff members' spouses lives in my village.) Also, they can sometimes find themselves in villages where they don't know the local language, which makes integration and life in general more difficult. The word for white person in the local language is nasaara; they use that same word to describe teachers. For them, it means foreigner, someone who is not like the rest of us.

Yet another problem is the fact the government tends not to send as many teachers as the schools desperately need. English is a required subject in secondary school, for example, but my friend's school does not have an English teacher, so the students are just screwed for the test they'll have to take to graduate middle school in a few years. My school was lacking a surveillant, which is kind of like a vice-principal and is something all high schools are supposed to have, until December. The first guy that the government sent was mentally off. Like, he didn't talk. He just sat there and stared blankly. Seriously. Sometimes he would kind of mutter to himself, and that was the most that anyone ever heard from him. Our proviseur (principal) sent him back after a week, and it took another month before we got our current guy. He's no genius, but he's nice enough, and he can talk at least.

Something that I find reflective of the general mentality toward education is the fact that a passing grade is 50%. When I was in school, I always aimed to get A's, and I always hoped for 100%. But here, all that anyone wants is to get above 50%. The very highest grades that I've seen in terms of trimester GPAs have been around 85%. Averages tend to be around 10-11 out of 20, which is what we're supposed to aim for, and that's what teachers teach to, and that's what the students will still think is sufficient when they go to look for a job as adults. How can a country make progress if all that you're aiming for is half?

Another friend and volunteer, Lindsay, recently wrote a nice blog post about other challenges to development work in Burkina, in case you are interested. Click here to read.