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.

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.

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. 

A piece of Burkinabe wisdom

A Burkinabe saying that I learned yesterday, for your Monday: Celui qui a le diarrhée n'a pas peur du noir. He who has diarrhea is not afraid of the dark. If I had to pick one sentence to summarize everything about my time here, literally and figuratively, I can't think of anything that captures it all better than that.