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

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.

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

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.