Women's Day 2014

Last Saturday was International Women's Day. Unlike last year, there were a bunch of events in my village organized by the mayor's office. Did they promote women in the community? Dubious. Were they entertaining for village residents? Fairly. 

The day started with a women's bicycle race. I wasn't planning on participating because I was worried it would be weird, but at the last second my friend Ami talked me into it, and in the end I was glad that I did. In total 22 women participated. It was only about a kilometer long and the wind was at our backs the whole way, so we went really quickly. It was pretty fun, and most of the village came out to watch it and cheer for everyone, and they seemed really excited that I was participating. I was impressed with how fast some of those women could bike on cheap rickety village bikes. They made it clear that it wasn't a race to win, though, rather it was just a race "to bike together and to have fun," and in the end, everyone got a Women's Day pagne (more on those later).

After the race, people gathered at an elementary school, and village officials gave speeches. They were in Mooré, so I can't comment too much on their content, but they were interspersed with traditional singing and dances. Women do this one dance where they gather in a circle and clap in these kind of complex rhythms, and then two at a time, they go into the middle and kind of twirl around until they bump their hips against each other on the strong beat. I call it the butt-bumping dance. It's kind of scary when the really big women do it...you have to be careful who you bump butts with. Some of the women also did a parade, which I think was supposed to illustrate the different roles that women play in the village.

Following the speeches, the mayor's office provided rice to the population, but the village officials went back to the prefect's house for a special lunch. (The prefect is the government representative for the region.) Naturally, Katie (the volunteer at my neighboring site) and I were invited since we're the official white people. It was ironic...men are supposed to cook and serve for their wives on Women's Day, but it was the prefect's wife who did all the cooking and serving along with one other woman whom they hired to help her. What's more, all the men sat in one corner and immediately made a little circle, and left the women outside in the less-comfortable chairs. Then, the men were served first, and they got the first pick of the special side dishes (tofu kebabs and green beans), which the women didn't get to serve themselves from until the men were done eating. Come oooon. That's not even trying. The prefect's wife didn't even get to sit with everyone else; after she was done serving, she made a plate for herself and went off into a back room to eat.

Katie left after that, and I went to hang out with the tanties (French for aunties). Every year, Burkina comes out with a different pagne (printed fabric) for Women's Day and anyone who can afford it gets a special outfit made out of it. I wasn't a big fan of the pagne for this year, especially the brown color, and then for some reason my tailor chose orange embroidery to go over it. Brown and orange, really? He did a good job tailoring it otherwise, though. Pictures with the tanties below.

The day ended with a men vs. women soccer match. I'm not sure how that promotes women in society, especially since it was the big tanties who were playing, some of them still wearing their new outfits. First of all, of course the men are going to let the women win, so the whole thing is just silly, and then of course the women are going to play badly because it's the only game they'll play, and maybe the only time they'll run, in the entire year. Every time they went to kick the ball and missed, or when they passed the ball to no one, everyone in the audience laughed. They can pretend that they were laughing together with the women, but I found the whole thing uncomfortable. They all wanted me to play, too, but I'm not going to put myself out there so they can laugh at me because, haha, women playing soccer, what a silly idea!

I like that Women's Day is such a big deal in Burkina and that the government makes such an effort to promote it as a holiday. On the other hand, I remember reading once in a college psychology course that an outlier does not change people's preconceived notions nearly as much as something that is only mildly deviant. This one day where everything is supposed to be different is too easily dismissed the second that it's over. The day that I see a village woman getting served lunch at the same time as the mayor and eating from the same table as he does will be worth a hundred March 8ths.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Bicycle races are coming your way, so forget all your duties, oh yeah.

Butt bumping dance

Women's parade

Women's Day outfits with Katie

Celebrating with the tanties (aka the Big Mommas)

Tanties all together. Apparently I'm the only one who's been practicing her photo smile.

Wend na ko-d veere. May God give us next year.

La grosse claire

I mentioned before that learning each other's names isn't high on Burkinabes' list of priorities. Here are some handy tips for how to refer to people when you don't actually know their name:

1. Refer to them by their title. For example: "le président" refers to the president of the parents' association at the high school; it's "madame la tresorière adjoint" for the assistant treasurer of the parents' association. (Wouldn't simply "Ami" be easier than that?) (that's her name) In many cases, you never refer to these people by their name, just by their title. For example, the school principal. I would never think of addressing him by his actual name.

2. Describe them in relation to a mutual acquaintance. For example: "Larba's second wife," or, "the brother of the deputy mayor," or "the younger brother of the guy who runs the boutique that everyone goes to."

3. When the above two options fail, describe them by their appearance. Like, "The white girl who lives in the neighboring village," or, in the case of some of the big aunties, "la grosse claire" (the fat light-skinned woman).

You'd think that it would be easier after awhile to just learn people's names to avoid having to say "le frère du maire adjoint" every time instead of...well, actually, I don't know what his name is. But wouldn't one word be easier than five? I say that, until I realize how many friends I now have whose names I have no idea of. Anyway, when you think of the number of Salamata Ouédraogos, or the number of Harouna Sawadogos, who live in my village, after awhile the vague descriptions like "the light-skinned girl at the back of the second row in 4eA" are more efficient than the names that could describe at least 10 people within a 5-mile radius.

Guest post

A post from my brother Jeremy, on his visit last September:

Arriving in Mariko's village I could see the buildings were mostly constructed of mud bricks and concrete with dirt paths connecting them. The center of town had the most sturdy looking buildings but still very, very rural. We were instantly greeted by some locals who knew Mariko and escorted to her hut. I did my best with the one or two Mooré words I knew which generally generated laughter and smiles, in that order, because I'm sure I was using them incorrectly, if even saying them correctly at all. Mariko told me the effort was the most important part, so I tried my best.

Speaking of greetings, in the village you say hi to just about everyone you pass (very different than back home). My favorite thing was to say hi to the children of the village because I would get one of two reactions, a warm reply and exaggerated hand waving, or (my personal favorite) a dropped jaw and look of shock and horror. There was a strong chance that Mariko or I was the first white person that child ever saw.

One evening we met with a French teacher from the village school and a doctor from the clinic for drinks. Although I understood almost nothing of what they said, the body language and intermittent translations from Mariko yielded a very entertaining evening.

The hardest part of my visit was the evenings. Temperatures didn't seem to care if the sun whet down or not and there wasn't much escape from the heat. No air conditioning, no ceiling fans (no electricity), and no cold drinks except for at the local bar, but the ambient air temp warmed them up rather quickly. Breaking a sweat from lying still is an uncomfortable experience.

A complete surprise to me was how loud the evenings were. The local insects created an orchestra of buzzing that almost made my ears ring, then the donkeys would all bray together, then the chickens would cluck, then the dogs would bark, then the Mosque prayer would start.

If you visit there, bring ear plugs!

Burkina Faso is a very poor country that has received a lot of international aid, but also seems to suffer from a dependency on that aid too. Most development appears to come from outside sources, very little from within. Work that Mariko is doing is "teaching the people to fish" not just providing a handout.

Despite the lack of development the people themselves are very courteous and friendly. When I got home it was very obvious what a surplus of assholes we have around here. Although we have progressed culturally in may ways, I can't help but wonder if we have regressed as people.

Library progress

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a quick update on the status of my school library. It's really coming along, and I think that we'll be ready to open in the next month!

The room

There are a bunch of different components to the project. The first thing that we bought was the solar panels and computer/printer/photocopier setup, which a local electrician installed right away. Use of the electronics has been somewhat frustrating because the school staff members don't really understand how to use them properly or take care of them, but we're getting there.

For the world map that we're painting outside a school building, I was hoping to do that while my mom was visiting in December, but as usual with Burkina, everything took way longer than expected. However, it's finally happening now. We paid a mason to come and make a flat surface for the map with cement, and then we painted it with a white and blue background. I borrowed a projector from the Peace Corps so I could project a map onto the surface and trace it, which was great, except it turns out that the "permanent" markers that we used to trace the countries actually disappeared after 5 days in the sunlight. Whoops. This past week, I've been going over it with black paint, which has been a rather laborious process between trying to decipher where the country borders used to be, and adding in more detail (the projector wasn't quite high enough resolution for the job). I haven't finished with all of the country borders yet, but I'm almost there, and I'm proud of how it looks so far. Students walking by have been really curious about it, and they like to come and stare at the map while I'm working. The number of students who have confused South America with Africa convinces me of how needed it is. Once I've finished marking all the country borders in, we'll paint the individual countries in different colors and label them. I'm open to suggestions for what to paint around the borders behind the map.

My student Alaye posing with the world map

The librarian: we selected the president of the parents' association to be the librarian. He just finished a 2-week training course with the NGO FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries), so this week I hope that he'll be able to help us with sorting books and creating a cataloging system. We also got library membership cards and cards for tracking books from FAVL.

The books: I went to a bookstore and bought about $200 worth of books a few months ago, and we just got a bunch of novels and textbooks delivered this past week. The school also keeps randomly coming out with more and more books that they've had hidden in corners of the school offices for years that are currently unavailable to students, so we'll add them to our collection as well. I'm not sure how many books we have in total now, but I estimate that it must be at least 600. With the library funds, we also bought some didactic materials, including maps of Africa and Burkina, plus soccer balls and posters of things like the human skeletal system for biology teachers. (In the past, the teachers had to draw the entire skeleton on the chalkboard for each class that they taught, and then students copied the diagrams into their notebooks.)

Librarian at work

Other stuff: We got the tables and chairs a couple of weeks ago, and the library building already came with bookshelves in place. Funny thing with the tables and chairs: we ordered them from a carpenter, but he didn't show us any models or anything before he made them. When he delivered them, they looked fine, and it wasn't until the next week when the tables were arranged in the library and I sat at a chair that I realized how low the chairs are compared to the tables. Sitting in a chair, my elbows are pretty much on the same level with my shoulders if I rest them on a table. Burkina...We've also gotten the electricity for the library set up, so there are lights inside, and a light in front of the library so students can sit outside and study at night even when the library is closed.

Like everything in Burkina, the project has had a lot of hiccups, but it's really happening. We're about done with the purchases for now, but I've set aside some money so we can have a nice opening ceremony and invite all the big people in the community when we open. I will keep you updated as we progress!