Les Nouvelles de Moi

Except for a few bits about the weather and various epidemics headed this way (or already here!), this entry is mostly about prostitution. Enjoy!

February 11, 2006

I don’t know about you, but I spent much of my evening in front of a television watching the sporting event of the year. Just about everyone else in Kongoussi was doing the same thing. However, the sporting event we were watching was probably different from what you were watching. I don’t think anyone around here knows that the Olympics are going on right now (I’m not even sure when they start), and it shouldn’t be a big surprise to learn that the Winter Olympics have never been a major attraction here (to the best of my knowledge, Burkina does not yet have a bobsled team). For the past few weeks, Burkina has been entranced with the Coupe d’Afrique - the African Cup of Nations - the continent’s largest soccer tournament. Burkina didn’t qualify for the event, so most people have been cheering for Côte d’Ivoire - Côte d’Ivoire is sort of like Burkina’s big sister, what Burkina could be with a bit more money and an ocean. Also, just about everyone in Burkina has family or friends working in Côte d’Ivoire at the moment (the regular influx of Burkinabé workers is, as I understand it, one of the major reasons for the political instability that has plagued Côte d’Ivoire for the past four years). At any rate, Côte d’Ivoire has a pretty good team, and tonight, the final game of the tournament, pitted Côte d’Ivoire against Egypt. Unfortunately for Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt hosted the tournament, so they had a bit of a homefield advantage. And after 120 point-less minutes, Egypt won the shootout at the end, 3-2.
In other news, I’ve joined an English club. The class is led by a very friendly primary school teacher here in Kongoussi (whose name, unfortunately, I don’t remember at the moment - I’m horrible with names here), who speaks about the best English I’ve heard from any Burkinabé (even better than some of the Burkinabé employed by Peace Corps). We meet every Saturday afternoon, and it’s an interesting experience, for several reasons. First, it helps me learn French - although everyone is supposed to speak English the entire time, there are inevitably some English words that people need translated to French, and the English words they don’t know tend to be the same words I don’t know in French, so we both learn them. But even more importantly, it provides an interesting glimpse into the Burkinabé mindset.
Today, for example, our topic was prostitution. (Last time, we discussed several issues, including poverty, pollution, and women’s emancipation.) Before the meeting, one of the club members had written up a two page document explaining what prostitution is, what causes it, and some possible solutions. About 70% of the document was completely incomprehensible. In some places, I could tell where he had directly translated some sort of French or Burkinabé idiom into English, and others places where he clearly looked a word up in the dictionary and just took the first French equivalent it listed, regardless of what part of speech it was, etc. I think my favourite part, however, was the opening line. Much like any good, clichéd American speech, he wrote that “the dictionary redheaded defines prostitution…” After a few seconds of staring at this sentence confusedly, I realized he must have been using a Larousse dictionary (and perhaps Babelfish or something similar? If so, he’s a pretty high-tech Burkinabé).
Anyway, I found the discussion to be fascinating. Everyone in the club is pretty well-educated - there’s one or two high school students (I think they’re in terminale - the last year of high school), and most of the rest are teachers, who have at least a high school, if not university, education. As soon became clear, however, I was apparently the only one of us with a liberal arts education. The document that the one member had written made a distinction between the “Ghanaian” and “Nigerian” forms of prostitution (both English speaking countries, I noted), and implied that prostitution didn’t really exist in Burkina, except when these loose Ghanaian and Nigerian ventured into Burkina. After awhile, the leader finally convinced everyone to admit that prostitution was not merely a Ghanaian or Nigerian phenomenon, that there were Burkinabé and even Bamoise (first time I’d heard that word - it means someone from Bam, the province of which Kongoussi is the capital) who engaged in prostitution. This admission was a fairly major breakthrough.
We then discussed the sources of prostitution. I made what I thought to be a logical argument that generally prostitution is caused by poverty. Although there was some support for my theory, there was far greater support for the “TV causes prostitution” theory. As best I could understand it, the gist of the argument was that there are more TVs in cities than in rural areas, and there are also more prostitutes in cities than rural areas. Unfortunately, assuming that “causation” and “correlation” had not yet entered their English vocabulary, I chose not to respond to this claim. There was also a general consensus that women who engage in prostitution suffer from some sort of mental illness. The final question, which began as something on the lines of “Think you this day or another it could legalise prostitution?” which we cleaned up to, “Do you think prostitution should be legal?” The general consensus was that prostitution is bad, immoral, shameful, and spreads HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and so yes, of course, it should be illegal. There was one other person (besides myself) who tried to present an argument in favour of legalizing prostitution. His argument consisted of “there are countries in the world where homosexuality is now legal, so why not legalize prostitution?” Someone else mentioned, to appalled horrific gasps, that homosexuality had just become legal in South Africa within the past month. This line of reasoning was quickly shot down. Finally, I gave my two cents, and mostly for the fun of it, argued that Burkina should legalize prostitution. Since it’s impossible to eliminate prostitution as long as there’s poverty, if you legalized prostitution, you could more easily enforce condom usage, and thus minimize the spread of STDs. After making my case, I waited for them to boo me out of the group. Luckily, that didn’t happen, although I think it was primarily because they had no idea what I said - except for two or three members of the group, they all seem to find my American accent impenetrable and incomprehensible.
At any rate, next Saturday is my turn to lead the group. They asked me to bring in some American songs that we can try to understand and interpret. (A few weeks ago we spent the meeting listening to and translating Bob Marley lyrics - they love Bob Marley.) So now I’m trying to go through the handful of cassettes that Mike left me (there’s no way I’m going to bring my iPod and computer speakers to play music for them) to find some songs that have interesting, coherent, and fairly simple lyrics. Unfortunately my choices are a bit limited - I had to rule out both the Bob Dylan tape and the Pearl Jam tape for the sole reason that I can barely understand what they’re saying (as best Abby and I can tell, Eddie Vedder sings one or two words in every song, such as ‘alive,’ ‘betterman,’ or ‘Jeremy spoke’ and then just mumbles his way through the other three to five minutes of the song) - so there’s no way I can expect the group to understand what they’re singing. This leaves me with Paul Simon’s Graceland album, U2’s Achtung Baby, an R.E.M. album, and a Tracy Chapman tape. And I’m having trouble finding any songs with interesting lyrics - after discussing the sources and possible solutions to prostitution this week, it seems like a bit of a step down to discuss “You Can Call Me Al.” And I have to bring three songs.
Anyways, nothing else particularly noteworthy going on. I went to Djibo this week (in the bank’s very nice SUV) for a day for a workshop explaining the bank’s services to rural farmers. It was pretty interesting, since these farmers have really no concept of what credit is, and most of the session was spent explaining credit in the simplest terms possible. The workshop also confused me more than most things in Burkina do, because it allowed me to be confused in three languages, French, Mooré, and Fulfulde, instead of the usual two. And although I managed to follow just about everything in French (the coordonnateur used his simplified, dumbed-down for the peasant-folk French, which I can follow without much difficulty), I was quite happy to discover that although I couldn’t understand anything in Mooré or Fulfulde, I could usually identify which language was being spoken (which is pretty good since, especially with farmers, I sometimes can’t tell if someone is speaking French or Mooré - and then there are the times when people try to impress me by speaking a sentence in English, but I’m not expecting them to speak English, so I get really confused, and look pretty dumb for not being able to recognize my own language).
Winter, such as it exists here, seems to be rapidly coming to an end. Several weeks ago, while in Ouaga, I bought a thermometer. Oddly, although there were several thermometer models, only one of them went up to 50°C (122°F) - the others only went to 40°C (104°F) for some inexplicable reason. With considerable foresight, I spent the extra nickel and bought the 50° one - this turned out to be smart, as I wouldn’t have known what temperature it was all this week had I purchased the 40° one. So far, the highest temperature I’ve recorded with the thermometer on my front porch is 116°F, but everyone assures me that this still isn’t that hot. Perhaps instead of the 50°C thermometer, I should’ve just gone with a meat thermometer. And speaking of meat and poultry, I hear that bird flu has shown up in northern Nigeria, and according to the BBC World Service, experts expect it to spread. Luckily, Niger presents a nice little buffer between Burkina and Nigeria.

February 21, 2006

Not much to write about today, but I think I’m going to try and post the last entry later today, so I figured I should probably write something new and current here. So, let’s see… I’ve heard rumors that the bird flu over in Nigeria has spread to Niger. At the moment, however, bird flu is not the disease Bamoise are concerned about. There’s been a fairly large meningitis outbreak here - as best I can tell, the epicentre is in a village called Nasseré, about 30 or 40km from Kongoussi, but it’s quickly spread throughout the province. This weekend, they were giving shots to people at the market (it was the vignt-et-un, the major market that’s held every three weeks, to which tons of people from all over the province come to Kongoussi. And, according to my neighbour, they’ve started distributing shots at the schools, too. Luckily, Peace Corps gave me a shot for meningitis back when I arrived in Burkina, or at least I’m hoping they did.
I’m trying to get my “formations informatiques” going again at the cybercafé down the road. It now sounds like Oscar, the guy who used to manage the place, is definitely not coming back. But there are still people interested in the classes, and I think I’ve finally convinced the woman who’s now running the place that the classes are a good idea.
It cooled off quite a bit this week. After two weeks of plus-100 temperatures, the Harmatan winds I’ve been hearing about for so long arrived. There was one day last week when it was really windy all day - I’d guess sustained speeds of around 15mph, but with some strong (maybe 40mph?) gusts - enough to knock over the wooden table on my front porch. And since it hasn’t rained in about four months, all the roads are dry and dusty. So with the wind, everything just became a mess - while sitting in my house, I frequently had to take my glasses off and wipe the layer of dust off of them.
In case anyone has been sending things to Ouaga, I haven’t been there in about a month, but am heading down there this Friday. We have in-service training - Peace Corps brilliantly abbreviates this conference to IST, which is the French equivalent of the English acronym STD, thus causing people to look at me weird when they see “IST” sprawled across my calendar for a week - and this from the guy promoting legalizing prostitution!