Final Post? Yeah, Probably

Bonjour tout le monde. Well, I haven’t been very good about updating my blog, but I doubt that’ll really surprise any of you who know me. (For those of you who don’t know me… I’m a bit of a slacker, especially when it comes to keeping in touch with people.) This’ll be my third substantive post in the span of a year – and also, I suspect, my last. You wouldn’t guess it from the short “Previous Posts” list on the side of the page, but I’ve actually been in Burkina Faso for well over two years now, and I’m down to the last few days. I’m planning on leaving Kongoussi on October 9, at which point I’ll head to Ouaga to spend a few tedious days filling out the mandatory Peace Corps paperwork. October 12 is my official COS (close of service) date. After that, I’m no longer officially Peace Corps volunteer – from then until October 30, when I fly back to America, I’m just some random American bumming around West Africa.

Computers and Caisses

When I arrived at the caisse (credit union) back in October 2005, they owned two computers, and only two or three people regularly used them (or knew how to). Now, two years later, there are at least a dozen computers (including several laptops brought to Burkina by my parents, Abby, and my friend Brian). And despite the fact that only two of the four main branches (and none of our roughly 20 smaller points of service) have electricity, all the accounting for the union is now done electronically. When I arrived, all the savings and credit records were kept by hand. They still are (for logistical purposes as much as anything), but there are redundant computerized copies, allowing them to quickly and easily generate reports and aggregate figures.
The arrival of the digital age at URCBAM (that’s the name of the credit union) has raised the need for technology-related education and training. This is where I come in. Over the past two years, I’ve tried to help the caisse incorporate technology into their operations. This has involved both technical training as well as some longer-term strategic planning. Here are two examples that have kept me busy the past two months:
At the end of August, I led a three-day long training session on Microsoft Excel. The accountants from the four COOPECs (branches – Coopérative d’Epargne et de Crédit, if you really want to know) attended, and got a lot out of the training. All of them already use Excel to some extent, but had only a very basic knowledge of the software or how they could use it. My training helped them not only to master Excel, but also to see different ways in which they could use it in their work. I followed-up on this training by helping two of the accountants redesign their accounting systems to better use Excel. And the training received a lot of positive feedback, so two weeks later, I repeated it for the branch managers and department heads from the main credit union office.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve also been working with the caisse to develop a comprehensive data backup system. While the caisse has eagerly embraced technology over the past two years, they still haven’t yet come to terms with all the implications of this change. For instance, it’s taken several painful and costly events for them to realize that even if you store your data on a computer instead of on paper, it can still be lost. While this probably seems very obvious to you, it took several failed data recovery efforts for the caisse to really learn this lesson. But we’ve now developed a pretty reliable data backup plan – it’s simple (every Friday, everyone is responsible for backing up their computer to an external hard drive, which is then stored in the caisse’s fireproof safe), but it works, and will no doubt save countless hours of redundant work in the future.

Cybercafe, but without the Cyber part. Also, there’s no food.

I think it was more than two years ago, while Giorgio and I were sitting around bored in Minima one day, that we first decided we should start a cybercafé. As we developed the idea over the next few months, it seemed brilliant – Ouahigouya had a huge demand for Internet access, but only two reliable cybercafés (which usually had lines of people waiting to use the computers). We planned to build a cybercafé at a high school in town. This would allow us to take advantage of a subsidized Internet connection rate from the state-owned telecom, and offer a reduced rate or free access to students at the high school. When students weren’t using it, the public would be able to, providing the revenue for the cybercafé to cover its costs.
About three months ago, a German foundation (the Stern Stuart Foundation) agreed to fund the initial costs of the project – buying computers, setting up the Internet connection, etc. Meanwhile, the high school’s APE (like the PTA) constructed a building to use for the cybercafé. About two months ago, we started purchasing all the equipment we needed. Everything was going perfectly.
Internet access in Burkina is terribly expensive. Outside of Ouaga and Bobo (where there are several dial-up providers and, as of a year ago, DSL in the rich neighborhoods), the only access available is through Onatel (originally the state-owned telecom, it’s just been privatized). Dial-up access starts at about $40/month, plus around $2/hour you’re connected. The only high-speed option (aside from satellite) is something called the “Liaison Specialisée”, generally called LS. You may be asking, what exactly is LS? I, too, had the same question and naively decided to ask Onatel, foolishly thinking they might actually know. Despite talking to half a dozen people, no one could really explain to me exactly how it worked. But they did tell me what equipment they would provide if we got an LS connection, what additional equipment we would need to buy, and how much it would all cost. Unfortunately, each of the half dozen people I talked to answered each of these questions differently. After several discussions between Giorgio, me, the principal at the high school, and several people at various levels at the Onatel main office, these questions remained unresolved.
But last week the principal assured us that the price had been worked out, and we started to get something resembling a consensus from Onatel about what equipment we needed. Although the connection wouldn’t be setup for a few weeks (it involves a lot of physical wiring), the principal asked us to go ahead and start setting the cybercafé up – since we’re both leaving in October, this would be our last chance.
I arrived in Ouahigouya last Wednesday, knowing about our Internet problem, but still cautiously optimistic that we’d be able to set everything up to the point where someone would just have to plug our router into the mysterious LS connection when it arrived. But this is Burkina, and things went wrong even before stepping foot into the cybercafé building. First, the high school’s guard (who’s responsible for maintaining all the keys) had lost the cybercafé key. Once we found it, and hiked through the overgrown thorn patch surrounding the building, we discovered that the handle to the door was not properly attached, making the door nearly impossible to open. As we started turning on the computers to begin configuring them… the power went out. Apparently, when the state-owned electric company wired the building, they put in a much weaker connection than we had asked for, leaving us with only enough power to run 2-3 computers at the same time (in a lab of 8 workstations plus a server). Also, the fancy new server we bought (all the other machines were used) spontaneously rebooted every few minutes. And when it rained that day, lots of water leaked into the building. However, after two days and a lot of work, we got things running okay. I pinpointed the server rebooting issue to a bad power supply, which we were able to replace. The electric company just had to flip a switch somewhere, which suddenly started giving us ample power. So now, finally, we have a pretty good cybercafé, except for the lack of Internet access at it.

Minima

Omar and I returned to Minima a few weeks ago (Giorgio was planning to come, too, but, ironically, was struck sick beforehand). Unfortunately, my host father was not in village, and the two older sons in the family were out in the fields. These were the only three people in my host family who spoke anything resembling French, so after I exhausted my thirty-word Mooré vocabulary with my host mother, there wasn’t much left to talk about.
Both Omar and I were struck by the fact that, although much remains the same in Minima, there have been a lot of changes. Omar’s host father built a new house for his family – this one out of concrete instead of mud brick – which, thanks to a complicated battery setup, even has an electric light. Giorgio’s host father now had a cell phone, and my host family now has a motorcycle (two years ago, their only methods of transportation were a bicycle and a donkey). The village had a new school building, and several new teachers. And the road into town is being repaired (not paved, of course, but the giant chasms that make several parts impassable are being filled in), and there’s even regular transport now. Furthermore, there is far more available at the market now than there was two years ago – although there were still only one or two women selling vegetables, they had a much larger selection now. They were selling things like tomatoes and cucumber – and there was even fresh bread available – two years ago, we had to stockpile these items whenever we biked into Gourcy. So although I was disappointed not to be able to see most of my host family, the trip was pretty positive overall.

We’re going to party like it’s 9/10, 9:09

So… what’s left for me now? I’m leaving Kongoussi on October 9, and until then, I’m going to be pretty busy saying goodbye to people. In Burkina, it’s customary to throw a farewell dinner for yourself if you’re leaving town. I’m throwing three of them, each for a very different crowd.
Thursday night is my villageois party, primarily for about 50-60 people I’ve worked with on savings and credit clubs. We’re going to kill and cook a nice lamb, and serve a bunch of rice and sauce with it. Since most of my villageois friends are Muslim, there won’t be any dolo (millet beer) served, just zoom-koom (a fairly bland drink made from millet flour and sugar). Pretty much any conversation at this event (and any farewell speech I might be obliged to give) will be in Mooré (this will keep my speech pretty short), since aside from me, there will probably only be one French speaker present.
Friday night is my caisse party, for about 15-20 people I work with at my credit union. For this party, we’ll go to one of the nicer restaurants in town and feast on grilled chicken, French fries, salad, and probably some rice. The meal will be accompanied by Burkina’s finest beers (both of them), and possibly even a box or two of wine; the conversation will be in French.
Saturday night is my “American dinner”, for people from my English club, English classes, and the students I’ve tutored in English. This’ll be at my house, and I’m going to try to cook some sort of American dish for everyone. I’m planning chili – most of the ingredients are easy to find here, plus it’s something that should be amenable to the Burkinabé palate – but don’t yet know what else I’ll serve with it – the leading candidate is either pasta salad or hot dogs. This meal will be accompanied by Coca-Cola and imported beer (some generic version of Heineken). I’m telling everyone who comes that they have to speak English at this dinner, but I’m sure many of them will revert back to French or Mooré when they’re not speaking to me.
There’s one complicating factor I’ve had to take into effect for all three of these parties. We’re currently in the middle of Ramadan, so just about every Muslim in town (and a lot of Catholics, for some reason) is fasting during the day – no food, not even water, from sunrise until sunset. So all my parties are scheduled to begin right around 6:15 or 6:30 in the evening, the second the sun disappears. On the plus side, no matter how badly I prepare the food for the American dinner, I know it’ll get eaten. And in addition to these parties, most of my other nights will be spent taking individuals out for dinner or a beer to say goodbye.
Although I don’t leave town until Tuesday, this Friday is my last day of work at the caisse. After fête-ing all weekend, Sunday and Monday will be spent packing and tidying up my house a bit. Peace Corps makes us arrange our own transport when we leave our sites (many volunteers end up tossing all their things onto the back of the first pickup truck or lorry to come through town), but there’s a Peace Corps car passing through Kongoussi on Tuesday, which I plan to commandeer.

One down, eighty-four to go…

When I leave Kongoussi, my first destination is Ouagadougou, where I’ll spend a few days filling out my COS (close of service) paperwork. There are several reports I need to submit, documenting what exactly I’ve been doing here for the past two years. Peace Corps has helpfully given me an 85-item checklist of what I need to do before I COS (which happens officially on October 12). Among the items I must check off are such helpful descriptions as “127-C Forms Received”, “Design. Of Travel (MS284B)”, and “Final DOS to IRC”. So that sure sounds like it’ll be a fun couple of days!
A few days after that, probably around the 14th or 15th of October, I’m heading down to Ghana for a week or week and a half with Audrie. I’ll sit on the beach, not have to speak a single word of French, and forget all the silly PC acronyms I’ve been using for the past two years. Then I’ll come back to Burkina for a few days before flying out on October 30. And sometime in there, I’ll probably head back to Ouahigouya to make sure our cybercafé has somehow magically been connected to the Internet.

The Future

No, no, I’m not writing about my own future here. After I arrive back in America at the end of October, I have no idea what’s next for me (aside from tickets to a Packer game on Nov. 11 – if their current streak continues, they should be about 10-0 by that point).
I’ll start with a bit about Kongoussi’s future. After I leave, Kongoussi’s American population will remain steady, and double within two months. Anna, a PCV who lives about 40km from here and is one of my two American neighbors, is extending her PC service for a third year. She’ll spend that third year here in Kongoussi, working with Plan (an American-funded NGO) on some health projects. And I will be replaced by a new SED (small enterprise development) volunteer – the new group of volunteers arrives in Burkina to begin training this week, and my successor will arrive in Kongoussi in December. He/she will also be paired with my credit union, and will hopefully continue a lot of the things I started, both at URCBAM and in the community.
There are several questions I’m dreading hearing when I return home. First, of course, is the generic “So how’s Africa?” to which I’ll probably reply with an equally generic “it’s hot”. I’m also dreading the inevitable questions about what I’m going to do next with my life: work, go back to school, etc. That question has been coming up a lot recently, and I still don’t have an answer. And of course, there’ll be the questions like “Are you glad you spent two years in Burkina.” Yes, I’m definitely glad I spent these two years here. It’s been a fascinating experience in many ways, and has opened my eyes to people and a part of the world about which I previously knew nothing.
Finally, I’m anticipating a lot of questions like “Was it worth it?” or “Did you really make a difference there?” And that’s a difficult question to answer. The easy answer is simply “No” – after all, in the big scheme of things, my impact here has been pretty negligible. And there really isn’t any quantifiable data I can use to say I’ve somehow made a difference here. The best I can manage is some anecdotal evidence – a bunch of people at the caisse have a better understanding of Excel; several of the students in my English club / class passed their Bac (in the Francophone educational system that’s the big test at the end of high school) with high marks in English – scores around 16 or 17 (that’s really good – like an A); etc. But I really can’t say that anyone’s standard of living has been improved because of anything I’ve done, or that because of me, or even Peace Corps in general, poverty is any less of a problem in Burkina. However, that doesn’t really bother me at all. I did what I could do, and am perfectly happy with that.
Moreover, I remain quite optimistic about Burkina’a future (and, by extension, the future of Africa as a whole). Although it will be a long time before the country can escape its crippling poverty, there are definitely continual signs of positive change. One of the most encouraging, in my opinion, is the rapid growth of the cell phone industry. Cell phone service arrived in Kongoussi the same year I did, and within those two years, phones have become nearly ubiquitous here. Even going back to Minima, I was surprised by how many phones the village now had. And until you’ve been here and experienced life in Burkina, it’s hard to really appreciate how significantly cell phones change things. In somewhere like Minima, there is almost no infrastructure – there are no land lines, no Internet connections, no mail service, no connection to the world outside village – before cell phones arrived two or three years ago, you had to bike 45 minutes to Gourcy to use a phone or mail a letter. Now, for example, my host father (who’s a tailor) can call fabric suppliers in Gourcy, Ouahigouya, and Ouagadougou, determine which has the best prices on the products he needs, and have them shipped to Gourcy. In the past, he’d have had to buy bus tickets to both places and spend several days checking with vendors before buying what he needed, spending a lot more time and money in the process.
Burkina is also slowly realizing its economic potential. Unfortunately, this country lacks many natural resources, but they’re learning to make the best with what they do have. Kongoussi’s principal resource is its lake. And market gardening projects, irrigated by the lake, are constantly growing and expanding (I wrote about this a lot in my last blog entry). When I arrived, Kongoussi already had a successful vegetable export industry, supplying green beans to France. In the past two years, they’ve begun exporting to Italy, too, as well as supplying tomatoes to canneries in Ghana. When I arrived, the entire 100km between Kongoussi and Ouaga was unpaved – now, it’s about 2/3 paved, and should be finished within a year, which cut the travel time in half – and make it a lot easier to ship fresh vegetables directly to a refrigerated airplane in Ouaga.
Microfinance is also having an ever-increasing effect on the economy. Microfinance credit unions have extended basic financial services to the 90% of the population who can’t get these services from a traditional bank. And these loans, as small as a few dollars, can be enough to help small entrepreneurs start or expand a business. A $50 loan in November, invested in tomato seeds and fertilizer, can yield $150 in April when the tomatoes are harvested and sent to Ghana. Before microfinance arrived, this sort of small investment was virtually impossible; now, it’s happening everywhere. And that $100 profit may not seem like a lot, but it’s huge to a family living off $400/year – it’s enough to send several kids to school for the year, or enough to buy life-saving malaria medicine, or perhaps enough to invest in some new land, seeds, or fertilizer for next year’s tomato crop.
The key to all of these changes is not increased aid from western countries. Certainly, that sort of aid helps quite a bit, but aid alone will never transform the Burkinabé economy. The cell phone revolution has occurred because of commercial investment – the cell towers weren’t built by USAID, nor did the UN give away free cell phones. Instead, private African companies (well, Onatel was still publicly-held when they began building a cellular infrastructure) built the towers and marketed their services towards the population here. Burkinabé were quick to discover the potential benefits of wireless communication and used their own money to buy phones. Likewise, microfinance institutions like URCBAM are self-sustaining. There’s no western aid agency pumping money into the credit union; rather, the union’s funding comes from the savings and loan interest contributed by its members.
Many of the market gardening projects here in Kongoussi received their initial capital from external donors (including the Friends of Burkina Faso, an American group composed primarily of former Peace Corps Volunteers), and this is undeniably a good use of foreign aid. With a few thousand dollars in capital, these projects are able to put in place the infrastructure and management not only to grow and export vegetables, but also to perform regular maintenance on their equipment, plan for depreciation, and make the project sustainable in the long-run.
I guess there are two main points I want to get across here. First, I think the rest of the world tends to look on Africa as being something of a hopeless, lost cause, doomed to poverty. Although my experience here is limited to just two years and mostly to Burkina Faso, I don’t find the situation at all hopeless. On the contrary, there’s an extraordinary amount of untapped potential here, and things are gradually changing, albeit at a frustratingly slow pace.
Second, we as Americans can certainly help to improve things in places like Burkina, but foreign aid isn’t the only way to do this, as aid money can only do so much. One of the great things about Peace Corps is that, instead of pushing funding, it emphasizes capacity building – several NGOs have given my caisse new computers, but no NGO has ever made the effort to train the caisse’s employees how to use them. Sending money to Africa can certainly help, but it’s equally important to send along the training and education necessary to appropriately use those funds – this is why I’m going to be heading back to Ouahigouya sometime between COSing and going home – to make a few people at the high school on how to manage the network I set up.
And finally, American and European agricultural subsidies continue to cause irreparable damage to the economies of countries like Burkina. As I’ve said, Kongoussi exports a lot of green beans – they’re sent to France and Italy, where they’re marketed under a free trade brand name. However, despite the fact that green beans are produced far cheaper in Kongoussi than in France (even when you factor in transport costs), the demand for Burkinabé beans is severely limited, because French green bean farmers receive generous government subsidies – meaning they’re sold to consumers at a lower price than the imported beans. If the French slowly eliminated their subsidies (and reinvested even a fraction of that money into improving agricultural infrastructure in countries like Burkina), the vegetable export market here would grow dramatically. A far better example is cotton, which is Burkina’s primary export crop, by far. Unfortunately, American subsidies have severely depressed the world cotton market, and in the past few years, Burkina’s cotton industry has begun to dry up – there’s so little profit in it now that many farmers are no longer growing it here. If the United States were to eliminate cotton subsidies, the impact would be far, far, far greater in several west African countries than all the American aid money spent here. (Not to mention eliminating the irony that the United States, while clinging to protectionist policies domestically, has constantly forced free market and free trade practices on countries in Africa and around the world.)
Anyways, that’s the end of my little tirade. Just a few more days left in Kongoussi… see you all soon!

Less than three months left!

Hello everyone,

It's currently sometime after midnight, and I'm killing time at the Peace Corps office (and enjoying its air-conditioning), waiting for my sister's flight to arrive (she gets in at 2:30am). So I thought I'd take advantage of this opportunity to let you know what I've been up to the past few months.

I continue to keep busy with savings and credit clubs -- I've got about eight of them going, three of which aren't in Kongoussi but in neighboring villages. To give you an example of how these clubs actually benefit their members: one group is involved in market gardening. They have a large crop of onions that they harvested in May. They wanted to use the profits from selling those onions to buy seeds to start a new gardening project (watermelons) in June. But now, with the savings and credit club, they're able to buy the seeds on credit, and save the onions until August or September, when the market price is at least double what it is now.

I've also started teaching English classes. They're twice a week in the evenings, designed for adults who want to improve their English. I regularly have about 6 or 7 students, and they're a pretty fun group. We spend Tuesdays doing grammar and vocab (I've learned way more about English grammar than I ever did before -- mostly how inconsistent it is) and spend Thursdays working with specific texts. We spent three weeks reading a magazine article about genetically modified organisms (at their request), and before that, spent a few weeks on a Roald Dahl short story (Lamb to the Slaughter). One of my students is taking the TOEFL in a few weeks -- I'll be interested to see how he does.

I'm still doing computer training with several friends around town. I had hoped to do another computer camp at the high school this summer, but don't think that'll work, because, oddly enough, I don't think I'll be able to find time for it. I have several computer trainings scheduled at the credit union where I work, mostly training the branch accountants and cashiers on how to use Excel (although I don't quite understand why I'm training people from all the branches, as only two of the four have electricity and thus computers).

And I think our cybercafe in Ouahigouya is finally coming together. We've now secured funding, so sometime in the next month or so we'll buy everything we need in Ouaga and somehow transport it back to Ouahigouya, then set it up and start training the staff.

Things are winding down. With Abby coming, I'm going to be traveling around for the next three weeks. After that is a week-long Peace Corps COS (close of service) conference in Ouaga, and after that I really only have about two months left in Kongoussi. Still not really sure what I'm going to do after that -- I'll keep you posted. (Well, probably not, considering how often I update this blog.)

A la prochaine...

Photos

Some pictures from Brian's visit to Burkina: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bjackrian/sets/72157600028184512/detail/

Beans and Travel

March 21, 2007

Today I’m going to be blogging ‘bout the bourgeoning Bamoise bean business. Kongoussi (and the rest of the province of Bam) is the center of Burkina’s green bean industry, and over the past two months I’ve spent some time seeing the green bean harvest in action, and I find it fairly interesting, so I’m going to write about it here. For those of you who are unimaginative and fail to see the inherent excitement in discussing green bean production and export, you can skip ahead to the more mundane parts of this blog entry, such as the part where my parents and I were nearly charged by a herd of wild elephants. Also, by popular demand, I’m trying to include a few more pictures in this entry to jazz things up a little bit. [I'm also using the "new, improved Blogger" for the first time, which seems to be roughly the same, except that it insists that I speak Italian, which makes it a little more difficult to navigate the site. I would understand if it gave me a French interface - but Italian? As Gob would say, Come On!]

Haricots, Haricots, les Fruits Magiques

As you may recall from a recent, critically-acclaimed cinematic masterpiece about Kongoussi (see my previous entry if you don’t recall this), the city is located on a lake (Lake Bam). Running the entire length of the lake’s shores are small parcels of irrigated farmland. Several crops are grown in these fields – carrots, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, onions. But all of these crops are sold locally – except for green beans, which are this area’s only exported cash crop (not entirely true – I recently learned that we also export some tomatoes to Ghana – but green beans are the only thing we export to Europe). Green beans are big money around here – during the green bean harvest (January – March), they dictate a lot of people’s schedules – I regularly have meetings postponed or cancelled because the people I’m supposed to meet with are busy down at their field, picking beans.

So here’s how the process works. Most of the fields along the lake are owned and operated by small associations of local farmers. For example, an association might have 50 farmers, and each farmer is given 10x50 meters of the association’s land. All of the land is irrigated by a large system of pumps and pipes – in Kongoussi, most of the irrigation system was paid for by the German government. I don’t think any of the irrigation systems in the area were actually paid for by Burkinabé – they’ve all been funded by European or American governments and NGOs. The associations (whose money generally comes from the dues of its members) are usually responsible for the maintenance costs of the irrigation systems – in Kongoussi, this usually means paying the electric company for the power needed to run the pumps; in more remote locations the association buys the gasoline necessary to run the pumps.

During the harvest, which begins in January and tapers off into March, people are constantly in their fields. First, they pick the beans off the plants. After picking the beans comes the more tedious task of quality control – individually inspecting each bean to make sure it doesn’t have any holes in it, or any bugs living in it, and making sure they’re the right size (beans that are too small or too big are the ones that they usually keep for themselves to eat). Since the beans are for export to Europe, all the rules on quality control are dictated by some unseen entity back in France.

There’s a large cooperative of green beans growers based in Kongoussi, called SCO-BAM. Every few days, a refrigerated truck comes up from Ouaga and parks outside the SCO-BAM building. On these days, everyone brings their beans to the cooperative and sells them. The going rate is 300CFA (about 60 cents) for 1 kilo of green beans – which works out to about 25-30 cents per pound. Once the truck is full, it heads back to Ouaga, and the beans are loaded on a plane that night, shipped directly to France, where they’re sold in supermarkets. As of this year, a lot of beans are also being shipped to Italy, where they’re being sold under the fair trade brand “Terra Equa”. Interestingly, Terra Equa’s web site says Burkinabé growers earn 80 euro-cents (about 525CFA or $1.05) per kilo for beans, despite the fact that all the farmers I’ve talked to say they make 300CFA per kilo.

So although 60 cents per kilo may not sound like much, it’s a lot of money around here. Except for a few areas in the south of Burkina, Kongoussi (and the surrounding villages) is the only place in Burkina that exports green beans, and they form a significant part of the local economy. Kongoussi has a population of about 25,000 – the green bean cooperative has about 6,000 members, which can give you some sense of the size of the industry here. At any rate, if you find yourself at a supermarket in France or Italy anytime soon, be sure to buy some green beans!

Traveling with the Parents

Back in January, my parents came to Burkina for two weeks. It was good to see the parents again, and was also fun to be able to be a tourist for a bit and see some parts of Burkina that I wouldn’t have gone to (or been able to afford to visit) on my own.

[First picture: this is where we stayed in Oursi.]

Their trip began with a day in Ouaga, mostly spent exploring the large urban park in the center of town, where Mom and Dad drooled over all the exotic birds. Then we went up to Kongoussi for a day – they got to see a bit of the town, meet a bunch of people. Feeling adventurous (and socially obligated in the situation), they even tried tô, the ground millet dish that, while the staple of the Burkinabé diet, is not exactly a culinary treat (nor is it particularly gentle on an unaccustomed digestive system). They also got a tour of the town – seeing the market, the credit union where I work, etc., and met some friends from my English club (who are always on the prowl for English speakers).

[Second picture: my parents, somewhere in the sand dunes of the Sahel desert. I love the cell phone tower in the background.]

After Kongoussi, our next destination was the Sahel, specifically a small village named Oursi in the very north of Burkina. We stayed at a small campement there, spending the nights inside a Tuareg hut. (The Tuaregs are one of the main ethnic groups that live in the Sahelian parts of Burkina – they are traditionally a nomadic people, so their huts are built of portable straw mats, unlike the more stationary mud-brick huts that are the norm elsewhere in Burkina -- see the first picture) While staying in Oursi, we rented camels and rode them out to the sand dunes, where we then hiked around for awhile. The sand dunes are amazing, though – they have a very Sahara-esque feel. Oursi is also home to an archeological dig (a large part of which was funded by the American government) and museum, which we spent an afternoon exploring. The site was essentially a village, from about the tenth century, which had been destroyed and burned by some unknown invader. It was fascinating to hear the explanations of how they figured various things out about the people who used to live there, and also kind of disturbing how similar their living conditions were to the people who still inhabit the area today. And, of course, Oursi is also a birding hot-spot – home to a large lake, where my parents spent a bunch of time staring off at who-knows-what with their binoculars.

[Third picture: My dad riding a camel. I hope this goes out on their Christmas cards next year.]

The other major destinations we visited were two national parks in the southeast corner of Burkina. The first is called W, and is actually a giant park spanning three countries: Burkina, Benin, and Niger. We stayed at a lodge in the park – right along the border – and used that as a base for animal watching day trips. There were tons of antelope, buffalo, something I’d never heard of called, I believe, a dyker, various baboons and monkeys, hippos, and a whole bunch of other assorted animals – our guide didn’t speak English, which sometimes made it a bit difficult to figure out what the animal off in the distance was that he was pointing to. Every morning, as we ate our breakfast, we watched baboons in a tree across the river eating their breakfast. And at night, we could hear lions making noise off in the distance.

[Fourth picture: My mom and Abga, our guide at W National Park.]

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any elephants at W. So we decided to spend a day going through a neighboring park, Arly, where the odds were much better of seeing some elephants. We arrived at the park about lunchtime, and stopped at the village that’s the entrance to the park. As we sat on a bench outside the guard station eating our lunch, a bunch of kids from the village came and started watching us eat (this is very normal – especially in more rural, remote areas, nothing seems to fascinate kids like sitting around and watching foreigners). Meanwhile, as the kids gazed intently at us, we were busy watching the large baboon who kept inching closer and closer to us. The kids kept asking us to give them our water bottle (which we eventually did), while the baboon was clearly eyeing our food (and our guide eventually tossed him some – so much for not feeding the animals). I found the whole thing very amusing just because for these village kids, seeing a baboon from ten feet away was nothing extraordinary, but seeing white people from ten feet away was. Anyways, after a little while driving around the park, we saw an elephant off in the distance, and got out and took the mandatory pictures. A few hours later, we stumbled onto an entire herd. However, initially we didn’t realize how big the herd was, so our driver stopped almost as soon as we saw them. This proved to be a mistake, as there were
some baby elephants in the herd, and the overprotective alpha male grew suspicious of this large SUV. So this large elephant began to approach us, waving its ears (which apparently is a sign that the elephant senses danger and is preparing to charge), and our guide frantically yelled at our driver to go, which he wisely did.

[Fifth picture: the baboon who came surprisingly close to us to try and steal our lunch. Not pictured: the children who were far more interested in seeing us than the baboon.]

And that, more or less, was my trip with my parents. We also spent a bit of time in Ouaga – found some souvenirs, took advantage of the swimming pool at the embassy, etc. They both seemed to enjoy their time here, and my mom especially seems pretty intent on trying to come back sometime or, save that, at least keeping in touch with some of the people she met here.

Traveling with Brian


Speaking of traveling around Burkina, my friend Brian from Pomona visited recently. His visit began with the obligatory trip to Kongoussi, including a tour of town (including the exciting green bean fields!) and taking tea with a friend of mine.

[Sixth picture: The Cascades]

Our next destination was Boromo, a town that marks the halfway point between Ouaga and Bobo. The city itself is nothing special, but we spent a day visiting a national park just outside of town. The Deux Balé Reserve is one of the best places in Burkina for seeing elephants (and the most easily accessible one – when my parents came, we rented a car and driver to visit the parks – but for Brian the med student and Chris the Peace Corps volunteer, renting a car was a bit out of our price range). We arrived mid-afternoon, and spent about an hour wandering around with a guide looking for some animals, but didn’t really see anything. The next morning we tried again, this time stumbling upon a dead cobra, then a large group of red monkeys running by in the distance, and finally, a herd of about a dozen elephants. Unlike when I’d been with my parents, we were on foot, with no car to jump into, so we tried to keep a reasonable distance between ourselves and the herd, especially given the fact that there were some young-uns in there. But the cool thing at Boromo was that we spent about an hour just following the herd, watching them eat and do whatever else it is that elephants do.


From Boromo, we went southwest towards Banfora. I’d never been to Banfora before, and was amazed by how green everything was down there. Kongoussi hasn’t had rain in about five months at this point, but clearly Banfora has. We borrowed some bikes from a few Peace Corps volunteers down there, and biked about 10km or 15km to the famous Cascades – a large waterfall. The waterfall was pretty cool – it had several different levels, and you could climb around the rocks and really get as close to any part of the waterfall as you wanted. From there, we walked to the Domes – the other big tourist draw in the Banfora area. The Domes are these huge rock formations – like the Cascades, you can just wander around on them, slowly climbing up to the top. The pictures I’m including here hardly do justice, mostly because you don’t get a real appreciation for their size. However, in one of these pictures, if you look closely, you can see a guy riding by on a bike, which should give you some sense of scale.

[Last two pictures: the Domes, near Banfora. The second one has a guy on a bike to the right of the large rock in the middle.]

From Banfora, it was back to Ouaga, where we visited the obligatory Artisan Village and embassy swimming pool, as well as going to Sunday mass at the Catholic cathedral in Ouaga – a place I’d never been before. The architecture of the cathedral was interesting – it was very clearly a cathedral, with large columns, statues of Mary, some buttresses – but it was also very African, with a roof of corrugated metal and a bizarre pink paint job. The cathedral was packed with people (and there were more outside), and yet among the hundreds of people there, we saw maybe half a dozen other white people – one of whom was the priest celebrating the mass.

Other Travels

So in addition to traveling with Brian and with my parents, in February I went and visited three other volunteers (Kara, Anna, and Leslie) that live near me – they’ve all been to Kongoussi before (two of them come pretty regularly), and I finally went and visited their villages (ostensibly, at least with Leslie’s village, to do a training on savings and credit clubs). Seeing their villages certainly gave me an appreciation for Kongoussi (which is definitely not a village), as well as for how different their living situations are from mine. Leslie and Anna are both health volunteers, and I got to help them with baby weighings, which are pretty chaotic – a group of maybe 60 women, all with at least one baby, in a space maybe 20x20 feet, all pushing to the front to try and get their baby weighed. There’s no concept here of forming an orderly line – the chaos gave it an almost refugee-camp feel. My job at both places was to write down the measurements while Leslie and Anna actually weighed the kids and handled all the communication (in Mooré) with the women. And despite the fact that I wasn’t actually handling the babies, a lot of them still managed to pee on me – “yeah, I never wear clean clothes on baby weighing day,” Leslie casually mentioned to me after the fact.

I also spent a weekend in Ouahigouya with Giorgio and David (two volunteers based in Ouahigouya) entertaining a group of three Germans whose foundation has just agreed to fund the cybercafé we’re starting at a high school there. This is exciting news, as we’ve been trying to get this cybercafé started for about a year and a half. I also went down to Ouaga for the end of Fespaco, the biennial African film festival, and managed to catch a few movies, including Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland, although both were disappointingly dubbed into French. (Blood Diamond’s “TIA” became “CCA” in French – Ca C’est l’Afrique.) And I went back to the U.S. for three weeks at the end of November, which was a nice little break from Burkina, as well as a golden opportunity to stock up on Skittles.

And Whatever Else

So this blog entry makes it look like I haven’t really spent any time in Kongoussi in awhile, which is not the case – it’s just that I haven’t blogged anything in several months. In fact, there was even a short period of time when I was suddenly prohibited from traveling – right before Christmas, when the police and military started fighting each other on the streets of Ouaga – which, luckily, blew over quickly. However, nothing terribly exciting has been happening recently in Kongoussi. Since coming back from America, I’ve been on a push to setup some savings and credit clubs – I’ve gotten at least seven new ones started, including one with some men, which is more-or-less unheard of. The hot season has finally started – I think it snuck in while I was traveling with Brian. The temperature is now regularly reaching 45 or 46 (113-115) on my thermometer in the shade during mid-day, and the harmattan winds that have been keeping things cool for the past few months have finally subsided. And I have about two or three solid months of this to look forward to. I’m starting to plan a few final projects before leaving in September. I’d like to do another computer camp at the high school this summer, which I’m starting to formulate the details of. And I’ve had several requests from friends in Kongoussi to teach some sort of English night classes, so I think I’m going to try to get started on that in the coming weeks. I still don’t have any idea what I’m going to do when I’m done with Peace Corps – I’ll leave Kongoussi around the end of September or early October. I’ll probably travel a bit at that point, and try to be home in time for Thanksgiving, and then… well, if you know anyone who’s hiring (or if you have a nice couch that’s going unused…), send me an e-mail.

And the Oscar goes to...

I just uploaded my Burkina video to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1Pb7hlIWw

USA, Here I Come

November 13, 2006

Hello again! Yikes, been awhile since I wrote anything here. I’ve been unusually busy the past few months, and am currently preparing to go home for three weeks for Thanksgiving. So here’s a brief (well, compared to my other posts) update on what I’ve been up to the past few months.

Way back in September, I led a computer camp at the high school in Kongoussi. I had twelve students – most of them were students at the high school, but there were also a few random people from the community who showed up. None of them had ever used a computer before, so we spent a lot of time just going over very basic things (like spending a very frustrating two hours explaining the concept of “Caps Lock”). But by the end of the two weeks, they’d all mastered the basics – they could do a lot of stuff in Word, and could a lot of the little programs that come with Windows, like Media Player and Paint. Most importantly, they’d become comfortable using computers. Like most Burkinabé (and people in general, I suppose) who’ve never used a computer, they were incredibly intimidated by the machines at first, but now would feel comfortable going to a cybercafé or the high school lab again to work on something. The most frustrating part for me was the condition of the computer lab – I suspect that there’s someone in France who sends four computers to this high school every four years. So they had four relatively new, Windows XP machines, four older Windows 98 machines, and a wide array of far older machines. The oldest date I was able to find on a piece of hardware was a black and white monitor from 1986.

A new group of Peace Corps trainees arrived in Burkina at the end of September, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with them. I communicated with several of them before they even arrived – Peace Corps gave out my e-mail address to all of them, so I spent much of September answering questions about what they should bring to Burkina. One of them asked me what sorts of things I always had shipped from people back in the U.S., and I told him Skittles – so he brought me a huge bag of Skittles. Several of them also read my blog before arriving, which was a little weird, since they knew an awful lot about me when they got here. One of them told me that after reading about my experiences during training, she had nightmares about coming. Ha ha.

Anyways, I spent the week after my computer camp in Ouaga, along with everyone else involved in training the newbies. The training is taking place in Ouahigouya, and every week they have two current volunteers (one health volunteer and one small enterprise development volunteer) there, helping to lead sessions. I somehow got selected to spend two weeks there, including the first week, when I was constantly bombarded with questions. I helped facilitate several training sessions, including one on microfinance in Burkina (I’m currently the only volunteer working directly with a microfinance institution, although four or five of the trainees will eventually be working with credit unions like mine) and one on ICT (information and communication technology).

After their first week in Burkina, the trainees spent four days visiting current volunteers, to get a bit of a feel for what we do and how we live. So I had a group of five come and stay with me in Kongoussi. I spent the four days showing them around town – touring the credit union and meeting everyone who works there, seeing the high school and meeting some people there, greeting various big-shots in town (the provincial governor, the mayor, the police chief, etc.), seeing my English club, and so on. Their favorite part was when the leaders of an animal-raising association I’m starting to work with came to my house and presented us with a gift of three live chickens. We took the chickens to a restaurant, where they grilled them in a delicious vinegar, garlic, and onion sauce.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time in Ouaga recently. I had to spend several days there for my mid-service physical. I’m surprisingly healthy for having spent a year here, with only one minor parasite showing up in one of the copious stool samples I had to submit. On the down side, I had to have a filling, but for some inexplicable reason, visiting a Burkinabé dentist was far less unpleasant than visiting an American one. I also spent a week in Ouaga for our mid-service training, which involved, among other things, a two hour visit and tour of the Ouagadougou landfill (where they do a lot of clever recycling and compost work – although we also got to tour the dump itself, and on a day when the wind was clearly working against us).

I also spent a weekend in Ouaga exploring SIAO, a week-long artisan / arts and crafts festival which bills itself as Africa’s largest. And it was pretty cool – I went three days in a row, and never got tired of it. Just about every type of African handicraft imaginable was available there, from wooden elephant carvings to Tuareg jewelry to batik prints to leather goods to cashew liquor (with free samples!). It was especially interesting to see things that came from other countries – you can really appreciate the variation in styles between items from Burkina and those from somewhere like Rwanda or Congo-Brazzaville or Algeria. I’ve always hated haggling for prices, which you have to do to buy anything more expensive than a tomato. But I got pretty good at it during SIAO, and by the end was getting some good deals. Of course, I still managed to spend several hundred dollars (keep in mind that Peace Corps only gives me about $200 a month), but I now have lots of cool gifts for people when I come home. SIAO was also cool just because it’s one of Ouaga’s two big festivals (the other, the FESPACO film festival, is this February), so there was food I’d never seen before in Burkina (cotton candy!), and a very relaxed, party-like atmosphere all weekend.

Last weekend, I returned to Minima, my training village, along with Giorgio and Omar, the two remaining volunteers from Minima. I managed to get a flat tire on the ride out, which Giorgio further destroyed while trying to patch, so we flagged down some kids passing by on a donkey-pulled cart, which we rode the last few kilometers into Minima. Everyone in the village was pretty excited to see us, and it was cool to see them again. It was also encouraging to see that a few things in the village had changed for the better – they now have transport twice a week, for instance. And my host family saved up enough money in the past year to buy a moped, so my host father can now get to Gourcy (the closest city) a lot faster than he could on his bike.

And that’s it. See? I told you I’d keep this blog entry short. I’m back in Kongoussi now, and I’m heading back to Ouaga in a few days, and then next Monday (a week from today!) I’m flying back to the U.S. for Thanksgiving and to take the Foreign Service Oral Exam. I’ll be there for about three weeks, arriving back in Burkina on Dec. 13. Also, assuming all goes well, there should be two photos with this blog post – one is me at the high school with the computer camp participants. The other is me with my gift chickens.

Summer Vacation

August 10, 2006
Bonjour tout le monde! Yes, despite the lack of new posts here for the past four months, I am still alive and doing well. July has been busy – I was out of Kongoussi almost the entire month, and although I’m finally back here, have a stream of visitors coming through, keeping me somewhat occupied. So, like several people in Kongoussi, you might be asking, where have I been all month? (Unlike several people in Kongoussi, though, you’re probably not asking what I brought you from those places – at least I hope not.) Abby (my sister – although I imagine most people reading this already know who she is…) came and visited, and we travelled around Burkina a bit and also spent a week in Ghana. And after that, I spent several days up in Djibo, working at a Girls’ Camp with some other Peace Corps Volunteers. So for those of you who enjoy skimming, in this blog entry I’m going to write about Abby’s trip, then Girls’ Camp, and then just some miscellaneous other stuff, like coming back to the U.S. this fall.
Abby flew into Ouaga on the 5th of July. Her flight came in around 8pm or so, and I think she managed to be the last person from her plane to leave the airport, so I spent a fun hour or two sitting outside the Ouagadougou airport. And although she was concerned ahead of time that I wouldn’t be meeting her inside the airport, she did manage to find me. (Despite being the only international airport in this country, Ouagadougou International isn’t exactly O’Hare – it more resembles a Greyhound station than an airport in both size and sketchiness.) From there, we went to our hotel – during these first two nights in Ouaga, we stayed at the Hotel Delwendé, which also bears a striking similarity to a Greyhound station (although I tried to describe it to Abby as "just like the Ritz.") On the plus side, the Delwendé is conveniently located in the center of Ouaga, and has a nice outdoor, second-floor terrace where you can sit and people-watch. After dropping stuff off at the hotel, we walked over to Kwame N’Krumah, probably the nicest street in Burkina Faso and got some food. On the way back to the hotel, Abby asked me if all of Burkina looked this "run down," to which I laughed, since we were walking through the nicest, most developed part of the country – the one neighbourhood where you won’t find mud-brick buildings. We spent the next day bumming around Ouaga – we went by the PC hostel and office, the Ghanaian embassy to pick up my visa (if you ever find yourself in the Ghanaian embassy in Ouagadougou, avoid the woman at the front desk – she’s very bitchy, and in both French and English), and just wandering around centre ville. After I mentioned that there was a swimming pool at the American Embassy, we went and spent the afternoon lounging around the pool.
Following our two nights in Ouaga, we came up to Kongoussi. After dropping stuff off at my house, we went and explored the marché, where Abby bought some pagnes (cool African fabric that’s usually in bright colors), which we took to two tailors I know in town to get made into pants and skirts. Somebody (hint: not me) kept complaining about the heat, so once we made it back to the house around 11am, we (although I wasn’t really the one making the decision) decided not to go out again for several hours, but to sit in front of the fan in my house instead. During the two days in Kongoussi, we did a fair amount – she got a nice tour of town, got to see the caisse’s new building (although, since it was a Friday afternoon, just about everyone had gone home for the weekend already), had some Cokes with Nicolas from my English Club, had a beer with a couple of guys from the caisse (and, as I recall, got a marriage proposal from one of them – the previous day, I had received a marriage proposal from the young woman sharing our cab in Ouaga), and got to see the lake and take some nice photos.
After out short stint in Kongoussi, it was down to Ouaga, to catch a bus for Ghana. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get tickets for the one air-conditioned bus which makes the trek between Ouaga and Kumasi (Ghana’s second biggest city, about five hours north of the coast), which meant we got to make the 20-hour bus ride in a non-A/C bus. (We took the A/C bus a week later when we went back to Ouaga, and I think I actually preferred the non-A/C bus, because it only left one hour late, whereas the A/C one left about five hours late, and the non-A/C one made fewer hour-long stops in random cities throughout Ghana.) July seems to be a popular time for Peace Corps volunteers to be visited by their sisters, and so on our trip to Ghana we were accompanied by another PCV, Tim, and his sister Mary, who was spending the last of her six weeks visiting Tim in Ghana.
The border crossing between Ghana and Burkina is not the most efficient operation. Before the border, you get off the bus, and have to give your passport to some random guy who happens to be standing at the bus door. Then the bus disappears, and after an hour or so, with your concern steadily increasing, you begin trying to find your bus. You then begin to panic, because your see that your bus is starting to leave, but you are neither on the bus nor in possession of your passport. Finally, at the last second, as the bus begins pulling away, you find another random guy who now has your passport for some reason (none of these people have any sort of uniform or nametag to make them seem official), and get it back from him, and then jump on the bus. At least, this was our experience – I’m not sure if this is how it’s supposed to work. And this was just to leave Burkina – the whole process was repeated on the other side of the border. Although at least on the Ghana side, you could inquire in English as to the whereabouts of the passport you haven’t seen in an hour. Coming back to Burkina is an even less pleasant experience – your passport disappears for a good solid two hours, instead of just one. Also, you have to haul all of your luggage off the bus, then stand around for an hour waiting for a Burkinabé douane to come and inspect your bag (one guy searches all the bags, which is frustrating, as you can see his partner just sitting in a chair twenty feet away, enjoying his fan while you bake in the sun). The only thing that makes it worthwhile is the kid selling FanChoco at the border – FanChoco, for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, is a bag of chocolate milk that’s been frozen – it’s sort of like a delicious hybrid between ice cream and a fudgesicle.
Anyways, after leaving Ouaga around nine (we arrived at the station sometime before eight) in the morning, we arrived in Kumasi about three the following morning. We had to make it to Takoradi (another five-hour bus ride away) by that evening, since we had reservations at a place on the coast called Green Turtle Lodge. After checking into a hotel at three in the morning, the four of us decided there would probably be an early morning bus to Takoradi, probably leaving around six or seven. So after a few short hours in the hotel (I took a shower, but didn’t bother trying to sleep), we went to the bus station, where we learned that we could have taken a 4 a.m. bus to Takoradi, and now had to wait for a 10:00 one. So we wandered around Kumasi a bit, got some breakfast, and watched the classic, Oscar-winning Rob Schneider film The Hot Chick, which happened to be showing at the restaurant. (Tragically, we had to leave before seeing the exciting and, I’m sure, thought-provoking conclusion to the film.) So at ten we piled onto another bus, but after the day-long ride the previous day, the five hours to Takoradi seemed pleasantly short. From Takoradi, we then had an hour or so cab ride to Green Turtle Lodge, which included our cabbie ditching is in one random town and handing us over to another cabbie there, for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear to me.
Green Turtle Lodge is an amazing place, and a perfect model of what eco-tourism could and should be. The place is located right on the Atlantic coast, about a mile down the beach from a small fishing village. The accommodations are small huts, designed to blend in with the surroundings – but with slightly nicer amenities, such as a shower, composting latrine, and solar panels on the roof to run the lights in your room. You can lie in bed in your hut, with the door open, and watch the waves crashing on the shore fifty feet in front of you – pretty cool. They also had some great food – lots of fresh fish, and plenty of French fries for Abby. We spent two nights there, and spent our full day lounging around the beach – swimming, Frisbee, walking, etc. All in all, a very relaxing place to stay.
After Green Turtle, we took a bus along the coast to Cape Coast, which is a very picturesque city. For several decades, Cape Coast was the center of the British colonial government, and the whole city if full of old colonial houses and offices – built a hundred years ago, and fairly neglected over the past fifty years, but very colourful and interesting nonetheless. The combination of the coast, the architecture, and the hills all over the city gave it a very pleasant feel, and we spent a lot of time just walking around the city. We also visited the Cape Coast Castle, located right along the coast, which was once a thriving embarkation point during the slave trade days. One of the nice things about the castle was that, unlike castles or historical buildings in Europe, we had free reign of the building, able to go wherever we wanted (there weren’t any roped-off areas or anything), and there weren’t too many tourists, so you could have an entire wing of the castle to yourself. On the downside, though, a door knob came off a door that I was trying to open, and after that, Abby kept blaming me for destroying a World Heritage Site.
Following two nights in Cape Coast, we took a bus (yay! more buses!) back to Kumasi, and spent a day there. We spent most of our day in Kumasi wandering around the market, which was unbelievable. I’ve never seen a market so large or so full of activity – there were so many people that we often didn’t really choose where we went, we just had to go wherever the crowd was going. And we kept doing this for hours, without ever hitting the same part of the market twice. Kumasi’s market also has several DVD vendors, and unlike the guys selling DVDs on the streets in Ouaga, these movies are in English. Also, they’re unbelievably cheap. For a mere 60,000 cédis, that’s about seven dollars, you can buy a DVD that contains nine of last year’s top Oscar winners. Unfortunately, these DVDs are not guaranteed to work (I don’t think my Oscar one worked, but the Harrison Ford collection one, complete with all three Indiana Jones movies, did).
Overall, Ghana was great. The country is far more developed than Burkina. It’s still very poor, but very noticeably wealthier than it’s northern neighbour. Everywhere we went, for instance, most of the children we saw were in uniforms, on their way to or from school. By contrast, in Burkina, there students can’t afford uniforms, and not very many can even go to school – you’re far more likely to see kids herding goats or begging on the street than on their way to or from school. The buildings were nicer, too – not only were they generally made of concrete instead of mud-brick, but the Ghanaians can afford to paint their houses, making villages and cities far more interesting looking than the drab, muddy brown Burkinabé landscapes. And unlike in Burkina, the streets of Ghana aren’t full of faux types trying to sell you something or con you into giving them money. When you walk through downtown Ouaga, you can’t go ten feet without someone yelling, "Mon ami, le blanc…" and shoving their merchandise in your face. This never happened to us in Ghana. While Burkina makes you constantly aware that you stand out, Ghana gives you the illusion of blending in. If I were a typical tourist, I’d be far more comfortable in Ghana than Burkina.
Anyways, after a day in Kumasi, we got back onto a bus for another exciting twenty-some hour long adventure back to Ouaga (the first six or so of those hours were spent in the Kumasi bus station, trying to figure out where the hell our bus was, and trying to guess why it was five hours late). After a night in Ouaga, we went to Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina’s other big city. I’d heard lots of good things about Bobo, but was a bit disappointed – it’s really quite similar to Ouaga, just a bit smaller and with more trees (and thus, more shade). After a day bumming around Bobo, we headed back to Ouaga, in time for Abby to visit the Artisan Village to buy some souvenirs before catching her plane. The Artisan Village is a really interesting place – just about any sort of west African handicraft that you could imagine is available there. And, unlike just about anywhere else in the country that you try to buy artisanal products, you don’t have to haggle over the price (we learned, however, that you can haggle over the prices, but you then have to hide whatever you buy in a purse of backpack so that you don’t have to turn in the non-existent-because-the-transaction-is-under-the-counter receipt when you leave). After that, we did some packing, and then Abby flew out.
After Abby left, instead of going back to Kongoussi, I went to Djibo to help with a Girls’ Camp organized by some volunteers in and around Djibo. Girls’ Camp is sort of what it sounds – a week long summer camp for middle school girls. However, it’s not quite the same as working at Camp Webb. First of all, everyone was speaking French (or Mooré or Fulfuldé). Also, there was a lot more swearing on the part of the volunteers than you hear from most camp counsellors – we could say anything we wanted in English, since we knew the girls wouldn’t understand. The camp was held at a high school – we used two classrooms, one for the sessions and for eating and sleeping. And unfortunately, instead of Stacey’s lasagna, our meals generally consisted of rice and sauce. Also, no matter how high the temperature gets at Camp Webb, I’m pretty it was worse in Djibo. Perhaps the single greatest difference between Girls’ Camp and Camp Webb: in Djibo, we could go out for beer at night, after all the girls were in bed – of course, this was a bit of a problem the night when a storm suddenly moved in, and we had to walk back from the bar to the high school in the middle of the night, in the rain, with sand being whipped into our eyes by the ridiculously strong wind, only to get back and discover that one of our tents had blown away, and then spend thirty minutes wandering around blindly in the rain and wind looking for the tent.
The general point of the camp is to help empower the girls and give them the skills, knowledge, and encouragement they need to advance in life. There were several themes repeated throughout the week, such as "stay in school", "don’t get pregnant until you’re married", and "don’t get AIDS." The activities included things like meeting and questioning successful women in the community, performing skits about the effects of getting AIDS or becoming pregnant as a teenager, formal instruction on how to use a condom, and role-playing what to do if your boyfriend wants to have sex and not use a condom. I thought the sessions were pretty good, but it’s really hard to tell what kind of an impact they actually had on the girls.
After Girls’ Camp, I came back to Kongoussi for a few days, then went back to Djibo to celebrate one year in Burkina with some volunteers up there, and then went to Ouaga to buy some plane tickets. I somehow managed to passably muddle through the Foreign Service written exam, and now I have to take the oral exam, which gives me a good excuse to go home for a bit, and maybe even convince my parents to pay for the ticket. So I’m flying back to the U.S. on November 20, and then leaving O’Hare on December 10, arriving on Burkina on Dec. 12, with a 15-hour layover in Casablanca (Royal Air Maroc recommended getting a guest visa so I can leave the airport and see the city during that time). Royal Air Maroc also doesn’t accept credit cards, which means that when I went to make the reservation, I had to walk around downtown Ouaga with about twice the per-capita GDP of Burkina Faso in my pocket. (Also, for those of you with Visa cards: if you don’t use your card for a year, and then suddenly try to take large sums of money out of several ATMs in Africa, you’ll run into problems.)
I’m (hopefully) going to post two pictures here. One is of Abby and I in downtown Kumasi, Ghana. If you look closely, you’ll see lots of evidence of how Ghana is much more developed than Burkina, such as the fact that we’re on a paved sidewalk (I don’t think Burkina has a single sidewalk), next to a paved road, with cars parked on it. If not for the woman carrying stuff on her head in the background, you might not even guess it was Africa. I let Abby do all the photography while she was here – when she sends me a copy of all her pictures, I’ll try to post some of them. The other picture is from Girls’ Camp. You’ll notice a few people in the picture who don’t quite belong – those are the volunteers in and around Djibo, and also Marily, the country director for Peace Corps Burkina Faso. Also, since the girls look sort of miserable in this photo, please keep in mind that Burkinabé never really smile for photos.