Ouaga!

September 27, 2005 / October 7, 2005

No narrative to write this time – the days in Minima are all roughly the same. I do have some interesting anecdotes, though. I’m actually writing the various anecdotes in this entry on two separate stays in Minima, roughly ten days apart, so I apologize if things are a little disjointed. I’ll begin with perhaps the most intriguing of these assorted stories. There’s a village near hear called Niessega – it’s one of the three villages where SED trainees are doing their homestay during stage. It’s bigger than Minima, but still only what you would call a large village – or so I’ve been told from the trainees staying there – it’s a good 20km bike ride away, and I’m lazy, so I’ve never actually been to the place. In Niessega, there’s a traditional medicine preparer. They’re called “wa-kos” or something like that – the Mooré word is something that sounds very similar to the English word “whacko.” One of these guys sold a man in Niessega a “contre-boule” pill – bulletproof medicine. The man took this medicine, and then told a friend that he’d taken them, and told the friend to shoot him. Sure enough, the friend did just that, killing the man.
Here’s the kicker – when other people in the village heard about this, they were appalled. But not because the guy actually thought they were bulletproof pills, or that he asked his friend to shoot him, or that his friend did. Instead, the people in the village were upset at the medicine man, because he had failed to put the secret ingredient in the pills. Had he done so, the villagers are convinced, the man would have survived. It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Niessega – in addition to this death, they had a woman fall down a well and die, and a kid (about nine years old) got ripped apart and killed by a crocodile. With all the bad things happening in Niessega, it almost makes us happy to be in Minima. Almost.
In another story that further endorses many of the prevailing western stereotypes about Africa, my host family ate a bowl of roaches the other day. After dinner, they brought in a big bowl, full of roaches (and a few crickets), all black and charred. They started eating them – seems to be a favorite dessert of theirs. They offered me one, and I declined. On the one hand, I was fairly proud of myself, as I realized that this was the first time during my two months in Burkina that I’d actually declined food (as opposed to just not eating what was served to me because it was making me throw up…). On the other hand, I was a little worried, because for a few seconds, I actually considered eating one of the bugs. After all, when else am I going to have the chance to eat a baked roach? And how bad could it really be? And wouldn’t that make a great story someday? And then I realized I was contemplating eating a roach and snapped out of it, politely declining.
Speaking of protein, I’m getting a little worried that there’s some sort of disease going around my courtyard. Until today, I’d never seen any dead (or even severely sick-looking) animals in our courtyard. Today, however, there was a young guinea fowl that flapped around a bit before dying, a dead (but otherwise healthy-looking) chicken, and a dead adolescent goat. This has me slightly concerned, and I joked with Omar and Es that I’d probably be the first Burkina Volunteer to get West Nile Virus. But I wonder what the family does with these dead animals – my guess is that they go ahead and eat them – I’m going to be highly cautious of any meat they serve me in the next few days, if they serve me any.
I’m slowly learning about a rather curious Burkinabé custom, called “parenté à plaisanterie” – I think that would translate as something like “relationships of mockery” – the phrase doesn’t really translate – to be fair, the idea behind doesn’t translate very well either. Burkina Faso is composed of about 60 different ethnic groups. The Mossi are the largest of them, accounting for a little over half the population, although the Mossi are big enough that they have sub-ethnic groups, the Yadega being the people around Gourcy and Minima (and, I believe, Kongoussi). Ouagadougou is a Mossi city, traditionally the center of Mossi culture. The Peulhs are in the north, around Djibo, Dori, and Gorom Gorom. (The Peulhs, unlike the Mossi, only have market days once a week – that’s why the famous market at Gorom Gorom is only on Thursdays.) Among these assorted groups, there is a timeless custom, wherein certain groups are expected to mock each other and insult each other, but aren’t allowed to get irritated or offended by these insults. For instance, our LCF this week, Edwige, is Gourmanche (that’s probably not even close to the correct spelling), an ethnic group from the southeastern part of Burkina. Here in Mossi territory, she’ll often laughingly tell villagers that they’re stupid, that they’re her slaves, etc. They smile and nod, and say similar things in return. This sort of back-and-forth is only supposed to take place between certain groups of people. The Mossi, for instance, are allowed to do this with the Peulhs and vice versa, but not with certain other ethnic groups. While we were in Ouaga for the counterpart workshop, the driver of the PC van at one point, learning that someone in the car was posted to Djibo, casually mentioned that the Peulhs were his slaves – something we thought was an odd comment at the time, but now makes a bit more sense. This custom seems to be an old Burkinabé tradition, going back to long before anyone can remember. Although I don’t entirely understand it, they attribute it to being one of the primary reasons why such a diverse amalgamation of peoples are able to peacefully co-exist in one country. Armande understatedly told us that in many African countries that lacked this sort of tradition, such as Rwanda, ethnic tension often arose.
The French language in Burkina Faso is an interesting phenomenon. There are several different variations of French in the country. On one level, there’s the occasional person who’s either from France or educated in France and who speaks Parisian French. These people form a negligible portion of the population. Most educated Burkinabé – like the LCFs responsible for teaching us French, as well as the entire PC training staff – speak what’s generally called fonctionnaire French. It’s what you might also call Burkinabé French – it’s probably as similar to Parisian French as American English is to British English. And then there’s villageois French. This is, evidently, what’s spoken by villagers who lack any secondary education. This is the type of French spoken by all of our host families here in Minima (or the members of those families who have any education – in my family, my host father and the two oldest brothers). This French is often incomprehensible to me, and even our LCFs sometime have trouble understanding it. In addition to the accent and the absence of some key sounds in the French language, speakers of villageois French rarely perform such tedious tasks as conjugating their verbs.
An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed is the disdain speakers of fonctionnaire French seem to have for speakers of villageois French – I’ve noticed it between LCFs and villagers, and in Kongoussi between André (very well educated) and Somé (much less educated). In Burkina, more advanced French inevitably indicates a higher level of education. During the counterpart workshop, Peace Corps had to repeatedly tell our homologues that, even though we might not be able to speak French very well, we were all university educated – an interesting disconnect.
The point of this discussion of French is that we (the stagiaires) have a lot of difficulty understanding what many villagers are saying. In an effort to work on that, part of our training today involved a causerie session. Causerie is the time-honored Burkinabé tradition of shooting the breeze. We got together with about 10 people – half of them fonctionnaires, half of them villagers, and just talked for about an hour and a half. Since Esmeralda has her own private Mooré classes, and Giorgio has been “sick” in Gourcy since the weekend, it was just Omar and I, and mostly they asked us questions about the U.S., which we tried our best to answer.
The question which surprised me the most was when a fonctionnaire (so a university-educated man) asked us who fixed prices in the U.S. Here, the prices on several basic goods are fixed by the government – the floor for demi-baguettes, for instance, is 50CFA. Most other items – at least the more basic foodstuffs and housewares available in villages and larger cities – have fixed prices (although they’re not set by the government – everyone just always charges the same for certain things). You can go to any vegetable vendor anywhere in the country and, even though the prices aren’t written anywhere, you know exactly how much everything costs. When he asked us this question, Omar and I looked at each other, and asked each other how the hell you explained the concept of capitalism or market forces to someone. I explained that there weren’t fixed prices – the prices go up when lots of people want something and go down when nobody is buying something. This, I think, is going to be one of the major challenges we’ll face in Burkina doing small enterprise development – introducing people to very basic economic ideas like market forces. What seems so intuitive to us is completely foreign here. I think what alarmed me most was that the question came from an educated man, who still had no apparent understanding of basic economics – a little disturbing. Granted, I am by no means an economist or anything close to it, but am rapidly learning that I have more than enough knowledge of business and economics to recognize some of the problems here, and hopefully even be able to effectively point these things out to some people here.
And now the latest news on the TDA front. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, a TDA is a trainee-directed activity, homework that we stagiaires have to do every week, usually involving us going out and talking at length to people in the community, which is tricky in Minima, where almost no one speaks French. Last week, I spent awhile talking to my host father about his business, and feel like I have at least a basic understanding of how it works. He’s a tailor. He regularly goes to Ouagadougou and Ouahigouya to buy fabric, and then, using his foot-powered sewing machine, turns that fabric into shirts, pants, and complets (a shirt-pant combination – kind of the traditional Burkinabé equivalent of a suit). He sells these things to people here in Minima – he sometimes sells at the market, and also has some clients come directly to his workshop here at his house. He also travels to several neighboring villages when they have large fêtes – the principal time villagers buy new clothes is for major religious festivals, such as the end of Ramadan – and he makes a decent number of sales at these fêtes. He charges between 100-250CFA for the work he puts into making each article of clothing – so he turns a 1,000CFA piece of fabric into a 1,250CFA shirt. Assuming his only expense is fabric, he believes he’s making 100-250CFA on every shirt. Unfortunately, there are several costs he doesn’t take into effect. Transport to Ouagadougou to buy fabric, for instance, costs between 5,000 and 7,000CFA. I don’t know what he pays for things like thread and buttons, or if he ever has to make repairs or do maintenance on his sewing machine. Regardless, he sees the fabric as his only expense. Taking into account his other expenses, Es (who also interviewed him for our TDA) and I aren’t even sure if he’s even making a profit – if he is, it can’t be more than 100CFA per item. And since it takes him around three hours to make a shirt, that breaks down to 33CFA per hour – around seven cents an hour. Oh, I forgot to mention, very few people can actually afford to pay 1,250CFA for a shirt, so he sells a lot on credit, usually demanding 750CFA up front. And although he mentally keeps track of who owes him money, he doesn’t seem to have any sort of written list. Or bookkeeping of any sort. Es and I suggested that he might want to start keeping some records — “but this is Burkina!” he responded (well, except it was in his villageois French). For this coming week, our TDA is to do a sensibilization for our host family business. (A sensibilization is, as far as I can tell, a uniquely Burkinabé word – it’s sort of like a training / workshop / presentation — for instance, health volunteers do a lot of HIV/AIDS sensibilizations.) I think Es and I are going to do one on the importance of bookkeeping – how he could use records to improve his business. The other one of us will do one on basic record-keeping, which might be difficult, since my host father is functionally illiterate. I really don’t think these sensibilizations will do much good, which is a bit frustrating. If this were Kongoussi, and I could gradually work with someone over a longer period of time and do follow-ups, it might be useful. But trying to teach someone who’s illiterate and has no interest in bookkeeping how and why he should keep records in one afternoon seems a bit ambitious.
This is the sort of frustration that comes up a lot during training. Peace Corps training revolves around the concept of community-based training, generally referred to as CBT, as regulated by the official Peace Corps “everything must be an acronym” policy. This sounds like a really good idea in theory, but is often frustrating in practice. Part of the frustration is because everything is very regulated and rushed – PC tells us what we have to do when, regardless of whether this is what the people in the community need. It’s taken Lars, the volunteer in Ouahigouya, two years to get his association to start keeping records and develop an efficient system – there’s no way to spring this sort of thing on my host father in one day and expect it to stick. It’s also frustrating because one of the key goals of pre-service training is to learn French. But because we’re in a tiny village, we don’t have that many opportunities to communicate in French, and thus to communicate at all, which makes it incredibly difficult to do these activities. It’s especially frustrating for SED volunteers, because none of us are going to be living in villages this small and with such minimal and stagnant economic activity. (Practically all the GEE and Health stagiaires, however, will live in villages this size. Wow that sucks.)
And one last story, to leave you on a sort of sad and depressing note. (You’re probably asking yourself if this can be worse than the bulletproof story.) Since this is our last week in Minima, we’re all trying to find some gifts to give our families. (Don’t ask me what I’m getting my family – so far, I just have a Wisconsin calendar I brought from home – I’m really bad with gifts.) Esmeralda bought some school supplies for her host father’s three young kids. There’s another family (her host father’s brother’s family) which lives in her courtyard. They have three kids who are high school age, and about to start going to high school in Gourcy (they’ll have to do the 10km to and from Gourcy every day). Unfortunately, they can’t go to school unless their father manages to get them some school supplies – he’s currently in Ouaga, doing whatever he can to get the money to get them some notebooks, pens, etc. Es decided to go and buy the three kids a bunch of supplies – notebooks, pens, chalk, erasers, rulers – probably about 3,000CFA ($6) worth of school supplies, enough to last them the year. She also got each of them a backpack (at 2,000CFA apiece). It’s a very thoughtful gift, and something these kids really need – and for an American, the total cost was almost nothing. Here’s the catch: she can’t actually give the items to the kids. Her host father (the chief of the village) won’t let her. He says she can only give gifts to his family; otherwise, she’d have to give gifts to everyone in the village – giving something to just one other family would be poor etiquette. And she can’t just bypass the chief and give the stuff directly to the kids – when you receive a gift here, the culture dictates that you go and show the chief the gift you received. And if the kids received the gift, their family would be put in a very socially awkward place. So she’s got all this stuff, and doesn’t know what to do with it. Unless their father comes back in the next few days, and has miraculously gotten them the supplies they need, these kids won’t be able to go to school – and there’s nothing Es can do about it. It’s a really crappy situation.
One final note. In letters, e-mails, and blog comments, people often say that they enjoy reading the blog but wonder how I’m actually doing – if I’m in good spirits and that sort of thing. And I must admit that, although there are some depressing stories, this place really isn’t too bad. Despite the conditions here, the people have an infectious optimism. And in spite of frustrations with Minima, with Peace Corps, and with the millions of other things beyond my control, I’m still pretty upbeat about things. I’m really excited to go to Kongoussi and to start working on things there. I can envision a lot of different things I’ll be able to do there, and although I know a lot of them won’t pan out, I’m pretty confident that I’ll manage to get at least one or two useful, sustainable, beneficial projects started there. And the thought of that is enough to make Minima tolerable and maintain my optimism. Despite the complaints, overall I’m having a pretty good time. And one way or another, it’s been one hell of an experience, which is exactly what I wanted.

October 16, 2005

It’s been an interesting week. I’m in Ouaga now, and am glad to be out of Minima forever! Last Monday we got some bad news – Kevin, one of the SED stagiaires, was medically separated (that’s the Peace Corps term for kicking someone out and sending them home) for some back problems he’d been having that couldn’t be corrected in Burkina (or Senegal or South Africa, the two regional medevac destinations). We found this out Monday afternoon, and all left Minima and started out for Niessega (Kevin’s village) to say goodbye to him. By the time we got to Gourcy (about halfway through the journey to Niessega), it was dark, and we didn’t want to bike in the dark, especially since Omar and Es didn’t have headlamps (Giorgio and I were prepared). We tried to get a bus down to Niessega, but they refused to take us because it was too short a distance and they didn’t want to deal with the hassle of putting our bikes on and off the bus. So, eventually, we found some guy with a pickup truck, and hired him to drive us and our bikes there – it was a bit sketchy, but it worked.
When we arrived, all the Niessega stagiaires, and two who had come up from Yako, were all sitting around drinking. Kevin had gone back to his house briefly – and he made quite an entrance when he returned – he came flying in on his bike, and had planned on doing a wheelie, but instead went flying over the handlebars. Everyone paused and gasped for a second, and then Kevin laughed and informed us that apparently the brakes on Burkinabé bikes were reversed from those of American bikes. We spent the night in Niessega, and then left at 5:30 the next morning, to give us plenty of time to get back to Minima (although I stopped to eat in Gourcy, and bathed and talked to my host family when I got back to Minima, I was late for class, showing up at 8:30).
The same day we returned to Minima, Tuesday, I spent much of the afternoon at my house, talking to my host father and a neighbor of his. Apparently, one of their neighbors, who isn’t the most mentally sound person in the world, had been missing for several days, and my host father had been among those looking for him. By Thursday, when I left Minima, I don’t know if they’d found him. Anyways, while talking to my father, he offered me some Zoom-Koom, which I accepted. This, I suspect, was where my problems began.
Zoom-Koom means, literally, “flour water.” And that’s exactly what it is: millet flour mixed in water, sometime with a little sugar or some fruit flavor added (not in this case, however). Although it’s not really good, it’s not all that bad either, taste-wise. Unfortunately, the stuff I drank must have been made with well water (and very bad well water, at that – when the stuff separated, the water was a distinctly yellow color). By Tuesday evening, I wasn’t feeling 100%, and wasn’t really hungry – I think it was the first time my family served me corn that I didn’t finish it.
Wednesday was the day of our presentations for our host family businesses. Rose (the SED APCD – the person overseeing my program), Lawson (the SED training director), and Vinny (our cross-cultural training director) all came for the presentations. Sometime mid-morning, while the three of them were at Omar’s house watching his presentation, I was at the school throwing up. By later in the day, when it was time for my presentation, I was feeling much better. My presentation was about the importance of record-keeping. Since my host-father is a tailor, we presented a skit featuring two different tailors, one who kept books and one who didn’t. And then I just discussed some of the ways that bookkeeping could help his business be more efficient. He seemed pretty responsive, and conceded that it really could help his business quite a bit. When I practiced it, the presentation was about five minutes long (plus the skit) – when I actually presented, it was about 30-40 minutes. Vinny translated my French into Mooré, and my host father would make comments in Mooré, which Vinny would translate back into French – thus adding a lot of time. After my presentation, Es gave one for my host father on how to actually keep some records – it’d be interested to go back to Minima in a year and see if he’s made any attempt to start bookkeeping (I would guess not – also, there’s no way I’m going back to Minima in a year).
Wednesday afternoon, with our presentations done, we just sort of sat around – it’s like the end of the semester, when you’ve just finished your exams – a really good feeling. Of course, a less good feeling was recurring in my stomach, and an even worse one in my bowels. Despite having no appetite and eating practically nothing all day, I spent much of Wednesday night frantically running to the latrine. One good note, though: on Wednesday evening I gave my family the gifts I had for them. Inspired by Es, I bought a bunch of school supplies for the kids – notebooks, pens, pencils, rulers, etc. I also gave the kids a Frisbee that my parents sent – the kids loved playing with my Frisbee (often waking me up at 6am to ask if they could use it). And I gave the family a Wisconsin calendar that I’d brought from home, which they seemed to like – I spent a bunch of time going through all the pictures with them and explaining what they were.
We agreed to meet at 7am to bike back to Gourcy. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the road where we agreed to meet, I was feeling ridiculously weak and light-headed (probably from not eating for a day and a half). Instead of biking back to Gourcy, I decided to call Sylvie (the medical officer) and ask her to send a car for me – I think this was a very good idea, as I almost certainly wouldn’t have made it to Gourcy. So after sitting by the side of the road for an hour, a PC van came and took me to Gourcy, where I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the med unit. Mostly I stayed in my room, but every hour or two (even during the night), I went next door to the bathroom – usually due to diarrhea, but occasionally to throw up. By Saturday morning, I was very proud of myself when I managed to drink some orange juice and eat an apple. By Saturday evening, the medicine that Sylvie had given me was clearly not working. Sylvie, I should point out, was in Ouaga most of this time – I would call her, tell her what was going on, and then she would have Mohammed (one of the training staff) give me whatever medicine I needed. So, Saturday evening, Sylvie decided I needed some medicine that only came in suppository form, which I would have to self-administer. Which I did, and that’s got to be one of the more unpleasant things imaginable. I think the medicine was the same one I received the one other time in my life I’ve gotten a suppository, which was when I had mono and was throwing up constantly.
The suppository seemed to do the trick. Although I had no energy Saturday night, I was able to eat a loaf of bread and keep it down, and my trips to the bathroom became far more infrequent. I had to wake up at 6am this morning for the PC van to bring me to Ouaga (everyone else, except for Joelle, who’s on crutches at the moment, had to arrange their own transport here). And I’m feeling much better today – the first thing I did in Ouaga, after checking into the hotel, was to go out and buy some orange juice and bread, which I quickly downed. And I’m looking forward to lunch! So it looks like I’ll be fine – my body seems to have calmed down, so once I get a bit more food in me I’ll be more or less back to normal. Which is good, because now we have a week in Ouaga to have fun, eat well, and prepare for Friday – swearing-in.