Homestay

Living with a family of a completely different cultural has been extremely difficult at times, but also extremely rewarding.  My family consists of my host dad, Abdoulaye, my host mom Mariam, three host brothers and two host sisters.  The oldest is 12 years old. Embarrassingly enough, it took me two weeks to figure this out.   The terms cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and nephew for all practical purposes do not exist in village life.  The terms son, daughter, brother, and sister are used liberally and not in a literal sense.  Village men refer to all of their male friends as “brothers.”  The kids of a sibling are still considered “my kids.”  To make things even more confusing, families are large and often live in the same area of the village, so the chances that you are actually meeting family members is high.  For example, my friend Natalie is hosted by the chief of Sanga, who has three wives and five kids per wife.  Clearly she has difficultly determining how everyone in her courtyard is related.

Coming into the homestay, I was expecting a similar experience to my homestays with families in Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur during an exchange program I was involved with during high school.  As everyone learns during Peace Corps service, expectations are more of a curse than a blessing. 

First of all, I was more capable of communicating in Spanish before my homestays in Baja California.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, my host dad is the only person living in my courtyard who speaks passable French. I use the term “passable” because I get this feeling from our short morning/evening conversations that I am slowly surpassing his French capabilities.  Luckily his younger brother, Akim, lives in the courtyard next to us and speaks much better French.  He is patient enough to work through my choppy and grammatically horrific French.  This has helped immensely, although our conversations are all too infrequent.

If not all Burkinabe speak French, what do they speak?  The answer is complicated.  Although there are five main languages (besides French) associated with different regions of Burkina Faso, there are also many languages that are unique to areas as small as 10 square kilometers.  For example, the inhabitants of my host village, Sanga, and most of the villages surrounding Leo speak Nunni, a language that is unique to the region. I have only recently mastered the morning greeting process, which consists of a long hand shake and a scripted conversation of how I’m doing, how the person I’m greeting is doing, how I slept, how they slept, how my family is doing, how their family is doing, and eventually laughter when it becomes obvious that I barely understand what they are saying to me.  

My experience with language in my host community is completely normal in Burkina Faso.  In rural villages, there are often only a limited number of community members that speak French well, and most people communicate entirely in the local language.  Children are taught French in school from an early age, but the children may not retain the language for a variety of reasons. Parents may communicate with their kids in local language instead of French.  Children that do not have aspirations outside of the community may not see the point of taking French studies seriously.  The style of education in Burkina is also not well suited to language learning, as most classes consist of repetition and copying from the board.  However, all government employees must speak French in order to accomplish the administrative aspects of their jobs.  This includes the nurses and other employees of the CSPS (Centre de Sante et Promotion Social), or village health clinics.

Besides language, there are a variety of other cultural differences between Burkina Faso and the US. Here’s a quick list:

-In village, it is important to individually greet everyone that you see, ask how they are doing, etc.  Not doing so is mildly offensive

-In the morning, it is impolite to greet someone who has not yet washed their face (or taken a bucket bath, although Burkinabe find it strange that I take a bucket bath in the morning)

-At first I considered it ridiculous that we had to bring our own bike helmet to Burkina, but now I realize that they don’t sell them here. Most families in village have bikes and motorcycles instead of cars.  No one wears a helmet.  Burkinabe find it extremely comical that Peace Corps volunteers/employees are required to wear helmets

-Babies are often tied straddling their mother’s backs using a 2 m x 1 m piece of colorful fabric called “pagne.”  With babies on their backs, women go about all of their daily tasks, including riding bikes, working in the fields, selling things at the market, and cooking

-Life is considered difficult.  Happiness and sadness, sickness and health, work and rest, life and death: all accepted parts of the life cycle.  There is a belief that people can’t do much to change their situation, they can only make do with what they have.  In French: “C’est la vie” (That’s life)

Some notes on being American in Burkina….

-Anything that an American says/does is considered high quality entertainment, even if they are saying/doing the right thing.  If you can’t laugh at yourself, you are doomed to an extremely unhappy existence.  As such, any self-conscious individuals should avoid Burkinabe villages altogether

-Burkinabe are extremely hospitable and respectful of guests, almost to the extreme from an American point of view.  They insist on carrying my bike and backpack to home when I get back from training, they grow concerned if I only consume half of the two pounds of spaghetti they made me for dinner, and they won’t allow me to do my own laundry.  For an ordinary American, obviously this is quite unusual and most volunteers find it uncomfortable.  I let it happen for the most part, though, because Burkinabe are genuinely happy to help us in any way that they can.  The families that are hosting volunteers are proud to have Americans in their homes and I am positive that we are the subject of constant village gossip.

As I write this post, my young host brothers are seated near my computer, alternating between staring at me and dancing to the music that I’m playing.  Reggae, especially Bob Marley, is extremely popular here, as the music style has important roots in Western Africa. Any American hip hop is also popular here about 6 months after it is released in the states.  Anyhow, it's still way too hot here, but things are going well.  Site assignments are announced on Wednesday, so everyone is pretty excited and nervous.  Internet is in scarce supply, but I'll keep posting when I can.

Todd