After spending three weeks away from site, I was
extremely nervous to return to my home away from home, Takaledougou. I had legitimate reasons to be away for so
long, but I still had this feeling of guilt that is difficult to explain. It felt like I had spent 3 weeks away from
college and while somehow managing to avoid missing any assignments or tests, I
had still fallen behind in all of my classes.
But everyone at this hypothetical college wouldn’t have experienced the
luxuries of my vacation: good food, electricity, pools, etc. And everyone at this hypothetical college
wouldn’t speak the same language as me, making it almost impossible to explain
what I had done during said vacation.
And this college wouldn’t really have “classes” or “assignments” or
“tests,” the professors would just let students do whatever they chose to do to
improve themselves and the community.
Alright this is a pretty bad metaphor
My official story is that those three weeks were
spent at a “formation,” French/Burkina slang for training. But to be honest, that isn’t the whole story.
The first two weeks were my stage’s “In-Service Training”
(IST). During the first three months at
site, our focus was integration, identifying the needs of our communities,
getting to know people, and settling into some sort of routine. We were also supposed to be drafting an
extensive report on our community, referred to as the “Etude de Milieu.” My friend Hallie describes the (extremely
informal) process here:
The goal of IST is to provide you with the technical
skills necessary to begin working on projects in your community during the next
21 months of your service. In reality,
IST was a lot of Peace Corps bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. We spent a lot time
talking about what was hard about living in a village and how to fill out the
complicated paperwork to apply for funding and report our projects to the PC
office. Don’t get me wrong, there were
some surprisingly useful sessions, but most importantly, we were given a few
ideas that will help us answer the ominous question, “What the @#$* am I going
to do here for the next two years?”
It was the first time our stage (training group) had
been together since December, when we were sworn in as PCVs and sent away to
our respective sites. Needless to say,
there were some long days of training and some long, fun nights. I only got lost once after midnight, engaged
in only one water balloon fight, only got scolded by five nuns, ate less than
three quiches, gained less than15 pounds, spent less than a month’s salary. and
never consumed five liters of beer at any single bar….in one night. Overall, IST was a resounding success.
Hallie recounts our amazing St. Patrick’s Day on her
blog. Warning: graphic pool scenes and
wolf packs…..
As IST came to a close, I decided to visit the sites
of a couple friends rather than return back to Takaledougou. I was expected to be in the capital for a
committee meeting in six days and it takes me at least a full day of travel to
get from my site to Ouaga. The last week
of IST had taken place in Koudougou, so it made sense to visit the sites of two
friends who live closest to the city, David and Kelly.
David’s site, Bouldie, is 45 km north of Koudougou
along the road to Toma. USAID is
currently funding a project to pave this road, but for now it is a dusty, bumpy
trip. The project is supposed to be
completed in 6 months, but this is Africa, so we can assume that it will take
at least three times as long. On these
types of roads, it’s almost preferable that the driver speeds, just so the ride
is over sooner. Not our bush taxi
driver. It took us two hours to go 45
km, which is ridiculous considering one can bike the same distance in 2-3
hours. It also ranks as one of the
dustiest two hours of my life. I got off
the bush taxi covered in a thick layer of brown red dirt and feeling like I had
smoked two packs of cigarettes. For me, this was a foreign feeling, as my site
lies on a paved highway.
David’s village has a total population of around 600
and is spread out, with courtyards often hundreds of meters apart. The climate is HOT, dusty, and windy. The vegetation is sparse and there are not
many trees, but I was visiting during the peak of the hot/dry season. With the
onset of the rainy season his site will look completely different, as the dried
up riverbeds fill with water and large expanses of dried, yellow grass turn
green.
Bouldie is a difficult site, even by Peace Corps
Burkina standards. Less than 5 people in
the village speak French, making it extremely difficult to David to communicate
with anyone. The local language,
Guaransi, is one of the more complicated languages in Burkina. The same word spoken at three different
pitches has three different meanings.
David’s counterpart, a representative of a very recently created
groupement (collective business organization), is extremely overbearing, often
attempting to follow him around for the entire day. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that
his counterpart’s house is less than 10 feet from his.
David is also the first PCV at his site, which
presents a different set of challenges than second or third PCVs face,
especially as a Community Enterprise Development (CED) volunteer. Often the first volunteer has only enough
time to accomplish small things that build a foundation for the work that future
volunteers will complete. This is partly
due to the fact that the Peace Corps development approach is difficult to
explain to Burkinabe in French, much less local language. This is especially true when people identify
you as a “business” volunteer. Most
Burkinabe expect Americans to have money and therefore build them things,
invest in things, or give them things.
On the bright side, David lives about 3km from a
much larger village, Didyr, that has a marché and kiosks selling most of what he
needs. Unfortunately, Didyr does not
have electricity, which is odd considering the fact that it has telephone
lines. Electricity will eventually come
after the paved highway, but that’s far from a guarantee. My village is directly on the highway and the
power lines skip it over, instead providing electricity to an adjacent village
with a large sugar cane factory. As a
general rule, infrastructure in developing countries provides for and connects
places with money.
David’s village also has a strong connection with
the country to the south of Burkina, Cote d’Ivoire. Many of the men in his village spend months
at a time working on plantations there, especially during the dry season. Even in the four days I spent there we met
one person returning from Cote d’Ivoire and two people leaving to work there. The climate in Cote d’Ivoire is much more
conducive to growing cash crops, creating a relatively constant labor demand.
We had some good times at David’s site, including
having Super Bowl Sunday a couple of months late. His mom sent him a DVD recording of the game
in a care package, so we made mac n cheese, drank some whiskey, and watched the
game. The 49ers really blew it and Beyonce
kind of sucked. We also visited a baobab
grove near his house. Baobab trees are
the largest trees in Burkina and are survive for thousands of years, although
an irregular ring pattern makes it impossible to date them. The fruit of the
baobab tree is highly nutritious and the leaves of the tree can be ground up
into a powder that is also incredibly nutritious. Although they are fairly common in Burkina,
they tend to be spaced relatively far apart.
Near David’s site, however, there is a square kilometer with about 30
baobab trees. No one in his village
knows why there are so many clustered there.
The only logical explanations is that the same aliens that communicated
with Egyptians and told them to build the pyramids communicated with Burkinabe
and told them to plant Baobabs in this particular area.
After a few days at David’s site, we traveled to
Kelly’s site, which involves backtracking towards Koudougou 30 km. Kelly is also a CED volunteer, but her site,
Reo, is the polar opposite of David’s.
Reo is a larger town with electricity, restaurants, a few cars, and a
population of at least 5,000. The
climate is similar to David’s site, but the elements can be somewhat subdued with
electricity. Unfortunately, Kelly’s
house itself doesn’t have electricity.
She’d be mad if I didn’t point that out.
Although Reo is in Guaransi country, most people speak French.
The organization that Kelly works with is also the
polar opposite of David’s groupements.
She works in an office (by Burkina standards) at an incredible women’s
organization that produces 35 tons of shea butter every year for export to
cosmetics companies. Her office has (slow)
Wifi! The organization also provides
microfinance loans for women who own small businesses. With Kelly’s work experience in finance, it
seems like the perfect fit and a dream assignment.
But she faces a whole different set of frustrating
problems. It’s difficult to know how to
help an organization that already produces a significant amount of income and
provides microfinance loans to female entrepreneurs. All of the Peace Corps CED training is geared
towards creating Income Generating Activities (IGAs) for smaller groupements,
such as gardening, soap making, and soy transformation. Kelly’s organization has asked her to help
them find additional international buyers for the shea butter that they
produce. Obviously there’s a huge
discrepancy there. The general feeling
of uselessness is common for first year PCVs, but it’s magnified when you are
honestly impressed with what your organization/community has already done and
are unsure how to improve upon it.
David, Kelly, and I managed to have some good times
in Reo. I’d heard legends of a bar in
town that sells cold 22oz Heinekens. It’s
literally the only bar we know of in Burkina Faso that has them (cold), and it’s
not even located in a regional capital.
Needless to say, we drank all of the Heinekens that they had in their
fridge. We also collectively consumed 60 brochettes. There may have been a beer pound off. Then we patted each other on the back and
said “nice job bro.”
In a classic example of Burkina transport, the bus
from Reo to Koudougou the next morning
was two hours late. We found out that a
guy who claimed to be in charge of the bus stop was actually trying to scam us,
demanding payment even after the driver had already told us it was free. The bus broke down in Koudougou about 1km
from the station. Rather than wait an
unknown amount of time for it to be fixed, we decided to bike with all of our
stuff in 95 degree weather. Once we were
on the 1200 air conditioned bus to Ouaga, though, all was well.
After the committee meetings, it was time to return
to site. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot
of people remembered me and asked me where I’d been. Siaka, a man who asked me to help him raise
$1,000 for his second microfinance loan to purchased moto taxi (basically a
3-wheeled moto pickup truck), had purchased one. I guess he found the money on his own. Ibrahim, my friend and counterpart in
village, had finished the outside construction of his new house, which I was
helping him build before leaving for IST.
And it was almost mango season.
Things weren’t so bad in Takaledougou.
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