I Meant "Fat" in a Good Way!

Among the many cultural differences that exist between Burkina Faso and America, perhaps the most interesting are the social norms of physical appearance. It is not considered impolite in Burkina identify someone based solely on their physical attributes such as skin color, height, or weight.  Of course this is typically after attempts to identify them by family name and ethnicity, but when half the village has the family name Traore and three quarters of the village belongs to the same ethnicity, this system breaks down pretty quickly.  It’s also particularly true when someone has a physical attribute that makes them extremely recognizable, which explains why I’m called “le blanc” and “tubabu” more often than Todd.

Burkinabe also frequently judge people based solely on their physical appearance.  In fact, prejudgment based on physical appearance takes place at least as often here as in the States, if not more. In Burkina Faso, there is no cultural norm that deems it inappropriate. This seems to contradict the myth of the African villager who does not place importance in superficial Western ideals such as physical appearance, but it is the simple truth.  An easy example is the fact that Burkinabe assume that all white people are rich and will consistently tell white people to give them things as a “joke.” A more subtle example is the fact that abnormally short people are not respected or treated like equals in my regional culture, which is reflected in the Jula proverb, “Mogo surunnin jusu b’a kaan koro,” (A short person’s heart is close to his head). 

A particularly interesting example is the fact that being overweight is considered a positive physical attribute in Burkina Faso.  To put it simply, “You’re fat!” is a compliment here.  When you return from trips out of site, villagers will often tell you that you look fatter.  If you ever lose weight while living in village, people assume that something is wrong.  Wealthier Burkinabe sometimes identify with you by pointing out “we’re both fat.”  When one of the women in my training group tried asking for less food for breakfast, her host dad thought something was wrong and said, “It’s ok, everyone in the village thinks you’re fat!”  At times like these, it can be incredibly difficult to accept the differences of another culture.

Part of the difference in social norms is due to language. The English adjective “fat” translates to the French adjective “gros.”   However if we do some reverse translation, the French adjective “gros” can also mean large, big, loud, or important.  Most local languages reflect the French lingual difference as well, with the same word describing large, fat, and strong.

However, the difference in social norms is largely due to culture. The size of a person is seen to indicate his or her material wealth in Burkina Faso and many other countries of Africa.  If you’re fat, it is assumed that you have enough money to eat and drink however much you want.   Therefore, it makes sense that wealthy people would be bigger than poor people.  Sure enough, many Burkinabe men and women with money are, technically speaking, overweight.  They live a more sedentary lifestyle, working government jobs or other relatively high paying positions.  They live in regional capitals or bigger cities, eating and drinking more than the average Burkinabe.  They exercise very little, if at all.

In the US, the positive correlation between wealth and weight is clearly not as strong.  Cheap fast food and processed food have “evened the playing field” so to speak.  The US has the highest rates of obesity, and therefore heart disease, of any country in the world.  However, there is also a broad segment of society that places importance on diet and exercise.  Many Americans are aware of the myriad of health complications accompany obesity and actively try to avoid them.  As such, being overweight is generally seen as a negative physical attribute. To put it simply, “You’re fat!” is not a compliment.  Clearly this obsession with “not being fat” is promoted to an unhealthy extreme by mass media in our country, but such are the wonderful contradictions of American culture.

In Burkina Faso, exercise for the sake of staying healthy is extremely uncommon.  In village and in cities, soccer is one of the only forms of organized exercise and it’s generally seen as a young men’s game.  For example, if I exercise in a public place in Burkina Faso I’m typically stared at and laughed at by both adults and children.  At site, I’m able to exercise in my house without causing a scene, but my experiences exercising out of site have been incredibly negative.  At the very least people will stop and stare. At the most people will take cell phone pictures and point/laugh.  Kids find it especially entertaining.

I’m not particularly self-conscious, but these experiences are extremely frustrating.   As one of the few Americans that most Burkinabe have ever met, I can deal with being a source of entertainment to a certain extent, but my experiences with public exercise push me to my breaking point.  To mitigate this frustration, I exercise inside my house, occasionally bike into the bush to go on trail runs, and play soccer as much as possible.  Before the rainy season, exercising in my house was basically the equivalent of cardio Bikram Yoga, but the weather is cooling off quite a bit.  Due to these efforts, I’m not usually called fat in village.  Instead, people make fun of me for exercising.  But I can deal with that.

Making Soccer More Than A Game

All you have to do is carry a soccer ball around a Burkinabe village to witness firsthand the popularity of the sport in sub-Saharan Africa.    As soon as any kid sees the ball they will run up to you and ask to play with it.  If you stay in one place too long, a crowd of children will slowly grow around and trap you, so it’s important to continue moving at a brisk walk, if not a slow jog.  It’s also necessary to carry the ball out of reach of children to maintain possession, unless have the dribbling skill of Ronaldinho and can weave through countless defenders who have nothing to lose.  Hopefully by this point a young adult in the community has spotted you and started the chain of communication that brings 20-30 young males of the community to the field to meet you.          

   During the months of March and April, I helped to set up a formation (training) for Peace Corps Volunteers and community members led by a non-profit organization called Coaching for Hope.  Eight Peace Corps Volunteers gathered in Bobo May 9-13. Each volunteer brought two counterparts from their communities, ranging in age from 15-35.  The formation focused on the utilization of soccer to conduct HIV/AIDS sensibilizations with village populations.  Each day consisted of morning and afternoon classroom sessions followed by practical application on the soccer field.  Topics covered included the definition of HIV and AIDS, modes of transmission, proper condom use, and living with HIV/AIDS.  On the last day of the formation, volunteers and their counterparts were organized into groups to plan their own VIH/SIDA sensibilizations and practice with the group.  The practice was extremely valuable, as it allowed the participants to experience firsthand the challenges of using soccer as a health sensibilization tool. The formation was concluded with a small ceremony during which PCVs and their counterparts received completion certificates and soccer balls to begin work in their respective communities. 

I returned to my community excited to implement what myself and my counterparts had learned at the formation.  As I suspected, however, there were a multitude of challenges to using soccer as an education tool in village.

·         Soccer balls are too expensive for most villagers to buy

Soccer balls tend to cost $5-$7 in Burkina, which is way too much for most Burkinabe families to spend on what is widely viewed by adults as a “toy.”  This can be an advantage when trying to mobilize groups in the village to participate in soccer related activities, but trying to control a large group of Burkinabe with a soccer ball is not an easy task.  It also means that once people know you have a soccer ball, they will ask for it constantly.

·         Young men have a cultural monopoly on soccer

It is culturally acceptable for young men to play soccer.  Older men dismiss soccer as just a game because they don’t have the energy to play with younger men or have some sort of injury.  It is not culturally acceptable for women of any age to play soccer.   It’s considered a men’s game and women grow up believing they can’t play.   It is culturally acceptable for boys to play soccer, but they often have to use a terrible ball or   an object other than a soccer ball to play.  Actual soccer balls are considered too valuable to give to kids.  Which may be a good policy because Burkinabe kids will find a way to break anything that you can play a game with, either through overuse or just general disrespect.

·         People may not understand or retain connections between soccer activities and health issues

As Peace Corps Volunteers, we are often looking for “captive audiences.”  Because it would be counterproductive to offer people material incentives to attend the events we organize, we try to capitalize on situations where there is already a group of our target audience assembled.  Soccer is an activity that typical creates a “captive audience” that, if managed correctly, will listen to basically whatever you have to say.  By “manage correctly” I mean maintain complete control over the soccer ball until you want to be ignored.  Because soccer is so popular, however, it can distract people from the actual message of what you’re trying to teach or demonstrate, even if the soccer activities are supposed to have obvious connections to preventative healthcare.

·         Setting up a soccer club/team with consistent meetings is challenging in village

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the concept of time in Burkinabe culture is completely different from said concept in the US. People tend to say yes to every invitation they are offered because it is considered impolite to say no.  Young men and male kids flock to soccer activities in village, but it will be difficult to establish a consistent club or team with women and kids.  For the young men, soccer obviously doesn’t take priority over work and school (I hope).

Even with these challenges, I am extremely passionate about sports and this seems like a perfect opportunity to enjoy my work.  So far, I’ve been playing soccer almost every evening with the young men in the village, trying to establish a consistent group.  Ibrahim and I have proposed the idea of getting primary school students and women involved on certain days of the week, which was met with a certain amount of speculation.  I can tell I will be working on this project for a long time before I see the results that I want, which at this point is honestly just getting men, women, and kids to play organized soccer on a regular basis and mix in some health education when I can.

In other news, I confirmed my trip to Cape Town August 20 – September 1!!!!!  I’ll have a week to see what kind of trouble I can get into before my parents arrive.  I just received a Cape Town guidebook from my parents and just looking at it is pretty overwhelming.  Of course the first page I opened to was a restaurant that has over 450 different types of whiskey and frequently organizes three course meals with whiskey pairings.  It’s going to be quite the shock coming from Burkina, but words cannot describe how excited I am! 

I’ve been missing friends and family a lot lately.  Hope all is well!

Pictures!

 I've been terrible about posting pictures in the past couple months, but it's not my fault!  The internet here is terrible and doesn't work well with the Blogspot interface (yeah I still know some fancy tech words).  I finally found a way to post photos through Picassa and Google+.  Turns out the failed social networking site that Google insisted would replace Facebook actually has some obscure uses.  Without further adieu (almost spelled  that ado.....or adue...... but my friend Jessica informed me that it comes from French), I present to you a glorified view of the few moments in the past 8 months that can actually be considered awesome.  I would post the pictures of my low points as well, but who wants to see pictures of me sitting around doing nothing, sweating my ass off, or getting made fun of by little kids.  

 My "happy place" at site. It's about 5 km into the bush along the river that borders the west side of my village.  Running in public in Burkina Faso will draw countless stares and jeers, but when I run along the trails around here I usually encounter less than 10 people.  The sound of water running over the rocks is a poor substitute for the sound of the ocean, but it reminds me of home. Basically paradise.......

 Baobob and me.  Yeah, these trees are big.  There are a ton of them at my friend David's site, which I discussed in an earlier post.

 Tower and  tank at a nunnery/hotel in Koudougou.  Purpose: unknown. Temptation to climb: high.  Feelings sitting halfway up tower after giving into temptation to climb: terror.

Sunrise over the sugar cane fields.  Takaledougou was once located in the area that is now occupied by these fields.   At some point in the 80's, the government negotiated a deal with the village chief that gave his people ten years of tax breaks in exchange for the land.  He split the village in two, creating Takale and Takale II, located on opposite sides of the sugar cane fields.  The corporation that owns the sugar cane fields, SOSUCO, employs men in my village on temporary contracts, but pays them virtually nothing.  The sugar cane fields occupy nearly all of the village's former cultivation lands, complicating subsistence agriculture.

View from under a mango tree at sunrise.  There are an abundance of mango trees in the southwest region of Burkina.  They are an extremely important part of the village and regional economies.  Mangos taste good.  If you know me well, you know that I don't really like fruit.  I felt that being placed in a region with hundreds of thousands of mango trees was a sign from a higher power that I should like mangos.

My site is 15 km north of Banfora.  10km west of Banfora is one of Burkina's premier tourist attractions, the waterfalls of Banfora.  I  hadn't visited them for a variety of reasons, but I finally got the chance when Ouadrago, one of the nurses at my health clinic, offered to take me there one Sunday.  As far as Burkina tourism is concerned, the waterfalls of Banfora were AMAZING.  Because it's the beginning of rainy season, the largest waterfall isn't much to look at, but we hiked up past the lower falls and found a series of smaller falls.

 Ouadrago and I.....chilling in a waterfall.

Enjoying a beer in one of the upper waterfalls

The team of Burkinabe that helped me with the malaria discussion/debate at the local primary school.  From left to right: Makoura (younger woman in village who I'm starting to work with), me, Ibrahim (an amazing Burkinabe in Takale who has helped me every step of the way), Ouadrago (nurse at the health clinic), and Diallo (head nurse at the health clinic).

Siaka's cassava fields.  Cassava is used to make Ateike, a local specialty that can best be described as sweet kous kous.  Siaka is the closest thing to an American entreprenuer that exists at the village level.  He just received a second loan from Zidisha, a micro finance non-profit that connects business owners in the developing world with internet users of the developed world.  Internet users can choose what projects to fund based on user profiles.  He has ambitious plans for expansion.  Although I've made it clear to him that I can't assist him financially, I helped him take pictures for his profile on Zidisha.