The Spaces Between

On September 3, 2014, I ended my service as a Community Health Development Agent in Burkina Faso.  The past couple months have been tumultuous to say the least, and I decided it was time for me to come home.  Before fully explaining my reasons for leaving two months earlier than expected, let me backtrack to my return from vacation in mid-August. 

I returned to Ouagadougou from Benin the day before the Close of Service Conference for my training group (G27) began.  The conference was held to review the tedious process of completing our service, to prepare us for life after Peace Corps (aka the "real world"), and to offer us an opportunity to provide feedback to the office.  All in all, it was a really helpful three days, although it was extremely overwhelming to think about resumes and job interviews after spending so long living and working in a village, which is about the polar opposite of what most Americans consider "work." 

G27 at staging in Philadelphia October 2012 (top) and G27 at COS conference in Ouagadougou August 2014 (bottom)

After the conference, I traveled to Bobo to begin last minute preparations for the five-day Girls Soccer and Well-Being Camp.  I had worked extremely hard to procure grant funding for the project: a frustrating process that is made even more infuriating by the snail's pace internet of Burkina Faso.  In the end, though, the grant was approved and we received the money just in time.  The camp brought 54 young women together from PCV's villages in the region to participate in the Grassroot Soccer SKILLZ HIV/AIDS education program and develop leadership skills necessary to become agents of change in their communities.  As I've mentioned before, women are constantly marginalized in Burkinabe society.  Soccer is a symbol of male entitlement here, as it is a sport that women can clearly participate in but are never given the opportunity as youth.  Using soccer as a symbol of gender equality was our starting point, and we structured the lessons of the camp around that idea.  It goes without saying that we also included a lot of time on the field playing soccer!  My friend Hallie and a third-year volunteer, Elisabeth, did an amazing job directing the camp, which featured lessons on family planning from Marie Stopes International, an introductory first aid class from Red Cross Burkina Faso, and even a self defense class!

Condom water balloon toss

Self defense class

Closing ceremony celebration with live music!

This camp was the culmination of my work with Grassroot Soccer during my service, and I was extremely proud that we were able to implement their 10 session HIV/AIDS education program.  The camp also allowed my best friend in village, Ibrahim, to show off his amazing facilitation skills.  Due to the project he was involved with in Banfora for the entirety of my service, I rarely got to work on projects with him.  He always wanted more resources for village education events that neither myself or anyone else in the village could provide.  This camp, however, gave him the resources he felt he needed to do his work, and he did an amazing job.  His background in theater was especially useful when we asked the girls to come up with skits to demonstrate what they had learned.

Camp photo (Ibrahim in front of the sign)

On the last day of the camp, I got a phone call from the head nurse of Peace Corps.  She informed me that my request to COS (Completion of Service) early had been denied, as the office was no longer accepting medical reasons as an excuse to leave 90 days early as opposed to the normal 30 days. 

What medical reasons, you ask?  For those of you who don't know, I've struggled with back problems since playing water polo in high school.  While my back bothered me on and off throughout college, I was able to manage it with exercise.  The same was true for most of my Peace Corps service, but in April, the accumulated stress of living in Burkina Faso caught up with me.  Between sleeping on bad mattresses or the floor, using horrible, jarring transport, playing soccer in bad shoes, biking with heavy backpacks, not having access to ice.......the list could go on for a while  But I had committed to serve for two years and wanted to see the soccer camp through to completion.

On that Friday, I was given a choice to either deal with my back issues until November 14 and officially complete my service, or medically separate from Peace Corps, see an orthopedic doctor, and get some good ol' physical therapy.  I chose the latter, primarily because I had determined my back problems would never be resolved in Burkina after developing my own stretching and physical therapy routine which I did twice a day for 3 months.  As Burkinabe like to say "Sante avant tout" (Health before everything).  At the end of the day, there's no practical difference between what I wanted and what I ended up getting, except for the fact that I left Burkina two weeks earlier than I had planned and it says I "ended" instead of "completed" my service on my DOS (Description of Service).  

It's hard to believe that I began this journey over 23 months ago.  It's safe to say that it was one of the most difficult and transformative experiences of my life.  There's a Peace Corps advertisement that claims "Leaving is the hardest part," which I always thought was a cruel joke, similar to the dark humor of the sign in the transit house in Ouaga that says "Just Another Day in Paradise."  But saying goodbye to the people I truly cared about in village was much more difficult than I expected.  I didn't entirely realize who had made a positive impact on my experience until I looked them in the eyes and told them I was leaving.

Wish Burkinabe smiled in pictures so you could see Lucien's!

There was the yogurt man in the market village, Lucien, who always had cold, sweet yogurt when I arrived, drenched with sweat from the bike ride.  He had one of those big, warm smiles that immediately puts you at ease.  He would always offer to charge my electronics, as he knew that I didn't have electricity in my village.  He always invited me to watch soccer: an invitation that I didn't get to accept as often as I liked because it was dangerous/impossible to bike back to my village at night.  He was a truly kind man and never asked for anything from me, content to just be my friend.  He was blown away when I offered to give him a flash drive of American music the last time we saw each other.  Unfortunately, he didn't have email so I have no way to stay in contact with him.  I imagine he's listening to some of that music on his stereo system, probably skipping 90% of the tracks.

There was Madame Zerbo, the owner of the store where I purchased all of the essentials to cook food for myself.  She was the nicest lady, and one of the only people I met who was actually good at teaching Djula, the regional language.  Even though I never got very good at it, she still lit up every time I asked for something in Djula instead of French.

And of course, saying goodbye to Ibrahim was not easy.  He was really the only person in village I felt close with.  He was extremely intelligent and had developed an ability to empathize, a rare and valuable quality among Burkinabe.  While he was working in Banfora for most of my service, he was an amazing counterpart when I did do projects with him.  It was pretty heartbreaking when he asked when I would be coming back.  The truth is I won't be back to Burkina Faso for a while.  Fortunately, he has an email address and access to internet cafes in Banfora, so we should be able to stay in contact

During my last week in Ouaga, I also had to say goodbye to some of the best friends I've ever had.  These people (not all pictured) are the main reason I was able to serve in the Peace Corps for as long as I did.  We shared our successes and (mostly) our frustrations, somehow comforted by the fact that we were all struggling through similar circumstances.

How do I feel about the end of my service?  A couple months ago, I read an article in the New Yorker during which Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Ag Leche, the bassist of the West African Tuareg band Tinariwen (I highly recommend their album Emmaar).  The interviewer tried to get Ag Leche to explain the underlying emotion of Tinariwen's music, and ran into some linguistic complications, but eventually arrived at a beautiful conclusion.

"The term he used to describe Tinariwen's music was 'assouf' which our translator rendered as 'nostalgia.'  Something seemed off with this word, and after several minutes of wrangling we arrived at the Portuguese 'saudade' and he lit up.  He described meeting a Portuguese musician and having roughly the same conversation.  He described the feeling as being 'between happiness and sadness,' and 'it is the sound of having endured something acutely unpleasant, leaving the person to bask in the complex joy of having survived, even though further hardships lie ahead.'"

While I wouldn't necessarily describe Peace Corps service as "acutely unpleasant," the type of complex feeling Ag Leche described was very familiar to me.  His insight inspired me to keep track of the emotional spaces and feelings that characterized my time in Burkina.  After returning, I've narrowed the list down and tried to cut out the cheesy metaphors, even though at times I was literally having to navigate "the space between two banks of a stream," or deal with the consequences of "the space between what you remember about last night and what you don't."  Anywho, here's what I came up with: 




Spaces Between

Somewhere between happiness                 and                         sadness

Somewhere between living in the moment       

                        and                             wishing you were somewhere else

The space between who you are                  and                                who you want to be

The space between where you are now                 and                           your destination

The space between you                           and                               the people you love

The space between the beginning of a journey                      and                         the end.


The feeling of being entirely alone even though you are surrounded by people

                         The feeling of understanding nothing even though you are expected to know

          The feeling of utter frustration with something you cannot change

The feeling of having endured something extremely challenging, 

                               leaving you to bask in the complex joy of having survived, 

                                                                                 even though further hardships lie ahead

Home, Sweet Home

Ok, I'm done waxing poetic.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you for keeping up with during my Peace Corps service.  I hope these posts made you laugh a little, think a little, and understand a little bit about another part of the world.   

Mormons and Strawberries

After the hike to the waterfall on the Togo/Ghana border, we enjoyed a last meal of chicken and fried rice in Ghana, knowing we may never consume such delicacies again. The same Togolaise guide who hiked with us to Upper Wli Falls walked us to the border, which was 200 meters out of town. On the Ghana side, three uniformed officials studied our passports for 15 minutes, searched our bags, and made us fill out some paperwork. On the Togo side, we had to wake the border official up from a nap and he dutifully copied our information into a giant ledger of border crossings, while waving any car that passed through the checkpoint without a second thought. Welcome back to the hot mess of Francophone West Africa.

We hopped into a shared taxi, the most common form of transport between cities in Togo, and started a 2 hour journey on a crazy, crappy mountain road. It's standard practice to cram 7 people into a car meant for 5, so someone has the unfortunate position of sitting between the driver and the passenger, contorting their body to avoid the gear shifts of the driver. Every pothole jarred the bones in our body and we were left wondering how the car was still in one piece after making that trip multiple times each day. Once we made it to a bigger city, we took another shared taxi to Kpalime, Togo, this time on a beautiful paved road. Alright, it was just black with a white stripe down the center, but it was nice and smooth.

In the process of looking for our hotel in Kpalime, we saw a foreigner biking with a helmet, the unmistakable sign of a Peace Corps Volunteer. We flagged her down and talked, finding out that hidden in this beautiful city was the training site for Peace Corps Togo. Over 30 people were still in training, so we made plans to meet up later that night. We had also planned to meet up with Burkina volunteers in Togo, so we had plenty of friends for the entirety of our three night stay in Kpalime.

During that stay, we hung out at another waterfall, hiked up the tallest mountain in Ghana/Togo (more of a tall hill), sampled coffee grown in the region, and found a restaurant owned by a Belgian couple that served authentic trappist ales! I was beside myself with happiness.

More waterfalls!

Beligan beer in West Africa.  A dream come true.

 After a couple days, we said a reluctant goodbye to Kpalime and headed to Lome, the capital of Togo. From there, we took a taxi to the Togo/Benin border, which only took 45 min because Togo is such a narrow country. Once crossing over into Benin, we headed to Grand Popo, a beach resort town. After our brief stint inland, it was nice to be back at the beach. We spent the rest of the day alternating between searching out seafood and relaxing.

The next day, we headed further down the coast to Ouidah. We ended up being dropped off really far outside of town, so we had to find a way to get ourselves and all of our baggage to a hotel that was apparently not very well known. After multiple people tried to rip us off, we just started walking in the direction we thought we were supposed to go. Unfortunately, we chose a terrible road that quickly turned into a series of puddles of mud. After about 30 min of slugging through ankle deep slop, a car stopped and a man asked in English if we needed help. He was traveling further past Ouidah, but offered to take us into town and help us find our hotel. Being a group of hardened, proud, Burkina Peace Corps Volunteers, our first instinct was to refuse. However, none of us had any idea where we were, we were tired, covered in mud, and pissed off, so we decided to accept the offer of help.

This angel of a man had his driver make room for the five of us and after some circular searching, found our hotel.  During the ride, we were casually tipped off that our savior was Mormon, as he had graduated from BYU and ran a business training program on behalf of the "LDS" church. Sometime earlier in our travels, a guy we met had said that Mormons were by far the nicest people he'd ever met while traveling. I wasn't sold on his assertion until the Mormons rescued me from a hot, muddy, hellish road that was 5 km from where I needed to go. Never again will I make jokes at the expense of the Church of Latter Day Saints. But I may still laugh at them.

The next day, we checked out a museum that documented the history of the slave trade in Benin and the exportation of Beninois culture to the Americas. Then we walked down the 6 km “Route d'Esclaves” that captured men and women marched down before being loaded onto ships and transported as slaves to the New World. The path ended at the “Point of No Return Monument,” which memorialized the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were exported from the shores of West Africa.

Point of No Return - Ouidah, Benin

 Ouidah is also supposedly the “capital” of Beninois voodoo culture, but clearly not the most authentic representation of it. While voodoo is depicted as a dark, doll worshiping magic in the United States, it's actually pretty similar to other polytheistic religions. Voodoo practitioners believe that there is a balance between light (good) and dark (bad) in the world. They believe in a “mother” of the earth and many other gods that control life as we know it. Animal sacrifices are a manner of showing respect to the gods and are extremely important to the practice of the religion.  Considering the frequency that animals are sacrificed in my village in Burkina, I wouldn't say it's a practice unique to voodoo.

Where most people start getting creeped out is the fetish practices of the voodoo religion. Various portions of dead animals are used to create objects that are “imbued” with certain spiritual powers by a priest. Priests can also be possessed by certain gods and deliver messages from the spiritual world. Although voodoo dolls are probably the best known symbol of the religion in the states, they are almost never used. All in all, it was extremely difficult to discern what parts of the voodoo religion and history were authentic and what parts were exaggerated for the sake of tourism, but the “fetish” section of the Cotonou market felt pretty damn real.

Voodoo fetishes in the Cotonou market

After Ouidah, we headed to Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin. It was a huge city, but we got tipped off to stay in a district of the city called “Haie Vive.” This little slice of paradise had pubs, clubs, and everything in between. A highlight of the stay was finding a grocery store that sold wine that I had actually tried during my Cape Town trip a year ago! It was a crazy coincidence We met up with more volunteers and had a couple of really fun nights.

Relaxing with South African wine in the Haie Vive District of Coutounou, Benin

 We were also able to check out a village that is built entirely on stilts located on a lake outside of Cotonou. It was actually more of a city, complete with a mosque and a church (both on stilts). People originally built the village to escape from the slave trade. The ethnic group in Benin that captured most of the slaves was forbidden from entering water, so they would never attack a village on a lake. When we asked our guide why people still live there when it seems harder than living on land, we got a very typical West African answer: “Because they're used to it.”

Stilt city on a lake outside of Cotonou, Benin

Everything goes in the lake......

 From Cotonou, we headed 12 hours north to the city of Natitingou, which came highly recommended by Benin volunteers. We spent a couple days relaxing and hiking around the area, which was very picturesque. Our last night of vacation, we got drinks and food at a bar on a hill that overlooks the city while the sun set. It was a beautiful end to an amazing trip.

View of Natitingou

Getting out of Burkina and seeing the rest of West Africa was one of the best decisions I've made during my Peace Corps service. It put my Burkina experience in perspective and confirmed my suspicions that the Faso is an extremely difficult place to live. From socializing with other volunteers, however, I realized that because the Peace Corps experience is universally challenging in West Africa, it tends to breed a negative perspective on your country of service and a idealization of life in surrounding countries. Nearly every volunteer I talked to, from the ones chilling on the beach in Cape Coast to the ones watching the sun set over the mountains in Natitingou, complained bitterly about their country of service. Not only that, volunteers in every country had heard ridiculous rumors about life in Burkina Faso. My personal favorite was the “strawberry myth,” which was recounted to us by volunteers in all three of the countries that we visited.

The myth: Burkina Faso has strawberries year-round. As soon as you cross the border, you start to see strawberry fields as far as the eye can see.  

Depending on who we heard the myth from, the explanation for this phenomenon was:

a) Burkina has cold, seasonal winds that produce frost in the mornings, which is necessary for strawberries to grow

b) The soil in Burkina is more fertile than surrounding countries

c) Burkinabe farmers are more resourceful than farmers in surrounding countries

d) NONE OF THE ABOVE 

That's right! The answer is d) NONE OF THE ABOVE!  The idea that frost exists anywhere in Burkina is laughable. The seasonal winds are hot and dry. Not to mention strawberries DO NOT need frost to grow. With less rainfall that Ghana, Togo, and Benin, Burkina's soil is dry, dusty, and not fertile for most of the year. Clearly there is one farmer growing strawberries who is more resourceful than the rest of farmers in the country, but to make the generalization that all of the farmers are that resourceful is ridiculous.

The truth:  Burkina Faso has strawberries for 1.5 months out of the year. They are only available in the capital, Ouagadougou, and I have no idea where they come from. I'll take 12 months of having the option of going to the beach over 1.5 months of strawberries any day.

In conclusion, it's easy to get narrow minded and negative when you're stuck in a difficult situation for a long period of time. Just the fact that I was experiencing new things during my vacation did wonders for my emotional health. And honestly, when I returned to Burkina, I tried a little harder to keep an open mind and appreciate the positive experiences I do have here. Because those are the experiences that will make it worth spending the last two years here.