I should take this opportunity to state here publicly (particularly in case future employers stumble upon this journal,) that the dissatisfaction with my service, at this point, is purely professional.
It is relating largely with the quality of support the Peace Corps Bureau in this country provides, and their receptiveness to the idea that individual volunteer realities are different.
I would like everyone's support who is reading this, but I do not want pity.
I want to make clear, it is not that I cant hack living without electricity or running water, that I cant hack the biking or the lack of privacy, cultural isolation and integration and potential miss-understandings that arise. Being comfortable is somewhat low on my priority list. I can hack my living situation. I have for over a year and a half. It is not that I was secretly hoping for an easier last six months of service when I approached the bureau with my suggestions and concerns. (Which were then deemed invalid.)
No, I was hoping for a meaningful last six months of service. My work has lacked meaning since this past November. I used to think it was because I was tired. Only I dont believe Im tired anymore, not in a general way. It is specifically the professional situation itself in my village which makes me tired.
I owed it to myself to try and fix my service, at the moment it appears as though I cant fix it. Actually, the realization that I cant fix it has been far more liberating than binding and I wish people could see this and appreciate it. That I really do have so much inexplicable hope in my heart about my direction in life. Only not about the next six months. The next six months is a black hole surrounded by daisies.
I am too immersed in the issues of my village and can no longer approach the same problems I have been working on from new angles. Having an action plan seems beside the point. I have addressed everything I can address, in the best way I could address it. I have worked with what I have. But this path has become like resuscitating a dead horse, more and more. It did not happen overnight.
Someone else has to approach the situation with a fresh perspective and vision now. I have given what I can give. And when I reflect on that, I feel at peace with what I have done here.
It is only when I think about the immediate future, that I am not at peace. |
Today my supervisor came to my site.
She seems to expect me to solve the biggest problem of my village (not having a coordinated plan or organized calendar) with a person with whom I just had the most major conflict of my service (and with whom she had just stepped in to mediate) tomorrow. Literally.
Today is the first day Ive ever regretted joining the Peace Corps. I never thought it would come to that. |
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Mar. 11th, 2007 @ 01:07 pm
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This is an email I wrote to my old French teachers class back home about agriculture and how it relates to deforestation and the environment:
( Read more... ) |
And so I have a meeting with my supervisor on Monday. It’s going to be a plea to find me a new project. If the bureau cannot help me, there is a good chance I will go home...
Before in my service, there was always something new to be learned, when things were bad, I always saw a window I could try climbing through. Before the problems here were interesting to me. Before there were things I wanted to prove to myself and other people. Now I have nothing left to prove to myself and couldn’t possibly explain what Vie been through to people at home much less prove it, so I stop trying. It isn’t a thing of importance anymore.
My life is, in some twisted way, set up in Burkina-- my house, my cat, my neighbors, my community. My villagers love me, and that was hard won. My village did not welcome me at all when I first came. Looking back, it was kind of brutal. Now, they treat me like Imp one of them, and Vie slowly learned to balance my growing multicultural identity. Jean shorts for Ouaga, panyas for village. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, and it happened far more gradually and by surprise than I ever would have thought before I came here.
Really, it’s been trench warfare. Everyday. I tell people now, if they welcome you, that is everything. So many Peace Corps volunteers take their welcome(ness) for granted, or naively think they earned it. I try not to resent that they have not suffered this test.
No, my integration is not the problem. The problem is that there is no discernable work to be done in my village anymore. Yeah, I could plow through it and tell them what they need like any other NGO. I have my opinions. And they would sit there and swallow it, like nice passive Africans are supposed to swallow the messages and ideas of the west (to the bank.) No one refuses my work. No one is invested either. In its intensity, it is very much so a problem particular to my village.
This lack of human investment, this human passivity over time, combined with hyper disorganization and miscommunication (which in its severity is not necessarily characteristic of villages in Burkina,) has run my motivation and energy into the ground. Somehow, miraculously, I am out of ideas.
I do really enjoy the people in my village in their own right. But I don’t think its enough to keep me here. Vie been tutoring music with a girl in the next village over, but that’s not enough either. (Any rate, there is no piano or other instrument candidate to teach her with and this greatly limits the whole process, though she brought me a mango the other day. I was very heartened by this.)
Really, I wouldn’t trade the past of this experience in, I know that. Peace Corps was astoundingly the right decision to have made for myself at the time that I entered into it. Burkina is what it is, and I have made peace with that. My village and my villagers are who they are. I have, mostly, made peace with that also. Slowly, I am making peace with the whole of my experience here, and that is where I am right now. I guess that’s why I haven’t left yet.
These past weeks in particular I have taken the slow rolling demise of my service very very hard, and it has hit my pride like sledgehammer. Though now I think maybe it’s not demise, rather a progression toward a goal I really don’t see yet. A conclusion perhaps different from the other volunteers in this country at this moment. This is me saying all of the questions I’ve had here were answered.
Sometimes, you keep hitting a wall; you have to turn a corner. This is my corner. Now I only hope I have the courage to turn. |
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Feb. 26th, 2007 @ 12:38 pm
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Ive been Thoreau these past days. Odd how much complacency under my skin right now. The future really feels uncertain. |
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Ebou, there are two Ebous. The one I dont get along with in my courtyard had a baby a few weeks ago. The baby only weighed one kilo when it was born, it looked so terribly tiny wrapped in the panyas. The mother was still having pains and the baby was premature, so they went to the hospital in Koudougou. The baby died.
Mostly what I felt when I heard this was relief. It would have been worse for the mother to have died and left 3 kids, one still nursing. Ive become far more accepting of death in this country, or hardened, I cant figure out which.
I went on a theater caravan with my neighbor Kellys group. We sat and drank tea together while the Burkinabes talked about family planning to the teenagers in this neighboring village.
It was amazing to watch really, like being at the center of something big happening, like communion. My village is not at that point at all. My talent and skill is wasted on them. My energy and resources are wasted on them. There is so much I could do but will not; I have to be content that somewhere some Burkinabe is talking about Family Planning.
I am not ready to leave the relationships I have made, but I am ready to leave the work. I think I could do something similar and would like it if only I wasnt forced to reinvent the wheel in a vacuum. My village offers me so little to build on. Before, I had this terrible can do attitude, and I am beginning to see that that motivation would return given the right climate. But not here. I do what I feel like and I stay occupied. Id rather no one talk to me about having done my best though, that makes it all feel like failure. Id rather appear like superwoman, but I see now the people who accomplish that have a great many people underneath them or behind them running around. No one is superwoman in a vacuum.
It has been bitter sweet, my experiences in Burkina. Slowly the end of this experience is descending on me and it has become necessary to make some sense of it...
All wisdom comes at a price, and I have definitely paid for the things that I now know. I am beginning to realize that most people reach a point in their lives where they are unable or unwilling to pay the price of knowledge, and that is the meaning of standing still.
That said, it has been worth it.
Jan. 19th, 2007 @ 11:26 am
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| » Long December |
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My village is a world so removed from this computer screen. I think about it every time I sit down to type. About how my words are going to be weighed by the people who have never seen it.
It hasnt been too much of a secret from my recent posts that I was suffering from some major disillusions these past few months, and most particularly, this past month.
Part of it was the sheer fact of the harvest. The cutting, the processing the storing. Then there was the string of old men deaths. The old man that ran one of the little bars died. I always left my bike there when I went to the market. Then Pima's uncle died, and at the wake I found myself sitting beside a man who'd asked me to marry him when Id only been in village a month, in that same room, last year at his sisters wedding. Life goes in so many twisted circles.
And then the other day there was a death across the way from my house. You could hear everyone sobbing at the top of their lungs. No one in my family knew who had died.
Whenever there's a death of an old person, the whole village shuts down. People pretend not to notice when the kids die, but they make up for it with the old people.
These two factors meant I got precious little done in December. I was pretty hard on myself, because I project my concept of self worth in my work. There was a two and a half week period where I set up a meeting nearly every day, and every meeting and activity fell through.
So.
I did spring cleaning on my projects. I did spring cleaning on my relationships here. And for once, I just tried to be a citizen of this village rather than the great big haloed savior I thought they expected. The humanity helped. I am beginning to realize, though I dont think Im going to adequately articulate it here, that each issue in my village is attached to a string of mentalities which only come to light for someone from the outside over a long period of time of just talking and asking questions of different people who have lived in that environment. It takes a very long time, not only to figure out what the issue is, but also to really listen to and grasp their mentalities on the issue so that you can make a convincing argument to them otherwise. And not only that, but as you are making this argument, to realize that they are people too with their own inter-workings of desires and human traits that make some behaviors too much to ask.
I feel a little embarrassed by this, but I only learned a few weeks ago that the people in my village normally only eat one meal a day, which is after sundown. They drink coffee or tea intermittently through the day, relying on the caffeine that they believe to have nutritious vitamins to continue doing the hard manual labor of their lives. Then they come home, eat one meal of usually only straight starch, and go to bed.
Then they dont understand why they are too weak to work, or lacking in energy. They are told they need to "eat well". If they eat well they will have strength. So they fill their bellies with millet, and go to the store to buy vitamin supplements, and think this makes for a balanced diet.
My neighbors and I, we came in thinking nutrition was a problem because we could see the bloated bellies and thinning arms of the kids. We could see them making to (boiled millet) at night and adding nothing else to it. We said, eat the Moringa tree. We said the Moringa cures everything. Maybe it does. But telling them to eat the Moringa without explaining what it means to eat well, is like trying to teach someone multiplication when they havent learned how to read numbers. The logic was so faulty, and I am embarrassed by this.
If I could do it over, Id listen more to how they view their problems. Trouble is, we've only recently reached a point where they talk about them in terms that make sense to me, to a point where they even feel comfortable discussing what they think they know at all.
In general, Im at a point in my service where Im realizing a lot of the mistakes that I made. A lot of it I attribute to the process of them learning how to interact with me. I think its only recently dawned on even some of my villagers that the things that I do which seem weird to them, are not weird at all somewhere else in the world, that difference exists in a far greater spectrum than what they may ever be privy to. These last couple months are the first months at my site where I feel as though they have begun to see me as an individual and not just the stock white person stereotype they attach so neatly to every foreign face. I feel as though Ive finally dug below the surface of what is going on in this country. I have sat and watched life go by. Ive felt very guilty over it, because I had thought I was here to do work in the most western sense of the word. But really, I came here to watch, and not do.
Cultural exchange is exhausting. Anyone who thinks it is fun has never really experienced it. It is in essence an experience of psychological struggle to the point where your views about the world become annihilated. Of not just wanting to have someone understand your perspective, but needing it very dearly as a necessity of life, of fighting with yourself about whether you are going to engage that difference one more time, cross that line one more time, have that same discussion one more time, and be misunderstood one more time.
But eventually you break through to something and you begin to see crocuses. And that is the real point of the whole mess of it I think.
Everything I have in this country I have earned, and that is not the case for a great many other volunteers here. Sometimes I look back at my time here and wonder if it could have been some other way, if I could have been delivered to this state more gently, (which Im not even sure I have a footing on yet.) But I think the answer is no. Either way, I am going to have to be ok with that.
Dec. 30th, 2006 @ 07:14 pm
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| » Dictionaries and an email excerpt |
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Its been hard for me lately to articulate insight into the Burkinabe culture in writing. I still have these bursting moments when things become clear to me, but the words are never clear in front of the computer and so I do not write them.
For the whole of my service, Ive been in contact with an old French teacher of mine who consequently raised 170 dollars for my village. I ended up buying 31 French only dictionaries, and two French-English dictionaries. Twenty of these, I gave to the primary school in my village, amid much trepidation that such a valued items would be clandestinely sold off or otherwise disappear to Burkinabe valuables heaven. Thus, I marked them really well, even put a note inside the dictionaries to guilt trip would-be thieves. Lack of books is such a huge issue in Burkina. So few entities in this country are producing books, which means that they must import information, just like any other product.
Anyway, long story short. It was a hugely good investment. The best possible way I could have spend 170 dollars. People in village now appear to be talking about the virtues of learning a language with the help of a dictionary. Ive put out notice with the students that if their parents pay me up front Ill look for personal dictionaries. Im trying not to be too optimistic about people taking me up on this offer. However. Sandrine, who is in my courtyard, did say that her teacher has split her class up into teams and anytime they dont know a word now on the board or otherwise, they are supposed to look it up in the dictionaries, six of which they keep on hand for her class specifically. This is a great step forward, well, I think so.
Anyway, off the subject. I had wanted to post the last email I wrote my French teacher, as it attempted something that Im not going to devote more energy to explaining at this moment, but its something I wanted to share. Just to qualify it a bit, my old teacher asked me to try and picture being a 14 year old again, so it is geared toward that.
It is about the lack of access they have to the outside world, information, and technology, and what that means for the upcoming generation of a developing country like Burkina.
( Read more... )
Dec. 12th, 2006 @ 07:06 pm
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| » The girl that would be Hope |
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Probably over a month ago now, Maimouna, Joseph's other wife, had a baby. Of course they ask the nassara for the name. However, I have learned now, the name has to be a French name that they have already heard of. I had wanted to name the baby Hope.
No. Too strange. They wanted a French name.
I named the baby Zoe.
No. They've never heard of the name Zoe.
I think Im going to give up, and I think they are just going to call the baby by its Gourounsi name, which is Elibou.
But this is the problem here in Micro. They want to stay with the tried and true, even with something so absurd as baby names. And even more absurd, they want a French baby name, an imported name, a colonizer name. A French imported colonizer baby name that they have heard of before. That is the problem with this country.
I gave 20 dictionaries to the primary school the other day, that Id bought with money one of my old French teachers had raised. I should have felt like Santa Clause I guess. I more just felt used. This feeling I cant shake lately. That I am letting them use me somehow. That it is all a big joke on me. I feel it, it lingers. Then Im hanging out in the Marche with my counterpart giving vaccinations and one of the cute old chefs comes by and asked me to go talk to people about clean water in his quartier. And then Im energized again and like Im doing something. My cat helps my mental health too I think. Im not sure what Im going to do with him when I leave, Im a bit torn.
This morning I went to Koudougou with 3 representatives from the village. This was a big step forward for me, trying to implicate them in my programs more. This would not have happened a year ago. We went and spoke with an NGO who could help us plug up the damn in the village which has been leaking out all the water the villagers use to cultivate crops. Then we went to another NGO which gives money to a certain type of committee for developing the village in general. Then we went to the place they test people for AIDS.
Ive been trying to get a theater troupe together recently, which, has been slow going as people are not showing up to the meetings and I get frustrated because Im giving up my time. When I give up my time and then my time is used extremely ineffectively it really urks me, but anyway. I was hoping to get them to do a play about AIDS for World AIDS day and then bring in the AIDS exam people to test people in village. I think its not going to work out though, as they want 60 bucks for gas and who knows what else. That was pretty disheartening.
Well anyway, happy thanksgiving.
Nov. 22nd, 2006 @ 08:45 pm
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oh my goodness, it exists.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/aboutthetrust/
This is what I want to do. Help build media infrastructure in the developing world. Now Im sure getting a job doing it would be like grooming myself to run for president. But at least its out there.
Oct. 29th, 2006 @ 05:21 pm
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I have been too hard on myself lately. Id been questioning a lot my impact here and my so called integration into this community. Burkina was looking very drab, very very plain and I didnt want to be here.
So I cleared out my schedule, asked what I was doing and who for and what for. I am not very good at finding a working balance. I feel like Im either killing myself or at a standstill and there does not seem to be an in between.
Right now my village is harvesting their millet. The millet all got cut down outside my house yesterday. It was a stark contrast. Everything is getting brown again.
I think Im going to use this time to try and formulate my action plan for the dry season. I have too many ideas and not enough time or leg power to do them. I have to get over the fact that no amount of killing myself will accomplish everything on my list, and probably not even close.
I was thinking how much better the quality of my service would be if I could just take a hot shower once a week and had a radio that worked well, or some good music. My CDs get scratched with the dust. hell, Id settle for consistently clean feet. I think Im really homesick right now. Most of the PCVs I know here have gone home or are going home come christmas, or have friends and family coming to visit them in the near future. I think this is a big part of it.
But the truth of the matter is that I am part of the village. Paulin, one of the health agents said I was a daughter of the village the other day, while he filled out the forms and Kabre vaccinated the babies. I can see it in their faces, in the way that they greet me.
My family gave me four mango tree saplings yesterday. Add that to the two papaya trees, a gift from someone my neighbor works with, and three moringa trees. I have a real garden now. The little kids make quite a procession of watering it, it is very cute. I dont know if their attention will last, but for now.
I bought a pumpkin in Koudougou and carved it last night for Halloween. This amused them a lot. We took pictures.
And just little things twisting into place. I put up some info about prenatale care on the wall and the men who were there while I was doing it began discussing it. It became its own little sensibilization. And my nurse was raving about the article I distributed to the district about moringa, proposing that they sell the powder in the clinics. He made it sound like the Doctor really got behind the idea and wants to institute it with the district. And he turned around and sensibilized the COGES at their meeting. That's the point. To get them to talk and not me. One would be surprised how hard that is.
There are other examples but I am not thinking of them now.
Yes, I think that is it. I am homesick.
Oct. 27th, 2006 @ 04:43 pm
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| » Short update |
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There were a few things I wanted to say.
I.
My boycott of COGES meetings has apparently ended with fantastic results. I had given up on them, their coddling had insulted me and I left with my pride and my toys and went home. This past month though 4 more important leaders in the community who were not getting paid to be there showed up on top of this 7 member committee for the meeting.
Then they actually sat there and talked about their problems. I was floored. To shake a Burkinabe out of complacence is quite a feat. Of course they still think writing Abijan, Cote D'Ivoire for money to buy a building is a good idea, but its better than them staring at me.
Maybe Im being overly optimistic, but I cant help myself.
II.
Some new health trainees came to my village to see my work. That was interesting. I sat there beside myself about how to interact with them. They talked about things like CVS and I had to struggle to recall the memory of it. It seemed like a lifetime ago that such things existed for me. They seemed incredibly picky, and concerned with things that seemed so unimportant to me, their strings wound rather tightly around what, I dont know. Well, isn't that the essence of American culture...
I guess they'll have time to figure it out here.
III.
The other day I gave a bunch of articles on Moringa to the District Doctor to distribute to the Nurses in all the rural clinics. I think I may use that model again, as it seemed to work really well. Also I found out (!) that they have a library at their offices. A Burkinabe library of course (think, material that would fit in a couple file folders in the states, not necessarily books.) All the books were, of course, horribly outdated, and then they had some pamphlets and things. My new goal is go put info in that library.
Oct. 18th, 2006 @ 06:15 pm
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| » Roots |
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Ive been here a year and a month now, my service is almost half over. And lately Ive been thinking a lot about exactly what I would like to leave behind to my village, what sort of legacy Id like to plant here. A year of sorting through all the problems that people here face and trying to make some sense of them. Not only that but agonizing over how to root them out.
To root them out, you must get at the root. I have learned this. Only for the longest time I didnt know what the root was. I mean the real root. I can tell people to buy mosquito nets so they will get malaria less but the truth is that only solves a symptom, a symptom stacked upon a much much greater issue. Its not deep enough or comprehensive enough. It is not square one. It is like starting to explain the alphabet to a child and starting with the letter F instead of A.
I have agonized over this many many days and nights. Recently though, the smoke has been lifting and I have begun to see it clearly. In terms of wholistic health. In terms of how everything, every health issue is connected.
My neighbors and I are putting together a clean water campaign regionally right now. Im doing some research on options concerning better well construction and water purification techniques which I believe to be the primary underlying issues. Ive started a dialogue with a professor whose specialty is on access to clean water in Africa.
This is something I really care about. I am beginning to think this is the thing I want to leave behind to my villagers. I am beginning to see that at the end of the day, the issues are nutrition and clean water. Nothing else I can get them to change will have a greater impact on their health all around. Everything else is a symptom.
And underlying even this, would be getting them to understand how health habits are all connected, meaning, imparting to them some sort of understanding about the immune system. That the more good habits they adopt the less likely they will be to get sick because their immune system will be able to fight off more diseases more often. Then they have a stake in adopting all habits and not just the ones they have come to believe have some effect on their lives.
Only thing is, how to explain to a mostly illiterate uneducated population such a concept. Its a challenge Ive been turning over slowly in my head, roasting it into a cooked state. I believe the immune system is at the very root of their understanding of health issues though, and at the very root of them having any power in improving their overall health, and not just a symptom, not just the avoidance of malaria.
In my mind the mere avoidance of malaria or diarrhea is not good enough any more. Its not good enough to tell them to wash their hands. There has to be a basis on which all other behavior is placed, and that basis does not exist for the villagers. That base, that root is the immune system, and the two systems just above it, like a tree branching out endlessly into the horizon, are clean water and nutrition.
Its not about treating a symptom. Its about the big picture of their health wholistically, the whole body, every day.
More than one person now has told me that this will be the hardest thing to accomplish, but it is also the most necessary. And Id prefer not to leave my village having only affected one symptom of the problem. Id prefer to get at the root, even if I only start digging and never quite get at it. Maybe the next person will uproot the issue. Im still an idealist.
Sep. 1st, 2006 @ 05:47 pm
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| » Season of good will |
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Koukouldi is not a tourist spot, though twice Ive seen buses of white people passing through with dazed or shocked looks on their faces.
This, however, being the European summer, I have seen the tourists pour in in the sorts of numbers that wouldnt seem like anything to someone passing through. But to me it is almost disorienting, like I dont know where I am. They come and set a certain tone and stature about (rich) foreigners that I then have to live with on a day to day basis.
Luckily, my village has adopted me. My counterpart said I was an African the other day and I think he meant it. Im rarely taken for a tourist anymore. I think I look too bedraggled and dirty. With the lack of anonymity for white people, people tend to learn who lives here and who has been visiting for a week. If you frequent the same places.
Normally I bear the tourists like a cross. And then there was the Sunday when they came, invaded, and ruined my work. I was supposed to be talking about the Moringa tree and nutrition at one of the churches, and in the afternoon was supposed to be my girls workshop.
The rainy season has forced me to come up with creative ways of gaining access to people, because everyone is running every which way these days cultivating and they are impossible to organize because of the sense of time they have here. Everyone wants to meet with me on Sunday if they want to meet at all, it seems. So I overhauled my schedule and made the day of rest my busiest work day. I am ok with that.
Then the four French come, and the world as we know it stops. And the woman I was working with to give the Moringa presentations cancels last minute because she wants to entertain the dignitaries. Kids about my age on holiday, here on the pretext of dropping off some medical supplies that would be considered paltry in the states but are of dire need in my village.
They got a dignitaries welcome, shown around every little nook of the village Im sure. They made a kissy face sort of Friendship at the Burkinabe. The one French woman responded to the hug the Burkinabe man who accompanied them gave. Women do not act like that here, she didnt realize he was taking advantage of her in the context of his culture. Such an act is probably about on par with sucking face with a stranger in a dance club to an American.
He then responds by acting verbally disrespectful to me, because he thinks its ok now. Luckily I dont have to follow their rules and can be bluntly rude if I need to be (and afterward claim a foreigners ignorance. Works every time.)
All the movers and shakers in my village turned up for them. The French in turn freely offered phone numbers and addresses and invitations to their houses. It became apparent that this is why they hassle me for these things. As tourists, they want to make contact with as many people as possible in as short of time as possible, so they can tell themselves that they interacted with the natives. How quaint. And to the "natives" its a status symbol, that they now have this phone number or address to show their friends. They collect them like autographs. The empty flippant invitations to France or the West fueling false hopes that this person might actually be the one to foot the bill for them to come and stay. Then they dont understand when I tell them I cant get them a Visa. Because the next tourist will freely invite them to their home for lunch not realizing that such an invitation does not mean the same thing to a Burkinabe as it would to me for example.
And so we wined and dined them, fish and pork. The stuff of celebrations here, though very meager by French cooking standards. I suppose they felt they had to do this because of the supplies they were receiving. Show the foreigners around for 48 hours, they dont sleep in the village because they are too good for it, and the Burkinabes except it. It is the price they have to pay for the pittance that they need.
Then the French wanted to take a picture, and one of them basically humiliated this villageois who didnt speak French by explaining to him how to work his camera. He didnt try to call over someone who could translate, he just assumed. My pharmacien ran over to help explain to him in Lyele to ease the situation but the French guy was completely clueless.
And in this way, at the cost of the above injuries and humiliations, they got some gause and cleanser to clean wounds.
Not only that but they set back my Sunday busy day work, to what ended up being two weeks. I couldnt work with the woman who would translate for me because she was entertaining. I couldnt hold the girls workshop because they were using the school to have lunch in, where I usually held the meetings.
It all makes me wonder what the right way to do it would be. How to make development ethical on the mass scale. Right now, it feels like the only way to do it is this hands on day to day live with them and get your hands dirty grit Ive been doing. It has paid off for me and I love it, but I cant and wont do it forever.
That said I have been thinking about extending my service a year recently. Its becoming clear to me that what my village and the people in my region really need is an advocate, a responsible representative who has at least glimpsed at the world through their eyes and remembers it once that person has been given some sort of leverage (the latter is probably even more important than the former). I feel like this would be the moral thing to do. To take what I know about the rural areas of Burkina and apply them on the national level where a more sweeping change may be possible.
I just dont know if I have a third year in me. It is very complicated. I am beginning to see more clearly though what it is that I need to be doing here and after.
On a side note, the French kids talked to me like they were talking to themselves, and I was following. I think I can declare myself fluent now.
Aug. 28th, 2006 @ 07:42 pm
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| » poem |
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Rumiki
Rumiki
Walking through the lush
stalks--
he hasnt had his front teeth for the last
eight months
smiles like pain
frowns like laughter
careful
as he puts his shirt on or
takes a bath in
the wide tin basin
his mother warmed for him--
Shy like a whisper
quiet like a prayer
made from the lush
aftertaste of the dabba
a taste of earth
a taste of green
a round face
a prayer.
Aug. 26th, 2006 @ 03:41 pm
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| » On the changing seasons, mentalities, my cat |
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You cant see my house from the road anymore. The millet fields have completely obscured it. Rather a stark difference, all green and lush and somehow feels like an unkempt arid jungle.
I was watching the kids in my family smack the millet from the husks today, thinking about how work intensive millet is, they have to do so many steps to get it to the point where it is edible. Is there a millet gin (like a cotton gin) in existence? Is that a stupid question?
I forgot to tell people that I got a kitten about a month and a half ago, who I presently think is in love with me. He is black and white and his name is Ezekiel. Im kind of worried about what Im going to do with him when I leave, as Im quite attached and I cant say that leaving him with my family here is really leaving him to a good home. (The only thing worse than being a Burkinabe villager is being the animal of a Burkinabe villager.) But I dont know yet if Im going to stay stateside or turn around and leave the country after this current adventure and thus it seems not feasible to take him.
Id decided Id wait and see about how I felt about the states at the end of my service, plus depending on where I got offered a job. This feels like the right strategy.
The other day I think was really the first time I broke down and drank dollo with the villagers. Normally I avoid it because of the drunkenness and well. Inebriated drunken villagers can be scary, because they always pick me out to harass. So I avoid that situation, as I avoid alcohol in general in village. Its because Im a public figure there and I represent America and the Peace Corps. Thats why.
But my friend Rosalie was offering some non fermented stuff, so I sat down and it actually turned out well because someone approached me about starting a theater troop which I had been wanting to do for a while.
Anyway, (of course) some old guy with no teeth started going off about how I should marry him, probably be his third wife under the age of 20 too, yuck, and Rosalie says...
"Il y a boucoup des hommes ici qui veux marrier Joelle, comme elle est belle (she gestures with her hands) mais toujours je leur dit non! Joelle est ici pour travailler, pas pour se marrier."
(Translation, and you have to think of her saying it in this extremely expressive African tongue waving her hands around, this woman with a permanently busted knee cap and her foot twisted to the side from some bygone injury that never got fixed and healed wrong.)
Translation: "There are a lot of men here who want to marry Joelle, seeing as she's beautiful. But I tell them no. Joelle is here to work not to get married."
Did I mention I love this woman?
I told them Im too young to get married in my culture, which is true in a much oversimplified sense, yet everyone seemed to "get" it for once. It was one of a precious few moments in this country where I felt like the gap between cultures was bridged, where I wasnt giving 90 to 100 percent and they were giving a pittance.
Mostly I think the villagers see me as a complete loss. Most of my time this past year has been spent trying to be like them, and then when I realized it was impossible, trying to at least understand well the way that they think so that I could attempt to get work done. And now I am coming in some sort of weird full circle where it is ok again to be an American and to be myself. I am enough Burkinabe that I have gained their trust, and that trust, in some rare moments, manifests itself as a tolerance of difference, or I should say, of my personal difference. Social tolerance is mostly unheard of in their culture. It is a hard won feat.
....I had more to say than this but I think this is enough for now. Peace be with you.
Aug. 10th, 2006 @ 01:32 pm
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| » Announcement |
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I have now fed giant sacred catfish by hand.
Aug. 1st, 2006 @ 07:49 pm
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| » On impact |
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I cant get over how many white people are swarming around Koudougou right now. I think there are more white people in this internet cafe than black people. I think Im going to die of shock.
This morning I talked with a group of women about selling Moringa tree powder in the market. They were pretty receptive, I very much so hope that works out.
But you know its funny. I have worried so much about the impact Im having here on my village. But do you know the clinic sold 100 mosquito nets in a week when we finally got them in stock? Jacob, the man who runs the pharmacy, said we never would have sold nets like that if it hadnt been for the sensibilizations. We are supposed to be getting another 100 here to sell, though god knows when. Still, we might have a few less cases of palu (excuse me malaria) in my village this year. I feel a lot of pride in this.
Also, just simple moments. Like the resident village crazy woman showing me how she was selling Moringa leaves in the market the other day, as if to say "look, I know what they do," or when I sent Jacob to go talk to the pregnant women while they waited for their prenatal consultations and two of them saying something to the effect that they had already heard about it. I have not talked to very many people directly in my village on this issue. Maybe only 30, and almost all women. But word on this issue has been like wild fire. Jacob has given seeds to 11 people, thats 11 people I know of who are sensibilized and I did not have to talk to myself. I think Pauline, aka wonderwoman, has talked to more than that. I had sent her off with trees this morning to talk to more women in the afternoon (because I had to come into Koudougou to get cash). And people at the meeting this morning were asking for seeds for women who were not there, saying they would tell them about how to make the powder.
Maybe its cheesy, I feel so very heartened by these developments.
....If it seems like Im very preoccupied with work, its because I am.
August 2 marks my one year in country. That said, I am really glad that I have another year, because I finally feel at the point where I understand most of their mentalities. I am exited about the future possibilities I see looming.
On another note... An American walked in here a few minutes ago, and it was as though she was from a foreign country, I dont know if that is a good thing.
Jul. 20th, 2006 @ 06:05 pm
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| » happy belated 4th |
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Kabre, one of my nurses, wants me to help him get a Peace Corps volunteer in his home village.
Several PCVs cut me down when I told them about it and I felt a little bad. But at the time I took it as a huge compliment. I do think it is a reflection of the work I have done so far. I have developed a reputation in village for meaning business. It seems I have garnered a tremendous amount of respect in village, particularly with the people I work most closely with, and it feels good knowing I can attribute this to my own accomplishments and not because some PCV or other foreigner came in and broke ground for me. I am breaking my own ground; it is going to be infinitely easier for the next volunteer in that village. I have stopped being bitter about it. I know exactly what it is that I have earned, and they will probably think they have earned a great deal of what is simply handed to them. But I am ok with that.
I have begun to really enjoy people in my village, particularly my majors (nurses) and members in my family. I was too hard on myself about integrating into this culture. The Peace Corps made me think that I was expected to do it all at once and that it somehow had to be total and quantitative and that I had to lose my identity in order to gain theirs. When really, my integration happened unexpectedly and gradually, really only solidifying when I stopped worrying about it and letting things naturally unfold almost as it would have making a friend in the states.
Anymore, I try not to stress about my impact here. It is quite an impossible thing to quantify.
The moringa tree campaign went pretty well, btw. I think I maybe talked to 100 women personally. Between Kelly, Elizabeth and I we probably talked to between 200-300. I think those are pretty good numbers considering that the rainy season is starting and everyone is going to the fields. (When the rains start, the crops can grow, et voila, no one is available to work with you.) Id really like to start a campaign where I train villagers to distribute seeds to other villagers during the rainy season. Thats still in the works.
I was also hoping to do a girls life skills workshop, Im not sure how its going to pan out if no one shows up.
****
Jul. 6th, 2006 @ 10:06 pm
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| » America is John Galt (part 3, scroll down) |
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VI where the money goes
During the course of the week, we watched money pissed away. They would buy too much food, send the drivers miles for simple errands, and otherwise mostly sit around and collect their precious per diem (money given to them on top of their salary when they are actually doing work.) We got late late starts every morning, ended up with 3-4 hour lunch breaks. It was a whole lot of sitting and then breaking for dinner.
It wasnt the villagers fault. They (motivated by the fact that they'd just been paid almost half of what they'd make in a month, plus hats and tee-shirts,) were ready to work, I thought. It was more than the money though, I think it was a sense of pride over being chosen.
(There is more to it than that but I am having a hard time analyzing now as my brain is very tired. Im walking away from the computer. I dont know if Ill have time to finish this by the time I leave for village. See how I feel after lunch I guess.)
Jun. 28th, 2006 @ 11:07 am
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burkinabe's journal