Politics and Lizard Poop

…are equally insufferable in Burkina Faso.

I’ll start with lizard poop, perhaps the more obvious of the two. I do not, like many volunteers, have termites or mice or scorpions or bats or ants tunneling through my walls. I had a tarantula-like spider with a body the size of my fist once – it provoked a scream and calls for my neighbor to come and kill it, which he did while much laughter ensued at my quasi-hysterics (our silly nasara, she’s afraid of a spider!). I do, however, have lizards. Not the disconcerting floor-traveling kind that can pop up anywhere and lurk under beds or scurry across feet, but the much more benign, insect-feasting lizards that people in Anglophone African countries refer to as “wall geckos.” They have those nifty suction foot-pads and make funny guttural clicking sounds when they’re talking or mating or whatever they do. They flee, scurrying up the wall, when I enter a room or my shower and generally keep respectfully out of my way, unless it’s one of the beyond-oppressive hot days when my house is the coolest place they can find and they insist on keeping me company, en masse. So, while I would assert that they are typically polite house guests who do an excellent job of gobbling up insects, they do have one fatal flaw. They poop. Everywhere. They poop on my shoes, in my shoes, on my books and papers, in my shower, behind the door and in other hard-to-reach-with-a-broom places. I have a rack with pegs on which I hang a number of objects which are, periodically and unpredictably, pooped on. In the grand scheme of things, the fact that sweeping up lizard poop is a necessary and ritual daily activity is amusing and I’m sure I will reflect upon it with nostalgia in the future, when I’m dwelling in climates not frequented by wall geckos. But really, is it totally necessary to poop IN my shoes?

Politics. In our American cultural context it evokes images of Congressman debating bills on the floor of the House and Senatorial races with below-the-belt references to so-and-so’s marital problems or history of *gasp* inhaling. We imagine demonstrations on the Mall, neo-Classical columns adorning the colossal Department of Such and Such, get-out-the-vote campaigns, idealistic young liberals struggling to reconcile their bleeding hearts with their consumer-driven lifestyles and curmudgeon-y old conservatives who wax poetic over “a simpler time.”

From what I have read and, quite recently, observed (but have a limited ability to comment on due to the whole being-affiliated-with-the-government thing) “politics,” “politicking,” or however such activities might be accurately categorized here in West Africa, constitute an obscure, mired-in-platitudes, fascinating-in-a-train-wreck-sort-of-way undertaking. We recently had elections for provincial (there are 45) legislative representatives (the same day as France’s presidential election). Since my village is quite large and a few political types actually hale from chez moi, there were lots of activities – rallies, a bike race, mass voter-registration efforts – and scads of publicity posted on trees and people sporting their political garb, from t-shirts to complets made from pagnes (fabric) patterned with party symbols. I avoided all of this like the plague, since it is, quite logically, not befitting a Peace Corps volunteer – a neutral ambassador of our great nation – to take part in local politics. I did have several small children (who, most recently, spend their time chanting party slogans…yes, it’s disturbing in a Hitler-Youth-in-the-bush sense) ask me if I supported the dominant party, and even had a friend ask me to appear on stage at one of the rallies (thanks, but I’d just as soon remain a Peace Corps volunteer until the designated end of my service, i.e. not get kicked out). So, you ask? What exactly CAN you express? Well, this. That all the scathing, critical books I’ve read by Chinua Achebe and other African authors, all those articles in the Economist, a lot of the things I had assumed to begin with…well, yeah, I gather that there’s something to all of that. Nascent democracy (I use this term loosely) is a complex and frightening animal.

Moving on from random diatribes to…village! Good things are happening. Children are learning (potentially), girls are playing soccer and boys are watching, traditional American games are being tailored to rural Burkina Faso. “Duck, duck, goose” has morphed into “mouton, mouton, boeuf,” (sheep, sheep, cow) “sharks and minnows” – the dry land version - became “caimains et poisson” (crocodiles and fish) but evoked such chaos that it resulted in a “let’s not ever try this game again” ruling. My high school/collegiate running career has even proven useful in the bush. My CM2 girls and I start every “gym” session with a run and stretching (them, barefoot, me, with my tender feet, in running shoes) . The other day, after a modest 5 minutes out, I suggested we stop and stretch and then head back. The girls unanimously vetoed this and we continued, eventually making a tour of village that was at least 3k, possibly more. Needless to say, I was impressed with their motivation and stamina. The stretching is typically the most entertaining part of the afternoon. I give them directions in a funny voice which they repeat, in a chorus of equally funny voices. I begin with, in French, the equivalent of “touch the sky,” “touch the earth,” “touch the sky,” “say ‘Good Evening’ to God” (at which point we all wave heaven-ward, which is totally acceptable in this non-secular state, where God is prolific). I even built my school a long-jump pit the other day and am contemplating some modest track and field-type competitions for next year. My head is swimming with ideas and, happily, my enthusiasm is contagious, which bodes well for the next school year. I have two solid high school girls with whom to start my aforementioned girls’ peer-sensitization program and await the end of this school year and their super-serious-potentially-life-altering exam to really get started.

My homologue (community counterpart) has taken an idea of mine and run with it, and I have a potentially great micro-enterprise project on my hands, as well. It involves women making handbags out of a thick, brightly colored nylon thread (they’re quite attractive and popular in cities in Burkina). The idea is that the women work together, starting with a small amount of money that they cotisé (in English…pool, I guess?). They must first be taught how to make the bags (a crocheting-without-needles sort of process). My counterpart actually took it upon herself to go out and buy materials and find someone in Fada (the nearest city) to teach her how to make them – demonstrating initiative like that is rare in village and, thus, is both encouraging and inspiring. They earn a significant profit (about $1-2) on each bag, which will allow them to expand their production. Then, at a pre-determined profit level, they’ll start issuing loans to women in the group to finance their individual income-generating activities (all of the women participate in some sort of commerce, typically selling vegetables or fried cakes at the market or selling an array of provisions – cigarettes, candy, biscuits, etc. – on the side of the road). So, initially the idea is to expand their base of available capital, a pretty simple idea. I want to go a step further and conduct regular business skills development sessions so that we can talk about tailoring production decisions to the market, keeping accurate records so as to track expenditures, profits, and consumer trends, etc.

The thing with women in village, the majority of whom participate in some sort of IGA (income-generating activity), is that, despite their sheer doggedness, they lack the basic knowledge to make their endeavors significantly or even sustainably profitable. So many of them produce the same thing, saturating the market to a point where I wonder how anyone turns even a modest profit. There are many dynamic, intelligent women who will, with a little impetus, I hope, start to think more creatively. This, I think, may be one of the greatest challenges in regard to Burkinabé culture. In the West, particularly the U.S., we absorb the rhetoric of possibility, endless horizons, self-starters, and the necessity of initiative from such an early age – after all, it’s the ultimate American dream. We have the legacy of Horatio Alger-esque, up-by-their-bootstraps rugged individualists. Here, however, a collective resignation is most often the philosophy du jour.

So, there you have it: all the news that’s fit, for now. Somewhere along the line, without really noticing it (though physically moving from the periphery to the center of village played a big role), I turned a corner (perhaps several) and started to feel like the Peace Corps volunteer I knew I could-should-wanted to be. I will definitely still leave Burkina feeling like I accomplished little, the immense, endemic, colossus of poverty, impotence, and inaction as daunting as ever, but I’m no longer sitting wide-eyed and twiddling my thumbs wondering where to begin or what the next step is. This road continues to be a strange and challenging one, but the journey is often meaningful and never dull.

In closing, some brief comments on the climate and weather. Last year at this time, I was enjoying springtime in D.C. – cherry blossoms, knee-length skirts and high heels, sitting on a bench eating lunch on the Mall, happy hours on rooftop patios in Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan, and the like. Recently, there have been days when I’ve spent the three to four hottest, midday hours as immobile as possible, rendered dysfunctional by the heat which turns human beings (ok, nasaras) into vessels of water consumption and excretion and zaps all energy, motivation, and will to actively participate in, well, life. These are precious hours I will never get back, thanks to geographic position, the hue of my skin, and global warming (Al Gore’s obviously on to something with all this greenhouse effect banter…).

Thanks for reading.

‘Til next time,

Chrissy

When you help, you see life as weak.

When you fix, you see life as broken.

When you serve, you see life as whole…

Fixing and helping create a distance between people

but we cannot serve at a distance.

We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected.

Rachel Naomi Remen

"Mouton, mouton, boeuf"

...and I'm the boeuf

“Dad was redreaming the world as he slept. He saw the scheme of things and didn’t like it. He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence. He saw the rich of our country, he saw the array of our politicians, how corruptible they were, how blind to our future, how greedy they became, how deaf to the cries of the people, how stony their hearts were, how short-sighted their dreams of power. He saw the divisions in our society, the lack of unity, he saw the widening pit between those who have and those who don’t, he saw it all very clearly. He saw the women of the country, of the markets and villages, always dogged by incubi and butterflies; he saw all the women, inheritors of the miracle of forbearance. He saw the hungry eating toads. He saw the wars in advance. He saw the economic boom in advance, saw its orgiastic squander, the suffering to follow, the exile to strange lands, the depleting of the people’s will for transformation. He saw the emergence of tyrants who always seem to be born from the extremities of crisis. He saw their long rule and the chaos when they are overthrown. He argued in three great courts of the spirit world, calling for justice on the planet. He argued with fantastic passion and his case was sound but he was alone. He didn’t see the mighty multitudes all over the world in their lonely solidarities, pleading cases in the supreme courts of spirits, pleading for justice and balance and beauty in the world, for an end to famishment and vile wars, destruction and greed. Dad was alone because he didn’t see the others, the multitudes of dream-pleaders, invading all the courts of the universe, while struggling in the real hard world created by the limitations in the mind of human beings.”

- Ben Okri, The Famished Road