Scorpions, Thieves and Harvest Time

…generations of black Africans dreamed and made love…spirits roamed the bush paths, rain soaked the earth in the wet season, and the sun boiled it all away in the dry season, trees fell in the forests…and if any white men saw these things, they left no papers with black marks describing them. There are no books about what happened before white men came to trade slaves. The great deeds and tragedies of the African ancestors were told by the old ones with dimming memories who performed stories by firelight…

Richard Dooling “White Man’s Grave”

Greetings from the land of sun and sand. Today finds me…hot, sitting in an internet café in Fada, contemplating the beauty of a glass of ice water (freezers are miraculous!) and my inability to procure one at this moment. I’ll be in the United States in two months and, despite the fact of winter, I plan on consuming copious glasses of ice water, just because I can.

The school year is officially in swing (it started at the beginning of October, but things are typically slow in commencing) and my village is once again animated and lively. The atmosphere is markedly changed as the village is again populated with people who spent the rainy season in the fields, the civil servants who are back from their “vacations,” and the junior high and high school students who come from surrounding villages to live in mine during the school year. Work is a bit slow in starting, but things look positive and potentially profitable, especially relative to Year 1 of my Peace Corps stint. I’ve already met several times with my primary school’s Parents’ Association (APE) and will be conducting a training session in the coming week for the officers of all 29 Parents’ Associations in my department. I’m running it in conjunction with the regional representative for the Ministre de La Promotion d'Education des Filles (which concerns itself with the education of girls) as well our department’s Primary Education Inspector (dept.-wide primary ed. administrator). Our goal is to instill a deeper understanding of exactly what the APEs are suppose to accomplish and what the responsibilities of the individual officers are within those overarching goals and the general functioning of the association. Bureaucracy is not a norm here and most parents aren't educated beyond a primary-school level, if they’re literate at all. Thus, the basic functions of a purpose-driven association of individuals are fairly far out of the realm of their every day experiences and practical knowledge. Other activities and events that I’m concocting for this trimester include a World AIDS Day extravaganza at our high school, a “life skills” class for high school girls (running the gamut from sex ed to future-planning to responsible decision making, etc.), a repeat of my very successful girls’ sports club at my primary school, as well as review classes for the CEP like those I conducted last year. But enough about work. A few vignettes from my last few weeks in village:

Scorpions

Preface: Scorpions in Burkina are generally not poisonous to the extreme of fatality, they just hurt like a “#à@(9&. It’s evident when Burkinabé comment on the level of pain that it truly hurts.

Preface No. 2: Up until the happenings recounted below, I had only seen two very small scorpions in my village. This, I believe, signifies that I am not only anomalous amongst volunteers, but blessed by some benevolent god as well.

A few blogs ago, I wrote about the benign lizards that populate my house and lauded the fact that I suffer few of the scarier creatures that other volunteers encounter regularly. This previous reality was recently altered by a most unwelcome visitor. A few weeks ago, I went about my morning routine, enjoying a cup of (real) coffee, born of my newly procured percolator, whilst reading one of the many books that I consume rapidly and voraciously (literary gluttony, if you will). After finishing several pages and a cup of American coffee (thank you, Liz!), I filled up my bucket and went to bathe. As I removed the pagne (length of cloth) I use as a towel from the peg rack hanging next to my shower, I was startled by a small, slightly translucent creature lurking ‘neath said pagne. I soon realized that it was a scorpion, about 3 inches in length. I immediately went outside in search for a neighbour to help me but everyone was in the fields, so I was on my own to battle the minute but well-armed creature. I came back to find that the scorpion had moved but soon spotted it on the floor in front of my shower. I grabbed a can of insecticide and sprayed it, hoping to render it immobile before killing it. No luck. It kept moving. I picked up a broom and started to wack the scorpion. Perhaps the broom was not the weapon of choice. Since scorpions have an exoskeleton-like cuticle that surrounds their body, the force of my blows actually propelled the scorpion toward me. Obviously this was less than ideal. At this point I tried to execute the effort with increased fatality-inducing precision. Success. I killed the sucker – by that I mean that I bludgeoned it into an unrecognizable mass of biomatter. I don’t feel bad about that. Burkina could do with a few less scorpions (this would surely be affirmed by those of my colleagues who regularly encounter several scorpions in a night).

Thieves

Why, he wondered...do I love it here so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here would ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its place on the other side of death, and on this side fluorished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst...

Graham Greene "The Heart Of The Matter"

As those of you who keep up with my blog know, I had a rather unpleasant incident of theft last spring. It resulted in my relocating to another part of village which, both at the time and in retrospect, was a good thing for a number of reasons. Since then, my village experience has changed enormously and for the better. In short, I love my new neighbourhood, my house, and my neighbors, specifically the rugrats who regularly populate my courtyard.

Recently, I experienced another theft, that of an especially sinister nature. Brace yourself.

Somebody stole my bra.

That’s right. My bra. (Pink, very girly, from a package that my parents had recently sent). A very nice bra. A theft-worthy bra.

There is a young woman who brings me water every few days and does my laundry. I pay her the equivalent of 10 dollars a month, a tidy sum given the amount of work. She does not, however, wash my undies because it’s very taboo in Burkinabé culture and, well, who wants someone else to wash their undies? I’m happy to handle them myself. Anyhow, a week ago I had quite a backlog of underwear, so I did a bucket-load of laundry. After hanging said items up to dry on the clothesline in my courtyard, I headed out for a late-afternoon run. After coming back, I did a little yoga, took a shower, started to cook dinner and, while waiting for my pasta to cook, went to take my laundry off the line. I piled up the laundry and, as I picked it up to take inside, I realized that my nice, new, seashell pink bra was not amongst the other clean and dry items. I looked around and quickly realized that it must have been stolen. There was no other explanation. I had attached each item to the clothesline with a clothespin. I immediately got really pissed off. It was not a graceful moment. Being a foreigner, I naturally feel a little more vulnerable here than I would in the States, being a stranger renders my situation that much more precarious. Beyond that, having something new that had been sent from the States was a really nice thing. Despite the fact that it was an object as trivial as a bra, being stolen from (again) made me feel like crap. I proceeded to make a fairly big deal out of the incident, informing my neighbors and, in doing so, communicating my displeasure and hurt.

Laundry

After dinner, I hopped on my bike to go to the marché and sit with Salimata, my best village-friend. I told her what had taken place and she immediately said that she’d come by my house the next day to talk to my neighbors. She was truly offended on my behalf, a fact that was deeply appreciated. She pointed out that it was almost certainly a neighbour, someone who felt comfortable enough entering my courtyard without knocking, and was obviously a girl or young woman. This fact was particularly disturbing since I’m on really friendly terms with my female neighbors and the idea that one of the schoolgirls or young women who lives near me would steal from me was disheartening.

In lieu of the theft, I had locked my courtyard door with a padlock upon leaving that evening (my door locks but the key has long been lost, Burkina could be accurately dubbed the “land of lost keys”). When I returned, feeling better for Sali’s consolation, I unlocked the door and walked in to find the bra lying on my terrace. It had obviously been launched over the wall by someone who had come by to return it, knowing that I'm usually at the marché at the same hour each evening, and found my door padlocked.

In retrospect, I can’t help but understand the motivation of a young woman for stealing my bra. Village girls and women don’t generally have a lot of clothes and the allure of something pretty and feminine is obvious. Women here like to look and feel beautiful, just like the average Western woman. Whoever it was had enough remorse to return it, which makes me feel less slighted. In the grand scheme of things it’s negligible, particularly considering that I certainly own more bras than any woman in my village. Thus, as they say…ça va aller (so it goes).

On the subject of thievery, another brief story:

The very next night I was sleeping in my tent, outside on my terrace, as usual. I’ve become accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of music and tam-tams (drumming) during the frequent weddings and various village celebrations. On this night, however, I awoke to the sound of persistent drumming at 1 am. This was unusual. Drumming doesn’t typically begin in the middle of the night. I tried to fall back asleep, but it persisted, and was soon accompanied by movement all over the village and the sounds of men’s voices. Shortly after, I heard the women from the closest neighboring courtyard talking as they sat on a huge slab of stone between our courtyards. I grabbed my headlamp, got out of my tent, and headed next door. I asked what had happened and they responded (in Mooré) something almost completely incomprehensible to me save the word “wagda”. Thief. This naturally freaked me out and I stood around with them until one of the women suggested, in a very maternal manner, that I go back to sleep. I did, eventually, feeling secure only in that I knew that if I screamed, my neighbors would hear me. I dozed off to images of a prowler breaking into some villager’s house, searching for money and valuables (villagers tend not to deposit their money in any sort of financial institution, even though we have a small bank, “caisse populaire,” in village and people do understand the basic value of doing so. I’ve been told this is born of the legacy of colonialism - keeping money in any official institution was risky as it would often be confiscated by the colonial powers-that-were).

My bedroom

After a less-than-satisfactory night’s sleep, I got up and stopped by the marché before heading off to school. I asked about the drumming and eventually ascertained that the theft had been of a cow, not a break-in. The drumming was an alarm system of sorts, a call to action for the village men. I felt enormously relieved that it was a cow-thief and not a burglar. The thief had gotten away, but without the cow. Though certainly not a good thing, livestock thievery is pretty common and, in village terms, is not as grave as other, less common forms of theft. Thus, my inquietude was diminished.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Milan Kundera “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”

Salimata, selling slices of watermelon at the marché

Harvest Time

Well-fed poets may dream of finding the world within a grain of sand, but a starving man can find the entire universe and all the ecstasies of eternity in a mouthful of groundnut stew and a tin cup of well water.

Richard Dooling, “White Man’s Grave”

We’re currently in the midst of the harvest season here in Burkina Faso, the dry cornstalks and crisp smell of dying vegetation and dry earth are reminiscent of the autumnal northeastern United States (I can almost taste my mom’s pumpkin pie). The word "harvest" seems most appropriately associated with abundance, Thanksgiving's cornucopia, a holiday meal. Unfortunately, this year’s rainy season, though violent, was brief. It started late, came all at once in deluge after deluge, then ceased unexpectedly. In my village, dozens of houses were severely damaged or destroyed, including the house of one of my closest friends. She insisted on continuing to sleep in it, against my protestations, and her house fell in on itself only hours after she'd been sleeping inside. The southern areas of Burkina experienced severe flooding in July and August, followed by extreme drought when there is typically rain. Climate change? Methinks most certainly. The Sahel (immediate sub-Saharan Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea – Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan) will suffer more than most regions of the world for the sins of the West and the evidence is certainly apparent: desertification, shorter, fiercer rainy seasons, hotter average temperatures, projected water wars. Yesiree, the Sahel is screwed. I recently read an excerpt from a memo authored by Lawrence Summers, an economist for the World Bank. To paraphrase, he suggested that the low levels of pollution in African urban centers are an indication of poor industrial efficiency. Beyond the mere fact of suggesting that lack of pollution in Africa is a BAD thing, an obviously assanine statement, the notion that a professional would even consider conducting serious dialogue in terms of pollution as a positive indicator of development is absolutely MIND BOGGLING.

Then again,

You didn't have to join the human race. You could have stayed in America where five percent of the world's population consumes seventy-five percent of the world's resources (Richard Dooling, White Man's Grave).

I guess it’s pretty obvious that I have a hard time wrapping my head around the increasingly dire situation that this part of the world faces and the factors of Western-origin that caused and perpetuate it. Please forgive the incendiary nature of the quote - it's a harsh reality that I've come face to face with via this formative crash-course in "this is how the world actually works." Life here is hard. I’m confident that, if anything, my blog entries have demonstrated that. The average Burkinabé struggles in a way that the average American can’t fathom. I understand that better than most, but I only live amidst it, I don’t live it. The fact that the lifestyles we, as inhabitants of the "First World", lead actually make life harder here is one of the universe's sad, sick jokes. The really disgusting thing is that, aside from perpetrating heinous environmental, economic and humanitarian crimes against the "developing" world, it's the example of the developed world, especially the United States, that pushes them to strive toward ill-conceived, damaging production methods and consumption habits that mimic ours.

The harvest itself has been dismal. Corn is a third or half the size it was last year, many millet fields were ruined or produced a much lower yield than usual, and I can only imagine the impact the copious rain, then lack thereof has had on cotton. These are Burkina’s cash crops and, currently, it looks like the average family will eat less than they did last year. Prices are already elevated and it’s clear that we’ll witness quite a bit more suffering and struggle than this past year, from the costs of refurbishing and replacing damaged or destroyed houses and the loss of revenue from poor or failed crops - the mainstay of the average rural family's income. The following is a quote from an article, "Local Leaders Say Flood-Hit Residents Will Need Food Aid for Months," the link to which can be found on the sidebar:

"I was sleeping with my family when I heard the waters entering through the windows," Lassina Sanou, father of eight, told IRIN. He said it cost him 300,000 CFA francs (US$645) to build his mud house; now it's gone and he lives in a makeshift shelter. He lost his crops and cattle to the floods.

"I have to start from nothing again. I will have to come up with money and it will take years."

So, there you have it. I realize this is a fairly somber way to end this entry, but it's reality as my friends and neighbors live it.

“The people of the First World are eating the children of the Third World every night for dinner,” he said, staring at Boone, as if he expected this statement to elicit a critique from his listener.

“That”s…unusual,” said Boone. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“Cannibalism,” said Frank. “You are what you eat; but they aren’t, because we eat it all; therefore we are eating them.”

Richard Dooling “White Man’s Grave”

Sarata, Amisatu and Rasmata - my neighbors

A millet field outside my courtyard

It’s hard to reconcile the world I left with the one I find myself in now. I feel as if I cheated fate and got a whole other life in my allotted span.

Tanya Shaffer “Somebody’s Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa”