Don't take my word for it.

The following was written by Shannon Potter, my good she-chum who, in the wet month of August, hopped on Mystery Air Flight ??? to Ouagadougou. Objective? Pay old high school friend a visit in Burkina Faso. In an attempt to show you, my readership, a new perspective on life in Burkina, I have provided, in unabridged fashion, the musings of Ms. Potter. I hope you find what she had to say fascinating and moving. I think you will.

Do enjoy.

-Joel

Hi friends! Well. Here I am, writing another update email. I’ll warn you now that this one will be the longest and definitely the least funny to date. Read this only if you have at least 10 minutes to spare and are in the mood for a heavy topic. Otherwise, save it until those conditions are met…

So I went to Africa for 16 days. West Africa. A little country called Burkina Faso. Raise your hand if you've heard of it. Burkina Faso is a little country about the size of the Czech Republic sandwiched between Ghana and Mali in the western part of Africa. (It's nowhere near Darfur, in case you're wondering). It gets only a handful of tourists per year, mainly because it doesn't have much to offer. I was told that it's the 4th poorest country in the world. I believe it.

My buddy Joel (with whom I have been friends since 8th grade) is in the Peace Corps doing development work in Burkina. He’s been there since June 2006. I’m in this travel kick, and I’ve always wanted to see Africa, so I figured now would be the best time to go. Especially since I’m geographically closer to Africa than if I were still in the States. So I packed my backpack, got some vaccinations, bought some sunscreen and took off for Africa!

The first thing I noticed was the smell: dust and exhaust and oil and fire and human waste and sweat and cooking food and… who knows what else. The air was extremely humid and thus thick with this indescribable olfactory onslaught. The first few days were a constant jumble of this type of overstimulation. We were in the capital city, Ouagadougou, for about 6 days, in the second largest city, Ouahigouya, for a few days, and the rest of the time was spent in Joel’s village. Let me say here that in the majority of villages there is no electricity and no running water. The depth of this is hard to envision. I thought before I went: “I’ve been camping before; I know how to rough it!” Let me also say here that when you go camping, you can go to the outhouse for a shower every couple of days. You can go to the convenience store and buy ice for your beer. You can buy beer. You can lie on the beach or go hiking (i.e., partake in an entertaining activity). Not so in rural West Africa. Life in these conditions is impenetrably hard. In Joel’s village (which is a decent sized village of 5,000 people), you can’t even buy vegetables. You want a tomato, you take a bush taxi 25k to the next village over.

So I travelled like the locals, ate like the locals, hung out in the dark and crapped in a hole in the ground like the locals. Joel has one of four latrines in his village. Four. And all of them are more or less private. This means that in a village of 5,000 people, 4,996 of them are doing their business wherever the inclination strikes. Considering that many serious diseases (e.coli, for example) are spread via human fecal matter, it isn’t difficult to understand the inherent problems in containing these diseases. There’s human crap literally everywhere.

Joel told me before I went to Burkina Faso: You’ll be able to see the plight of Africa firsthand in all its glory, because in Burkina, plight abounds. I was anxious to get some kind of perspective on this plight, but when I did see it up close and personal, I didn’t even know how to characterize it. The Burkinabe have a saying: The foreigner has eyes but cannot see. That’s how I felt. I can never comprehend their way of life, only observe from an indefinite distance.

I did realize a couple of things about the “Africa problem” that surprised me While it most certainly is multi-faceted (and to even call it the “Africa problem” is really quite unfair, since there are 49 separate countries in Africa, each with their own set of issues), there are two very major players: the Western world and Africa itself.

Developed nations are truly doing a lot in the name of development, health, and education. Billions of dollars in aid are given, and volunteers (like Joel) dedicate their lives to these efforts. But there’s definitely something in it for the givers. As it turns out, there are a lot of rich people getting richer off of helping a small number of poor people. Example: Burkina grows green beans. France buys green beans. France gives itself a pat on the back for helping a poor African country (eases guilt a bit for that whole colonization thing). France cans green beans. France sends canned product back to Burkina and sells it at 10x the cost. France profits. Burkina suffers. The West is doing so much in the name of development, but what they aren't doing (and the absence is notable) is enabling the people to get from raw product to finished product. They aren’t willing to do this because of the effects on their own economies. Teach a man to fish and he’ll stop buying fish from your market…

But do the Burkinabe want to learn how to fish? This was unclear to me. The Burkinabe are most definitely aware of modernization, and they want to be rich and healthy and more comfortable, but they seem at the same time content with their simple way of life. They seem to want the impossible, which is modernity on top of traditionalism. This paradox was most evident in the fact that most villagers have cell phones. They have no electricity, their water comes from a well, their homes are made of rudimentary sun-dried mud-bricks, yet they are one SMS away from instant international communication. With wealth and development, they lose simplicity. They might have to trade it for western-style conveniences. From our perspective, that’s a good thing, but from the perspective of a group who has maintained certain traditions and a certain lifestyle for thousands of years, a certain reluctance is likely.

It's the rainy season now, and this was the first time I've seen firsthand how a group of people can have such a love/hate relationship with nature. It rains for 3 months of the year, during which they farm and stockpile all of the food that they will need for the remaining 9 months. They depend on the rainy season as their primary means of survival. But at the same time, it is a deadly means. The lack of infrastructure is such that after a medium to heavy rain, roads are destroyed, people are stranded, reservoirs flood, and people drown. The first day we arrived in Joel’s village, a man from the area had been trying to cross the road over a nearby reservoir on his motorcycle when he was swept away into the water. They didn’t find his body for a couple of days.

The rain was a large part of my experience in Burkina. My absolute favorite experience involved a bus ride from the village of Titao to Joel’s village, Pobé. Let me interject here that when you pay for transportation in Burkina Faso, you’re not just paying to get from Point A to Point B, you’re paying for excitement! Adventure! Entertainment! Each time guaranteed. So we’re on this bus about 5k from the village we just left, when the bus driver stops and instructs everyone to get out and go collect rocks from the river. Rocks. So everyone gets out, grabs large rocks, and stows them in the baggage compartments under the bus (the token white people included). Meanwhile, we have no idea what the rocks are for. Some of our speculations included: he’s selling them; perhaps a suspension problem with the bus; a landscaping project, etc. We get back in and keep on truckin for another 3k or so, when the bus stops again. This time we can see that there are three large vehicles stuck in the road. Upon further inspection (everyone immediately piled out of the bus to get a closer look), we see that there are massive flooded sinkholes all over the road. The three large vehicles (a livestock transport truck of some sort, a trailer with a big tractor on the back, and another bus just like ours) are stuck in the mud. Here we realize what the rocks are for: we get to fill in the holes and fix the road so our bus can continue. So we worked for a while unloading all of the rocks (there were probably hundreds), then the bus driver unceremoniously gets back in and barrels on through to the stable side of the road. People clapped, got back in, and we were on our merry way again.

A couple of things are notable about this experience. First, the fact that it happened at all. This sort of thing would not go over well in the US or in Prague. For one thing, if there’s a problem with the road, the Dept. of Transportation is called and a crew is sent out to fix it. No such department exists in Burkina, so the people have to fix these things themselves. Secondly, if the bus stopped for ANY reason, people would be irritated. If the bus driver asked you to do something, especially something that involved getting dirty, phone calls and angry threats would be made. Money-back would be demanded. Not in Burkina. People complied with whatever was asked of them with a smile on their faces. Everyone helped: old people, women with babies on their backs, there was even a guy on crutches. After we were back on the road, a guy came back and thanked us for our hard work. I learned through this experience about the “togetherness” that these people live by.

A few days after I got back to Prague, I saw a BBC news report about how the floods in that part of West Africa had reached emergency status, the worst they had been in living memory. In Ghana alone, over half a million people were homeless (I see now how this is possible, since their homes are built with bricks made of dirt, straw, cow crap, and water) and many crops were destroyed. This is major: we're talking widespread famine, disease outbreak, malaria... So I saw the one article, and then no update, nothing else on any other news source. There’s (right now!) a huge humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people, and no one even knows about it. The reality is that it isn’t newsworthy because it isn’t news; it’s the status quo. The plight of Africa.

I think I fell in love with this little country. I know that most of what I’ve said about Burkina Faso has probably portrayed it as a miserable place, but that most certainly is not the case. There are so many beautiful and admirable aspects of this place and these people, and I truly have much more to say. Sorry (for those of you who were patient enough to read this whole thing) that this email wasn’t funny. But in truth, these are the most significant things that I want to share about my experience, not the silly adventures I had in a latrine, or on a rented bike, or in a dance club (although those are funny, and I’ll get to them eventually…).

At any rate, I’ll be writing much more about this topic, and if you’re interested, let me know. Women, ethnic groups, languages, food, beer (which I'm convinced was actually bottled goat urine masquerading as beer), cockroaches, giardia, sheep testicles, and much much more.

Funny stories to come.

-Shannon