Hungry

Working in a developing country, you quickly realize that nothing works the way you thought it would.  The dirty, naked, African babies with fly encrusted eyes from commercials are not always lurking around corners, waiting to break your heart.  And though your first urge if you did happen to come across one would be to empty your wallet to fix this problem, your quarters and dimes would be poor fodder for a hungry child.  Hunger may not work how you thought.

To begin with, not all hunger is created equal.  Many of the world's malnourished children ate breakfast, lunch and dinner today, and snacks in between.  Even so, their bellies bloat, hard and round, with shadows showing between their ribs, skinny limbs carrying them around. Named kwashiorkor malnutrition, this illness means they're eating--just not the right balance of things.  Carbohydrate loading and a low-protein diet (usually coupled with gastrointestinal distress) can lead to long term and sometimes irreversible damage.  Marasmus malnutrition, on the other hand, is an illness faced by children trying to grow up with no food at all--a hallmark of famine, war, extreme poverty, and lack of access.  These two problems require two very different solutions.

In both cases, the normal procedure seems to be to send boat loads of plumpy'nut (an amazing nutritionally rich sweetened bar used to combat malnutrition) to villages and let people figure out how best to deal.  When there is no food, and no other options, this makes perfect sense. Refugees, displaced persons in war, and drought would all be good reasons for this.  But when having no food is NOT the cause of malnutrition, you can't just throw food at a child to solve this problem.  I personally met dozens of mothers while working in Burkina Faso who managed to get their babies up to weight using plumpy'nut, sometimes in just a few weeks--and then I saw them come back in two months, as the plumpy'nut ran out, and they still had no idea how to feed their children correctly, even though all the resources were already available.

As has been seen before, throwing free shoes, money, and food at developing countries rarely fixes anything and often makes things worse.  There are shoe makers, business owners, and food vendors in most of even the most impoverished places.  By dropping a load of free shoes in the middle of a village, you put all the cobblers out of business.  By dropping a bunch of money on a country, you buy a new land rover for a politician.  By dropping a bunch of free grain, you ensure a farmer will make no money that year. 

So should we stop trying to help developing countries? No, but aid organizations have to work smarter and be more responsible.  Free money and development should not go hand in hand.  That was development 50 years ago.  It's time to be better.

Oooh adventures, and cheers to being done!

Well, it has finally arrived! I am officially a RPCV, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer--except for that returned part.  I have begun the grand adventure! As if I just haven't gotten enough of West Africa after 5 months in Mali before the coup, and 20 months in Burkina, I feel I must have MORE!

I left my little village of Ouarkoye (ok, maybe 10 000 people isn't so little) in Burkina Faso about three weeks ago, through a maelstorm of tears, the majority of them my own (I think my cat, Tequilla, shed a few as well), but A LOT of them from my association ladies. It was ROUGH, and sooo much harder to leave than I thought it would be. I spent the whole week before in a nervous packing, planning, guide book frenzy, feeling like I was about to reach the end of the world and fall off into a big, scary travel (and soon America!) abyss.  The final leaving was almost a relief, just to get it done and see what's on the other side!

I spent a week in Ouaga afterwards, wading through that lovely paperwork that our government loves so much, but I finally got that pin from Peace Corps that I've been working two years to acquire, woohoo!

So now I've started the next big adventure, or at least an intermediary one, covering 7 countries in 2 months, and traveling from the southern coast of West Africa in Lomé, Togo, to the west coast in Ziguinchor, Senegal, overland. Like, in a car. It is gonna be a looonng ass trip, but I'm pretty excited about it.

Rough schedule:
Benin and Togo for a week and a half--Check, Check, and a blog to follow soon.
Mask Festival Burkina Faso, Dedougou
Mali, to visit my first village and finally say g'bye! Then to the great Bamako to check on that music scene.
Senegal, going through Tambacounda and arriving in Ziguinchor for a few days of jungle luxury on the beach with a Peace Corps friend from Mali.  Then to Dakar for a few days of african colonial non-sense before heading to....
Italy! First in Rome, then Turin to see Yoro from Mali!, then to Venice to see a study abroad friend
Aaaand last but not least to
Morocco to check out Casablanca, Fez, and Marrakesh with Meliea, the best Peace Corps recruiter ever.

So there it is, wish me luck!

Malaria!

Farmers all over Burkina are staring hopefully (and more than a little desperately) at the skies these days.  The skies are lovely, sunny, cloudless--a perfect day to relax under a mangoe tree and chew on kola nuts--and 100% empty of the monsoon like rains that are usually in full force by this time in June.  The earth, just beginning to erupt in little patches of green grass from the early rains in May, has begun to draw back in, re-drying and baking into clay basins.  When one of those cataclysmic rains does finally come, all that dry soil is going to have a hard time soaking it up--instead, it's going to collect in little ponds all over town.  These little ponds will be the cause of death for hundreds, thousands of children all over Burkina and Mali in the next six months, all from a seemingly innocous little creature, smaller than the tip of my finger, with a big appetite and an unbelievable ability to spawn--mosquitoes are on the prowl.

The female anopheles mosquito is the culprit, and her weapon of choice is malaria.  Malaria is probably much different from what most peope think, especially if you've never lived in a country as inundated with and jaded to malaria as Mali or Burkina Faso.  In these countries, malaria is thought of and treated like the flu--it's everywhere, it sucks, everyone gets it, it's definitely no fun, but your not really afraid it's going to kill you--just a week or two of misery.  Some people, most people even, live with it in their system most of the time and just don't have symptoms until their immune system is weak.  There are even some people, by a genetic quirk called sickle cell anemia who don't get it all (their funky shaped red blood cells just hold no apeal to the virus).  Pregnant ladies and children, however, are not so lucky and are most often victims of fatal cerebral malaria.

The most frustrating part? IT IS SO EASY TO PREVENT! The female anopheles mosquito only comes out between 10pm and 4am (generally speaking)! Literally, just sleeping under mosquito nets would prevent such a huge number of cases that it would for all intents and purposes rid the world of malaria (from an epidemological perspective). So, why oh why don't people just sleep under a damn mosquito net? Here are the reasons I hear:

1) Those nets don't let in any airflow (Answer: A little true, but rainy season is cooler anyway)

2) I never get malaria anyway (Answer: Maybe not, but it could be in your system and you could unknowingly transfer it to your pregnant wife or little child)

3) And anyway, malaria doesn't come from mosquitoes, it comes from Mangoes and Corn, you silly toubab!

(Answer: Raaaar! This one frustrates me the most, not because it's silly and not because I get mad at the people that think this, but if you have ever tried to have an intellectual show down with an uninformed or ignorant thought shared by several people who don't know or care about the scientific method and years of research in labs, you can't begin to understand my frustration.  At home, if you want to prove a thought, you whip out that smart phone, you punch in that question, and blast the oposition with your superior knowledge.  Burkina Faso: Non-applicable on so many levels, and further more, we toubabs are always coming up with the craziest ideas anyway (remember when she wanted us have gardens in water bottles! Ha!))

So, I'm going on a mosquito rampage this year, by golly.  Just handing out gazzillions of mosquito nets is clearly not enough (Burkina has been doing that for a while).
Step one: Sweet mural of a lady and her baby under a mosquito net
Step two: A little harassment of villagers in the streets of my village, namely badgering them to enter a contest for a super cool american mosquito net by  promising to sleep under one during rainy season

Step three: Make mosquito repellant with my assocation out of shea butter and neem oil to sell all over town.  Step four: Save babies! End malaria!

Denmisenw/ Kids

Denmisenw means kids or children in Dioulla and it's a word I use a lot as pretty much everyone has at least 5 in Burkina.  Kids here have blown my good moods to smithereens plenty of times and have made my day just as many.  They have the luck here to have a whole village in which to run amuck, a village full of mango trees to climb, crumbly mud brick walls warm from the sun to scale, lizards to catch, animals to chase with sticks and roars, other hooligan kids to wreak havoc with, and, lucky for the kids in my village, a toubab to watch and pester at their leisure.  They have the unforunate luck of getting the last pick of meat, the worst hand-me-downs, the fewest baths, the most wacks across the butt with skinny stinging switches, and a disproportianate share of the most grueling housework.

They are shockingly obedient to their parents and their teachers, as they know the serious consequences of anything but perfect behaviour. They tie their baby brother's and sister's on their backs and go mango hunting while mom pounds the corn to make flour for 'to', and dad fixes shoes, drinks tea, or wanders unhelpfully through village.  They steal from each other greedily and give selflessly in a ten minute span.  They play dress-up with rice-sacks, tumble and wrestle in sandpiles, braid each other's hair, make bizarre rhythyms with recycled instruments, help the toubab with her 6th and still pitifull garden, ride bikes 10 times too big for them, collect bottle caps and make games with them, create cars with boxes and card board wheels, and generally look for anything at all to do.

They are usually totally gross with all this fun, full of sand and dirt and snotty noses and sticky mango finger and gaping holes in their clothes until their mom finally dumps  a bucket of water on them and scrubs it all away. They tranform for holidays and weddings into little adults, in matching out fits with their brothers and sisters, shiny with shea butter on their skin, eyebrows drawn in arching lines that sometimes make them look angry or surprised, much to my amusement.  They are darling devils!

you can see my pictures of some of my favorite kids at  https://picasaweb.google.com/102639843968564284925/DenmisenwKids

Famine

FAMINE is a word that brings up images of biblical scenes involving locusts and first sons as well as little African babies (from the country of Africa) with scrappy clothes and fly covered faces.  Before coming to first Mali and then Burkina Faso in West Africa with the Peace Corps, I imagined that hungry babies would haunt my dreams; that people would just be miserably hungry all the time.  As it turns out, those scrappy clothes are a point of practicality on the part of parents who do not want to change their children's clothes fifteen times a day for no reason (an advancement over some germaphobe American parents I've seen).  I can attest to the fact that it is HARD to stay clean here, impossible if you are a drooly two year old who thinks dirt is the most brillant food item since breast milk.  And those flies harass everyone, regardless of race, creed, gender, nationality, or hunger level and everyone gets sick of batting them away at some point.  I don't mean to imply that there are not malnourished kids here--that's part of my job--but like most illnesses and diseases, it probably doesn't look or work like you think it would.

Thus, I have become somewhat desensitized to the intensity of the hunt for food here in West Africa.  I sort of forgot about this word Famine until my French tutor, Mr. Dakio, brought it up last Satuday during our lesson.  He'd prepared a little comprehension paragraph, which I read aloud, fumbling over the words and trying to dig out the meaning.  At the end, he asked me very seriously "Have you ever seen a famine?""Nooo," I replied hesitatingly, "but I almost did before I left Mali," as if it were a CBS special I intended to watch but missed due to another engagement. "Have you?,"I asked, mentally preparing for the deluge that was always Mr. Dakio's long-winded response to questions, wondering what he would think of grocery stores..  He told me that the first famine he experienced happened in the 60s, when he was still a kid.  That year the rains  didn't start in May or June like they usually do after the hot, dry season that proceeds them (the hot season, incidentally, being the beginnings of the hurricanes that later tear across North America).  All the way to October, they barely managed to squeeze out a few drops, choking even the drought-resistant millet and sorghum.  The functionaires (government employees whose salaries, though still pretty measily, by far surmount what most villagers make in 20 years), including Mr. Dakio's family, simply bought grain to make to, the grain blobs everyone eats here.  He told me that for kilometers around the village, not a green leaf could be found.  People ate leaves they'd never looked twice at before, boiling it two and three times to get rid of the bitter taste.  Some people eat clay, just to fill their bellies.  The elderly passed away quickly, as only a day or two with no food was more than an already frail body could handle.  The protestant church came to the Upper Volta, as it was not yet Burkina Faso, with bags of red sorghum, the stuff we (Americans) usually use as animal feed.  This was available in tiny amounts for huge families, offered with the stipulation that the family would join the church (being catholic didn't count).  This red sorghum became famous and the words American and Protestant were tied with it.  To this day, when Burkinabe find out that I am American and not French, they are almost instantly friendly and pour out doting words on Americans.  People tried for a while to keep to local beliefs, sacrificing animals, dances, masks, even some particularly devout who ran around to all the old places of worship naked, arms flailing--the whole shebang.  Unfortunately, this method didn't seem to work and many soon switched to Christianity, not surprisingly. 

This place is always just a harvest away from famine.  It's like living month to month with your paycheck, versus having a sound savings that could stand sometime of no income.  I think at worst in America we could live on spam and twinkies, which are sure to survive a nuclear fallout, for at least a year or two.  When I try to think of why these two countries are so different and really think about what the problem is, my thoughts start running at a hundred miles an hour and I come to 10 minutes later with a sigh, pulling on the uneven parts of my hair and staring at the wall.  It's not called a "developing country" for no reason--infrastructure (roads, buildings, water pumps, storage, factories, public bathrooms, transportation), education (an old system of memorization, catered to boys, poorly managed and run, the idea of savings and investment), illness/disease (malaria, meningitis, and diarrhea are rampant and misunderstood, poor and distant medical facilities, lasting effects of childhood illness, vaccinations, free medicines that exacerbate problems like HIV as people seem asymptomatic, unwanted pregnancies, the list goes on) and the job market/economy (no real buyers, instability <coups happen!>, no jobs for even the educated, economy worldwide) for starters.  All of these factors line up like dominoes, both individually and nationally, and with no external forces they seem good enough, their fragility forgotten.  But one little push, one little breeze, and one breaks on another, wreaking havoc and starting everything back on square one....again.  Say what you will about America's imperfect system, but I don't think our economic brinks even comes close to the one Burkina Faso has been tip-toeing for a while.  Throwing money at these big problems, as a lot of development has been doing for some time, is also clearly not working.  Throwing money at Africa, as far as I can see, has only made things worse!  Just asking for some jerk to gobble it all up for motorcycles, fancy cars, and mad parties.  A lot of villages and people here are also now spoiled for money and especially projects, a word that makes most people here's eyes sparkle as if it is a free present--which it has been.  Not a simple problem, not a simple solution. 

Lil' village gangster gossip

October 14th, 2012--Lil' village gangster gossip

This morning I found myself barreling down a bumpy dirt road, gripping the front passenger's seat of a shiny blue SUV with pink and purple silk ribbons streaming from the bumpers.  I asked our driver if that wasn't his wife in the car that we had just paused to talk to and he replied shortly, "Yes. The fifth."  I was, and still am this afternoon, exhausted from this man's marriage extravaganza to his latet wife, which has broughht his total to six (Rumor has it tht one of his wives left due to some intermarital trouble; wonder what it could have been?).  And what an extravaganza this marriage was.  You would think having done this five (or six) times already would make him les inclined to really throw down, that maybe he would rather have a quiet ceremony with only friends, family, and of course the other five wives and fifteen children. But oh no, not this one.  Apparently this wasn't just a marriage--it was a political power move as well.  Bum bum bum!

Our man of many wives, who I shall call Amadou, is brown, tall, and has hair that is mostly salt and a little pepper.  Attractive, but not enough to convince me to be his seventh wife (that man doesn't exist).  Amadou started out in the cotton business, smalltime, like many Burkinabe farmers looking to make a buck.  Amadou apparently started to really make it big, thus calling in the vultures to descend upon his good fortune.  This fortune was also sought by shady means, however, including the distillation and distribution of what I'd have to call moonshine (oh man does it burn!).  This, like in the states, is NOT legal, and thus brought Amadou several days behind bars in Dedugu.  These bars could not contain such gangster power as was manifested in this one, however, and through a bit of palm greasing in the strategically powerful and right palms he was free in a conspicuously short time.  This little success deserved nothing more than magnificient moonshine party, an excellent opportunity to make all kinds of friends all over town, though not the police that arrested him, although they were invited too. 

His other jail term  was far less amiable, however.  After making big bucks in cotton and moonshine, he decided to move on to bigger and better things, namely the selling of quality seeds to the government of Burkina Faso, and he felt that everyone else should also jump on this money boat.  "No" was not an option in response to his business proposition, and allegations soon started to pop up that he was responsible for the burning and destruction of cotton fields all the way down to Banfora.  Not a good way to make friends; but, a good way to make money and gain, most importantly, power.  This little battle between his majesty of the seeds and six wives and the cotton growers has chilled, but is by no means over, as evidenced by this most extravagant wedding to luck lady number six (or seven, depending how you look at it). 

Walking into this wedding, I was scorching under a midday sun in a new outfit of handmade cloth, black cotton with lizards and animals crocheted into the weave.  I felt I had walked into some medieval African games.  Regional music with balaphones and drums burst from the speakers inside a huge concession of packed earth, hemmed in by huge two story houses, factory style (one for each wife and her children, and one for his lordship Amadou).  A dance troup flocked in the center, decorated in handmade clothes, furs, hats with mohawk shaped fringe, and jingly attachments, perfectly choreographed, sinewy muscles shiny black under the sun.  At the end of the concession, his majesty sat in an uplifted stand, covered in purple and white fake silks, ribbons, and roses.  At a long table, the mayor and all the other officials of the municipality accompanied him to his right, while his wives sat decked in shiny purple dresses, hair twisted and kohl arching over their eyes, to his left.  Thousands of villagers camped out in the shade next to the houses, watching the spectacle in the center, like spectators in an arena.  This was only a distraction until huge bowls of rice teetered out of somewhere on dozen's of ladies heads.  Men with heavy plastic crates followed, with Brakina and Beaufort (local mediocre beers), and Fanta. He, incredibly, fed and watered everyone. No moonshine, (fortunately or things probably would have gotten really out of hand), but wine, dolo (millet beer), brakina, and whiskey streamed in constantly, and soon the dance party was ON.  I am happy to say that the people of my village are still talking about my dance moves. I'm sure that's a Peace Corps goal somewhere.  I only made it until about 10pm, however, until I had danced myself away and puddled on chair fast asleep under the stars.  We eventually moved inside, though that couldn't stop the bass, which raged until 7 am with plenty of party people, from entering my ears andd head and dreams  all night.

The next morning the whiskey, wine, and beer came out with breakfast and was tucked away quick as a wink.  Who would have known Burkinabe could be such party animals?  So, many thanks to Monseigner of many wives and his power play.  I think it was successful, if sexist.

An old man's funeral

September 29^th—

Victorine's father, the man with the feather in his ear, died last night.  I remember thinking the other day that he would probably die while I was here.  They took him to the doctor yesterday because his stomach was bothering him.  He told Victorine and I before that that he wasn't feeling well, hurting all over, in his joints especially.  He had lost weight,  so that his skin hung on his shoulders, shiny and taut from the weight of all the rest of his skin pulling down on itself.  They told me yesterday that he was sick but that it wasn't serious—just an IV drip.  

I went over to their house by myself this morning, as everyone with whom I would normally go to such an event is part of that family and was already there. Justine, Victorine's sister, this old man's daughter, was despondent and bleary eyed, lost.  Deni, Victorine's brother, was digging the huge grave with a dozen other men, burying big tree pillars in the ground to make a hangar.  I saw Micheline first, Victorine's sister, and wished I had more words to tell her how sorry I was.  I kicked off my sandals and went into the house where he laid on a gaudy green plastic mat, a hand woven blanket covering his long form, and the smell of parfum hanging on the air to cover up another smell. 

I could see the shape of his nose through the blanket, which made me think of his droopy eyes above it, sagging with age, and his ears being tickled methodically with a feather shaft, much to my amusement.  His wife sat beside him, her ethnic scars, normally visible all over her face, now hidden in the dim light of the room. She emitted sighs as if trying to figure out how to deal with this.  I wondered how long they had been married

—it could easily have been over 50 years, beginning before Burkina Faso was even Burkina Faso.  I already felt teary eyed and choked up before going in their house, but as soon as I saw Victorine, I started to shake uncontrollably and only barely got out a “Fo” and “Alla ka heneyala” (Sorry and May Alla give him a cool grave), before I couldn’t speak.  I felt my face twisting and twitching in the deluge of tears and I felt acutely embarrassed and somehow presumptious to cry here, as if I, as an outsider, could be “in” enough to feel such real remorse over the death of this old man whose name I don’t even know. 

I remembered the old man in Mali who told me that the death of a really old person is a loss to the whole community, a wealth of knowledge like a library, suddenly gone.  I thought of a huge old tree with thousands of rings in its trunk, cracking as its sinews and fibers snapped apart brittley, and crashing with a rumble on the forest floor.

Follow-up

Who knew what a rockin’ party this funeral would turn out to be?! The first two days were solemn with lots of tears and blessings.  Hundreds of people streamed in from all over Burkina Faso to pay their respects and give blessings to Victorine’s family.  But that doesn’t mean they didn’t also throw down.  Dozens of animals must have been slaughtered this week, a hundred of kilos of rice consumed, thousands of blobs of to.  Victorine’s family bought beer, fanta, dolo (local made millet beer), sopal (a really gross liquor that’s like fire going down your throat). 

 I think I drank my weight in dolo this week, really.  I kept accidently getting drunk.  I was waiting for lunch to be ready, so I was of course taking up all the offers of a free calabash of dolo to entertain myself (and others, admittedly).  Three calabashes into waiting on Wednesday, and I found myself chasing the headcook with a stick, telling her to get to work, "Everyone's hungry!" I hollered, to peals of laughter all around.  It didn’t take long for her to snatch that stick out of my hand and start pointing it in my direction (don’t worry, all in good fun, no battle wounds to speak of). 

I would take a little sieste to sleep of the dolo effects at 3pm after finally eating some riz gras (kind of like Spanish rice) and then not waking up until 5pm—by then the day is almost done!  So, I walked down to give my blessings and say hi at the funeral, only to be offered another calabash of dolo.  Drunk again! Damnit! How does this keep happening?! But who can say no at a funeral?! Not me.  Clearly.

The idea behind all the merriment is that this old man lived a full long life, something that deserves celebration.  In the states, the big expenses of a funeral (I believe) are buying a place for the departed in the soil, a box to set inside that place, a stone to mark the place, and a reception for friends and family.  Here—it’s the reception that costs all the money.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner for hundreds of people for over a week.  Whew.

Anyway, I’m hoping for a more sober week. But only sort of.