Returning to Guinea after my sisters wedding in August, I was greeted very excitedly by my friends and neighbors and while it was wonderful to be home in the states, eat ice cream, bagels with lox, spice cake with caramel icing, and see everyone, I returned to Guinea excited for some good rice with peanut sauce. By than, I had spent a great deal of time fostering projects, many of which were finally getting going. A friend proudly presented me some of the mango jam he had made in my absence, a technique I had taught him which he was excitedly exploring to help provide additional food for his family throughout the year. My work helping to start a school focused on educating women in literacy and business activities was finally beginning to move beyond the planning stage, having developed an action plan to use locally available resources to start the project without requiring the need for external financing. I was exploring a small revenue generating activity and protecting the environment by growing shade grown coffee with another volunteer and I had just made plans to work with one of my best friends to explore the food security and commercialization efforts of an agricultural organization and do a three village tour to instruct individuals in the use and construction of mud stoves, a technique that cuts wood used for cooking by 2/3rds. I am not sure I have complete closure for my time in Guinea. I overcame many challenges to have and be comfortable in a life very different than the one I grew up in. I was doing, at least what I think, were many great things. I never got to say an appropriate goodbye to many of my friends and many projects I had spent my time fostering were just hitting the tipping point where they wouldn't have needed me to succeed. I can only hope that in my absence, people take what I taught them and will make things happen in my absence. I certainly took what I learned in Guinea and have been putting it to good use in my new hometown of Djibo, Burkina Faso.
Welcome to Burkina
After a month spent in Mali, I finally had my new direction in continuing as a Small Enterpris Development volunteer in Burkina Faso. While my trip leaving Guinea was a carsick filled 22 hour adventure overland, we flew out of Mali on an overly conditioned airplane and upon landing, I was still shivering. But I consider 60 degrees cold so I'm sure you wouldn't have had a problem. While Peace Corps is very different country to country, it certainly is easy to pick out the Peace Corps Volunteer from a crowd – the white people wearing colorful West African fabrics. Transferring presented a whole different set of challenges. Usually, when an individual joins Peace Corps, they build many friendships during 'stage' or training; a group of other volunteers who you first meet in the states before flying oversees with. These friendships become the basis of your support network when you first move to your new home, where you each share stories of how terrified you may be to leave your house, the hoard of children who sit and stare at you through your door. I was leaving a place where I had developed all of these relationships for a new place where I knew four people transferring with me. I still am one of the 'Guinea transfers' but I have gone from being a Guinea volunteer, to a Guinea evacuee, to a Guinea transfer to a Burkina Faso PC volunteer. All in the span of a month! I spent roughly a month attending some training sessions, primarily in the local language, Fulfude. I should note that in Fulfude, numbers for counting and numbers for prices are different. If I were to say Noogay as a number, it would be 20. As a price, it would be 100CFA. Sappo as a number would be 10 but as a price, 50CFA. If you haven't figured it out, the price is just the number multiplied by five. I spent many hours with my language instructor trying to pick this up and am only starting to be able to do so in my local market. Why I have to do basic arithmatic in a foreign language just to ask how much some tomatoes or peanut butter is is beyond me.
After some training, I had my first experiences traveling around Burkina by this fancy thing called a bus which runs on a schedule. Two very new concepts to me when it comes to travel. I had the privelage of also riding in a Burkinabe bush taxi and was shocked at how empty it felt when it was really full It was a van type vehicle and I felt we could have squeezed at least 10 more people in. I also had my first experience with a courier service when as we were pulling out of the bus station or garre, we realized our bikes weren't on the bus. I basically jumped out of my seat trying to get the bus driver to stop ready to argue about getting my bike on the bus. I just attracted a lot of strange stares from uninterested folks. I was later assured that despite having to make a connection from bus to bush taxi run by two different companies, my bike would make it and sure enough, it did. One of the things I had done in Guinea was invest a lot of time and energy into learning about agriculture in Guinea and in West Africa in general. This was some of what I brought with me and while I was visiting one volunteer, we went out to meet with a small woman's association engaged in gardening. I must say, prior to Peace Corps, the extent of my gardening experience was confined to shoveling dirt and moving rock for my mother, telling her that the tomatoes growing in her garden did not taste nearly as good as the tomatoes you by in the farmers market in Florence, Italy and occasionally walking out to the garden to pick vegetables at my mothers instruction. But, when you live in a culture where upwards of 80% of the population engage in subsistence agriculture, it really pays to learn something about it. Throughout my time in Guinea, I had spent a great deal of time trying to get people to adapt improved gardening techniques, emphasizing water management techniques such as mulching. For the most part, these were all failures. But on this particular visit, I actually helped water some banana trees which are heavy users of water. Needless to say, it was a lot of effort to walk 20' with a full can of water only to be able to water two trees when their were well over 30 trees. With the assistance of the volunteer I was visiting, I explained the benefits of mulching to the women and demonstrated the technique by gathering up dead leaves from the banana trees themselves. Within a few minutes, the women of the group were right their beside us, mulching their trees. After watering both mulched and un-mulched trees, they invited us to harvest rice which by all means is a very labor intensive process. But after about three hours of harvesting rice, they cut us off after a short while because we moved to slow, sitting under the tree playing mancola with small holes dug into the ground and eating rice, we returned to the banana trees. Sure enough, the trees we had mulched maintained their moisture while the base of the un-mulched trees was dry. If you wonder what the significance is, this simple technique allows the women to be more effective. They spend less time watering one plant or area and use the time saved to increase the size of their garden improving their family's food security or use of the garden as a revenue generating activity. More than a month after this visit, I get a message from the volunteer saying on their own initiative, the women began planting more trees and mulched them from the start. This early success I hope was the start of many to come.
I finally moved to my new site and home in Djibo, Burkina Faso shortly after thanksgiving. I was fortunate to have a real thanksgiving, the only items missing being mashed sweet potatoes with marshmellows and pecan pie. Djibo is roughly the same size as Telimele, my home in Guinea with about 25,000 people. Unlike Telimele which was green and mountainous, Djibo is flat and on the edge of the Sahel desert.
Djibo and Around
I moved to Djibo at the beginning of December, 2009. The organization I am paired with is named the Maison des Femmes, an organization sponsored by the government of Burkina Faso to promote woman's rights, health, education and economic empowerment. In many ways, very similar to the second chance school I was working with in Guinea. Needless to say, after two months out of site life, I was ready to hit the ground running, start building projects and get back into the daily grind of going to the market, although the camels in my market are a new addition, finding my favorite place to eat and enjoying the minimum of three hour repose during the heat of the day to relax and read. The biggest weakness I identified with my organization is it's dependence on outside financing, a similar issue facing the host organization I worked with in Guinea. Throughout my service, I have felt financing is a double edged sword. It provides much needed capital where disposable income and credit are scarce but also reduces individuals willingness to invest their own capital or save should they feel they can get some organization to finance their activity for them. At the same time though, financing is often provided and designed to meet specific requirements of the donating organization where the desires of the donor may differ from the specific needs of the recipients, resulting in an inefficient use of capital. The volunteer's site I visited where we demonstrated mulching had two woman's gardening groups; the one we worked with was very motivated to make their garden succeed but had been given funding for fencing from an outside organization. The other group did not have fencing and believed they could only start their garden should someone provide necessary funding and displayed little interest in working around this challenge for themselves. Sadly, so often I have observed that in the absence of funding, knowledgeable and otherwise motivated people proceed with life as it is rather than looking for small steps to take to improve their lives or assist others.
In an effort to help my organization have a small but steadier source of income to pay for some activities, I explored various needs of the community and region in an effort to develop a social enterprise and am embarking on a project to commercialize what is called enriched bouille to combat malnutrition. I had the privlage to arrive in time to participate in a meeting of 50 individuals who are community trainers in malnutrition. These, primarily women, have been trained in how to make enriched bouille and how to train others in this technique. Enriched bouille is a flower made from any number of ingredients that provide a source of calcium, protein, salt and sugar which is turned into small balls by adding water slowly and boiled. However, widespread adaptation of this technique is limited for many reasons including the inaccessibility of ingredients in local markets and the time it takes to create the powder from hand, first hand I can say pounding anything into powder is a tedious, time consuming and physically demanding task. What I am doing is helping start a new business – a new product with all the challenges of marketing, developing a strategy, and ensuring that on the financial side, the price attracts low income buyers but is profitable enough to earn money to pay for various trainings in malnutrition and infant health.
In addition to the enriched bouille, I am also working to commercialize a powder made from leaves of the Moringa tree, a powder that provides most of the essential vitamins to both infants and expecting mothers. While the ingredients for the bouille are all available locally, the moringa project is more challenging in it involves developing a network of suppliers to plant the trees and harvest the leaves. However, should this succeed, it is a uniquely designed project encouraging individuals to plant trees in an effort to combat desertification and protect the environment, creates an economic benefit for individuals who harvest and sell moringa leaves and brings to market a simple product designed to combat malnutrition. Or more simply put, a positive public health, economic and environmental impact for the region.
While I have set my expectations high with those projects, I am also working on smaller projects introducing solar ovens to combat desertification, helping a woman's association create new products by reusing plastic bags, which litter the landscape, by transforming them into thread for use in weaving to make cell phone cases, bags, mats, etc., and hopefully soon, along with other volunteers in my region, have restarted an English lesson radio show. Who thought that when I moved to West Africa I would become a radio DJ? I'm sure there is more I am forgetting and I've only been at my new site a month! I certainly got my wish in having the opportunity to hit the ground running and get projects going.
Personal Notes
One of my last experiences in Guinea was a 140km bike ride I did to some spectacular waterfalls. Being mountainous, this was about 22 hours worth of biking but was well worth it. I did this with one of my PCV friends and neighbor and while we got some spectacular views of the waterfall, we didn't quite make it to the base of the waterfall as we did not have the time to traverse a small mountain and the river was to filled with water, being the end of rainy season, so we could not ford the river upstream.
Since Djibo and Burkina in general is much flatter, I have found my biking adventures to be somewhat easier, although I have not yet gone on one as long as my adventures in Guinea. I have enjoyed biking out and off road to small hills that surrond Djibo and climbing to the top where I am rewarded with amazing views of vast nothingness which is the desert, beautiful in its own right assuming you like rocks and sand. For my first weeks at site, these desert outings were always accompanied by a popped bike tire in which I became very proficient in changing out tire tubes and involving the occasional 3-4km walk back as it got dark because my tire tubes were beyond patchable. In one instance, I was about 8km outside of town and 2-3km from the road when I popped my tire and as I attempted to repair it, my bike pump broke. However, despite these small hindrances to my outings, I discovered some amazing spots where I passed both Christmas and new years camping in the desert. By new years, I had certainly learned from my mistakes made on Christmas where I barely slept because I was so uncomfortably cold at 60 degrees. As we were buying food for our Christmas outing, my neighbor and I joked about the down coats we saw for sale in my market; next morning we really wished we had bought them.
As for my living situation in Burkina, I am kindly being hosted by the Red Cross in something similar to a motel or dorm room. My living quarters is roughly 12'x12' where I have a double bed, a guest bed or my couch when no one else is around, two desks and some artisan chairs I picked up during my month in Mali. About 10' or so from my living area in a separate building is my kitchen and store room. As woodless construction, I am able to enjoy both spaces since they stay cool during the day and maintain some warmth at night. Perfect for those chilly 60 degree evenings.
I have been accepted well into the Burkina Peace Corps community, even to the point where I was asked to represent Peace Corps Burkina at a regional conference for an organization focused on recognizing and helping the work of West African entrepreneurs and innovators. In many ways, I have felt moving in the second time around was a lot easier. It helped that my French is far superior to what it was a year ago and knowing what its like to be dropped off by Peace Corps, it is much less terrifying the second time around.
It is frustrating to have had to leave the work I had done in Guinea behind; I am sad to have left my friends but I am very excited for the new experience and possibilities that await me here in Burkina!
