A bigger Africa

Having finished my great summer African Voyage....Just kidding it was only two countries on the continent.  Contrary to popular belief I have not been living in Africa for the last year I have been living in Burkina Faso, a country about the size of Colorado on a continent that occupies about 20% of the worlds total available landmass.  In much the same way one tends to say that they're from Washington rather than saying that they're from North America I find that it's important to avoid broad stroke generalizations in these matters.  This point has really been driven home for me over these past few months where I have taken the opportunity to travel around the region and found a beautifully diverse ensemble of cultures, climates, and ecosystems all sharing boarders.  I'm in the north of Burkina in a small village completely populated by an Ethnic group called the Mossi and this doesn't even fully capture the full image of what Burkina is like just like a weekend in Seattle, WA won't tell you a lot about what life in Spokane is like over on the eastern half of the state.  Also imagining that Seattle and Spokane also spoke two different languages.  Having passed what could be argued as the driest year of my young life in Burkina I decided that it was high time to go see an ocean again so I loaded up my backpack, grabbed some good books, and bused on down to Benin and Togo, our oceanic neighbors to the south.  Its about a 25 hour bus ride if you can get your hands on a no-stops ticket and its an engrossing journey as you get to watch the desert melt away to a jungley goodness that I had forgotten existed.  What was difficult to grasp through the glass of my one way air conditioned bus was the cultural change awaiting me upon dismount in Cotonou, Benin.  It was still West Africa and there were many tangible similarities for me to grasp onto as I began to get my bearings in a new city, but for lack of a better word, there was a different vibe.  As if everyone had agreed to adjust their typical behaviors to just 5 percent off of the norm.  I am still a white male in West Africa and this still garnered all of the typical reactions; plies for friendship, solicitations for help, an insistence that my money belongs to them, a promise of healthy children, a harsh jeering chant of "white" in local language with the sole hope of possibly eliciting a angry reaction because my existence is solely for their entertainment.  Yet, underneath all of this it felt different, if you were to insist on judging a country by how people interact with you it might be easy to miss the subtle differences, but when you look at how they interact with each other you see a different world.  There was a slight liberalism that I found in Cotonou that I had never seen in Burkina.  No liberalism in the popular western sense of the world, just a slightly more progressive behavior set in relation to the local norm.  I again found this to be true in Lome, Togo.  Finally upon arriving in Kpalime I was finally presented with a fascinating observation that I don't think would have been possible had I never left the boarders of Burkina.  Here I was once again greeted by a sharp swing in cultural norms, in this case it seemed to be derived from a widespread Rastafarian population and the ever present French volunteer and ex-patriot population around this little mountain town.  One helpful aspect is that while vast swathes of Burkina are terrible and deserty, this little paradise was beautiful, jungly, and had more beautiful waterfall hikes than you could shake a stick at, you know,  if shaking sticks at destination waterfall hikes happened to be a hobby of yours.  This being the case the town invited an ex-patriot population who lived in Togo not because they felt drawn to aid work, but simply because they wanted to live there, and for me this made all the difference.  To preface, I love Burkina Faso, it is a remarkable country full of rich friendly culture, amazing people, and at its core a deep desire for self improvement.  That being said it is no destination country.  If I were looking to uproot and move somewhere and start a life for myself, it would probably would not be Burkina Faso.  With this being the case there aren't any real Western Ex-patriots who simply live in Burkina Faso, their existence in Burkina always encompasses Aid work to some varying degree and that is usually what is keeping them in the country.  Some Lebanese and Middle Eastern ex-patriots that work their way into the restaurant industry in the big cities, and there are people brought in with the mining companies, but the Burkina of a mining executive is a different world entirely.  In Kpalime, Togo however, the story is quite different, but the local reaction is rather telling.  Togo is a beautiful country with a lot of natural attributes as well as a deep sea international port which makes a world of difference in the availability of Western Comforts.  Following these silver linings you begin to find Westerners living in Togo simply to live their life their rather than spending their time working to aid and develop Africa from some sort of moral high ground or in search of an altruistic feel good moment not as readily available for them in their country of origin.  This altruistic drive has driven foreign presence in African countries for so long that I have found it hard for much of the local population to view a white stranger as anything other than an altruistic ATM.  This became clearer to me as I began to talk more with a Belgium ex-patriot named Yanni living in Kpalime and running a restaurant with his mother, Togolese wife, and their two children.  He had been in Kpalime for 7 years and through our conversations I gleaned that he had been rather fed up with Western life and had simply wanted to get away and start something new for himself.  Despite his seven full years living in Kpalime his whiteness still prevented him from settling down to a normal life.  He told me that he had had to stop going to church because the pastor would always insist that it was his duty as a white man to buy them a new church, or build them an orphanage.  When Yanni would reply that he didn't have that kind of money the pastor would call him a liar, because everyone knows that the whites are rich.  He would get a similar reaction from many around town that played host to so many different aid and volunteer organizations.  In a small remote part of Togo there was no steady flow of media to give the population any real blueprint of Western life other than what they saw and what they saw most clearly was white aid and white pity.  Every year the insistence that they can't get things done on their own is reinforced to the tune of hundreds of volunteers coming through their communities to help them, donate, build, and teach.  In their mind 100% of western foreigners exist to develop them because for the last 50 years that's all they've seen.  Now all of this isn't to say this is the case for every single person, because that would be grossly overgeneralizing.  And in fact in Kpalime I met some truly

inspirational Togolese locals working to better their community completely on their own.  They had started an organization that aimed to work on trash clean up and respecting the environment and they didn't wait for a white westerner to come along and pull the strings in the background.  But for every dynamic group like these two there are another 100 waiting in the wings, paralyzed by their perceived need of western intervention and perfectly content to wait for the next white foreigner to cross their path and hand them the mythical key to success.  I also don't want this article to come off as some vendetta against the foreign aid industry, for lack of a better term.  The Peace Corps has three goals and two of those goals are about cultural exchange between the host country and the United States and my main medium for that is this blog.  If painting an accurate portrait of Burkina Faso through a blog seems like a daunting task that is because it is.  I have been here for over a year and yet I am constantly surprised by what this country teaches me.  Beyond that it can sometimes be hard to grasp how diverse Africa really is having never been and seen.  I guess my goal in writing this post is too just illuminate the diverse landscape of cultures and ideas found all within three small West African countries, and for every "Africa" you hear about, see in photos, or read about in a sub par Peace Corps blog, there are hundreds more existing simultaneously, actively contradicting descriptions, lying in secret, or just waiting to surprise you.

And hey!That fun picture of a waterfall is a hike that I went on in Kpalime. Like I said. Pretty beautiful little spot.

Update on those Fields though

Yes I know I am posting an update on a blog post at the same time that I posted the post that is being updated, but I actually did write them at different times so if you want you can read my first farming post and then wait a few weeks before reading this one for dramatic effect?  Or simply binge upon all of my wonderful posts at once because you delight in my prose and find my dry humor powerfully addicting.  Whichever route you decide to take, always remember, the choice is yours.

Well since returning to my village in the final week of July from my solo trip through Togo and Benin farming has firmly occupied all of my waking moments.  In part its because I've never farmed by hand (let alone farmed at all) before and as such I am a lot slower than everyone else in village.  But it's also slightly due to the fact that I am a bachelor in a farming community.  To look at marriage from an economic utility standpoint it makes complete sense to get married young and procreate often in a community that relies upon subsistence farming.  To borrow from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress marriage is a "device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children", in this case it is also key to survival and rests at the core of a remarkably adept interdependent society.  In the West there is a culture of privilege were you grow up being informed by our cultural that the individual is king, your successes are yours and you got to where you are by your own hard work and nobody gave you any freebies on the way and in a way the relative wealth of the West works to mask the glaring inaccuracies of this ideal.  Realistically you can have success in the Western world with very little interaction with other people.  You can stay single, find a job, receive your paychecks avoid friends, and binge on Netflix every weekend all in the comfort of relative solitude if you so choose without running the risk of dying or starving to death.  Amidst all of this its easy to see why cultural attitudes exist that insist that we can do everything on our own.  Yet if you truly want to convince someone that they rely upon others in everything that they do in life, put a hoe in their hand and say "plant".
In village I am able to eek by alone because while living and farming in village I am still a salaried individual and can use that money to support myself.  For the rest of the village, you're nothing without community.

Most all of my waking moments in village over the past month have been devoted to farming giving me a better appreciation for the word "exhaustion" in all of its varied implications as well as my dependence upon community.  I got back to site to find my fields well sprouted yet surprisingly overgrown with weeds.  It was a little startling, I had left on my trip at the onset of rainy season so having left a dry desert dirt land I was rather shocked to see how quickly vegetation had picked back up from last year.  "No problem" I thought "I'll just weed that all this week and I'l be good to go".  No idea why I thought it would be this after my planting farce, but the mind is quite good at forgetting unpleasantness and that looks to be what had happened.  The next morning I grabbed my Daba (pictured below) and went at it without exactly knowing what to do, but hey, its just weeding, how hard could it be?  Turns out, stupid hard.  I enthusiastically started hacking away with my little hand hoe, hands nicely callused up at this point, and body positioned in the 90 degree farming bend as I meandered my way through the fields, hacking, yanking, throwing, and destroying all weed life before me.  My core problem was that I had a lot more tasks stacked up than just weeding my soy fields and my delightfully short attention span precludes any true single task devotion.  I needed to weed my soy fields, dig a new garden bed, plant said garden bed, transplant about 40 Acacia trees along my field, and start moving my Moringa trees from their growing bags into the fields that had been left aside for our Moringa project.  So like a squirrel getting ready for winter each of these tasks received about 5% of my attention and time in order of highest to lowest interest and while this kept me moving at a good pace the end result after 10 hours was an exhausted Ryan and five barely started tasks.  The problem was that this time around I wasn't working one exhausting day and then scurrying off on a vacation.  I was working one exhausting day and then waking up to do the exact same thing again.  And again.  And again.  My mind was like mush and when I went to bed each night little weeds danced before my eyes.  These weeds came to define my existence.  I gave each species a deservedly sharp nasty nickname, I came up with names for the Daba strokes that I used to kill the individual species, and spend enough time farming and you will slowly come to learn interesting facts about yourself that you would have never otherwise stumbled across.  We are all filled with facts, preferences, and skills.  For example if you are good at basketball you know that about yourself.  Some people have found that they love chocolate cake, but hate vanilla cake.  They know this because they live in a cake soaked world where they have probably been introduced to both kinds of cakes and have therefore had the chance to learn these facts about themselves.  Others prefer chunky peanut butter to smooth.  What I am saying is that your environment pushes certain facts out of you, facts that may have been there all along, you had just never been presented with the proper stimuli.  Well here I was learning all sorts of interesting tidbits about myself that I sometimes wish had remained dormant.  For instance, after having spent over 100 hours thrashing around in my muddy soy fields I can tell you that I somewhat prefer the taste of soil with a high clay content as opposed to a high sand content.  I know my weeding time per row like an Olympic sprinter knows his 200m dash.  On a post rainy day I can weed a heavily infested row of soy in 60 minutes, but if it has dried out I can bust that bad boy out in 45...43:12 is my record.  I know certain weeds only die if you shake all of the dirt out of their roots otherwise they come back as zombie weeds with the next rain, permitting you to re-weed vast swathes of your field whilst re-watering your plants with your tears.  I also know that soy planted in clayey soil will develop about 50% faster than soy in gravely soil.  As you can see, non of these are real resume diamonds and if I were to buy you a drink at a bar and then regale you with my preferences for clayey soil its rather unlikely that I would be getting your number on that particular evening.  But that being the case, these are some of the new facts about myself that I have gleaned from having my life utterly consumed by farming.  Every day I'm back in the fields by 8:00, 9:00 if I was feeling a bit chuffed that morning, I work until noon, I buy rice and sauce at the market, eat and repose until 14:00 at which point I'm back in the fields until 18:00 at which point I crawl back into my home, prepare the simplest dinner possible of which I have ingredients for and then go to bed.  Days 1 and 2 I was actually doing 10 hours rather than this abbreviated 7-8 hour schedule.  But by day 3 my body informed me that it was uncomfortable with this new arrangement by getting sick and so I slackened off a bit.  Despite this ridiculously fun workload I found that I wasn't really making much progress.  As I hinted about above I had to double weed huge portions of my fields because I didn't properly shake the weeds out and they all just came back, switching to my new weed shaking process dropped my productivity to a crawl (not literally this time) and I was starting to realize that I once again couldn't do this alone.  I was barely able to even feed myself alone, not to mention my house looked like a small bomb had gone off because I had no time to clean.  My clothes were all dirty so I wore my same farming pair each day and when we had a heavy rain I just hung them on the lines and called it clean.  I was getting a chance to see firsthand the importance of family and community in my little village.  And so I turned to them.  I hired my neighbor and her two friends to help me weed and the difference it made was unbelievable.  I could breath again.  My sweaty pathetic attempts over the course of 2 weeks had barely knocked out a quarter of my fields and then they came in a wiped everything out in a single morning. A single. Morning.  I wouldn't have believed it possible if I hadn't been there with them like some overgrown kid getting in the way.  They flew through line after line while I was left standing in the background holding my lower back in pain, covered in dirt and sweat, and carefully shaking each weed to death.  No breaks, no complaints, just business as usual.  I paid them in a slight daze, tried to thank them but they just laughed it off, and watched them zip back off to their own fields to work some more.  With my new breathing room I finally a little bit got my life back together, cleaned the house, tidied up the weeding they'd done, set up some real meals to cook.  Also left with a new found appreciation for what its like to live in Kogho.  Not as some sort of Tenant, but as a real resident of the village.  This is the only reality that you know, there are no others, at least nothing possible.  This is your world, the space you have been given to occupy and you make due with what is there. 

Having been saved by the community I still knew my troubles were far from over.  Putting down fertilizer was an absolutely miserable week and its almost time for the second round of weeding.  I also insisted to the three women that they don't weed the entirety of my field, I had them leave that space where I planted myself.  I had prepared it on my own,  planted it, and I wanted to see it through to the end.  That being said, it is still not all the way weeded and we're almost ready for the second round of weeding out here, a true testament to the eye watering speed of my hand hoe-ing.  But despite the rather constant exhaustion, the aches, the soreness, the ample gallons of sweat that I have poured into the ground, and the one dimensional-ness of my life right now, I am still glad that I was dumb enough to plant a half a hectare of soy by myself.  In addition to my preferences in soil taste, I have learned a lot about myself through the whole process and will probably continue to do so through the next weeding period and the eventual harvest, learning how to balance a busy life with the necessity of farming.  I have also earned a new lenses with which to view the people in my village, a lens that can only be bought and paid for with time and sweat.

Pictured above:  The local weeding Daba, great for taking down fields full of weeds and the integrity of your lower back.

A Summer in the Fields

I'm going to ignore the glaring gap between my posts and I think it would be better for everyone if you all did the same. 
A lot of the work that I do out here is agriculture based and I've found it quite relaxing to allow that to bleed into my own life.  I keep a garden in my courtyard, I am growing several types of fruit trees to go along with my ample moringa trees, and I have a pit behind my house where I develop manure during the dry season.  Its not only a very relaxing hobby, but it helps define my presence in Kogho for many of the villagers.  As a farmer, it is a lot easier to trust the advice and credibility of a person who is actively demonstrating the new techniques in their own life and proving their efficacy using locally available time and materials.  Along with this sometimes my hunger for perspective and my insatiable curiosity get me into trouble, this was one of those times.  My final decision to do this was made while reading a book called Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricutural Improvement and the Roland Bunch talked about the powerful perspective found in completely immersing yourself in the community that you wish to work with, seeing parts of their world through their eyes, unifying sense of community felt in the shared jolt of panic as a late rain comes after the season and you find yourself running out of the courtyard with the local family to quickly cover the drying peanut.  I read that chapter and knew that I had to have that, I had to really put in the time and commitment if I wanted to continue in the agriculture sector of development.  I had already established myself as a well of knowledge on Moringa cultivation, and surprisingly enough sesame cultivation, but with the school year winding down I felt that there must be something else that I could add into my repertoire to fill my impeding influx of free time.  And this book pushed my mind to fall upon farming.  I live in the...downtown? area of a small farming community, during the dry season everyone lives close by because of the access to the market and the high school, and just all the things.  When the rain comes my bustling metropolis of a town drops to population 50 in a matter of days as everyone uproots and moves out to live on their farms during the rains.  If I am really a member of the community I ought to farm as well.  I decided upon planting soy, its extremely nutritious, has an exciting number of varied applications, and best of all, nobody has heard of it.  That's not to say that nobody in Burkina knows of soy, tons of people know about it.  It's produced on an extremely large scale in many regions, you can find tofu kibabs in most large bus stations, but there is a big difference between Burkina knowing about something, and then my village knowing about something.  Might as well be in two different worlds.  So I set to it with a will.  Turns out the small plot behind my house is for whoever lives there, they just haven't had a resident in awhile.  Nice, called dibs on that.  Picked up some planting soy, gathered up my awesome well developed manure, and picked up the necessary tools in the market for a dollar, this is going to be great.

Well school is now out, as predicted the village is in fact a ghost town, and there's one crazy white dude chomping at the bit to get started on this years season.  Only tiny problem was that there was no rain.  I had been promised awesome jaw dropping, school interrupting, tropical storms by the middle of May and yet here we sat in the middle of June with not a drop to speak of.  The village was getting worried, but if I hadn't known them so well I wouldn't have noticed.  All of the smiles were still there, the easy laugh, the pointless small talk, but underneath it you could hear the strain.  This is all they have, they sit around doing nothing all year and then work like a devil behind a plow for 5 months in order to scrape out the merest existence and here that was being taken away from them.  The stress wasn't all permeating however, the kids, free from the burden of worrying about supporting a large family where free to laugh, joke, and bemoan the unpleasantness of farming.  I was shocked, how could they not take farming more seriously? This was their livelihood! Their bread and butter, their, their everything?  I listen to stories of them devising new and interesting ways to cut their workloads down, describing planting techniques deviating so far from the manicured ideals that I'd read about in books that I couldn't believe that they yielded anything.  I chipped in "but the rain should be here soon! Then we can start planting!" At which point my 17 year old friend Etienne turns to me with that kind exasperated yet affectionate expression usually reserved for the precocious toddler who bawdily states that he is about to eat an entire cake, and says "monsieur, ne soyez pas presse pour cultiver, ca va arriver".  Well that pulled me up short, maybe I was too excited to farm?  Maybe I was too excited to pleasurably engage in the hard physical labor that had defined the lives of so many people in this part of the world.  And maybe I simply had no idea what it was actually like to farm.

A couple days after having curbed my enthusiasm at the hands of Etienne's candidness the rains did in fact come and so work began.  It was hard, but the rains came at a time when other obligations where popping up and I was not able to devote the time to the fields that I would have liked, which prevented me from catching the real brunt of the blow.  I was digging some zai planting pits instead of plowing with my nonexistent donkey because I wanted the village to see how much more productive their fields could be with this style of planting rather than plowing.  They were taking longer than I had expected, but I never worked longer than 2 or 3 hours in a day and walked away with nothing worse than a few blisters on my hands before having to travel into the capital to get some work done.  I got back to village with a slight ball of stress building in the back of my mind, I finally measured it out and it turns out that I had sunk my teeth into a half of a hectare of planting (2500 square meters) and reality was starting to bare its teeth.  I had claimed this piece of land, the other families had made plans to not plant here because the Nassara had claimed this land, I couldn't back out now, this was prime location, if I left it unplanted it would be a big empty scar for everyone to see, and I would never live that one down.  But I was leaving the country in 8 days to visit Togo, and Benin.  Months ago it had made sense to go in the middle of July, if the rains had been on time then it would have been no problem but now we're a month behind schedule and I've got 8 days to somehow plant a half a hectare of soy in a dry field.  So I set to it with a will, only problem being gumption isn't enough to make the rains come any more often than they want to and I could only go out and dig the zai pits if the ground was wet.  7 days and one Chief sponsored rain dance later I had all of the pits dug that I was likely to get done (10 rows, generously speaking maybe 15% of my field) but I could only plant if it was wet otherwise the tribes of free range chickens that infest all of West Africa would eat my seed out of the ground.  I made plans with one of my students who was working fields near the town.  I would pay him the going rate to bring his plow and donkey over and finish the rest of my fields for me while I was out of town so that I didn't miss my already painfully narrow window.  Well some sort of rain deity smiled on me that night and I woke up on my final village day prior to vacation with wet ground and a hell of a lot of soy to plant.  I needed to carry all of my manure out to the fields a bucket at a time and toss a handful into each planting pit after which I would walk around with a planting pioche (pictured below) and a bowl of seeds and plant every hole in a half bent painful shuffling gait that the members of my village are insanely good at.
Well 10 hours later I was quite literally crawling through my fields on all fours trying to finish all of the planting in the most acute level of exhaustion that I had subjected myself to since probably my high school athletic days when I actually participated in regular coached conditioning.  I felt sluggish and disconnected from my body, new vistas of information opening up to me, such as why farming communities never spent their free time developing trigonometry or pushing moral philosophy, why one might find the idea of marriage before the age of 20 very tempting, why all of my village friends hands felt like equal parts boiled leather and sand paper, and above all why nobody is really excited to start farming.  I crawled beneath my shade tree to nap a little bit while savoring of the the exciting messages that my body was sending me and then went searching for the motivation to make dinner and get my life back together.  That evening I was given the tiniest glimmer of why I was doing this. 
I'd eaten and cleaned up and was sprawling in my village chair with that slow languid feeling that usually follows mass carbohydrate expenditures when Etienne swings by for a visit.  We talk of small things until the conversation works itself to my fields and I expound to him the difficulties of planting.  How by the end of the day I couldn't even stand and plant, I had to sit next to the holes and then crawl from one to the other, pioche long forgotten, just shoving seeds into the ground with my bare hands.  The sight of seeing this foreign white professor spewing forth all of the classic rainy season lamentations of the village regular in a mixture of French, local language, and typical Burkina sound effects proves to be too much for Etienne and he just falls over laughing, I join in too because its pretty easy to see the humor in the situation, and we spend another 20 minutes joking about how much farming sucks and how if you farm too much you get stuck in the farming position for the rest of your life. 
24 hours later I'm on an overnight bus to Benin reflecting on my decision to farm and the landscape of my upcoming summer.  Sure I wasn't really going to be blowing anybody's mind with my new fangled planting techniques, but I was getting a rare window into the daily perspective of a Kogho native and despite my hard months ahead, it looked like piece by piece I was wearing away some of the more jagged edges that kept me labeled as a stranger and moved me closer to the heart of what our village was.

This is the hand held planting pick that everyone uses in my region.  It varies subtly from place to place and between the different ethnic groups, but the core idea remains the same.  This is the tool used by traditionally by men (and women because the women really do most if not all of the actual work) to prepare the fields and to plant.  In order to understand planting you have to have the stance just right so why don't ya'll hop up and give this a try.  You stand up, bend at the waist until your head is a few feet from the ground while keeping you legs perfectly straight and then hold that posture while slowly walking through the fields.  Each pocket you swing your little axe into the ground, pull up the dirt, sprinkle in 2-3 seeds, and then tap the dirt with the head of the axe to pack it back in before moving to the next hole.  Once the planting is done everyone switches to different tools, but the elders in village are rarely seen without their traditional planting axes, wood worn smooth by years of planting, axe head burnished and hooked over the shoulder, dressed in traditional bubus and drinking local beer.