Well along with the numbers our higher ups also like us to give a context for life in village. We talk about our integration, our daily activities, and at the end of that section they ask us to write a "success story". Now this isn't a winning the Superbowl kind of success or finally banging out that perfect game on Wii bowling kind of success. This is anything you want it to be. Earlier in my service I'm pretty sure one of my success stories was that I found out where the good rice tauntie was at lunch times. Another reporting period I think my success was that one of the students who I hangout with a lot bought us some Gateau (salty fry-bread) to share together instead of the typical other way around. Well this time around I decided to write about a series of failures that have occupied my last few months in site and how that often times successes don't actually have to be successful, but it is still nice when they end up that way.
Just a primer, since this was written for my superiors I dulled down my witty insights and delightfully hilarious commentary of which you have all become so fond, but alas, I am not in fact an adult so some of them will still pop up from time to time. I just wanted you to be forewarned of the reduction in volume prior to diving into the meaty central narrative of my previous 4 months of life. Enjoy.
*Exits stage*
Early on in my peace corps service I identified malnutrition as a problem in my village. People weren't necessarily hungry, their diets were just poorly varied and the only source of variety came from the artificial lake/garden combo in a neighboring village 35 km away. They only problem here was that if and when the vegetables from this lake made it to Kogho they were now too expensive for the majority of the population to afford and the remaining population who could afford them didn't see the value in vegetables and therefore did not often buy them. During my groups in-service training me and my professional counterpart, Paulin Bamago, discussed this problem and then brainstormed a project framework to address this problem. We wanted to build a garden for the local high school where the students could work the garden, sell and eat the produces, increase their nutrition, and provide much needed goods to a struggling community. We were very excited and we brought this idea back to the community where it was met with middling enthusiasm. We talked about the benefits and laid out how we would go about implementing this project, but a large portion of the community really felt that in order to garden you had to have a large artificial lake, otherwise it would be impossible. Having been met with this response I began to think that maybe this wasn't the best project for Kogho and I began pursuing other projects that the community had proposed to me and I could clearly see that they were highly motivated to pursue. Well a few months passed and my school's administration asked me about the progress on the garden project and I confessed that I had started molding the project into something focusing more on Moringa because it was something the community really wanted to do. Upon hearing this my school's headmaster told me that he had been really excited about the garden when he had heard about it and really hoped there was a way to bring the project back. A week later one of my fellow science teachers, M. Ouedraogo, told me he would love to have a garden available to use in examples in his classes because he often struggles to find concrete examples for the students to work with during plant biology. Following this my homologue, Paulin, once again told me he was excited to see how the garden would turn out and that our school's quartermaster had pledged 5.000cfa a month of the school's budget towards managing the school's garden and dealing with any small costs that came up. At this point I began to believe that maybe this would work, and having seen the encouraging work from my small group of student gardeners of whom I've written about in previous stories I decided that maybe I was being too cautious and that we should move ahead on this garden plan.
Well cut ahead to October, start of the school year. It was interesting navigating the start of a school year this time around because I had a better idea of what to expect, the students already knew me and how I like to approach teaching, and I actually spoke French this time through. Our school received an influx of science teachers this year so I saw my hours cut to three a week, but as a group we created an extra gardening class which would occupy one hour a week per class so my teaching hours would still occupy about ten hours a week so I would still be relatively busy. How little I knew. It seems with the start of every school year everything has to start over from scratch. We were getting a new quartermaster, professors are slow to return from their homes in the cities, the school lunch program doesn't start for months, student tuition can't come in until the harvest is over, on top of this our mason was behind schedule on the compost pits, I hadn't included enough gardening tools in the grant, and I was coming in late from a tumultuous two weeks at "camp coup" where elation and despair seemed to manifest themselves simultaneously in every day. I noted the lack of tools in my list of obstacles, but looking back it ended up being a very important element to the development of this garden. The missing tools along with 5.000cfa pledge from the administration changed completely how this new garden was viewed by the students who would work their. Instead of returning from their vacation to see a beautifully constructed garden with everything provided waiting for them by "America" or by me as many students thought that I had simply paid for the fencing myself, they returned to see a new garden as well as a lot of upcoming tasks. The missing tools slowed everything down and gave the students time to process this garden as well as start asking questions which gave me the platform to discuss the nature of Peace Corps projects, grants, and outside sponsors. The missing tools also provided the community the opportunity to rise to the occasion. The Mayor's office provided all of the tools necessary for the students showing the students the community's investment in their garden and then with my budget from the school I was able to purchase small necessities such as our planting seeds as well and an extra watering can. I can't quite quantity how important this was but to a student from a small village "your administration paid for this" means so much more than "a larger aid association provided the funds for these". In a country that has had foreign aid worked into its DNA for decades hearing that something came from "outside Burkina" immediately gets lumped into a category of "white people gave you this" but hearing that their own administration used some of their limited resources to buy something gives them the chance to really take pride and ownership of something. But I digress, my real success doesn't come into play until much later. In an effort to shorten what could be a very lengthy story I will summarize by noting that the next three months were some of the hardest of my service and that while I did my best to teach and share my passion for growing things with these students they ended up teaching me more than I think I was able to teach them. Despite my programmed ten hours a week of garden classes I probably spent closer to 30 hours a week working in that garden with those kids. I found out how unbelievably long it can take to dig out 225 square meters of hardened earth even with a large (slightly ADHD) task force. I discovered that leading groups of people can be the most frustrating experience while being filled with some of the most fulfilling moments. I found an important manifestation of the differences between students in an interdependent culture versus an independent culture. And I found out that sometimes in order to succeed life has to knock you down pretty hard, just to see if you can get back up. My moment of getting knocked down came in second week working with the kids. Entering the year I was working towards my vision of a garden. In this vision my garden was managed by 100 Ryans who all loved nothing better than spending their early mornings watering plants and carefully nurturing each plant so that it grew into the best plant it could be. Each day I worked with the kids this vision started feeling more and more unattainable which worried me since I had already decided that without a realization of this vision I couldn’t consider this project a success and all of this came to a head one afternoon when I was reduced to shouting at my students as they wrestled each other for the sign out sheet, each one wanting to be the first out of the garden class so that they could get to a local harvest festival that I didn’t know about. I stormed out of the class and smoldered for two days. During this time I spent a lot of the time just talking with one of the 3eme students, Etienne, who is also one of my closest friends in village. We didn’t really talk about anything in particular. Mostly just stuff about school, cities that he’s heard of, and delicious meals that we have eaten during our lives. But during this time I was able to step back and readjust how I saw the garden. No this garden wasn’t going to solve the nutrition problem in Kogho. It might not even produce enough vegetables to feed the students who subscribe to the school lunch program. No this garden wasn’t going to turn 500 students who had never gardened before into avid gardeners. Maybe it would at least get 10. And no this garden wasn’t going to somehow make so much money that all of the classes would be able to afford new notebooks and pens. But it could still do something. In the states all of the extra curricular activities are so commonplace that we forget that not everywhere in the world has them, and we often forget what their role really is. High school football doesn’t exist in the states to train NFL players, it exists to give high school students a structured physical activity beyond the curriculum. High school chess teams don’t exist because we are still looking for the next Bobby Fischer. They exist to give students a chance to challenge their minds outside the required learning materials. And this garden could be that too, it could exist so that this one small school would be able to provide its students with some activity beyond the classroom that pushes them to grow and learn in ways not necessarily found in the school.
With this mindset in mind we move into the closing chapter of this story. Well we got the garden dug. We managed to get some compost mixed. We managed to get a reasonable amount of planting sacks to sprout, mostly cucumber and tomatoes, but it’s something. We managed to get all of those plants into our freshly dug garden beds. And little by little we managed to get the staff and students to take ownership of this garden. I started seeing students watering without being told to do so once they saw the plants had started producing fruits. I started seeing professors taking their students on walks through the garden during class time to point out aspects of their lessons. And finally I had one student, Sibila Kargougou, nervously approach me after class to help me realize the true potential of this garden. He told me that he lives near a lake 18 km away from the school and that for 2.000cfa we could buy enough onion bulbs to fill four whole garden beds, and it hit me. We were a small garden watered by pumps and worked by students who have to attend classes and had never gardened in their life rather than local gardeners who did this as a job. We shouldn’t be trying to embark on a seed to product enterprise, it just wasn’t feasible, we needed to function more as a value adding intermediary. And this was an extremely modest cost, one the school could certainly afford to conduct in coming years. I told the student that would be amazing and asked if I commissioned him when could we expect to get the onions. He told me four days, which would put the arrival date at two days after I had left for a Soy training. My initial instinct was to tell him that we would have to wait until after I got back so that I could be there to supervise. Then I thought, “this garden is going to have to get along without me, why not now” so I gave him the money, let my homologue know that some onions should be arriving soon and I had designated a group of students as my Geba Naba Ramba (Onion chiefs), then set off to Leo to learn how to transform Soy. Well I got back to find out that the garden had been regularly watered by my students, the new created geba naba ramba had successfully planted the onions with some surprise assistance from my professional homologue who is usually worried about getting his pants dirty, and that our administration was thrilled with the relative ease in which we were able to acquire onions that could be used for the school lunch program. And that does it. Sorry for how long this story was, but if you wanted to hear about something that dominated this reporting period for me as far as stress, time, failure, and success goes this was it. It was a long and trying chapter in my service and it is by no means over. But as I enter the final phase of my service and struggle with the thought of leaving a community that has grown to occupy such an enormous part of my life, its moments like this that help me visualize a Kogho without me.
