So
I’ve been back for about a month now and I’m still struggling with some aspects
of American culture that I forgot existed or have started since I left. But I haven’t forgotten my promise to try
to document any interesting insights that I might stumble across or new lessons
that I found hidden away in my experiences in Burkina Faso, but every time I
try to start a post I realize that while I have lived my life these last two
years—you, my dedicated readers, have not lived my life these last two years. Sometimes I will have these really cool
realizations only to come up short remembering that to somebody who didn’t know
have all of the background information my really cool realization would really
only sound like disjointed ramblings.
So here’s the plan. As I
previously promised I will continue to share random stories from my time in
Burkina along with my thoughts about those experiences. They won’t necessarily always be in
chronological order, or funny, or interesting. But I like to think that they are all important as far as
gelling together my larger takeaways from my time in Burkina. Then again we do risk getting to the end
of this whole creative process only to find that my final points still just
sound like disjointed ramblings.
But isn’t the risk what makes it exciting?
So
without further ado, here is the first brush stroke that shall be the word based painting of my life. Sounded kind of cool right? This is an old essay that I wrote up last year per request
of somebody in our Bureau. I don’t
think they ever did anything with this piece, but it was fun to write and quite
possibly shall be fun to read. See
you next week.
“I am because WE are and, since we are, therefore I
am.” (John S. Mbiti)
Success Story
Just plain old dirt.
Working
in the yard has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up out on an old horse pasture
in Western Washington my typical Summer Sunday was spent wheelbarrowing around
mass quantities of weeds, tending the vegetable gardens, trying to get the
orchards to start producing, and any other landscaping activity that cropped up
in an ecosystem that pushes living vegetation out faster than anyone cut it
back. So with this
background it didn’t take much deliberating to decide to start a small home
garden at village shortly after my affectation. There was nobody around yet because of the rains, I had no
work so to speak, and I’ve always found the raising of living things to be
relaxing and an excellent and tangible time keeper. I knew nothing of gardening in the Sahel and so I decided to
go with the trial by error approach and just wing it, I did have time after
all. My first garden was poorly
dug, rocky, and quickly demolished by my pet chicken. All this in the relative secrecy of my courtyard. Time for Garden number two: this time I
planned to put up some light fencing around the boarder and so I talked to Christophe,
my community homologue, and we left the next day to the Marché village to pick
up materials. This served as an excellent opportunity for me to bond with my
new community homologue and it also ensured that the entire village would now
know what the Nassara (read “stranger”) was doing with his spare time. I was the first volunteer in Kogho in a
decade, I was a white foreigner from a different culture, and quite frankly I
was a mystery to my community.
They don’t know what people from Western Culture do for fun, what
motivates them, or what makes them tick.
By starting Garden round 2 I was offering them a puzzle piece to add to
their sparse collection of Nassara puzzle pieces. When you spend time in my village quietly listening to
“Nassara” you hear more than just a word.
You hear a statement, desperately trying to make sense of a confusing
situation. You hear a question. You hear the assumptions. And you hear the gaps. But you don’t hear malice. Insisting not to be called Nassara
creates just as many questions as it does answers. You give them your real name, you insist that you are only
called that name, and they are left still wondering what that name means. When asking around village for the
names of other members of the community you find that nobody has the name they
chose.
“What
is his name?”
“Karensamba”
[Teacher]
“And
him?”
“Chef”
“Sous-chef” “L’inspector” “Le Proviseur” “Monsieur le sous prefet”
They
have the name they were given. The
names that recognize their role in a community rather than their identity as an
individual. In the community they
are their given name and the names given to us by others can be a lot more
telling than the names given to us by ourselves. To change your self-given name requires merely a personal decision. To change a community given name
requires time plus willingness to learn from both you and the community in
question. It was in this vain that
I progressed from Garden 2 to Garden 3.
I had to let the community take the time to learn who I was, and I had
to take the time to first learn what the community thought I was, and then help
them learn and listen to them teach.
If gardens must be rated by quantity of edible goods produced, Garden 2
was a complete failure. Because
there were zero of those things.
But if a garden is to be rated by number of conversations started, or by
friendships created, then Garden 2 was a huge success. School started around the same time as
Garden 2 and with that came a steady increase in visits from students. They would come by to greet me and then
see my attempted garden.
“What
is that?”
The
question just barely masking the question
“who
are you?”
That’s
my garden. I’m trying for squash
and spices. Here’s what you can do
with squash. With basil. With mint. Here smell the basil.
Try the mint. Could you
grab that watering can? Yes, water
it just like that. Why don’t you
come back again on Friday? I was
thinking about starting some cucumbers and I could really use your help.
As
time went on I slowly developed a small group of students who would come by two
to three times a week, they would help with the garden chores, ask questions,
and usually go home with some sort of problem to puzzle over, or a new sapling
that they were responsible for keeping alive. Some of these same students were in my 4eme SVT class which
conveniently enough was a Geology course offering up many opportunities to
relate the subject material to my garden, trees, agriculture, and their lives
in general. Believing that
critical thinking skills in relation to the environment might be a use skill to
leave my students with I also began using a new section on all of my
tests. It was always titled
“Monsieur Kennedy, Le Geologue” and in these sections were situations in my
lab, my field work, my fields, or any geology related location in which they
would be given clues and they would either have to identify the problem, think
of a solution, or label a new discover.
Over time I found that my name among the village school kids was no
longer just Monsieur, the fallback name for a professor, I was now Monsieur le
Geologue. Some of the blanks were
being filled in.
That
brings us to Garden 3 and another name.
Garden two had been dug up by my dog and the final result was as
follows. Dead mint plants: 1.
Almost completely dead and unusable Basil plants: 1. Papaya tree barely
clinging to life: 1. Squash plant with one withered disappointment on it: 1.
And cabbage plants: -1, dog didn’t even give those a chance to sprout. So it was back to the drawing board,
uprooted and re-dug everything while my pride insisted that I explain to the
students the beauty of the scientific method and that carefully evaluated
failures are actually just as important as the evident successes and more
important than unexplainable windfalls.
Garden 3 had carrots and cucumbers as well as some new homemade drip
irrigation bottles that could be replicated on a village budget with easy to
find village materials. I told my
kids that I had never tried this before, but this was our chance to experiment
and see if they worked. Around
this time the small group of student gardeners started referring to my home
garden as “le laboratoire” because a laboratory that only produces carefully
documented failures gives a stronger impression of success than a garden that
produces only carefully documented inedible failures. New name.
Garden 3 was just as unsuccessful as Garden 2 if we follow the “edible
products yielded” rhetoric because my dog once again laid in wait until the
garden began showing signs of promise before sowing the seeds of destruction
once more. Yet this time the
results that were yielded were much farther reaching than even I could have
imagined, not knowing that results like this could be found within a seed. The start of garden 3 brought the
students and the school administration to me with a strong push for a school
garden, having been told by my professional homologue who had attended our IST
that this was something that a volunteer could bring to a community. The motivation from the administration
was encouraging, but what moved me to put this project into action was the fact
that my student gardeners were itching to start their own laboratories and more
than anything a match once struck needs a place to burn and so we began work on
providing these students with a place to imagine and experiment. After having prepared, submitted, and
received my Grant funds for the garden project as well as a separate Moringa
project, I was on to Garden
4.
Garden
4 was the realization of my entire garden adventure as well as the stepping
stone into the second half of my service.
Garden 4 was started with the advice of a tidy little notebook filled
with well-documented failures and the wariness of my dog, who had finally
learned that the route to a happier life did not lay in the confines of that
garden. With the onset of the
rains my garden burst into a productivity of cucumbers and beans and new names. I was Chef Garte, Chef de l’eau et
foret, Ouedraougo Ryende, Monsieur le Geologue, le cultivateur, a credible
source of advice, a part of the community, a part of their system, but before
all this, in village I was still Nassara.
I have been Nassara the entirety of my service and I will continue to be
until the day that I leave this country because no matter how much of this
culture I absorb I will still always be a stranger, but that is not a bad
thing, it’s simply recognition of reality. I’m also not the same Nassara that I was when I first
arrived in Kogho. Within the calls
of “Nassara” that I get every day that I stroll through the village the gaps
are now filled in with the answers I’ve given and the questions are answered by
everything that my village permits me to be. I think that it is important to remember when entering into
this style of service in this part of the world that we leave behind a lot more
than toilets and cheese. We also
leave behind a culture that has been informing us how to be since the day we
were born. We leave behind the
Descartian Western ideal of “I think, therefore I am” and step into a world where
we must subject to the dictum of “you think, therefore I am”.
Looking
back on my first year it has been amazing to see what can come of plain ol dirt
and as these two fenced enclosures are finished and I begin to take steps to
wrap up the grants it will be exciting to see what can continue to grow from
whatever it was that I planted in the first home garden. But what has been more exciting than any of the work that I have been doing has been the learning experience of trying to understand how to be a piece of something bigger than yourself rather than an isolated individual moving around in a big vast space vainly trying to save the world.
So
here’s a shot of Garden 4, I find that while I still consider Gardens 1-3 to be
intellectual and emotional successes a garden full of your “typical success”
(read “edible growing things”) to make a much better photo than one filled with
carefully documented failures. As
important as those are.
