Stepping stone to something bigger

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.