So where are we now. About a week since my last post (see
look I’m trying to stay a little more regular on these posts now) and I’m going
to once again share a previously written article that I had worked on for our
in-country volunteer newsletter. BUT. I'm doing it in a different way so this is not more of the same, but rather innovation at its finest. It has been interesting look back on different aspects of my service and
how I viewed them at the time versus how I view them now, which is why you’re
getting this delightful introduction and an equally delectable conclusion that
I am adding on to this written piece.
An analysis. One might go as far as to call it commentary from the Author. So
enjoy the article, peruse the added conclusion (think of it like bonus material
on a blue-ray disc of your favorite sci-fi movie), warning this is a long
one, and Go Hawks.
A Summer in the Fields
For those of you that live in
villages and haven’t taken the opportunity to plant something, the best advice
that I have for you is, plant something.
Anyone who has spent enough time in this country has gotten to watch the
gradual transitions of the land and people from season to season. You watch the rains come, the village
breaks out into a palpable buzz of excited energy as preparations are made, the
crops fill up the countryside, the rains stop, the harvest begins, the families
move back to the village, the markets swells, and everybody gets settled in to
wait and weather six months of windstorms and heat. Throughout all of this there is a small aspect to everything
that you miss by only observing or helping. There is a certain eye opening aspect to investing a sense
of ownership into this whole process that can’t be found any other way.
I affectated in August with enough
time in village to catch the tail end of rainy season and wanted to try my hand
at farming, the occupation of almost every member of my community. The trouble was they weren’t my fields
to farm and also being the first volunteer I was still firmly held in the
position of being a foreign stranger and I was appropriately treated as
such. If I went out to the fields
with my Daba I would be allowed to work for about five minutes before my daba
was taken from me and I was told to go rest beneath a tree. And so went all of my visits to the
fields, but it was pointless to try to fight against this. My friends were simply following the
cultural protocol of having a guest come to visit and it would have simply been
rude for me to demand to be allowed to work rather than a gesture of comradery. I only had about two months in village
to explore the fields before the school year started and lacking any real sort
of investment in the harvest my entire attention was allowed to be eclipsed by
trying to figure out how to teach math and science in French to hundreds of
kids who barely understood me. And
with that my season was over, not because I had finished the season, but
because I simply had no more time for it and I was well off enough to simply
walk away when I needed to. The
school year sped by, as school years tend to do, and slowly around March the
village started stirring from its season long hibernation to start to get ready
for the upcoming season and this is about the time that I either had a really
stupid or really amazing idea.
I felt like I had a decent amount
to do on my plate, but with the rains coming and the students getting ready to
leave for the summer I started thinking about what I could do to fill my
impending free time. I had
been thinking about doing some projects with soy, but having not had the chance
to demonstrate to the village the varied uses of this crop I saw it to be a
rather fruitless idea to attempt to convince a large group of subsistence
farmers to experiment with a new crop that they had never heard of or seen in a
region already dealing with a paucity of rain and rich soil. Thinking back to my past rainy season I
started to come up with my plan to plant my own field and I would plant soy. “Brilliant” I thought, with my own
field nobody could stop me from working all I want and people will be able to
see this new crop and then maybe next year they will be interested in farming
it themselves. Absolutely no
drawbacks.
The interesting thing about
language is that we use different words and grammatical structures to express certain
thoughts and emotions and certain words conjure up certain emotions and ideas
when we hear them. There is a real
difference in knowing what something is and knowing what something means and I
found that to abundantly be the case in farming. I knew what a half a hectare was, but I didn’t know what it
meant. I knew that my neighbors
often worked eight to ten hour days, but I didn’t know what that meant. And I went on to find that there were a
lot of things about my village that I knew, but had no idea what they
meant. Farming in a small village
forces you to ask certain questions that you never thought to ask as well as
providing you with a platform on which to ask them. For example I probably would have never thought to ask my
friends in village “what does a family do if they don’t own a donkey and a
plough?” or “what does the village do if the supply of government subsidized
fertilizer doesn’t come in time?”.
And more importantly even if I had thought to ask those types of
questions without having been forced to by my new found farming needs my
village would not have understood why I was asking those questions. These were facts of life for them,
everybody knew the answers to these questions and since everybody already knew
these answers nobody knew how to answer these questions. More often than not if I tried asking
some sort of question in this vain during the dry season they would wonder why
I wanted to know, or tell me that it doesn’t concern me so I don’t need to
worry myself over that. Now asking
these same questions as a farmer in the village I finally made sense to them,
of course he needs to ask these questions, he’s the idiot farming by himself.
More important than the questions
my experience taught me to ask, however, were the questions answered for me
simply by my experience. You read
in papers and in manuals all of the new and efficient farming techniques that
can increase yields and help soil structure and you wonder why nobody uses
them, like digging Zai pits for your fields. Well after spending two straight weeks digging Zai pits I
completely understand why very few farmers implement that strategy in their own
fields. I spent two weeks digging
ten fifty meter long rows of Zai pits and one long miserable day crawling
around my field planting those same Zai pits before having to leave village for
a vacation. One of my friend’s
kids offered to finish up my field for me while I was away and with his
family’s donkey and plow he was able to finish the remaining 80% of my field in
a single day. Well there’s two
questions answered. Why don’t
families use the Zai pits more often?
Because they suck. They are
extremely time consuming and when time comes at a premium this time of year and
you still aren’t convinced this strange new technique will actually be worth
the huge initial investment of time it is easier to just plant a larger low
producing field and then move on to the next crop. Question two, what do families with no donkey and plow
do? They lean on the support of
their community, their family and friends. Kogho was becoming my family, little by little. Many volunteers are often touched by
the family like nature of the communities in this part of the world and the
sense of welcoming and family can come in all shapes and sizes. The communities over here don’t know
how to exhibit love and affection using the languages of Western Culture,
because they have their own ways of expressing these feelings. It’s part of our cultural exchange with
our hosts to learn their language, not just the spoken language, but the
language of their behaviors, so that we can understand what we mean to our
closest friends during our time here.
Understand what they are trying to say even if they don’t have the words
to express it. This can take many
forms, and farming isn’t the only way to connect, but in a small farming
community, it is a great way to start.
The rains continued and little by
little I began to understand more about my village, about the life, about the
struggle, and about how life and struggle were often intermingled into the same
sentence or salutation because when farming is all you know than your only
concept on the reality of life is that it is a never ending cycle of
struggle. With August came my two
rounds of weeding the fields and adding fertilizer. Every day, in the fields, six to eight hours a day. My body was broken down, and built back
up week after week. My hands
hardened as each new wave of blisters developed and healed over. And little by little my field of Soy
was developing. During my time in
the fields I didn’t have any sort of great epiphany, or philosophical insight,
I was simply too tired. All I
could think about was weeds and dirt.
I would close my eyes and see them dancing in front of my eyes, mocking
me. It was during this time that I
had some of my favorite interactions with members of my village. Since my arrival many members of my
village had been scared to come talk to me because I was something of an
unknown quantity. Children ran in
fear and adults simply waved but said nothing since they didn’t really know
what to say to me, we shared no common ground. That all changed with the fields. Every day I would meander back and forth through the fields
weeding and checking my plants and now suddenly people had a reason to come say
hello.
“Nassara manna wanna?” (stranger, whatsup?)
“manna neere” (it’s good!)
“fo manna boe?” (what are you
doing?)
“mam manna tumma” (I am doing work)
“ah! Nassara. Po po po. Mam nonga
fo” (ah! Stranger, po po po. I like you!)
“barka! Wend na man sabg songo!”
(thank you! May God do good things for you)
“amina! Wend na ko saaga” (amen!
May God give us rain!)
“amina” (amen!)
note most of my Mooré was just
learned orally so that fun dialogue is probably wildly inaccurate as far as
written Mooré is concerned
Some people came to just watch, some people came to ask what
I was planting, some to know what I could do with my new crop, and some just to
ride their bike back and forth a few times to casually double check that I was
actually farming.
Overall
I would like to say that I did a reasonably good job developing my field, but
my biggest learning curve hit me during the harvest. During the rains if you can’t quite get all the work done
its ok because Mother Nature comes in on the assist, the rains take care of a
good portion of the responsibility.
But come harvest time it’s now all just you against time. The previous year I was simply able to
walk away from the harvest when I no longer had time for it and as such I
completely missed the scope of work that goes on during the harvest. But this year was a different
story. The fields were ready to
harvest, classes were starting, and I had to start organizing the students for
a school garden. And I wasn’t the
only one overloaded around this time of year. During the rains your life is just farming, but come harvest
time the real world comes storming back and you are still just as busy as you
were during the rains just with all of your old responsibilities as well. The students were able to help me a
little, but they had harvests of their own to work. We had to cut all of the soy plants down with a machete,
carry them by hand to a drying area, protect them from animals while they
dried, beat them to a powder with big sticks, and then pour this powder into
large bowls using the wind to blow away the crop residue leaving just the
finished product. Writing this in
one sentence makes it sound smooth, but it wasn’t. We were late cutting the soy down so many of the seeds fell
early and were lost to chickens, then the village released their animals
earlier than I thought and they came through and ate a lot of the harvest,
later we left the pulverized crop in my courtyard for too long leading to a
mouse infestation, and finally my friend’s wife took pity on me and helped me
“vanner” my harvest. I finished
the season around early December with around 70 kgs of product from an area of
land that can produce 400kg in ideal conditions, 3 sacks of animal feed and no
animals, blistered hands, and what felt like a new village.
I
started this article with the advice that you should plant something. And then went on to belabor the point
that it was painfully difficult and I was in over my head. That may seem counterintuitive, but in
my opinion that is exactly why you should plant. It teaches you an important lesson about life. Coming from America we believe in the
power of the individual, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and making our
own way in life. I think this
attitude masks the reality that nothing in life is truly accomplished alone. There are few things that really hammer
this principle home more than trying to farm a field that is too big for
you. It forces you to accept that
there are things you can’t accomplish alone. It teaches you how to lean upon those around you. It helps you understand the importance
of culture and community. And
afterwards you will start noticing that there is a lot in life that is like
trying to farm a half hectare of soy.
And that we’ve been leaning upon people our whole lives, we just forgot
that we were doing it.
The fields
Friend’s wife Assesta taking pity on me
Beating up the soy with sticks
BONUS MATERIAL
What I took most from this multiple
month experience in my service was how it really served as a turning point in
my service. It changed who I was
in the eyes of my village and when you live in a village who you are is more
defined by what people think of you and less by what you think of
yourself. Throughout my service,
and hopefully throughout my upcoming posts, I struggled with the idea of privilege. Of the ideas that my village held about
me because of my whiteness. And
often how I didn’t think that I should even be here as I worried that Western
meddling in the developing world did more harm than good. But my summer in the fields helped
solidify certain ideas that I had about my place in the village, and as I
noted, changed some of the ideas that my village held about me simply because
of my whiteness. This whole
undertaking put me in a very vulnerable and public position. Coming into Kogho the general idea was
that white people know everything, Africans need to just listen to white
people, and whatever this white person says we will give it a try (this was
also compounded by the fact that I am a male on top of being white). And this creates a very difficult
situation. Sometimes people take
this response and run with it. Say
to themselves that they do know everything. And by the end of their time, wherever that may be, they
will have oodles of successful projects, solved malnutrition, and made the
world a better place to boot. But
this line of thinking has missed a whole half of the equation, and that is the
village. The most important aspect
of spending time in these development roles is to understand that you are simply
part of a dialogue. And a good
conversation needs two halves, two sides, and honesty and understanding between
both sides.
A theme in a lot of my writing has
been learning through failure and I will probably bring this up at least..1.4
more times. It’s important to
fail, it’s important to know why you failed, and beyond that it’s important to
avoid unnecessary failures (but you just said failures are good?) I know. Shut up. What I mean is what I believe all Peace
Corps volunteers figure out before the end of their service is that we should
never go into a community—go into a problem—with our own ideas about how to
solve this problem. Because we
will fail, one hundred percent of the time. We have to go in, shut up, and
listen, a sentiment best expressed by Ernesto Sirolli in a TED
talk that he does in 2012. And the
reason that I bring this up is that my ill-advised foray into farming really
helped my community and myself with the “listen” part of this formula. Up to this point I had done some
shutting up, and I had done some listening, but I hadn’t yet become comfortable
with hearing that I might be wrong.
And my community had not yet become comfortable with telling me that I
was wrong, and so there was something missing in our dialogue, in our
conversation. Well after making a
monumental ass of myself for a few months with a hand hoe my community
discovered something. Yes I was
white. Yes I was a man. And yes I was the volunteer sent to
their village to help them. But I
could be just as clueless as any one of them, and seeing me struggling through
my failure turned me into an entirely different person in their eyes.
Following this progressive “light
bulb” moment my conversations with my friends and co-workers became
different. They began to bring
their own ideas more often; they told me when my ideas wouldn’t work, when they
would, and how to change them to better address the needs of the village. They brought their passions to me and
in turn I was able to simply serve as a resource, as a servant, as a friend,
and not as a leader. And that’s
something special about the Peace Corps.
It allows individuals and communities around the world to get together,
share their passions, and try to solve problems. Because at the end of the day we share the same problems all
over the world; just not necessarily the same solutions. As Ernesto says, “nobody can succeed
alone”.
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