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.

Waiting on Rain

I thought what might be an interesting addition to my running country commentary would be posts on the general climate of village life in addition to my recounting of the many and varied of adventures that is my life.  I hope that these occasional add ins might give a better flavor for what life feels like rather than just what happens.

Growing up in a State like Washington you can kind of forget that a simple reality of life can mean different things in different places depending on its distribution and quantity. Realty, rain, lots of it.  In Washington it rains about 13 months out of the year and the other 3 months it rains.  You can enjoy the calming nature of constant drizzle, curse the constant sogginess of all things, deal with emotional lows onset by 6 months of no sky, or happily anticipate that one day in the summer when you can head on down to the beach and parade that pasty white collection of skin that is your winter body, briefly surfacing after months of hibernation beneath your ample collection of flannel. "Oh hello ladies, just keeping it real."  But out here it's life, its massive, unpredictable, uncaring, and all powerful.  In a tiny little subsistence farming village all things circulate around rain.  When its raining you talk about rain and you work for your years food and then it stops and you sit around and talk about rain whilst doing nothing.  Talking with the farmers you start to tap in to their vast store of self taught empirical knowledge about the rain.  From the number of layers on an onion to how hot it "feels" over a period of days they can tell you how much rain there's going to be, if the season will be good, and where the rain will come from.  The month of June passed us by with almost no rain at all.  Having decided to plant and cultivate my own field this year I often find myself at the bar with the other farmers asking questions of when I should be starting the different planting phases.

"After the third big rain, we start to prepare the fields".

Well apparently we normally get our third rain before the start of June and my village thins to a paltry 100 or so people as everyone rushes out to the fields to pick up the next phase in their cyclical existence.  Well it's near the end of June and we have only had two, everyone simply sits and waits, there is nothing else to do, no other work to be had, everything is building up to this moment.  The trees have responded to the climate change and have started to give fruit again, grass is begininning to sprout back out after months of dormancy, children wander around looking for their families free ranging donkeys to get ready to plow.  The typical village day consists of climbing trees to throw down handfuls of tiny grapes and talking of small things.  Despite the utter necessity of the rain to my village, nobody overtly shows stress or worry, oh they say things that might indicate worry, but there is no sign of it.  It takes too much energy to worry over that which you cannot control and in their minds that includes most every aspect of their life.  I sit in the bar and pepper them with questions.

"Will it be a bad rainy season? What happens if we miss the planting window? Will harvest be later?"

to which I'm met with the response

"Ryan, you think to much of things far away. It is better to think of things close to you, then you can make them the best you can. Do not be in a hurry to farm, the farming will come whether you are in a hurry or not"

So we wait.  Which is all we can really do, there is no ecological advantage to pushing against life, pushing outside the box, because all you're pushing on is nature and while history has shown that Humans are great at pushing against to nature to negative ends, when it comes to willing more rain, we are utterly helpless.  You take what life brings to you and simply do the best you can with it.  The culture doesn't reinforce innovation, it reinforces waiting and being safe because those who take risks when dealing with rain tend to lose.  What also stems from this is the beautifully supportive extended family structures which serve as an insurance policy against uncontrollable setbacks, but it also leaves you with a population head shy of innovation which makes the early stages of any agriculture project such a critical time because you have to make sure have enough early success to push them past the critical mass of implantation if you want to make it past that cultural safety net of security before innovation, but I digest.  (word jokes).

Back to painting my village picture.

The rains come.  It was an exciting day, I awoke one morning to see these dark clouds blotting out the southwest horizon and I knew they rains were coming.  The whole village was buzzing, last minute preparations, herding of animals, tying down of materials, rushing to get indoors before that wall comes, and come it does.  Two straight hours of unrelenting oratory and then calm, no sound.  Then the farmers emerge, the tools of the trade tossed over their shoulders, all thoughts of the lateness of the rain washed away and they begin making their way back out to the farms to scratch out another year, that was just like the last year, and will be just like the years to come in this calmingly consistent world of theirs.

PS there are photos to go with this post, but the camera that has those photos is off on the other side of the country right now so you shall get them later, I super promise.

PPS......go Hawks.

Observations on behaviour

One of the plethora of awesome things that I endeavor to get into whilst en brousse is "ponder time".  Its fun, just try to actively take in all that's been happening to you and look for patterns, nuance, riddles, or moments and behaviours that can be applied to larger ideas.  Well thanks to a little punk known by "Arnol" (he is the youth who fell asleep while petting my dog featured in my Instagram post recently) I've stumbled across an interesting observation on behavior.  Arnol visits my courtyard from time to time and he has the look of being much better cared for than the typical village youth due to the fact that he is a functionaire's child and with that package also comes a modicum of French which permits me to converse with his 5 year old self.  Well despite the fact that he is a functionaire child he still mingles with all the village children as they wander about village bringing the ruckus and doing whatever it is that they do to fill their days.  One of these practices is scouring the village with stones and slingshots in search one of the local species of lizards.  The village children collect these dead guys up and then scoot off to someone's cook fire and proceed to feast on the lizards.  Arnol never really sticks around for the cooking and feasting parts of this activity because he doesn't really have to, he gets reasonably well fed at home so he remains blissfully unaware of the true purpose of the lizard hunts, simply understanding it to be a fun game.  Well during my time in village I  have yet to discover any nefarious practices of these lizard brethren.  In fact, I encourage their existence in my courtyard because they gleefully eat the ample ant population that flocks to my garden beds.  I keep an open door policy on my courtyard during the day for the local kids because I'm usually tinkering with some sort of DIY drip irrigation system or planting new growing bags and they love to watch and help.  Often times they go into exports of delight at the sight of all my delicious edible lizards and I must quickly calm them down before they start hauling off stones all over the place in their efforts to kill them and I'd rather just share my bag of beans with them rather than watch them wreak havoc on what had previously been a perfectly orderly courtyard. Sometimes its just me and Arnol in the courtyard and I might be explaining how often to water the different plants when I see a hard look settle in his eye and following his line of site a see a harmless lizard slurping up ants on my wall.  He then informs me "je vais le tuer" and I ask him why he is going to kill it.  "Je dois le touer", oh now he must kill it.  Are you going to eat it? Blank look, shakes head "no".  Well why do you have to kill it, Arnol? Still doesn't know, "c'est comme ca".  Oh that's just how it is? Well Arnol, you cannot kill the lizard today.  It intrigues me as to why Arnol truly feels that he has to kill this lizard seeing that I have found no necessitated motive to kill this speedy lil beasties.  For instance we readily kill mice, they ruin food.  We hack snakes to pieces with machetes, they're poisonous.  I've seen an entire village flock together to beat a rabid dog to death with rocks before it could bite someone, but in a culture where they simply sho away large spiders rather than kill them since they are in fact harmless I can't quite piece together a motive for Arnol's bloodlust.  Every time it happens the best Arnol can come up with is that that is just how it is and I find that to be an interesting perspective.  It's an accidental glance into the possible origin and propagation of some of the more perplexing human behaviors found in the world today.  Behaviors that may have arisen to solve some ecological or adaptive need that have become so tightly woven into a cultural fabric that they are no longer understood or questioned in much the same way that Arnol so cheerfully aped the behaviors of his youthful village cohorts without bothering to ask why when they could have easily told him, they were hungry.  These types of practices are often times the results of bigger systematic pressures rather than the cause of general problems and trying to fix them as a problem in and of itself is like trying to fix a leak simply by wiping up the water on the ground.  When enacting policy or working to adjust human behavior on a grander scale it would behoove us to search carefully the sources before leaping to solutions.  Arnol's rate of lizard murder would be much more drastically affected, for instance, by creating a more food secure environment in village rather than enacting a ban on lizards killings.  It also wouldn't hurt, in our own daily lives, to ask ourselves what behaviors we have become comfortable with simply because that is how it is, we might just be surprised.

A day in the life

I decided to write this post in a kind of first person narrative to try to express the kind of working conditions that are necessitated out here.  It's also a hell of a lot longer than my typical posts so, you know, if that bothers you then probably don't read it.  In grass roots development you can't come in all business, calling meetings, professional settings, schedules, dates, plans, info packets.  You just kind of exist as one of the "buddies" and you just work when you can, mess around most of the time, and usually do the two at the same time if you really want to get something done.  Out here I've found my niche among a group of guys highlighted by the one and only Christophe Sawadogo! He's my community homologue and one of my best friends in village.  He's the owner of one of our villages four bars and he also serves on a number of village committees which makes him a very well placed individual for moving projects along because he knows all of the right people.  I never ask him to meet with me officially because that would be boring so I usually hangout at his bar every third day for the Market and any evening that I feel like mossying on over there.  This being the case I am also well accepted amongst Christoph's family (Seven brothers, it's a blast) and all of the bar's regulars which includes people from simple farmer/masons to tailors or even the occasion local Chief.  The local Chiefs are huge for establishing myself in village because Mossi culture is extremely hierarchacal so being in with them places me in very high local social groups and they are well placed for condoning my projects or giving favors.  I usually spend my time here being a goofball and would you believe it? My village is full of people just as ridiculous as myself and by making a scene whenever I go out in public they tend to gravitate towards me on their own.  I make exagerated salutations to market vendors, shout about how delicious their food is in local lang, we use funny voices while we greet each other at the bar, add exagerated dance moves to express just how content we truly are, and buy each other tasty snacks and beers.  So this is my office, my place of work, the think tank where my project ideas are injected into the community and the place where I wait for people to come back with questions at which point I am always happy to divulge agriculture factoids and make plans to go to their house and install some tree or compost pit.  One afternoon I was there on a market day to talk to Christophe about choosing a location for a moringa plantation and the next step in our Farmer's Co-Op and it went down something like this.

*All quotes have been changed from Moore to facilitate you the reader's better understanding*

It's creeping up on 14:00 so it's about time to head to the bar, I lock up the house, put my solar lamps out, and promise Manchu that if she promises not to dig up Dad's new plants she can have some tasty fish when I get back.  She agrees.  I grab my helmet from the hook and unnecessarily bike the 30 seconds to Christoph's place of work.  I pull around the corner, and there are all the guys, posted up in their local made reclining chairs under the hangar.  I power slide my bike to stop in their midst while dismounting and throw a fist in front of my mouth in the manner one might if they had just seen something entirely too ridiculous and they are going "damnnnnnnnnnn".  I shout out in Moore
"Whuddup!!! The Nassara has arrived!"
They all respond entusiastically "Whuddup!! Our Nassara!!!"
I then toss my helmet on my bike and go to each person and perform greetings following the general format

Me. "Yo how are things??"
Dude.  "No problems!"
Me.  "And work?"
Dude.  "Very nice"
Me.  "VERY NICE! How's the sun?"
Dude.  "Damn, it's hot"
Me. "Super hot"
Dude. "How's your dog?!"
Me.  "She's on form! She's just back home working out"

and so on and so on.

After I've hit everybody, danced with one of the masons, dapped Bidari a few times, and told Francois that if he hits anyone today I'm going to have to kick him out, they offer me a chair in the high traffic area and I flop into it next to Christophe.  Can't talk about work yet, that would be lame, we just exchange news, how's my work at the school going, how's my dog (again), what do I need at the market? Let's go get it!
*Insert market wandering and bartering*
I've got all my goodies and we're walking past the snack stand where two of the brother's wives work (Since I have become one of the brothers they are also my wives so I can technically give them any work related command and if anything where to happen to a brother I would be part of the support group that helps her out with raising the kids, families exist here like tiny interconnected support villages inside of a larger yet still small interconnected village) and one shouts out,
"Nassara! How are you?"
"I'm so good! Wait, I'm TOO good"
*laughter*
"Come and eat one of my snacks! (tasty fried bread with salt and chili powder)"
*shouting* "What?! For me?! Very Nice!! (kind of Borat-esque)"
*Ryan noms a tasty snack*
Now the other vendor starts laughing to,
"Wait, Nassara, eat one of my snacks!!"
"No way?! You are too kind"
*Noms second snack, more laughing"
now we have a small crowd because I have been making a scene of this and everybody loves watching the white guy do stuff, now another vendor comes out of the crowd,
"Nassara! Eat my snack too!!"
Ryan noms more snacks*
I thank everyone, shout a benediction to everyone, and make my way to the bar.  Once back I toss my purchases in the back room and ask Christophe if he wants to talk about projects? Sure does, we swoop two chairs a little more removed from the action and he orders two beers.  We start talking about little stuff, I list off some of the stuff we will need to do, never everything all at once because we will just forget, usually one or two important bullet points like "So before the rains we are going to have to clear that land" or "I'm about to start negotiating our Sesame Seed deal, what kind of price are you shooting for" and then leave it there.  And these bullets don't get delivered in quick succession, or even all at once such as is the case today.
I open with a mention of our moringa plantation, someone bumbles in so we have to do all the greetings, ask for news, share some, he's gone.  Little pause, moringa again, land.  Then in the middle of my sentence Christoph shouts
"Ryan look!!! Its my pet rat!!" (so this guy went out in a tiny village where rats are all over the place destroying stuff and pooping in houses and somehow buys a domestic rat that has burrowed into the wall of his bar and he feeds it snacks from time to time)
Well the distraction has been raised, you can't ignore it, just go with it until the conversation flows back to agriculture
"Ah it's your rat!!" I bust out laughing, laugh every time I see that thing, too ridiculous not too.
Francois comes running into the room
"Where's the rat! *Jokingly* I'm gonna kill it!"
Christoph "No! don't kill it!! Ryan!! Don't let him kill my rat!!"
Me: "Francois not the rat!! I told you no hitting today, that goes double for killing rats!"
Francois: "No I want to kill it! Its a rat!"
Christoph: "No no no! Save the rat!!"
Me: "Don't worry, the rats safe"
Francois: "No it's not, because I'm about to kill it"
Me: "Francois"
Francois: "Yes?"
Me: :"No rat killing"
Francois: "Ok Ok fine"
Christoph: "ha ha! that's right, can't kill my rat!"
At this point Francois laughs and leaves and Christoph thanks me again for saving his rat and we finish our beers and sit for a bit.  After a few minutes I turn to him
"so...moringa?"

We're back on track, nail out the important details, and I head back home to make dinner.  Next morning Christoph swings by my house to let me know that they will get the land cleared by the end of April and gives me an asking price for the Sesame.  See? Everything worked out great.  The trick out here is figuring out that there is no real delineation between work and leisure time like there is in the states, your life is your work so you are always working.  Problem is, if you treat your life like work you might crack, I find it more enjoyable to treat my life like leisure that gets work done and it's been working out great so far.  Until next time my ravid readers!

Go Ner's
Go Hawks

What's he been doing?

Yes what have I been doing, the question I am sure gives you all sleepless nights, and for this I am truly sorry.  I can only hope that this latest update makes up for the appalling deficit of Ryan that you are all experiencing.
Well with the end of the school year starting to creep up my secondary projects are starting to take form and a lot of my time.  For those of you who don't know because for the life of me I can't remember if I've already explained this.  Volunteers are given their primary assignment such as Education for me or possibly Health, Economic development, Agriculture, etc.  After this primary assignment the volunteer is allowed to branch out into whatever sector they want for their secondary projects depending on the needs and interests of their community.  These projects typically don't start right away because it takes time to get to know your community, meet people, discuss their take on their needs and then start proposing ideas to them to see what they would be interested in doing because it will be them who have to continue the project after I have finished my service.  Also as I have mentioned before I have taken a strong interest in food security since arriving here and that has been strongly due to both my interest in general health as well as the relative food insecurity found in my village.  We are small, 14 km from the nearest body of water, and 65 km from the nearest paved road so there isn't a rapid exchange of goods between us and larger cities and the poorer farmers survive mostly on what they were able to grow during the rainy season from June to October.  In addition to this nutrition practices aren't the greatest which leaves groups such as pregnant women and newly borns highly susceptible to malnutrition. 
The first project my community jumped at was my suggestion that we try to find a way to cut out the intermediaries in their trade of sesame seeds.  Everyone here grows sesame seeds, but nobody knows what to do with them.  They're grown here as a cash crop, but nobody has the means to transform them into oil or any edible form so their two alternatives have been to sell their sesame in small quantities to the neighboring village which undercuts them well below market value, or to simply walk around eating raw sesame seeds and trying to invite the white guy to come eat raw sesame seeds with them.  Well they've done both of these in excess so naturally they were thrilled when I told them there might be another option.  We've moved forward on creating a sesame co-op of local farmers with an elected bureau and recognition from the mayor's office.  This gives us the ability to pool resources and hopefully find a larger buyer in a bigger city.  We've had our first few rounds of meetings and its been going great so far, we won't actually have to sell anything until the end of the harvest which is in October so we have until then to make sure that everything has been organized and put into place so that we can move quickly after the harvest.  This being Burkina everything could still go terribly wrong, but then again everything could still go terribly right.
Next up are my two projects more on the agricultural end of food security.  I've always enjoyed gardening in the states and now I enjoy gardening in Burkina.  It's a completely different challenge with all different gardening and composting techniques and more of a budget and resource constraint than one would experience in the states, but it has been fun these last six or so months learning all that I can about gardening, composting, and tree planting here in Burkina from a variety of interesting sources.  In my own courtyard I have a small vegetable garden, a steadily growing collection of trees, and a small composting pit, while outside I have a larger pit for developing animal manure. How does this relate to the community?  Well currently I am organizing two projects, one with the Health Clinic (CSPS) and one with the High School (Lycee) that I work at.  At the CSPS we are going to start a Moringa forest that the clinic can use to create a high nutrition powder to give to women who have recently given birth to help counter malnutritient during the first three months.  The forest will also give the clinic the oppurtunity to give out a small sapling at the same time as the initial distribution of powder so that the women can plant their own tree and have a replenishing stock of Moringa.  Moringa is a tropical drought resistant tree well suited to sandy soils and absolutely packed with nutrients.  You can use just about every part of the tree, but we will just be focusing on the leaves at first.  If you are super duper interested in more info on this kickass tree feel free to google that bad boy and bask in its nutritious glory.  In addition to the Moringa Forest, we are in the process of setting up a school garden to help improve our current hot lunch program which is currently a repeating cycle of beans, spaghetti, rice, beans spaghetti, rice, and so on.  The vegetables would give the kids a much needed nutritian boost and we could use the garden in compound with some of our science courses which include a plant anatomy section as well as a study of soil structure (taught by yours truly).  Both of these projects will hopefully be funded by a grant from a West African Food Secuitry organiziation which is why these projects are time consuming, writing and processing grants are never the easiest of things and when you add my current living conditions into the mix you can see my difficulties.  Like the sesame co-op, nothing has gone wrong yet, but we still have plenty of time.
And last, but not least our school administration is hoping to add solar power to one of our classrooms to give the students someplace to study after the sun has set.  Some students come from families that have enough money to have an extra flashlight that the student can use to study, but this is usually the male students who get the flashlight while the girls are left in the dark.  So over the past weekend I've been biking all over the place with my counterparts to meet some electriciens and battery people to calculate costs and find materials to make this happen.  This too will be written in the form of a grant and we're hoping to have it installed by the beginning of next school year.

I hope to keep you all updated of the different projects progress reports, but as with all things in my life these days keep the expectations low and you will never be disappointed. Until next time!