Projects can happen without the volunteer

Scholarship for the Advancement of Girls in Kogho

Thank you for taking the time to learn a little bit more about this project and I hope that you stick around until the end!

As some of you reading this are probably aware, I served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso from 2014 to 2016.  During this time I learned a lot about myself, about a small slice of the world beyond the confines of "society" and found myself walking away from my service with some truly humbling experiences and lifelong friends.  Since my return to the states I have remained in contact with both my friends in village as well as my friends who call the capital city, Ouagadougou, home and throughout this time we continue exchange news about our lives and how they can continue to advance their communities.  I think that is what drew me to my two close friends, Paulin Bamogo and Christophe Sawadogo.  They were determined to push their communities regardless of whether I was there as a volunteer or not, my presence was simply a bonus to their innate desires to leave behind a better world.  You will all hopefully hear more about my project with Christophe in the near future, but today I am sharing about a project that was concocted with the help of my friend and professional mentor, Paulin Bamogo, heretofore referred to as just "Bamogo".

Bamogo was my professional counterpart in village and was the lead French professor at our little school in Kogho and since my departure he has been promoted to headmaster and moved his family to a nearby town to be closer to the school.  He worked tirelessly to help his students, but also to help both Kogho and the village where he had been born.  He was and is a staunch advocate for the rights of all students to access education and never hesitated to involve higher authorities in the event that it appeared that a student was being barred access to the school.  He was also relentlessly patient with me as I proposed idea after idea to him and he would explain each idea's flaw or offer an altered version of the project idea that would more seamlessly fit into the cultural norm of our village.  Such was the case again when I came to him with an idea this winter.

One of my former students had just called me and was telling me how school was going and what she hoped to accomplish.  This particular student had always impressed me with her ability to think critically, arrive at detailed solutions to problems even when presented with limited information, and her commitment to advocate for her fellow female classmates.  In fact, hearing about her ambitions to go to college so that she could be a teacher and help out future female students both filled me with pride as well as sadness.  The pride is rather self-explanatory, but the sadness had to do with what I knew about the harsh realities of life in a village in Burkina Faso.  School was a luxury rather than a requirement and while it has been demonstrated that sending children to an equal distribution of years in school maximizes a family's lifetime earning potential, culturally, most families in Burkina Faso tend to pool their resources behind their one or two "smartest" kids and the rest of the family falls into line.  In a traditionally male dominated society it is rare that a daughter is selected for this honor and she is only selected if the family has money left over after sending their son on through higher education.  This isn't to say that no girls get the chance to go to school, but they are rarely given the opportunity to complete school.

 Because of this reality many girls don't hold a belief that by performing well in school they might be allowed to continue.  They understand that their schooling could come to an end at any point and so they try hard, but an uncertain future can erode the determination of even the most dedicated student.  Now the student who called me wasn't any old student.  She was exceptional.  In fact she had the highest test scores of any student in our entire region.  So with this in mind I called Bamogo to propose the idea of a scholarship.

During my time in village I often explained my involvement with the female students by saying things along the lines of "well my mother is a school teacher in the states and she wants to ensure that the girls in my village have access to good school materials" or "she wants to ensure that the girls at my school have access to books".  I did this because it wasn't uncommon for female students, unsure of their future in school, to seek out professors as potential partners.  If I was going to spend time with the girls at the school either as a tutor or a mentor I had to ensure that my presence did create unfounded rumors around the village as everything that I did in village was so closely observed due to natural curiosity.  It was along this line of thinking that I approached Bamogo with the idea to create a scholarship fund for this particular student in my mother's name to ensure that she would be able to continue with school and hopefully in the future have the opportunity to help those that came behind her.  My hope was that through framing this as an investment by my mother it would feel more like an accomplishment by the awardees and coming from a women who herself had to face adversity in her education would help serve as an inspiration to the young students of Kogho.  As Bamogo always does, he responded with a rebuttal.

"Why don't we make it a scholarship for exemplary female students, rather than for just this one student?"

"That's a great idea!"

"And could we raise money for more than one student?  I think that the professors would like to nominate multiple students from different grades"

"I hadn't even thought of that, yes of course!"

And with his usual brilliance Bamogo created an excellent project design.  We have gone back and forth more since that conversation and have a clearer picture of what we hope to accomplish with this project and who ought to be nominated and we have decided to begin our first year with $1000.

What does these $1000 do?  Great question.

These $1000 will compliment money already contributed by a student’s family to ensure commitment, but it will allow four female students in four different grades to continue with another year of school.  It will cover the costs of textbooks, which are almost deemed a luxury item for female students in village.  It will cover the fees for the school lunch program for a year.  And most importantly, it will serve as example to the other female students in Kogho that working hard can pay off in school.  It will serve as an illustration that yes, there is a future for girls in school that is tied to their achievements rather that the financial standing of their family and that through hard work they can become architects of their own futures.

Along with the funding that this scholarship provides, successful nomination and acceptance into the program also requires the parents of the girl to allow her to stay after school in study hall three days a week.  A luxury typically reserved for the male students, as the girls must head home to take care of their chores around the home.

This is only our first year and as much as I have been able to I have left the vision in the hands of Bamogo and taken a backseat as a supportive friend.  As you have noticed I have left out the names of the students who will be awarded the scholarship in this first year and I also won't be providing progress reports on the individual recipients following the administration of the funds as I believe that they have the right to privacy in this matter.  This may change in future years, but I will leave that up to Bamogo to decide as he has now stepped into the lead role in Kogho and has ownership over how this project will grow over the years as he works to invest in a future that is female in Burkina Faso.

I thank you all for whatever you can contribute to this project and for sticking around until the end of my ramblings.

https://www.gofundme.com/scholarship-let-girls-learn

Cheers,

Ryan K

P.S.  Stay posted as I transition to a new blog platform!  Christophe, Bamogo, and I will be launching a microfinance project in the spring and we hope to have your support as we outline Christophe's vision and why rural entrepreneurs are so important!

The return to Burkina

Well as I find my time winding down in country I feel as if it would be appropriate to tell you, my dedicated readers, how I have used those last few weeks in country.  As this blog is titled "My adventures in Burkina Faso" this last visit fittingly signals the approaching end of this blog due to the fact that I would imagine that it would be hard to discuss at great length my adventures in Burkina Faso while restarting my life in America.  Even though that is exactly what I did during these last few months of being back in the States.  I just don't want to count that because it didn't have that sense of finality that I wanted to accomplish with my blog.  As I alluded to in my post http://ryankennedyburkinafaso.blogspot.com/2016/04/stepping-stone-to-something-bigger.html I hoped to use this final chapter of my strange service as a functioning takeaway from my service because a series of posts without a conclusion ends up just being the ramblings of a half starved Peace Corps volunteer rather than something useful and coherent.  And as we all know.  I am nothing, if not useful and coherent.  But I digest.

So plane rolls into the airport, I pass through customs, passport stamped, and I walk out and I am immediately assaulted by a hoard of taxi drivers eager for my business.  I take a deep breath in, my shirt already sticking to my back in the sticky humidity that follows a rain.  I'm back.

It was startling how foreign a lot of the sights, sounds, and smells had already become having only been gone for three months.  But believe it our not, this place that I had called home already felt a little like a foreign country all over again.  Luckily the adjustment is a lot quicker the second time around.  Your local language comes back now that its being shouted at you from all directions again.  You quickly remember what it feels like to constantly be sweating.  And this time you don't have to deal with the troubling thoughts of, "oh no, I signed up to do this for how long?"

I have a few days in the capital at the start of my trip so I meet up with old friends to say good bye.  Volunteers who I probably won't get a chance to see for a few years, members of the bureau who I might never see again, and friends from village who live in the capital during the summer months.  Its all a bit overwhelming and yet calming.  Your friends' excitement over seeing you returned to your country of service cements the reality of the life that you created over the two years of service.  An affirmation of what you meant to people, and a reminder of what these people meant to you.  You sit there responding to eager questions about your health, your time in the states, your family, and it really settles in how different you are for having had the foolhardy hope of changing the world.

I had the chance to meet the family of my good friend and professional counterpart Paulin Bamogo, I was able to have dinner and again meet the family of one bureau member, Aicha Pitroipa, with whom I had worked closely on both of my grant projects and who blew me away day after day with her passion for her work and her willingness to learn from anybody.

I made plans to meet up with some volunteer friends of mine for the 4th of July in a village near mine and geared up to make the eventual return to Kogho.  I had no idea what to expect upon my return to village and I was both nervous and excited.  Life moves slowly in Burkina, but change can happen quickly.  A village is like a living breathing entity in the north near the Sahel.  The homes are built from clay and wear away steadily with each passing rain or windstorm.  Homes are raised in a matter of days and can fall in a matter of years allowing the village to grow and shrink steadily like the pulsating of a large heart.  Friends come and go as work becomes available.  You might leave for a few months to find maybe your favourite student has moved to a different relative's home in a city on the other side of the country, your best friend left to Senegal to mine gold or Cote D'Ivoire to harvest Cacoa, or your favourite Tauntie has moved to a bigger city to sell her wares and charm to a larger market.  In a village where personal possessions carry so little meaning it is easy to uproot your entire life and move on upon a whim and that a certain amount of unknown in my return to Kogho.

The other half of the unknown were the projects that the village and I had been so dutifully working.  What would they look like after three months without me?  A three months where the village knew I was done forever.  A three months that came about three months too early and without warning.  All of my carefully laid plans, all of the hard work.  Well as I learned time and time again at the hands of an unforgiving Burkina, plans have little substance and serve more to give peace of mind than to offer any meaningful structure in an unpredictable life.

Well for this post I shall leave you here.  My return to village was affirming and overwhelming and surprising not because of any specific thing that I had done but because of what those close to me had done and I feel that each of their accomplishments deserves its own post.  I want to be able to take my time on these posts and try to work them to one single conclusion as I close out this blog.  So here is what I propose.  I will take my time,  George R.R. Martin style, and put together a three part post documenting what I found in my return to Kogho and closing with my take away message from my service.  And that shall be it.  As I have noted before I have a wonderfully sporadic posting style which I am sure you, my dedicated readers, have probably loved.  But with this final posting I will make sure that the three posts come out in a scheduled manner.  Building suspense through expectation and all of that.

So until I find enough time to actually sit down, drink a litre of coffee, and ride to battle Balzac style to achieve three consecutive and coherent posts, my dedicated readers.

“This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.”

-Honoré de Balzac

My Privileged Dog

My privileged dog.

Well as some of you may or may not know.  I had a dog while volunteering in Burkina Faso.  Not terribly surprising.  Lots of volunteers have dogs, gets lonely out there and dogs are undeniably awesome when it comes to dealing with loneliness.  But having lived with a dog for a few years I found out that they are quite good at a lot of things other than dealing with loneliness. 

My dog taught me how to teach while being taught at the same time.  Helped me understand the Burkinabé views on life and its cyclic nature.  How to hold on to something you know you will inevitably lose.  And most surprisingly of all, my dog taught me about some of the unintended consequences of privilege. 

So back to the beginning.  I got my lil pup around my third week in village because upon arriving in town and realizing nobody was planning to talk to me for at least the first month I started putting it out there that I would really like a dog.  Preferably a boy dog because that would allow me to avoid the eventual complication of all the stray dogs in Burkina hounding my house for a month while my little lady was in heat.  But at the end of the day I just wanted a dog.  My neighbor managed to procure a litter of puppies and they were all girls, but I was lonely and these little suckers were tiny and adorable and only three weeks old and I had to have one.  Well I took my lil pup home and called her Manchu.  A name which translates to “bear” in the language of the Ponca Native Americans, a Midwest tribe near Omaha.  I did this partly because I liked thinking of her as my little bear (I often called her chu-bear), but also it helped me start small conversations about how white people were not in fact the first people in America and in fact there were hundreds of diverse people already living here and the white colonizers had taken their land.  I figured if I was going to be responsible for portraying America to my small village I should try my best to include everything.

But back to Manchu.  Well I had this tiny little animal in my house now and I wanted to raise her how I had always raised dogs.  In America dogs are part of the family and get well fed and can get on the furniture and get hugs and toys all that good stuff.  Eventually I would have to have to find a balance between my American attitudes towards dogs and the Burkinabé attitudes towards dogs.  But that could wait for now, I had to get her all dogged up. 

 LOOK HOW LITTLE SHE IS

So I contacted home and had my parents send me a blue dog collar and a leash and a dog toy and a book about training dogs.  I filled my freetime with the training of Manchu.  We got into all sorts of mischief, she picked up on my body language and moods and was always there for me if sometimes everything seemed like too much.  I even taught her how to open and close my courtyard doors as well as climb the walls so as to better perform her dogly duties of protecting the estate.  And as all of this went on and I began to feel like I was living underneath a microscope of communal observation I became more and more Burkinabé about raising my dog.  She was still allowed to get on my lounge chair, but if she refused to eat that days beans she just didn’t eat.  There was no more worriedly finding something she liked better.  And if she broke the rules?  Well she got popped on the noggin.  Because in Burkina dogs get hit and a dog that isn’t scared of getting hit is labeled as a broken dog and is swiftly eliminated by the community, no questions asked.  And I definitely didn’t want Manchu to be eliminated, although I had to constantly remind myself every day that it might happen despite my best efforts.

The reason I started making all of these changes in the way that I raised Manchu was because as I spent more time in my village I came to realize that my house wasn’t really an island and my life wasn’t entirely my own.  Anything I did was carefully scrutinized and how I chose to lead my life affected those around me whether I liked it not.  Just in being observed you can change how someone behaves or makes decisions.  This concept became abundantly clear with Manchu because she, like all dogs in Burkina, was a wanderer.  All the dogs were free to roam as they please and both the individual and the community had the responsibility of making sure their animal behaved in an acceptable manner.  So if Manchu wandered off and started breaking communal doggy rules that was partly my fault.  I couldn’t angrily tell my neighbors to mind their own damn business and how I raised my dog was none of their concern, because in Burkina, it kind of is their business.  Seeing as it affects them.

Well about a year into my service I found out that privilege runs two ways and it takes a group working together to deal with it.  I was given this realization in the form of a giant dead sheep’s head courtesy of Manchu.  I was in my courtyard working on something…or just staring at my plants wondering if you could watch Moringa trees grow to pass an afternoon.  And I hear my courtyard door bang open and closed (remember I, in my infinite wisdom, had taught Manchu how to operate this most ingenious of devises) and I looked up to see my little lady with blood smeared on her face holding an entire sheep’s head. 

 How many times has your dog brought you one of these?

Well damnit.  This can’t end well.

Leading up to this point I had been told, with slightly increasing frequency, that Manchu was a bad little doggy. 

People would say, “oh that dog is a bandit” or “oh that dog is broken”

To which I would invariably respond, “oh no she’s not, she’s a good dog” blinded as I was by her adorable little bear face.

Well I still mulled this news over.  Manchu was stealing.  Probably food, maybe if I just fed her more this problem would go away.  So I proceeded to feed her extra helpings of beans and rice.  I was worried that if she went full bandit on me then somebody would definitely kill her so I decided to invest the additional 15 cents a day to keep her extra fed so that she wouldn’t feel the need to steal food anymore.   So I was quite literally feeding the problem.  And surprise surprise, turns out that doesn’t work.  Because I was doing it every day leading up to the whole stolen sheep head incident.

So back to dead sheep face.  Well there I was, with a half eaten dead sheep face, a now undeniably bad bandit dog, and an angry villager waiting in the wings somewhere.  At this point I’m not going to make much progress fixing whatever inherent problem has made Manchu a thieving little bugger in the short term.  Short term goals were focused more around mitigating sheep head problem as this was kind of uncharted cultural waters for me and oddly enough I had yet to learn the phrase “I’m sorry my dog stole your sheep’s head” in Mooré.

So I go about scruffing Manchu who is intent on protecting her “kill” so I have to rough her up a bit to remind her that the Alpha gets their pick of the meal first.  She backs away from said “kill” and I put dead sheep face out of reach and start planning my explanation.

Enter angry villager

Well on of the local butchers comes storming up.

“Nassara!”

“Oui?”

“A dog stole my sheeps head while my back was turned and everyone told me it was your dog because of that collar she wears”

Damn collar.

“You know, I am really sorry.  Here is the sheep’s head if that helps”

*Looks at gnawed sheep’s head*

“No, I don’t want it back now.  Just acknowledge that she stole it”

*I pause to contemplate in confusion this request*

“…Yes, she stole it”

“Ok, that’s all.”

“Wait, that’s it?”

“Ya, I just wanted you to acknowledge that it was your dog’s fault and that you were sorry.  Also she’s a thief because of that collar.  Everyone knows she’s yours.”

*Walks away*

Well that left me with quite a bit to puzzle over.  First of all, what an interesting demand.  And also the butcher’s closing comment had a ring of truth to it.  I decided it was a problem for my counterpart, Christophe, and biked over to his place after giving the sheep’s head to my neighbor and leaving Manchu at home.  I get to his bar and go through my usual routine of shouting greetings to anyone and everyone, hand shakes, inquiries about children, about the students, about our work, about the sun, about the rain, about whatever we felt was funny on that particular day, a round of beers, and now it was time to talk.  No reason to rush anything in Burkina.  I ask Christophe about if he’d known Manchu was a bandit and he said of course he knew.  Everyone know’s that she is “Nassara baga”, “white person’s dog”, “different/protected”.  And so I asked him to clarify what all that implied.  And I learned that the villagers didn’t want to hit my dog because they knew how important she was to me and they were worried if they hit her they’d get in trouble.  I later ran this by some of my courtyard kids Aimé and Etienne and they told me the same thing.  Because I had put that collar on Manchu everyone knew she was the Nassara’s dog and they treated her differently.  Not always drastically different.  But different enough.  And it wasn’t just a few people, it was everybody.  Everybody treated her subtly differently in the same way on a consistent basis and the end result was a dead sheep’s head in my courtyard.

It was interesting, everyone and everything in Burkina works in groups and I had accidently made my dog an individual.  Dogs weren’t normally treated differently, they were seen as one equal group and all treated the same.  A dog comes sniffing around your house looking for scraps you clock it with a rock.  You don’t think “who’s dog is that?”  You simply think “there is a dog doing what a dog shouldn’t do”.  So for all of the other dogs the community defines their space and they are forced to operate within this space and by a certain set of rules.  Except for Manchu.  The community provided her with greater space within which to work, a different set of rules under which to operate, privilege. 

Now obviously Manchu was unaware that her situation was different than other dogs around her because, well, she’s a dog and dogs don’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.  She was simply provided a situation, provided a space, and went about filling that space.  She was given more room to experiment and so she experimented.  She was given license to go places other dogs couldn’t go, and so she went there.  And eventually she was implicitly taught by society that she could get away with certain things without punishments and so she did them.  She was not aware of all these things happening to her and even if she were a sentient being capable of rational thought I doubt that she would have at any point sat back and reflected about the apparent advantages that she seemed to be enjoying.  I think this because oftentimes humans (the debatably rational member of the human-dog relationship) don’t even step back and try to identify moments of privilege in their own lives.  Not because humans are inherently bad people, more because that is just one of the sneaky ways in which privilege works as is shown in a clever little buzzfeed sketch found by me via the internets.

We are creatures dependant upon systems and we tend to fill whatever space a system provides us without question..much like a fluid.  Now the end results will always vary.  Knowing what I now know can I definitively state, if you put a collar on your dog in a village in Burkina Faso then your dog will steal a sheep’s head from a butcher?  No, I cannot.  At least not without some careful research and data collection and I doubt that I would be able to find someone to finance that research project.  So for now we remain in the realm of thought experiment.  So if I can’t say that giving a dog “collar privilege” causes them to steal sheep’s heads, what can I say?

Well here I can say that privilege obviously exists and that it has consequences.  Not always the same consequences.  But when privilege mixes with ignorance those consequences can become either problematic or dangerous and the responsibility of that doesn’t fall on any one individual, it’s the responsibility of the group and the individual together.  And seeing as I am in the middle of a thought experiment lets imagine the scenario carried to it’s conclusion and imagine how varied and diverse the consequences could be.  We’ve already seen that Manchu’s collar privilege lead her to become a bandit because the system never taught her that was wrong.  But what if all the other dogs noticed this treatment and realized that they aren’t valued as simply dogs and start saving up their doggy income and purchasing their own collars.  They don’t understand why the collar is significant in the first place and putting them on doesn’t make them necessarily feel any different.  But it labels them as a different group and opens them to some of the privileges of that group.  The system sees this and naturally responds by offering collars of varying quality and style so that if the dogs have a higher doggy income they can purchase collars of higher and higher quality so as to inform the group that they are worth more.  And when this is established the dogs who sell the high end collars will start coming up with new collar styles that they change each season so that the privilege seeking doggies feel the need to buy new and better collars every season so as to remain part of this group and because they feel that happiness is just one more collar away.  

Now that was merely one possible chain of events resulting from “collar privilege”, we already know that stealing a sheep’s head is another resulting chain of events, and we can assume there are hundreds of other possibilities stemming from the existence of this particular form of privilege.

And so we arrive at a dangerous privilege cycle via what can only be described as a massive slippery slope logical fallacy.  I apologize.  But I feel that it got my point across.  Because while the thought of some sort of dog based economy centered around collar acquisition is ridiculous.  Sometimes joking about the exaggerated or impossibly ridiculous helps bring attention to the subtler versions that actually do happen every day.  Which I believe is the role of comedy in these kinds of conversations, a view I at least partially share with Eddie Murphy.

Privilege crops up everywhere and in everything and there is no one answer of how to deal with it.  No single example that can fully encompass all aspects of it.  It’s why we need multiple solutions, we need diverse stories, varied perspectives, open and honest dialogue, and an introspective population that is willing to receive criticism and grow.  Just as I hope to receive criticism for this article, we should all hope to receive criticism for any opinion that we voice.  In this scenario seemingly innocuous societal privilege given to an individual led to that individual developing into a broken member of society, a breaker of rules.  Makes you wonder how often this kind of thing happens within our own societies. (hint: a lot).  So let’s look for the Manchus out there and fix the problems at their roots rather than playing the blame game every time something goes wrong.

So I am sure many of you are wondering.  And by “many” I mean at least 5 out of the 10 people who will probably read this.  What did I end up doing about Manchu?  The little bandit.  Well for starters you can notice that I didn’t try to blame the sheep’s head for being all bloody and delicious.  Bloody and delicious that sheep face may have been.  But, this was both Manchu’s fault and mine.  In addition she didn’t get her extra helpings of beans anymore, quite apparent that that wasn’t working.  And I started putting it out there in village that, yes, definitely hit my dog if she’s being bad.  See her sneaking around your food stall at the market?  Give her a wallop, dogs shouldn’t be there.  See her stealthily approaching a table with raw meat on it?  Throw a rock, dogs shouldn’t be stalking that meat.  I didn’t take the collar off because in the short term that would have most surely lead to her death.  Yes the collar is what turned her into a thief, but it was also the only thing keeping her alive at this point.  Take it off before she’s had a chance to learn how to be a well-behaved dog again and she dies, simple as that.  So I instead opted for the “tell my village to throw rocks at her” approach, and to my knowledge, it worked reasonably well. 

Also for those of you who haven’t gotten your fill of reading yet feel free to peruse these Wikipedia pages and learn a bit about the Ponca Tribe and Manchu’s namesake.

How I got my "name"

Hello everyone.  I am Ryan Kennedy.  And growing up that meant something to me.  We carry our name around like an appendage, allowing it to grow with us and to some small degree shape who we are.  Our relationship with the names people call us, our calling names you could say, grows and changes with the cultures around us.  Don’t believe me?  Just look around you.  Do you live somewhere where your get to call your boss Steve? Or is it always Mr/Ms. Jackson?  Have you ever had a professor that insisted that you call them “Dr. someoneso” vs. “Mr/Mrs. Someoneso”?  They did get their PhD after all, and how you address them should reflect this accomplishment.  Your insistence on what your calling name is seems to be an insistence on who you are.  Your individuality.  So when living in a culture devoid of individuals, does it make sense, or seem right to demand to be an individual?  Great question, Ryan.  Thanks Ryan. Well this isn’t the kind of question that has an answer, but I will share my take on this problem and would invite you, my dedicated readers to contribute to the conversation either in the comments section or you can reach me via e-mail because my experience is just one of many and these are the kinds of questions that really need to be shared amongst multiple perspectives.  So more on this in the bonus section at the end.

Growing up as a white, straight, American, male I was afforded the privilege of dictating who I was.  Culturally I was permitted to base my identity off of my accomplishments, my jobs, my academic achievements, and ultimately my choices.  If somebody did make assumptions about who I was they were typically positive and affirming and gave me the space to develop into the person that I felt that I wanted to become rather than spending my time trying to fit myself into a mold that society had created for me or felt the pressure of societies expectation of who I should be weighing down on me.  Now I have mentioned in previous posts about how even for someone like me the groups and cultures around me exert enormous influence over who I become, but even so I was left an enormous license in deciding who I wanted to be.  Living in Burkina challenged that space.  Challenged my identity.  But in a strange and unprecedented way.

In the states names are very important.  You meet someone, you shake their hand, they ask you your name, you tell them and ask them their name, and then if you’re anything like me you some how never manage to focus hard enough to actually hear their name because you’re too busy thinking of other things like breathing and saxophones and literally anything your brain can think of besides that person’s name.  At which point you are forced to embarrassedly ask that person what there name is while assuring them that you are going to forget it again.  And all of this because names are important.  We identify with our name, we are proud of our name, we like people calling us by our name, and we note with pride the moments when our superiors upgrade us from “you” or “weatherby” to our actual name.  It’s a sign of respect and refusing to call somebody by their name is refusing to acknowledge that person as an individual.  So I guess it would surprise you all to hear that for a good portion of my service I had no name.

In Burkina a person’s name serves a different role than it does in most social circles in America.  It is used to identify somebody as part of a group rather than as an individual because no individual is more important then the group that they belong to.  The title of that group allows you to know something about who this person is, what they do, and decide if they should be allowed within your group or if you are not ready to trust them.  While in Burkina many volunteers are confronted with what I would call the “Nassara problem”, that is the general population simply calls all of us a single word.  In my region it was Nassara.  In the western region it was Tubaboo.  When I was in Togo and Benin it was Yovo.  And no matter where you go it is never your actual name.  It is an informative statement of who you are made by others.  There is rarely a moment during the introductions when you will be asked for your given or personal name, you are simply given this new name.  Often times I will hear people translate this name as “white”, which is often the case, but not always true.  In fact I know many nonwhite volunteers who still receive this name.  I find a more accurate translation to be “stranger”.  Which makes a lot of sense coming from an interdependent culture that’s primary objective is to protect the in-group, protect the village.  Being called “stranger” immediately identifies you as an outsider and it allows people to treat you accordingly.  As I mentioned in a previous post not every call of “nassara” is the same, but this is where it was important to practice listening so that you could actually hear what you were being called.  Some “Nasara”s meant, “Go away”.  Some meant, “entertain me”, some meant “who are you”, and some meant “this is what you are”.

Now every volunteer has a different interaction with the Nassara problem and every volunteer comes up with their own method of handling this problem.  Because it can be hard.  Moving around the country with chants of your whiteness following you around.  Maybe starting a meeting where you present yourself by your name and the response you get is “ok, Nassara”.  I think that to some people this refusal to be acknowledged as an individual is hard and scary.  For most of us, or at least those of us who have been benefactors of white privilege we have never lived in a culture that dictated who we were.  That gave us a role that we were obligated to fill. 

So I guess there are multiple ways to respond to being called Nassara, or “le blanc”, or really any other term that dictates your identity.  The path that I ended up following was to accept it.  Because, as I said, the bizarre nature of this labeling.  In fact the labeling that comes from being a Nassara isn’t inherently negative.  In fact some of it is positive.  Being a Nassara can sometimes open the individual to realms of unearned privilege due to the fact that the culture values whiteness.  Oftentimes this privilege makes us feel uncomfortable or guilty.  But the response to this feeling shouldn’t be to demand the culture to allow you to feel comfortable.  In a way, I think that it is important to feel uncomfortable about this treatment.  Accept the reality of it and try to learn from it. I saw it as an acknowledgement of my place in Burkina.  I was not here to be an individual. I had not earned that right and I don’t think that I should use the privilege that comes with my whiteness to insist that I be acknowledged as an individual.  Some volunteers sit their friends down and explain, “do not call me Nassara, in my culture that is an offensive thing to do, my name is ______ and you should call me ______”, which is a perfectly reasonable request.  If you were amongst Americans.  But you aren’t and sometimes you have to bend to the reality of your situation.  Imagine it from their perspective.  You see a white guy and you call them, “hey, white guy!” just like you would expect to be called “hey black guy!”.  But then the white guy comes over and sits you down and tells you that that was a rude thing to do, and that you should call him Greg.  And well, he is a white guy, so you want to do what he says, so you say, “ok, Greg”.  But on the inside you’re really thinking “but why? You are a white guy?  I must not understand”.  And so now if you’re Greg, I would be curious as to whether or not that was the impression you wanted to make?  I would argue that you haven’t fixed anything; you haven’t explained some aspect of your culture to a friend or colleague in the hope that they might learn something new.  You demanded that they treat you as if this was your home, but the problem is.  It’s not.

Another response is for volunteers to ask to be given their “village name”.  And I would imagine this comes from a place of wanting to find a replacement for “Nassara” and so you tell you friends in village, “don’t call me, ‘Nassara’ call me something local’”, and normally your friends will be delighted to do this.  And so you get a name in the local language and it is easy for your friends to remember because it means something to them and you now have an identifier that you become attached to.  I guess the interesting conundrum here is that essentially you have arrived and you are called “Nassara” or “stranger” and the response comes across as “no, I am not a stranger.  I am here and I am one of you and I will have my name”. 

I felt that it did me more good to have that constant reminder that I was not one of them.  I was not a villager from Kogho.  And no matter how hard I tried, how much I integrated, how much I denied the trappings of a western life to completely immerse myself within the conditions of this life I could never truly be one of them.  My reality wouldn’t permit it.  If something went wrong for me the Peace Corps had me medically covered.  If the rains were bad, I received a monthly stipend regardless of the rain so I would still eat.  Hell I’m hoping most of you, my dedicated and detail oriented readers, noted that during my summer in the fields I left in the middle to go on a vacation to Togo and Benin.  It still allows you to live in your village and integrate, but it changes the way that you address life having that background sense of security.  Living in Burkina is hard.  There is no questioning that.  But as volunteers we all knew that any suffering that we endured was a temporary condition and that eventually it would end, or if you needed you could take a break.  You could learn to adapt and accept, you could find ways to avoid it, or you could just white knuckle your way through a service in the desert.  But it will end.  For your friends in village that isn’t the case.  They aren’t holding on to any idea that this suffering is temporary.  This is their reality and you just have to deal with it.  As a volunteer or hell even as an American when we encounter a difficult situation we can or are encouraged to just leave that situation.  You don’t like your town?  Move to a better town.  You don’t like your name?  Change your name.  You don’t like your school? Transfer to a better school.  The way you adapt and develop your problem solving ability is very different from somebody who understands that these unpleasant conditions are permanent.  You don’t like your village?  Make your village better.  You don’t like your name?  That’s not up to you.  You don’t like your school?  Work harder to like your school. 

It falls in line reasonably well with a lot of the hashtags attached to different posts from the instagram account @barbiesavior (lord the internets are amazing) such as #gonativeorgohome or something along about being one of the average, getting the true local experience.  Its this thinking that I really think people like the creators of this account are trying to go after.  Not necessarily to attack, but to encourage conversation and awareness.  Because at the end of the day neither this post nor, I would imagine, the posts by others talking about this topic.  Are intended to be an attack.  I don’t want my message to be, “don’t go out there and serve” or “don’t travel” or “don’t try to help”.  More “be aware of what it is you are doing, what you are not doing, and accept the differences”

Your interaction with the world around you is different depending on the cultural cycles that you occupy and while living in your village you will always occupy a different cultural cycle.  But that’s ok.  We aren’t there to be an African.  Or to be a Burkinabe.  To earn some sort of “I’m now an African” badge and come back to America and start talking about how much more meaningful life is because you’re African.  No, we’re there to be different.  And to share that difference, to understand why they are different.  And if they are going to remind me of my difference every time they call me, that’s ok.  Because I am different, so let’s talk about that.

Now I did eventually get given a village name.  Which is good, I guess, otherwise the title of this blog post would have been really confusing.  But it was because my village decided too, and it wasn’t really a replacement of Nassara.  Just an adjustment.  I was given the name Ouedraogo Rayende after I had lived in village for about a year and it was really just a different label to describe me.  To explain what I was.  My name is Ryan Kennedy they told me.  Kennedy is the royal family in America and Ouedraogo is the royal family in Burkina.  So we will call you Ouedraogo.  And you live alone. You have no wife and you have no kids (weirdo) so we will call you Rayendé, which means “a man alone”.  And it’s funny.  Most of my friends in village just shorten Rayendé to Rayen.  Which sounds oddly like Ryan.  So at the end of the day I was called by my given name.  But I think that the way that I got there made all of the difference.

So what is the take away from all of this?  Besides the fact that my village thinks the Kennedys are the American royal family (which in and of itself excludes me from being a #truenative , but is still kind of funny).  I guess the best that I can offer is that the world is really made up of a lot of different groups.  Some groups composed of individuals.  Some composed of people who see themselves as one.  Some groups with privilege. Some without.  Some groups well publicized.  Some never heard of.  And while living in Kogho it impressed upon me that there are just some groups that you don’t get to belong to.  You can insist that you belong, or you can force your way into a different group.  You can do everything just like the members of another group, but at the end of the day, you are different, separate, Nassara. But I think there is something connective about recognizing our differentness while at the same time trying to take the time to learn and listen to these other groups.  So yes, after two years in Burkina I never became a true native.  But that wasn’t why I was there.  And yes during my two years I had the opportunity to do some pretty cool work, but I didn’t really solve any problems.  I was given a unique opportunity to go out and share something with this little village and they were able to share something in return.  And allowing my village to remind me every day that that was all that I did and that I was simply a small part of a larger whole leaves a bigger impact than convincing myself that I was there to be one of them and to solve their problems.

But what am I doing, I just spent all of this time talking about how these kinds of things are meant to be conversations rather than a one sided lecture.  And as I have mentioned, my experience is very limited to..well my experience.  A white, American, male serving in the Peace Corps in Kogho, Burkina Faso.  So I would like to invite you, my dedicated readers, to participate in this conversation.  Maybe I missed something, maybe I wildly oversimplified an extremely not simple problem, or maybe I am way less smart than I like to sometimes think that I am and you would simply like to inform me that I am wrong.  Feel free to use the comments section as a forum or even email me your responses at rkennedy12345@gmail.com.  I will respond, and if you want to compose a response highlighting how wrong that I am I will even post those later, either anonymously or with your name attached so that others can enjoy our attempts at defining the indefinable.  Well here’s to hoping this idea actually works.  Cheers, and until next week.

Fun picture.  This was taken during my ride home from my neighboring town about 10km away.  It was always a nice relaxing ride once I got over the fear of becoming lost in the bush.  But also a good add on to this conversation.  I could ride this route 100 times with a bushel of hay on my head and I would still never know what it was like to be the guy in this picture.  Only he knows, so why not spend the time to ask him?

Remembering the fields

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

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live” (Henry David Thoreau)

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”.