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”.

Stepping stone to something bigger

So I’ve been back for about a month now and I’m still struggling with some aspects of American culture that I forgot existed or have started since I left.  But I haven’t forgotten my promise to try to document any interesting insights that I might stumble across or new lessons that I found hidden away in my experiences in Burkina Faso, but every time I try to start a post I realize that while I have lived my life these last two years—you, my dedicated readers, have not lived my life these last two years.  Sometimes I will have these really cool realizations only to come up short remembering that to somebody who didn’t know have all of the background information my really cool realization would really only sound like disjointed ramblings.  So here’s the plan.  As I previously promised I will continue to share random stories from my time in Burkina along with my thoughts about those experiences.  They won’t necessarily always be in chronological order, or funny, or interesting.  But I like to think that they are all important as far as gelling together my larger takeaways from my time in Burkina.  Then again we do risk getting to the end of this whole creative process only to find that my final points still just sound like disjointed ramblings.  But isn’t the risk what makes it exciting? 

So without further ado, here is the first brush stroke that shall be the word based painting of my life.  Sounded kind of cool right?  This is an old essay that I wrote up last year per request of somebody in our Bureau.  I don’t think they ever did anything with this piece, but it was fun to write and quite possibly shall be fun to read.  See you next week.

“I am because WE are and, since we are, therefore I am.” (John S. Mbiti)

Success Story

Just plain old dirt.

Working in the yard has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.  Growing up out on an old horse pasture in Western Washington my typical Summer Sunday was spent wheelbarrowing around mass quantities of weeds, tending the vegetable gardens, trying to get the orchards to start producing, and any other landscaping activity that cropped up in an ecosystem that pushes living vegetation out faster than anyone cut it back.   So with this background it didn’t take much deliberating to decide to start a small home garden at village shortly after my affectation.  There was nobody around yet because of the rains, I had no work so to speak, and I’ve always found the raising of living things to be relaxing and an excellent and tangible time keeper.  I knew nothing of gardening in the Sahel and so I decided to go with the trial by error approach and just wing it, I did have time after all.  My first garden was poorly dug, rocky, and quickly demolished by my pet chicken.  All this in the relative secrecy of my courtyard.  Time for Garden number two: this time I planned to put up some light fencing around the boarder and so I talked to Christophe, my community homologue, and we left the next day to the Marché village to pick up materials. This served as an excellent opportunity for me to bond with my new community homologue and it also ensured that the entire village would now know what the Nassara (read “stranger”) was doing with his spare time.  I was the first volunteer in Kogho in a decade, I was a white foreigner from a different culture, and quite frankly I was a mystery to my community.  They don’t know what people from Western Culture do for fun, what motivates them, or what makes them tick.  By starting Garden round 2 I was offering them a puzzle piece to add to their sparse collection of Nassara puzzle pieces.  When you spend time in my village quietly listening to “Nassara” you hear more than just a word.  You hear a statement, desperately trying to make sense of a confusing situation.  You hear a question.  You hear the assumptions.  And you hear the gaps.  But you don’t hear malice.  Insisting not to be called Nassara creates just as many questions as it does answers.  You give them your real name, you insist that you are only called that name, and they are left still wondering what that name means.  When asking around village for the names of other members of the community you find that nobody has the name they chose. 

“What is his name?”

“Karensamba” [Teacher]

“And him?”

“Chef” “Sous-chef” “L’inspector” “Le Proviseur” “Monsieur le sous prefet”

They have the name they were given.  The names that recognize their role in a community rather than their identity as an individual.  In the community they are their given name and the names given to us by others can be a lot more telling than the names given to us by ourselves.  To change your self-given name requires merely a personal decision.  To change a community given name requires time plus willingness to learn from both you and the community in question.  It was in this vain that I progressed from Garden 2 to Garden 3.  I had to let the community take the time to learn who I was, and I had to take the time to first learn what the community thought I was, and then help them learn and listen to them teach.  If gardens must be rated by quantity of edible goods produced, Garden 2 was a complete failure.  Because there were zero of those things.  But if a garden is to be rated by number of conversations started, or by friendships created, then Garden 2 was a huge success.  School started around the same time as Garden 2 and with that came a steady increase in visits from students.  They would come by to greet me and then see my attempted garden. 

“What is that?”

The question just barely masking the question

“who are you?”

That’s my garden.  I’m trying for squash and spices.  Here’s what you can do with squash.  With basil.  With mint.  Here smell the basil.  Try the mint.  Could you grab that watering can?  Yes, water it just like that.  Why don’t you come back again on Friday?  I was thinking about starting some cucumbers and I could really use your help.

As time went on I slowly developed a small group of students who would come by two to three times a week, they would help with the garden chores, ask questions, and usually go home with some sort of problem to puzzle over, or a new sapling that they were responsible for keeping alive.  Some of these same students were in my 4eme SVT class which conveniently enough was a Geology course offering up many opportunities to relate the subject material to my garden, trees, agriculture, and their lives in general.  Believing that critical thinking skills in relation to the environment might be a use skill to leave my students with I also began using a new section on all of my tests.  It was always titled “Monsieur Kennedy, Le Geologue” and in these sections were situations in my lab, my field work, my fields, or any geology related location in which they would be given clues and they would either have to identify the problem, think of a solution, or label a new discover.  Over time I found that my name among the village school kids was no longer just Monsieur, the fallback name for a professor, I was now Monsieur le Geologue.  Some of the blanks were being filled in. 

That brings us to Garden 3 and another name.  Garden two had been dug up by my dog and the final result was as follows.  Dead mint plants: 1. Almost completely dead and unusable Basil plants: 1. Papaya tree barely clinging to life: 1. Squash plant with one withered disappointment on it: 1. And cabbage plants: -1, dog didn’t even give those a chance to sprout.  So it was back to the drawing board, uprooted and re-dug everything while my pride insisted that I explain to the students the beauty of the scientific method and that carefully evaluated failures are actually just as important as the evident successes and more important than unexplainable windfalls.  Garden 3 had carrots and cucumbers as well as some new homemade drip irrigation bottles that could be replicated on a village budget with easy to find village materials.  I told my kids that I had never tried this before, but this was our chance to experiment and see if they worked.  Around this time the small group of student gardeners started referring to my home garden as “le laboratoire” because a laboratory that only produces carefully documented failures gives a stronger impression of success than a garden that produces only carefully documented inedible failures.  New name.  Garden 3 was just as unsuccessful as Garden 2 if we follow the “edible products yielded” rhetoric because my dog once again laid in wait until the garden began showing signs of promise before sowing the seeds of destruction once more.  Yet this time the results that were yielded were much farther reaching than even I could have imagined, not knowing that results like this could be found within a seed.  The start of garden 3 brought the students and the school administration to me with a strong push for a school garden, having been told by my professional homologue who had attended our IST that this was something that a volunteer could bring to a community.  The motivation from the administration was encouraging, but what moved me to put this project into action was the fact that my student gardeners were itching to start their own laboratories and more than anything a match once struck needs a place to burn and so we began work on providing these students with a place to imagine and experiment.  After having prepared, submitted, and received my Grant funds for the garden project as well as a separate Moringa project,  I was on to Garden 4. 

Garden 4 was the realization of my entire garden adventure as well as the stepping stone into the second half of my service.  Garden 4 was started with the advice of a tidy little notebook filled with well-documented failures and the wariness of my dog, who had finally learned that the route to a happier life did not lay in the confines of that garden.  With the onset of the rains my garden burst into a productivity of cucumbers and beans and new names.  I was Chef Garte, Chef de l’eau et foret, Ouedraougo Ryende, Monsieur le Geologue, le cultivateur, a credible source of advice, a part of the community, a part of their system, but before all this, in village I was still Nassara.  I have been Nassara the entirety of my service and I will continue to be until the day that I leave this country because no matter how much of this culture I absorb I will still always be a stranger, but that is not a bad thing, it’s simply recognition of reality.  I’m also not the same Nassara that I was when I first arrived in Kogho.  Within the calls of “Nassara” that I get every day that I stroll through the village the gaps are now filled in with the answers I’ve given and the questions are answered by everything that my village permits me to be.  I think that it is important to remember when entering into this style of service in this part of the world that we leave behind a lot more than toilets and cheese.  We also leave behind a culture that has been informing us how to be since the day we were born.  We leave behind the Descartian Western ideal of “I think, therefore I am” and step into a world where we must subject to the dictum of “you think, therefore I am”.

Looking back on my first year it has been amazing to see what can come of plain ol dirt and as these two fenced enclosures are finished and I begin to take steps to wrap up the grants it will be exciting to see what can continue to grow from whatever it was that I planted in the first home garden.  But what has been more exciting than any of the work that I have been doing has been the learning experience of trying to understand how to be a piece of something bigger than yourself rather than an isolated individual moving around in a big vast space vainly trying to save the world.

So here’s a shot of Garden 4, I find that while I still consider Gardens 1-3 to be intellectual and emotional successes a garden full of your “typical success” (read “edible growing things”) to make a much better photo than one filled with carefully documented failures.  As important as those are.

Back in America?

Well I’m back.  Not how I had planned. Not when I planned.  But after spending two years abroad in Burkina I had already learned that we don’t control nearly as much of our lives as we like to think we do.  Control is a luxury.  And in America we are able to afford more of it than other parts of the World, but less of it is as real as we would like to belief.  So let’s go after some concrete examples before I lose you down the rabbit hole. 

In the Peace Corps you leave your friends and family behind and set off into the developing world with your naive ideas of travel, saving the world, and life and dive right in.  You learn a new language or two.  You try to eat new foods.  You get really sick.  You learn that a very small percentage of the world’s population uses toilet paper. And you learn that you in fact don’t know anything.  It’s overwhelming and you feel yourself spinning out of control.  Or at least I did, during my first three months of service in my village.  It was one of those afternoons when I hadn’t interacted with a single person in 3 days because everyone was living out on the fields and the remaining population were too scared to come talk to me.  I don’t know what we would have talked about anyways; I didn’t really speak the language.  And on these afternoons I often brought up the question “Ryan, what the hell did you do?”.  I felt lost and so I went about trying to nail down my life.  Create control.  I developed a daily routine so that all (almost all) my time was spent productively, I aggressively studied French, I dug a garden, I outfitted my home, I maintained my sanity, and by month three I was feeling pretty good about myself.  I had done it, I had exerted myself on my environment and I had won, I had controlled what had happened to me and I would continue to control what happened to me and in that control I felt safe.  Well my first year of service rolled along and every day I continued to pour more of myself into this service, this village, this work, this life.  As each day went by less of me was left in America and more of me started filling the space around me in my village and probably would have continued as such if I hadn’t been given a painful reminder of how little we control in life.

It’s September 2015, a little after I hit my one-year in village mark and everything fell to pieces.  I am going to make the assumption that all you readers closely followed the political events that have unfolded in Burkina over the last two years so I won’t go into details, but this was the Military coup.  I had already weathered a public uprising that had ousted a 27 year dictator so I expected more of the same, but then all of the sudden we were getting calls to pack our house up, and before you knew it we were getting calls to get out and that we were consolidating.  Well that was hard.  Your whole life has to go into boxes in the space of 24 hours and you don’t even have boxes so you can imagine the difficulties.  What about all that control that I had?  All my work? My routines? All of my life that I have poured into this place?  Well that didn’t matter because that’s not how life works.  I was about to lose everything and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.  Not because I did anything wrong, not because I was particularly unlucky, but because that’s just how life works.  It’s this huge uncaring unknowing colossus and we control it about as much as we control…something equally uncontrollable. 

Well that was a tough two weeks, every day not knowing if you stay or if you go.  Calling your friends in village to see how everyone is doing.  Getting good news followed by bad news followed by good news again until finally it was over and we were going home. To village that is.  Well unfortunately that wasn’t the end of my tumult.  A few months after that due to security concerns our travel zones in country were restricted and travel to the capital was reduced and monitored.  Control shrinking.  Or never there to begin with.  And then the terrorist attacks in January shook everything to its core.  Those are the kind of events in life that do nothing but remind everyone that life can’t be controlled. But I guess that’s the point of terrorism?  Well it worked.  Our lives in country were irrevocably changed after that.  The security restrictions, the travel restrictions, the way people looked at us after, and the loss of innocence.  Even a trip to the Market started feeling risky and there were police and metal detectors everywhere. There wasn’t time to think “why me?” or that this was incalculably unlucky that this had to happen during my service, or if only I had served somewhere else, or any of those classic thoughts that come up whenever something terrible happens.  Because at the end of the day, we have no control over it and we’re better off making due with what we do have rather than lamenting that which we don’t. 

So here I am, right about the 2 year mark in my service sitting in America, not Burkina.  But I long ago lost my sense of control.  And that’s ok.  I was sent home early due to some medical complications.  Nothing serious but based on standard Peace Corps operating procedures I couldn’t stay in country.  Was this one of the hardest turnarounds in my life?  Well yes.  I was in wrap up mode.  I had just finished an awesome training on animal husbandry with two members of my village, the garden was productive and full of life and it was because of my professors and not myself, our Moringa garden was filling up with trees, and my students had picked up on all the zany ways I teach leading to a great rapport.  My village was so proud of the progress they had made and I was ready to simply “be”. Just live out my last few months in village, die a little from the heat, plant my fields, and take time to say good bye to this little village that I had spent the last two years of my life filling with myself.  And then it was gone.  And no matter which way I try to look at this one in my head it hurts.  This is not how I planned it; this is not how it was supposed to happen.  But I have taken my time to grieve, it was hard, but I can’t fix my situation by looking for a reason why, Burkina taught me that.  I can just accept that it happened and then I have to let go, because that’s life.  And now I take the next step in my life knowing that loss like this is inevitable and scarily enough it happens to somebody every single day.

So we have no control.  What does this mean?  Well I don’t have an answer for you, and if that was what you were reading for then stop now. I command you.  Or don’t.  What it means to me is that our lives and our decisions are a product of so much more than just us.   Any decision that we make has been informed by the culture groups that we occupy and even when we have an original thought or idea there were a lot of moving pieces that contributed to our arrival at this decision.  We operate within an unstable system and there are multi-trillion dollar industries that exist for the sole purpose of making us think what we think and no matter how hard we work in life to create our legacy, to amass things, to control, that can all disappear in one single second.  And that takes different forms for different people.  A poor medical diagnosis, a surprise medical bill, an unplanned pregnancy, a terrorist attack, a drone strike, a failed class, the list goes on and occupies a huge spectrum from tiny to life changing, but that should just impress upon us the vastness of the world and what our place in it looks like this.  So what do we do in the face of the terrifying possibility that any of us could lose everything at any moment? I don’t know.  But I do know that I should stop using the collective “we” because that’s annoying.  Well what do I do?  Let go.  I look back at my service and while I lost a lot of myself when my service was ended before I was ready I find it more telling to look at what wasn’t lost.  While there I made some of the closest friends I have ever had in life.  And whether I had stayed until July or left when I did their lives will be different for having known me and my life will be different for having known them.  While my presence in Burkina individually probably didn’t do much to change the overall trajectory of their country’s development I can at least take pride in knowing that I participated in a group that worked with Burkina to make a better future for Burkina and America both.  And having seen how much a group truly affects the individuals within it I can be thankful for all of the people and groups that have surrounded me my entire life that have helped develop me into the person that I am today.

I don’t really see this as the end of my service.  More the next step.  The things we learn as volunteers don’t have to stop just because we aren’t abroad anymore.  In fact just the opposite.  When we got to Burkina we were a collection of naive enthusiastic Americans who had to spend our whole first year learning how to apply what we knew into a Burkinabé cultural context and now it’s time to try to take what we learned in Burkina and try to apply it to an American Cultural context.  We learned how to cultivate a passion, what kind of day to day work it takes to work towards a long term goal, how to share, how teach by example, how to listen, how to appreciate those around us and how to let a village know you care about them without ever saying a word.  We learned a new way of life, we learned new languages, we learned new eating habits, and we learned a lot of things about ourselves that can only be learned when all the extra stuff in life has been stripped away.  And these are all things that contribute to an amazing Peace Corps service, but are also things that volunteers should work to bring back to the lives in America.  We just have to spend some time translating what we learned into an American context.

Having said all of this I can safely say that I haven’t finished learning from my service.  Partly because of how abruptly I had to leave.  But also I believe that some lessons can’t be learned until we have leave and have the chance to look at them in a different light. My friends in village probably taught me more than I ever managed to teach them, but that’s the nature of the service.  I will probably carry my time in Burkina for the rest of my life and that’s something pretty special.  In that vain I will actually take this opportunity to let you, my dedicated readers, know that I will actually be keeping up with my blog as I reacclimatize to life in America.  And yes I know there are probably only 5 people who read this thing regularly.  But as I spend more time with my friends and family in America I find myself responding to questions that I never thought to ask and remembering stories that I had forgotten meant a lot to me.  Some of them hilarious, some of them thought provoking, and some of them pretty stupid.  But being back has given me the space to take a second look at some of those memories and they look a lot different when you’re this far from the dust and the heat.  So I invite you all to stick around while I try to piece my stories and memories into coherent and meaningful narrative that might capture better my time in the Sahel.  Well here’s to the rest of my life and thanks for sticking around during my two years of service in Burkina Faso.

So once PC has decided to medically evacuate you they don't really leave you with much time to get process, it's just go go go.  So I had one full day to essentially close out two years of my life.  Address my projects, leave instructions, pack my home, pass pets on to new owners, and try to say good bye to an entire village.  If it sounds impossible that's because it was.  But here is my disheveled self on my last morning in village as two of my students (top photo yellow shirts left to right) Aimé and Etienne came to see my off and my best friend Christoph rode with me to the bus station (stretch of road 200m from my house..."bus station" makes it sound so official)

A "success" story from my Garden

Every four months during a Peace Corps service we have to fill out a Volunteer Reporting Form and submit that to our Bureau which then relays that on to Washington where fancy people use fancy computers to look at our fancy statistics in a fancy way and justify Peace Corps annual budget based on these numbers which confirm that volunteers around the world are making a difference.  Many peoples impression of the Peace Corps when first brought up is just a bunch of volunteers living out in the poor wilderness reading books, playing with kids, and doing nothing.  This is not at all what we do.  We in fact live out in the poor wilderness, read books, play with kids, and then try and turn those activities into meaningful statistics every four months.  See.  Big difference.  But I kid, volunteers around the world do some pretty cool work and during our time here its important to try to get that all down on paper so that on a larger scale we can step back and try to see what has worked, what hasn't worked, and what should be changed.  Such is the nature of the world and its why I spend one weekend a month sitting at a computer debating on whether or not the women who came to help me in a Moringa Garden should count as merely participants or realized contributors and if maybe I could wangle that activity as an IGO or simply leave that indicator blank.  Didn't know that happened, did ya?

Well along with the numbers our higher ups also like us to give a context for life in village.  We talk about our integration, our daily activities, and at the end of that section they ask us to write a "success story".  Now this isn't a winning the Superbowl kind of success or finally banging out that perfect game on Wii bowling kind of success.  This is anything you want it to be.  Earlier in my service I'm pretty sure one of my success stories was that I found out where the good rice tauntie was at lunch times.  Another reporting period I think my success was that one of the students who I hangout with a lot bought us some Gateau (salty fry-bread) to share together instead of the typical other way around.  Well this time around I decided to write about a series of failures that have occupied my last few months in site and how that often times successes don't actually have to be successful, but it is still nice when they end up that way.

Just a primer, since this was written for my superiors I dulled down my witty insights and delightfully hilarious commentary of which you have all become so fond, but alas, I am not in fact an adult so some of them will still pop up from time to time.  I just wanted you to be forewarned of the reduction in volume prior to diving into the meaty central narrative of my previous 4 months of life.  Enjoy.

*Exits stage*

Early on in my peace corps service I identified malnutrition as a problem in my village.  People weren't necessarily hungry, their diets were just poorly varied and the only source of variety came from the artificial lake/garden combo in a neighboring village 35 km away.  They only problem here was that if and when the vegetables from this lake made it to Kogho they were now too expensive for the majority of the population to afford and the remaining population who could afford them didn't see the value in vegetables and therefore did not often buy them.  During my groups in-service training me and my professional counterpart, Paulin Bamago, discussed this problem and then brainstormed a project framework to address this problem.  We wanted to build a garden for the local high school where the students could work the garden, sell and eat the produces, increase their nutrition, and provide much needed goods to a struggling community.  We were very excited and we brought this idea back to the community where it was met with middling enthusiasm.  We talked about the benefits and laid out how we would go about implementing this project, but a large portion of the community really felt that in order to garden you had to have a large artificial lake, otherwise it would be impossible.  Having been met with this response I began to think that maybe this wasn't the best project for Kogho and I began pursuing other projects that the community had proposed to me and I could clearly see that they were highly motivated to pursue.  Well a few months passed and my school's administration asked me about the progress on the garden project and I confessed that I had started molding the project into something focusing more on Moringa because it was something the community really wanted to do.  Upon hearing this my school's headmaster told me that he had been really excited about the garden when he had heard about it and really hoped there was a way to bring the project back.  A week later one of my fellow science teachers, M. Ouedraogo, told me he would love to have a garden available to use in examples in his classes because he often struggles to find concrete examples for the students to work with during plant biology.  Following this my homologue, Paulin, once again told me he was excited to see how the garden would turn out and that our school's quartermaster had pledged 5.000cfa a month of the school's budget towards managing the school's garden and dealing with any small costs that came up.  At this point I began to believe that maybe this would work, and having seen the encouraging work from my small group of student gardeners of whom I've written about in previous stories I decided that maybe I was being too cautious and that we should move ahead on this garden plan.

Well cut ahead to October, start of the school year.  It was interesting navigating the start of a school year this time around because I had a better idea of what to expect, the students already knew me and how I like to approach teaching, and I actually spoke French this time through.  Our school received an influx of science teachers this year so I saw my hours cut to three a week, but as a group we created an extra gardening class which would occupy one hour a week per class so my teaching hours would still occupy about ten hours a week so I would still be relatively busy.  How little I knew.  It seems with the start of every school year everything has to start over from scratch.  We were getting a new quartermaster, professors are slow to return from their homes in the cities, the school lunch program doesn't start for months, student tuition can't come in until the harvest is over, on top of this our mason was behind schedule on the compost pits, I hadn't included enough gardening tools in the grant, and I was coming in late from a tumultuous two weeks at "camp coup" where elation and despair seemed to manifest themselves simultaneously in every day.  I noted the lack of tools in my list of obstacles, but looking back it ended up being a very important element to the development of this garden.  The missing tools along with 5.000cfa pledge from the administration changed completely how this new garden was viewed by the students who would work their.  Instead of returning from their vacation to see a beautifully constructed garden with everything provided waiting for them by "America" or by me as many students thought that I had simply paid for the fencing myself, they returned to see a new garden as well as a lot of upcoming tasks.  The missing tools slowed everything down and gave the students time to process this garden as well as start asking questions which gave me the platform to discuss the nature of Peace Corps projects, grants, and outside sponsors.  The missing tools also provided the community the opportunity to rise to the occasion.  The Mayor's office provided all of the tools necessary for the students showing the students the community's investment in their garden and then with my budget from the school I was able to purchase small necessities such as our planting seeds as well and an extra watering can.  I can't quite quantity how important this was but to a student from a small village "your administration paid for this" means so much more than "a larger aid association provided the funds for these".  In a country that has had foreign aid worked into its DNA for decades hearing that something came from "outside Burkina" immediately gets lumped into a category of "white people gave you this" but hearing that their own administration used some of their limited resources to buy something gives them the chance to really take pride and ownership of something.  But I digress, my real success doesn't come into play until much later.  In an effort to shorten what could be a very lengthy story I will summarize by noting that the next three months were some of the hardest of my service and that while I did my best to teach and share my passion for growing things with these students they ended up teaching me more than I think I was able to teach them.  Despite my programmed ten hours a week of garden classes I probably spent closer to 30 hours a week working in that garden with those kids.  I found out how unbelievably long it can take to dig out 225 square meters of hardened earth even with a large (slightly ADHD) task force.  I discovered that leading groups of people can be the most frustrating experience while being filled with some of the most fulfilling moments.  I found an important manifestation of the differences between students in an interdependent culture versus an independent culture.  And I found out that sometimes in order to succeed life has to knock you down pretty hard, just to see if you can get back up.  My moment of getting knocked down came in second week working with the kids.  Entering the year I was working towards my vision of a garden.  In this vision my garden was managed by 100 Ryans who all loved nothing better than spending their early mornings watering plants and carefully nurturing each plant so that it grew into the best plant it could be.  Each day I worked with the kids this vision started feeling more and more unattainable which worried me since I had already decided that without a realization of this vision I couldn’t consider this project a success and all of this came to a head one afternoon when I was reduced to shouting at my students as they wrestled each other for the sign out sheet, each one wanting to be the first out of the garden class so that they could get to a local harvest festival that I didn’t know about.  I stormed out of the class and smoldered for two days.  During this time I spent a lot of the time just talking with one of the 3eme students, Etienne, who is also one of my closest friends in village.  We didn’t really talk about anything in particular.  Mostly just stuff about school, cities that he’s heard of, and delicious meals that we have eaten during our lives.  But during this time I was able to step back and readjust how I saw the garden.  No this garden wasn’t going to solve the nutrition problem in Kogho.  It might not even produce enough vegetables to feed the students who subscribe to the school lunch program.  No this garden wasn’t going to turn 500 students who had never gardened before into avid gardeners.  Maybe it would at least get 10.  And no this garden wasn’t going to somehow make so much money that all of the classes would be able to afford new notebooks and pens.  But it could still do something.  In the states all of the extra curricular activities are so commonplace that we forget that not everywhere in the world has them, and we often forget what their role really is.  High school football doesn’t exist in the states to train NFL players, it exists to give high school students a structured physical activity beyond the curriculum.  High school chess teams don’t exist because we are still looking for the next Bobby Fischer.  They exist to give students a chance to challenge their minds outside the required learning materials.  And this garden could be that too, it could exist so that this one small school would be able to provide its students with some activity beyond the classroom that pushes them to grow and learn in ways not necessarily found in the school.

With this mindset in mind we move into the closing chapter of this story.  Well we got the garden dug.  We managed to get some compost mixed.  We managed to get a reasonable amount of planting sacks to sprout, mostly cucumber and tomatoes, but it’s something.  We managed to get all of those plants into our freshly dug garden beds.  And little by little we managed to get the staff and students to take ownership of this garden.  I started seeing students watering without being told to do so once they saw the plants had started producing fruits.  I started seeing professors taking their students on walks through the garden during class time to point out aspects of their lessons.  And finally I had one student, Sibila Kargougou, nervously approach me after class to help me realize the true potential of this garden.  He told me that he lives near a lake 18 km away from the school and that for 2.000cfa we could buy enough onion bulbs to fill four whole garden beds, and it hit me.  We were a small garden watered by pumps and worked by students who have to attend classes and had never gardened in their life rather than local gardeners who did this as a job.  We shouldn’t be trying to embark on a seed to product enterprise, it just wasn’t feasible, we needed to function more as a value adding intermediary.  And this was an extremely modest cost, one the school could certainly afford to conduct in coming years.  I told the student that would be amazing and asked if I commissioned him when could we expect to get the onions.  He told me four days, which would put the arrival date at two days after I had left for a Soy training.  My initial instinct was to tell him that we would have to wait until after I got back so that I could be there to supervise.  Then I thought, “this garden is going to have to get along without me, why not now” so I gave him the money, let my homologue know that some onions should be arriving soon and I had designated a group of students as my Geba Naba Ramba (Onion chiefs), then set off to Leo to learn how to transform Soy.  Well I got back to find out that the garden had been regularly watered by my students, the new created geba naba ramba had successfully planted the onions with some surprise assistance from my professional homologue who is usually worried about getting his pants dirty, and that our administration was thrilled with the relative ease in which we were able to acquire onions that could be used for the school lunch program.  And that does it.  Sorry for how long this story was, but if you wanted to hear about something that dominated this reporting period for me as far as stress, time, failure, and success goes this was it.  It was a long and trying chapter in my service and it is by no means over.  But as I enter the final phase of my service and struggle with the thought of leaving a community that has grown to occupy such an enormous part of my life, its moments like this that help me visualize a Kogho without me.

Took a solid two-ish months of digging in two hour increments to get all of the garden beds dug.  Although I regularly assured my students that this will be the only year they have to work this hard.