Wordless Wednesday

[Photo by Miriah Hodgins]

Tô

A strange thought crept into my mind the other day: I am kind of excited to eat tô again.

It might be surprising, that I don’t sound more excited about this (although if you find it surprising I’d suggest you haven’t eaten tô before). The fact is I have a love/hate relationship with tô. I enjoy it but I also think it’s gross...it's just how it goes perhaps.

Tô (pronounced ‘toe’) is the main dish of Burkina Faso. It’s made from either corn flour or millet flour which is mixed with water and cooked over a fire until it forms a hard paste.

This process results in a texture that is very different from anything we eat in Canada. And, it’s the texture that is the biggest challenge for me.

Just an aside: one girl I know saw people patching a broken bicycle tire with a glob of tô- it’s got that kind of sticky, hard texture.

The tô itself is just the “paste” but it is generally served with a sauce. [I’ve also seen it eaten without sauce, or mixed with water and consumed as a drink...But with sauce is by far the most common way to eat tô and it’s where variety comes into the diet.]

The two most common types of sauces are gumbo and leaf sauces.

Gumbo sauce (pictured above) is made from dried fish, sliced veggies (tomatoes or onion), okra (which adds a stringy textures) and an assortment of spices.

The leaf sauces are my favourite: Baobab (the national tree of Burkina) or oseille (the sorrel plant) make delicious sauces. Sometimes the leaves are mushed up and cooked together, other times they are left whole and boiled with onions and spices.

As far as I can understand the average family eats tô nearly every meal (for lots of families leftover tô from the previous nights dinner is served as breakfast).

The older children at the orphanage eat tô two meals a day, and bouille (a porridge, most comparable to cream of wheat) for breakfast.

So am I excited to eat this? Maybe less so for the tô than for what tô represents: a gathering. Mealtimes in Burkina are best defined by the fact that they are a social gathering.

If you are walking past someone that is eating, their automatic response is "t'es invité" (you're invited) meaning you're welcome to join in the meal. Most times the courteous response is simply 'bon appetit' but, this demonstrates, the relational aspect of the Burkinabé even down to meals. It is this that draws me to be excited for tô.

the finish

I’m feeling a little like these guys probably were: I can see the finish line and I'm anxious to get there. Only I’m not in a donkey race...I’m just anticipating my last final of the semester.

Once I cross that finish line I can breathe a sigh of relief (the proverbial victory lap) and focus on getting ready to leave.

[Photos by Miriah Hodgins]

Wordless Wednesday

Thirteen

I’ve been following a lot of news reports about the volcanic ash over Europe. [Selfishly] I’ve been praying this whole problem clears up as soon as possible [so when my turn to fly comes around there won’t be problems].

I am thirteen days from departure. It is hard to believe two weeks from now I will be stepping onto the tarmac in the land that I love. Excitement and stress (thoughts of everything I need to do before I can leave) compete for my mental energy. It's not too fair of a fight though, as excitement seems to win a lot.

image from here

Africa

When you’ve acquired a taste for dust,
The scent of our first rain,
You’re hooked for life on Africa
And you’ll not be right again
Till you can watch the setting moon
And hear the jackals bark
And know that they’re around you,
Waiting in the dark.

When you long to see the Elephants,
Or to hear the coucal’s song,
When the moonrise sets your blood on fire,
You’ve been away too long.
It’s time to cut the traces loose
And let you’re heart go free
Beyond that far horizon,
Where your spirit yearns to be.

~Emily DIbb

Evance (and The Star)

Meet Evance!

He has a sense of humor that is all his own, and his smile and laugh do nothing but put a smile on my face. He is, simply put, hilarious.

When I think of Evance I think of the music he loves. Even now, the song ‘Mighty To Save’ has a special place in my heart because it reminds me of Evance and the night us volunteers and all the children sang and danced together under the stars. But, when I think of the music Evance loves I think of him at church and I am reminded of how he takes of care of the little ones there. A gentle pat on the head as he walks past them, or quiet conversations are simple ways Evance shows Therese and Ferdinand he is their loving older brother.

One day last spring I was sitting with a bunch of the boys teaching them tongue twisters. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ we were endeavouring to say but, inevitably we would end up laughing before the phrase was finished. At one point I asked if there are any mooré tongue twisters. The boys said they’d have to think about it and we continued on to learn “She picks sea shells by the sea shore”. Later that evening, or maybe even the next day, Evance came to find me. He had a huge grin on his face and a slip of paper in his hand on which he’d carefully written down a mooré tongue twister. We practiced it together and he cheered me on until I was pronouncing it “well”. It was a small gesture but, a kind gesture that I appreciate immensely. It is also a wonderful example of Evance's tender heart.

Evance has an amazing love for people and a desire for knowledge. Sometimes after lunch Evance and I would sit in the shade and talk away sieste. I remember more than a few conversations about what westerners don’t understand about Africa and about the differences in our cultural values. Evance always approached these conversations as though he were an old friend, explaining to me something he’d learned over the years and simply wanted to share so I’d have something to mull over. He'd then ask me for my thoughts on the subject and we'd talk through how I saw it, maybe why us westerners approached it that way. We’d often sort through questions about life, the past and the future. These conversations would leave me feeling pensive- with thoughts of Evance’s dreams weighing heavily on my heart.

I think though, it would be improper to introduce you to Evance without also introducing you to The Star.

The Star is Evance’s bike. Now, all the children at the orphanage have a bike but, The Star is the only one I know that has a name. And if you are wondering, I haven't translated the name for you, Evance uses the english term for his bike (or that's all I ever heard used). Evance's english is, in fact, very good.

Save for a few very rare exceptions Evance was the only person to ride the bike and I’d often see him in the courtyard replacing the tires and spokes, or caring for the paint job.

Evance used to tell me “The Star is the most unique bike in all of Yako, maybe all of Burkina!”. It is a pretty unique bike so I didn’t doubt him too much but, it wasn’t until I kidnapped his bike for a day of “adventure” that I discovered just how unique it was. (The day of adventure was when Liz and I took pictures of it all over town. We then we posted them on facebook for him to find and he thought the whole thing was hilarious).

I asked a man to pretend to put the star on his bush taxi so I could take a picture of it, and the man said to me “This is the most unique bike in all of Yako, maybe even all of Burkina!” I almost burst out laughing. Apparently, all of Yako recognizes the uniqueness of The Star.

Evance sent me a message last fall telling me The Star was sick (meaning it was broken). Fortunately, I received word recently that The Star has been healed.

(Re)defining

A few months ago a friend asked me what I would do differently when I go back to Burkina this time around. At the time (I’m sorry to admit) I acted as though I hadn’t been thinking about it much and so it was a hard question to answer. In reality it was hard to answer because I’d been thinking about it a lot.

When I begin to process and decide on things I will change a small switch goes off in my head and somewhere a play button in my memory is pushed: still snapshots, slow motion movies and snippets of conversation come together to form a well rehearsed segment that rewinds and plays forward until I press stop.

This is the amalgamation of painful memories I have brought with me from Burkina. It usually starts with an image of the face of a child I wish I showed more love. Somewhere in the middle is a slow-motion, film-style memory of a man I met and had an opportunity to bless but, I was so wrapped up in myself in that moment that I missed the opportunity. Nearer to the end of the segment there is the soundtrack of a conversation in which I had an opportunity to use my words to undo hurt, and chose instead to stay quiet.

This segment of memories represents the regret I brought home from Burkina. For a long while, although I couldn’t verbalize it, I thought admitting I hold onto regret was somehow admitting failure. Perhaps, I thought, regret was demonstrative that I had not achieved something I was supposed to in Burkina. After a while though, I began to recognize the fallacy of this assumption. The fact that I was allowing myself to decide I wish I’d acted differently was proof that I had taken something away from the situation- as painful as it might be. I think failure would be if I came away having learned nothing.

There are moments, although fewer now, in which I still slip into guilt over these memories. Mostly though, I don’t allow myself to dwell on this regret, but I do allow it to take a productive form (rather than the unproductive component of guilt) by allowing it to help me decide what I want to do differently.

I want to put into action the lessons that I’ve learned from these painful memories: lessons that are hard to explain because they are so bound-up and tied to my heart.

This time around there are things I will endeavor to focus on that I didn’t so much last time, and things I will endeavor to not focus on that I focused on too much last time. There are ways in which I hope my heart has been changed (and will continue to change) so I can love more and give more. All of this towards the goal of living more selflessly; more like Jesus.

I struggled with a way to sum this all up because it seems like a heavy subject. Maybe then, I should tell you how excited I am by this. Although it’s not an opportunity to redo things, it is an opportunity to put into action the things I learned where I learned them. While I don’t believe the lessons I learned are restricted to Burkina there is something special about being able to return with these thoughts on my heart and mind.

Wordless Wednesday: Water

The Gap

I get a lot of questions about how poor Burkina is. There are a lot of ways to address this question but, for today here are some statistics to mull over.

The Human Development Index, which essentially ranks countries based on quality of life, currently ranks Canada 4th in the world and Burkina Faso 177th. (There are 182 countries represented in the report).

So what does that mean...?

• 20% of children in Burkina don’t live to see their fifth birthday. The probability of a child passing away before their fifth birthday in Canada is 0.6%.
• 1 in 10 Burkinabé women die in childbirth.
• In Burkina the probability (at birth) of not surviving to age 40 is 26.9% while in Canada the probability of not surviving to age 60 is 7.3%.
• A Burkinabé’s healthy life expectancy at birth is 43 years while a Canadian’s is 75 years.
• The adult illiteracy rate (inability to read or write) is 71.3% in Burkina Faso. 14.6% of Canadians lack functional literacy skills (reading and writing skills that are adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life).
• 23% of the Burkinabé population is not using an improved water source.
• 81.2% of Burkina’s population lives on less than 2$ a day and 56.5% live on less than 1.25$ a day.

Phew! That’s a lot of numbers.

I certainly won't remember all of these statistics but, I don't think that's the point for me. In some ways the point of all these numbers is to to be able to recognize the gap between the rich and the poor. But, I also feel as though it is to begin to recognize that, for the poor, the gap between life and death is narrow.

[The above information is pulled from the 2009 Human Development Report published by the United Nations as well as the WHO country profiles for Canada and Burkina Faso]

A Likeable Excerpt

“But I am an African,” Derek said.

“If you are an African,” Yoyo said, “tell me the capital city of Burkina Faso.”

“I don’t know, but-”

“It’s Ouagadougou,” Yoyo said, “and if you were African, you would know it.”

from Lawrence Hill’s novel Any Known Blood.

This...

• is likeable because it mentions Burkina Faso- which doesn't happen often!
• is funny because usually when Burkina is mentioned it's as a trivia question.
• makes me smile because finding Burkina Faso represented in literature, radio shows and movies has become a sort of game in which I keep tally and a wonderful assortment of family, friends and the odd random acquaintance provide me with items to score. [Keep it coming- I love it!]

For reference sake finding Burkina Faso mentioned in a mainstream novel gets mad points. Props!

Les Ailes de Refuge

I always love to know what the places people write about actually look like. So, although I don't have amazing photos of everything, I thought to put up some pictures so you can have an idea what my Yako courtyard looks like. Welcome to Les Ailes de Refuge or Sheltering Wings (SW).

This is the road just outside the courtyard walls. The orphanage is everything you can see to left of the road!

(Also, I took this just after a big rainfall- normally there wouldn't be puddles on the ground.)

Looking across the courtyard from just inside the gate: On the far left is a hangar that is being used a classroom. Then the large concrete building on the left is the tech centre. SW employs three women to weave (place-matts & soap bags), and another woman to make soap.

To the right of that is a bit of the school. It's a primary school and is open to orphanage children, sponsorship children and orphans from the surrounding community.

Another look across the courtyard. This shows the school again and the playing field. The playing field is always a flurry of activity with school gym classes or weekend soccer matches.

The small hangar (near where the children are playing) is where the women cook lunches for the school children. The school doesn't take sieste (called journée continue) and instead the children stay at school for a lunch provided by SW.

I never actually took a picture of the house but, here is a picture of me standing in front of it. Ruth is a most gracious host and I'm very fortunate to call this my Yako home.

This is taken standing at the front door of the house looking across the courtyard in another direction.

You can see the gate to the courtyard (blue).

The building is the children's dorm. There's a room for the girls, an office and two boys rooms on one side. On the other side of the dorm is a toddler room, another boys room and two baby rooms. SW houses 28 school aged children and 20 or so babies (I'll be able to give you an accurate baby count when I'm there.)

This is the baby/toddler play area!

I spent a lot of time here last year (and hope to do the same this coming summer).

It's situated on the baby side of the dorms (you can see just a little corner of the dorm building). It's perfect for providing shade while still allowing us to care for the babies in the fresh air.

This is where the cooking happens!

Each day breakfast, lunch and dinner are prepared for the children here.

As you can see it's not too far from the baby play area (although normally potty training happened further away from the kitchen).

This is the clinic!

SW has two amazing nurses that work hard to keep the children healthy! Currently all the orphanage children, school children and sponsorship children have access to clinic services.

Since the clinic opened SW saw a massive reduction in the number of children needing care at the hospital. This is an amazing testimonial and encouragement to the work SW is doing!

I felt like it's important to note the water tank!

SW is blessed with an abundant water source from a wonderful, clean well. All the water is pumped into the tank and carried across the courtyard in pipes to taps at the school, tech centre, kitchens, clinic, WCs (water closets or toilets) and the house.

There's a glimpse of the Ailes de Refuge courtyard!

It's tour time!

Welcome to Yako!

Time to show you around a bit.

We're just entering Yako on one of the two paved roads in town. The one we're on runs from Ouagdougou (the capital of Burkina) to Ouaihgouya (a large city northish of Yako).

Stop off and check out the Grande Mosquée. There's some 40 odd mosques in Yako but this is the central mosque.

This is where we buy vegetables.

The women are here every day selling vegetables, peanut butter, herbs and spices.

Every three days is market day. At market you can buy vegetables but you can also find just about anything: rope, fabric, sandals, matts, stools, soap, goats...

Continuing along the road from where we buy vegetables (facing the opposite direction of the first photo). The big building on the left in this one was just barely visible on the right in the first photo. This building was being constructed for commercial use but, construction has stopped and it's not being used.

Stepping off the “main road” now we’re getting closer to the orphanage. To the left is a walled in sports field. (Lots of soccer games there!)

Also note the black plastic bags. These are nicknamed 'the Burkina flower' because of their prevalence.

This is the road leading right up to the orphanage. If you look closely you can see a green gate between the trees. That's the gate the school children use to come into our courtyard.

(Pictures of the orphanage to come...).

Note the 'Burkina Bird' (black plastic bags) in the trees.

If you were to leave the orphanage and head into town, on a different route than you came, you'd see this. I loved walking this way because I thought the tree off in the distance was so beautiful.

Thanks for touring Yako with me!

five to one

The other day I caught myself uttering five words I never thought I would let slip past my lips again: “I have nothing to wear.” As I tossed another outfit on the floor I said to myself “Really Brittany? Do you truly have nothing to wear?”. (I know I was talking to myself but, stick with me- hopefully the crazy ends here).

Of course I had lots to wear; there was just nothing I wanted to wear.

Standing in front of my closet door, feeling guilty for complaining about my wardrobe I was reminded of Issouf. Issouf is a small boy of ten years old. He, his mom and surviving siblings (7 of his 10 full blood siblings have passed away) live in a 10x10foot home, not far from the orphanage.

I remember the meeting with Issouf’s family clearly: the boy that had climbed on the moto with us to help us find Issouf, the broken bike leaning against the wall of his house, the children playing on the street in front of us as we talked, our awkward seating arrangements because Issouf’s family simply didn’t own stools or benches...

But, none of that is what I remember most about our visit with Issouf. What I remember is two things: Issouf’s clothes and his eyes.

When I met Issouf he was wearing the only clothing he owned: a simple button up shirt, and a pair of shorts. The shirt, missing more buttons than it had holding it together, gaped in the front revealing his chest and rounded stomach.

I’m so unable to describe his eyes to you without searching for clichés... When our eyes met I was struck by a realization that this boy knew sadness.

I have been thinking over my definition of poverty recently. Sometimes though, I let go of concepts and terminology and simply allow images and memories to flood my thought processes. When I do this sometimes I am reminded of Issouf. Reminded yes, that factors like not having proper clothing play a significant and important role in determining poverty. But, if I really allow myself to give into the memories I find myself sitting in front of a small house, on a quiet street, on a hot day, looking into the eyes of a small scared boy.

And, I am reminded of the individuality of poverty.

Each person affected by poverty has his own story. I can define his situation and label his needs, I can formulate statistics and all of this is good. But, none of that is worthwhile if I can’t also see him as one. One man, one child, one woman with a story that is solely their own.

Bare Feet

[above: at an OCC distribution]

I’m participating in a day without shoes today.

My going without shoes doesn’t change the fact that thousands of people, without money to purchase shoes, are going without shoes today by no choice of their own. However, the hope is that the collective effort of thousands of North Americans going shoeless for a day will help raise awareness for the impact simple things like shoes can have on a someone’s life.

Last year one day as I was walking down the street near the Grand Mosque, in Yako, my flip-flop broke. The piece that broke was that plastic band that goes between your toes (although you can follow along with the story without that piece of information...). They were getting really worn (the heel nearly had a hole in them) so I wasn’t too surprised to have to bid them farewell.

I knew there was a little shop at the other end of the road that sold flip-flops so I tried to keep walking on the broken sandal for a moment and then, when it wasn't working, decided just to walk barefoot. I laughed about it and kept an eye out for where I was putting my foot but, there was a small part of me that was uncomfortable: the fact is that the road was really dirty and I wasn’t crazy about walking without shoes.

I bought a new pair of flip-flops (1$) and continued on my way home. As I got closer to the orphanage I passed by a group of older women. I bowed to show them respect as we exchanged greetings. One woman beckoned me over, and motioned towards the flip-flops I still had in my hands. I looked at the sandals and then back at her, a little unsure what she wanted. I’d only been carrying them until I could bring them home and figure out what to do with them. She smiled at the flops and motioned for me to give them to her. As I passed them over she took my hand and thanked me profusely. “Pasekei, Pasekei” I said. It’s nothing, it’s nothing. And it was I felt. She was thanking me for what I'd considered garbage.

The next day I passed by her again. I bowed and we greeted each other. My eyes drifted to her feet and I saw the carefully repaired sandals. Limited by my lack of Mooré and her lack of French we smiled at each other, I nodded my head towards her and continued on my way.

As I walked I began to formulate a new definition of what it means to be rich. To be rich is to have things like shoes and to be able to replace them when they break.

[below: at a church soccer match]