03 Février 2012
FN:
Different strokes for different folks
One of the interesting things about living in the transit house is that you encounter a wide range of volunteers from a wide range of sites. If you live in a more or less urban setting (like I do), you don’t really get to see much of village life, and if you live in a village like most volunteers, you don’t really know much about how things are in cities that aren’t Ouaga. When you bump into each other at the transit house, you naturally exchange stories, and in the process you usually get a much better feel for how the other half lives. Since I’ve been living in the transit house for the past week – and will be for the week to come as well – I’ve had a lot of time and opportunity to do just that; I’ve been talking to the various volunteers as they come and go, and I’ve heard all sorts of stories about just how varied life can be in Burkina Faso.
Just for a little background: there are 3 types of Peace Corps volunteers here in Burkina: DABA, Health, and Education. I personally am a DABA small business volunteer (formerly known as SED, or Small Enterprise Development), but there are also DABA agricultural volunteers, health volunteers, and formal and informal educational volunteers within the volunteer spectrum. When you read this blog, remember that you’re really only getting one facet of the whole.
Probably the most story-filled group are the health volunteers. They all live in small villages, and they all work at the local CSPS (health clinic). Theirs are the most deprived lifestyles in PC Burkina: only two of them have electricity, none of them have running water, and most of them live in place where a command of the local language is far more important than a command of French. Although they primarily pass their time weighing babies and helping to teach people about the woes of malnutrition, poor sanitation, and VIH/SIDA (HIV/AIDS in French) prevention, they also do a lot of more interesting things as well. Multiple volunteers have helped deliver babies[1], patch up moto accident victims, circumcise children[2], treat various horrific tropical parasites, and otherwise do things that have absolutely nothing in common with my much more complacent, urban, business-oriented service.
Similarly, the agricultural DABA volunteers[3] are very different creatures from the DABA I know. They’re a lean, sun-bronzed lot who speak Mooré like natives and possess a certain wiry strength in the arms that bespeaks long hours spent doing manual labor. Their stories aren’t always all that fascinating – there’s only so much excitement to be gleaned from tales of endless gardening and tree planting – but the mute testimony of their physical conditioning absolutely is. In the most quintessential sense, they are the Peace Corps. They’re the ones who know every person in their village, they’re the ones who take local wives and husbands, and they’re the ones who can leave knowing they helped feed a people, improve their sanitation, give them a first-hand look at how things can get better. I look at those volunteers, and even though on a realistic level I don’t want their lives in any way (I’m just fine with not being hot and actually having food options, thank you very much), I’m still a little bit shamed and jealous; I like my work a lot, but I can see that they love it, and that even in this advanced age the old-school PC ethic of ‘live in the village, work in the field’ is still alive and well[4]. But me, I’m just some jerk who lives in a house with fans and types on his computer a lot.
The third group, the education volunteers, don’t really excite me quite as much. It’s not that their stories aren’t good – Burkinabé children say and do the most amazing things – it’s just that I already know how the life of a teacher goes. Even in Burkina, the basic mechanics of the job don’t change all that much. In a weird way, I have far more in more common with the education volunteers than I do with the other DABA volunteers, even though DABA technically all have the same job title. It’s really almost like there are two different Peace Corps, and the one we’re in is a lot more comfortable but also a lot less romantic.
Oh well. Romance is overrated anyway.
[1] ie they’ve been present and passed things to the doctor/midwife – PC rules restrict volunteers from doing any actual medical procedures.
[2] One of them described it in the most chilling words I’ve ever heard: two and a half snips. My spine quivers every time I think about that.
[3] Here in Burkina Faso, 90% of all economic activity revolves around either subsistence or commercial (primarily subsistence) agriculture. Because of that, the business and agriculture programs were combined into one, called DABA (Developing Agricultural and Business Activities or some such). There are two types of DABA volunteers: the business folks, who tend to live in larger towns and work more with small businesses (this would be me), and the agricultural folks, who tend live and work more in villages, with farmers.
[4] At least in Burkina Faso. Sadly (or happily, depending on your personal preference for progress vs nostalgia), computer work like that I’m doing presently is becoming far more common. In 20 or 30 years, field work may entirely disappear. Since PCs goal is essentially to put itself out of work, I can’t say that’s a bad thing.
