Full Circle

I opened my eyes to a blank white sky and the Harmattan winds blowing the memory of a feeling into my sleepy mind. I raised myself and blinked around, gazing at the drying weeds, the sorghum and millet stalks towering above my house, the yellowing bean leaves, hearing the crackle of it all shake together, smelling the almost subconscious fluttering of decay. And then it hit me; nostalgia. This day had the same quality as every other October I’d ever experienced, including that of last year when I first arrived in Burkina Faso. It’s a feeling tinged with sadness, of the beginning of the end, but carried forward with the anticipation of the harvest, of holidays, of familial warmth.

I got up and stretched and considered how odd it was that I should have such a familiar feeling in such an unfamiliar place. Had a year living in this country truly allowed me to feel the full cycle of things, to feel reminiscent? It seemed so. It took me all the way back to Sapone when Kellynn and I rode home for the first time to our host family’s house, dodging animals and ducking through the sagging sorghum fields. I remembered watching with delight the last rain of the season, at the time being my first encounter with the violence of African rain. How different things were then. How different a person I was. I cannot now venture to enter the mind that was mine a year ago. Certain things have become more certain, certain things less. What can I say?

After breakfast I headed over to Philippe’s house. The mother of the proprietor of my house had passed away two nights ago and we went together to pay our respects. On the way back we passed another courtyard with a group of people sitting outside on nats, the customary way to wait to see someone. We stopped, took off our shoes, sat down and greeted everyone. We learned that someone in the Chef de Village’s family had passed away the night before and that the interment would be this morning. The Chef of a nearby village had also died in the night. Shocked by the concurrence of these three deaths, we expressed our condolences with dismay. Philippe told me he planned to go to the burial and asked if I’d like to go. As it was something I’d never seen before and pushed by the sentiment of the day, I said yes.

Titao’s cemetery lies around the base of a small, desolate hill on the outskirts of town. I had never ventured here before and was awed by the sheer number of dirt mounds stretched to the foot of the small, red rise. We made our way among these towards a large gathering of men and boys surrounding a hole. In typical Mossi fashion, three boys tirelessly dug while the crowd around them informed them of what they were doing wrong. I looked inside and saw a common grave, except the workers were in the process of excavating a small trench along one side of the hole. They soon finished and Philippe and I went to sit and wait for the body to arrive.

Cooled by the wind and delivered from the heat by the ever-overcast sky, we sat and waited. We talked of death and poverty and the difficulties of escaping them. I could hear the anger undercutting Philippe’s voice. Anger at what, I don’t know. Death? Frustration? Apathy? Tiredness? It became too much and we fell silent. Nudged by the fall breeze and these thoughts, the thread of remembrance began to unravel and I looked upon the last year as from on top of a mountain. Here is what I saw:

I had wanted so much to do something, to help, to learn. I came here full of hope, discouraged and cynical of the American life I saw around me. Everything was new and I devoured each new experience eagerly, knowing that it would nourish the person I wanted to become. Then Kellynn was forced to leave and I realized that this was never something I had wanted to do on my own. And yet there were still experiences here for the taking; still I had not done any actual work that I could be proud of; still there was so much to learn. I made a promise to myself that I would see this through for at least a year. I threw myself into work, starting projects left and right. I buried my loneliness in activity, and when that lulled, into the company of other volunteers and alcohol. I came out of each project with a new understanding of how things are done here and began to see patterns emerge. Speaking with other volunteers and seeing how they live helped me create a clearer, more comprehensive idea of what life here is and what we as volunteers can do within it.

I believe that the majority of volunteers are placed with organizations at the village level to ameliorate the larger, entrenched problems that the higher levels in the ministry do not care to deal with. For example, formal education volunteers take the role of teachers to address the problem of overcrowded classrooms. However, there are plenty of qualified Burkinabé eager to teach. The real problem is that the government will not pay the salaries of more teachers. So in effect, the Peace Corps is supporting this bad policy and volunteers are left to manage, as free labor taking jobs away from locals, classes of 100 students and more. I know less about the medical system in Burkina but have heard health volunteers complain that their job is to make sure that their Burkinabé counterparts do their jobs and that there is not enough oversight or support from the ministry. This goes for the Agriculture sector as well. We are placed with host associations, the majority of which are financed by American or Burkinabé aid organizations such as USADF, USAID and FAIJ, purportedly to be some kind of on-the-ground auditor. We are unwitting good-will ambassadors banging our heads against bureaucratic walls, filing quarterly reports for the benefit of our associations’ benevolent donors. This is not what I imagined service to be.

Besides our primary projects, I’ve seen the biggest impediment to getting anything done here as being the half-a-century-long culture of post-colonialism. For decades, motivated by institutionalized guilt, foreign organizations have come to poor communities, done on-the-fly community assessments, thrust large sums of money into a small number of hands, and left. The carcasses of these projects lay strewn everywhere, evinced by faded signs, crumbling buildings and silent, unmoving machinery. Where does the money go? With little to no follow-up and oversight, the funds for the new mill could just as easily become someone’s new motorcycle. Then here comes the Peace Corps volunteer, yelling, “Sustainable community development!” and what’s the first thing people do? Ask us for money. I am tired of hearing about someone’s “lack of means” to accomplish their dream project. But who can blame them? This is all their history has led them to expect; that nothing can be accomplished without outside aid. This is not the land of the self-made man. Goals are not to be reached for, but to be begged for. This view is probably shaped in part by the fact that I’m currently reading Atlas Shrugged. Nevertheless, I feel that if I am to truly accomplish anything here, it will be to convince someone, anyone, that they have the power to change their own life. To refuse to give someone money is one of the most important things I can do.

Dust rose in the distance and broke through my melancholic reverie. Everyone stood up as one. A truck with a covered bed backed up to the edge of the cemetery. Men began filing out and the last took hold of a stretcher within and brought it over to the grave. The body was wrapped in a straw mat and tied to the stretcher with a white cord. Two men started mixing water with some dirt to make a mortar. I was awed by the silence around me. Never had I heard a group of Burkinabé so large be completely quiet. That is to say that there is usually a lot of quiet joking that goes on or a phone ringing at least, but not today. The cord was untied and the body was lifted from the stretcher. An intricate, vibrantly red rug was pulled over the grave, held by about 20 men. Men inside the grave took down the shrouded figure and lay him in the shallow trench. Bricks were handed down one by one to cover the small opening. The last brick disappeared and the rug was taken away as the two men began delivering shovels of mortar to those in the grave. When the tomb was sealed and the grave vacated, everyone took turns heaving dirt into the hole. The wind threw dust towards where we were standing and we shifted around. With the hole filled and the mound created, there followed a slight pause and then suddenly everyone fell to a crouch, which I followed. Someone close by the grave said a few words aloud and then a profound silence fell once again. A minute or so passed. And then, in a dizzy contrast to the waiting that had preceded it, everyone got up and left.

I walked back with Philippe, immersed in my own thoughts. I asked a few questions about the burial, but was thinking of it in my own terms. I have been here a year. I have come full circle. What more do I want out of this? How much more can I endure by myself, without the support and presence of my best friend and wife? I feel that the hopes I came to this country with have been buried in the sand of the past year. Are there new ones to replace them? Are there new seeds to be planted in the next year? Honestly, I don’t know.