Arrival

Although most of my hours the first week here were spent in mundane training sessions, the hour between landing in Burkina Faso and being ushered behind the walls of our temporary training site was EASILY the most intense period I’ve ever lived. In this interval between 4:30 & 5:30pm on October 5th, my mother, whose birthday was today, came incredibly close to receiving the gift she most desired—having her son back home.

At 4:35pm on October 5th, a plane carrying myself and 36 other volunteers (22 Health Education Volunteers and 14 other Small Enterprise Development Volunteers) touched ground in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. In the seconds between our landing and our exit, my mind ran rampant with imaginings of what Burkina Faso would be like. Of every possibility that ran through my head, however, the reality of life in Ouagadougou, at least as I perceived it this first day, was far beyond even my wildest imaginations.

At around 4:55pm, I entered one of the cars that had been sent to take us to our training site with six other volunteers. While we waited for the driver to secure our belongings, a boy around the age of 13 approached the car window. He was one of what seemed like hundreds of vendors who mobbed us while walking from the airport terminal to our vehicles. When he approached our car, it was apparent that he wanted to sell one of us some sort of toy he had. After five minutes of holding the toy up to each of our faces, he decided to direct all his efforts toward one person—me. I don’t know what made this boy focus on me, but he did so with unyielding resolve. I shook my head in a manner to suggest that I’m not interested, but with every side-to-side motion he appeared to grow in determination. Realizing that I didn’t have the language capacity to communicate with this boy, another volunteer told me to tell him “merci, mais non (thanks, but no).” Like the refrain of a song, I repeated this phrase over and over again in hopes that it’d lead to the boy’s departure. It didn’t; he stood with dogged perseverance and stared at me boldly, passionately. I quickly became fearful of this boy. I wasn’t so much afraid of him (after all he was just a young boy), but I was absolutely TERRIFIED of the person behind that piercing stare. His, was the stare of an African boy who seemed to have been anesthetized to pain and numbed to suffering, the stare of an African boy who seemed to have been robbed of his innocence, the stare of an African boy who seemed to have been groomed into a boy soldier. The driver eventually entered the car and began driving away but, as he did, I remained captured by the boy’s stare. His firm gaze was matched with a guttural recurring shout, “Demain (Tomorrow)! Demain! Demain!...” I didn’t know how he would, but I was never more assured of anything—tomorrow that boy would find me and, when he did, my fate, like the toy he tried selling, would be in his hands.

From around 5:05 till 5:25pm, I was transported through Ouagadougou, in what became as intense an experience as my encounter with the boy at the airport. Not even the word primitive, a word that I’ve long considered to be extremely offensive when used to describe African societies, goes far enough to sum up the pre-industrialized world that I first found Ouagadougou to be. The main road on which we traveled to the training site was one of only a few paved roads that I could remember seeing this day. This road was lined with hundreds of vending booths that were made of little more than corrugated tin and tree limbs. Donkeys, goats, and chickens maneuvered the side streets amongst thousands of bike and moped riders. Alongside the main road, urinating men and pooping children helped to complete this first picture of my surroundings. As I stared out at what appeared to be life in Burkina Faso, I was absolutely certain that I wasn’t going to make it past this first week. The “slum-like” landscape of Ouagadougou was identical to (if not more regressive than) African sceneries depicted in films like Hotel Rwanda and Blood Diamond. Realizing this, one thought came to dominate my thinking: if genocide occurred in those scenes, and this scene is identical to those, genocide must have occurred/ must still be occurring here. Although I understood how irrational this thought was (since I knew the Peace Corps would never send volunteers to an area that’s in the grips of civil conflict), I couldn’t rid my mind of it. I’m not exaggerating when I say I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE AFRAID OF ANYTHING than I was, at this moment, of remaining in this country. Suddenly, I was reminded of “boy soldier” from the airport and, when he came to mind, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and began begging my dear Lord to please get me the [INSERT EXPLETIVE] out of Burkina Faso!!!

At just past 5:25pm, my vehicle pulled safely behind the gates of our temporary training site, SIL. In SIL, I had found a secure haven away the dangers that lied just beyond its gates. Here, my fear began to dissipate and my lost confidence began to be renewed. Before the hour that elapsed between landing at the airport and reaching SIL drew to a close, I channeled the whirlwind of emotions that I was feeling into one semi self-encouraging message: “Justin, you can do this, but…if for any reason you don’t think that you can, know that it was nice of you to try.”

Now 3:32pm on March 6th 2008, five months past my tumultuous first hour in Burkina, it’s nice to know that I’m still trying.




A brief addendum to the above posting:

It’s unbelievable how much one’s perception changes over the course of a few months. As I look back at my understanding of life in Burkina Faso on October 5th, I can’t help to be ashamed of my ignorance. My thinking was so flawed in so many ways. First, the fact that I thought the boy at the airport was a “boy soldier” is utterly ridiculous. I’ve since met many boys like him and, having done so, can declare with certainty that he was, at best, a tough salesman. Secondly, the fact that I described Ouagadougou as primitive is not only extremely offensive, as I’ve always known it to be, but also…utterly ridiculous. Sure it’s not the booming metropolis that New York City is, but it is similar to NYC and other urban hubs throughout the world, in many respects (e.g. it’s densely populated, moderately developed, fairly liberal, etc.). And lastly, the fact that I was convinced that Burkina Faso must be some war torn savage land is—take a guess—UTTERLY REDICULOUS! I have never felt safer anywhere than I do in my community here. There’s certainly nowhere in Chicago, or at least nowhere that I’ve ever lived, where I can sleep outdoors without fear of being robbed, raped, killed, or all of the above. Here though, when the hot season arrives, I will remove myself from the fiery pits of hell (i.e. my 95˚ house) and sleep as everyone else in the country does, outdoors.

Wrapping up, I just want to comment on how misleading, deceptive, and dangerous mainstream media depictions of Africa can be/ are. Although I knew better than to assume that Burkina was some hot bed of civil strife, I couldn’t get the images of atrocities that I’d seen committed elsewhere on the continent, in films, out of my mind as I stared out at Burkina’s “rough” landscape. My hope is that volunteers in the decades to follow will come to associate abstractions such as intelligence, beauty, and cultural depth that they derive from media portrayals of life in Africa, with varying landscapes throughout the continent (even the “roughest” of ones). I guess that’s the great thing about hope: it makes even the most remote possibilities seem attainable.