Dictionaries and an email excerpt
Its been hard for me lately to articulate insight into the Burkinabe culture in writing. I still have these bursting moments when things become clear to me, but the words are never clear in front of the computer and so I do not write them.
For the whole of my service, Ive been in contact with an old French teacher of mine who consequently raised 170 dollars for my village. I ended up buying 31 French only dictionaries, and two French-English dictionaries. Twenty of these, I gave to the primary school in my village, amid much trepidation that such a valued items would be clandestinely sold off or otherwise disappear to Burkinabe valuables heaven. Thus, I marked them really well, even put a note inside the dictionaries to guilt trip would-be thieves. Lack of books is such a huge issue in Burkina. So few entities in this country are producing books, which means that they must import information, just like any other product.
Anyway, long story short. It was a hugely good investment. The best possible way I could have spend 170 dollars. People in village now appear to be talking about the virtues of learning a language with the help of a dictionary. Ive put out notice with the students that if their parents pay me up front Ill look for personal dictionaries. Im trying not to be too optimistic about people taking me up on this offer. However. Sandrine, who is in my courtyard, did say that her teacher has split her class up into teams and anytime they dont know a word now on the board or otherwise, they are supposed to look it up in the dictionaries, six of which they keep on hand for her class specifically. This is a great step forward, well, I think so.
Anyway, off the subject. I had wanted to post the last email I wrote my French teacher, as it attempted something that Im not going to devote more energy to explaining at this moment, but its something I wanted to share. Just to qualify it a bit, my old teacher asked me to try and picture being a 14 year old again, so it is geared toward that.
It is about the lack of access they have to the outside world, information, and technology, and what that means for the upcoming generation of a developing country like Burkina.
I was, like you said, trying to remember what it was like to be 14, and thought Id talk a little about technology here. The states, and the west in general, lives in a state of constant bombardment with information and I dont believe Americans appreciate this at all. Ask your students to try and picture a country where not a single Mexican or Thai restaurant exists. What does that mean for the population? As a culture, Americans have taken and piggy backed on every good thing that the world has to offer. Because of the predominance and power of English, every important document in existence in the world has either been written in English or has been translated into English. What does that mean if you only know Lyele (as many of my villagers do)? Even if you can read Lyele, because not very many people speak this language, you are faced with less people that you can talk to, who are likely to express a far more narrow range of ideas than the average American is privy to. Not only that, but you are likely to have less vocabulary in your language because your culture has not accessed and made its own more complicated issues.
As a result, most local languages in Burkina are peppered with French words, to fill the gap in their own languages. Most things that came after French colonialism take the French word. A good example of this is the time of day, which is always said with slightly altered pronunciation in French even by people who do not speak any French at all otherwise. This is slowly rendering obsolete local languages. Burkinabe have explained to me that often they are obliged to use the French word, if they are also French speakers, because they dont know the word in Lyele. There is a very interesting debate going on about local language right now.
Only its not just Thai and Mexican food they dont get exposed to. Not very many people own bikes let alone TVs, computers, cars. Think about how much information you glean in a day, from the things that you happen to read or the news you happen to get passed, and that everyone around you is also privy to that information, so if someone tells you they heard something, not only can you take it as probably true, but you can also look it up yourself. You have free libraries, you have your teachers to ask, you have the internet to search.
It is not like that in Burkina. The few libraries that they do have (in the towns) are not free, and beyond that, are more meager than most personal libraries Ive seen in the states. Almost all the reference books are extremely dated. Recently I was thinking about this. Try to picture what it would be like in a world where every reference book you ever saw was probably at least 20 years old. Where there were (at least in my rural village) no signs, and therefore, no reason to read on a daily basis. And not only that, a place where almost everyone you met was privy only to those exact same reference books and hearsay. Where the best that you could have was imported, though more likely, a European cast off.
Cell phones are an odd exception. There are two land line phones to serve my village of 4,000 people. These you approach as a non automated cell phone. There is someone there who will dial for you and who you will pay the price that the meter shows at the end of the call. Land line phone calls are conversely very expensive in Burkina, but cell phone calls are about the same. In Africa, if requires far less to put up one tower to have a whole area under cell phone coverage than to string telephone lines along individual routes. Therefore, despite the fact that the cell phones themselves run very expensive, many people are making it a priority to get one. Cell phones are also a status symbol here, probably more than in the states, because its also a vehicle of power. You have the power to call people, and it is a personal object. These are things that not everyone has.
Over the summer I tried to have a club to mentor teenage girls into staying in school and not dropping out pregnant, which often happens. At the first session I asked these girls to make name tags and draw a picture of something that they liked. At first the girls were puzzled by the idea. When they drew things that interested them, one girl drew a bucket. Her interest she said was drinking water from buckets. Another girl said she liked sand. I thought this over for a long time. One girl said she liked eating mangos and riding her bicycle. These are kids who could have been like you, but they never got to try Mexican food, they probably dont know what rollar skates are, they've never been bowling. And so what are they left with as "interests"? They are left with sand. It is deeper than ignorance.
In general, there is not the concept of individuality in Burkina. People live very communally and lack privacy. Family ties and family obligations are extremely strong. Americans might be living in some sort of information age, with all the things we have access to getting rolled into one common idea of pop culture, which consequently, holds you as teenagers together with the teenagers or Oregon and Oklahoma. The things that hold teenagers together in Burkina are also a common set of values, and maybe that they share that common fate of having access to so little.
For the whole of my service, Ive been in contact with an old French teacher of mine who consequently raised 170 dollars for my village. I ended up buying 31 French only dictionaries, and two French-English dictionaries. Twenty of these, I gave to the primary school in my village, amid much trepidation that such a valued items would be clandestinely sold off or otherwise disappear to Burkinabe valuables heaven. Thus, I marked them really well, even put a note inside the dictionaries to guilt trip would-be thieves. Lack of books is such a huge issue in Burkina. So few entities in this country are producing books, which means that they must import information, just like any other product.
Anyway, long story short. It was a hugely good investment. The best possible way I could have spend 170 dollars. People in village now appear to be talking about the virtues of learning a language with the help of a dictionary. Ive put out notice with the students that if their parents pay me up front Ill look for personal dictionaries. Im trying not to be too optimistic about people taking me up on this offer. However. Sandrine, who is in my courtyard, did say that her teacher has split her class up into teams and anytime they dont know a word now on the board or otherwise, they are supposed to look it up in the dictionaries, six of which they keep on hand for her class specifically. This is a great step forward, well, I think so.
Anyway, off the subject. I had wanted to post the last email I wrote my French teacher, as it attempted something that Im not going to devote more energy to explaining at this moment, but its something I wanted to share. Just to qualify it a bit, my old teacher asked me to try and picture being a 14 year old again, so it is geared toward that.
It is about the lack of access they have to the outside world, information, and technology, and what that means for the upcoming generation of a developing country like Burkina.
I was, like you said, trying to remember what it was like to be 14, and thought Id talk a little about technology here. The states, and the west in general, lives in a state of constant bombardment with information and I dont believe Americans appreciate this at all. Ask your students to try and picture a country where not a single Mexican or Thai restaurant exists. What does that mean for the population? As a culture, Americans have taken and piggy backed on every good thing that the world has to offer. Because of the predominance and power of English, every important document in existence in the world has either been written in English or has been translated into English. What does that mean if you only know Lyele (as many of my villagers do)? Even if you can read Lyele, because not very many people speak this language, you are faced with less people that you can talk to, who are likely to express a far more narrow range of ideas than the average American is privy to. Not only that, but you are likely to have less vocabulary in your language because your culture has not accessed and made its own more complicated issues.
As a result, most local languages in Burkina are peppered with French words, to fill the gap in their own languages. Most things that came after French colonialism take the French word. A good example of this is the time of day, which is always said with slightly altered pronunciation in French even by people who do not speak any French at all otherwise. This is slowly rendering obsolete local languages. Burkinabe have explained to me that often they are obliged to use the French word, if they are also French speakers, because they dont know the word in Lyele. There is a very interesting debate going on about local language right now.
Only its not just Thai and Mexican food they dont get exposed to. Not very many people own bikes let alone TVs, computers, cars. Think about how much information you glean in a day, from the things that you happen to read or the news you happen to get passed, and that everyone around you is also privy to that information, so if someone tells you they heard something, not only can you take it as probably true, but you can also look it up yourself. You have free libraries, you have your teachers to ask, you have the internet to search.
It is not like that in Burkina. The few libraries that they do have (in the towns) are not free, and beyond that, are more meager than most personal libraries Ive seen in the states. Almost all the reference books are extremely dated. Recently I was thinking about this. Try to picture what it would be like in a world where every reference book you ever saw was probably at least 20 years old. Where there were (at least in my rural village) no signs, and therefore, no reason to read on a daily basis. And not only that, a place where almost everyone you met was privy only to those exact same reference books and hearsay. Where the best that you could have was imported, though more likely, a European cast off.
Cell phones are an odd exception. There are two land line phones to serve my village of 4,000 people. These you approach as a non automated cell phone. There is someone there who will dial for you and who you will pay the price that the meter shows at the end of the call. Land line phone calls are conversely very expensive in Burkina, but cell phone calls are about the same. In Africa, if requires far less to put up one tower to have a whole area under cell phone coverage than to string telephone lines along individual routes. Therefore, despite the fact that the cell phones themselves run very expensive, many people are making it a priority to get one. Cell phones are also a status symbol here, probably more than in the states, because its also a vehicle of power. You have the power to call people, and it is a personal object. These are things that not everyone has.
Over the summer I tried to have a club to mentor teenage girls into staying in school and not dropping out pregnant, which often happens. At the first session I asked these girls to make name tags and draw a picture of something that they liked. At first the girls were puzzled by the idea. When they drew things that interested them, one girl drew a bucket. Her interest she said was drinking water from buckets. Another girl said she liked sand. I thought this over for a long time. One girl said she liked eating mangos and riding her bicycle. These are kids who could have been like you, but they never got to try Mexican food, they probably dont know what rollar skates are, they've never been bowling. And so what are they left with as "interests"? They are left with sand. It is deeper than ignorance.
In general, there is not the concept of individuality in Burkina. People live very communally and lack privacy. Family ties and family obligations are extremely strong. Americans might be living in some sort of information age, with all the things we have access to getting rolled into one common idea of pop culture, which consequently, holds you as teenagers together with the teenagers or Oregon and Oklahoma. The things that hold teenagers together in Burkina are also a common set of values, and maybe that they share that common fate of having access to so little.