Sunday, January 22, 2006
Friday, January 13, 2006
Dollar Bottles and Pork Ribs: A Ramadan Special
There is a poster hanging up in my living room that says SPECIAL RAMADAN PARTY at the VIKING CLUB. The upper left and right hand corners of the poster are embossed with the figure of man dressed in Muslim attire dancing with a cigar in his mouth. The text below informs the viewer of the Date, Location, and extent of how much fun is going to be had by those who attend. For example: The music is provided by DJ MOUNE, there is a competition to see who is the most Sexy, a competition to see who is the best couple, a competition to see who is the best dancer. The cover at the door is 3 dollars per couple and 2 dollars if you are single. The text is flanked on the left by the picture of a man and woman dancing together. The right flank is a picture of a sultry woman wearing a bikini. Unfortunately, I missed this “Incredible extravaganza for the Ages”. I have been to the Club before with one of my Muslim friends. He told me it is the best place to listen to music, drink beer and we discovered they had some nice cuts of pork that went well with the beer.
I just recently celebrated the festival of Tabaski, which is a festival where you go to all your Muslim Neighbors houses, and they give you sheep meat and beer/rum/sangria. The actual purpose of the holiday is tied to the story of Abraham and his obedience to God when asked to kill his son. God replaced the son with a sheep and this is the reason we ate sheep. I am not sure how the booze worked its way into the holiday, but it definitely made the dinner conversation more lively. I suppose that this should not be that big of a surprise. I know Catholics who eat Steak on Fridays and waffle on the authority of the Pope; Southern Baptists who believe in evolution and refute a literal translation of the Bible. In regards to myself, I certainly shirk some of the dogmatic doctrines of the Christian Church.
This is not news, but I think it is important to see that this side of Islam exists. Intellectually, I am sure that we all know that Islam, like any religion, has a wide range of followers. Followers of Islam can range from the apathetic Muslim who does it as a sign of respect to his family and tradition to the fanatical Muslim who believes in a literal translation that condones the murder of infidels. When I told people that I was coming to Burkina Faso a country where the majority religion is Islam at nearly 60 percent of the population, I received many warnings to be careful and not let the terrorists get me. The statement that not all Muslims are terrorists is tired, stupid, and so patently obvious - that no serious person, should contemplate something that is reserved for a pre-teens first socially conscious thought. Instead I want to just talk briefly about how religion always exists in a context and the context in which it exists in the Middle East is very different from the way it exists in West Africa which is very different from the way it exists in America. In Burkina Faso there is a long tradition of the Animist religion and it is said that each person is a combination of percentages of their religion and 100 percent Animist. It is the culture and the history that the people share in common. Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism are traditions that came in late and now worn like a sports jacket. You identify with this camp or that camp, you prefer this style of philosophy to the other but in the end it is not what you identify as. This approach makes people extremely religiously tolerant, to the extent that one family can have a Muslim father a Catholic mother and children who worship at the Protestant Church. I really respect the outlook that the Burkinabe have towards religion. I think they look at the world, their situation, and realize that there are so many problems; it doesn’t make sense to create more based on what traditional religious practices are better.
I just recently celebrated the festival of Tabaski, which is a festival where you go to all your Muslim Neighbors houses, and they give you sheep meat and beer/rum/sangria. The actual purpose of the holiday is tied to the story of Abraham and his obedience to God when asked to kill his son. God replaced the son with a sheep and this is the reason we ate sheep. I am not sure how the booze worked its way into the holiday, but it definitely made the dinner conversation more lively. I suppose that this should not be that big of a surprise. I know Catholics who eat Steak on Fridays and waffle on the authority of the Pope; Southern Baptists who believe in evolution and refute a literal translation of the Bible. In regards to myself, I certainly shirk some of the dogmatic doctrines of the Christian Church.
This is not news, but I think it is important to see that this side of Islam exists. Intellectually, I am sure that we all know that Islam, like any religion, has a wide range of followers. Followers of Islam can range from the apathetic Muslim who does it as a sign of respect to his family and tradition to the fanatical Muslim who believes in a literal translation that condones the murder of infidels. When I told people that I was coming to Burkina Faso a country where the majority religion is Islam at nearly 60 percent of the population, I received many warnings to be careful and not let the terrorists get me. The statement that not all Muslims are terrorists is tired, stupid, and so patently obvious - that no serious person, should contemplate something that is reserved for a pre-teens first socially conscious thought. Instead I want to just talk briefly about how religion always exists in a context and the context in which it exists in the Middle East is very different from the way it exists in West Africa which is very different from the way it exists in America. In Burkina Faso there is a long tradition of the Animist religion and it is said that each person is a combination of percentages of their religion and 100 percent Animist. It is the culture and the history that the people share in common. Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism are traditions that came in late and now worn like a sports jacket. You identify with this camp or that camp, you prefer this style of philosophy to the other but in the end it is not what you identify as. This approach makes people extremely religiously tolerant, to the extent that one family can have a Muslim father a Catholic mother and children who worship at the Protestant Church. I really respect the outlook that the Burkinabe have towards religion. I think they look at the world, their situation, and realize that there are so many problems; it doesn’t make sense to create more based on what traditional religious practices are better.
A Woman’s Work Is Never Done
Throughout history, there has been a consistent and illogical connection made between biological capability and social and moral obligations. Somebody who follows this false logic might say something like this: Women are physically able to give birth thus it is their social obligation to be a mom and stay at home to cook, clean and raise the child. If the mother does not perform this function of being a “mom” as it is traditionally understood, she is failing her moral obligation. Hopefully you can spot the huge hole in the logic between physiological capability and social obligation. Why does physically giving birth tie a woman closer to raising the child than physically providing the sperm? True, women provide breast milk, but again, this physical process comes to an end like a term of labor and you still need to bridge the gap from physical capability to social expectation. Biological causes can only have direct biological consequences. (I have the capability to feel when my skin is being burned, so I pull my hand away from boiling water.) As we can see, Biology is something people appeal to give their argument for maintaining a certain social arrangement the appearance of irrefutable credibility. The piece that people insert to bridge the gap between biological ability and social obligations is social norms. Societal norms is just another way of saying social obligations, thus we see the false logic turns on it self, social norms propagate social norms, the whole thing is circular and there is no particular justification for why the social norm exists the way it does, or even if it is correct.
The reason for this brief exercise in logic that might be leaving some with the impression of leftist University Speak is to show that this type of thinking has real life consequences. This social norm is propagated again and again; women swallow it and in turn propagate it onto younger generations of women. Here are some of the practical consequences that come from when the social norm mandates that your gender role is to provide for your husband and children:
Ex- scission is the process of female gender mutilation. Often a trusted family member (grandmother) will come in the night time to take the girl just entering puberty, into an unsanitary room where a man uses an unsanitary knife to remove the clitoris and to prevent sex with anyone until marriage, the vagina is sewn shut. In many villages, like the villages that surround where I live, this is the general rule and not the exception. Girls education and empowerment volunteers purport that between 60 -80 percent of girls. This projection is taken from interviews with villagers, but there is not published survey that can support these projections. It is clear that this practice is not an anomaly and it happens quite frequently. When asked why, the response is often that it is not the role of women to have sexual pleasure and if they don’t enjoy sex they are more likely to successfully serve their role of being faithful and serving their husband.
Women get beat. It is socially acceptable to beat your wife. Educated people beat their wives. Women often have little recourse. I am reminded of a conversation I had with an English teacher at their equivalent of a Junior College, he is one of the most educated people in the city. We were talking about American women’s independence and their likely argumentative response if you told them to make your dinner. His response, “Do they want to be beaten.” I was pretty sure that he did not quite understand the use of the word, ‘want’.
Girls are not sent to school with the same regularity as boys. The reason is that it is not their role in society. As a result illiteracy is much higher amongst girls. Girls are less likely to be able to have the tools to be financially independent. Instead they spend most of the day, cleaning the courtyard, spending 3-4 hours at a time making meals and cleaning the dishes for several meals a day. During the wet Season their downtime, is spent doing back breaking cultivation with the use of only a small hoe. In this period the smaller girls take over chores of cooking and cleaning. Girls are frequently married off in their mid teens and usually have children by the age of 18. The social norms reinforce the role that women play in society. Some claim that this is their culture, but I believe that begs the question of whose culture? Are the women and men of this society choosing this structure from the same level of capabilities? Who knew that the capability to give birth would lead to all of these social expectations?
But who knows, maybe the women asking for social reforms are just frigid ice queens, maybe we will look back at these days as the good old days of Burkina Faso- when the divorce rate was low and there was no question about what constitutes a marriage. The point I take from it all is that sometimes being more uncertain of social norms is not such a bad thing. It might produce different challenges, but the new challenges are a welcome relief from the status quo.
The reason for this brief exercise in logic that might be leaving some with the impression of leftist University Speak is to show that this type of thinking has real life consequences. This social norm is propagated again and again; women swallow it and in turn propagate it onto younger generations of women. Here are some of the practical consequences that come from when the social norm mandates that your gender role is to provide for your husband and children:
Ex- scission is the process of female gender mutilation. Often a trusted family member (grandmother) will come in the night time to take the girl just entering puberty, into an unsanitary room where a man uses an unsanitary knife to remove the clitoris and to prevent sex with anyone until marriage, the vagina is sewn shut. In many villages, like the villages that surround where I live, this is the general rule and not the exception. Girls education and empowerment volunteers purport that between 60 -80 percent of girls. This projection is taken from interviews with villagers, but there is not published survey that can support these projections. It is clear that this practice is not an anomaly and it happens quite frequently. When asked why, the response is often that it is not the role of women to have sexual pleasure and if they don’t enjoy sex they are more likely to successfully serve their role of being faithful and serving their husband.
Women get beat. It is socially acceptable to beat your wife. Educated people beat their wives. Women often have little recourse. I am reminded of a conversation I had with an English teacher at their equivalent of a Junior College, he is one of the most educated people in the city. We were talking about American women’s independence and their likely argumentative response if you told them to make your dinner. His response, “Do they want to be beaten.” I was pretty sure that he did not quite understand the use of the word, ‘want’.
Girls are not sent to school with the same regularity as boys. The reason is that it is not their role in society. As a result illiteracy is much higher amongst girls. Girls are less likely to be able to have the tools to be financially independent. Instead they spend most of the day, cleaning the courtyard, spending 3-4 hours at a time making meals and cleaning the dishes for several meals a day. During the wet Season their downtime, is spent doing back breaking cultivation with the use of only a small hoe. In this period the smaller girls take over chores of cooking and cleaning. Girls are frequently married off in their mid teens and usually have children by the age of 18. The social norms reinforce the role that women play in society. Some claim that this is their culture, but I believe that begs the question of whose culture? Are the women and men of this society choosing this structure from the same level of capabilities? Who knew that the capability to give birth would lead to all of these social expectations?
But who knows, maybe the women asking for social reforms are just frigid ice queens, maybe we will look back at these days as the good old days of Burkina Faso- when the divorce rate was low and there was no question about what constitutes a marriage. The point I take from it all is that sometimes being more uncertain of social norms is not such a bad thing. It might produce different challenges, but the new challenges are a welcome relief from the status quo.
No Place like Home for the Holidays
Each year there are people who rail against materialism and proclaim that Americans have forgotten the “reason for the season”. I am not one of these people. The argument goes that we lose sight of what is important and replace family and faith with shopping, movies and television. Being away from home this year naturally makes one think about all the things he is missing. What I found is that I did not miss the material things, in themselves; rather I missed the modern day traditions that are signified by these material things. Christmas shopping with my sister for my parents, going to a romantic comedy with my sister, mother and grandmother and watching hours upon hours of college football with my dad and friends constitute the traditions that bring me close to my friends and family and these traditions have been with me for all my life
.
Fortunately, I was not the only person in Burkina who was missing these traditions. The other Peace Corps Volunteers do a tremendous job and banding together to enjoy the holidays, reflect and even try to emulate the traditions we are missing at home. What follows is an account of my holiday season:
I spent Christmas in my city of Fada with three female volunteers from nearby villages. I bought a pathetic plastic Christmas tree from a stand that sells liquor and stickers of the Virgin Mary. I put the girls’ presents underneath the tree. They were wrapped in notebook paper and then colored to resemble actual wrapping paper. Christmas morning began by waking up the girls with, Mariah Carry’s “All I Want for Christmas”. It was the only Christmas song we had, so we played it on repeat until we could not take it anymore. Shortly after that we opened the presents that we had bought for each other in the local market. I received a pair of white plastic loafers and a machete. We next moved on to making a huge brunch that included omelets, French toast, hash browns and fruit salad. While I am sure that I could find finer brunches in America, no brunch has ever tasted as good. All and all, Christmas was great; not as great as being at home with my family and friends, but the surrogate family we have created over here makes life much easier.
The next week was filled for preparation for our New Years Eve Celebration, which was a themed Moustache and Turtleneck Party. The theme was actually given to me by a friend who had to return to the States. It was a party that he and his friends created to College and continued well into the five years after his college career had ended. He so cherished this party that he and his friend went to tremendous lengths to ensure that it could continue even though they were now working in the corporate world where it is inappropriate and unprofessional to grow a beard or moustache. The resolution to their problem was found in charity.
One of his friends spoke with the ‘Make a Wish’ Foundation and organized all the paperwork for a “Beard-a-Thon”. Shortly after Thanksgiving the annual patrons of the Moustache and Turtleneck party took the fundraiser sheets to their respective bosses, thus forcing the bosses to say NO to the ‘Make a Wish’ Foundation. Without fail, no bosses could say “No”; the patrons raised money for charity and were able to continue the tradition. The reason I give the back-story of this party is to demonstrate the lengths to which people have gone to preserve it. I have already mentioned the importance of emulating American traditions in Africa; and for Kevin, it was important to bring this time honored tradition to Burkina Faso. In his absence, I wanted to make sure his vision was carried out to fruition.
We scoured the local market, which in all seriousness, is better than any thrift store in America. The girls were able to find one piece jumpsuits of crushed velvet and satin. I was able to find a red turtleneck and seersucker pants. The other Peace Corps Volunteers were able to find similar treasures at their local markets and thus, the themed New Year’s was a success.
The next morning I awoke cold and shivering. Africa changes you, the other day I thought that it was quite pleasant and even mild, maybe somewhere in the high 70s; I then came to learn that it was, in fact, 100 degrees. The point being, you get used to the heat and when it actually is in the mid 70s you are freezing. As the sun continued to rise over the steppe, it became warmer and more people began to wake up. New Years Day, was not filled with watching football, but instead filled with watching elephants. Any pictures that I post at a later time can not convey how amazing it was to be 100 feet away from wild African Elephants. Amazing is a word that could easily be replaced by intimidating or crazy, though these emotions are lost in the photo’s because pictures of wild elephants are ubiquitous on travel/adventure shows, and magazines like National Geographic. The experience of walking across the tall grass of the West Africa with my good friends and then coming upon a pack of elephants as the first day of the New Year began to break is an experience that I will be hard pressed to forget. With this, a very unique holiday season came to a close. I wish everyone a happy 2006 and I look forward to ringing in the next New Year in the United States.
.
Fortunately, I was not the only person in Burkina who was missing these traditions. The other Peace Corps Volunteers do a tremendous job and banding together to enjoy the holidays, reflect and even try to emulate the traditions we are missing at home. What follows is an account of my holiday season:
I spent Christmas in my city of Fada with three female volunteers from nearby villages. I bought a pathetic plastic Christmas tree from a stand that sells liquor and stickers of the Virgin Mary. I put the girls’ presents underneath the tree. They were wrapped in notebook paper and then colored to resemble actual wrapping paper. Christmas morning began by waking up the girls with, Mariah Carry’s “All I Want for Christmas”. It was the only Christmas song we had, so we played it on repeat until we could not take it anymore. Shortly after that we opened the presents that we had bought for each other in the local market. I received a pair of white plastic loafers and a machete. We next moved on to making a huge brunch that included omelets, French toast, hash browns and fruit salad. While I am sure that I could find finer brunches in America, no brunch has ever tasted as good. All and all, Christmas was great; not as great as being at home with my family and friends, but the surrogate family we have created over here makes life much easier.
The next week was filled for preparation for our New Years Eve Celebration, which was a themed Moustache and Turtleneck Party. The theme was actually given to me by a friend who had to return to the States. It was a party that he and his friends created to College and continued well into the five years after his college career had ended. He so cherished this party that he and his friend went to tremendous lengths to ensure that it could continue even though they were now working in the corporate world where it is inappropriate and unprofessional to grow a beard or moustache. The resolution to their problem was found in charity.
One of his friends spoke with the ‘Make a Wish’ Foundation and organized all the paperwork for a “Beard-a-Thon”. Shortly after Thanksgiving the annual patrons of the Moustache and Turtleneck party took the fundraiser sheets to their respective bosses, thus forcing the bosses to say NO to the ‘Make a Wish’ Foundation. Without fail, no bosses could say “No”; the patrons raised money for charity and were able to continue the tradition. The reason I give the back-story of this party is to demonstrate the lengths to which people have gone to preserve it. I have already mentioned the importance of emulating American traditions in Africa; and for Kevin, it was important to bring this time honored tradition to Burkina Faso. In his absence, I wanted to make sure his vision was carried out to fruition.
We scoured the local market, which in all seriousness, is better than any thrift store in America. The girls were able to find one piece jumpsuits of crushed velvet and satin. I was able to find a red turtleneck and seersucker pants. The other Peace Corps Volunteers were able to find similar treasures at their local markets and thus, the themed New Year’s was a success.
The next morning I awoke cold and shivering. Africa changes you, the other day I thought that it was quite pleasant and even mild, maybe somewhere in the high 70s; I then came to learn that it was, in fact, 100 degrees. The point being, you get used to the heat and when it actually is in the mid 70s you are freezing. As the sun continued to rise over the steppe, it became warmer and more people began to wake up. New Years Day, was not filled with watching football, but instead filled with watching elephants. Any pictures that I post at a later time can not convey how amazing it was to be 100 feet away from wild African Elephants. Amazing is a word that could easily be replaced by intimidating or crazy, though these emotions are lost in the photo’s because pictures of wild elephants are ubiquitous on travel/adventure shows, and magazines like National Geographic. The experience of walking across the tall grass of the West Africa with my good friends and then coming upon a pack of elephants as the first day of the New Year began to break is an experience that I will be hard pressed to forget. With this, a very unique holiday season came to a close. I wish everyone a happy 2006 and I look forward to ringing in the next New Year in the United States.
