Leaving Burkina Faso

I am leaving Ouaga this evening. It was not easy just to be here, walking around streets and having food at the restaurant as an unpaid intern without speaking French. But thinking back on it, it was a very good setting to observe a different culture and learn from every single moment.

There were many stories during the time. People think Korea is a part of Arabia and asked me about perspectives of US - Arab economic cooperation :) One day, I was told that I had got malaria by a local hospital. I started to Google about malaria and the more I read about it, the more I got into a panic. The next day, I went to another hospital run by a French doctor and it turned out that I didn't have malaria. People in the Ouaga office helped me in various ways, from gathering information for my paper to bar hopping on weekends. I was very lucky to work with such nice people both in the HQ and the country office.

After seeing a bit of Burkina Faso, there have been some changes in my thoughts. Before coming here, I read a lot of documents on Burkina Faso and unconsciously concluded that economic growth is almost impossible in this, one of the poorest countries in the world where the poverty rate is more than 60%, average lifespan is around 50 years, the unemployment rate is more than 80% in 20s and 30s, and the more people study the higher unemployment rate…

However, after talking to people, especially women, I found that there are a lot of opportunities here for Burkina to boost its economy, such as moving up its live stock value chain to meat export and making more value added oil seed products, among the projects that I have looked through.

Burkina's currently GDP is more or less the same as South Korea's economic level after the Korean War. If I were a policy maker in South Korea at that time, I would have envied Burkina Faso, with good weather for agriculture and live animal production and political stability. After 50 years, South Korea became the 11th largest economy in the world and China and Viet Nam are growing even faster than Korea.

Of course it is not that simple and there are a lot of constraints. However, I could not find any reason why Burkina cannot overcome to be the same as Korea. The only thing is how much desire people have for its economic development including its government.

I am hoping that someday in the near future, when I tell Burkinabe children how Burkina was when I was doing an internship there in 2008, they will think of my story as a fairy tale, as I do when I listen my father’s talks about his childhood in Korea, not having shoes and one hour walking to go to school: the fairy tale which I never experienced and a far away story in my imagination. As big a jump can be achieved within our lifetime, within one generation.

After being here a few weeks

After being here a few weeks, I feel I am far away from other parts of the world whenever I have chances to talk to people.

My friend, Yoonjung, is in Korea now and complaining about how boring her work is after working at the same company for a while. She feels that there is not much learned or much achievement and she does not know what to do.

My classmates in the US worry about the tuition for the next year. And they say it is so miserable to be poor.

A Korean newspaper on the internet talks about the risk of having mad cow disease from imported beef from the US.

Everything must be so very important to you and you might feel terrible for your situation. But I feel like none of those issues is that big after being a Burkina this little while. All of us are too-happy people according to Laundry’s standard. We can have a job and get an education. We can also eat.

Lunch at McDonalds

A few days after arriving, I had a chance to talk to a good friend of mine in Dublin. He worried if I got sick because of the food in Burkina and told me, “just eat at McDonalds”

“Mc.. do.. nalds? Sweetheart, There is no such a thing here!” I was thinking one of us is abnormal. How can he think there is McDonalds in a country like Burkina? Or how I can think everybody knows there is no McDonalds in Burkina? Or why am I even somewhere where there is no McDonalds… After thinking for a while, I concluded he is abnormal.

After a few days, while travelling to a small village not far from Bobo, I found McDonalds. Oh… he was perfectly normal and I was the stupid one. I followed American tradition, eating at Mcdonalds after travelling all the way to Burkina, and found that it was best McDonalds I have ever been to. I had a cuscus with tomato sauce as well as Burkina beer, which is amazing. The African paintings on the walls and West African music made the place perfect for late lunch on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

(McDonalds in Banfora, Burkina Faso)

We came here to show off

I was walking on the street by myself when I got attacked. A strange looking guy was coming close to me and followed me when I tried to retrace my route. He hit my shoulder and tried to get my bag from my shoulder. I saw some people cross the street and shouted. The guy who hit me was laughing at me and imitated my shout with unpleasant teasing laughter, and people on the street also laughed at the scene. No one came to stop him. I left the place quickly and went to back to hotel soon. However the incident made me nervous for a whole day.

The guy was not really trying to steal my bag or doing something harmful to me. I could see he was crazy person with his half naked / half homeless look. He just wanted to scare me and made fun of me being scared. Even though people are generally very nice, it is not surprising there are always crazy people in a big city. However, what I was surprised by was people’s reaction to the attack. No one wanted to help me or stop him. They are more like watching it as entertainment.

Sometime, I feel people want to provoke foreigners. Whatever I do, sleeping at the cheapest inn and eating a baguette for a dinner on the street, we are too rich for them. Just the fact that we came all the way here to do unpaid work is too luxurious for them.

It is not pleasant to see a rich foreigner walking around the street, when they don’t have anything to eat and wear. If the foreigner is young, and even a woman, it is much more unpleasant.

It is surprising to hear sometimes what people think about foreigners. My friend Margo asked her coworker if there is any good place to jog. And her coworker told her “jogging is what foreigners doing for showing off”

What do I know about this country?

Bobo was beautiful. The city is so green and full of live music. This live town was full of diverse people from different villages who gather here to sell their crops in Grande Marche and many tourists who cross West Africa. We went to a nice bar with West African dancing and had a good beer. We could also see most of the touristic spots which lonely planet recommended. Hippo lakes, Banfora…

And we arrived at a small village where one of the ethnic groups lives. There are no such things as electricity, a water system and roads. People live in traditional houses, which are less than 2 meters in diameter, without windows or chimney. There is no TV, no shower… no anything.

But there was everything. There were handicraft artisans, women who make rice cakes and corn beer and happy children playing with chickens. They are located on the top of the rock hill, which protect them from invasion. They have several places for different kinds of ritual ceremony and a person who is in charge of the ceremony. They have their own rule and customs. They also have a village wide dance party.

When I was in DC, I felt that I knew everything about Burkina after reading more than two boxes of documents, from its fiscal stability, debt analysis, export promotion strategy, growth diagnosis, the impact of exchange rate on recent cotton exports, employment study, gender issues, poverty profile, recent food price crisis, and so on.

But, the way people live here is so different with the ways I know. I just felt that I don’t know anything about this country.

Weekend trip - Bobo Dioulaso

Trip to Bobo

I happened to attend an event in DC held by the Burkinabe president and got to know some ministers before coming to Burkina. During my stay, it was very helpful to know them, to know more about this country and have some close contact with government people.

The first weekend in Burkina, I could even join the minister’s team to visit Bobo to attend a ceremony. So I decided to have a weekend trip to Bobo Dioulaso and shared a car with Laundry and Gilles, bodyguards of the minister.

When I had not yet fully landed in Burkina’s environment, it was quite brave to go out of the city, travelling to Bobo, the second largest city and 5 hours driving distance from Ouaga. When the car entered the already darkening highway I must have had a scared look, surrounded by guys twice as big as me. (Both of them are as tall as my classmate Peter, and Gilles was even bigger than Eric White)

Laundry was a very considerate person and wanted to help me to feel better and told me, “don’t worry. There is one gun here and another one is there. If something happens, we will protect you”… I could not dare to reply to him that ‘Laundry… what I am afraid of is mosquitoes…’. The trip to Bobo started like this.

My friend laundry

After some hours of driving, I could stop thinking about mosquitoes and guns, and started to talk to Laundry. He is from a village near Kotanoe and joined the army 11 years ago, right after his middle school. He has been working for this minister for most of his army life since this minister used to be a general of the navy. Now he has two children and a house in Ouaga.

After getting to know him a bit more, I asked him “do you like your job?” But he looked at me with confused eyes for a second and told me, “there is no such thing as liking the job or not here. If you are lucky enough to have a job, you work”

To be honest, I was quite embarrassed by his answer. I came all the way to Burkina to do development work, but stupidly, I had not being prepared for this kind of answer. I just wanted to make up for myself being an ignorant foreigner or development rookie and told him, “I was just wondering if you are happy…” and he told me with a naïve smile, “yes, I am happy with my life. I bought a motorbike for my parents” I felt myself like Marie Antoinette who said that “if people don’t have bread, why don’t they eat cake?” and shut my mouth up.

The same day, Margo experienced a similar conversation. She asked a child, what do you like to eat? And was told that “there is no such thing as you like or not like here. If you have food, you are happy and you eat.”

White girl from Korea

In Burkina, people call me a white girl. When I first heard that, I thought they had made a mistake and I told them, “I am not a white, I am from Korea.” Then they told me, “you are a white girl from Korea.” Later on, I found that there are two races here, black and non black, which is white.

Come to think of it, in Korea we also didn’t have those words like white, black and yellow before we opened up our country to Western countries. We called some foreigners colored-eyed people in the 18th century. Maybe people didn’t recognize much difference in skin colors when the first European, Dutch fisherman, Hamel, came to Korea by typhoon.

My friend Denise was taught a song in a US church when she was a child. The lyric was that god loves all kids, black, yellow and white, and she could not understand the meaning. Those words are commonly used in many countries with different races, but they convey a stereotype.