hope

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that everyone you ask will tell you it is impossible to condense all events and experiences from one year into a 20 minute presentation. Over these last few weeks, I’ve given two presentations summarizing my experiences with MCC in Chad and Burkina Faso. Neither was an accurate summary. How could I have included enough detail in 20 minutes? So I chose to tell the following story. I’m the first to admit that these are patchwork reflections, but I hope they’ll offer some perspective on my time.

Disclaimer: the following stories are my one. I do not pretend to speak to experiences across Africa or in Chad or Burkina Faso, or even in the communities in which I lived. I’ll be representing my experiences in these places the very best way that I can.

Full disclosure: it gets a little more intangible although I’ll come back around to some more tangible stuff at the end.

I start my story back in spring of 2017 when I had the very hard job of studying abroad in the south of France for a semester (this is sarcasm). I spend five months living in a cute little apartment, attending lectures, going on wine tours, and frequenting the 24 hour bakery down the street from my front door.

I remember learning on one of the aforementioned wine tours that it takes approximately 30 years for a grapevine to reach its wine-making peak. The guide mentioned how because of this, families tended to hold onto vineyards for many generations, and winemakers would plant new vines, not for themselves, but for their children to harvest. That blew my mind.

A few weeks later I was in a tourist shop somewhere and found a little notebook – which I still own by the way – that had the following quote printed on the front:

“To plant a garden, is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn

It reminded me of the dedication and hope of the parents at the vineyards and I bought it as a souvenir. But, I never really believed in that kind of hope in tomorrow for myself. What would that feel like?

I think there is a certain kind of hopelessness among my generation. We’re saddled with lots of student debt, sometimes medical bills and there are few well-paying jobs out there. We are hearing news about climate change and natural disasters on an almost daily basis, while global political movements actively try to sow division and hatred. Could it be possible to feel hopeful in tomorrow?

This is a photo I’ve shared before, but I like it because it shows my first host family’s courtyard along with some of the lovely fruit trees. In the center (closest to my door) is the family’s guava tree. On the left side is a tree that produces “pomme cannelle” or sugar apples in English. Shading the motorcycle in the lower right corner is a mango tree. All throughout my time there, we were eating one or another fruit produced by these trees.

I found these flowers and peppers in the nun’s garden. They also had a very full basil patch which we benefited from often. One of my favorite parts of driving around the dusty city during the dry season was spotting the green oases that at first I took for parks. I soon realized they were, in fact, nurseries of trees, both big and small, planted in woven bags for sale.

After I had lived in Burkina Faso for some months, my host mom took me to visit her daughter who had just moved into a new house. Patricia – the daughter – graciously showed us around her yard in which she had recently planted several trees. She reached out to gently squeeze a small, orange-pink pomegranate on the branches of one of the trees and said, “Oh, these aren’t ready today, but I think they’ll be ready tomorrow.”

It took me the full year and then a few weeks to realize what I had been passively observing the whole time: all around me, people were planting gardens for tomorrow. For their children. For their grandchildren. They were planting hope all over the place.

So here is a picture of my small mint and basil plants in my backyard in Goshen. I’m trying to keep them alive, but already the mint plant is turning brown. Maybe her season is over this year, but I’m going to keep on planting because for me, hope is a discipline.

 

 

 

re-entry

Here I am, sitting at home in Goshen, Indiana after eleven months abroad. It doesn’t feel as strange as I expected, actually. Except for maybe the part where we have 14 hours of daylight and it is still light outside at 9:00 pm. It has messed with my sleep schedule and I am not thrilled!

I had a few airline troubles getting back to the US, but by Wednesday, July 10 I was sitting in Akron, Pennsylvania with all of my fellow SALTers playing games and sharing about our experiences. After a week of wrap-up presentations and paperwork we let loose for a cultural gala whose program was composed of funny stories, dancing, and sharing the best parts of our countries. It was certainly nice to have a bit of a buffer week alongside others who had shared experiences before getting on a plane heading home.

My family was waiting at the airport for me with flowers and Pocky sticks when I arrived in South Bend. (My sister later informed me that she had wanted to bring a sign that said “Welcome Back from Rehab” but my mother stopped her.) My brother arrived later in the week and the whole crew went on a family camping trip. It was a nice way to settle back in: lots of nature, cooking over the fire, and down time.

This summer, I’ll be spending several weeks in Goshen, then heading down to Bloomington and finally, making a trip out to California. In mid-September, I’ll be leaving for France to serve as an English teaching assistant for the 2019-2020 academic year. I am over the moon about it, but I know I have plenty of things to do in the meantime.

I’ll be sharing more about my time at my two churches in the next few weeks. First, on July 28, I’ll be sharing at Berkey Avenue Mennonite Fellowship and then on August 18, I’ll be sharing at Silverwood Mennonite Fellowship during the Sunday school hours.

I will soon be showing photos and telling stories to many of my family and friends so I’ll post just one photo of me and a fellow SALT friend at the re-entry retreat in Akron, PA. Owen served in Rwanda and I visited him and Jake, another SALTer, during my year. I can assure you, we get along fine despite the way we are posed in the photo.

And so my term with Mennonite Central Committee ends! Thank you once again for all the prayers and support.

 

days

Time is going past quickly here in Burkina and it’s a sprint to the end. I’m feeling tired, to be completely honest. I have about 15 to-do lists that are scattered across notebooks and post-its and loose sheets of paper. Sometimes I even add something along the lines of “simplify to-do lists” to whichever to-do list is on hand.

My head is a little scrambled with all the endings and beginnings that I am preparing for. I’m reminded that preparing for an ending and preparing for a new beginning are such different things and I almost feel the urge to write separate to-do lists for each of them. (I’ll try to restrain myself.)

My SALT term is coming to a close in four weeks and I’ll be heading back to the States for the summer. What can I say except that I am grateful? I am so grateful for all the people who have been with me on this year-long trek that took me places I never expected to go. I am so grateful for the emails, the messages and the phone calls that saw me through to right now. I am so grateful that I was able to share my experience – albeit in a segmented way – through this blog. I know that it will stay as a reminder of the tricky, funny and more often than I’d like to admit, awkward moments shaped my time in Chad and Burkina Faso.

I will be saying lots of goodbyes followed by many hellos in the days to come and I’ll continue to be grateful for your support in this transition time. And I’ll see some of you very soon!

rain

Ten weeks.

I moved to Burkina ten weeks ago already and it feels like the blink of an eye. What’s been going on with me? What hasn’t been going on with me? Here’s a quick recap of the top ten highlights (in no particular order).

One rainy day at the MCC office

1. Baked goods, including: banana bread (twice), strawberry biscuits and mango crisp/crumble (coming soon). Somehow, baking has become a bit of a hobby this year..(I know, me? Baking?) Anyway, I’ve had some fun figuring out what to make with whatever fruit is in season.
2. A couple really weird rainstorms. We have been (supposedly) in the thick of hot season and nobody was expecting rain until June at the earliest. However, we’ve had at least five good rainstorms in the past ten weeks which generally cool things down a few degrees.
3. So many geckos! Geckos are a constant in my life. I hear them chirping in my room. In my office. In the house. In my compound. They scurry around taking up residence behind wall hangings and under my bed. They peer down at me from my walls and eat up all the annoying mosquitoes buzzing around my room. I’ve seen some that are shorter than my pinky and others as long as my hand and some without tails. I named the little guy in my room Mr. Squeaky. Don’t ask. It just felt right.
4. Three weeks of language class that I completed in March. I studied the local language in and around Ouaga which is Morre (pronounced like “moray” in moray eel or like “that’s amore” except without the “that’s a-“).
5. Field visits! The first was to Po, close to the southern border with Ghana, which I mentioned in my last blog post. The second was a visit to an agriculture project in the western part of the country in a village called Koti.
6. Seamstress-ing? One of my host sisters is a seamstress and I started hanging around after work most days to chat with her and the other girls working there. In response, she put me to work! I’m thrilled because sewing has always intrigued me, but I’ve never had the patience to really sit down and work at it. Everyone at the shop calls me the “stagieaire” (intern) and I’m hoping to make myself a few nice souvenirs before I leave.
7. A visit to Kigali, Rwanda. (Again.) This time, it was so that I could provide childcare for an MCC meeting with a bunch of the country representatives. I spent the week working with the two SALTers in Kigali to care for 3 girls and two boys. We played entirely too many variations on tag and even created a game called “Duck Duck Goose Charades Tag.” I can send you more information on the rules and strategy by email, if you’ve got little ones to entertain for a week or more.
8. The MCC Partner Gathering. This was one of the big projects that I have been working on with MCC since I arrived. In the end, I planned a two-day training and meetings with all of our MCC partners and learned so much about the partners and projects in the process!
9. Zumba class. Because sometimes you just need to find a safe space to get down with some other ladies.
10. Get-togethers hosted by MCC reps which sometimes involve real brick oven pizza and swimming! These are much appreciated after eating my fill of rice and fish and after 10+ consecutive days with temperatures in the triple digits.

I hope to get back into posting more regularly now. (Cross your fingers for me…)

Enjoying one of the milk bars of Kigali.

My front door.

The MCC Burkina Faso team. (Back row, L to R: Kendri, Adam, Derek, (me), Kinani. Front Row, L to R: Charlotte, Sarah, Sabine, Amy, Anais)

One of these black and white animals is not like the others….

Sita and Edith working in the seamstress shop.

The street outside my house.

 

restart

I have just barely been in Burkina for a week, so it is rather uncharacteristic of me to have a post already, but I think you wonderful people deserve to be kept in the loop since I’ve had very little time in the last month to post.

On Monday, March 4, I landed at Ouagadougou International Airport and was met by Amy, the Connecting Peoples Coordinator, and Kendri, the YAMENer from DRC serving in Ouagadougou. They had brought along a cool bottle of water and after traveling for 10 hours, they had lived up to the MCC priority of “extending a cup of cold water to the thirsty.” Mission accomplished.

We zipped over to the MCC office in Amy’s car for a quick chat with the administrative assistant Abel and then to Amy’s house. I had soon dropped all my luggage, met Amy’s two cats (named Annabelle and Pendé) and found myself being served salad with homemade croutons and dressing along with fresh mango. It was a wonderful, warm welcome to my new home city!

Over the next few days, I met the rest of the MCC team in Burkina, moved in to my host family, and I even rode along on a trip two hours south of Ouagadougou to a town called Pô, where MCC has an education partner. It helps me (and my efforts at orienting myself) that the Area Directors Bruce and Betsy made one of their bi-annual visits to Burkina Faso this week. Their goal was to meet with as many partners as possible which coincided nicely with my own goals. This week ended up being a bit of a crash-course in the MCC Burkina Faso projects and partners. I’m glad no one is testing me just yet because I still feel like my brain is overflowing.

On top of all that excitement, I moved in with a new host family! While I am still getting used to their daily routines and expectations, I have settled in very quickly to my new room and surroundings. My room is equipped with the usual – a bed with mosquito net and a dresser – as well as a desk, a couple of chairs, an electric fan and a solar fan. The house has electricity most of the time, although it will fail for a few minutes to an hour at a time on occasion.

In addition to my host parents, Marie and André, I have an adult host sister, Grace, who runs a sewing shop out of the front of the house, and a host brother, Jean Joel, who is still in school. There are two other young women about my age, Jacqueline and Laurentine, who help around the house and the shop.

Friday, March 8 was International Women’s Day which is a big deal here in Burkina Faso (and was in Chad as well). Another one of Marie and André’s daughters came up to visit for the weekend with her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter. The mother’s name is Muriel and the daughter is little Ines Anaël. It has been so much fun to have them around!! Ines isn’t speaking much yet, but she is always happy to mimic whatever weird face I make at her or ceremoniously give me some papers that she had ripped to shreds.

I spent most of this week getting settled in my host family and trying to figure out my work details so that I’m ready to dive back after the long weekend. (Oh, did I mention that International Women’s Day is an official holiday that we got off from work? Looking at you, America.)

So that’s my second update for the week. Thanks for all your emails, messages, and prayers as I’ve been making this transition! I hope I’ve sated some of your curiosity about my new life, but if not, please feel free to get in touch. I’ll try to respond as quickly as time and wifi allows!

reflections

Here’s the news this week: I have left Chad and will be spending the remainder of my term with MCC in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

The backstory is that earlier in February, the MCC regional coordinators came through Chad to assess all of our programs and workers and they felt that my assignment wasn’t quite as beneficial as they had hoped. The projects that I am supposed to be working on don’t have funding yet, and they won’t be starting for another while. Really, there just wasn’t enough work for me. So, they decided to switch me to the country program in Burkina Faso.

Changes like these are never easy, and it has given me plenty to reflect on as I try to transition from my assignment in Chad to a new city, a new country, and a new culture. I appreciate your support, your thoughts and your prayers as I made this leap into the unknown.

It was only a week ago that I landed here in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso so I apologize if this news comes as a shock to any of you. I have only know that this would be happening for a few weeks and to be completely honest, the transition has left my head spinning.

The first week after I was informed by MCC about the move to Burkina Faso was spent packing up my little room in the convent in Gore, saying goodbye to friends and wrapping up my work with colleagues. My SECADEV colleagues were so sweet and threw me a going away party, even on short notice!

The next week, I was in limbo in N’Djamena. Again, I was saying goodbye to my host family and church community, but also figuring out all the paperwork and preparations which needed to be made before I arrived in Burkina.

It didn’t even truly hit me that I was leaving Chad until I was sitting on the plane taking off. And then suddenly, I was touching down in Ouaga! I hadn’t had any time to really process or prepare for the new adventure ahead of me. Thankfully, the team here in Burkina has been incredibly understanding and has afforded me so much grace as I’ve worked to adjust. The climate and language are the same, and there is significant cultural overlap which also helps with the whiplash. But, I’ve taken my sweet time this week reflecting and settling in.

I am happy to report that things have started well and I’m finally feeling like I have at least a semblance of a daily routine. Let that reassure you, even if I haven’t been great about keeping in touch just now.