Where does Shea butter come from?

Last month, I got a chance to visit a village near mine that makes high quality Shea butter (no, I can't tell the difference in Shea butter quality, I am going off of what people tell me). A friend of mine started helping the women transport the butter to cities from their village because there is not a big enough market for the butter in their village and they don't have transportation aside from walking. My friend asked if I could go with him to see the group and then use my mad PCV skills to help them, finding other markets and ways to transport the product there.
I showed up to the village and was greeted by a large group of women, all in various stages of making Shea butter. They greeted me and, in the usual Burkina style, offered me water and food. After the initial pleasantries, they proceeded to show me how one actually makes the Shea butter:

Step One - start with Shea butter seeds.

Step Two - soak the seeds in hot water, then dry them in the sun.

Step Three - pound the seeds

Step Four - roast the seeds

Step Five - Grind the pieces into a thick liquid state (or use a mill if you have one)

Step Six - mix the Shea goop

Step Seven - stir over heat to separate oil from the semi-solid parts

Step Eight - Let it cool into a butter consistency


And there you have it! All you need now is your own Shea tree, right? :)

*If some reader out there happens to be an expert in Shea butter making or interested in becoming such, I admit that there could be errors/something left out of my process. I'm going off pictures I took and my memory, I am not claiming to be an expert on it.

8 Mars - International Women's Day

March 8th is International Women’s Day and a recognized holiday in Burkina Faso. My village throws a big party to celebrate. Mostly I think they just want to throw a party but I still appreciate the effort they put into it. This year’s 8 Mars was essentially the same as last year and this gave me a great opportunity to see just how far I’ve come in the past year.

To start off, there was a women’s bike race. Last year, I knew there was a bike race in the morning but crazily enough, I didn't get the program informing me what time everything started and I missed it. This year, I asked around and of course there was not an actual time it was to start so I wandered over to the road and chilled out there chatting with some friends while we waited for it to start.

Then while we had a crowd gathered after the race, my counterpart put together a presentation to talk about the hygiene things we learned about at a latrine workshop we attended together. He essentially planned the thing himself and it might sound cheesy but I was so proud. It really is a PCV's dream to become unnecessary in a good way. I watched my counterparts do everything themselves while I stood on the sidelines.

Later in the afternoon, there was a men's soccer game and then a women's soccer game. I almost played in it - if they had asked me again I would have said yes but since they didn't, I was content to watch women run around ridiculously in their nice clothes and absolutely NOT follow the rules of soccer.

Me wearing the pattern my villagers picked out for the holiday holding a baby wearing Burkina Faso's national pattern for the holiday

After the game, there was a little dancing. It was a taste of what was to come later that night. Then we ate massive amounts of rice. After dinner, everyone grabbed a piece of ground to set up camp. People actually were setting up camp and taking naps before a night of all night dancing. And once the dancing did start, my crazy villagers really did dance all night long. I got different reports ranging from 3 to 6 in the morning but in either case, they went crazy. (I went home by midnight, being the old lady I am). The dancing was done to balafones which is like a wooden xylophone and drums. The popular dance move in my village is to walk around in a circle and our circle got HUGE! Every time I looked around there were more people dancing. It took up at least half of the soccer field! All in all, it was a very fun day - one of my best in village to date. It made it even better to see how different it was from last year. The activities were identical to those of last year but this year instead of being overwhelmed all day long I enjoyed it all.

An Analysis of 5 Common Jobs in Burkina Requiring No Education (in order from worst to best according to the humble opinion of the author)

Brick maker – These men wait until it is dry season and then chop and carve mud/dirt bricks out of the ground. They work all day long in the hot sun (and dry season also happens to be hot season!) chopping away at rocks with machetes. To top it all off, I don’t think bricks cost that much so all they get from this torturous work is back problems and heat stroke. *And most of them also cultivate during rainy season!
Summary: Loads of manual labor in the sun, little payoff

Farmer – Most people are farmers, even if they have another side job. As soon as rainy season begins, they set out to their field to plant their crops of corn, sorghum, millet, cotton, peanuts, or rice (usually some combination of these). In my village, some people have to walk to fields as far as 13 km away and sleep there during the height of things instead of trekking back and forth every day. However, in many other villages, the fields are planted all around the houses and village. In villages like this, one has to know where things are because you can not see houses or stores amidst the tall stalks of millet. Anyways, farmers work in their fields continuously through rainy season. My village was deserted from June until October (with some people working in fields as late as December). All of these crops are cultivated by hand so it is a very tedious and time consuming process.
Most crops like corn, millet, and sorghum, and rice are stored in storehouses and eaten throughout the year. Some might be sold but a large portion is eaten by the people who grow them. Other crops like cotton are sold, I assume to the Burkina Faso cotton company, Sofitex.
Summary: Lots of manual labor in the sun but you get food and a little money, so that’s a plus

Boutique/small shop owner – These people sit in their small, usually claustrophobically packed shack of a store selling random things all day long. Many people, especially if it’s mainly the woman of the family who holds down the fort, even cook meals next to their boutique.
Summary: Minimal manual labor, spending all day in the shade. The downfall of this job (according to the opinion of yours truly) is that you are in the same spot all day every day.

Marché lady – These women spend their days in the marché selling produce. Usually, all the ladies clumped together are selling basically the same products – tomatoes, onions, eggplants, etc. How do you pick who to buy from? I don’t know how Burkinabe do it, I just walk around awkwardly inspecting the produce of everyone in search of the prettiest looking veggies.
Summary: Similar to a boutique owner, these people have very minimal manual labor involved in their job and spend the day in the shade. The upside, though, is that even though they stay in the same spot all day, they are surrounded by their friends and get to chatter and gossip all day long.

Bush Taxi driver/loader/money taker – These people drive and ride back and forth between two destinations, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. The loader (who is also sometimes the money taker) throws any baggage or bicycles or anything else you can imagine travelling with (goats and chickens, for example) on top of the old creaky van and ties it there. Sometimes if the van is full, they ride on top with the bags et al. I think driver and money taker are pretty self-explanatory.
Summary: you get to drive around on the open road all day, constantly meeting and talking with new people, and feeling the wind on your face. Overall, I’d say a pretty sweet gig. I wouldn’t mind doing it, that’s for sure.

Misunderstandings and Renewed Hope

A few times throughout our service, someone from the Peace Corps office in Ouaga comes to visit our humble sites. Last week, one of the staff came to visit my site. He inspected my house, finding lots of mouse holes and places where scorpions apparently like hiding (I have only seen one scorpion in my time here but he said they were the perfect scorpion hiding places). I didn’t have a gate; there is no shade-providing hangar in my yard.
Then we went to the CSPS where we had a meeting with my two counterparts. I expected it to be more of a formality than anything because here, people always like to be “informed” of things and greeted especially when someone comes from out of town. I also expected them to be given a little grief into helping me bully the carpenter into getting my gate and hangar made (did I mention I ordered them over 6 months ago, stop by at least once a week to ask about their progress, and they STILL hadn’t been made?). However, it turned into an awkward situation where my counterparts were yelled at for not working enough with me. Being an American, I do NOT like yelling but here yelling is how you get things done. While the yelling was uncomfortable, ultimately I think it was a good thing. Misunderstandings between my counterparts and I were brought to light and now I can work to fix them.
Another thing I realized after this visit was that I had been feeling a little defeated by Burkina and development work in general. I didn’t know I was feeling this way until suddenly, with some misunderstandings cleared and a spark in the form of chastisement was lit under my counterparts, I didn’t feel that way anymore. Suddenly, I’m feeling very enthusiastic and optimistic about my last 10 months here and the work I hope to accomplish.
And I’ll try to keep you posted on these endeavors as they happen
Peace out!

So how does one spend their time in the BF?

It has recently been brought to my attention that after over a year here, I haven’t done a very good job of shedding light on my day to day life. So I will begin my post by trying to better illuminate village life.
By the time I wake up around 7 AM (a little later the few weeks a year it’s below 80˚) everyone in village is awake. The women are busy, finding wood to cook with or pounding something (rice, millet, corn, etc) and sweeping their courtyard. I drink some instant coffee while eating oatmeal or the previous night’s leftovers if it’s not hot season. After a couple of hours to myself, I head out to the CSPS. While I’m there, I generally hang out in the pharmacy or the maternity. I help with little things as needed until lunch time. While I’m doing this, village women are still pounding things and preparing lunch/dinner (usually one meal is prepared a day and the family just eats throughout the evening until it’s gone). If it’s rainy season, people are in the fields planting and weeding and whatever else goes into growing crops.
At lunch time I bike back home, stopping at my village’s mini-marché on the way. At its best, there are tomatoes, onions, cabbage, garlic, aubergines, hot peppers, yams, and very occasionally, green peppers and lettuce. At its worst, it has onions, some very sketchy looking tomatoes, and dried hot peppers.
I buy whatever veggies I need and continue home to cook them with rice or pasta. After lunch, it’s the beautiful time called repose. Sometimes I nap, sometimes I read, but it’s almost always a time to not move during the hottest part of the day. The rest of the village tends to be lounging around under trees.
When the sun starts to lose the worst of its intensity, I visit neighbors or hang out with people who have come to visit me (mostly this consists of children, though lately I’ve had a few more adult visitors than usual!). Visiting someone usually means being offered a stool to sit on and a bowl of tô to eat. The women almost always keep doing whatever they were doing when you I arrived and very little talking takes place (unless there’s a group of women and then they talk too much and too fast for me to understand anything).
Once the sun goes down, I take a bucket bath and settle in to read or write letters by candle light. Sometimes a couple of my neighbors come over and they use my battery-powered light to do their homework. The past couple weeks they’ve brought over some leaves that we boil in water until the water turns red. We take out the leaves, add sugar, and enjoy (Okay, I’ll be honest – I’m mostly enjoying the company and drinking the beverage to be polite). Then eventually it’s time to go to sleep, and my exciting day is done!
A few notes on life in general:
Amenities – There is no electricity in my village. For water, there are wells and a few community faucets of water where people get water by the giant bowl full (or, for those of us who can’t carry 25 L on our heads, by the 30 L yellow gasoline jug strapped to the back of my bike!)
Language – Some people speak “village” French and essentially everyone speaks Jula and Gouin. I can get around in Jula and greet people in Gouin, but I rely heavily on gestures especially when talking with women. Days can pass when the only person I speak English to is myself.
Getting Around – I ride my bike everywhere, and there are many families that have bikes. Some people have motorcycles/mopeds and there are two cars in my village. Getting around village, most people walk.

Happy Mid-Service!

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been here over a year! But there have been a few instances recently when it has been very obvious that not only is my life incredibly different over here but that I am so used to it I don’t always notice when things are “amiss” by American standards. This change stood out exceptionally when I spent a day with my fellow PCV and her parents who were visiting from the States. Things that we thought were nice or even luxurious – a private car that didn’t break down where you weren’t sitting on top of someone or getting tetanus from the rusty spring poking your butt or a hotel that had a real toilet and air conditioning – they found to be severely subpar. Another thing they kept saying was how difficult, sad, and downright miserable life is here, not just for PCV’s but especially for Burkinabe. With one week in country, I can see that mindset. However, I can safely say that my life is not miserable (no matter how much PCV’s like to complain amongst ourselves). Sure some days I am hot and trying without success to make something work but most days are fine.

I have also noticed that my good days here are almost impossible to convey to people back home. So I’ll try but I don’t know how this will come across. If my bike hasn’t broken and given me problems and a mouse hasn’t tortured me all night with his presence in my house and the kids listen to me and realize I’ll be nicer to them when they don’t harass me and I’m not compared to another volunteer (too much) and I am amused by my neighbor’s curiosity (read: nosiness) instead of irritated by it and I say the right ridiculous things to get people to laugh and have a conversation…these things make a good day. It’s so many little things not going wrong that leave me with a feeling that I live here and the next year will be fine and not overwhelming and I’ll actually like it. See? That hardly sounds like a good day when put into words, even to me! But I feel great about myself and life at the end of them.

So let’s see, life in village. My closest PCV neighbor and I threw a Halloween party. It was going to be really fun (candy, cookies, mask decorating, dancing, bobbing for aubergines…) but massive amounts of kids came who I had never met and it got kind of crazy and we had to end the party after only a few activities.

I found some wonderful books that are in Jula (one of my local languages) and are photos of people in West Africa doing daily things – market day, making certain foods, making dolo (locally made millet beer). They are great! I read them to the kids and they love them. At the end of the book about making dolo, it says “But attention! Dolo is not for children!” Yes, this seems obvious to not give children alcohol but here it is not so obvious and can lead to some crazy things. Which segues nicely into my next anecdote…

My neighbors are a great family, with polite, healthy kids and a clean courtyard . Often, the ten or thirteen year old will watch their baby sister, Pascaline, who is 2. One day, the three of them came over after school. Pascaline likes me and was happy to see me, but she was acting crazy. She ran around in circles then fall over, then giggle and get back up and run around until she fell over or ran into me. “Pascaline!” I exclaimed, “What is wrong with you?!”
“Oh,” replied her sister, “Can’t you smell it? She drank too much dolo!”
“What? Who the heck would give her dolo?” I demanded.
“Well, we were in school, our parents were in the fields, so we left her with the old people.”
(I should also note that most old people in my village spend all day long drinking dolo)
While I certainly do NOT approve of this, what could I do but laugh at the adorable baby stumbling around? Of course I said that dolo is bad for children.
“We know!” they said. “Attention!” they used their quoting voices, “Dolo is not for children!”
The next few days, I would hear kids randomly saying “Attention! Dolo is not for children!”

I will end this by stating how funny sounding the words ‘forty-four’ and ‘bottle’ are. I never noticed until I said them around a Burkinabe who cracked up, making me laugh, until we ended up on the floor laughing at how weird these words sounded as we repeated them over and over. Seriously. Just say them.

Peace out!

Ramblings of a Village Dweller

So if I were someone who followed this blog , I’d be annoyed at me for not posting in forever . So sorry, mom! Things here get more and more normal to me all the time so it is hard for me to remember things that are funny or interesting to non-PCVs. Things are going well in general; rainy season is great because it is no longer regularly over 100°F but that also means everyone is in the fields working and even the people who don't work in the fields (teachers, nurses, etc.) are convinced that doing any kind of project is impossible. That includes even thinking about maybe planning a project. As I enjoy planning, this is pretty irritating. But I just keep bothering people and hopefully in a month or two when it is no longer rainy season, people will be ready for all the things I'm bringing up.

Since there is no school kids are getting crazier and crazier. In fact, right at this very moment, a bunch of kids are just standing staring at me and my computer activities. Hooray. I will be very pleased next month when school starts.

I did do one little PC-esque thing. I made Neem Cream with my friend. Neem is one of many seemingly magical trees that Burkina has that has so many cool functions. The leaves of Neem trees can be used as a natural pesticide and when you boil them and add shea butter (shea trees are another super abundant tree here) and soap you get a natural, very inexpensive mosquito repellent! Which means reduced chances of getting malaria if you use it. So I helped my friend make it (read: gave her the recipe) and all of her neighbors love it. So now she is going to make more and try to sell it (income generating activity AND fighting malaria. BAM!)

Earlier this week was Ramadan. I celebrated the way people celebrate every holiday here: went to my friend's house and ate as much food as I could take. Which is not enough for them. They try to feed me SO MUCH and here is the thing I do not understand: why does village food taste like bitter dirt water? What is the secret ingredient that leads to it not just tasting blah but actively tasting bad??? I do not understand it. I just am thankful I can eat pretty much anything no matter the taste.
Speaking of which, last month was caterpillar month! Caterpillars were EVERYWHERE and guess what Burkinabe do with them. If you guessed eat them, you are correct. And since they are only prolific for one month all year they are quite a delicacy. So of course everyone wanted to give me some. Here's the thing, though. When they are fried well and you don't think about what you are eating, they are pretty good! I wouldn't eat them if people didn't give them to me and I certainly won't ask for them but if there is a bowl in front of me, I'll munch away and won't even be trying to calculate the minimun I have to eat so they will not force me to eat more.

And finally, a story about being villageoise (or I guess villagey in English) and also language mix ups. My friend's sister came to village to visit her one day. This sister lives in Ouaga and was very western by Burkina standards. She teaches English there so naturally everyone thought we should be friends. I felt silly in my fish pagne dress next to this lady in her collered shirt and pencil skirt and heels (WHY would you where these things in village?!) but she was nice and spoke English surprisingly well. At one point she said she didn't love her husband because he sh@t on her. WHAT?! I figured it was some poorly translated expression to say he was a jerk to her and went along with it. She kept bringint up over and over again how he sh@t on her throughout the day. Finally, she said something and from the context it suddenly clicked. "Wait," I said. "Are you saying he CHEATED on you?" "Yes, he sh@t on me," she responded. I explained that she was mispronouncing it and also explained what she was actually saying. Oh, Burkina...

Anyways, I guess that's it for now. I will try to update much sooner next time.

Peace out!!