A Relief In Rain

I've noticed something lately that has me towards the edge of worry. Not worried about myself nor the direct future. A distant worry.

In total, I saw two fights in my first two years of service here. The first was between ten year olds. They were wrestling. One accidentally bit the other's finger (hard) and it turned into fisty-cuffs. The second wasn't even in Burkina. Not but moments into Ghana, two men were slugging it out at the first major town we passed.

Things have changed in the last month. Along the bus ride to Saponey, two men in the fields were pulling at each other. Same at the Kongoussi-route stop at the edge of Ouaga, only this time it was a teenager and old man. Again, before getting onto a bush-taxi for Sindou.

The unrest in Burkina has meant something. Perhaps this is it. Whatever one says of reform, punishment or revolution, perhaps the most common impact is stress, that tension that builds into confrontation.

It would be a hard stretch to say that Burkina is violent. Far from it. A few fights is hardly pandemic. It only shows a raised tension. As each volunteer has felt, so have the traveling merchant and the ticket boy, the farmers in their fields and the two taxi operators. Each has felt the pressure from military unrest and looting, soaring food prices, school closures, cotton farmer boycotts, heavier foreign investments in gold mines, sugarcane workers' protests, so on and so forth.

Having endured these three months of sporadic unrest, the rains here are welcomed more than ever. Not only for the refreshing burst of green that hits the landscape but for the promise of work, hard work. The fields will be torn apart and seeded. Backs will break in the sweat of it all. The breaking of ground can be that violent outbreak, that release of stress.

One hopes for a strong season and consistent rain for it means good work and food. Without those, I wonder what sort of other trends will show.

A Final Week (in protest)

This week was ruined by casual protests. A swarm of teachers pulled me from my exam to recruit me. They had a movement. For whatever good that movement meant, it hardly seems like it would do well for my students. Their week of final exams was naught. A single vocabulary test is all that we could manage to produce as a grade for this final portion. A vocabulary test more important now than it seemed at the time.

Teachers are meant to be bastions of thoughtfulness, action built out of thorough reflection. How short we fall! This week, I had no choice. My foreigner place does not give me the luxury of argument and going against too many grains. Oh that I could have spoke freely! When petitioning the government, what is the difference between taking the test and refusing to give the grades and refusing to give the test? Both would accomplish the same task, a shutdown of the school’s apparatus. Yet, by not surveying the exams, we have hurt our students. Their opportunities to gain those few extra points are lost in the bumbling smoke spewing forth from the exhaust pipes of fleeing teachers. They are off to gather and casually chat.

In the meantime, I will wait out the remainder of the week and nod my heads at my kids as they pass me on the road. They will shout “It isn’t easy, sir!” and I will reply, “I know” with a wave. The stress of the moment will leave me but those missing hours of lessons will never find their way into those smiling heads. Something is lost in the muddle even if the teachers have found their higher pay.