Yel Kaye - Travel Blog, Writing and Photography » Development

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with excerpts from my research.

Caitlin — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:45:19 +0000

Man: The way you look at polygamy is the way we think when we look at your culture on television and see two women or two men getting married. It’s scandalous! We don’t understand!

Woman: We intellectual women fight for the liberation of women, but in our homes our husbands still try to maintain their authority. Our husbands do not want intellectual women changing the rules of the game.

Man: If a man can get more than one wife, all we can do for him is clap.

(Considering making that last quote the subtitle for my paper.)

In retrospect, I’m glad I chose polygamy in Burkina Faso as my topic.
25 days before I leave for traveling… 25 pages left to write before then if I want to graduate. Life is pretty good! Can’t wait to hit the road!

Caitlin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:10:09 +0000

In less than six months, I will be back in West Africa, and it’s all I really think about these days. I feel another world away from Sapone right now. It’s practically a blizzard outside, my socks are soaking wet, and I’m listening to the piano soundtrack to Amelie. I just checked my email, and received my daily news update from Burkina Faso. One of the recent stories is a quick, three sentence piece reporting that there is no famine yet, but farmers are worried about the lack of rainfall. A short little three line story summarizing what will probably mean malnutrition and maybe even starvation in villages like Sapone.

It’s funny. If you ask most people about their vision of Third World poverty, they’d probably tell you about crowded, urban slums you always see on TV. But I think just as often, at least in countries like Burkina Faso, the worst poverty isn’t in the cities, it’s in the countryside. There, villagers have large, family compounds and there’s none of the chaos of the city. It might be easy not to notice the poverty if you quickly drove by. All you’d see are smiling children running through your car, old men drinking dolo in the shade, farmers bent over in the field, and colourfully-dressed women carrying water on their heads. You might only notice a graceful kind of dignity that surrounds the place.

But if you look closer, you’ll see that the poverty in the countryside is quieter. Like my friend Emily wrote, the poverty was not necessarily “that of potbellied children with flies crawing at their eyes. It appeared instead as the constant pressure of precarious finances, constrained choices and a lack of opportunity, thrown in among the commutes, errands, housework, gossipand all the other little things that make up life anywhere.” This kind of poverty is not nearly as dramatic as that you see on television, but I don’t think it’s any better. Nervously eyeing the clouds after a rainstorm ends too quickly. Millet every day, rice on special occasions, one or two meals a day, meat once or twice a year. Out of seven children, picking the brightest boy and only putting him in school. Dressing your children in donated clothing, a Tupac shirt for her and a an Osama Bin Laden shirt for him. Sending your daughter to work as a maid, so you will be able to pay for her high school tuition. Having to ask strange foreigners for money, but still offering them dinner when they visit. Being able to buy a cellphone, but not clean water or mosquito nets.

But you might not notice all this. It’s not crowded in the village, so it’s not in your face. At first glance, all you might see is the warmth and beauty that hides frustration with the present and anxiety about the future.

Cultural Relativism.

Caitlin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:24:31 +0000

On Tuesday, I almost started to cry in class when we started talking about cultural relativity. A year ago, on June 21st, 2006, I made the following post to my old livejournal from the slow-as-hell internet cafe in Sapone:

The stars here are amazing. You can see so many. Last night, when it was still 30-some degrees at midnight, the three of us and a Burkinabe friend lied out on a mat and stared at the stars for hours. We counted over a dozen shooting stars and argued over whether the light in the sky was the Milky Way or a narrow cloud.

I have been pretty bummed out today. Before I came here, people always told me to never judge the way things are here, to keep cultural relativity in mind. But sometimes it is so hard. How can I accept the way women are treated here? Every day, I see the little girls slave away the whole day while the boys run and play. My job here might be data entry, but every time I type in a student’s personal information, and write why so many girls quit school so early, I have to type in that yet another fifteen year old girl has been taken out of school and married off. Last night we had some friends over for wine, and we learned that these particular (well-educated) guys that we hang out are incredulous that we don’t realize that women are inferior and that the Bible gives them the right to beat their wives. My friend Adeline, a young Burkinabe woman my age, told me that even educated men here want to keep their women ignorant, because they find educated women too emancipated. I know that I am not supposed to judge, but it is so easy for us politically correct social science students to talk about cultural relativity and the importance of not judging when we are the women who get to sit in our comfortable homes, gaze at out university degrees, and (for most) live without beatings from our husbands, who we get to choose.

Also, I miss dairy products. But I think I will get over this second complaint. The status of women here is likely to continue to haunt me, however. I have grown quite fond of the small girls and teenage women living near me here, and it depresses me to think about their futures.

It’s now October 2007, and I still feel pissed off. Cultural relativity can be a good thing. A month after getting back, I realized that some of the things that perplexed me about Burkinabe society – overwhelming emphasis on family and community, not individuality, for example – made more and more sense when I reflected upon the cultural context of the village. Suddenly, the slow pace of life in West Africa seemed a whole lot more civilized than my lonely commute every morning, rushing from bus to train to streetcar without so much as looking at my fellow passengers.

But I will never accept the argument of cultural relativity when it comes to what I hold to be basic human rights. One of these, of course, is women’s right to equal opportunities, equal treatment, and, most importantly, a life free from abuse.

Saying this, I can already hear the groans from the uber politically-correct development studies students. I’m unfairly imposing my beliefs on a different culture, they might say. Gender equality is not valued in all cultures, and it is ignorant of me to expect otherwise.

But fuck it, seriously. Any such arguments are only suggesting that the little girls and young women of Sapone don’t deserve the same things that I take for granted. And no matter what I hear in development studies I’m not going to accept otherwise.