Three years into a fast-track career at Amazon.com, I decided to leave it all behind and join Peace Corps. I loved my job at Amazon but I spent a little too much time behind a desk and not enough time in the service of others. As a student at the University of Washington, I had written Peace Corps off as an arts major’s fallback, but a few years later a former volunteer and a Peace Corps recruiter helped me to see otherwise.
With my business and technical background and a smattering of high school French, my recruiter suggested that I might be assigned to an internet café project in francophone Africa. When I arrived in dusty, underdeveloped Burkina Faso, I wondered if I had ended up in the right place.
Burkina Faso is located in the center of West Africa, landlocked and extremely lacking in natural resources. With the exception of the Sahara encroaching in the north and a few dwindling forests in the south, the land is primarily savanna. Access to clean water, as in other parts of the developing world, represents a significant challenge: a single river provides the only year-long source of water, requiring locals to survive off water stored during the two-month-long rainy season.
I and 50 other health, education and business volunteers slowly adapted to the weather, culture and language during an intense three month, in-country training. In this training we began to learn how to merge our educational and work experiences with grassroots, sustainable development. Regardless of what each of us did in school or in our career, we all shared a common dedication to fulfill Peace Corps goals, one of which is to help interested countries meet their needs for trained men and women. It was during these first three months that we began to all ask ourselves: what exactly is a trained man or woman? Learning that we would often be working with illiterate and innumerate populations— Burkina has a 21.8 percent literacy rate—we realized that our college business management classes and Excel spreadsheet savvy were not what we would need to help. Our real strength lay in our understanding of basic health, education and business principals. Our challenge for the next two years was to learn how to communicate these ideas in an appropriate, culturally sensitive and practical way.
In my fourth month of service, I moved in with my 23-person host family in the village of Réo. Although my immediate host family was comprised of only a handful of people, I shared a courtyard with the extended family. A provincial capital, Réo boasts approximately 20,000 inhabitants, electricity and running water. In a predominately Muslim country, it is uniquely Catholic, with an affinity for local beer, delicious oven-roasted pork and one of the highest school enrollment rates in the nation. The culture is built on close-knit community values. High water tables allow for gardening year-round and numerous mango trees provide a snack, a product for export and much-needed shade.
For my first few months, learning the language, adapting to the culture, surviving illnesses and dealing with loneliness were daily challenges that left me drained at the end of the day. I spent most of my time learning how to wash my clothes in buckets, how to keep bugs and rodents out of my house and figuring out what to eat. There are over 60 ethnicities in Burkina, each with its own language and sub-culture, but the unanimously favorite dish is tô, a polenta-like paste normally made from pounded millet seed, corn or sorghum and eaten with a peanut or leaf sauce. After a few weeks of eating this flavorless paste for breakfast, lunch and dinner I decided to experiment with my gas burner. With some practice I was able to recreate some of my favorite basic dishes from home and even share them with my family, including favorites such as vegetable fajitas, stir-fry, pancakes and crepes. As my French and local language improved, I began to venture out and explore my community and its colorful array of characters. Initially, conversations were about the weather, me and my life in America and village gossip, among other things. From there it wasn’t difficult to begin asking questions about their needs, challenges and hopes that would help me understand how I could best help the community. Asking the right questions and showing a genuine interest in helping was all it took to begin building more substantive relationships.
After being regularly approached by students and adults asking me to teach them English, I began one of my first organized activities in the village. To Burkinabe, English is considered the universal language and is strongly associated with American culture, idolized for its wealth, SUVs, hip hop, massive global influence and obsession with espionage (mostly learned from the TV show ‘24’). The English classes and groups were successful, but with time I slowly turned my focus toward my primary goals of advising small business owners and leading small initiatives aimed at directly improving the quality of life.
The initiatives I led were informed by the theory of appropriate technology (AT). This theory encourages trainers to develop a solid understanding of the habits and values of the audience, and to use this information to gauge the relevance and appropriateness of interventions designed to improve the quality of life. Through discussions with my village family, friends and various community members, it was easy to identify the primary shared needs in my community. These needs were related to having a sufficient food supply and fuel for food preparation; access to education including tuition and supplies; preventive and emergency health care and maintaining a steady source of income. With research using Internet and Peace Corps resources, I was able to hold AT trainings on topics such as mud stove production to reduce wood consumption, fruit and vegetable drying to preserve garden products and fuel briquette systems to turn waste into fuel. It’s surprisingly difficult to make small changes in a culture where things have been passed down unchanging from generation to generation, but in a village where one meal a day is standard, the smallest improvements really did make a difference.
For all volunteers, one of the greatest challenges we faced was finding motivated and dedicated work partners. This is not to say that people are unwilling to work with us, but rather that it requires an exceptionally devoted and committed community partner or group to bring about long-lasting change. Originally I was assigned to work with an 18-member women’s group who made pottery from local clay. The women’s group was one of a few in the country, creating a product that served both local and tourist markets. After a year or so of struggling to determine what the group wanted to do to develop the business and themselves as individuals, I realized that they were perfectly content with the status quo. I had hit the brick wall for volunteers: you can’t force change on people, and if you do, it’s bound to fail the minute you leave the village. Peace Corps’ grassroots, sustainable method of development is reliant on full participation and adoption by the community. A project completed by the volunteer alone may bring about a short-term change or spur a change in thinking, but it is the community-managed and owned projects that endure, bringing a lasting impact that continues long after the volunteer is gone.
The highlight of my service began the day that I met Epema, a true African renaissance woman. Skilled in tailoring, sewing, crocheting, hammock making, weaving and crafting, she designs, produces, markets and teaches. A widow of eight years, she is now solely responsible for caring for her five boys, four female apprentices and two ‘adopted’ girls. I spent months at Epema’s home workshop learning about what she does and trying to identify the processes involved in doing it. When work is intermingled with everyday life activities, it’s surprisingly difficult to differentiate the two and find areas for improvement. It was at this point in my service that I began to realize what providing trained men and women actually means.
We spent the majority of our time developing her collection of wall hangings, bags and clothing that had already been successful with international visitors. I introduced Epema to magazines with new clothing and hand bag models and ideas for new products. We dug into local resources including local artist’s paintings and illustrations from her kids’ school books for traditional designs for her wall hangings. We walked through the processes involved in producing some of her products and brainstormed how we could streamline or eliminate redundant work. We casually discussed spending, pricing and profits. As we broke down complex business management issues into smaller pieces she was able to make small changes and see instant improvements. After more than a year of work, she had reduced costs by buying supplies in bulk; doubled her production by streamlining, organizing and delegating; opened a store in town and contracted to sell her products at the national artisans’ marketplace.
As I facilitated improvements in village businesses and organizations with basic business training, I began to look at possible next steps. In the United States, it is widely agreed that business development activities can be significantly enhanced by the incorporation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The term ICT encompasses a broad range of skills and technologies, including basic computer literacy, the Internet, email and the increasingly prevalent cell phone.
Although ICT is not yet recognized as a key component to business development in Burkina, the immediate adoption of cell phones in a country rooted in traditional values and practices convinced me of ICT’s potential as a development tool. Although often purchased as a social status symbol, even in Burkina Faso cell phones have become a necessity for keeping in contact with friends and family, the same people who are a businessperson’s primary clients in a small community. Cell phones are used as multimedia devices, watches and even flashlights — I used mine to bike home in the dark more than once.
Benefiting from a rare, reliable Internet connection in a neighboring city, I was able to adopt development strategies that included the Internet and email. I worked one-on-one with individuals to introduce them to the Internet and email for communicating with distant friends and contacts and accessing online resources such as product supplier and non-governmental organization websites. Some Burkinabe have never touched a keyboard or mouse, while others were skilled enough to complete basic online searches. In Burkina Faso, access to the Internet is increasing and relatively affordable; an hour of Internet is about the same price as a 30-second international call, offering people access to once inaccessible resources and the ability to communicate with people far beyond their borders.
As October approached and I neared the end of my service, I began an ICT project that built on my experiences during the previous two years. Along with another returned Peace Corps volunteer, I explored 11 West African countries in four months by foot, bike and public transportation. We stopped to meet with associations and small business owners to introduce them to the value of Internet representation and, if they were interested, develop a basic website during a short stay with them. At the end of our trip we had built three websites and began the process for remote collaboration with three other candidates. Market Day International, a non-profit organization that provides ICT education and training for underrepresented populations, grew out of this work. It is with this endeavor that my partner and I hope to continue collaborating with small business owners in West Africa, and other regions, to raise the prioritization of ICT in business development and increase Internet representation for underrepresented populations.
As I pass the one month mark of my return to the states, I am exploring options for my next steps. My life has undoubtedly taken a new course from where I was three years ago and there is something exciting about knowing that I was able to make a difference doing work I loved. Peace Corps was a unique opportunity to learn a new language and culture, see life from a new perspective and to use even my most basic skills to help someone. My volunteer experience helped me discover the best parts of my own culture and identify a component of work that brings me a true sense of fulfillment. I am sincerely proud to have served as a member of an organization established over 45 years ago, still serving President Kennedy’s vision to carry “the spirit of American idealism… to the far corners of the earth.”