unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/12/89)
a good 16 hours on the trot every day of the week.
Twice a week, trips to market break the monotony of Catherine
Bana's life. Like other women in her village, she goes to market
to barter or sell the jugs and pots she somehow finds time to
make so as to be able to afford one or two little luxuries, pay
the healer or by some medicine. Sometimes she goes all the way
to Ouagadougou, 15 kilometres away. About twice a year she buys
cheap second-hand clothes for the family. On market day the
menfolk get a chance to meet for protracted discussions well
lubricated by dolo. "There's no better way of forgetting one's
problems and whiling the time away," says chief Tapsoba. True,
but some husbands, when they run out of drink money, make
serious inroads into their wives' meagre savings. "If we
refuse, they beat us", says Catherine with an embarrassed
smile.
When all goes well, market day is a pretext for people to enjoy
themselves and have a bit of a feast. This can involve jazzing
up the universal diet of to with pieces of meat and chicken.
Such a luxury is rare in the Bana family: "My husband doesn't
work," says Catherine. "I don't ask for that sort of thing so
as not to embarrass him."
From time to time -- "when he's in a good mood" -- her husband
kills one of the chickens she has reared. If they find they are
short of money (because of an illness in the family, or some
unexpected purchase), they sell one of the sheep or goats which
the children look after.
Catherine's husband needed to sell only two animals to be able to
buy a luxury contraption that distinguishes him from other
villagers: a second-hand bicycle. Otherwise heads of families
live from day to day without really knowing how much they earn.
They just leave it to God -- or rather to their womenfolk.
Poverty is rife in Balkoui. Yet the village is gradually
emerging from centuries of underdevelopment, which 60 years of
colonisation (by the French) and 30 years of independence
(interspersed by a succession of military coups) changed in
almost no way despite its being so close to the capital.
In the last few years, the government has at last begun to do
something about modernising Balkoui. The villagers had almost
given up hope when they suddenly got, in quick succession, water
(five pumps and a small dam), a school with three teachers, a
maternity clinic and even a grain-milling machine donated by the
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Vaccination "commandos" were sent in, and 50 or so women,
including Catherine Bana, managed to find time to attend reading
and writing lessons. Lastly, the only manifestation of the
central government's presence in the area, a compulsory
flat-rate tax, has been abolished.
True, the dam often dries up. Only a minority of children go to
school, even though there are 100 pupils to each class. The
maternity clinic, which was built ten years ago, got a
professional midwife only last year and is still waiting for
running water.
But when one listens to chief Tapsoba and old Ma Tenga, a
matronly woman with tattooed cheeks, talking about how things
used to be, and when one looks at national and international
socio-economic indicators, it is easy to gauge the extent of the
changes that have been made and to see that Balkoui does not
come absolutely bottom on the poverty scale.
Not so long ago, the village was regularly ravaged by fatal
outbreaks of measles and whooping cough. Women had to walk
kilometres to have their babies, to draw water ("Over there,
towards the hills"), to get vaccinated or be treated by a
doctor. Only the chief knew how to read and owned a radio set.
That recent past, which is fast becoming no more than a memory
in Balkoui, is still quite common in Burkina-Faso: in the
neighbouring village of Kossovo, "there's almost nothing -- no
school, no maternity clinic, just two water pumps," says Ma
Tenga. Elsewhere the situation is often even worse.
In Burkina-Faso, the international standards of what passes for
development are still virtually impossible to achieve in almost
all areas: infant mortality and the number of mothers who die
in childbirth are among the highest in the world; half the
population has no access at all to health care; a third of all
children suffer from malnutrition; only a third go to primary
school; the adult literacy rate is under 20 per cent; average
life expectancy is about 40 years; per capita income is one of
the lowest in the world.
The fact that some people are even worse off than Catherine Bana
does not really make life any easier for her. But after giving
birth to six children, at least she is still alive, as are her
children. Three of them are already going to school, and she
herself has learned to read. The maternity clinic is round the
corner, and there water more or less on her doorstep.
So if, on top of that, the rains are good, if foreign generosity
does not let up (20 per cent of Burkina-Faso's budget comes from
development aid), and if the latest military government succeeds
in turning its revolutionary promises into genuine progress for
people like Catherine Bana and her fellow villages, there are
surely grounds for hope.
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
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Patt Haring | UNITEX : United Nations
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-=- Every child smiles in the same language. -=-