Hello again,
I’ll get right into continuing on with the description of my trip with Catholic Relief Services to Burkina Faso. In my last post I covered the orientation, the arrival in Burkina Faso, and meeting with the staff at CRS Burkina Faso headquarters. This only got me to the middle of the first day.
After the meeting at the CRS Burkina Faso headquarters and having lunch we went to our first site visit. The site that we visited is one that sadly doesn’t get as much support as CRS would like to give. The sad fact is that CRS doesn’t have enough money to help everyone that they would like to and they have to prioritize as best as they can. We had a couple of the CRS Burkina Faso staff with us when we went to this site and I could see that they wished they could do more, but they just couldn’t.
The site was the Delwende center. This is the center that I mentioned in a previous post that I would be going to. This center is a refuge for women who have been accused of witchcraft.
A little bit on the culture of Burkina Faso is in order. The best statistics I can find put the religions in the country as being about 50-60% Muslim, about 15-20% Catholic, about 5% Protestant and the rest being part of the traditional animist belief systems. However, there is a saying that in Burkina Faso 50% are Muslim, 50% are Christian and 100% are animists. Despite their being part of more formalized faiths most Burkinabe still hold some of their traditional beliefs. This is in part because for them these beliefs explain certain things in a way that is easier to understand, and the formalized religions use a bit more modern understanding of the world within their system.
One of the areas that the animist religions show through is in the understanding of early deaths. Despite its sad commonality there is a struggle for the Burkinabe to understand when a child dies. They look to their traditional beliefs which say that the soul of the child must have been stolen by a witch. This is obviously more common in the rural areas and less so in the more developed cities. When a child dies they look for the witch that must have stolen their soul. Once an accusation is made it is assumed to be a true accusation. Most of the time the accusation of being a witch falls on an older woman, typically either unmarried or widowed. Most of the time this woman is childless, but occasionally she does have children of her own.
Once the woman is accused she is run out of the village with only what she has on her at the time. Her house is burned down and she is not allowed back into the village. Many of these women will die out in the bush; it is a very harsh climate. A lucky few are able to find their way to a center that some charity runs for these women. But even then their life is hard. They have to deal with the fact that they have been exiled from what they knew. They are not able to ever contact any family that they may have. And they are looked at with suspicion even by those who are more educated in the society.
The centers scrape by on donations and limited income opportunities. At the Delwende center they make thread out of cotton that they buy and they grow a garden, both to feed themselves and to sell the excess. The Delwende center does have a nurse come in for healthcare, but with the age of these women it could never be enough. As I said, CRS used to support the Delwende center to a great extent, however, as budgets are tightened and restrictions are placed on some donations they have had to cut back. They still give what they can, but it would be so much better if they could do more.
At the Delwende center we met a German nun named Sr. Maria. She has given 40 years of her life to the people of Burkina Faso and has been at the Delwende center for much of this time. Sr. Maria was an example of love and self-giving, an amazing woman. When she spoke to us she spoke of course of the need to provide essentials for these women, but was even more emphatic on the need to help educate the people of Burkina Faso so that this culture will not continue to harm these women in this way. That was also the wish of those who were living at the Delwende center as best as I could tell. The women living there don’t expect their lives to get much better, but they hope that something is changed so that others don’t have to go through this in the future.
After the Delwende center visit we had a couple of hours to go to get to the hotel that we were staying at for the night. The next day was a great day of seeing what CRS does. One thing to note is that while CRS of course does emergency relief and helps provide for immediate needs such as food and shelter, there are a lot of places where it focuses on development assistance, projects that will help the people to help themselves. In Burkina Faso it does all of these. I didn’t see any immediate emergency situation needs, but they are gearing up for that because towards the end of the last rainy season the rains didn’t come so the crops were significantly less, if not complete failures. All the weather models show that a drought period is starting in that area so CRS is gearing up for that, above and beyond what they do all the time. During my trip I witnessed more of the everyday things that they do.
One development project that I was very, very, very impressed with was what we went to visit the morning of our second full day in the country. We were greeted as we arrived in the village by singing and dancing of what had to be most of the village. They were excited to greet us, both simply for being strangers, of whom they are a welcoming people, and the fact that we were representing CRS. In this village, named Retkuilga, they knew how much they had been helped by CRS and were very thankful.
In the village of Regkuilga we were visiting a SILC. SILC stands for Savings and Internal Lending Community. This is a project that CRS runs that has had great success and is very popular. Word spreads about it and CRS gets requests to help set up SILCs in other places.
A SILC is a microfinance operation, but not the microloans that you may be familiar with, where money comes from elsewhere and is paid back to elsewhere. In a SILC there are between 10 and 30 members, most often women, but not always, and they meet every week. They set an amount that each person will save each week, and then give loans out of that to members of the group that will help them to prosper, or at least have opportunities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
There is so much more to the SILC. Each group is run by its members. CRS doesn’t provide any start-up funds, but what they do provide is a strong box, some locks, and the ledgers to keep track. CRS also provides the format, and in the village a person trained to help guide the groups, there can be many groups in one village. Each SILC runs for about 10 months, from the end of the rainy season to right before the next rainy season. Any savings and interest is dispersed at the start of the next rainy season so that people can buy essentials, such as seeds, to help them make survive, and maybe make some money.
So, what happens is that each group sets the minimum amount to save each week, every member of the SILC has to be at the meeting each week. There are three different locks on the strong box, the box is kept by one person and a key by each of three different people. They gather and after the box is opened each person comes forward and puts in their savings. The amount at the group I was at in their first year was 100 XFA, about twenty cents. Each person can save up to five times that in any given week. The amount saved is tracked in a ledger, since most people in Burkina Faso are illiterate they track it with stamps in boxes. Once the money is set aside they hear loan requests and decide what may be a good project to loan money to. This could be something like buying a sheep or a goat to raise to sell. If the group decides to loan the money it will later be paid back at a set interest rate. If they decide that the loan isn’t a good idea they work together to advise the person on how to make it better.
Now a really amazing thing with the SILCs, each group is required to have a social fund that everyone contributes to. This is money set aside to simply help the other members of their group. For example, one woman mentioned that she had been helped by the social fund allowing her to go to the city for medical care, she returned from that to be a productive member of the community.
While saving seems obvious to us, we heard constantly how much the members of the SILC appreciated being taught about saving. With the poverty rate they hadn’t saved before, so they didn’t have money to buy seed when they needed it and the cycle went on. With this savings and the ability to get loans the members mentioned that they truly are living better. So much so that in this, the third year that the group is running they have tripled the amount of savings that they do each week, they now save 300XFA, about 60 cents as the unit, again someone can save up to five times that. I glanced at some of the ledgers, most are saving between 2 and 4 times that amount weekly, so $1.20-$2.40 on average, impressive savings rates when the national income averages just $345 per person per year. This is truly a program that helps people to help themselves. CRS has minimal investment, but provides the things that are necessary, especially guidance, to help people.
The village was so very thankful for our visit, the people danced and sang as we were leaving too. Then they stopped us and gave us a gift to show their thanks. The gift was a goat, an amazing gesture on their part, to the level that we really don’t comprehend. We took it, as telling them to keep it would be in insult. We later gave that goat to the Delwende center to help them out a little bit.
I will write about the rest of that day in a later post. I hope you are enjoying my experience.
Peace,
Adam
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