Trip to Burkina Faso gives students unique perspective

By Patricia Ho

"I did not go to Burkina Faso to 'help' in the traditional sense," said Charlotte Vallaeys ('02), who last summer was a program coordinator on a library-building project, Friends of African Village Libraries. "So many people think that I 'helped' the villagers by working on a project that brings books and literacy to the villagers. I don' t see it that way."

FAVL is a non-profit organization that was started in January, 2001 by Santa Clara professors Michael Kevane and Leslie Gray. "This is a very small project responding directly to a major problem in African villages - children go to school but they have nothing to read," said Kevane, an economist and president of the organization. Two other students accompanied Kevane to Burkina Faso last year.

Instead of an act of charity in one direction, Vallaeys views her participation in Bereba, a village in Burkina Faso, as a chance that allowed her to learn about another way of life.

"We need to understand and respect their culture and their way of thinking," she said. "I want the West to realize that there is much wisdom and much to be learned from African villagers. The relationship should not be one of 'we help you,' but 'we learn from each other.'"

A religious studies, psychology and German triple major who graduated from Santa Clara last year, Vallaeys is currently a research assistant for the Institute on Globalization. Photographs she took while in Bereba can be seen on the windows of Market Square in Benson.

In one picture, a traditional healer is sitting on a woven mat. Traditional healing with its holistic approach is one part of African life that Vallaeys feels the West could benefit from.

"If somebody is sick, they don't just look at the physical side of it, but they'll look at the person as a whole," she said. "For example, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. They don't just treat the physical conditions."

Reflecting Vallaeys' emphasis on balance, next to this picture is a villager with broken arm set in a wooden cast.

"They recognize that a broken bone is a broken bone and you got to fix it. If they did treat everything by consulting the cowry shells, then I wouldn't agree with it either."

In a third picture, a boy holds onto a bowl of "to," a mixture of sorghum and water with sprinklings of leaf sauce. "It has no taste and it only has carbohydrates and no real nutritional value," said Vallaeys.

With the level of poverty in Bereba, monetary demand for food from the country's capital Ouagadougou is low. Consequently, the group's pantry was modestly stocked.

"Coming into that your room and seeing your vegetables rotting because there's no refrigerator and seeing what you do have which is like a bottle of oil, a jar of margarine, some old stale bread, usually ants crawling over the sugar cube and a bag of rice and a little bag of salt and that's about it. That just really got to me," said Vallaeys, now comfortable laughing about the memory.

"You get these cravings, like cravings for fresh fruit and salad," she said. "You just start craving lettuce like crazy! And to know that for you to be able to get an apple, you'd have to spend a half-day on the bus to go to the city to go to the market to buy an apple."

For Vallaeys, the hardest part about living in Bereba was being hungry.

"It's very different doing a fast here and actually going to a country where there really seriously is no food," she said. "Here if you are fasting, at least you know that there is food and that at the end of the day you'll be able to get food. This assurance that there is the possibility of getting food is something that we take for granted."

In spite of the scarcity of food, Vallaeys continues to work with FAVL this year. In March, she anticipates returning to Burkina Faso to help set up two new libraries and organize a workshop that will bring together librarians and library committees from different villages.