 Leopold in better days... The good, the bad, and the ugly… Love tends to include pain. Today we heard devastating news from Leopold. Via WhatsApp we listened to his somber halting voice as he told us that his precious son Emmanuel had been killed in Burkina Faso. Leopold was our housekeeper / cook and mentor & uncle to our small children. He and his family truly became family to us. Emmanuel was the same age as Anna. They played together. Leopold made huge financial sacrifices to allow Manuel to graduate with a master’s degree in engineering. Manuel was married and his wife is pregnant with their first baby. After graduating, he had taken a three-month contract in Burkina Faso - a country that is being overrun by terrorists. Last Wednesday was the last day of his contract. He was shot by terrorists the following day. Circumstances are still blurry. Aside from deeply grieving with Leopold and his family, we also struggle with survivor’s guilt. We left those who had become dear to us in places that have become increasingly dangerous to live in. Some of their children have begged us to help them come to Canada. However, we are simply unable to help them overcome the prejudice of the Canadian government against African want-to-be immigrants who don’t have fat bank accounts. On top of that, the unwanted actions of terrorists in their countries smears our innocent friends and family with an additional negative label that they ‘come from a terrorist country’ making it even harder to be eligible for immigration. I may have published a book about the lighter side of our life in Niger. However, for us this is a book without ending. The darker side of our experience includes the fact that we had the means and privilege to escape the increasing danger that we left our dear friends to endure. They go to church with the chance that a group of extremists will come to kill all worshippers in the building. It is at times like this that we have hard questions for God. Questions that we don’t always get an immediate response to. All we can hold on to is that God cries when we cry. So, let us take some time to cry with God. In support of the grieving hearts of Leopold and his wife, please join us in prayer for their peace.  Emmanuel Rest In Peace!
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 Our family tree... Did Niger ever feel like ‘home’ to you? Yes, it did! Niger quickly became our ‘normal.’ Joanna and I had already experienced one major cross-cultural adjustment when serving in Liberia, in the eighties. So, our adjustment to Niger (thanks, in part, to our colleague Jan’s prep work) was much easier – in spite of having young children and an infant with us. Our Liberia experience had made us less risk averse. Also, our experience with ‘culture shock’ from the more-extreme conditions that we experienced in Liberia meant that we were spared from it in Niger, where conditions seemed somewhat ‘milder.’ I think that our previous experience in Liberia helped reduce the cross-cultural stress for our children because they sensed Joanna and my comfort with the adjustment. Thus, they settle in quite well. Noting the differences of life in Niger led to many innocent questions and observations – some of which have been captured in my book. These observations from our kids allowed for some great dinner-table conversations and valuable learning. It became a normal part of life to see and experience new things. On one wall in our home, we created a huge family tree with pictures of all of our family, extended family, and close friends that our children referred to as aunt or uncle. Because of the open adoptions of our (then) three children, this became a huge mural. Regularly we would take one of the children in our arms to the tree to look at the pictures of our loved ones. We decided to try and stay away from the expatriate crowd for the first months. This encouraged us to make friends with the local Nigerien families that lived around us. It helped our children to develop friendships outside of the expatriate community – which can sometimes isolate itself from local life. Due to a regular home routine, we all quickly felt at home. At one time, after returning from a visit to Canada, Joshua voiced the sentiment for all of us: “Boy, it is good to be HOME again”!  Joshua apprenticed with African friends in a local stone carver's shop. Did you ever secure funding from the Dutch Funding agency? YES! We successfully convinced the funding agency to provide $10,000 for, …guess what… ? An improved pork production project! The ACEN board was able to convince this funding organization that a pork production project would be profitable in a country where 99.5% of the population is Muslim! (Islam forbids its followers to eat pork.) The representative of the funding agency seemed to enjoy her role as mentor. Rather than just being the gatekeeper to her agency’s funds she found herself invited to impart her knowledge and wisdom to contribute to the skills of the ACEN board members. Unlike her first few days in Niger this was a no-pressure gig! While the formal dress of Djara and Baljuwa differed from European business attire and in spite of their limited French, these ACEN board members are truly wise and experienced individuals. Because of its non-Muslim identity, the Gourmanche people have always had some pigs running around their villages. Every few months a few old pick-up trucks rattle their way through the roadless bush into the villages to ask for ‘Gabriel’ – the code word for pork. The Muslim drivers then buy up as many pigs as their vehicles can carry and sell the meat in Niamey. The ACEN board members realized that their traditional way of pig raising could not keep up with the demands of the pork vendors. So, they wanted to hire a veterinarian on retainer for a year to introduce (in their words) ‘modern’ pork production techniques in the Gourmanche villages. During an initial interview with the Nigerien veterinarian they had already heard that they would need to build pig pens and that it would be valuable to plant Moringa trees, since adding moringa leaves to the millet chaff for feed would make pigs grow faster. Besides that, planting Moringa would also contribute to reforestation, and consuming the beans as part of the family’s diet, would provide much needed iron to their diet. And, so, by the time they met with the representative of the funding agency the ACEN board already had a detailed plan as to how this would work, who would be involved, and how they expected this to affect their people. Once they had verbally explained their plans to the representative I put the ACEN board members together with my Nigerien colleague Harouna. The board members would verbally explain their ideas to Harouna who would then transcribe their ideas into proper French, following a standard proposal outline. Thanks to the ACEN board’s solid plans and Harouna’s skill in transcribing these plans into an excellent proposal ACEN was awarded $10,000 to start an improved pork production project. Harouna then worked with the ACEN board members to manage this grant. ACEN contracted the veterinarian who provided advice on housing, feed, and care. He immunized the pigs, taught about fertility, and monitored the pork production enterprises in each village for a year. Project participants planted hundreds of Moringa trees in each of their villages (introducing Moringa as a new tree/food variety.) They collected millet chaff from village households for feed and mixed it with other ingredients and Moringa leaves. Individuals were selected to look after the pigs, and the vet was called on when needed. Some families also started using the nutritious Moringa leaves and beans for personal consumption. And, finally, the increasing the number of pigs for sale would improve their terms of trade for the villagers. When we left Niger this project was being implemented, and it continues to operate with success. This project reinforced a lessen that I had learned many years earlier from the ACEN board members. A lesson that is so well-articulated by the Latin-American development genius Paulo Freire, who warned against “…a lack of confidence in people’s ability to think, to want, and to know.” In other words: TRUST the folks that you work with to be capable of making the right decisions! Below: One of the modern pork production units resulting from this grant.  The proposition that everything is created for a purpose was a huge ‘AHA’ moment for me!! Aside from affirming the inherent worth of all creation, including myself, it called me to discover what my purpose might be. This search for meaning was also much discussed in the vibrant Young-People Group that my (now) wife Joanna and I belonged to. We had a great youth pastor who challenged us to contemplate our ‘calling’ in life. While studying for her nursing degree Joanna had been approached by some folks in the church, encouraging her to consider using her nursing skills as a missionary nurse. It also seemed that my agricultural background and engineering education might be useful for working with the international development arm of our church’s mission agency. So, aside from our weekly dance lessons we decided to add an extra-curricular course to our date nights to learn more about international development. The course, was called “Issues in Third World Development Studies.” It focused on the power dynamics between developing countries and their rich ‘benefactor’ countries’ methods of creating dependencies – decades before ‘neo-colonialism’ became a term. Our instructors showcased issues such as unfair world trade practices, the lingering effects of colonialism, disempowering foreign aid approaches, disabling policies of the World Bank, the devastating role of the arms trade, clandestine government support of dictators in the name of development aid, and how ‘tied aid’ served to boost our own economy in the name of ‘foreign development.’ The course shattered our naïve assumption of poverty being the result of a lack of education and the need for modern technology. It felt like a slap in the face to our false sense of innocence. Our exposure to this dark ‘underbelly’ of a society that we were part of inflamed us with a desire to do something! We approached the International Development arm of our church denomination. They invited us to move to Liberia to develop a water & sanitation programme for an association of mission clinics and hospitals throughout the country who wanted to lower the high mortality rates from water- and sanitation-related diseases. Joanna focused on health education for women, teachers, and local health workers, while I worked with the men to build wells and latrines. We were wholly unprepared for what we got ourselves into. We found ourselves in a place where mystery, witchcraft, and violence reigned supreme – a country where cannibalism was still actively practiced, and with a government so corrupt that even the World Bank and US government were forced to stop providing aid. We also quickly found out that instead of technology and infrastructure, ’development’ is a social endeavour for which I had completely the wrong skill set! I often refer to this crazy time in Liberia as a three-year-long out-of-body experience. But, at the end of that work term, we had “the bug” for International Development work. We were hooked! Upon our return to Canada, I wrote myself a future job description to identify the training I needed to be better prepared for this kind of work. After applying these new skills for some time in inner-city neighbourhoods in Calgary, our young family embarked on this adventure in Niger. Below: Liberia, 1983-1987  DID YOU EVER FIND OUT WHO PUT THE ‘BAD MEDICINE’ IN YOUR YARD?
No. As the story ‘Bad Medicine’ suggests, thinking that someone might be trying to put a spell on you is very destabilizing to your relationships. It elicits questions from ‘who did I offend?’ to ‘who, really, is the target of this magic?’ Is someone trying to harm me? Or is the person who ‘found it’ trying to make me suspicious of someone that he has a grudge with? Witchcraft is all about relationships. We purposely decided NOT to try to figure out who did it, because that kind of thinking would rob us from a certain kind of innocence in our relationships. The fact that witchcraft is all about relationships does not make it less real. Twenty years earlier, Dr. Andy C. invited me to go on rounds with him through the small remote hospital that he operated in Kolahun, Liberia. At the end of rounds we passed a teenaged girl lying alone in a room. Dr. Andy was trained in the USA, a pilot, and was doing epidemiological research on Lassa Fever. Yet, this highly educated and accomplished doctor told me: “She is dying because someone witched her.” He explained that, in spite of his psychiatric training, medication, and the availability of tranquilizers, the power of belief in witchcraft would eventually lead to her death. He concluded his explanation with: "I have seen this over and over again." I was in my mid-twenties, that early morning, but this lesson about witchcraft has never left me.  Truthfully, I never thought of myself as a 'blogger.' However, since the launching of my book, I have received a number of questions that might well be asked by other readers. I hope that my response to those questions, in this blog, lends a bit more depth and detail to the various 'vignettes' in the book. Cultural change and International Development are complex processes that cannot easily be addressed in short stories. So, I hope that this blog will act as a forum for those of you who wish to 'dive a bit deeper' in the various meanings behind the stories. Please, feel free to pepper me with your questions!
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ArYIn this blog I hope to go a bit more in-dept to questions that my readers have for me, or about my book. |
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