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July 20, 2008
To Plough or Not To Plough
“Yimbe Saouga ndeman hikka, tilay” said the hitch-hiker as we approached the village of Saouga. “The people of Saouga will be forced to plough this year.”
Saouga is the village where the road to Gorom-Gorom gets cut off each year during rainy season, the swelling river rushing over the road, often up to chest-height.
The people of Saouga have made a killing each year by helping people through the river – at a price. They have been renowned for their lack of pity for those without the money or willingness to pay, since they know there is no alternative – (although, they sometimes have shown surprising kindness.) A number of men have discovered this to be a more profitable way of spending the rainy season than working the fields.
But this year the Burkina Faso government has built a bridge over the river at Saouga...
Everyone is happy about the bridge at Saouga – except the people of Saouga, who will be forced to plough this year...
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
Back in Gorom-Gorom, Pierre tells me of going to town to ask for a field to work. People looked at him in amazement, and asked “Where are you from...?” Apparently people are abandoning field work more and more because they are just not getting anything from it.
After one or two years of poor harvests, you might still believe that it is just a bad patch and hope that things will get better. But when year after year you invest time and energy over three months to plough, sow, and weed a field by hand, and then the rains fail at the end, leaving you with nothing, you begin to lose that hope.
Inconvenient Truth
A minority of people will continue, in the face of increasingly overwhelming evidence, to refuse the fact of climate change and the role of human activity in it. It could be argued that the testimonies from locals that the rains have been getting worse over the last 20 years, is just a case of “it was better in the old days”. The observations of more extreme weather, including the increased frequency of drought and flood, could be a blip. But the abandonment of fields worked over generations speaks of the reluctantly-accepted, and life-changing reality of a changing climate.
The people of Saouga will be forced to plough this year. But what of next year? And the year after that? Alternative activities here are scarce. What options do they have?
"La Vie Chere"
And, all the time, food prices are increasing. At this time of year, when millet is scarce and rises in price, people have often bought rice instead. People can’t do that anymore. Last year, a sack of rice was about £16. This year it is over £20. That is a huge price rise when, for example, new teachers earn maybe £35/month.
There have been demonstrations and riots in Burkina Faso because of the struggle people are having with “la vie chere”. The government has taken tax off basic foodstuffs, but people blame the government for the price rises. They of course don’t understand the role that gambling on international markets, the rich world fling with biofuel, or the growth of the middle class in China, have on their food prices.
If people abandon their unproductive fields, to try other alternatives, they will of course have to buy all their food. But what work can they find here to earn enough to feed their families?
Life Goes On
For us, climate change is still largely a cause for academic discussion or bad jokes. Price rises may mean inconvenience. For those in Gorom-Gorom, they are massive threats.
Yet, people carry on with life, less troubled by the coming storm than we westerners are by the fact that we have to pay more to fill up our car. They have seen famine and drought and know what it is to go without, and to trust God in those times.
In this morning’s 6am prayer meeting, Seydou was encouraging us with Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:25-34. In Europe and the US, we rarely if ever have had to actually put these verses into practise in the way these guys do on a regular basis:
“Do not worry about what you will eat, drink, or wear... but first get hold of God’s reign and righteousness, and he’ll take care of these other things as well.”
Tags: africa sahel burkina burkina faso saouga travel bridge flood poverty
Posted by Keith at July 20, 2008 10:00 AM
