Christina in Burkina... IN TOGO!: December 2008

09 December 2008

Trick-or-treat!

9 December 2008

Happy holidays! Friends and family, I hope you are all well... and enjoying the season! In Burkina, the Harmattan winds are starting to blow and the nights are growing cold. Yes. I sleep with long sleeves and a blanket! :) The Muslim fête of Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) is happening now... or yesterday... or the day before depending on your village. According to Wikipedia, this religious festival commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of obedience to God. Muslims families therefore sacrifice a goat or sheep. My friends here call it "la fête du mouton" or "the goat party". Unfortunately I wasn't in village on Tabaski to share my friends' goats. However, I did made to the chicken party in September...

The Chicken Party

The Muslim holiday Eid ul-Fitr marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. Muslim families in Burkina Faso celebrate by killing and cooking chickens. Men kill, women cook. In fact, if a women kills a chicken in Burkina, by tradition she must name her child chicken. Meanwhile if a man cooks... well its hard to imagine that. So in Burkina, always, greetings are super-important. On holidays like these people tour around their village greeting all of their family and friends to wish them a happy holiday. This process takes so long it actually lasts a couple of days. Additionally, the holiday has no fixed date - it depends on when your Imam sees the crescent moon marking the end of the holy month. This year, for example, Ouaga celebrated on September 30, Djibo on October 1 and Béléhédé on October 2.

In Béléhédé, men celebrate with their "groupe" or circle of close friends. This could be anywhere from 10 to 20 people. Each group gets together at a selected house around noon where a meal of oily chicken and greasy rice or toh will be prepared and waiting. Their will also be zoom-koum, the local festive drink made of millet, sugar, tamarind water and sometimes ginger or other sweet aromas. When its time to get started, everyone rinses their hands in the same bucket of water, squats down in a circle around the food and starts eating with their right hand. (By the way, that's not special for the holiday, its just regular community eating practice.) Then everyone rises their hands off in the same bucket and drinks zoom-koum from the same one or two cups. (This is also regular practice.) But then... everyone gets up and moves on to the next house to do the same thing. Oh yes.

So, on the day of this party I did just what I described with a group of male friends 15 times in a row. Ha! Where were the women during this period? According to the men they were with their own groupes tucked away in other people's houses. During this whole noon-time tour of chicken-dishes in village, I saw and greeted men galore as they performed the same ritual but only a handful of dispersed women. Later that evening I went to greet my friend Poitiba and confirmed that, indeed, after they cook all morning and drop off the meals at selected houses, the women get together in someone's courtyard to celebrate with their own groupes but don’t parade around village like the men (and me apparently).

The kids also have stuff to do. Like the men and women, the kids dress up and get together with their groupes. Boys and girls alike tour around the village wishing adults a happy holiday with a special Ramadan greeting - it sounds something like Allah barka – but basically means trick-or-treat. The adults give them money or as a substitute, sweets.

Last year, I celebrated Ramadan in my village, sort of… but not really because I wasn’t with a groupe. This year, on the other hand, I was so happy to have my own groupe – an authentic experience (!) if we forget my gender for a moment…

So I dove right in to all the traditional festivities (and too much chicken) doing just-like-they-do…

I threw hand-sanitizer and caution to the wind (both figuratively) as I enjoyed breaking the Muslims' fast with friends…

That night I was exhausted, in a good way!

Two days later I was exhausted, and reeeally sick. I had contracted tonsillitis. Can someone remind me to bring along soap next time I want an authentic experience?

Facts & Figures on Girls' Ed

Out-of-school children

• There are 115 million children out of school – the majority of them, 62 million, are girls – and 77 million children not enrolled in school. The difference represents the millions of children who are enrolling in but not attending school.

• Children from the poorest household are three times less likely to be in school than their counterparts in the richest households.

Gender parity

• There are now 94 girls in primary school for every 100 boys, up from 92 in 1999.

• Of the 181 countries with 2004 data available, two thirds have achieved gender parity in primary education.

• The gender gap remains particularly large in Afghanistan (44 girls in school for every 100 boys), the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Pakistan and Yemen.

Illiteracy

• There are 781 million illiterate adults, two thirds of them women, worldwide.

Early childhood

• Children whose mothers have no education are more than twice as likely to be out of school as children whose mothers have some education

• In developing countries, 75 per cent of the children not in primary school have uneducated mothers

• One additional year of schooling for 1,000 women helps prevent two maternal deaths.

• Early childhood care and education establishes a solid foundation for learning and makes both girls and boys ready to attend school at the right age. It also improves parents’ and caregivers’ readiness to send their children to school by equipping them with deeper knowledge and skills.

• More girls can attend and complete school if other children they need to care for are receiving early childhood care and education; this is particularly crucial for children affected by HIV and AIDS.

HIV and AIDS

• If all children received a complete primary education, around 700,000 cases of HIV in young adults could be prevented each year.

• Women represent 62 per cent of the 15- to 24-year-olds living with HIV and AIDS globally

• The burden of AIDS care falls especially heavily on women, and can limit educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

• Higher education levels for girls are associated with a reduced risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

• 15.2 million children under age 18 have lost one or both parents to AIDS; 12 million of these children live in sub- Saharan Africa.

Violence

• Girls between 13 and 18 years old constitute the largest group exploited in the commercial sex industry. It is estimated that around 500,000 girls below 18 are victims

of trafficking each year.

• Female genital mutilation/cutting affects 130 million girls and women globally and places 2 million at risk annually.

• In some cultures, the preference for boy children results in prenatal sex selection and infanticide of girls. In India, there are 933 Indian women for every 1,000 men,

reflecting 40 million ‘missing’ women.

Emergencies

• More than 80 per cent of the world’s 35 million refugees and displaced people are women and children.

• Emergencies put women at risk of extreme sexual violence and abuse. In Rwanda, 2,000 women, many of whom were survivors of rape, tested positive for HIV during the five years following the 1994 genocide.

In addition to its benefits for girls and women, education is a uniquely positive force with a wide-ranging impact on society and human development. Educated girls can better protect themselves against HIV, trafficking and abuse, and are more likely to grow up to have healthier families and send their children to school.

From United Nations Girls' Education Initiative