My Backyard

This week there are a number of visitors in the house mostly from Texas. Some have come for business others just to see what’s up with the project. Yesterday we took a trip to two places in Ouga that are run in part of in whole by Catholic Relief Services/charities.

The first place, whose name in Mooré means “Lean on God”, is a compound for women. I’m going to liken it to a battered women’s shelter although that it not the reason these women are living there. These particular women are living in the shelter because they were at some point accused of being witches. Let’s stop for an explanation.

For those of you think “I knew it there’s all sorts of witchcraft in Africa”…STOP IT…yes there are some people here that practice things that could be construed as witchcraft, mainly there are some who will kill a chicken or something of the sort to make sure god is hearing them. The particular women we went to see do not necessarily fall into the category of “actually being witches”.

Normally what happens here is that if you are in the village and have a problem with someone, specifically women, you call them a witch and kill them or run them out of town. Happily these women were not killed; sadly they were run out of town. Again in most cases these accusations are false and are made in order to either get rid of problematic women...here’s a list of what might qualify one for being considered problematic if you’re a woman; any evidence or appearance of mental illness or unstableness, having someone else’s baby, people dying in the village and you looking like a scapegoat, perhaps an argument with a man…you know reasons that are complete bull shit.

In any case some of these women find their way to this shelter or the annex that is in the center of town. Let me remind you that the shelter is in Ouga these women come from all over the country there just aren’t many shelters like this, and by many I meant to say there’s roughly two. At the compound the women work with cotton...everything is done by hand, picking out seeds, combing it, and putting it onto spools in thread shape. They sell the cotton at the market so they can buy food. The flood of roughly a month ago hit their compound as they are located very near the lake. In the flood they lost their pigs, a large source of income for the community. It now sounds like one of our friends from Texas will be doing a pig campaign. So hopefully sometime near Thanksgiving I’ll get to go buy a pig from the market to hand over to the community.

Our other stop was at an orphanage near run by the Catholic Church and right beside the Catholic Cathedral in down town. That facility is quite nice in comparison to the compound where the women live. The orphanage handles children from less than 6 months to about 2-3 years old. From what I saw there were about a total of 30 kids living in the place. Those children who are there of course fall into some of the same categories as the rejected women (i.e. handicaps ect.) On a brighter note they do look well cared for.

I wanted to be more torn-up about what I saw yesterday but sadly or happily the women and children I saw yesterday are at least alive with some where to live. The other not so uncommon out come ends with dead babies in ditches or latrines and murdered women in the bush. Better days ahead one can hope.

Peace,
Ben