There are 177 countries on the UN human development index, and Burkina Faso comes 176th. An Irish charity is bringing hope to people with disabilities there, writes CARL O'BRIENin Burkina Faso
SHE’S 15 YEARS OLD, but looks like a toddler, sitting in the dirt outside the family’s mud-walled home. When her grandmother calls from inside, Asmoom doesn’t so much crawl as shift her way through the dust and animal droppings, using the momentum of her slight frame.
As she moves, her multi-coloured plastic necklace dances around and catches the light. Her thin legs are powerless, while her hands are slight and misshapen. Her congenital disorder has robbed her of any mobility in her lower body. It also means her bones are incredibly fragile, so she tries to avoid using her hands.
“In the rainy season, she has to stay indoors. The street just turns to mud,” says her grandmother, dressed in a violet robe and headdress, which makes for a striking dash of colour amid the dreary mud walls.
Asmoom is bright-eyed and curious, if a little shy. She braids hair and loves fashion. Because she has a physical disability, she was refused access to school. It also means she’s incredibly isolated. In all her 15 years, she has rarely left home. Smaller children in the neighbourhood play with her but friends of her own age have long since moved on or gone to school.
“What she needs is a wheelchair to get around properly,” says Melissa Miller, a development worker with the NGO International Service, who came across the family a few weeks ago. “A specially adapted wheelchair, which costs around €300, would make an incredible difference.”
Just around the corner there’s another child, Issaka. He’s playing on his own, sifting through a pile of plastic bottles, containers and wrapping which his neighbours have gathered, to try to make some money. Nearby in the shade, some children are playing hopscotch with pieces of white plastic tied together. On their faded T-shirts are the faces of exotic footballers such as Ronaldo or Drogba, or the frayed club shirts of Man Utd or Chelsea. They are taunting reminders of an unattainable world, a million miles away from here.
Issaka (10) can’t walk properly; his leg is twisted from what also seems to be a congenital disorder; his spine is curved and is threatening to displace his internal organs. Recently, it’s started causing pain throughout his body. He has never been assessed by a professional medic or physiotherapist.
“He probably needs an operation, and definitely some physiotherapy,” says Miller, who has a list of children in need that grows with every passing day. “It would help to stop the condition getting worse and give him so much more mobility.”
HERE ON THE DUSTY, boiling streets of Burkina Faso’s sprawling capital Ouagadougou, there are countless other children with disabilities, hidden away from public view because of shame or prejudice, or both. Their lives are already mapped out the moment they are born, consigned to living in a twilight world where they are stripped of rights, dignity or hope.
As a rule, disabled people aren’t allowed access to the education system. To make matters worse, there is a deeply ingrained social stigma against people with disabilities, so they end up socially isolated and dependent on their families for support. In general, they are the poorest of the poor, a forgotten people. There isn’t much sign that the government is overly concerned. In a country where food supplies, water shortages and the threat of starvation are an ever-present threat, the rights of disabled people don’t get a look in.
Each year, the UN publishes its human development index – a measure of well-being. The results for Burkina Faso are frightening. It ranked 176th out of 177 countries. It’s little surprise. To travel across much of Burkina is to travel across a biblical landscape with almost no trace of modern development. Xylophone-ribbed cattle pull wooden ploughs, women still carry water and food in earthenware jars, families still live in basic mud-walled huts.
It has few exports. Mangos are about the only thing in plentiful supply. Almost everything else is imported into this land-locked country which has few natural resources. The lack of wealth is, ironically, something in its favour: it means it has escaped the ravages of wars linked to oil or minerals. It is remarkably politically stable, even if many grumble about its anti-democratic nature. The president, after all, recently celebrated 20 years in power.
Yet, for all the problems facing the country, there are glimmers of hope. Development agencies such as International Service Ireland are reaching out to communities of people with disabilities and working with them to improve access to education, training and employment. It’s not just another model of giving, perpetuating a cycle of charity and dependence. What sets this apart is it is a long-term partnership, aimed at empoweringpeople and their communities. With funding from Irish Aid, the organisation has placed six experienced development workers with disability groups across Burkina Faso to help people start their own businesses and build sustainable livelihoods. Already, hundreds of people have benefited from being taught basic literacy, sign language and Braille.
Sometimes some of the most basic of interventions can make the biggest differences: finding a modified wheelchair for Asmoom, or accessing ongoing therapy for Issaka. For others, it can be finding a job or a source of income that helps create a sustainable livelihood. International Service hopes that, by sharing ideas among the various groups, isolated success stories can be turned into development models in the country and beyond.
“There’s a phrase which says, ‘if you give a man a fishing rod, you feed him for life’. Well, we provide the fishing rod – but we’re also helping people draw on their own resources to make the fishing rods in the first place,” says Aidan Leavy, director of International Service Ireland. “We’re strengthening the capacity of these organisations over a long period of time so that, if we leave in the future, we leave behind organisations that are solid, and capable of running activities, fund-raising and improving services themselves.”
THE VILLAGE OF N’Dorola, in the south-west of the country, is as isolated a place as you’ll find in Burkina. It’s a bumpy three-hour car journey away from the nearest town in a country where few have access to motorised transport. It’s not so much a village as a large collection of mudhuts, surrounded by dry fields and shaded by mango and Baobab trees. Like most of the countryside of Burkina, there is no electricity or running water here; the only power comes from large car batteries which take the best part of a day to charge up in the nearest town, about 100km away.
People with a disability here face the usual prejudices: too weak or disabled to work the land, and not educated enough to rise out of poverty, they are typically excluded from mainstream society. But some profound social changes are looming, driven by disabled people themselves and assisted by an experienced development worker. The local disability people’s organisation is installing a number of solar panels to generate electricity, doing away with the need to travel long distances to recharge batteries. The group will share the profits equally, as well as re-investing around a third into other activities.
“This will change the way we are seen,” says the president of the organisation, Aboudrumane Traoré (33). He has a disability caused by polio and also has albinism, a condition that leaves him without any skin pigmentation. “Everyone is asking, when will this be up and running? There is great anticipation.”
This slow, often unglamorous, work of em- powering communities is not without its challenges, though. A few hours away in Orodoro – a large, sprawling shanty town – the local disability organisation is making a range of products, including woven deckchairs and clothes for children, to generate income. The products are of good quality, but they’re not selling.
“Some months we might sell a handful of items, but other months we sell nothing at all,” says Sanogo Adama (40), the president of the local organisation. The clothes are too expensive to compete with the price of the imported cotton clothing which saturate the market, while the lack of funds means woven deckchairs can only be made to order.
Funding for these projects will be crucial over the next few years. Irish Aid’s budget has been cut by 20 per cent this year, sending a chill of uncertainty through development organisations. “We’re not sure what lies ahead,” says Leavy. “The OECD said recently that the Irish Aid programme was world class. So, why cut a programme that is benefiting so many people who are in such dire straits?”
Sometimes the scale of problems can feel overwhelming, as in the small encampment of mud huts in Bogue in the west of the country, near the town of Fada N’Gourma. Here, a daily ritual begins in the early hours of the morning. Across the dusty plains and stifling heat, an eight-year-old leads her mother by the hand in search of wood. With her mother’s thin frame and stick-like legs, their progress is painfully slow. As they look for wood, the woman blindly feels her way around, directed by the occasional shout from her daughter. Tomkoumo Solange, a 48-year-old mother of five, cannot see. She is completely dependent on her daughter, Oubra, a quiet girl who’s incredibly small for her age. Times are tough – but they are about to get tougher. June, July and August are the most difficult of months, when food supplies run low and the Saharan winds send temperatures soaring towards 50 degrees.
“It is difficult for people like me,” she says. “People with disabilities are treated badly. They are called names or discriminated against. I stay in the house most of the time, when I can. Neighbours help me, but you need to collect food to survive.”
WORK HAS JUST started to try and empower people like her. Vicky Harris, a development worker from Dublin, is helping to organise the local disability group to lobby the government and start generating income. It has secured a plot of land on which it plans to start a large chicken farm. By selling the poultry after a few months, it hopes to make enough money at the market to improve living standards and reduce the dependency on charity.
“These are people who have been completely disregarded,” says Harris, who used to work with the Dublin Simon Community. “So we’re creating the foundations of a project to try to change that . . . It’s inspirational to see the confidence building up in people when they get together.”
They are powerful sentiments. Here, on a rubbish-strewn landscape dotted with meagre chickens and cattle, hope has been a commodity in short supply. The government and ministers tend to accept most of the suffering of disabled people with a grim fatalism and a shrug of their shoulders. But there is a resilience and solidarity among these people and a refusal to accept their exclusion from society. Given half a chance, they will seize it with both hands. “For now, it is about survival, but in the future things will change,” says Tomkoumo Solange, in slow but steely tones. “We know we have rights, now. Life, we hope, will be better for the next generation.”
International Service Ireland is a development agency that works to combat poverty among marginal groups, with a particular focus on people with disabilities. See www.is-ireland.ie