Photograph by Katherine Lahey Horrigan
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso—The air is hazy with the red dust and wood smoke of West Africa. The roads are jammed with thousands upon thousands of bicycles and small motorcycles, along with the crowding and jostling of cars and trucks that fill the central roads. Most of the vehicles here would be junkyard fodder in America, but a few bright Mercedes-Benzes and Toyota SUVs testify to the undercurrent of wealth and corruption that plagues every African nation.
This is the capital city of Burkina Faso, third poorest country in the world. The smell of unfiltered engine exhaust almost overwhelms the lingering scent of wood fires used by most city residents to cook their meals outdoors. All is dust and smoke and hustle, horns and shouting and the ever-glaring sun.
Since 1997, six people from greater St. Louis have passed through Ouagadougou on their travels between America and Yako, a remote village that, for some, has become home. Working with Sheltering Wings Inc., a St. Louis–based nonprofit, and Burkinabé officials, they have built an orphanage and a school and established a feeding program for hundreds of malnourished orphans living with their extended families.
Two hours on a narrow road as straight as the desert’s horizon take the missionaries from Ouagadougou to Yako, where they live amidst dust, germs and disease beyond the imagination of most Americans. They must filter every drop of water they drink or buy it bottled. Their diet is monotonous. They must learn French to speak with the educated people in the country, tribal languages to speak to anyone else. They have been vaccinated against yellow fever, hepatitis and meningitis, which are normal dangers there. To prevent malaria, they take medicine—which usually works but sometimes doesn’t.
And they love living there.
What they want more than anything is to expand their work in Yako, not to come back here where it’s comfortable.
Burkina Faso lies just south of the Sahara Desert. The land is savannah, and the sandy red soil is arid and nearly barren even in the rainy season. Men and women bent over from the hips work the soil with a hand-cultivator called a daba that looks like an Iron Age tool—a wooden handle about the length of a forearm, with a heavy triangular metal head.
Outside the pounding engine of the orphanage’s battered pickup and the wind against the windshield, there is near silence.
Tacked-together stalls displaying fly-blown tomatoes and eggplant appear at the edge of the pavement, announcing the outskirts of Yako. The only paved road in the village wanders past a mosque and dozens of mud-brick buildings crumbling behind rows of rickety stalls offering cheap fabric, T-shirts and stunted vegetables.
The side roads are dirt paths wandering, in the rainy season, through patches and runnels of coarse grass. Violent monsoon rains gouge ruts as deep as 10 inches across the rocky red clay.
“When I think about Yako, I think about quiet,” says Amy Cox Shaw, the first person from the St. Louis area to move there. It was 1997, and she was a 21-year-old Peace Corps volunteer.
“It was pretty frightening to be there alone,” she recalls. “The first few months I’d lie down under the mosquito net in my little bunk and ... I couldn’t sleep.”
Petite and strikingly beautiful, with an enchantingly slow, gentle smile, Shaw (then Cox) had grown up wanting to be a missionary in French-speaking Africa. “The Peace Corps seemed like the easiest route,” she says. “I’d never heard of Burkina Faso. I was actually thinking Morocco or Tunisia.”
Instead, she wound up as the only white Western woman in a remote village ruled absolutely by African men—most of whom had three wives and 15 or 20 children. The gentle courtesy of Burkina Faso’s public interactions overlies a culture that has been listed by UNICEF as the world’s “most unfriendly” for mothers and children, who are considered property—as they were in America 100 years ago.
Men stay in the courtyards of their fathers’ homes, and often very extended families live in a single walled courtyard, cooking and eating outdoors and sleeping in a scattering of small mud huts roofed with thatch. Incest and rape are common. If an unmarried girl becomes pregnant, she may be cast out, her baby taken from her and placed in an orphanage. Homeless women wander the streets of Yako, disoriented, sometimes naked, unsure of their own names.
This is the dark side of the confusing but gracious culture Shaw was struggling to understand.
The lighter side is a social circle that eliminates the concept of personal property: If there is any food, it will be shared by all. If someone needs money to buy medicine, all who have money will give it. Generosity to guests is a priority that can wipe out a week’s food with a single celebratory meal.
When she arrived, Shaw had wildly thick, long, curly red hair and wore a minuscule gold nose ring. She had a soft voice and a rollicking laugh—and she received one marriage proposal after another. “It’s a cultural way of giving you a compliment: ‘Want to get married? I’ll give you a cow. I’ve got an extra goat,’” she says, laughing.
The nearest Peace Corps neighbor was 35 kilometers away, Shaw’s only transportation a bicycle. “I think the hardest thing was the loneliness,” she says, serious now. “You’re in a really quiet place, and your head is screaming, ‘I’m alone.’ She pauses, looking down at her mug of tea. We’re talking in the kitchen of her 100-year-old Alton house. Hand-thrown pottery plates in a striking pattern are displayed in the old glass-front cabinets behind her. A monitor on the counter keeps tabs on her 1-year-old daughter, napping upstairs. Tomorrow Shaw will be on duty as a nurse in the newborns ICU at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center.
It was in Africa that she decided to become a nurse.
The people of Yako “are rich, but not in material things,” she explains. “They are rich in family, in how they spend their time investing in each other—and in the appreciation that they have for life, because so many of their children die before they’re 2 years old. Death is more of a reality—but not something they fear, as we do.”
The most desperate need in Yako, Shaw decided, was help for the thousands of orphaned children. Malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, meningitis and starvation have preyed on Yako’s residents for untold generations. Children have traditionally been shifted to a relative’s courtyard if their parents die, but the ravages of AIDS have overwhelmed the old system, and by the time Shaw arrived, the courtyards were overflowing with malnourished or starving orphans, who were often treated as indentured servants. She began to put together a plan to build an orphanage.
“I did a little bit of the grassroots,” she says now, “but Mom started it.”
Ruth Cox, Shaw’s mother, had left Alton to become a missionary six years earlier. She had raised three kids as a single mother, working as a computer programmer at Edward Jones. As soon as her children were grown, though, she’d sold her house and everything in it and headed for China and Tibet.
Like her daughter, Cox has a delicate bone structure and a soft voice. She is quiet but intense—a person who laughs easily, lacing her conversations with irony and self-deprecating humor. Living in Tibet, she quickly learned that just a few sips of yak-butter tea and a request for a refill met the cultural requirement of three cups per visit. “It was awful, just awful,” she recalls with a shudder, “but you had to drink it.”
During Shaw’s last year in Africa, Cox traveled the long route to Yako to visit her daughter—and says she felt God calling her to stay. She returned to St. Louis, set up Sheltering Wings as a support organization to found the orphanage, then flew back to Yako, where she has lived for nearly seven years now. She has no intention of leaving.
Eighteen months ago, Cox was ready to build staff housing in the orphanage courtyard, but she had to wait for the end of the growing season for the request to appear reasonable to the local people. Corn and beans are planted in the courtyard, and food is too precious a commodity to waste. “The whole community would know that the white woman did something so stupid,” she says with a chuckle. “They don’t ever, ever, ever throw away food. They don’t throw away anything.”
In the early days, she says, “Hungry people would come to my door, and I would give them a little bit of food, whatever I could afford, but I couldn’t talk to anyone, because I didn’t know French and I didn’t know the tribal language. When I walked down the street, people stared at me. They couldn’t figure out what I was doing there, so they called me the crazy white lady.”
It took two years for the red tape of Burkina Faso to slowly unwind so that she could open the orphanage. Meanwhile, she learned to speak French and began a sponsorship program to help feed and educate malnourished orphans living with their extended families. “Everything in this country is built around the family,” she says. “If these kids don’t have family, they don’t have anything.”
Sadia’s story is typical. She came to the orphanage as a newborn after her mother died in childbirth. South of the Sahara, one in 16 mothers dies of complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. In Burkina Faso the baby usually dies, too, because bottles can’t be purchased, formula is prohibitively expensive and most people don’t have the knowledge or resources to purify the water, which is contaminated with parasites and human waste.
Sadia, though, was born near Yako. She spent almost two years at the orphanage, growing into a showoff, a charmer with a thousand-watt smile and a determination to capture the attention of the nearest “mama.” At 2 years old, she knew she was fetching in her usual outfit of a cloth diaper and plastic pants. She was walking a little unsteadily on the coarse red gravel of the courtyard, playing confidently, and no longer needed formula.
Her father was contacted, and he began a series of visits to become reacquainted with Sadia before he took her back home.
For the first visit, he arrived at the orphanage wearing what was probably his best dashiki, white with red and gold around the neck, with his hair and beard close-cropped. His handsome face expressed deference to the courtyard of the nasara—the white people. But as he reached out to hold the little girl who looked so much like him, his face split into a delighted grin.
In a land where two of 10 children die before their fifth birthday and motherless infants cannot survive, his little girl was alive and well and crying in his arms, unsure about this new man.
Long-range plans call for enough nurseries and dormitories to house 200 children at the orphanage, as well as the addition of a clinic and more school space. The buildings are concrete block, finished with stucco painted a faded pumpkin outside and plaster painted soft yellow inside. In the West African style, each room is isolated, opening to the covered porch and the outdoors. Floors are concrete, and in the nursery rooms the women scrub them until they shine.
Many of the orphans here are teenagers from the bush, where there are no high schools. “The only way to break the grip of poverty in this country is education,” Cox says again and again. “We try to keep a balance. One reason that we cultivate is so that our kids will know how to cultivate, but at the same time our kids sleep on beds. Our kids have electricity to study with at night. Our kids have books.”
Josie, a shy and lovely girl of about 15, was the first orphan to come to live in Cox’s house. Bea, an outgoing girl about the same age, came the next year. (Ages for all children are approximate in Burkina Faso; births are not recorded.) Each morning Bea and Josie race to the single outdoor water faucet to fetch water for bucket baths. They speak no English, but their delight is written in huge smiles as they gesture their offer to carry the water to the outdoor douche, a roofless enclosure of concrete block with a corrugated tin door, built against the courtyard wall. They spend hours pounding millet or corn into meal, then cooking it in metal cauldrons balanced on large rocks over an open fire.
Without the orphanage, the girls would have spent the rest of their lives working like that for their families. But the orphanage began paying them to help teach in the preschool, and now they are in their second year of training to be nurses.
“They want to come back and work at the orphanage,” Cox says. She doesn’t have the $150 a month she’d need to pay two nurses—but she could certainly use them. Each of the 45 children at the orphanage contracts malaria several times a year. Each year a few babies die of malaria, meningitis or dysentery contracted before their arrival at the orphanage. Some infants probably have HIV, but the Yako hospital is not equipped to test for the virus, and Cox refuses to use its facilities for any serious problems. “Once, when I took a baby there that needed an IV, they couldn’t get it in,” she says. “They took us into the operating room to try, because they said the light was better in there. The operating table and the floor were covered with dried blood.”
The babies at the orphanage live a rarefied existence for Burkinabé babies, who are usually picked up by one arm and are rarely bathed. Mothers carry them tied on their backs, but there is almost no eye contact, and babies are not cuddled, talked to or played with. Most Burkinabé children don’t know how to play.
Kids at the orphanage do, though, and they’re kissed and hugged constantly, thanks mainly to the hard work and joyful spirit of a teenage girl from Imperial, Mo.
At 15, Jenni Fox visited Yako with her father. She didn’t like it and never wanted to go back. A year later, she had an experience that changed her mind. “I had a batik of a man with a daba hanging in my room, and he was bent over, cultivating plants,” she says. “I was just looking at it, remembering the hurt and the brokenness—and I started weeping.”
She spent the next summer in Yako. Her mother insisted that she come home and finish high school, so she finished two years of schoolwork in a year and a half and was on a plane to Africa in January 2004. She learned French and Moré, a tribal language, and spent two years working at the orphanage.
Surrounded by sick and dying babies, with flies landing in her eyes and nose, Fox began teaching the staff “mamas” how to cuddle and talk to the orphans, who crowded around her eager for attention. When she contracted an infection on her face and was warned to stop kissing the babies because that was probably the source, she rejected the warning: “If I don’t kiss them, nobody will kiss them.”
Now 21, studying linguistics at the University of Missouri–Columbia, she longs every day to return to Yako. “I want to see my kids’ faces,” she says. “I just want to be with them. The dilemma is: Do I go back to Africa every summer and prolong the process of school, or do I just get finished with school and then go to Africa and stay?”
Lynn Peters runs the orphanage sponsorship program, providing education and hundreds of pounds of rice and millet, dried fish, salt and other staples to more than 250 orphans in the community. She knows all of the kids, what they need and how they’re doing, and she spends two days a week visiting the courtyards where they live. Often whole families live in a single room. Orphaned siblings might live with a grandmother too old to cultivate crops, or a widowed aunt. Life expectancy in Burkina Faso is 43 years—lower now than it was a few years ago, thanks to AIDS.
Peters is a single woman in her mid-40s, with short curly hair and freckles on her upturned nose. She loves a challenge and has no qualms about dangling her feet in the parasite-infested reservoir or eating food not recommended for Westerners. Two and a half years ago, she left her job as a regional official for a chain of day-care centers in the St. Louis area to start a school in Burkina Faso. When she talks, she’s always upbeat, the words pouring out of her in a staccato rhythm, her excitement obvious—yet her e-mails record wrenching experiences. “We’ve lost two babies in the last two days to meningitis,” she wrote in January 2005. “This morning, it was Caroline, a sweet 11-month-old we’ve had for almost a year. With the dust, the dryness and the heat usually comes meningitis, but this year it’s early and intense due to the lack of rain during the past ‘rainy’ season. By the time we got McWendi to the hospital, it was too late. We thought Caroline had received the treatment in time yesterday, but she was gone by this morning.”
Peters’ devotion to God is central to her work; she believes grace is the reason she is able to take heartbreak in stride and keep going. “The dying babies in my arms isn’t the hardest part,” she says, “and the heat isn’t, and the bugs and the filth and no QuikTrip or Target. The hardest part is the lack of relationships like we have in the States.” To her large, close-knit group of friends and family here in St. Louis, she must explain again and again what it’s like to be a missionary in Yako.
“You hear people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe what you do,’” she says. “In my mind it’s, like, ‘What? I just love kids over in Africa. It’s not this shocking thing.’”
This fall Peters opened a Sheltering Wings primary school, and 90 local orphans—most of whom would never have gone to school otherwise—are now taking classes. For Burkina Faso, the school’s a huge experi-ment: Often “they teach children by scaring them and beating them and criticizing them, talking down to them,” Peters says. “We want it to be an African school, but we want to educate the teachers about some better ways of disciplining children and some more creative ways of teaching.”
She’s planning to work with three local teachers, showing them that children learn better in a relaxed, supportive environment. But sometimes it’s hard to imagine a relaxed, supportive environment in Yako. In one day, Peters visited an 11-year-old who had been bitten by a poisonous snake, and then she had to turn down two orphaned babies because there was no room for more at the orphanage. That evening, she had a lighter adventure: “A large frog has popped through the pipes into my toilet,” she wrote. “I don’t always think to look before I lift the lid, and it sent me screaming. My night guard, François, very seriously informed me that he will return tomorrow night with a fishing line, hook and insect to bait the frog in my toilet and catch him! Get a good visual of that in your mind—François standing over my toilet with a fishing pole to catch my visiting frog.”
The Sheltering Wings school, sponsorship program and orphanage exist because of donations from St. Louisans and the help of volunteers such as Mark Smith, a nurse, and his wife, Connie Smith, a dental hygienist. The Smiths lived a comfortable, suburban life in St. Charles—until they were so affected by a visit to Yako that they returned for a year to help.
“Our kids were grown; they were doing well,” Mark explains with a shrug. “We’ve had a good life. We felt like we needed to do something more than give money.
“The people there have absolutely nothing but a joy that seems to exist within them. They expect life to be difficult, and it is—and if there’s ever any simple joy, they rejoice greatly in that.”
