Chandema's Household

by Heather Nicholson

This January, a group of trip team members continued an interview initiated by Dr. Ray Norman a year ago with Chandema, a security guard at the Handicapés en Avant Center. This interview was a part of the RRA, or Rapid Rural Appraisal, which DE has been incorporating into the last three trip teams. Chandema’s household includes eleven men (four elderly), seven women, and roughly 30 children.

Team members asked the household to rank a number of items according to their relative household importance, and both good health and enough food topped the charts. The team discovered that the family members thought much more in terms of an item’s worth to the household survival rather than of its monetary value, reflecting a strong difference between American and Burkinabe culture. When the family began to rank and discuss its crop growth, it became clear that cotton was a sensitive issue in wake of the recent plunge in cotton market price due to American overproduction. The family had grown a great deal of cotton almost at the expense of the grain millet, which they ranked number one in household importance due to its centrality to their diet. Though millet is essential to survival, cotton was supposed to bring in revenue. While cotton ranked 1st in relative cash value to Chandema’s family, it was only 6th in household importance, leading the family members to admit that they would aim to grow less the following year.

The rankings of community problems varied significantly between the men and women. While the men cited the lack of irrigation water as the community’s biggest obstacle, the women were more concerned with the issue of food insecurity. Men and women both ranked the problem of land tenure far lower than they had in 2004, when it was tied with food insecurity as the biggest concern. This shift in priorities also reflects the reality of the cotton crisis, for a year ago the family was preoccupied with land tenure because they wanted more land to produce more cotton. With this interview, DE also determined two newly declared community necessities: the need for a hospital and more firewood.