PITTSFIELD, MA (WAMC) – Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in West Africa, is one of the poorest nations in the world. For the past five years, the BARKA Foundation, a Berkshire County-based NGO, has been working to bring students and residents in Massachusetts together with those in Burkina Faso with the hope of improving the lives of both.

WAMC’S Berkshire Bureau Chief Patrick Donges caught up with BARKA Foundation founders Esu and Ina Anahata to talk about some upcoming initiatives both in Burkina and the Berkshires.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE.

In the email blast we uploaded several photos of water (my partner Ina & I live in a one-room cabin that rests three feet off the shore of a pristine spring-fed lake in Maine and have almost 10,000 photos of water in its various forms).  We wrote of how water is understood within the indigenous paradigm, particularly the Dagara five-element cosmology of Burkina Faso. For the Dagara people, the Spirit of Water is about grief, forgiveness, reconciliation, healing and ultimately peace.  Within Dagara numerology, years that end in the number 1 or 6, correspond to the element of water.  That makes 2011 a “double” water year.

We linked the indigenous African wisdom with the ancient wisdom of Lao Tsu who said,

“THE SAGE’S TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD ARISES FROM SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF WATER.  IF WATER IS UNITED, THE HUMAN HEART WILL BE CONNECTED. IF WATER IS PURE AND CLEAN, THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE WILL READILY BE UNIFIED. THE PIVOT OF WORK IS WATER”.

Five hours later the newsletter was complete (click here to see the newsletter and gorgeous water photos) after which came the following slew of water-related activities:

• It had been snowing all day and the ice-covered lake now had enough snow to ski on it once again.  I got on the water for possibly one of the last cross-country ski outings of the winter because the ice on the lake is beginning to become rotten.  I’m going to miss these short intense blasts of exercise which help balance out long stretches in front of the computer. As I skied I offered my gratitude to the Spirit of Water on which I was skiing, and respect for my life being in its hands.
• I had worked up such a sweat that I took a bucket shower outside in the snow with hot water that we heat on the wood stove.  We have no running water so we bathe like we do when we’re in the bush of Burkina, with a bucket of water.  As I took my bath, World Water Day, water conservation, and our small water footprint were foremost in my mind.  After the bath, to submerge fully into water I jumped into the icy lake through a hole in the ice we keep open all winter, partly for this purpose.  To do this on World Water Day felt appropriate… and felt great.
• I went up the hill to our Ancestor shrine to say my daily prayers. Ina had gone to a spring a few hundred yards into the forest and I decided instead to find her.  The spring is a sacred place that never freezes over.  It too would be a perfect to visit on this day.  When I arrived Ina had already gone.  I performed a small ceremony and prayed for the healing of our earth’s waters… the following thoughts arose:

Water is our greatest healing agent.  Our bodies are 80% water. Dr. Masuro Emoto, the Japanese research scientist made famous in “What the Bleep?” has shown that water has the power and ability to reflect our intention.  If we look at the state of water today- oil plumes in the Gulf, dead baby dolphins washing up on shore, depletion of the ocean’s fish due to over-fishing, melting glaciers, privatization, it’s easy to see what water is reflecting- Koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance.

The gift of this water year of 2011 is the cleansing and purification required to navigate through the crucible of 2012, what indigenous prophecies have called the end of time.  To our understanding that doesn’t mean that the world will end in 2012.  It simply means that systems that have been revealed to be corrupt and unjust will fall, and society will undergo major transformations.  This process has already begun.  One need look no further than wikileaks, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Japan, Haiti, US Homeland Security, Wisconsin, food security, the housing market, etc. to see evidence of this.  We have created a world in which the richest 1 percent have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined and almost 1 billion people lack access to clean water, life’s most essential natural resource.  Water is raising our consciousness as we raise water consciousness on the planet.

• Ina arrived- followed my tracks in the snow.  We kiss by the spring because it was so gosh darn romantic.  There isn’t another human being around for miles.  We live way out in “unorganized territory”.  We walk home along the route that we have walked many times carrying water from the spring.  Like our family in Burkina Faso, we too walk for water.
• I finally get to the Ancestor shrine to complete this prayerful day.  Ina stepped onto the lake.  She began belting out the Native American water song, echoing among the neighboring hills and mountains.  I joined in, my voice resounding the sacred water song throughout the forest… a duet of honoring and thanking the Spirit of Water.

For the co-founders of an NGO working to procure clean drinking water and basic sanitation for the poorest of the poor in rural West Africa, every day is Water Day… however World Water Day is special because we get to share this focus with the rest of the world.  It’s a celebration of solidarity, a birthday for every water activist on the planet.

Each day I ask Spirit and the Ancestors to walk with me every step of the way… today was a day like that, a day in which that happened…

The BARKA Foundation held its 1st Peace, Water & Wisdom Walk in 2009– a 500-mile journey through 20-cities-in-20-days to raise awareness and funds for clean water for the people of Burkina Faso, West Africa. On Peace Day BARKA held a walk for water in Ouagadougou, Burkina’s capitol. BARKA now walks with schools and communities in North America to build cultural bridges which help secure the human right to clean water & sanitation for all. Join us!

I got to work this morning at 9:30am after briefly chiseling the ice out of a large hole we keep open in the frozen lake in front of our cabin where we fill our water buckets and wash our faces while we say our morning prayers (not knowing it was going to be my only physical exercise for the day) and didn’t leave my desk until 12 hours later when the generator ran out of gas.

The workload right now is so intense, that 12 hours didn’t seem to even put a dent in it.  I was typing an email furiously to a promotional partner for our February $28K Campaign when the power flickered and I knew shut down was imminent.

Work today was hell.  It wasn’t the work, it was the way I was not able to handle the stress of being so short-staffed,

wearing about 9 too many hats,

advances and setbacks with the website,

no funds coming in today and not wanting to flog the newsletter recipients with another call to action to raise funds- said we were going to give them a break this time…

a revelatory phone call with a program director of a non-profit which is a bit further down the road than BARKA, operations of $400K (Development Director doubled their operating budget), 2 FT staffers on the ground in Africa, she said that the way to grow “right” is to apply all those business skills to keep organized and on task… we agree.  This call resulted in a fairly unanimous decision between us and Board members that our desire to accept TOM’s Shoes donation of 33,333 pairs of shoes may not be feasible for BARKA at this point, until we have staff and more country-based partners in Burkina… that was a disappointing acknowledgment.

A million other things happened today- we spent an hour dealing with the paypal business account for BARKA Foundation,

looked up private foundations in Maine for Christina Long, an extraordinary supporter who is a sophomore at John Bapst Memorial High School and wrote an impassioned letter asking for donations which she will send out to companies throughout Maine, signed by the entire student body,

conversed with Glen Niemy, another extraordinary supporter who we met last month when we presented at the Bridgton Lakes Region Rotary Club in Maine… after the presentation he grabbed Ina, pulled her aside, put a $50 bill in her hand and said ‘Call me, I want to help.’  That’s an offer you can’t refuse.  He’s a very busy lawyer who works on both coasts, and a long distance runner, and he was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and said to us last night that he was more interested now in helping others and not being as focused on himself and his own needs, and that our project was “unambiguous” and he offered to tap his friends for donations, contact a buddy who knows someone at Stephen King Foundation, speak to the school board, put it out to the legal community, get the Rotary more involved, and to contact local newspapers… I mean, what more could you ask for?  We asked him if we could put his name in our newsletter because we wanted to share his inspiring and selfless love-in-action, and he humbly replied that he didn’t think he was all that inspiring but to go ahead if it would help.

We’ve been calling all angels.  Alex Falk, another angel we met through Rotary in Marblehead, MA, who is the CEO of a hi-tech company that’s putting out a product launch in 2 weeks stopped what he was doing to donate $500 on our Global Giving project page and offered to share the urgency of BARKA’s need with the Rotary Club in coming weeks.

Up until today we’ve been getting donations from people we don’t know and who are not even on the email newsletter- new faces are finding us for the first time.  Twitter?  Facebook?  Global Giving?  A natural consequence of increasing momentum?

Jeez, for a minute I was thinking that today was a train wreck because it was yet another day (7 in a row) when I have not been able to accomplish what I set out to do, namely write a press release about our February Fundraising Slam, modify a recent 5-page grant proposal for a more general audience, and put up the blog I’ve been writing in my head for 6 months about how it shouldn’t be this hard to do this work, that funding should not be so sparse and what’s wrong with our current giving models and aid systems- specifically that they’re not selfless enough, nor bold enough to take risks and venture outside their own paradigm… I did send an initial email to Huffington Post, on the day they happened to have been bought out by AOL for $315M (it amazes me how AOL can still consistently make the headlines), and Ned Breslin, outspoken CEO of Water For People is now following us on Twitter.

Molo a molo as Faddaben in Kokrobite, Ghana taught us… little by little.

This blog is long enough. Just watched DemocracyNow online (they’re keeping the heat on coverage of the Egyptian Revolution), ate some deer steak, and it’s 1:30am.  After the power went out, I went outside and meditated and sat in prayer for a couple of hours… the silence is so beautiful… thank goodness I can clear my head… must be 10 degrees F and it doesn’t even feel very cold.

I only recounted about half the day’s work.  Two other quick items worth noting:

1. May 27 BARKA will hold several “Walks for Water” in Maine and New Hampshire with Living Innovations, a community of special needs adults
2. A developing “virtual technical advisory committee” of retired Peace Corps volunteers who were stationed in Burkina Faso and will advise BARKA’s work on the ground in various sectors.

As Ina would say, tomorrow is another day.