Interview of Jean-Marc Terrisse, from the association Via Sahel

 

For this article, I have made an interview of Jean-Marc Terrisse, a volunteer for the French association Via Sahel. This interview was an oral conversation in French, so I have done my best to translate it but I apologize if some parts are a little bit odd to read!     

Via Sahel is a federation of eight associations created in 1992, who have been working in the Dogon country, Mali, from 1998 to 2012. Jean-Marc is an engenieer in mechanic and hydrolic, and have been the president of the national federation between 2014 and 2018. The actions of Via Sahel, willingly reduced to the circle of Bandiagara, and especially around the city of Sangha, are covering a wide range of topics: the access to water with the construction of villagers wells, micro credits for women, maternities, hospitals, classrooms, literacy classes for young girls, organic croplands, fight against inflation in dearth period, etc. The associations constituting the federation are very small, with only two or three active members, surrounded by twenty to thirty volunteers less actives, and they are currently working in Burkina Faso for the construction of a maternity and the funding of an organic cropland irrigated with a photovoltaic pump.

Jean-Marc Terrisse (to the right) and Robert Hovor (to the left), the new president of Via Sahel 

Source: La Dépêche, 2015

First of all, I would like to know why after spending all this time in Mali, the federation decided to leave this country to concentrate the actions in Burkina Faso?

We have been working in Mali until 2012, but with the propagation of the conflicts coming from the North, the Tuareg and the Toula people, as well as the Jihadist infiltration and a big problem with the dissemination of weapons from Libya after the fall of the Colonel Gaddafi which have completely contaminated the country. Little by little, all of the associations on the Dogon country left for reasons of safety, personal safety as White persons, but also for our collaborators, so they won’t be targeted for working with White people.

We had a representant on the spot, Alain, who had studied pharmacy and was married, with kids, and lived with his entire family on top of the Bandiagara Escarpment. He considered himself as relatively safe, and didn’t want to leave, but I was in contact with the consul in Bamako who was asking us to make him leave, so I wanted to offer an ultimatum: either he agreed to exit the Dogon country, and continued to work for us in a safer area, either we were stopping our work together. I have been put in minority within the federation, the other associations didn’t want to force him, and given the responsibilities I had as a president if Alain and his family were kidnaped or murdered, I decided to resign. Alain stayed one more year in this area, but have been evacuated in 2019 by the French special forces just before an intervention of the French army over the territory. Right now, Alain is in Bamako, he is 65 years old and even though we have stopped his activities as volunteer, we are thinking to a way to remunerate him, even though he never had a status of employee he worked for more than twenty years with us, and we feel responsible regarding of his situation.

With Via Sahel Muret, the association I am currently volunteering in, we have considered a lot of countries since 2014, and with the encounters’ hazard, we have been in contact with a sculptor native of a village in Burkina Faso, in the South of Ouagadougou, far enough of the fighting zones. We have been there to meet the mayor of the village, the women’s association and the inhabitants to ask them if they were interested by our help, a how we could help them. The first project they unanimously asked was the construction of a maternity, as well as the arrangement of a maket gardening plot of one hectare that had been given to the women’s association but was useless because of the lack of water. We spent 2-3 years to raise the funds for these two first projects, and now the maternity is functioning since October, the first baby is born 15 days ago, and we paid for the construction and the installation of the photovoltaic pump with two systems : an irrigation by basin, in which they fill watering can, and an irrigation drop by drop which will be maintained if they judge it more useful than the other technique. We also fund the fence around the crop, as well as a formation for organic agriculture, plant nursery and products valorisation.

Pictures of the formation to transplanting and organic agriculture, Via Sahel Muret, 2020

I also wanted to ask you about the criticism when talking about European associations working in Africa, which is the lack of formation of the volunteers and their lack of attention regarding of the needs of the population they are working with. How do you work in order to prevent this, and is it something of which French associations are aware?

The involvement in an association fluctuates regarding of the age, the personal issues, etc, but the engagement in an association remains a luxury for rich and healthy persons. One of the main issues for the small associations like Via Sahel is the recruitment of the actives members, but we often faced young persons, who were ready to give us a week, fifteen days, to go on the spot, and who thought that it will be enough to be useful and to do good. We then had to explain to them that we were going there to bring specific technologies, formations or cares, but that doing things that the local population could do too didn’t make any sense, except for the feeling that you have made a good deed. And yes, we see associations, more or less lucrative, that are sending young persons in the entire world to dig, paint, clean, when the persons already there know how to do it. The engagement have to be on the longer run: these fifteen days they were ready to give us, it would be more useful if it was one day per month, where they are going to raise funds and do the things that the beneficiaries need. Another example of this could be this: at the beginning of our activities of healthcare, we were sending doctors in the countryside and they were providing their services for free in villages very isolated. But what we found out after some time, is that the ill villagers started to wait the passage of the doctor we were sending for free, rather than going to the city where they had to pay. And there, while we though we were doing good, we were actually doing more harm, because the pathologies were getting worse, so we stopped this action, but we started to fund formations and sensitization to first aid and hygiene.

Another example : in the 2000's in Mali, a great project of Japanese collaboration had the goal to spend the money that was granted to them in drilling sites equipped with manual pumps India Mali, and they installed about forty or fifty of those pumps all over the country without discussing it with the populations and installing those themselves. The lifespan of one of those pumps without maintenance is about five years, therefore they all broke down within five years. On the works that we created, we created solidarity and maintenance funds that users finance very gradually, with very small amounts of money each time, for the servicing of the infrastructures, a technician or the strengthening of a well's edge, for example. In the village in Burkina Faso, they had for example a mutuality fund for the manual pumps financed by the Saudi Arabia about 15 years ago, and the six pumps I had saw were all working. One of our priorities is also to try and no import any technology that would be out of range for the populations, the Dogon land is far away from Bamako, and in Burkina Faso it's still part of a rural environment even though it's a bit less isolated. Therefore, we wish to have technologies as autonomous and sustainable as possible, for example the wells only have to be reinforced with concrete. Nevertheless, when we had to introduce technologies such as photovoltaic pumping, we made sure that technicians close by were capable of maintaining these structures, and we put them in touch with the women's association.

The way France and the United-Kingdom have, or haven’t, let go their old colonies and the nature of the relationship with them also influence a lot our vision of Africa, don’t you think? 

There has been a huge evolution in the associative sector in twenty, thirty years, and especially in the relationship the French have with the beneficiary. Yet, whatever one might say, there is a sense of superiority, and it asks a lot of efforts and self-analysis to restrain it, but we sometimes had to intervene in order to block some patronizing behaviours. We are there to help people we consider as needy, and we aren’t, so it already creates inequality. This introspection of your own motivations, it is something that people weren’t doing very much twenty years ago, but we see a change in France, especially from the financial backers, who insists on the fact that the beneficiaries have to be partenors, driving power for the projects: the associations have to respond to real needs that are expressed, they have to stop exporting and project their vision of what should be the life of these persons. How would I react if a Saudi was coming into my neighbourhood, and found my garden poorly maintained, or the paint on my house ugly, and if automatically, he starts to repaint my house or clean my garden without even asking my opinion? I would be upset, even though he is probably right! But yes, the story of decolonialisation, which is still a running process in France, was totally different in England, where we could say that they relatively ‘succeeded’ in the evolution of their relationship with the colonies, which is very less true and questionable from the French side, with the dirty aspects of the France-Africa that we are still dragging. If it's a project conceived and imposed by the White, its failure is guaranteed, if it doesn't answer to a demand from the population. For example, I've tried for four to five years to plant trees in order to act against deforestation, to foster the protection of early shootings. I've tried to understand how to unite the farmers and the population around this concern : they use wood for cooking, women sometimes have to walk miles to fetch some wood, but I failed to favour reforestation, it's a cultural failure and a project I abandoned after a few years.

        If there's a desire to implement a sanitary policy and to limit the work of women and girls, it's necessary to give a better access to water so that it can be used for more than drinking. Water in Mali is 40 to 50 meters deep in the ground and 1,5 meters of diameter, that serve to fill 10 litters worth goatskins. This water isn't of very good quality, it gets contaminated by aerial pollution, but it's still water. Mali's policy has been not to make more wells with a great diameter but closed drilling sites with pumps. With this system, water is of a better quality, it is filtered on 40 meters and stays uncontaminated, but the price point differs : a well with an open diameter costs around 2000/2500 euros, whereas a drilling site can cost up to 15 000/20 000e, and it's quite easy to see that the Malian policy isn't applied since they cannot apply their own recommendations. We answered to the villager's demands, we did not have the means to do so, and the other interest of great diameters wells are self-sustainable structures : the first one that were made in 64/65 are still working even though we left Mali. Another problem is the quality of the water, there is always a pathway between the pump and the mouth: the container in which the water is collected, who is it going to be transported? The dust lifted on the way that enters the buckets carries diseases, faecal matter etc, water is then stocked in earthenware jars etc. Water's production is a problem, but you cannot resolve all the problems while only seeing a link in the chain. We tried, with no success, to work on all the water's chain up until consumption, but it demands a great deal of formation.