Full Circle Associates

My KM4Dev colleague, Pete Cranston, pointed me to this amazing Senegalese piece, SUNUGAAL - AWADI / KIRIKOU. (Note, it may be my Firefox is crazed, but again, I could not get the audio and video to load in FF, but could in IE. Sounds like I have to do some troubleshooting tonight. ) The English text is:

Tune
All your beautiful words
All your beautiful promises
We always wait for them

AWADI :
You had promised me that I would have of the job
You had promised me that I would never be hungry
You had promised me of true activities and a future
Really up to here I still see nothing
That's why I decided to flee, that's why I break myself in dugout
I swear it ! I can't stay here one more second.
It is better to die that to live in such conditions, in this hell
Come what may
I again prefer to die
The political journalists are in prison or in the DIC (Criminals Investigations Department)
The political opponents are in prison or in the DIC
Too many companies are bankrupt
ICS, SONACOS all sink into the bankruptcy.
Every day your scandals flood our radios
The Old man, his spiritual son, the son of the Old man
It became grave what takes place in Senegal
The thieves and the criminals are free or loosened and we find that legal.

Tune
All your beautiful words
All your beautiful promises
We always wait for them

KIRIKOU:
What became the work which you had promised us
We still see nothing!
We wait since!
It is not you who had promised to take out us of the misery?
Really every day it gets worse.
All this noise,
It is in no way for what we hoped
If everything worked well, we would not embark on these dugouts
All this noise,
It is not what we hoped for.
Our dugouts flow and it is our kids who leave it their life.

Tune
All your beautiful words
All your beautiful promises
We always wait for them

AWADI:
You do propose us your University of future
But we worry about the current one
The young people are living in the anxiety
Excessive power cuts in the SENELEC
Result? Nobody can work!
For the water, it's similar, they spend time cutting it to us
And in spite of all these inconveniences they cut you the service if you do not pay your invoice.
It is not because we made some politics or because we want to force you
But this is only the sad narrative of the reality.
We certainly accept your realizations and big projects: roads, electrifications and bridges
But regrettably the man does not feed himself on tar
It is not a glory for a carpenter to make a table, he was paid for, He makes his job, it's all
One leader should not claim victory in every constructed road.
The people voted and gave him a mandate and a budget for
God does not go to urns, it is the people who votes!
When we are elected, or we work or we cross the hand

Tune
All your beautiful words
All your beautiful promises
We always wait for them

The song give me food for thought about our assumptions of "helping" and how people outside think they have answers, how leaders think they have answers. But we don't. We have to listen and look with fresh eyes and ears.