Burkina is in the northern hemisphere, but its seasons don't exactly follow the seasons in America, at all. Here's what we have here:
December-January: "Cold" season where it gets down to the high 60's at night; otherwise, dry and dusty. People do a lot of gardening around this time, so there tend to be a lot of fruits and vegetables in the market. This is also the time that a lot of construction and house repair happens because people have more free time and money after the November harvest. Fruit in season: watermelons.
February-March: Harmattan season. Moderately hot and extremely dry. The harmattan is the wind that blows in dust off of the Sahara. It. is. so. dusty. The haze from dust is reminiscent of smog in Beijing on a bad day.
March-May: Hot season. Supposedly it will get up to the 110's-120's during the day. Dreading this.
June-September: Rainy season. People spend most of their time working in millet, corn, rice, and sorghum fields. They don't do much vegetable gardening during this time, and the grains from the previous year are starting to run out, so nobody has money or good nutrition. Fruit in season: mangoes.
October-November: Mini hot season, but not as hot as the real hot season apparently. This is the harvest season for grains, thus it's the busiest time of year for most people. Fruit in season: guavas.
I mention the fruits that are in season because they are EVERYWHERE and you can get them for practically free. People eat them nonstop.
We're starting to get into the harmattan season. I couldn't see the sun this morning because it was so hazy. Biking is difficult, especially in dresses. The dust is crazy. I can sweep out my house in the morning and by afternoon it will already be covered in another film of dust. Since we've been out of the wet season for awhile, most of the green plant life has died off, so the landscape is all flat rust colored and there's nothing to block your view of the garbage that people throw around everywhere. It's lovely. My classes are interrupted every 10 minutes or so when a big gust of wind blows in another cloud of dust. It's pretty terrifying looking when you see it coming, and the students all scream "DUST!" and run to slam shut the doors and windows. Of course, then it's pitch black in the classroom because there aren't any lights. And you thought your high school had weird problems.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Burkinabe French
When I tell people that I'm in Africa teaching math in French, people's reaction is always as follows: You're teaching math in French? How's that going? It combines many of Americans' worst nightmares, you see: math and foreign languages. Well, French is not the problem for me. My French is still far from perfect, but I speak so much more French than the average villager that I feel it doesn't actually get me that far outside of the classroom. Maybe half the people in my village can speak French at an okay level, more men than women. A surprising number of people don't seem to know that the response to "bonjour" is just "bonjour." I say "bonjour" to them and they shift uneasily and respond with an uncomfortable "uh hm!"
The lack of French abilities on the Burkinabe side makes teaching a lot more difficult. First of all, if the student's parents don't speak French, it means that they really can't give their kid any academic support. Primary school is taught in a mixture of local language and French, but secondary school is only in French. Teachers can get into trouble for giving explanations in Moore. My math students are in their second year of secondary school (like 7th grade), and most of them get by in French, but a lot of them are still really terrible at it. Sometimes I give explanations that should be extremely simple, but half the class still doesn't get it. If they understood the language, there's no way they couldn't understand.
I did a recent unit on fractions, and it was the first time I used word problems with my class. They could. not. do word problems. I explained them over and over but they still didn't get it. Part of the problem is definitely the fact that they are just resistant to having to think about how to solve a problem instead of mindlessly cranking out calculations. But there's more to it than that. On the last test I had a question "I have a bag of 50 candies. I eat half of them. How many candies are left?" Responses were all over the map, including things like "There are 49/2 candies left." or "There are 10 mangoes left." (An actual response. No idea where some of those numbers came from. Or mangoes.) A follow-up question was "I give 1/5 of the remaining candies to my sister. What fraction of the original bag did I give her?" That one really confused them. A lot of people responded with variations on "I gave my sister 10 candies fraction of the bag." or "I did to give 99/50 fraction of candies to her."
If that's your French level, I can't really blame you for hating math because you think it's impossible to understand.
Even at its best, Burkinabe French has some funny quirks that separate it from French French. They got me confused for awhile. For example, in France, "soir" means evening, thus you greet people with bonjour all day until the late afternoon, when you start bonsoiring. So when I arrived here, I greeted people with bonjour at 3 pm and they laughed at me like I was nuts. Mais c'est le soir, Mariko! Crazy foreigner. Bonsoir starts at 12:01 pm. They don't use the word après-midi, French for afternoon, at all. Students studying English seem to have trouble with the distinction. I've gotten a lot of good evenings while I was on my way to prepare lunch.
Another one that still gets me are the words devoir and examen. In France, devoir means homework assignment, and examen means test. But here, devoir means test and examen can be either a major examination or a medical exam. If you want to give students homework, it's exercices de maison, house exercises. Sometimes I still accidentally tell students they have a devoir due tomorrow, leading to much upset all around. But really I don't understand why they use devoir like that. I don't see how someone wouldn't have fixed that mistranslation before it got stuck. But there it is.
And then there's the word interessant, interesting. Shortly after I arrived at site, I made crepes and shared them with some people I knew who had never had crepes before. The reaction all around was "c'est interessant." It's interesting? At home, I would be so upset if everyone's reaction to something I cooked for them was "it's interesting" and that was it. They always said it really slowly with an unreadable expression. Well no more crepes for you! On another occasion, I told someone I had walked to a nearby river by myself and he told me that it wasn't interessant. Dude, why would you tell me my story wasn't interesting? Then another day, someone told a story about how 3 people died in a motorcycle accident and it wasn't interessant. What? People died and it wasn't interesting? It took me about 4 months in country to finally figure out that in the dialect the word "interesting" means good. It explained so much. I haven't yet figured out an appropriate substitute for the word interesting to tell someone that I have no interest in something.
I feel that the Burkinabe really need to learn a second language to allow free communication across ethnic groups, as well as to give them a boost on communication with the outside world. At the same time, though, how much is it really worth letting students' comprehension of all other subjects suffer until they start getting a grasp on French 3 or 4 years later?
The lack of French abilities on the Burkinabe side makes teaching a lot more difficult. First of all, if the student's parents don't speak French, it means that they really can't give their kid any academic support. Primary school is taught in a mixture of local language and French, but secondary school is only in French. Teachers can get into trouble for giving explanations in Moore. My math students are in their second year of secondary school (like 7th grade), and most of them get by in French, but a lot of them are still really terrible at it. Sometimes I give explanations that should be extremely simple, but half the class still doesn't get it. If they understood the language, there's no way they couldn't understand.
I did a recent unit on fractions, and it was the first time I used word problems with my class. They could. not. do word problems. I explained them over and over but they still didn't get it. Part of the problem is definitely the fact that they are just resistant to having to think about how to solve a problem instead of mindlessly cranking out calculations. But there's more to it than that. On the last test I had a question "I have a bag of 50 candies. I eat half of them. How many candies are left?" Responses were all over the map, including things like "There are 49/2 candies left." or "There are 10 mangoes left." (An actual response. No idea where some of those numbers came from. Or mangoes.) A follow-up question was "I give 1/5 of the remaining candies to my sister. What fraction of the original bag did I give her?" That one really confused them. A lot of people responded with variations on "I gave my sister 10 candies fraction of the bag." or "I did to give 99/50 fraction of candies to her."
If that's your French level, I can't really blame you for hating math because you think it's impossible to understand.
Even at its best, Burkinabe French has some funny quirks that separate it from French French. They got me confused for awhile. For example, in France, "soir" means evening, thus you greet people with bonjour all day until the late afternoon, when you start bonsoiring. So when I arrived here, I greeted people with bonjour at 3 pm and they laughed at me like I was nuts. Mais c'est le soir, Mariko! Crazy foreigner. Bonsoir starts at 12:01 pm. They don't use the word après-midi, French for afternoon, at all. Students studying English seem to have trouble with the distinction. I've gotten a lot of good evenings while I was on my way to prepare lunch.
Another one that still gets me are the words devoir and examen. In France, devoir means homework assignment, and examen means test. But here, devoir means test and examen can be either a major examination or a medical exam. If you want to give students homework, it's exercices de maison, house exercises. Sometimes I still accidentally tell students they have a devoir due tomorrow, leading to much upset all around. But really I don't understand why they use devoir like that. I don't see how someone wouldn't have fixed that mistranslation before it got stuck. But there it is.
And then there's the word interessant, interesting. Shortly after I arrived at site, I made crepes and shared them with some people I knew who had never had crepes before. The reaction all around was "c'est interessant." It's interesting? At home, I would be so upset if everyone's reaction to something I cooked for them was "it's interesting" and that was it. They always said it really slowly with an unreadable expression. Well no more crepes for you! On another occasion, I told someone I had walked to a nearby river by myself and he told me that it wasn't interessant. Dude, why would you tell me my story wasn't interesting? Then another day, someone told a story about how 3 people died in a motorcycle accident and it wasn't interessant. What? People died and it wasn't interesting? It took me about 4 months in country to finally figure out that in the dialect the word "interesting" means good. It explained so much. I haven't yet figured out an appropriate substitute for the word interesting to tell someone that I have no interest in something.
I feel that the Burkinabe really need to learn a second language to allow free communication across ethnic groups, as well as to give them a boost on communication with the outside world. At the same time, though, how much is it really worth letting students' comprehension of all other subjects suffer until they start getting a grasp on French 3 or 4 years later?
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Ne y taabo
That's Moore for happy holiday. For this past taabo, I went back to Sapone to visit my host family from training. It was good to be back. It was the first time I had seen any of them since August, and everyone seemed to be doing well. Christmas is a big deal here. It's the biggest holiday of the year for Christians, and my host sisters made me promise from the time that I left in August that I would come back to celebrate with them.
I arrived on the 24th in time to go to the evening Protestant mass with my host mother and her grandson Fabrice. They told me that if I felt tired at any time we could leave. It was my first time attending a church service in Burkina, and it wasn't really what I was expecting, but I liked it! It was held in a small square room with cement flooring and walls and plain wooden benches. When we arrived, the light weren't working so it was lit up by a kerosene lantern. (They got the lights running later, but I liked the lamp light better.) Women and men sat separately. There was some guy leading songs in Moore along with accompaniment from another guy at a drum set, and they did a lot of the call-and-response kind of songs you might imagine. People who felt inspired clapped and danced, not least of all my host mother, who was shakin' it in the aisles. I really liked the guy who led the songs--he got really into it. If all church services were like that, I'd go just for the music.
After an hour or two, the music ended, and another guy came in to start preaching. One man preached in Moore, and another man next to him translated into French. It was getting pretty late by then, and Fabrice and I were both getting pretty sleepy so we left not long after.
The next morning, the 5 daughters arrived from Ouaga and beyond. There are 6 daughters in total; 2 are still in high school and the rest are grown up. The 2 high schoolers were there when I was at training, but during the school year it's just the youngest plus Fabrice. The father is blind and doesn't work, but the mother is a government development worker, and as such the family is quite well-off for Burkinabe standards.
The day started with Fabrice putting the finishing touches on his Christmas nativity scene in front of the courtyard. My family didn't have one last year. Fabrice built it out of mud, and he was so proud of it. It will stay there in front of the house, "joyeux noel" and all for the rest of the year until he repaints it for Christmas 2013.
The daughters, with intermittent help from the mother, spent all morning preparing the food. On the menu were:
In the end, it didn't feel that much like Christmas to me, but it was a nice holiday. They don't exchange gifts besides giving candy to kids, which I much preferred to the excess of the US. There was no Christmas tree or annoying songs that stay stuck in my head until March. It was just a religious holiday where everyone in the family gets together...and eats a lot. Which is fine by me.
The day after, my friend Matt and I biked and bush taxied to our friend Royce's site, just a little further down the road toward Ghana. Impressions: they have great bananas! And nice restaurants! And her house is way bigger than mine! (I still like my house though.)
It was interesting being back in Sapone after 4 months' separation. Some things had changed--the gas station had been redone and looked like it had come straight out of '50's America, which is a big step up from where it was before. When I left last time, the city government was saying that my host family's house should have electricity before Christmas, but the poles that were supposed to hold the wires still stood empty. Maybe they will be electrified by Christmas of next year. Anyway, I think nothing changed so much as my perception of it.
 |
| Fabrice and his nativity scene |
After an hour or two, the music ended, and another guy came in to start preaching. One man preached in Moore, and another man next to him translated into French. It was getting pretty late by then, and Fabrice and I were both getting pretty sleepy so we left not long after.
 |
| The Christmas spread |
The day started with Fabrice putting the finishing touches on his Christmas nativity scene in front of the courtyard. My family didn't have one last year. Fabrice built it out of mud, and he was so proud of it. It will stay there in front of the house, "joyeux noel" and all for the rest of the year until he repaints it for Christmas 2013.
The daughters, with intermittent help from the mother, spent all morning preparing the food. On the menu were:
- Salad
- Pasta
- Rice
- Green beans
- Chicken
- 2 kinds of fish (grilled and fried)
- Peanut butter cookies and banana bread that I brought
- Sodas and 1 bottle of red wine
Nothing too exotic. Whatever they put in the garlicky mayonnaise sauce for the salad and pasta was like crack. I couldn't stop eating it. We started eating a little after noon and never really stopped eating for the rest of the day, or the next morning. The family exchanged a few dishes of food with neighbors, but I didn't try any of what they brought over. But they were SO EXCITED about that banana bread.
Later in the evening, all the girls put on the new dresses and jewelry they had gotten just for Christmas and asked me to take their pictures. They went nuts about getting their pictures taken. In the end I took more than 50 pictures with every possible combination of the girls and their parents.
 |
| The family |
The day after, my friend Matt and I biked and bush taxied to our friend Royce's site, just a little further down the road toward Ghana. Impressions: they have great bananas! And nice restaurants! And her house is way bigger than mine! (I still like my house though.)
It was interesting being back in Sapone after 4 months' separation. Some things had changed--the gas station had been redone and looked like it had come straight out of '50's America, which is a big step up from where it was before. When I left last time, the city government was saying that my host family's house should have electricity before Christmas, but the poles that were supposed to hold the wires still stood empty. Maybe they will be electrified by Christmas of next year. Anyway, I think nothing changed so much as my perception of it.
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