The kids are all right

I think that from America, it's easy to over-romanticize poor kids in rural Africa. There's this image of the starving but ever-hopeful child who is probably dirty and crying while gazing deeply into the camera lens. Before I left America, a lot of people commented that at least the students in my classrooms here would all be really polite and respectful to me and really really want to learn everything that I could teach them.

Bahaha. The fact that people are ignoring is that kids will be brats everywhere. The unfortunate reality is that kids here are not on the whole that much better than kids in America; they're just poorer/starving while they're doing it, so you have more sympathy for them. While I don't agree with the helicopter-parent/excessive-protection-from-the-world style of parenting that's prevalent in America, Burkina takes it too far to the opposite extreme. As soon as kids can walk around by themselves, they are no longer their parents' problem; you regularly see 3-year-olds who leave the house in the morning and wander around the village unsupervised all day except maybe at mealtimes (if they have meals...cue the dirty crying child photo). It means that there's nobody to teach kids good manners or morals; when a little kid chases after me trying to hit my bicycle with a stick, the only possible guidance that he or she might get is if a conscientious adult nearby decides to get up to hit them. 

This all means that by the time kids are at middle-school age, there are a lot of serious bandits among them (as they say in Burkina French). They have caused me a lot of grief over the past year, especially when they did things like purposefully break the trees that I planted in half, or when they drew dots of motor oil on my world map for no reason. It's true that teachers have a more respected place in Burkina society than in America, but that doesn't stop kids from being little shits.

Not all hope is lost, though. I want to take a moment to appreciate the good kids in village. I don't know how they got to be like that, if something was different in the way their parents brought them up, or if they were just like that by chance. Something right happened, though. For example, my student Alaye, whose photo showed up in a previous blog post about my world map progress. Alaye is in quatrième, which is like 8th grade. He failed last year (a lot of people in that class failed last year for some reason), so this is the second time he's taking the class. He's not a brilliant math student. Most of the other students who are repeating the grade are getting really good grades this year, but while he always gets passing grades on my tests, they're not much more than passing. 

However, he's such a polite kid that he still stands out from the other 90 students in his class. Anytime you see him in village, he comes to say hi, and he'll try to take anything that you're carrying so he can carry it for you. He pumps water for one of the other teachers for nothing in exchange, just because, and anytime you ask questions in class he will raise his hand and try to answer even if he doesn't get it right. 

Last week I planted a tree nursery at the school to add to the trees I planted last year. I organized it with my science club, which is composed of students I invited based on good grades from last year, so he isn't normally a part of it. I told everyone that they were invited to come to the tree nursery planting, though, whether or not they were a part of the club, so he showed up. Afterward, he signed up for the weekly watering schedule that I set up, and today, when I went to check on the 120 trees (they're sprouting!), I was surprised to see that there was another little nursery of 40 or 50 more pots that someone had made next to ours. I saw him nearby and asked him about it, and he said that it was his, and that he would take care of watering it himself. He was just really excited about having more trees for the school, so he took the initiative himself to plant some more himself. He told me that if he got seeds for more different kinds of trees, he would add them in, too.

I mean, what kid does that? Voluntarily creating daily responsibility for himself, for the benefit of kids who come to the school 5 or 10 years from now? I was so impressed.

Alaye

When I see the bandit kids running around the village throwing rocks and generally being bandits, it gets really discouraging. They can so quickly undo any of the work that I try to do here--by messing up trees or whatever, but also by knocking up the female students and by being bad role models to their successors. Why even try to help them? In those cases, it's important to also keep kids like Alaye in mind, who independently of any kind of external reward still run around trying to save the village for the future. It's kids like that who give hope on the part of them all.