On the Road Again

I am currently in Ouagadougou again, finishing up the counterpart workshop. Each volunteer is assigned a counterpart from our community whose work is related to what we'll be doing in the field. For example, my counterpart is another math teacher at the lycée (high school) where I'll be teaching. He seems very nice. Tomorrow I will travel with him to visit my future site for the first time. I'm in a medium-sized village of about 3000 people in the north-central region of Burkina, and I am SUPER excited to see where I'll be living and working.

I know that I'll be teaching math and or physics/chemistry (they combine the subjects in the Burkina curriculum) to 10th or 11th graders, which is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that many people in 10th or 11th grade here are at least as old as I am. A lot of times students have to drop out of school for lack of money and then they enroll again a few years later, or else they fail and have to repeat grades (very common). Thus, students can be as old as 25 or 30 by the time they graduate from high school. One plus is that while middle school classes often have well over 100 students per class, I hear that there will be fewer than 20 students per class in the high school because of a high attrition rate. Of those students, I think that at most only 1 or 2 tend to be female, so there will be a lot of interesting challenges. I think that seeing my site and taking a tour of the high school will give a lot more perspective and meaning to the rest of training, so we'll see how it goes. There is exciting work to be done.


Anyway, I'll get a tour of my town on Wednesday evening and Thursday, followed by 2 days in the regional capital 30 kilometers away, where I hear that they have good yogurt and ice cream. Then I'll come back to Ouaga for a night before returning to training.

The hotel where we're staying now is blowing my mind a little bit. Sunday was the first time I had used a toilet or taken a regular shower (granted, still without hot water, but who needs hot water when it's hot outside anyway) in over a month. Some things will never be the same.