Biker

I was kind of nervous about biking before I got here. After my parents made me learn how to ride a bike as a 9-year-old so that I would grow up with the basic competencies of a normal person (joke's on you! 23 and still can't drive a car!), I spent the next 12 years determinedly proving the fact that you really can forget how to ride a bike. By my senior year in college, though, things were getting embarrassing. One memorable Ohioan afternoon, I re-learned how to cycle on the kiddie bike of a friend.

That brings us to this past June, when I got here and was told that I would be issued a 21-speed 13" women's mountain bike for all my transportation needs. I knew I could manage it...but I was nervous. We had a 2-hour session before moving in with our host families on basic bike repair and maintenance, which mostly involved teaching us how to take off wheels and repair flats. Then, that was it. They were assuming we already knew how to do things like turn with less than a 20' radius. I was on my own. I had never even shifted gears while riding a bike before.

The first time I rode my bike was when I went home with my host family. Loaded down with a heavy backpack and with my mandolin case thumping on my right knee, desperately trying to follow my host mother through a cloud of dust as she motorcycled down uneven dirt roads, I thought about crying. Kids here learn to bike when they're 3, and I did not want their first impression to be of me falling off of my shiny expensive brand-new bike because of my own incompetence. Thankfully I made it back, barely. Who knows what they thought. Things got dicey by the second day of training when I got my first flat. I didn't even know I had a flat. My host brother had to tell me. I sat there waiting for half an hour with my flat front tire while my host brother went to get my host mother, because he said we were too far from the house to walk back. Eventually, though, we walked back. We were 7 minutes from the house.

What really freaked me out was how self-sufficient I had to be with the whole thing. I got a little repair kit with my bike, which included patches, glue, a bottle of mineral oil, and a bunch of mysterious metal tools that I didn't know how to use. I also got a bike repair and maintenance handbook that I still haven't opened. Was I supposed to figure out how to do this all on my own? I had witnessed flats being fixed, but could I really do it in the heat of the moment? What if something went horribly wrong with my bike but I had no idea because I was clueless about my bike anyway, and then one day it broke and I crashed? After the first time I got a flat and didn't know it, I became really paranoid about getting more flats and not noticing them. I imagined living forever in shame after ruining the rims on my wheels. I was not a competent enough biker to look down at the tires while biking.

Things came slowly. I shifted gears a couple of times over the next month. Not actually that hard. I got to the point where I could take my right hand off the handlebars long enough to wave at people. (Only my right hand though. Couldn't do it with the left hand.) My host brother told me that my tires needed air, so I tried to pump them up. A few weeks later I figured out that I wasn't using the pump right and that's why it was really difficult and the tires weren't actually inflating. I took my back wheel off by myself. After 2 months I heard someone talking about oiling her chain, so I oiled my chain, and suddenly my bike ran so smoothly and quietly. Someone showed me how to tighten my brakes. By the end of training, I sort of felt okay about the whole thing.

Now, I'm on my own, and the bike repair guy isn't there every day to help me anymore. Intimidating. At first. Biking 8 km to my friend's site was one of the longest bike rides I had ever been on, ever. I had to reinflate my own tires when I myself noticed they were getting low. I had to oil the chain when I heard it getting squeaky.

But suddenly, 2 months after getting to site, I realize that I am totally fine with all of it. In fact, I enjoy it. I can now look down and check both my front and back tires while riding my bike, I know immediately when I get a flat, and I can talk on my cell phone using either hand while I ride (er, not that I ever do that). I went from only using the lowest gears to only using the highest gears, and a 30 km bike ride to the regional capital is no big deal. It seems like there was never a time when I couldn't do it all. I still don't fix my own flats, but that's only because the pump is a major pain to use, and why bother anyway when I can pay someone to fix it for me for 50 francs, the equivalent of 10 cents. I enjoy keeping everything clean and taught and running smoothly. Tightening the brakes, adjusting the seat, it's just part of my day. Nothing intimidating about it.

I could go on about the whole thing being a metaphor for getting used to life in a foreign culture, but I'll fast-forward over the cheesy explanations. You can think about it for yourself. At least I never fell off my bike. I will say, though, that my progress with bicycling has grown closely with my integration here, and also my overall sense of self-reliance. I kind of feel like a grown-up who can take care of herself now. And maybe, maybe now that I've gotten to the biking skill level of the average 12-year-old, it will just be another decade or two until I get there with driving.

Names

Last week, I started collecting and grading homework for the first time. That sucked, because I had to grade about 160 papers at a time, and also because it made me realize how many people were falling through the cracks. Anyway, handing papers back was a joke because I had to read everyone's names out, and I just don't know what to do with a first name like Maneguedibkeita. (I'm pretty sure that's what the name was. Students tend to have messy handwriting and I don't have a printed list of all the names in my class, so it's just a guess.) There was a lot of laughing.

Anyway, I discovered some interesting things about names here. Last names I already knew about--about a third of all my students are named Ouedraogo, pronounced Wedraogo, don't forget to roll that r, which means "stallion" and is a common name among the Mossi ethnic group. Similarly, there are several named Sawadogo, which means something about being the person who brings rain. Other common names include Nikiema, Kinda, Sore, Barry, and Sissaogo, among others.

The first names were more interesting. Most notable was the girl named Noaga, which is Moore for "chicken." Why would you name your daughter chicken? Apparently mothers are not supposed to kill any animal while pregnant, because custom says that you should never take and give life at the same time. If a mother kills an animal while pregnant, she has to name her child after that animal or else it will die while it's still a baby. I asked my Moore tutor what happens if the mother kills multiple animals while pregnant (would her kid be named chickenandgoat?) but she didn't seem amused.

There were also a number kids named Larba, Lamoussa, and Sibri/Sibdou. Larba means "born on a Wednesday," Lamoussa Thursday, and Sibri/Sibdou Saturday (male/female versions of the name, respectively; other days of the week don't differentiate between genders). Sometimes I tell people my name is Sibdou because I moved to village on Saturday. But sometimes it confuses them because the other volunteer near my site, Katie, also moved here on a Saturday and tells people she is Sibdou. They mix us up frequently because all white people look alike (granted, we're both the same height and wear glasses, so, I guess that's confusing), but maybe it's better for them if they can just yell Sibdou for either of us and later on pretend they knew who they were talking to.

A sampling of other boys' names includes Moussa, Souleymane (how many Souleymane Ouedraogos are in my village? so many), Ali, Mohamadou, and Iliass. Girls' names include Awa, Rasmata, Alimata, Aminata, and other more familiar names like Mariam, Marie, Lydie, and Edith. But then, there are the names like Maneguedibkeita. Or Rimzinigdou. Or Wendingnolside. What do you do with those names? Do those kids actually go by that name in casual conversation? "Wend" means God, so sometimes it pops up in names meaning things like "God's grace" or "Force of God," etc. I'm convinced they're just there to mess with me though.

What I find amusing is that my school principal refers to other teachers as "Mr. Ouedraogo" and "Mr. Sawadogo." I think there are 4 Mr. Ouedraogos among the teaching staff, and 2 or 3 Mr. Sawadogos. Meanwhile we all have unique first names. He refers to me by my first name. I just don't understand.

Teaching: First Impressions

I just finished my first week of teaching. I am responsible for 2 classes of cinquieme, or seventh-grade, math with over 80 students in each. I teach for 4 hours on Mondays, then 3 hours on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'm done by noon every day. How was it? It was a little nuts. It happened, though. If I thought that the feeling of not knowing what's going on or what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to be was going to end after training, I was mistaken--I think that's just service in Burkina.

On Monday, the school's vice principal took me to the 2 classrooms and introduced me to the classes. I said a little blurb, and then she asked them, "did you understand what she said?" and everyone shouted "no!" Great start. When we left, she said the problem was not me, the problem was that the students were too busy staring at the white person and weren't listening to what I was saying. Hmm. For class, I introduced myself and the weekly plan for the trimester, then had them fill out questionnaires with questions about themselves and about basic math (using negative numbers, fractions, protractors...). I've only gotten through about half the questionnaires as of yet; I'm waiting until I have a beer in my hand for the rest of them. Among the personal questions, the one they had the most trouble with was "list 3 words that describe yourself." About half the students left it blank, a quarter wrote boring things like "studious" and "good student," and a quarter wrote weird things. I liked I am not a delinquent, which I got a couple of times. The best one was the first one I read: "January, February, March." What did she think I was asking for?? Another person wrote "corn, millet, and beans." Another interesting response that I got on the math part, where I told them to write "I don't know" if they didn't know how to do something, was the number of spellings of the phrase "I don't know." In French, it is written je ne sais pas, but I got "je ne sait pas" (understandable), "je n'ai sais pas" ("I don't have know"), and, my favorite, "je ne c'est pas" ("I not it's"). Teaching math in French to students who barely speak French.

Wednesday and Friday we did reviews of adding and subtracting negative numbers and fractions. Teaching such a large class wasn't actually a huge problem. True, it could be hard to tell who was guilty when someone was talking, but it kind of worked. We're early enough in the year that no one's trying to push my limits yet. When I had them solve problems, I once told them to discuss their results with their neighbors, and they stared at me blankly and then sat in silence for 5 minutes. We'll work on it. But...they cooperated, and if they didn't understand my French, they covered it well.

Some things to get used to: sometimes other teachers would walk by my classroom in the middle of my class and come in just to say hi to me, and I was supposed to stop my lesson to ask them how their morning was going--weird. I think doing that is considered polite on their part. Also, on the first day, there were no bells, so every class started about half an hour late. (The school bell is the metal rim from an old car wheel hung off of a tree that an assigned student hits with a stick on the hour.)

Next Monday is our first day of teaching/learning new material. We will see how it goes. In the meantime I am in Ouaga eating cheese and milkshakes.