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| A view of the school. My 2 classrooms are in the nearest building. |
- English club. One of the English teachers has been wanting to do this for awhile, but he teaches over 30 hours/week so he doesn't have time to do it himself. So together we started putting it on since the beginning of January. I do 1 afternoon a week each with the 8th, 9th, and 12th graders, and the English teacher joins me on Thursdays for the 9th graders. We invited all the students in each of those classes to attend, and although it's not compulsory, we've still been getting 40-50 people showing up in each of the classes (except for 12th grade because there are only 12 12th graders to start with, and they're lazy). Apparently this is the first formal extracurricular activity that the school has had in several years. Activities we have done include learning and singing songs; discussing gender roles and writing/performing skits about them (the last part was a flop because they didn't understand what a skit was); learning soccer-related vocabulary and how to cheer for a team; and for Valentine's Day, how to write a love letter. I'm also looking for pen pals from America, though they've been hard to find.
I would have been happy if we had smaller groups of students so I could give more individual attention and have them practice speaking. However, it's not really feasible with such large groups, and I don't want to exclude anyone who's interested. As it is, at least they get more exposure to the language outside of their 3 hours/week (totally not enough for effective language learning!), and maybe it will inspire them to like the subject more.
- Soap/neem cream production with the APE. APE stands for L'Association des Parents d'Eleves, which is to say the Parents' Association. They collect a lot of money from each student, in the range of $20 per year, which is a fortune for the families here. The APE is responsible for all of the maintenance of the school and for a ton of other things that the national government should seriously take care of but doesn't. So although the $20 is being put to legitimate use, I want to help the APE to find other income sources so that they're not leaning so heavily on the families. In a couple of weeks, we're going to start producing soap to sell in the community to help raise money. Right now, no one in town produces soap, so everything sold at the market is being transported from the southern part of the country, hence raising the cost. So we're going to try introducing our own stuff. Later on, we're also going to start making neem cream. Neem trees grow like weeds in the village, and supposedly you can use their leaves to make an anti-mosquito cream pretty easily. I'm not convinced that we're actually going to make any money on either of these ventures; I think we'll be lucky if we can even make 1 or 2 cents off each ball of soap that we sell, which to me doesn't justify the labor involved. But my APE president is really excited about it, so, uh...whatever. Anyway, hygiene and anti-malaria related projects can't hurt, right?
- Tree planting. I might write more about this later. This is probably my favorite project. I ordered the seeds through the Peace Corps for 300-350 trees to plant around the school grounds. We need more trees for so many reasons. It will help block noise and distractions from the big road next to the school; it will help demarcate the school campus from the rest of the village; it will give students shade when they go outside during breaks, because they have no shade currently; it will help to reduce wind and dust during the harmattan season; we can use trees to enclose the school garden and keep animals out; we can use or sell the edible products from the tamarind and nere trees that we plant; and so many more reasons. We're going to start the nursery in March and then plant the trees in late May. It will be good.
- IT lessons. There are 4 or 5 staff members at the school who own laptops, but they're not very adept typists or Excellers. I want to teach semi-private typing/Excel/basic computer skills lessons to them and anyone else in town who's willing to pay, and then we can use that money to finance other projects. I was worried that it would be difficult to find anyone that would be willing to pay even $6/month, but I've found a couple of people who are definitely interested. So maybe it will happen after all.
- Health Month. This idea is still in its early stages, but I'm already excited about it. One estimate suggested that all of the students in our school are having sex by 8th grade, yet in spite of that fact, no sex ed is taught until 9th grade. And even then, there's no guarantee of the quality of the teaching, since even the teachers are often embarrassed to talk about it. Plus, it's taught to girls and boys all in one room, so I think the students are embarrassed to ask questions, especially the girls. My idea is to give a questionnaire to the 6th and 7th graders about things like HIV facts and condom use, and then invite 40 each of the lowest-scoring boys and girls to participate in our Health Month. Then, each Saturday in April, we would have them come in to a classroom for an afternoon, girls and boys separated, and we would talk about things like anatomy, STIs, condom and other contraceptive use, how to make good choices/communicate their decisions/support their friends, and take a trip to the health clinic. We could also invite the local doctor and midwife to answer questions and dispel myths. Mainly, I want to make it fun and make the students comfortable so that they will know how to talk frankly about sex and who to go to with questions. I really hope this one pans out.
- Installation of hand-washing stations at the school. There is nowhere on campus for students to wash their hands. There are a couple of water pumps, but they're far away from the latrines and are labor-intensive to use, and there's no soap. So the students don't wash their hands at all during the day. Hand-washing stations can be built extremely inexpensively, and if we use the little money from the IT lessons I think we could make something of good quality that will last. We could also use the soap produced by the APE. The main question, then, is getting students to use them. I want to see if there's a way we can incorporate the whole thing into Health Month.
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| Another view. The building on the right is some of the on-campus teacher housing. |
- School garden. Teachers already had ideas for an Ecological Club that would do gardening and learn about good agricultural practices like composting. There's even a garden on the campus already, but it's maintained and used solely by the groundskeeper.
- Girls' support activities. I think it would be cool to set up a mentorship program between the high school-level and middle school-level girls at the school. The idea is to help staunch the rates of unwanted pregnancies and female dropouts. To do: figure out how to train mentors. A separate idea is to start a girls' sports club. Girls are completely excluded from playing sports at the school. I talked to teachers about it and they claimed that it's because the girls aren't interested; however, every volunteer I've talked to who started a girls' soccer team said that they had an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from their students. The only problem: I don't know how to play soccer.
- Further school beautification. We're already doing tree planting, but there's more to do. Tree planting can continue next year, plus I want to work on getting benches or other outside seating for students, since there is none. If we're inspired, maybe we'll paint a mural.
- Promoting a safe learning environment. Although corporal punishment is technically illegal, violence remains entrenched in the educational system here. It's not nearly as bad at my school as in others that I've heard of, but there's still a lot to do. Actually, I don't know that much about it yet, but I got a call from a PC staff member this afternoon saying that she's sending me to a week-long workshop on the topic in 2 weeks. Catholic Relief Services is active in my area, and the workshop is mostly for their agents, but since I'm in the area she wants me to be trained as well so that I can give them support in my village.
A big question with all these projects is ensuring their continuation after I leave. It's great if I can do clubs and activities for the 2 years I'm here, but the goal is sustainable development. We don't want them to rely on a Peace Corps volunteer staying in the village for the rest of forever until Burkina gets past the 17th century. The more I can get my projects established this year, the more momentum I can build up and then transfer into the hands of the Burkinabes.
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Some friends and family members have asked me how they can help support my projects and if they can donate money. I really appreciate your support, and I'm SO SO touched by your offers. For the moment, all of my projects are low-budget and should be able to be financed entirely within the community. Generally, I feel that community financing is best because it helps the residents to feel more ownership of the project, as well as empowering them to embark on similar projects on their own. It also helps to dispel their idea that white foreign aid workers (like me) will come in with buckets of money and freely give them anything they want. That's not what I'm here for. But, as a volunteer, I can still look for outside financing on my projects if there is legitimate need, so there will come a time when I will need your help! To do so, however, I am required to do it through the Peace Corps office with a grant application and a full budget outline in place. That will help to ensure that I'm doing a well-thought-out project with community backing, and that all the money will be put to proper use. For example, I will be helping to put on a science camp for 7th and 8th graders this September, and pretty soon we'll be putting in our grant application and asking around for money. So in sum, thank you so much for your offers, and rest assured that I will let you know asap when and how you can help!
