Library progress

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a quick update on the status of my school library. It's really coming along, and I think that we'll be ready to open in the next month!

The room

There are a bunch of different components to the project. The first thing that we bought was the solar panels and computer/printer/photocopier setup, which a local electrician installed right away. Use of the electronics has been somewhat frustrating because the school staff members don't really understand how to use them properly or take care of them, but we're getting there.

For the world map that we're painting outside a school building, I was hoping to do that while my mom was visiting in December, but as usual with Burkina, everything took way longer than expected. However, it's finally happening now. We paid a mason to come and make a flat surface for the map with cement, and then we painted it with a white and blue background. I borrowed a projector from the Peace Corps so I could project a map onto the surface and trace it, which was great, except it turns out that the "permanent" markers that we used to trace the countries actually disappeared after 5 days in the sunlight. Whoops. This past week, I've been going over it with black paint, which has been a rather laborious process between trying to decipher where the country borders used to be, and adding in more detail (the projector wasn't quite high enough resolution for the job). I haven't finished with all of the country borders yet, but I'm almost there, and I'm proud of how it looks so far. Students walking by have been really curious about it, and they like to come and stare at the map while I'm working. The number of students who have confused South America with Africa convinces me of how needed it is. Once I've finished marking all the country borders in, we'll paint the individual countries in different colors and label them. I'm open to suggestions for what to paint around the borders behind the map.

My student Alaye posing with the world map

The librarian: we selected the president of the parents' association to be the librarian. He just finished a 2-week training course with the NGO FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries), so this week I hope that he'll be able to help us with sorting books and creating a cataloging system. We also got library membership cards and cards for tracking books from FAVL.

The books: I went to a bookstore and bought about $200 worth of books a few months ago, and we just got a bunch of novels and textbooks delivered this past week. The school also keeps randomly coming out with more and more books that they've had hidden in corners of the school offices for years that are currently unavailable to students, so we'll add them to our collection as well. I'm not sure how many books we have in total now, but I estimate that it must be at least 600. With the library funds, we also bought some didactic materials, including maps of Africa and Burkina, plus soccer balls and posters of things like the human skeletal system for biology teachers. (In the past, the teachers had to draw the entire skeleton on the chalkboard for each class that they taught, and then students copied the diagrams into their notebooks.)

Librarian at work

Other stuff: We got the tables and chairs a couple of weeks ago, and the library building already came with bookshelves in place. Funny thing with the tables and chairs: we ordered them from a carpenter, but he didn't show us any models or anything before he made them. When he delivered them, they looked fine, and it wasn't until the next week when the tables were arranged in the library and I sat at a chair that I realized how low the chairs are compared to the tables. Sitting in a chair, my elbows are pretty much on the same level with my shoulders if I rest them on a table. Burkina...We've also gotten the electricity for the library set up, so there are lights inside, and a light in front of the library so students can sit outside and study at night even when the library is closed.

Like everything in Burkina, the project has had a lot of hiccups, but it's really happening. We're about done with the purchases for now, but I've set aside some money so we can have a nice opening ceremony and invite all the big people in the community when we open. I will keep you updated as we progress!

That's so Burkina

A few snapshots of moments that capture life in Burkina for me:

* On the bush taxi to Ouaga, with Ninja Turtle driving (real name: Rasmané). He has a playlist of music popular in Burkina, including a selection of Akon, Lucky Dube (a South African reggae singer), Bob Marley, Shakira, and a bunch of West African singers who I can't name, that he likes to blast for the whole ride. The volume is loud enough that it sometimes gets quite painful. Notable among his musical choices are some of Lucky Dube's songs that are "dubbed" into French by some guy with a deep voice, who repeats whatever was just said in translation in a deep whisper. The translator starts to take liberties toward the ends of songs, though, and he starts singing along, but not well. When we get into Ouaga, sometimes Ninja Turtle starts singing along with Lucky too, except he doesn't speak English so he doesn't know what the words are, and also he is extremely tone deaf. That does not stop him from belting it out. Only the back of his Bob Marley hat and the gesticulation of his large, grimy hands are visible from behind the driver's seat. It's not easy to understand it son, but I hope you'll make it...

Goofy Smile hands a moto down to Ninja Turtle and 2 other guys who haven't distinguished themselves enough to have secret nicknames yet; photo credit to my mom

* At the village market. Anytime I go around the village, there are sure to be bands of small children wandering around, and what could be more exciting for a little village kid than to see the white person biking by? They like to wave and shout "nasaara!" which is Mooré for "white person." Other things that they like to shout to me are "ça va?" (French for "how are you?", though they generally pronounce it "ça ba" and don't appear to know what it means, since they keep repeating it even after I answer), "bye bye!" (which I think they think is a greeting), and "mam data bombom" ("I want candy"). Some kids last year started saying "nasaara, berebé!", which confused me because it means nothing in English, French or Mooré; one of the other teachers helpfully suggested that I had misheard them and that they were actually saying "fat white person" in Mooré (no thank you). We eventually concluded that they were trying to say "bien reveillé?" meaning "did you wake up well?" (a common part of greetings in the morning; that did not stop the kids from saying it in the afternoon and evening as well). Most recently, they've started saying "nasaara, koumba?" I'm still stumped about that one. Koumbas are the local bitter eggplant. Who knows. Anyway, anytime I go to the market, the toddler children of the female vendors are sure to stare at me. They walk out on wobbly legs and wave at me wide-eyed; as I approach them, their enthusiasm transforms into fright (omg what if she's a ghost??), and they run behind their mothers and start crying. The mothers find this uniformly hilarious, and tell their babies they're going to send them to America with me, which further increases their terror. Never have I caused someone so much fear before. Never have I wielded so much power!

* At school, talking to the English teacher. The English teacher, Yacouba, is vaguely reminiscent of a large frog both in appearance and in voice. He has a tendency to talk very slowly and over-enunciate all of his words in both English and French, which is probably good for his students, and is slightly infuriating when I'm in a hurry. He only speaks to me in English, and even if I try to speak to him in French to make him talk faster, he determinedly forges on in English. Mild social awkwardness on his part is greatly compounded by odd English word choices, whose origin is explained you see the weird phrasings printed in the national textbooks. His earnestness in improving his English and in encouraging his students more than make up for any awkwardness, though, and you have to forgive him. Sometimes when I get bored, I bake cornbread or banana bread, things foreign to the Burkinabe diet, and bring them to share with the teachers. Each time I bring in a loaf, he takes a first bite, then sits thoughtfully for a moment, and then brightens and says "well, it seems to be delicious!"

Hello from Morocco

Erg Chebbi sand dunes

Unrelatedly, a picture that I took last year and then forgot to post of one of my student's tests. Usually students have to write their test answers on lined paper (not directly on the test), and some students get really into making them look fancy. Here's an example. Is this a good use of test-taking time? I'm not sure, but at least this kid still got 20/20.

I want that you study

This year, in addition to teaching one math class with my students from last year, I took on an English class. I thought it would be a fun change of pace, just something different to do. I have 41 English students, making my English class less than half the size of my math class, and most of the students are in their late teens/early 20's. Classroom management is a breeze. I say "be quiet" and...then they're all quiet! It's like magic. The oldest student, to my knowledge, is 29. I met him last year, and I thought he was like 17 at the time, because why else would he still be in high school. Then I found out that he's a lot older than me. Awkward.

Anyway, teaching English has been challenging. Part of the reason that I specifically asked to teach Première, aside from the smaller class size and the ease of classroom management, is that there's no set curriculum. The students are supposed to have already mastered all the major points of English grammar, so at this point, they're just supposed to be reviewing and expanding their vocabulary. Of course, this being Burkina, the kids actually have no mastery of English grammar or vocabulary and struggle with the most basic things, like the difference between "his" and "her." Anyway, I figured that at least I'd have more liberty: I could freely adapt my lessons based on the needs of the students, without having to follow something irrelevant.

While I do appreciate the freedom, it's been a little scary, especially because the students have none of the basics. At least if we had a textbook, we could work our way through it and I'd have some way to measure progress. As it is, I just kind of make up lessons based on what they need, and I hope that they're learning something. I didn't really know what I was doing at the beginning of the school year, so the first several lessons were pretty rough. My teaching didn't really match their level initially, plus none of them had ever been taught by a native English speaker before, so they had a really hard time with my accent. I think it's gotten a lot better; we've established a routine to the way that classes go, and I can feel their faith in me as a teacher grow with each class. (Nothing worse than trying to learn from someone you don't have faith in.)

Still, I feel like I'm just treading water a lot of the time. We can spend an entire 2-hour class period going over one grammar point over and over again, and at the end they'll appear to have gotten nothing out of it. For example, I noticed that in their homework, a lot of them were writing things like "I want that you go" instead of "I want you to go," so I spent 3 hours in class last week going over that sentence structure very carefully with them and then practicing it over and over and over and over. Then, for homework, I had them write very simple sentences using that same structure, only to find that at least a third to half the students just wrote "I want that you go" again. (Except now some of them wrote "I wanna that you go." Not better.) Am I actually accomplishing anything? My goal for this year is for all of the students to master basic sentence structures and agreement between nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but that's looking like an awfully high goal right now.

I guess at this point, the biggest persisting problem is that I don't have a lot of faith in what I'm doing. It's not that I think my teaching is inadequate, I just think that it's pointless that the kids are studying English. When are they ever going to need it? Unless they manage to leave the country to go somewhere English-speaking, which is highly unlikely even for high-school graduates, they're never going to need it. Burkinabes point out to me that the students might someday use English to talk with foreign aid workers or to read labels on medications or something, but that seems like a totally lame reason for studying a language for 7 years. Any foreign aid worker worth their salt in Burkina will already speak French, and you'll figure out the medication labels if it's that important whether or not you speak English. How can I convince them to make an effort to learn something that they're being forced to study but that they'll never need? (Notice that I say they're being forced to study it, not forced to learn it.) One might argue that my job is to make the subject relevant and exciting for them, but I'd really rather see them learning about science or computer skills or entrepreneurship or anything else.

Lest I sound too hopeless, I will point out for my benefit as well as yours that the kids have to study English anyway, whether it's me or a Burkinabe teaching them, so at least I can make it more interesting for them. Plus, I have my secondary projects, so not all is lost. Still, it's an uphill struggle, and it's hard to make it up that hill when the students and my own self are pushing back down.