Pictures

Emmanuel helps paint the border around the map. Standing on the same table, you can see the line of where I was straining to reach with the paintbrush. Oh, the things I could do if I were so tall.

Library books

I'm excited about how many students have been visiting the library. The books that the kids on the left are holding were donations from the NGO Darien Book Aid, who sent us a free box of books, and the picture dictionary on the right was a gift from my friend Pierre. We're off to a good start with the books, and you can see how much more room we have to add. (There are a lot more books off to the left, I promise...)

Finally, a NYT article about Africa by David Brooks that I appreciated. Happy weekend!

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.

Photo: World Map Progress

I'm proud of how it's coming along. After the break I'll touch some things up (sorry, Indonesia) and work on the borders, and then we'll think of some activity to do with students for writing the country names. Almost there!

Women's Day 2014

Last Saturday was International Women's Day. Unlike last year, there were a bunch of events in my village organized by the mayor's office. Did they promote women in the community? Dubious. Were they entertaining for village residents? Fairly. 

The day started with a women's bicycle race. I wasn't planning on participating because I was worried it would be weird, but at the last second my friend Ami talked me into it, and in the end I was glad that I did. In total 22 women participated. It was only about a kilometer long and the wind was at our backs the whole way, so we went really quickly. It was pretty fun, and most of the village came out to watch it and cheer for everyone, and they seemed really excited that I was participating. I was impressed with how fast some of those women could bike on cheap rickety village bikes. They made it clear that it wasn't a race to win, though, rather it was just a race "to bike together and to have fun," and in the end, everyone got a Women's Day pagne (more on those later).

After the race, people gathered at an elementary school, and village officials gave speeches. They were in Mooré, so I can't comment too much on their content, but they were interspersed with traditional singing and dances. Women do this one dance where they gather in a circle and clap in these kind of complex rhythms, and then two at a time, they go into the middle and kind of twirl around until they bump their hips against each other on the strong beat. I call it the butt-bumping dance. It's kind of scary when the really big women do it...you have to be careful who you bump butts with. Some of the women also did a parade, which I think was supposed to illustrate the different roles that women play in the village.

Following the speeches, the mayor's office provided rice to the population, but the village officials went back to the prefect's house for a special lunch. (The prefect is the government representative for the region.) Naturally, Katie (the volunteer at my neighboring site) and I were invited since we're the official white people. It was ironic...men are supposed to cook and serve for their wives on Women's Day, but it was the prefect's wife who did all the cooking and serving along with one other woman whom they hired to help her. What's more, all the men sat in one corner and immediately made a little circle, and left the women outside in the less-comfortable chairs. Then, the men were served first, and they got the first pick of the special side dishes (tofu kebabs and green beans), which the women didn't get to serve themselves from until the men were done eating. Come oooon. That's not even trying. The prefect's wife didn't even get to sit with everyone else; after she was done serving, she made a plate for herself and went off into a back room to eat.

Katie left after that, and I went to hang out with the tanties (French for aunties). Every year, Burkina comes out with a different pagne (printed fabric) for Women's Day and anyone who can afford it gets a special outfit made out of it. I wasn't a big fan of the pagne for this year, especially the brown color, and then for some reason my tailor chose orange embroidery to go over it. Brown and orange, really? He did a good job tailoring it otherwise, though. Pictures with the tanties below.

The day ended with a men vs. women soccer match. I'm not sure how that promotes women in society, especially since it was the big tanties who were playing, some of them still wearing their new outfits. First of all, of course the men are going to let the women win, so the whole thing is just silly, and then of course the women are going to play badly because it's the only game they'll play, and maybe the only time they'll run, in the entire year. Every time they went to kick the ball and missed, or when they passed the ball to no one, everyone in the audience laughed. They can pretend that they were laughing together with the women, but I found the whole thing uncomfortable. They all wanted me to play, too, but I'm not going to put myself out there so they can laugh at me because, haha, women playing soccer, what a silly idea!

I like that Women's Day is such a big deal in Burkina and that the government makes such an effort to promote it as a holiday. On the other hand, I remember reading once in a college psychology course that an outlier does not change people's preconceived notions nearly as much as something that is only mildly deviant. This one day where everything is supposed to be different is too easily dismissed the second that it's over. The day that I see a village woman getting served lunch at the same time as the mayor and eating from the same table as he does will be worth a hundred March 8ths.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Bicycle races are coming your way, so forget all your duties, oh yeah.

Butt bumping dance

Women's parade

Women's Day outfits with Katie

Celebrating with the tanties (aka the Big Mommas)

Tanties all together. Apparently I'm the only one who's been practicing her photo smile.

Wend na ko-d veere. May God give us next year.