I had an un-bloggably good weekend in Ouahigouya this past weekend, full of delicious food, delicious company and delicious travel adventures. It was really nice. Sometimes things happen that remind me that I love being a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso, and sometimes things happen that remind me that I simply love being in Burkina Faso. This weekend was the opportunity for the latter.
Being a GEE volunteer here is a wild job, kind of like summer camp in that I’m always ON, even when I’m not really doing anything that to the outside observer might look like work. I wander around my campus and I’m on, I visit a friend’s village and I’m on, I go into Kongoussi and I’m on, I sleep in and I’m on, I do my laundry and I’m on. It’s tiring sometimes, when you stop to think about it.
So being in Ouahigouya was nice. I could causer (cooooooozaayyyyyyy) with people and speak Moore and stuff, but I could also ignore people and laugh really loudly and buy sachets of gin and go out for dinner and bike bike bike and not feel like I needed to be a Peace Corps Volunteer all of the time. I could be Molly. I was just chillin’, travelling a little bit and enjoying a weekend in a familiar town. Getting lifts from nice people, voyaging under the stars…I love when coming back to Kongoussi feels so good.
I talk a lot about being “on” while doing work that doesn’t look like work, but I actually do have a few different things that I do around here. Not everything is a sustainable project in terms of the stuff we were told we might be doing during training (…what? You mean Peace Corps life might bear little to no resemblance to the things you’re told during stage?), but it’s helpful and I really have no interest in starting clubs or projects that aren’t asked of me and that I am not completely into because I know that’ll make life sucky and stressful. So I will describe some of the things I do, to give you an idea of how I spend some of my time (and also to validate myself…but anyhow).
There are 4 grade levels at my school and each grade (classe) has a test (devoir) in some subject every Monday and Friday. End of trimester grades (moyens) are calculated solely by the marks received on devoirs. For most secondary schools, students maybe have one or two devoirs in each class for the trimester, period. PRESSURE! My school’s ridiculously huge amount comes from the fact that it’s a high-functioning private school with a well organized director and good teachers. So the teachers write up their devoirs a week to a few days ahead of when they’re going to be given and I type them all up and get them spell checked and make corrections and then photocopy them and organize them for dispersal. Pretty secretary-like. I also proctor (surveiller) two devoirs on Monday and two on Friday. So that’s maybe 3 to 5 hours of typing work per week plus 6 to 8 hours of sitting in a classroom and reading a book while making sure that the veritable angels who go to this school don’t cheat on their tests, which really they never do. Either that or they’re really, really good at it.
I also go to the English Club in Kongoussi on Saturdays for two hours to play the role of Native Speaker, which is cool, especially since it’s not my club and the two teachers who run it are fluent in English as well as French and are thus completely better suited than me to lead the thing. I think I’m going to start dividing my Saturdays between English Club and computer lessons that my computer-teaching counterpart (informatique) holds for the teachers at my school. I’ve been avoiding the informatique classroom like the friggin plague since I was in mortal danger of being confused as an computer teacher when placed at Ste B’s (apparently due to my “IT background”, but that is a whole separate tangential subject matter that is pretty well situated in the past at this point). However, it might be a cool way for me to spend time with some of the teachers here (so hard to do with most since they come in for their classes and leave right after to go teach others at different schools) as well as with my smart friendly and motivated official counterpart. I’m going to ask him if I can join. They’re starting Excel this weekend. ‘Bout time I learned how the heck that program works.
The girls have 2 hours study time every night except Saturday, so I head over whenever I can…or want to…really I need to start being more regular about this…to hang out and chat (distracting?) or help them with English or math (plus do high school level math myself, which rocks my world) or if they’re all busy and in no need of me I read a book in French or chat with the two guys from Lioudougou who help out during study hours as well.
* edit 2/2/01: last night I promised the 4eme students that if every one of them spoke in English on the debate topic they were “discussing” I would stand on the table and sing and dance for them. Looks like they’ll have to try harder next time…!
I try to hang out with my nun friend here, who is one of my favorite women in the world really, as much as I can. I like to accompany her on her errands and trips when the opportunity arises so we can chat and stuff and I can pry my way into helping her with the big funding stuff she does for the school. I do little things for her whenever opportunities arise, from helping her design a brochure for the school to taking photos of the classrooms to helping her send emails to getting her mail for her at the post office…lots of little errands. Very personal assistant-ish. There’s another term for it as well, which I am tempted to use in the kindest and least self-deprecating sense of the word…but kids read this stuff.
Hmm…so we’ve got Devoir Master, English Club Goer, Study Hour Crasher and Sister Elisabeth’s…Enthusiastic-Menial-Task-Assistant. “EM-TA”…ha! So far nothing I’ve designed and implemented myself but ça va aller. I’m starting out by helping out.
I have done some other little things already so far. I teamed up with a PCV neighbor of mine to run a three-day girls camp for the 10 secondary school girls in her village where we talked about health and decision making and puberty and AIDS. It was a smashingly ridiculous and wild success because we did it the right way…she’s been in her village for 2 years and knows the place and the girls really well, we combined our interests and personalities to present subject matter that we were comfortable with that related to what the girls wanted to learn about and do, and we took it day by day. We should get medals for how great it went and how great we were, to be perfectly modest.
I also got two of the cook girls (cuisinares) at Ste B’s who had been out of school for a year or two, who work here because they are various degrees of orphaned and didn’t want to be forced into early marriage, officially enrolled for this year. It didn’t take any eye opening social education (sensibilisation) on my part because they are under the care of the nuns who run the school here who CLEARLY are down with GEE (yeah you know me), but it did take talking to them a whole lot, finding out that they wanted to go to school, talking with my nun friend about it, and going to the schools in town to argue a place for them even though the school year had already started. One of the girls, Denise, is doing great. She’s in this really crappy night school program where each class meets once a week maybe if the professor feels like showing up, and she’s been out of school for two years working (or “rien”—nothing—if you ask her what it is she’s been doing) but she’s kicking its butt. –edit: she just came into my little secretariat office to grab something for one of the nuns and told me excitedly that she’s getting two of her devoirs back next week and she knows that she did a good job and she’ll bring them to me so that I can see them and she has another devoir at the end of February and she’s studying for it already and my goodness I’m so glad this girl is in school.
Kids who can make it through the entirety of the Burkina Faso public school system can probably persevere through just about anything in the world.
I’ve got a few “am going tos” on my agenda at the moment, though in true Burkinabè fashion they aren’t exactly being rushed into, for various reasons both in and out of my control. Maybe I’ll update on those another time. And you know, really the most important part of being here, in my view, is wanting to live here, wanting to go out and spend time with people. Maybe in some ways its better to not have a job or clubs, to just be hanging out and enjoying life and convincing people that I want to live with them, that I’m not anxious to go back to the States…I want to live in this country that’s hot and hard and poor, that I enjoy living in for numerous reasons. I’m not here to change the country, to change the world…just to do the little things that I can do to help out, to make people laugh and smile and feel comfortable in their lives…like I would want to be doing anywhere else. I just get to live in Burkina Faso while doing it.
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