To all of you who donated to our library...Thank you very much! Everyone at school is very excited. The project has been fully funded, and we will be purchasing the books soon. Our French teachers have come up with a list of African novelists that we will use to stock the library. The books won't be here in time for this school year (...already pretty much over), but the kids have been asking about them, and I am positive they will be eagerly read come October.
Yes, school is pretty much over. I've given my last lessons, corrected my last tests, and all that remains is calculating GPAs one last time. I'll see my 8th and 6th graders on Monday and Tuesday, but I "officially" said goodbye to my 7th graders this past week. Not an easy thing to do. My planned motivational, good luck next year, work hard, live life fully speech turned into a few quick sentences as I choked back tears. It's hard to imagine my life without my students, my village, or Burkina. That mysterious, scary place called West Africa somehow became home in the past three years, and while I'm definitely looking forward to spending time in my other homes- Minnesota and California- this one is going to be hard to leave.
But before that...books and computers! Along with one of my PCV friends, I've organized a weekend computer camp for 16 of Tcheriba's brightest 8th graders. We're going to spend next Saturday and Sunday in Koudougou learning everything there is to know about computers- or at least how to use a keyboard and mouse. With a little luck we'll even get online. I'm quite curious to see their reactions- most of them, especially the six girls, have never been out of Tcheriba, to say nothing of using a computer. How to explain a file? a folder? a double-click? the internet? One student told me he wanted to bring his notebook so he could write down all the information he could find about his biology class essay topic- he's going to need quite a few notebooks is my guess.
