Help Fight Malaria in Burkina

Malaria is one of the most common infectious disease in Burkina Faso, killing more than 25,000 people (mostly children under the age of 5) each year. If you’re sitting at home asking yourself “What can I do?”, I have an answer.

One of my volunteer friends is working with SOS Enfants in Orodara, Burkina Faso. She has helped set them up to be a new distribution site for insecticide-treated mosquito nets through the Against Malaria Foundation. This means that if they raise enough funds, 5000 mosquito nets will be distributed free of charge to orphans, vulnerable children, and pregnant women. Donations are done online and are tax-deductable. Better yet, this British NGO receives private donations for all of their administrative costs, so 100% of your money goes towards the mosquito nets. At only $5 per net, a little bit goes a long ways. Though often associated with poverty, malaria is also a cause of poverty and a huge hindrance to economic development. Check out this link, and help a PCV out in her work. Thanks!

On the Road...or at Least Not at Home

It’s been quite the week or so since I left village. I’ve seen friends in several parts of the country, had a killer barbecue, did some biking, and am currently in town working with a PCV group organizing HIV/AIDS awareness activities.

My first stop was in Koudougou, the nearest big city to my site. I met up with some friends for lunch and surprisingly had the most delicious steak I’ve had since leaving Minnesota last spring. Luckily we knew that service at this restaurant is notoriously slow, so we ordered about an hour and a half before we wanted to eat, and the timing was perfect. I spoke with several friends who have recently attended an informational workshop regarding the Morenga tree. Morenga is kind of the magical, do-everything tree of Africa: its leaves are rich in nutrients, and powder from its seeds can even sanitize dirty village well water. I’m really excited about the possibility of doing a Morenga project in my village.

For the Fourth of July we ended up going out on the town in Ouaga. It was quite the night with dinner and dancing. We even lit sparklers and sang that “Proud to be an American” song that is a requirement of every fireworks display across the good old US of A. (Don’t worry, we sang at our house before leaving so as not to embarrass ourselves too much.) It was a fun evening, but the Fifth of July was the real party, though. We were completely intent on having a barbecue at our house; the only problem was the barbecue. Our guard tried to acquire a grill from one of his friends, but when that fell through, we had to “grill” the burgers on a frying pan on the stove top. Not quite the same, but still good. We had homemade french fries and even lemon bars. The only thing missing was beer-marinated brats. I guess I’ll have to tailgate in Madison when I get home next fall.

I took a trip out to see one of my friends in the East of Burkina for a few days after the Fourth. We went on a nice bike ride and helped his neighbors plant corn one day. Both were fun, but as the Burkinabe were quick to tell us, “We have no machines here! Planting makes your back hurt!” What do you know? They’re right! I did learn several interesting things though: it’s illegal to let your animals roam freely through village after planting starts because they’ll eat the crops; peanuts are planted about 10cm apart…making a large field a lot of work; and sesame seeds are so tiny and difficult to plant that people mix the seeds with 3 parts sand in order to spread out the seeds enough. And not a single tractor in sight! (Yes, I’m a wimp.)

I’m in Ouaga now, and between helping with the new group of trainees and teaching English here in August, I’ll be in large cities with internet the rest of the summer. I’ll try to update my blog more regularly. And hopefully I’ll get some pictures up soon. All the best!

Somewhere South of the Sun

I blinked and the school year was over. Sure, it helps that the third trimester was barely five weeks of teaching, and that the heat has melted my brain. But I can still hardly believe that summer is already upon us. (Check out my last day of school pictures!)

As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, a French family visited our village a couple of months ago. (You can test out your French on their blog.) They donated several sets of math and science text books, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to use them with my students. The last unit in my 7th grade class was three dimensional objects: prisms, cylinders, pyramids and cones. Perfect. They’re a pain to draw on the blackboard and the books have great illustrations and lots of practice problems.

Before assigning the students reading and problems, I smartly gave them time to look through the books. Colors, glossy pages, and cartoon learning aids were all new. So was the realization that math in France is pretty much the same as math in Burkina Faso. “Monsieur, we studied this, too!” Then disaster struck. Most of the kids had never used a textbook, and so they didn’t know how to use a textbook.

Things that I took for granted after a lifetime of daily math readings and homework were completely foreign to them: the table of contents, the glossary, the idea of reading to learn, example problems and chapter summaries. Every single group had their hand up with questions the entire class period. Being just one person against their 60, I was completely outnumbered. When I wasn’t helping a group, they were chatting with their friends, wandering outside, or complaining about not understanding. Even once they knew the answer to a question, they didn’t know what to do: I literally had to tell one group to write the answer on a piece of paper. We accomplished nothing.

I went home that afternoon and just stared at the wall. I wasn’t able to understand how I had been beaten so badly by what was supposed to be a fun lesson. What had I not explained well? Why were they unable or unwilling to use the books as I had expected? I finally realized that because textbook use in class was a brand new concept, I had to start from the very beginning. The next day I gave them a crash course in book use and a cheesy speech about how we were trying a new learning method. They were used to copying and memorizing a teacher’s notes, but today they were going to have to search out the answers on their own. It worked for about ten minutes. I eventually threatened a test the next day, and when some kid ran out of the room, another threw a pencil, and several others had a yelling contest, I made good on my threat. I wasn’t happy; they weren’t happy; and their grade averages certainly weren’t happy. It wasn’t a good way to end the year in my favorite class, but I’m glad I tried. Seeing their reaction to a new learning style and different problems makes me want to provide all the more variety in my classes next year. And the textbooks will certainly be back.

The second crazy experience of the trimester was much more positive.

Outside of classes, the last three weeks of school were consumed by the first annual Headmaster’s Cup, a school-wide soccer tournament, complete with jerseys, a trophy, and monetary prizes for the winning classes. As the head teacher for one of the sixth grade classes, I found myself as the coach and number one fan of what would undoubtedly be the underdog team in all of our games. I took the (apparently unusual) step of deciding to have fun with the kids, and we organized a practice game for our team. Most of the boys in the class showed up (and a bunch of kids from other classes), and we had a great three-hour game. (”Young Africans never get tired, monsieur.” OK, play on!) Everyone- the team, the substitutes and the other students- got as much playing time as they wanted. That makes it sound too formal. Let me try again.

There were 30-40 kids on the field at all times. Cartwheels were performed anytime someone touched the ball. With all the team-switching, I have no idea how they kept track of who was going which direction. The field had no out-of-bounds lines, so we played until the cows got in the way or until someone decided to throw the ball in. One small speedy kid got stuck playing goalie for a while (no crossbar on the goal…which is two large branches dug into the ground). After making some amazing saves, he took to yelling “Small but dangerous!” every so often from the goal box. He was so adament about it, that we adopted his saying for the team’s slogan and never looked back.

We caught a couple of lucky breaks in our first two games, and at the end of the round found ourselves advancing with the older teams. In a fantastic game, we won our semi-final match against the 7th grade team, and the superiour 8th grade team lost to the lucky 9th graders.

And just like that we were in the finals. The day of the final match was cool and cloudy- perfect for playing soccer. The school had invited the mayor, prefet, school inspector, and all the other important people in the village to the game. And most of the villagers showed up as well. Why not, right? Before the match everyone was talking about how the 9th graders were going to stomp all over my 6th graders. By halftime, we had made fans out of every one of the naysayers. Though the score remained 0-0, we had played very well with the older, bigger, and stronger kids; our goalie had made some fantastic saves; and our offense had several near misses. Midway through the second half, our legs started to give out, and the 9th graders took advantage of our fatigue. They won 3-0, but the damage had been done. They had not creamed the little kids, and we deflated their egos, if only just barely.

What was our prize? A new soccer ball and the equivalent of about $25! Yup! $25. How crazy is that? The next day I talked to the class president and we decided to buy candy and peanuts and crackers for the entire class. Even though they are almost 100 strong, $25 can provide quite the sugar high for a bunch of sixth graders. It was chaos. Candy candy candy. They loved it. I had problems with class control, but it wasn’t too bad…after all, it was a party. Watch out for us next year. We’ll be a little less small, but still very dangerous.

Now that summer is upon us, I find myself staring at a void with quite a bit of downtime. I’m going to be helping with the training of the new volunteers who are arriving in a couple of weeks. I’m really excited to meet the new people and help them get ready for their service. It will also be nice to see my former host family in Ouahigouya, where our training was last year and where the training will be this summer. Additionally, I hope to do some traveling- possibly to Togo and Benin- later in the summer. Despite my excitement, however, I will definitely miss my students, and am extremely glad that I’m coming back for another year in the fall.

Sweating it Out in Village

My latest “I’m not in Kansas anymore” moment came a couple of weeks ago during my afternoon math class with 95 6th graders. We’re in the middle of our hot season, and the temperature in the classroom was easily 110 degrees. With the glare from the sun, the blackboard is hard to see from the front corners of the room, so I had to close the door while writing at the edge of the board. This cut off basically all airflow to the room. In the time it took me to write the definition of a histogram, almost every student had taken off his or her uniform shirt (for some unfathomable reason, they almost all wear undershirts) and were using them as fans. I looked out to see a sea of swirling shirts and sweating students.

My first thought was, “Huh, this looks a lot like Homer Hankie time at a Minnesota Twins game.” Now, I’m sure the school has a rule somewhere about kids being required to actually wear their school uniforms, but at the time I was sweating buckets, and I knew the temperature in the back of the classroom- where the older, bigger kids sit- was probably 10 degrees hotter. I decided to let the rule slide.Needless to say, we finished class early that day.

Sweating has become a recreational activity for me. On a cool day, if I sit in one spot in the shade fanning myself and there’s a breeze I can almost stop sweating. The slightest activity however, such as turning the page of my book, brings back the perspiration with full force. On a hot day I feel like I just got out of the swimming pool.

Constantly. I’m never more than five feet from a water bottle, and when I drink I immediately see an increase in my sweat production.

It’s like the water doesn’t even bother to go down my throat. My front porch gets sun pretty much all day; it heats up so much that I can’t even walk barefoot on it in the middle of the night.

I have two saving graces. One, my cannery. This is a large clay pot full of water that I keep sitting on moist sand. Magically the water stays cool. It’s not exactly a refrigerator, but it works pretty darn well. My second saving grace are mangoes. Mango season coincides with the hot season, and there’s nothing quite as refreshing as eating a juicy mango after a long day chasing kids…uh, I mean teaching kids.

The hot season is almost over now though…I think. We’ve gotten several rain showers and one decent storm in the past couple of weeks.

The first rain storm kept the temperatures under 95 degrees for almost 12 hours, but the subsequent storms have done better. Last week we had two days that actually felt comfortable. Of course, I’m not quite sure what that translates to in terms of degrees. I was talking to my mom on the phone last week and told her- honestly- that it didn’t feel too bad at the moment. Then I looked at my thermometer: 98 degrees. What am I going to do when I have to go back to a Minnesota winter?

One more thing. Last week I gave a series of lessons on the Beatles to my English class. They had never heard of them, and I thought that was an atrocity. I talked about their music, their importance to music history, and their influence on the culture of the 1960’s in America and Europe. I brought in my iPod and some speakers I borrowed from a friend, and we listened to several songs. The favorite: “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. For the grand finale, I busted out my guitar and taught them “Let it Be”. If you have ever questioned the importance of arts education, question no more. I’m not a very good guitarist, and my vocal skills are…decidedly sub-par. But they loved it. We had a great time, and they demanded lyrics to more songs. They also wanted to dance. “Let it Be” isn’t exactly a dancing kind of tune, but luckily my iPod has plenty of songs from one of the most popular American artists they do know: Micheal Jackson.

(Why do they know him? Remember “We are the World”?) “Thriller” was a big hit, as was “Billy Jean”. I think they think I’m crazy- what teacher plays music and sings and lets them dance during class?- but that’s OK once in a while. Now I have to somehow write a test on what we learned.
Hope all is well.

Happy Easter

I celebrated Easter at a friend’s house in East of Burkina Faso. We went to Church, played baseball, and had a bonfire (kind of regretted that decision on such a hot night). Check out this video of me preparing the Easter feast. The butcher is also the janitor at my friend’s school. The student helping is known affectionately as “The Kid Who Does Everything” because, well, he does everything. Happy Easter!

***The Amy Warning: Do not click on the above link if you are a vegetarian, a person who doesn’t like blood, an animal rights activist, just coming back from your lunch break, or are unable to fight off nausea when you get a paper cut. If those things apply to you, click here instead.

Anything is Possible; Nothing is Certain

I’m borrowing the title for my blog today from a French couple staying in my village. They left France a few months ago and are in the process of touring west Africa by van, having driven down through Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, and into Burkina. They’ve had a fantastic journey, and talking with them has given me a fresh perspective on my work in Burkina. In Africa, anything is possible; nothing is certain. That’s the fun of it.

Our second trimester of school ended this week with what seemed like a mad sprint of grading exams, calculating averages, and ranking students. At our end-of-the-trimester meeting, we discussed the fact that only 3 students in the class of 65 ninth graders have a passing overall grade average. Ninth graders take a national high school entrance exam at the end of the year, and teachers demand a lot of the students in order to prepare them for this very difficult and important test. Hence the low grades. If a neon warning sign is going off in your head, I’m with you. However, though concerned, none of my colleagues declared “catastrophe” at the meeting, so we’ll just keep plugging away.

A few weeks ago one of our two English teachers was assigned to a new school. (I know. It’s the middle of the school year.) Guess who her replacement is. While I’m not thrilled about teaching English, I managed to squirm my way into having only one class, so it shouldn’t be too bad. The difficult part is remembering/learning all the technical aspects of the language. What the heck is the present perfect progressive form of an irregular verb? The neat aspect of the English program, especially compared to the math curriculum, is that it is much less of a straight line- you don’t have to know adverbs to use the future tense, and vice versa- so I can pick and choose what I want to cover. The kids love learning song lyrics, so I’m going to do a couple of lessons on the Beatles after spring break- history, fame, and (of course) lyrics. Can you believe that none of them has heard of the most listened to group in music history!? Anyone want to come sing back-up?

The big event of the past few weeks has been the school soccer tournament. The sports season opened in mid-February with a day-long ceremony that included a speech by the mayor, an Olympic Opening Ceremony-style parade, two games, and the signature of a Burkinabe special event- meat and bottled drinks. Last week in the final, after barely beating the 6th graders in the semis, the 9th grade team got a chance to revenge a previous upset loss against the 8th graders. And what a final it was! 8th grade scored first, but 9th grade quickly responded. As the sun began to set, the referee (whose salary I maintain is paid by the 9th grade class) ended regulation (sort of at his discretion, there is no time keeper for these games) on a 1-1 tie. And then we went to penalty shots. The 9th grade goalie earned hero’s status when he blocked a shot by the 8th grade class president, sealing a 6-5 victory. Let the celebrations begin! Cartwheels. Back-flips. Singing and cheering. The winning goalie was paraded around the field on his teammates’ shoulders. The scene was amazingly similar to that seen in Anytown, USA after a big high school football victory, and it got me to thinking.

I keep writing of our students as kids, but the 9th graders are 18-25 years old- about the age of an American university undergraduate. The collective focus of the American undergraduate, and indeed much of the country, has undoubtedly recently turned to brackets: the NCAA Basketball Tournament. In a few weeks America will crown the champion of a tournament that annually eats up millions of dollars in advertising, scholarships, salaries, and professional contracts. The prize money for our school tournament was seven dollars. Despite the difference in monetary value, the heart of each tournament is theoretically the same: athletes playing for fun, camaraderie, and bragging rights. Why does the American tournament hide those intangible prizes under millions of dollars? How much does that dilute what competition is really about? Does all of the money make the American tournament more important? Does the lack of money and fancy equipment (like shoes and shin guards) make the Burkinabe tournament less important? Whose society is really richer? All interesting questions that I ponder while sitting on my front porch.

A couple of weeks ago, Dedougou, the nearest big city to my village, hosted the annual West African mask festival. The US Ambassador stopped in my village on her way to the festival and invited me to join her for the weekend. (Yeah, it’s a small country.) I must say, we travelled in style: air-conditioned SUV; best restaurants in town; and accommodations at the private corporate villas of Sofitex, a major cotton harvesting company. My room had AC and a bathroom! Ah, life with the Ambassador. When I asked if we could call Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, “just to say hi”, the Ambassador almost choked on her water. Apparently they haven’t even met. It went without saying that calling King George was out of the question. To my relief, however, she does have Sec. Rice’s phone number. (Hey, I had to ask. If we ever have to do a Saigon-style evacuation from the Embassy rooftop, you want to know that the Ambassador is talking to the Secretary, not some State Department lackey, right?)

The festival itself was pretty neat. Though we saw masks from Burkina, Benin and Senegal, all the performances had a similar theme: the masked dancers, representing spirits, were controlled by various types of music. Their every action- waking, dancing, and dying- came as the result of a change in music provided by guitarists, drummers, and vocalists. The Burkinabe dancers were wrapped head-to-toe in tree leaves; some costumes were form-fitting, others resembled a dancing Christmas tree. Not that this is hard to do, but they all made the Stanfurd mascot look pathetically amateur. The Beninese had the most elaborate show, with music, fire, and spooky metaphors for the devil. I’ll try to get pictures posted soon.

So that’s what I’ve been up to the past month or so. I’m on spring break right now, and though I’m ready for a little break, I must say I’m going to miss my village. The students are always at my house, and we have a great time hanging out- playing Uno and Dominoes and looking at magazines. Popular questions include: Do you have Coca-Cola in America? Do mini-vans really come with TV screens? Is Matel your brother? Why did he write his name on all your playing cards? I taught Cribbage to a few of my students, and after a few games one of my best math students challenged me to a one-on-one match. I kicked his butt. Twice. Call it revenge for finding two errors on the last math test I gave him. Little punk.

Happy Spring Break!

Seventh Grade Math and Science Club Comes to Life

One of my biggest challenges as a teacher in Burkina is incorporating interesting activities into my daily math lessons. The national curriculum is packed full of topics, and with class sizes of 60-100 students, there isn’t much room for deviation from the norm. Unfortunately the norm involves the teacher writing on the blackboard, the students arguing over which arrangement of doors/windows open/closed allows the majority of them to see, and very little time for personal interaction with the students. I try to get my students up to the board to do problems and did a couple of full-class activities last semester, but that was pretty much it. My idea for a remedy to this situation is to have an after-school math and science club for the students. I want to have math/science themes each meeting, but really to use it as a time to get to know a smaller group of students and introduce them to different styles of hands-on learning. Basically, to have fun. Marshmallow snot rockets and capture the flag are probably out of the question, but science and math are so important to the development of Burkina, that I want to try to convince at least a few students that they can be fun as well as useful.

I decided to make the club an honors-type deal; I invited the top 10 boys and 10 girls from each of the two seventh grade classes. When I read the list to the students Wednesday morning, I just about had a mutiny on my hands. The kids who weren’t invited were mad because they thought the smart kids were going to get extra homework help. The kids who were invited were mad because they thought it was going to be just another class. Luckily after explaining things several times, I managed to pacify the non-invited kids and excite the invited ones. But it was a close call.

For the first lesson, I wanted to really emphasize my two goals: learning science and having fun. I decided to do a lesson about the brain. For obvious reasons (my limited French neuro-anatomy vocabulary and the student’s age), the lesson was extremely cursory. I told them about the differences between the right and left brains and taught about the main lobes of the brain. I also gave them a huge list of the brain’s functions; the only functions they came up with were “thoughts” and “something with reflexes”. They were shocked to learn that there are more; the most discussed function was a signal when it is time to urinate. I also managed to successfully embarrass a boy when I told him (in front of everyone) that his brain tells his heart to speed up when he sees a pretty girl. That brought down the house.

As for the “fun” part of the lesson: we drew pictures! I handed them each a sheet of blank paper and told them to draw something. I refused to give any ideas about what they could draw, and they were completely lost for about five minutes. “I don’t understand?” “What am I supposed to draw?” “Is it OK if I draw a _______?” When I finally managed to convince them that they could really draw ANYTHING they wanted, that there was no right answer, they went straight to work. Then I made a big mistake. I had told them to bring colored pencils, and I held up four or five packs of new colored pencils, asking if anyone had forgotten theirs. Despite them being Burkinabe colored pencils that are available at our weekly market, the kids went nuts. Every hand shot up as they had all suddenly forgotten their pencils. It should be no surprise, then, that they literally jumped over tables when I held up two packages of American-made markers. Complete chaos: markers flying through the air, being stolen from hands, screaming, yelling, complaining, fighting, accusing…I thought the club was going to have to disband right then and there. I finally managed to convince them that they each only have one hand and can therefore only use one marker/pencil at a time. They were still a bit punchy but generally settled down.

Seeing their choices of drawings was probably the most fun I’ve had in a classroom. It was really interesting to compare what they produced to what I was expecting from my experiences with American middle school kids. I was thinking the girls would draw flowers or butterflies and the boys would draw cars or guns. Yes and no. True to their Burkinabe school upbringing, many of them made practice drawings on a second piece of paper. I saw a lot of houses and motos- meticulously drawn using straightedges for the walls and compasses for the wheels. A lot of the kids drew maps of Burkina; they started by making a grid on the paper then placing certain key points in the border and connecting the dots. All of the maps were exactly the same and it was obvious that they had studied this extensively somewhere along the line. Between the maps and houses, there was very little winging it, but we did get a couple of really creative drawings- some traditional Burkinabe masks- based on a local festival- and some pottery- for which my village is famous.

All in all, our first meeting was a huge success, and I can’t wait to get everyone together again. Hopefully I’ll learn from my mistakes: schedule the fun activity for the end of class, and count the markers before the kids leave (apparently three of them have legs). Next week I think I’m going to introduce them to Sudoku, and the week after we might do a health lesson. Wish me luck!