A Camel Comes to Visit

Last weekend I was sitting minding my own business on my front porch. I had gotten a little behind in my lesson preparations, and as it was already late Sunday afternoon and I had nothing prepared for Monday morning, I admit I was a bit…focused on my work. And that probably explains my delayed reaction as a mob of swarming children stampeded into my courtyard. (I’m not kidding. There were probably 50 of them.)

My first thought admittedly was, “Great. What do they want? And why are there so many of them?” I’m accustomed to having numerous small children come to stare at me, but usually they try to sneak into the courtyard (as if a group five year-olds can sneak anywhere) and peek over my wall to stare at me and ask for candy. But as my gaze rose, my jaw dropped, and I watched as a man’s head bobbed up and down above my courtyard wall. He slowly made his way to the gate, moving in a very jerky manner that at first made me think he was on stilts. Nope. He got to the gate and I immediately saw that he was sitting atop a gigantic camel. He smiled and waved at me, then eased the camel through the gate and rode right up to my porch. I was dumbfounded. And for a second I didn’t think he was going to stop. My thoughts sounded like a stuttering adolescent Romeo: “Uh, pbt, ah, what do I do with a camel on my porch?” I froze. Luckily he stopped at the porch step, and my 8 year-old neighbor came running up.

“Monsieur, he’s travelling through town and wants you to take a picture.” When a man rides into your courtyard on a camel asking for a picture, you oblige. I ran into the house, and was shocked again when I came back out. The camel that had been enormous moments ago was now kneeling with his head about level with mine. I took a few pictures of the man and his camel, then, without a word, he got back on, stuck out his hand for a tip, and was gone. Equally amazingly, the children had found the one thing in village more interesting than a goofy white person, and they followed the camel (which we don’t see very often that far south) out the gate.

I talked to my neighbor a few minutes later. Apparently the man, a member of the Tuareg tribe that lives in the Sahelian north of Burkina, was travelling through town, probably on his way south to Cote d’Ivoire. Someone must have told him that there was a tobaboo (the Djioula word meaning “stranger”, “foreigner”…or “white person”) in village who would love to take his picture. So he came to visit. And I took his picture.

Almost two years in Burkina, and it’s still bringing me surprises. Go figure!

Word from the Village

Pictures from my family’s visit!

Second, a BIG shout out to Ms. King’s 6th graders in the Bay Area! I received your letters yesterday and am going to share them with my students this week. They will be thrilled. Thank you so much!

Life has been good lately. My family came to visit right after Christmas, and we had a great time together. We got hassled in the markets, biked out to the waterfalls in Banfora, and were celebrities in village. Though we differed on temperature comfort levels (I was freezing in the mornings and during our afternoon dips in the pool; they were unpleasantly hot in the mid-afternoon), I think they had a good time. In village we got to visit my school and told my students all about life in America. In return, students and other friends were at my house at just about every day-lit moment to talk with my family. They took us on a tour of the pottery making boutiques, showed us around the elementary schools, and even gave us front row seats during my village’s New Years celebration. They were incredibly kind and generous, sharing food and souvenirs with my family. Though the latrines and bucket baths took a little getting used to, I think they secretely loved village. My students tried their hardest to convince Nick to replace me when my time is up. We’ll see…

School has been going well this trimester. Mornings are so cold (OK, 72 degrees) that students come in bundled under three or four shirts and complain when I tell them to open the windows or door so that they can see the blackboard. (I must admit I shiver a little too; my last full Minnesota winter seems a long time ago.) Lately, though, the heat has returned, and by the time the afternoon class rolls around, students are passing water bottles around to try to stay cool (temperatures over 100 degrees). And we’re not yet to the hot season. Our school soccer season has started, and my class of 7th graders almost beat the ninth graders a couple of weeks ago. It looks like we’re going to have a great team this year!

I’m in Ouaga this weekend for a softball tournament with the American Embassy. We’ve had two games so far…and played well both times! Haha. It’s been a lot of fun, though I must say it’s been weird being around so many Americans the past two days.

I’ve got to run, but I should be at a computer again soon. Happy New Year to all!

Arly National Park

See the pictures!

Over the first part of our trimester break two friends and I went on a bike trip to and through Arly National Park, in the South of Burkina. We spent three days in the bush, saw some neat wild animals, and did a lot of biking. A lot of biking. Because no Burkina trip is complete without a little randomness, we also were given wine by a regional forester from Ouaga, learned why the 1969 moon landing was staged in Nevada, and met up with (though were not allowed to socialize with) rich Europeans vacationing and paying up to $10000 to hunt Burkina’s big game.

Our trip started with a Christmas celebration in Caleb’s village, east of Fada. We had a nice dinner of guinea fowl, pasta, rice, and watermelon with his family, and folded paper airplanes with his little neighbors. Around dusk the party started to get going at the church. They had a drum set set-up outside, and people were dancing a bit and mingling. A few hours later they started a movie about Jesus; the movie was European-made, but dubbed over in Gourmanche, the language spoken in Caleb’s village. We had no idea what was going on, but we did get to see Jesus raise a girl from the dead and fill the fishermen’s nets with fish. Go Jesus! We hung around after the movie waiting for the dancing to start, but when nothing had happened by 11:30, we decided to go to bed.

The next day we took transport east and south from Caleb’s village to Diapaga, the last large town before hitting the national parks system. Nothing too exciting about transport- only broke down twice, lost one tire, two babies threw up, another kid screamed the whole time. But we made it. Saturday morning we took off on our bikes into the bush. We biked about 75km past very small villages, some gorgeous cliffs, and lots of sand. At the entrance to Arly National Park, there’s a hunting lodge, and we stopped there for lunch. The place was gorgeous- pool, bar, restaurant, bungalows (see picture)- and after our initial shock wore off, we started to feel a little out of place. Sure enough just after we finished eating, “the clients” showed up in their 4×4’s with three suitcases a piece and several guns. As we were (quite literally) shuffled off to the side by the staff, we quickly decided that this place was out of our price range for the night. We asked the staff if there was somewhere else to stay, and they kind of laughed at us as they told us we could continue 15km into the park and try to stay with the forester. So we did.

We figured that the forester’s would be located at a village of some type, and since we had camping gear, we weren’t too concerned. Well, we got to our “village” to find that it was literally one family plus the forester. There was an old abandoned hotel that the family worked to keep in minimum (and I do mean minimum) inhabiting condition, and that was it. The hotel was built in the 1950’s and had apparently been THE spot for hunters from around West Africa and Europe; there was a pool, dance floor, bar…it clearly used to be gorgeous. Due to new hunting laws however, the big game hunters are now staying elsewhere, and the hotel is slightly rundown. Soon after “checking in” to our room, we went over to the forester’s to find some dinner. As luck would have it, the Park Forester was hosting a regional higher-up in the Forestry Department that night. And we were invited! While we waited for dinner to be prepared, Peter, the man from the Forestry Dept, busted out his laptop and showed us a movie entitled “Why No One Has Ever Been to the Moon”. Conspiracy theory and that stuff. I must say, the flag blowing in the atmosphere-less environment is pretty convincing. But I digress. Dinner included watermelon and wine. Ah, life with the Forestry Department.

Sunday morning we got up crazy early and went on a guided bike tour of Arly. We saw some baboons, gazelles, elephants, deer-type animals, and hippos. We were kind of hoping to see lions, but we were kind of glad we didn’t get eaten by lions. (Despite numerous reassurances that “they won’t attack you if you don’t attack them”, we were a little scared.) We also got to visit a fishing village where they smoke their catches, then ship them off to Ouaga. Talk about living in the middle of nowhere. This village was probably 15km from the place we stayed, which was itself not really a village. The nearest primary school was probably 60km away. After our bike excursion in the morning, we were pretty exhausted, so we decided to take Peter up on his offer of a ride to the next town. We loaded up in his pick-up, and set off. When we got to the campgrounds, we quickly realized that it was another place for high-paying European tourists, and once again we were not quite in our element. Luckily the manager was very nice and let us set up our tents in the back by the staff quarters.

I must say, I believe we had it better that night. We spent the night trading card games with the staff and trying to figure out magic tricks. For those of you who have never played cards with Burkinabe before, you’re in for a treat. The suits are called tomatoes, peanuts, diamonds, and spades. They play a game sort of like “Uno”, but the rules seem to change each hand. We also watched them cut up one of the water buffalo that had been killed that day. After quartering it, it still took two men to carry over a single leg to the butcher’s table. Then they went at it with knives, hatchets, and axes. It seriously sounded like they were trying to chop up a piece of rock, the bones were that hard. While watching them work, we got the inside story on the hunting trips: rich people pay to come to Burkina to kill a certain type of animal; they stay for a couple of weeks and almost always get their kill. Once the animals are killed, the heads go home to Europe, the neck meat goes to the staff, one quarter goes to the government, one quarter to the hunters, and the other half goes to the villagers. The villagers sell the meat and use the money to buy communal things like water pumps and schools. This made us feel much better about their trips- at first we had though they were just coming to Burkina to exploit the land, people, and animals. And though the rich tourists refused to even return our greetings, at least they were doing something for the people here.

Monday morning we said goodbye to our lodge staff friends, and took off by bike on the last 40km of our trip. It was a pretty easy day since the last 15km was on a paved road, but I was still exhausted as we reached Pama. Luckily there was a bush taxi ready to go, so we got on and next thing we know (OK, lots of stops, about ten 100kg bags of beans…but no breakdowns!), we were 100km north in the capital city of Fada. Ah civilization.

And now I must run. I’m meeting Mom, Dad, Nick and Chelsea at the airport in just a couple of hours! I can’t wait to see them! Happy New Year to all!

Tobaskie (Eid ul-Adha) in Village

Last Monday was the Muslim holiday Eid ul-Adha; this is the Muslim holiday of sacrifice, celebrated in honor of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to show his loyalty to God. What this translates to in village is eating. A lot of eating sheep.

I started the day off at one of my colleague’s house. I got over there around 8:30, and hung out with his family for a while. Then everyone got all dressed up in their celebration garb: long, flowing outfits for both the men and women. Once we were all ready and pictures had been taken, we went over to the morning prayer session. Yup, I prayed with the Muslims. Prayers are normally held in the mosque, but because just about everyone in village shows up for special occasions, this morning the prayers were at the big soccer field across from the school. We walked over there, and my colleague set out the prayer shawl for the two of us, continuing one of many lines of people set up to pray facing Mecca in the East. We had arrived fairly early, so we sat for a while on our shawl, chatting with people and listening to the Arabic music. They had one megaphone set up, and music played for about an hour before the Imam arrived. Not surprisingly, he arrived in typical Burkinabe style- in the front seat of the ‘Blue Express’ village bush taxi. (That’s the newest addition to our bush taxi fleet…or it may just be newly painted.) I had to chuckle a bit when they opened the back door and 25 of the Imam’s closest friends piled out. The prayer itself lasted only about 15 mintues. The Imam spoke for a bit, all in Arabic, then we all kneeled to pray. I had been nervous that I’d feel out of place or not know what to do, but I didn’t feel any more neon than I do any other time in village, and I don’t think I screwed anything up religiously. I have to admit, it was very peaceful and meditative. I couldn’t help but thinking how wrong so many people are to be scared of the Islamic religion.

After the prayers were done the Imam was presented with a sheep, which he ceremonially slaughtered, as is tradition. I couldn’t see anything, so no video this time. Sorry Amy. Also during this time, the Koranic school boys roamed throughout the crowd asking for donations. These are usually kids whose parents can’t afford to send them to (the supposedly free) public schools, so they attend the Koranic schools at the mosque instead. They learn about Islam and the Koran, but have no one to provide food for them. So they ask for donations; they walk around with tomato paste cans and take what people offer, usually giving you a quick blessing and thank you in return. I think this was the “asking for money” portion of the prayer service, because many women with young children walked around the crowd and asked for money and or food as well. Also, a photographer roamed throughout the crowd taking photos for the mosque’s collection.

After prayers we went back to my colleague’s house where he killed not one, but two sheep. I hung out with his kids for awhile, teaching his youngest daughter (about 3 years old) English. Her older brothers have just started to learn English in school this year, and she is eager to learn as well. We also chased chickens away from the sheep carcasses and grilled the heads for eating the next day. After a couple of hours, my colleague brought out he first round- liver! He and I shared this while his wife continued to prepare the feast. A little later my other colleagues came over, and we all ate the rest of the sheep together. Good stuff. Then we went over to the school headmaster’s house…and ate again. This time sheep and POPCORN! Yup, apparently popcorn is one of the special holiday foods. Then we went over to another one of my colleagues houses. And ate yet again. Chicken this time. All three meals were delicious, and I could barely walk afterwards. Key word: barely. We then went to one of the village bars where all the non-Muslims and less strict Muslims continued the festivities. When I got home my neighbors shared with me some of their feast as well. Yum yum!

Lesson learned: holidays mean lots of food. Really, it’s kind of like Thanksgiving. In Arabic.

SIDA Fighting to the Max

Hello hello out there.

December 1st is World AIDS Day, and this year my school took part in a pretty significant way. Two colleagues and I attended a Peace Corps HIV/AIDS and Life Skills workshop last spring in Ouahigouya, a city in the north of Burkina. There we learned all sorts of activities, games, and other teaching strategies to use with students at school. At the end of the workshop we came up with the goal to do a series of three HIV/AIDS sensibilizations with every class at our school. I must admit, at the time I thought we were aiming way too high to have any chance of success. But I was wrong.

Throughout the month of November, the three of us took one class per week and put on a crash course in HIV/AIDS. We talked about myths and realities surrounding the disease; modes of transmission of HIV; and prevention. The highlight of every class was without a doubt the condom demonstration. The Peace Corps lent us wooden penises, and at the end of each class we used them to demonstrate how to properly use a condom. As you can imagine, the mere sight of a wooden penis causes a class of 15 year olds to go completely nuts- screaming with laughter and practically rolling down the aisles. However, once they calmed down, they were dead silent, and the room usually took on an air of “Oh, so that’s how you do it. I never knew…”

This past Thursday (while all of you in the US were muching on turkey and watching the pathetic Lions), we gave a longer, more in depth presentation for the entire student body. We touched on subjects we had already addressed in the classrooms (you can never hear about condoms too many times, right?) but also talked about HIV history, stigmatisation, and the affect of HIV/AIDS on our village community. To celebrate after the presentation, the administration bought us lunch- a huge pile of goat meat. Nick, you’re going to feel right at home here, uh, sort of.

All in all I think our sensibilisations went really well. Though we got a lot of questions from students that seemed completely irrelevant to their lives (Can monkies get HIV? What about dogs?), we also got to address a lot of practical questions such as: Can I use two condoms? (No!) Can I use the same condom twice? (No, again!) Can you get HIV by eating with someone? (Third no in a row.) And since it was probably the only time most of the students have ever talked about sex with grownups, I think it was very beneficial for them. If nothing else it provided them with ample opportunity for snickering at wooden penises.

School Daze

Howdy howdy. The past few weeks have been all about school, so I thought I’d take a minute and tell you a little more about our school. Needless to say, it’s a little different than the typical American middle school.

The school day starts each morning at 7am. On Mondays one of the class presidents raises the national flag, while everyone else watches in respectful silence. Classes go from 7am to noon, with a 15 minute break at 10:00. Lunch lasts until 3pm, when everyone comes back to school for two more hours of class. Though each class’s schedule is different, no one has class Thursday afternoon- reserved for tests. The other popular test time is Saturday mornings; most weeks most classes have tests at either or both of those times. Saturday afternoon the kids who don’t live in our village can go home to visit their families for the rest of the weekend, before biking or walking back (sometimes as far as 20km) to my village for school on Monday morning.

Our school has about 600 students in six classes (two each of 6th and 7th grade, one 8th grade and one 9th grade). The smallest class is the 9th grade with about 85 students; eighth grade is the largest with 125 students. I polled the students in my 6th and 7th grade classes on the first day of school and found that their average ages were, respectively, 14 and 15 years. The challenge in teaching, however, comes from their age range: my youngest 8th grader is 11 years old, while the oldest is 19.

Our school administration consists of a school principal (who also teaches 25-30 hours per week), an accountant, a disciplinarian (who helps with everything from proctoring tests to handing out punishments), and a secretary. The secretary types all official school documents on her typewriter, and makes copies using an old-school carbon-copy machine whose name I don’t know…in French or English. It’s got a big crank on the side and is a very messy thing to use. But it gets the job done. We have four full-time teachers: me and one other math/science teacher, an English teacher and a history/civics teacher. We also have two part-time community members who come in to help with physical education classes and one English class. I’ve never done the math on the student-to-staff ratio, but I’m sure it’s a little on the high side.

One other big difference between our school and an American school comes at the end of the trimester, when we calculate grades. After the official end of classes and tests, there are still a couple of weeks of work left for the teachers. Once grading papers is finished, it’s time to face the students. Each teacher goes into each of his or her classes and reads off the grades of every student, verifying their marks and calculating their overall grade for the course. Then the teachers go back and fill in the report cards (manually you silly goose…MS Excel doesn’t exist in village). Once the report cards are filled out, the classes are divided up, with each teacher in charge of one class. Back to the classroom. Now we verify each student’s grades in each course, and calculate their overall grade point average for the trimester. And fill that in on their report card. With all the GPAs calculated, we can now rank the students, calculate a class average and write out a list of students- twice: once in alphabetical order, once by class rank. Finally, at the end of each trimester, we have a full staff meeting and give the statistiques for each class- how many kids passed, how many failed, etc. It’s a lot of work, but I don’t mind the math and have some sick fascination with calculating grades, ranking students, and filling out report cards. Call it the curse of being organizationally excitable.

And that’s school in a nutshell.

Happy Halloween to all.

PS Hi Mrs. C. Hope all is well in Maryland!

School St-St-St-Starts

School came to a stuttering start a couple of weeks ago. The official “rentrée scolaire” is October first, however, that was the day my village decided to celebrate the Muslim holiday Ramadan. Ramadan is the end of the month of fasting and is supposed to coincide with the new moon. The new moon was the last day of September, and so most of the world celebrated then. For some reason our village chief decided to wait a day.

The Ramadan celebration was pretty neat to see. Everyone dressed up in their finest traditional clothes- long, flowing dresses for the women and similar traditional outfits for the men. Even the kids got all snazzed up…it was weird to see some of them wearing any clothes at all, much less fancy ones. Everyone went out to the soccer field by the main road and had a prayer service, then went home to eat. I was invited to eat with one of my colleagues and one of my neighbors. Both families had chicken, and both meals were delicious. I did think it kind of strange, though: when I went over to my neighbor’s house, neither his wife (who clearly had prepared the meal) nor his kids were there. It was just him, me, and several of his male friends. I didn’t ask, but maybe celebrating Muslim holidays is like praying in that men and women do it separately. Anyone know?

Over at the school, about half the kids had shown up, despite the holiday. They sat around for a while, then the Vice Principal installed them in their classrooms. This involved him reading roll, bringing them one-by-one into the classroom, and choosing the table they will sit at for the year. After he finished he had them stay in class for another hour or so, then he told them to go home. I’m not sure what the point of all that was. Due to the holiday, most kids hadn’t come, so he did the same exact thing the next day. That takes us to day number three, a Friday. Needless to say we did nothing. Classes finally started Monday, sort of. Since we don’t have copy services here, the first day of class is typically reserved for giving students the syllabus for the year. The teacher writes the list of chapters on the board, and the students write them down in their notebooks. So I gave my first real lessons the next day, almost a week after the official first day back. Thing is, after having seen the same thing last year, I knew exactly what to expect. I was in complete accordance with the other teachers in not wanting to do anything the previous Friday. I think I’m going to go into shock when I go back to America and something actually starts when it’s supposed to.

We just finished the second week of school. So far, I’m teaching a sixth grade math class and two seventh grade math classes. One of our other math/science teachers is leaving at the end of the month, so I’m probably going to be picking up one of his classes, which I’m excited about because he teaches the older students. There’s only so many times discussing properties of a line (”It goes on forever! It doesn’t even stop at the end of your piece of paper!”) with sixth graders is intellectually stimulating. That said, our next unit is about the order of operations; PMDAS returns. And wait ’til they find out that PMDAS is coming to village, live and in person. She’ll be the biggest celebrity this side of Michael Jackson.

One more quick thing. The US Election. I’m sure you are all sick to death of hearing about it, but I want to point out that everyone here is paying attention. Well, the educated people anyways. Even some of my students know who Barack Obama is. For the rest of them, when I tell them a black man might be the next POTUS, they pretty much think it’s a bad joke. Most of them don’t believe that black people can have money or a solid education, certainly not enough to be in charge of the US. I hope for nothing more than to be able to come into class the day after the election and tell them that America elected a president who is intelligent, cares about people, is willing to listen to viewpoints from around the world, who will continue to provide American aid to poor countries…and who happens to be black.

PS For those of you not in San Franciso…I sent in my absentee ballot recently, happily voting to change the name of the “SF Oceanside Water Treatment Facility” to the “George W. Bush Sewage Center”. Go Bears!