L'Education Mondiale - A Tale of Two Classrooms

The week I found out I was being sent to Francophone West Africa for my Peace Corps service, as opposed to Spanish-speaking Latin America for which I'd spent the previous year preparing, I freaked out and asked my friend Maryline if she would give me an afternoon refresher in French.  It had been 20 years since I’d been in a French class and since I’d been taking Spanish classes for my supposed departure to Central or South America I was a little rusty, to say the least.  Maryline is a native of France who married a friend of mine and moved the Batesville over a decade ago.  She’s the head of the French program at the Peabody School where she teaches French to elementary and middle school kids.  In looking through my pre-service paperwork,  I noticed a pamphlet explaining World Wise Schools, a correspondence match program started by former Peace Corps Director, Paul Coverdell, as a means to connect Peace Corps Volunteers with classrooms back home.  I asked Maryline if she would partner with me and she said, “Bien sûr!”, thus beginning a two year correspondence with Madame Meyer and her 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade French classes.

We started writing to each other soon after I installed at my site in Diourbel.  The first letter I wrote was edited by my French tutor before I mailed it.  She red-penned it so much that I had to re-write the whole thing before sending it.  The kids wrote back with a series of questions for me to answer, which I did, one by one.  The delay in response time was quickly frustrating on both sides of the ocean.  I’d send a letter then wait 2-3 weeks for it to arrive.  Then they'd draft a response and it would take over a month to reach me.  Madame Meyer and I decided to try Skype instead.  That was much more fun, but it didn’t allow me the luxury of someone else proofreading my comments before they came tumbling, grammatically incorrect, out of my mouth.   Thankfully, our French was at a similar level, so we all stumbled along together and Madame Meyer was very patient with all of us.  Although Skype was more gratifying than waiting for international snail mail, it did pose its own problems.  The sound and/or video quality were often lacking and because I struggled with electricity problems the first year and a half I lived here, I couldn’t always guarantee I’d be at the other end of the line.  We’d schedule a call well in advance and then when the day arrived, I’d sit down at my desk, open my Skype account and the electricity would go off.  For some reason, this often happened minutes before the call and then would stay off for hours.   This was a big problem for us (and for me, in general) until about 6 months ago when the election season started and the electricity has magically stayed on for days and weeks at a time.  Regardless of our delays and interruptions, we continued to schedule and reschedule calls on a regular basis.  On occasion, we’d still send care packages or notes to one another through traditional means. I sent them Senegalese souvenirs and postcards and they sent me snacks and mementos from home.  This was surely a win-win situation.

 

 

Last October, I visited the kids at school while I was home on vacation.  We organized a school-wide assembly and I gave a presentation (decked out in traditional Senegalese garb, no less) on what it’s like to live in Africa and to be in the Peace Corps.  The 6^th grade French students sang a song I taught them in French, Wolof, and English.  Everyone was so impressed.  After the assembly, Madame Meyer got the kids excused from whatever classes they had and we gathered together for a live correspondence session. I was thrilled to see the bulletin board they’d created with all of the letters, post cards, and pictures I’d sent.

 

 

 

This week, we had our last calls of the year.  I sent back traditional leather and cowrie shell necklaces for them, as well as a certificate for completing the correspondence program with me.  Collectively, our French has improved dramatically and because I’ve been a constant presence throughout two school years, they’re no longer shy about coming up with questions or speaking to me in French.  At the last call for each of the three classes, I asked them a few final questions, including what was the most interesting thing they learned about Senegal.  Their responses varied, but among the most common were:

• The tale of the griots (village singers) being buried in the hollow of the baobab tree
• The explanation of the seasons (or lack thereof) in Senegal, basically we have the Hot and Rainy Season, the Hot and Dry Season, and the REALLY HOT and Dry Season (I'm experiencing the latter right now).
• Senegalese salutations and greeting
• Differences in food, food etiquette, and agricultural product
• The politics of our recent Presidential elections

I also asked them if they might consider joining the Peace Corps after they finish college.  To my surprise, most of them were pretty sure they’d look for a job right away instead.  They seemed pretty driven to start earning money, but maybe I scared them away with tales of the heat.  Regardless, I'm not sure why this was so surprising to me; finding a job straight out of college was exactly what I did.  Maybe I was just hoping I’d instilled a taste for adventure in them, or maybe I was just regretting not joining the Peace Corps earlier, myself.  The good news is that they all indicated that they planned to continue with their French studies.  I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for all of us to be able to communicate in another language.  People here in Senegal often speak 3 or 4 languages (Wolof, French, and one or two other ethnic dialects), not perfectly, but at least they can get their message across to a wide group of people.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, I’ve also befriended a local school, Algor Dioum Primary, affectionately referred to as “Al Gore”.  This school enrolled 10 of its students into our Eco-Ecole program last year and its Director, Moussa Diallo, is a member of Baol Environment, my partner association.  Of all of the schools we work with, this one and its students are the most engaged.  With the exception of Friday prayer and Muslim holidays, Director Diallo is almost always decked out in western clothing:  a suit or polo shirts and dress pants on weekdays and soccer jerseys and baseball caps on weekends.  His attire is indicative of his work ethic.  Moussa runs a mile-a-minute.  He’s always late to meetings, and not for the typical Senegalese reason of “just being late”, but because he’s usually just left another meeting.

Last year he approached me about helping him apply for a grant to improve the latrines at his school.  I told him I’d be happy to help and went to check out the situation.  He wanted to extend an internal wall that divided the boys’ side from the girls’ side.  When I went in the small outbuilding which housed the latrines to take some measurements and pictures, frankly, I was appalled that this was all he wanted to fix.  There were several stalls on either side of the existing divider that contained typical Turkish toilets (porcelain in-ground bowls with foot treads and a mounted tank on the wall above).  Unfortunately, all of the tanks were out of order and there was no back-up water system in the building.  Because these toilets are a little “fancier” than the standard hole in the ground that many kids may have at home, not everyone was sure how to use them, thus there was feces  piled throughout the stalls—in the bowl and out—and no means to wash it down the drain.  The closest water source was communal sink situated a few yards outside of the latrine, but it was not functioning either.  Because the school can’t afford a night guard, thieves have come repeatedly to steal the spigots off the faucets.  The whole situation was really quite dreadful.  I asked the Director if he thought fixing this bigger problem was more important that extending the wall and he agreed that it was, but felt hopeless they’d ever find the money to take it on.  Keeping the boys out of the girls’ latrine (and vice versa) seemed more pressing to him and was a manageable task to complete with the money that we had available to us.  I left with the measurements and photos I'd taken and asked that the director follow-up with me to collect demographics about his student body so I could complete the grant request.   Unfortunately, every time I've seen him since then he says, “I know, I know, I still owe you a report” and then I don’t see him again for a month or two.   Since the timeframe for applying for grants has now ended for me, I plan to tell my replacement about this project.  Hopefully, with a little more pushing, they can expand the wall and try to improve the plumbing system.  Things take a long time to come to fruition here.  Accepting that has been one of the many great challenges I've faced during my service.

  

 

     

This week, Ibou and I dropped by Moussa’s office because he’d failed to show up at a scheduled meeting the week before.  We needed some information from him about an Educational Fair we’ll be attending at the end of the month and thought we’d have a captured audience if we just showed up on his doorstep.  This proved to be true.  After a productive meeting, he asked if we’d like to see the interactive white boards that had just been installed in two of his classes.  “What?!”, I uttered, thinking I’d misunderstood him.  “Interactive white boards that project from a computer onto the classroom wall,” he said.  “Why, of course I would”, I answered, still in a bit of disbelief.  Sure enough, we walked across the courtyard, just steps away from the broken latrines and non-functioning sinks and found a classroom with an LCD projector mounted to the ceiling.  The teacher invited us into her classroom, propped a laptop on a lidded bucket, and fired the thing up.  She then started calibrating the touch-sensor on the rectangular “white board” painted on the wall.  With my jaw still a bit slack, I watched as she used a wand to draw pictures and type words onto the board.  Then, the kids got up and did the same.  Granted, I’ve been away from the U.S. for a couple of years and haven’t visited a classroom (aside from the aforementioned trip) since Elliott and Emily were little kids, so maybe these are in commonplace back home, but I was truly taken aback.  This is rural Africa, for God’s sake, where kids don’t even have proper toilets at school, yet here they were using a keyboard image to type out words on the wall.

This lovely world never ceases to amaze me!

 

 

 

Love, Loss, and Not Letting Go

Part I - Love and Loss in the Information Age

Being 4,000 miles from home poses many challenges, physically, emotionally, and logistically.  Moving out of my house with little notice and leaving behind people and pets who I love was just the beginning.  Since my arrival, I’ve had to adjust to a daily life filled with cultural and language obstacles.  Most of this I was prepared to face, knowing it may be difficult at times.  I’d made contingency plans for logistics back home, I faced each cultural roadblock as a learning experience, and I continue to struggle with communication issues, but these are all things I was prepared to do because I expected them.

What I was not as prepared for was the unexpected--the real life things that happen to people everyday, but that you don‘t think will happen to you., especially when you are so far from your support system.  I was not prepared for the sudden death of a close friend, my faux-uncle and confident of 20 years, who was diagnosed with brain cancer a few weeks after I left the States.  He passed away soon thereafter, and the memorial service which I was very sad to have missed occurred the same day that the long-term relationship that I‘d left behind, hoping it would somehow be strengthened by a temporary physical separation and an exercise in self-reflection, took an unexpected nose dive and crashed to its ultimate demise.  I was not prepared for my sister to suddenly have serious health problems taking her in and out of the hospital with no definite diagnosis, leaving my family worried about what might happen next.  I was not prepared for my 13 year old dog who I left with a dear friend to develop a malignant tumor that would cause him to be put down, even though I knew in the back of my mind that he might have passed away from natural causes before I returned.  And lastly, I was not prepared to be attacked on the streets of Dakar last week, as an mugger tried to take my purse, leaving me with minor physical injuries, but emotional side effects that might stick around a while.

The loneliness and helplessness that come when you can’t actually be with the ones you love in their time of need, or in your own, take on a new dimension when your support network can only be reached through modern technology.  It’s the “boy in the bubble” scenario (Travolta, not Seinfeld).  I have the ability to speak with people over the phone or on Skype and to chat with people on Facebook and Gmail, which is a luxury Peace Corps Volunteers of the not-so-distant past certainly did not have, but it’s not the same as true human contact.  As the world gets more and more reliant on these communication methods, this is a good reminder that these will never replace the need for a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on, or a glass to clink.  That being said, this is certainly the next best thing if you’re physically separated so I guess there a balance to be had.  Recently, a friend who was surprised at how accessible I was on-line asked me if I thought being so connected took away from my overall Peace Corps experience and I quickly responded, “No, it’s my lifeline.”   In retrospect, the answer is really YES, it does change the experience, but in a way that I’ve come to appreciate.  Being able to share my experiences, celebrate someone else’s joy, or provide some words of support makes me feel less lonely and less isolated.  My intention when joining the Peace Corps was to use the advantages I’d been given in life to give back to others, experience a world unknown to me, and in the process maybe discover something about myself.  I certainly had no notions of an “Into the Wild” fantasy where I cut off all contact with the outside world.

This ability to communicate with others has opened doors I never would have imagined.  People whom I’ve never met have found me through my blog or through other friends and have reached out to me to thank me for my service or to let me know that they‘ve been inspired to do something new and life-changing themselves.  Old friends who I’d lost touch with are back in my life and are cheering me on through my journey.  Classrooms of kids are being introduced to a part of the world they’d never heard of before and are becoming inquisitive about their global surroundings.  None of this would have been possible had I only the antiquated third world postal system to use for communication.


 Part II - Not Letting Go

Women of my generation have been trained from a very early age what to do in the case of an attack.  In fact, I’d had a refresher just a few months ago during our Peace Corps Pre-Service Training.  Most of the advice you’re given focuses on how to protect yourself from a physical and/or sexual assault and how to alert other people’s attention to what‘s happening.  For a robbery, though, the advice is almost always to let the attacker have what he asks for to avoid being physically assaulted.  Somehow, probably because my robbery took the form of an sudden attack, my instincts told me otherwise.  As is likely the case in most of these incidences, my assailant appeared from out of nowhere.  One minute I was walking down the street and the next minute I was being dragged down it.  The mugger came running at me from behind and tried to grab my purse which was strapped diagonally across my chest.  Since it didn’t just slip off my arm, I was thrown to the ground and my hands immediately latched onto the strap to stop him from taking it.  My grip became gecko-like, and my fingers held onto that strap as if my life depended on it.  Ironically, had I just let go, I probably wouldn’t be as bruised and battered as I am now because our struggle continued for quite some time.  I kicked and screamed and was determined to not let him prevail.  My friend who was walking just a stride behind me saw the whole thing tried to hit the guy to get him to stop, but he quickly elbowed her in the eye and knocked her to the ground.  People from the surrounding compounds came out in droves to assist us and ultimately chased the attacker off, luckily, without my purse.  We were just outside the apartment building where we were spending the night with an American English teacher we’d met when all of this occurred, literally just several feet from the door.  The building guard came out and helped us inside as we were both bleeding and in shock.  We called our Peace Corps security officer and within a half an hour, the Country Director was there to pick us up and take us to the Med Hut (the medical unit at the Peace Corps office) which was just 500 meters away and where the security office was awaiting our arrival.

Although our injuries were minor (scrapes, bruises, a black eye, and sore muscles), we were both pretty shaken up and stayed in the Med Hut for several nights.  The Peace Corps medical officer was great and the security officer followed up on the case first thing the next morning.  Apparently, the neighbors who’d come to our assistance recognized our attacker as someone who lived in the neighborhood and had done this before.  One of the neighbors accompanied us to the Gendarmerie (the national police) to identify him, which was great, because despite the fact that I’d spent several minutes looking at my attacker straight in the face while trying to fend him off I don’t think I’d be able to identify him in a line-up.  It’s strange what the mind chooses to block out.

Unfortunately, our experience dealing with the Gendarmerie was not as positive as our experience with the Peace Corps staff.  The intake officer took one look at us and, before even hearing what we had to say, went on a tirade in Wolof about how stupid Toubab women are for walking alone at night and how we should have expected something like this to happen.  The officer in charge was not much better, as the first question out of his mouth was, “Why didn’t you have men with you?”  Aarrghh!, this patriarchal society makes me want to scream sometimes!  Although they were quick to judge us for the incident, in the end, they did take it seriously and plan to arrest the guy.

The process is interesting.  First of all, the reason we were dealing with the Gendarmerie and not the Police is because the attack occurred in the Village of N’Gor (a small village within the city limits of Dakar) and the Gendarmerie has jurisdiction over villages.  Once our initial complaints were filed, they gave the neighbor who accompanied us an official stamped warrant and asked him to take it to the Village Chief.  The warrant requested that the father of the young man who attacked us bring his son in voluntarily.  When I asked what would happen if they didn’t come in, they responded that they’d round up a group of people to go get him in the night, a veritable modern-day posse.  Wow!  We should find out what came to pass on Monday.  At this point, I’m not sure if we’ll be called back to Dakar to testify in an actual trial or if they’ll just throw him in the slammer based on our complaint.

It’s been several days now and my wounds have scabbed over and the swelling has gone down.  My back, arm, and leg muscles still ache from the struggle, but I suspect that, too, will subside in the coming days along with my headaches.  The initial shock that I experienced which left me a bit nauseous with wobbly knees and insomnia only lasted 36 hours or so.  What remains, I’m afraid, is a overactive startle-response that’s left me panicked three times already.  The day after the attack, my friend and I ventured to a grocery store a couple of blocks from the office to get some food to cook while we were there.  It was late afternoon and although we were on-guard, we felt safe enough walking there from the office as this strip of road was heavy populated and it was still light outside.  This was the same grocery store I blogged about a couple of  months ago that was overwhelming to me when I was in a normal state of mind, so I was a bit over stimulated on this trip and found it difficult to make decisions.  We wanted comfort food, but didn’t want to go through the process of having to decide what to buy and then cook it for ourselves.  This is definitely where a “mom” would have come in handy.  Anyway, that’s the position we found ourselves in, so I was standing at the cheese counter (naturally--all comfort food contains cheese) and the lights suddenly went out.  My knees gave out, I gasped for breath, broke out in a sweat, and collapsed into the side of the cheese case. This sudden change in my environment was so startling, yet power outages are daily occurrences in Senegal. The generator popped on within seconds and I quickly recovered.  Yesterday, something similar happened.  I was able to catch a ride halfway back to my site with the Peace Corps security officer and a team of people who were heading to a meeting in Thiès.  They planned to help me at the Garage and put me in a Sept-Place back to Diourbel.  Along the way, we stopped at another volunteer’s village for a quick visit.  I asked to use her bathroom and while squatting over her toilet, a squirrel jumped from a tree onto the tin roof, clamoring above my head.  The same physical reaction occurred, yet I was precariously hovering over a Turkish toilet.  I guess this was a prime location to have the shit scared out of me, but apparently (and thankfully) that turns out to be just a figure of speech!  I was able to pull myself together.  Even today, as I’ve been typing this story, a group of young kids came into our compound looking for my host-Dad.  I told them he’d just left for a few hours and they said they’d come back later.  I shut the door of the compound when they left, so I could continue writing undisturbed, however, a few minutes later I heard a knock at the door.  My room is quite a distance from the door, so it took my a minute or so to get there and the knocking continued as I approached the door.  When I opened it, the young girl on the other side was not standing where I had expected her to be, but was in the process of climbing up the door to peer over the top.  This caught me so off guard that I jumped back and lost my breath again, hyperventilating and scaring this poor little girl who was just coming back to find out what time my host-Dad would be returning.  Yikes!  I guess I’m going to have to live with this side effect for a little while, but hopefully, it will pass sooner than later.

It may sound silly, but I’m glad I walked away from this experience without having my purse taken.  Somehow, it feels empowering not to have let him have it.  I know I’m lucky that he didn’t whip out a knife or seriously hurt me, but if he’d gotten away with my things I would have felt so much more violated.  There are a lot of strong women in my life and each of them, upon hearing this story, has commended me on not letting go of my purse.  It may not be text-book advice to put up a fight for things that are surely replaceable, but it definitely made me feel less helpless.

Writing about these experiences for my friends and family to read is not the same telling you in person and then sharing a hug, a glass of wine, or a much-needed bowl of comfort food, but it has helped me process what's happened and hopefully will help me move on.

As I know from past experiences, "time will heal all wounds."