Girl's Day

On Friday, March 8, I made a special trip to my school to celebrate International Women's Day with the girls at the Lycee. I usually don't teach on Fridays, so first I made a stop at the gas station for cookies and then the roadside juice baggie sellers for jinjam and bissap. There are 20 girls in my school of approximately 150 students. My plan was to congratulate them on making it to high school, pass out snacks, pass out cadeaux, and then make a sign celebrating their identities as female Guinean high school students.

For the seniors, I used pens that my parents brought with them. They have pretty swirly designs on the outside, and the seven of them were really excited to get them. I still see them using them every day in school! And all the boys are sooo jealous. For the rest of the girls, I just gave them regular pens, which isn't that great of a present in my way of thinking, but they seemed happy and it was a school-related gift, after all. Plus, even though 500 francs is just monopoly money to me, it's not negligeable to them.

Once everyone had their presents and were happily eating the sugar-blasted snacks I brought, I told them we were going to make a sign that said "Nous travaillons pour nos futurs. Nous sommes:" (We are working for our futures. We are:) and then list the characteristics that they believe best describe them. This is where the whole thing could have flopped. I could just imagine them looking at me with confusion or boredom. But instead, when I gave them a few examples of what I was looking for, they took off! In no time at all, we had made a draft on the board of what we wanted to write.

It was especially fun to write the feminine plural form of all of the adjectives. In French, if there's so much as one male involved in a group, all of the conjugations in plural remain male. So for their entire lives at school, when students are being described, the male version is always used. It made me really happy to use those girly words! French is a sexist language, I swear.

I asked the girls who wanted to write on the big sheet of paper I brought, but they all told me I should write. I was OK with that because, well, my students can sometimes take forever trying to make everything just right. They picked the colors of sharpies I used though, and directed me in the placement of the words.

At this point the boys came back from break and made us change classrooms because of their whining. So we did, and I had the girls sign the paper. Then we took pictures!

Seeing the finish line

I currently have five and a half months left of my Peace Corps service. Crazy! Time flies, as my students would say. In some ways, having such little time left has made me incredibly grateful for the moments I've had, like the soccer game I got to play in the other day, the big-ups from the cute kids across the street, and hanging out with my family.

On the other hand, it makes me antsy to get home and start dreaming about new directions! It doesn't help that I'm in pain pretty consistently every day from my arm/wrist problems. I can't WAIT to finish teaching! But more so I can't wait to come home and see all the people I've been missing for two years, who are spread out across a huge country! I can't wait to start applying for real jobs that could lead to a career. To see my nieces for more than a few days. To catch up on TV and movies and technology. Sometimes it's hard not to daydream too much, especially when my kids are mouthing off or don't seem to care about their futures.


In other news, Conakry has been kind of a mess recently. There was a planned march last Wednesday, with a planned "ville mort" (closed up city) on Thursday. Both days spiralled into violence with rocks being thrown, shots being fired, teargas, etc. Even more unfortunately, the violence became ethnically motivated (to my understanding) and continued on Friday and Saturday. I can't figure out whether or not to be concerned. On one hand, protests and violence are not abnormal. On the other hand, it seems like we might be approaching a boiling point. We'll just have to wait and see and stay safe, which is why I'm leaving early today to go back to site. Whew. I was here receiving a malaria prevention training. Just wait til April! You'll be hearing from me about malaria ALL the time.

Senegal vs Guinea

As many of you may know by my overuse of facebook in the past two weeks, I was in Senegal getting my arm checked out. I've been having wrist pain on and off since training, but only in the last three months has it been my right wrist, and now my right elbow and shoulder. The orthopedist and neurologist I saw feel that they ruled out all the "bad" reasons for my wrist pain, and that I gave myself tennis elbow when I was bracing my wrist while writing on the chalkboard. So now I need to become ambidextrous, do some PT exercises, and wear a forearm band. Luckily, I am already partially ambidextrous due to a lifelong desire to become so, as well as 3 months of college spent practicing writing with my left hand. Some people doodle in class, I wrote the alphabet. Anyway, we'll see how things go when I get back to site. There is the option, should I push for it, of getting a steroid shot, but that's not a long-term solution, and Peace Corps isn't a huge fan of it. At this point, though, I only have 3 months of school left, so I would be OK with a short-term solution. It looks like I'll just have to deal with the wrist pain and wait to get it further evaluated when I come back to the US. I don't feel like this is bad enough where I should end my service over it, but I do have to consider the risk of giving myself a chronic condition. All in all, not an ideal outcome to two weeks, but not all bad either.

Dakar was ridiculous. It's clearly an African capital, because there are the bustling markets and the hustlers of tourist-priced goods and the incredibly cheap local food....but there is a definite Western feel as well. I ate ice cream and cheese daily, I went to the mall, I went to hospitals that looked like hospitals, I went to restaurants with menus that serve everything on the menu. In short, I was totally spoiled and lazy and ate everything I wanted to. It was so much overindulgence, actually, that I am looking forward to returning to my scrambled eggs and bean sandwiches and eggplant sauce. Also looking forwards to running. I only brought flip-flops with me! Landing in the Conakry airport last night, I found that I was really glad to be back in Guinea. As the PC car drove me to the bureau, the lights piercing the dusty air and the candle-lit boutiques and the cars going the wrong way on the trash-littered street, I couldn't help but grin. Hey, it's a shit-hole in Conakry. But it's my shit-hole.

Going from Dakar to Conakry feels like going from a Mondrian painting to a Jackson Pollack. I'm not sure what artist Tanene would be characterised by, but I can't wait to get back. Today I'm going to do some computer-based tasks and get myself used to the heat again, and tomorrow a.m. I'll head back for my last 6 months of service! Time flies when you're having fun! (or always out of site...)

When I'm ravenously hungry...

After class one day this week, I headed "downtown" to grab some food because I was very hungry, as it was nearly 3 pm and id eaten some peanuts at 10 am. (pardon the terrible typing, i got a new brace for my right wrist and am thus typing left-handed, which does not lend itself to correct capitalization or punctuation.)

When I say downtown, i mean the area of town called the "Carrefour". It means intersection, and it's a trianguar section formed by the fork of two paved roads. Nearly every volunteer has a carrefour, but mine is, I modestly think, the best. I have a gas station (aka walmart) with consistently cold drinks and a selection of overly preserved snacks and cookies. (think pringles and twinkies...but lower quality twinkies). There are also women selling ice, bananas, and fried cakes. There is also transportation to at least 3 major towns every single day. That's not to be taken for granted. Many of my friends have to wait for market day to get to even one town! And yet im still considered au village.

Anyway, there are also a multitude of women selling rice and a variety of sauces. The sauces are the best earlier in the day, so on this particular afternoon, I had to settle for cold sauce and slightly dried out rice. It was, however, my favorite sauce, so that made up for it. I bought the smallest plate for 3000 francs. It was a huge bowl of rice. I mean imagine a Chipotle bowl if its major axis was its diameter. (coughnerdcough) I also bought 2 sacs of filtered water, one of which i drank right away in the complete ecstacy known only to a chalk-coated teacher who just spent the last 6 hours talking and then walked ten minutes in the 90 degree arid sun, then found gloriously cold water. I ate maybe half of my rice bowl before I started to worry about popping the seams on my dress. So I left it to be finished by some passing child (oh thats not what you do with leftovers?) and started waddling home. But then I got distracted by freshly fried cakes and plaintains, so I bought one of each of those for dessert. And then I realized I was all out of cash.

My entire meal (too much rice and sauce for 3000 francs, 2  sachets of water for 1000, and 2 desserts for 1000 francs) had included a main dish (carbs, fats, proteins, and veggies), two drinks (albeit water), and 2 desserts (both delicious, btw). The American cost: 71 cents.

I wiped grease from the plaintain off my face and contentedly waddled home.

And they say life is hard here.

Parents in Guinea

What will I remember from my parent's visit to Guinea? The time we got ripped off on the islands for new years eve? The impossibility of finding a taxi out of Conakry? No.

Because when your real family (minus my sister) meets your adoptive family, all the stupid little stressful things go away. I'll remember making my favorite sauce with Bijou, and how she kept hugging and kissing my parents and telling them how happy she was. And how my parents played with her daughter, Hawa, as though she was a third grandchild. 

I'll remember my mom's surprise and happiness when she saw Ela, a child in my compound, dragging a box around by a plastic bag string and calling it his car.

I'll remember my students singing the national anthem to my parents, and singing the American anthem for them. Not to mention all the questions they were brave enough to ask my parents that they've never asked me. And the questions my parents had for my students.

I'll remember head-lamp reading with my parents in my enormous bed under the mosquito net, singing along to "Call me Maybe". And how disconcerted they were by not having light at night, something I'm completely used to.

I'll remember dinner out with all the volunteers and hearing my dad give the French line. The French line? If you've heard it, you'd know what I mean. Both hilarious and embarrassing, in that special way that only a parent can manage. 

I'll remember hugs and laughs and the happiness that comes with knowing that your loved ones can better understand what you're going through. 

Thanks, Mom and Dad. It was wonderful to have you here! I love you!

The lessons you learn

Coming into Peace Corps, I thought a lot about the lessons I would teach. Velocity! Optics! Wash your hands! Always use condoms! Don't cheat!

When I came to Guinea, I realized, as I knew I would, that teaching was just the background noise to my own personal learning experience. It's just that the lessons I have learned are not the lessons I expected to learn. I've learned:

• That life is precious. Oh, so precious.
• That in America, we build a wall between ourselves and death. Or we think we do, and that's just a facade. But living and knowing that death is always there, always intrinsically bound to life, is not easy.
• That I fight back.
• That this too shall pass. For better or worse, life will change.
• That my trash is a Guinean child's toy.
• Food is nourishment. It should not be wasted.
• That people can be there for you, even when you go weeks without communicating.
• That being called out for being different is hard to stomach day after day after day.
• That laughter can unite us all.
• Especially when you're laughing at yourself.
• That Guinean hospitality means opening yourself up to give too much. And that emotionally, I do that. But when it comes to chocolate? Oh hell, no.
• Just keep chipping away at things and they will eventually come to pass.
• That I am whole unto myself. Or I can be, sometime, when I self-actualize.
• That it's OK to just be on the path, and not have reached the destination yet.
• That nothing can be taken for granted--my health, running water, basic math skills.

Everyday brings lessons, but I have to say, I didn't anticipate having to learn from being attacked by a crazy person, an extended med hold in the US for stomach troubles, or burying an adorable kitten. Peace Corps kinda takes all the ups and downs of a regular life and shoves them all together into two years so every day, much less every year is a rollercoaster of challenges and overcoming those challenges. Boy, I am tired out today. If you didn't hear, the kitten I was taking care of died this morning on my way to Conakry. She was sick, but I am very sad.

Double Rainbow--double hope?

A New School Year

I know it's been forever and a day since I posted. I've been busy and occasionally sick and just not able to think about blogposts!

But I figure most of you are curious about what I'm up to at site, now that the school year started in October. We actually got off to a pretty fast start. Kids started showing up on the 8th, when it was supposed to start the 4th. And I gave my first real class the 15th and we've been rolling since then! All of the consistent teachers from last year are back, although the other English teacher has been mostly MIA as well as my counterpart (the economics teacher) until November. So I've had a lot of my students from last year and the new 11e kids asking for English classes, and I've had to refuse them.

I am teaching the two "senior" classes, also known as Terminale. I have a social sciences class and an experimental science class. I teach SS English, which is a subject they have to pass on the BAC, their national exam, at the end of the year. I teach SE (sciences experimentales) Physics and English. They have to pass the BAC in Physics, but not in English, so we just have fun in English class.

The two classes couldn't be more different. SE has sixteen kids signed up, and 14 of them show up on a regular basis. When I had review class in the evening on the first week of school, ten of them showed up. Can you imagine American kids doing that? They are curious and hardworking. They like learning English, even though they have so much work to do for their BAC preparation. And they have, well, WE have a LOT of work to do. These kids are supposed to be able to understand vector accelerations based on the derivatives of position and then velocity vectors. They don't even understand what we're drawing when we draw vectors. They still mess up multiplication by zero. They mix up plus signs and multiplication signs in the pythagorean theorem. They can quote me a beautiful definition of angular velocity, but they don't understand what a radian is or how to convert to it. It makes me so angry, because these are smart, interested kids, and they want to learn soooo much, but considering the atrocious mathematical education they've had and the lack of teachers over the years, it's unsurprising that they struggle. These kids are also going to have to take a test in Biology, when there hasn't been a Bio teacher at their school since they were in 11th grade, two years ago. Sometimes I get mad and I have to explain that I'm not mad that they don't know what tangent means, I'm mad at their education system, which fails them and then demands so much of them at the end of their schooling. Last year's physics BAC was mostly a question about interferences fringes created by the young's slit experience. If any of you know what that is and the formulas involved, you took physics in university. And they are just high schoolers! In a developing world country!

*deep breath*

The other class has over 50 registered students, and about 40 of them show up physically, and about 10 of them show up mentally. Passing the SS test is supposedly much easier, since it's essays and some history memorization, but no math or science. So this is where the people who aren't really sure why they are in high school go. Which is unfortunate for the people who really want to go into a social science field like journalism or business or politics. They get pulled down by all these slackers. The students don't listen to me, they don't seem to care about English, and they simply don't respect me. It's frustrating for all sorts of reasons that are different than my SE class. Nonetheless, I feel really bad for the motivated kids in my class, and I'm going to see what I can do to make sure that those kids pass their BAC.

I'm also officially teaching 11e SE in English, although I picked it up last week and then fell unfortunately ill. I'm now better and heading back to site! Apologies on the lack of picture in this post!