The politics of education

“You have to organize,” the director of the school is saying. “There are more teachers like you than teachers that aren’t like you. You have to want change.”

I came to the school for my weekly English department meeting. I walked into what appeared to be a semi-rally of all the teachers of their power to change the governmental policies concerning their profession.

I had heard rumblings of problems with salaries since I returned from my training.

There are different levels of teachers in the Beninese school system.

Permanent teachers, meaning a teacher works at one and only one school, are few and far between in public schools in villages.

Since many villages close to each other have their own small schools, many of which don’t offer the more advanced classes, most teachers are vacateurs, meaning they teach classes of the same subject at more than one school. This allows them to book more classes than are available at the small schools, which means, consequently, that their paycheck is bigger.

For example, my school only has four classes of students (it only offers two of the seven grades you have to complete before taking your baccalaureate exam). Most of my colleagues also work at the larger school near me (which offers all seven grades and has a total of 37 classes) or at the other small schools at villages in the area in order to supplement their income. 

It seems that when vacateurs went most recently to receive their paychecks at our commune capital, there were issues over the number of hours taught and the number of schools where one is eligible to teach. As a result, some of my colleagues did not receive their salary for work they had already done this semester.

It’s too early to use the term “strike” but it is not unheard of here. In the last school year, the teachers were on strike for two months until the government threatened a pay cut unless they returned for the rest of school year. (If there is a strike, I am supposed to continue to teach as long as the school year stays in session.)

That is not to say that the Beninese teachers are not without their faults. They are notorious for starting classes late (sometimes due to traveling in between schools), not showing up at all, bailing on department meetings (which count as part of their paid salary), not completing the curriculum for the school year and leaving class early.

I am not informed enough to pick a side yet. But I can tell you that if the teachers are brought again to strike, the winners in the fight will not be the students. As a result of last year’s strike, only half of the required curriculum was covered in the English classes. I have students in their second year of English that still don’t know the names for the colors.

And aren’t the students the reason we do our jobs anyway?

It's a "it takes a village" kind of place

“Auntie?” I hear calling from my front door as I’m making dinner in my kitchen. I peek my head out and see two kids of my neighbor and another neighbor at the door. I greet them then go back to making hummus.

A few moments later I hear the kids and the neighbor in her kitchen in the back of her house. A few moments later the kids are running around the courtyard in front of all our houses.

I used to think that kids just showed up at my door because I was that different. Also, I have a pack of 50 markers and a seemingly endless supply of copy paper on which to color. But it’s also that when you live by someone with kids, it’s partly your responsibility to help raise them. It took me the better part of a month to figure out which kids went where in the houses near mine because they were always together and always coming out of a house that was different than the one I had seen them go into last time.

I spent the better part of my childhood wandering my suburban neighborhood with the kids who lived down the street, but it’s different here. Because there aren’t a lot of DVDs or board games or Playmobil here, when kids come over to your house, they basically just follow you around. It’s up to you to give them something that will entertain them or else all your possessions will soon not be in the places where you left them.

I am not a mom. And I don’t intend to be one for a while. But I would say these kids have taught me some things about how to raise kids. At least how to hide the things that you don’t want broken on the top shelf.

When the CA tells you to eat all your pounded yams, you eat all your pounded yams.

There are certain people here who it is important to have on your side. One is the king of your commune, if you have one. One is the chef of the village, a traditional position passed through lineage. The other is the Chef d’arrondisement (CA), an elected position sort of like the mayor of a large city.

The way to get these people on your side is to visit them, talk with them for a few minutes and then sit in silence, a major part of the culture here.

Today, I went to visit the CA. After what I thought was an appropriate amount of time, I told him I was going to leave.

“Why?” was his response. “What will you do?”

I thought to my plans for the rest of the morning. They included reading Esquire, grading exams and making lunch. Nothing that was more important than whatever the CA wanted to show me. (Although my students may think differently. They really want their tests back.)

So, I hopped on the back of his moto and went wherever this morning was going to take me.

It doesn't feel like December when it's 95 degrees.

My Thanksgiving two Saturdays ago ended the way all my previous 21 Thanksgivings have ended: sprawled on the ground, vowing to never eat again, but sitting up as soon as someone mentioned dessert.

I spent my Thanksgiving in Save with nine other volunteers. With two gas burners, a charcoal grill, the help of two host country national experts in slaughtering ducks, and a lot of sweat, we managed to pull off a relatively decent feast. Observing American tradition, we started the next day by blasting Christmas songs.

And so began my first holiday season of my service, and my first holiday season that I will not be at the house in which I grew up. It will be the first year that I don’t see the Plaza Lights. It will be the first season that I don’t see snow. It will be the first December that I don’t spend two days baking with my sister. It will be the first Christmas that I don’t sit with my back against our brick fireplace opening presents in age-order with my family.

It will be the first holiday season that I decorate my house with paper snowflakes that my students made. It will be the first year that I will likely eat my Christmas dinner with my hands. It will be the first December that I visit the beach. It will be the first Christmas that I will receive things such as peanut butter, African ignames and oranges as gifts.

I used to wonder, on those holidays where my family stayed at our house instead of traveling to see relatives, when you stop going to holidays with the family in which you grew up and started having holidays with the family that you created. When do you leave some of the traditions you’ve practiced your whole life and start making your own?

Whether I like it or not, it’s happening now. And while I don’t want to think about it (and my parents won’t like to hear this either) these next two years will probably not be the last time that I wake up Christmas morning under my Christmas blanket in the room in which I have, until now, woken up every Christmas. While some things may be coming to an end, this is the beginning of others.

I don’t know how hard this next month will be, but I’m pretty sure I won’t forget it. 

Uphill both ways

I am sitting in a bush taxi on my way south looking out the front windshield, but not really seeing what is passing me by on the paved road.

I am trying to distract myself from sweating and daydreaming about the upcoming week of training when I realize that for the past 10 minutes, we have been passing a steady stream of students in their khaki school uniforms.

There are normally people walking on parts of the road where you wonder where they could be coming from and where they could be going. When I see these people I tend to think of the trip that I’m seeing as a rarity, although it probably occurs a lot of more than I would want to know. I know, though, with students that they are all making this walk at least four times today. And I know we won’t pass the secondary school for another 7 km.

Right, now, in the hottest part of the day, their journey is making my hour ride in a taxi, while sitting two people in what most Americans would consider a spot for one, not as bad as I first thought.

My first screaming match

“That’s not true,” I yell back. “In class, I change my English. I don’t teach American English. I teach British English.”

“See!” the other English teachers whose point I just validated exclaim. Our English department meeting dissolves into elevated voices as we continue to argue over the importance of phonetics and pronunciation in the classroom.

It is not uncommon for communication to dissolve into raised voices. The Beninese come from the group of people who escalate the decibel level of their speech as they become excited or impassioned or convinced that the other person will understand them better if the comment is louder. 

For someone who is relatively timid, especially around people I don’t know very well, I tend to just sit back and watch it happen.

This time, though, I had a point to make. (And I had drank coffee beforehand.) So, I yelled my way into the conversation. 

Once I started yelling, I could not stop. It was energizing and exciting to speak in a tone I usually reserve for when someone cuts me off on my bicycle. And I came out from the meeting unscathed. No one’s feelings were hurt. No one made anyone angry. People were probably significantly thirstier, but that was about it. 

I have a feeling this will be my first of many times I will be screaming in public.

Today was one of those days where I felt like an adult.

I make a lot of lists. It’s how I get things done, and when I spend a significant amount of time working on things on those lists, especially things I don’t want to do, I gain a certain feeling of accomplishment.

That sense of accomplishment is what I feel like adulthood feels like.

I have a week of training next week, which has lit my ass on several things that I’ve been putting off doing. So today I proctored three exams, got forms signed that will give one of my girls at school a scholarship for the year, wrote a paper (Something I already thought I would never have to do again. I thought that was why I walked across a stage in a gown and was handed an empty certificate cover.) and made my colleague laugh at a joke that I made in French.

I rewarded myself by making macaroni and cheese and watching Mean Girls.

I needed a break from adulthood.

Everything here is worth it when I make a kid laugh

We were five Americans playing baseball on an abandoned soccer field across the road from a church holding mass in a village about 5 km from the Benin-Togo border. It was impossible that we would remain undiscovered very long. After the third pitch, I looked toward the road. They had found us. They were wandering sneakily outside the church and then running as fast as possible across the street.

The kids were coming.

There are days when I wonder why I’m still here. There are times when all I want to do is lock my door and watch the West Wing the entire day. There are times when I want to start drinking at noon because there was a fistfight in my English class that day.

It all disappears the moment I make one of my students laugh, when I push my neighbor around the courtyard on my bike or when my neighbor’s daughter giggles as I dance with her around my house. The kids might be my best friends in my village, but I’m ok with that.

One of my friends said it best: “There is no feeling like the feeling when a kid runs up to hug you.”

Tonight I learned drinking cold water is bad for you (false) and sometimes you make sacrifices (true)

You know those times when you do something just because your friend asked you to? When you don’t really want to go to the grocery store or sit through a documentary or attend a 2 and ½ hour workshop in French on what foods and plants are healthy to eat but you do because your friend wants you to?

My colleague at work invited me to the latter a couple days ago. I forgot about it until he stopped by my class yesterday to announce the event to my students. Today, my students reminded me about it again, and, since the person who asked me is important to me and I still have another 22 months in the same village, I lured my postmate with a promise of peanut butter cookies to come with me so I would have another American with which to talk.

You could argue there is a fine line between being true to yourself and being a good friend. I didn’t really want to go to the presentation, but to be fair, usually, what I really want to do here involves air conditioning, ice cream and Netflix. So, almost not possible.

Right now, my job here really, even more than teaching middle school students English, is to become part of a community. To build relationships with people who have lived their lives very differently than mine, and to learn from that exchange.

So, for now, if that means sitting in a hot church until 10:40 at night listening to a lecture that is sometimes both bizarre and false, that is what I’ll be doing.

How I became a big sister

I have a neighbor. He’s one of those kids who seems to show up at my house whenever I want some time to myself. ie right after I get home from teaching and the only two things that are on my mind are making lunch and watching the next episode of the West Wing.

He’s one of those kids that makes it his mission to get into everything. I once chased him around our compound on a mission to get back the purple Sharpie with which he had started doodling on every surface that he could find. I’m still finding purple swiggles in new places. 

He also never wants to leave. When I tell him “bye” in Ife and try to gently guide him out of my house, he crosses his arms, shakes his head and says, “NO!" 

But somehow, he’s been growing on me for the past week. He runs to me when he sees me walking down the street, yelling "Auntie!” as I approach. He loves my plastic sunglasses. They’re a pair of those ridiculous plastic ones with the neon-colored sides that recently have made a comeback as promotional swag at any event. They are far too big for his face, and he unfailingly wears them upside down. 

I never had the chance to be a big sister. I’m by far the youngest in my family and spent my childhood being tortured (but also looked after) instead of being the torturer. Now that I have become the big sister in two other families, I have gotten to teach my younger brother how to ride a bike, use a younger sibling as an excuse not to pay attention in church and have someone think you’re the coolest person they know simply because you are their big sister.

Plus, if I get sick of it, I can always go back to pretending locking my door, closing my curtains and pretending like I’m not home.

P.S. Special mention to my older siblings. You cannot be replaced. I may be playing grown-up now but you will still always be the only people who get to roll me up in a Jane Fonda exercise mat.

I made a girl cry yesterday.

My classes are taking quizzes this week, and in my first, after several warnings, one student continued to occasionally say things to her neighbor. So, I took her quiz away from her.

“Madame! Madame!” several students said to me a few minutes later. “She’s started crying.”

I looked over at the student whose quiz I had just marked as a zero. Her head was on her desk, and her shoulders were shaking, as though she was breathing deeply, or crying.

I’m still trying to find my footing as a teacher. And no amount of training can prepare you for goats wandering by your classroom; boys who ask you to go to the bathroom, then look like they are going to pee their pants when you deny them; and the feeling of making a student cry.

I like to believe in the good in people, to the point where it is sometimes a fault. Like when I let those two boys leave together in what seemed like a dire situation to use the bathroom, only to have them disappear from class for 10 minutes. And I don’t want to fail my students. And I don’t yet believe that there are those students who are beyond help.

It’s a hard line to walk being a teacher my students respect, but also ending class by singing “Skidamarinky Dinky Dink.”

I offered the student a make-up quiz for after class Friday.

I’ll leave it up to after Friday to see if I regret that decision. 

What I owe to the Academy

I had a dream about my high school the other night.

I was back in my plaid skirt and embroidered white polo, (my high school was Catholic, all-girls and uniform-wearing) and I was sitting in my newspaper advisor’s room in the black leather chair that always sat in the corner between the dry erase board and the wooden bookcase. I was talking to my high school friends about high school things: where we were going that weekend, the football game at the all boy’s high school. 

In terms of a malaria medication induced dream, it was pretty tame. 

What it did do, when I woke up under my mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside, was get me thinking about what had brought me to a place where I was waking up under a mosquito net to the sound of roosters and sweeping and my cat meowing to be let inside.

I did not have the normal high school experience. I was awkward. There are many parts that I wish I could go back and do-over. I choose to believe that those two things are normal feelings for people after graduating high school.

But there are also things that happened to me in high school that made me the person that I am today: I learned how much I had been given; I became obsessed with Woodward and Bernstein; I drank my first drops from the fountain of feminism and my first cup of coffee; I was shown the power of words; I was first challenged to re-evaluate the person I was becoming; I had teachers who showed me the kind of person that I wanted to become.

I choose to believe those things changed me for the better.

I’ve always understood my high school experience was different than most. It wasn’t until college that I began to appreciate what those differences meant. I’ve thanked the Academy many times in college application essays, in final speeches at banquets and in my head. What surprises me is, almost 5 years out, for how much I still I have to thank the Academy.

There are so many places, people and experiences that brought me here, but I know that path started with a plaid uniform and an embroidered white polo.

Water, water everywhere, part 2

I stuck my head outside my door. I figured in the middle of the daily siesta would be my best chance. My best chance for no one to see me. My best chance for no one to watch as the stranger struggles to carry water from the well.

I had watched the women do it many times. And I gathered water, and carried it back on my head, once, but the pump is further from the well, and I felt like making as little of a spectacle of myself as possible that afternoon.

I crossed the two doorways to the well, grabbed the green rope and pulled up my first bucket. After three and a half, most of the second bucket ended up on me and the ground, my basin was full. I tried to lift it onto my head, but my arms, already weak from pulling up the water, couldn’t do it.

I struggled to put the basin back down into the top of the well. I shook my arms out and conceded to carry the water back American-style, which meant it took me longer and I ended up more damp than when the mamas who live in the concession when they carry their water back.

As you may have noticed, water is a big issue for me here. But it isn’t just for me. For my entire village, how and where they get water is a huge issue.

Most of my village gets its water from pumps. I don’t know anyone who has running water in his or her house. Until a couple years ago, there was only one pump to serve the entire village of 3,200 people. There are now four, and housing groups, like mine, have a well inside walls. It isn’t as clean as pump water, but for dishes and laundry, it does the trick.

Most of the time, it’s just inconvenient to get water. It’s hot; water is heavy and every basin you think will be the last just manages to come up short.

When it turns from inconvenient to a problem is during the hot season; the season that we’re coming up on next.

I’ve heard stories of what it was like before the other pumps were built. Women would walk for kilometers to find a pump that wasn’t empty. The price at the pumps would shoot up from 25 Francs (what it is now) to 250. People would wait at the pump for hours for their turn to get water.

I never realized how much of a commodity water was until I moved here. That morning, when I had run out of water, I dreaded the sweat-drenched afternoon of slowly refilling the storage container in the my kitchen.

But there is no other option. Either carry water back or don’t wash my dishes. Either get the upper-body workout of the week or don’t take a shower. Either have my neighbors look at me questioningly or don’t have clean clothes.

I only made it three trips back and forth before my neighbor took the basin out of my hands and finished the job for me.

The afternoon I napped under a tree

I wandered over to my host family’s house at about 10:45. As part of my first three months at post, I have to write a report about my community, and I had some questions to ask my papa.

The electricity had been out since about 9 that morning, but I wasn’t concerned. After the last time, I started making an effort to always have my computer battery charged just in case it went out when I needed to do work, or wanted to watch episode of the West Wing while I ate lunch. 

He answered my questions as we sat out under the tree in his front yard, a place that consistently seems to be the coolest place in the village. (I mean in terms of temperature, although it could be argued under the tree was also where anyone who was anyone in the village spent time.)

When we were finished, I packed up my stuff. I told him I was going to go take a nap at my house.

“It will be hot in the house,” he said. “Not cool, like it is here, under the tree.”

That’s ok I told him. I’ll use my fan.

“Do you have electricity?” was his response. I shrugged my shoulders.

We checked. The village was still powerless.

“Guess I better stay under this tree then,” I said.

And so me, the kids, the goats and my papa passed the afternoon napping in white plastic chairs, our legs stretched out on the wooden bench in front of us, under the shade of the tree in his front yard. 

The papaya

Job appeared at my door in the afternoon last Thursday exactly as he had promised that morning at school. In his hand was a large plastic bag, a ubiquitous item in Beninese culture.

“I brought you that papaya.” He handed me the plastic bag. I was expecting several papayas, having lived most of my previous life in Missouri, a place not really known for its large quantity of papayas. Grabbing the item inside by the stem, it was revealed that Job had not brought me several, but one papaya. One papaya the size of a medium pumpkin.

In front of my middle school are fields of beans and manioc, a couple mango trees and some papaya trees. After piecing together several conversations at the school, one of which involved him protesting the sacrifice of his beans for a soccer field, I learned that Job is responsible for many of these plants. 

He and I have joked about me working in the fields with him and me making dinner with the produce he would give me after the harvest. One conversation focused specifically on mangoes and papayas. This was about a week before he showed up at my house with a fruit bigger than my head.

I took the papaya; my arms strained under its weight. He left me with instructions to wait a few days before cutting it open. Then to refrigerate what I couldn’t eat right away.

He said this last part with a completely straight face.

It’s hot here. And there are few solaces. I have spent hours trying to map the location of all the fridges in my village. And added the names of those people to the list of those whom I need to make a particularly good effort to talk to on the street.

“Job,” I said, “I don’t have a refrigerator." 

"Oh, I do,” he responded. “Just bring it over after you open it, and I’ll keep it for you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, mentally adding another point to the map in my head as he left.

Two years is both a long time and no time at all

Before I came here, I never imagined myself living here. I figured I would be able to pass the 27 months some way, but in many ways, I only had to get through the 27 months before I would return to the life that I left behind in the United States.

Maybe it’s because it’s the first place that I’ve moved in my pseudo-adult life, but part of this has always felt impermanent. I know that it is, but the knowledge of my impending plane ticket to the US caused me to fail to see how long two years is. I felt like I would just float in here and then float out after 27 months.

Which is why it’s weird that I’m starting to find my life here. I have students who greet me by name outside of school. I have neighbors who look for me running down the street; they don’t understand why I run for fun, but they know that I will be passing their house every other day. At the market, I have a bread lady, a tomato lady and a plastic bucket lady. And most of all, I’m starting to make friends.

When I was in Porto Novo during training, I once said to someone that I wasn’t sure how to build relationships with people in French. She responded that she imagined it was the same as in English.

What I was thinking about was that I would be with people from a different language and culture, I didn’t know how I would ever be able to communicate my real self to the people around me. I looked at other volunteers around me and marveled when they talked about the friends they had in village. I didn’t understand how they did it.

Things started to shift for me when I stopped thinking about this experience as a two-year trip and more as the next two years of my life. The more I am here, the more I comprehend just exactly it means to be doing this for the next two years. And the more I am able to comprehend how I will be doing this. 

Last Saturday marked the longest that I have ever not lived in Missouri. I just realized that benchmark is something that I will probably continue to pass again and again. 

How my English class was thwarted by goats

“Madame. Please, Madame,” says Florent, one of my students, interrupting my lesson on the months of the year.

“Madame. The goats.” He gestures to the fields beyond the school building where the teachers are growing mangoes, papayas, manioc and beans, the latter a particular favorite of the gangs of goats that wander around the village.

The animals here are not kept in pens, but rather allowed to walk freely around from yard to yard, eating what they can find. Along with children, I have to watch for goats, chickens and pigs wandering into my house without knocking first. I once chased a chicken around my front room for 5 minutes while trying to direct it back out my front door.

Several students follow Florent’s lead. “Me too Madame! The goats!”

Now the attention of almost all is directed toward the animals in the field. I nod my permission, and the three boys, grabbing rocks from outside the classroom, run toward the herd, jumping over the taller plants.

The rest of the class cheers as the goats scamper back toward the primary school on the other side of the trees. My serious teacher façade is broken when one of boys grabs a stick and wildly chases after a particularly stubborn mutton.

The boys return to the class a few moments later, sweating and out of breath, but the beans, at least for now, have been saved.

“Can we continue now?” I ask, trying not to smile.