An excerpt from my student’s English Valentine’s Day cards

Being a few hours away from break didn’t exactly serve as a catalyst for me to come up with a different idea for my English club this week other than making valentines in English, despite being a week after the holiday.

But, I was impressed with my 8^th grade students’ abilities to string together English phrases for their messages of love after giving them certain vocabulary.

From Isaak:

“Oo, my valentine, I love you everyday. When I see you, I am over the moon always because you are beautiful and I love you. I love you and I will love for always.”

Maybe next time

Today, in my 8th grade class, I decided to try something different. It was the last class before a weeklong break, and I knew we were at least three weeks in front of the other class, so I loaded up all the children’s English books my family had sent me over the past 20 months and brought my English library to school. 

I divided the class into groups and each group had 30 minutes to read their book together and then write a summary. I walked around answering mainly vocabulary questions, but a few general questions, like why is this dog sleeping in a bad? (Go Dog Go), Who is this furry, blue creature? (Grover) and Why does this pigeon driving a bus? (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus)

On one of my last laps, I passed Suzane, one of my smartest students. She stopped me. 

“Madam, this book,” she said shaking her head. “In this book, it’s only animals who talk. And everyone knows animals can’t talk.”

I was just glad she understood the English of the Little Red Hen. The imagination? Maybe next week.

Gratitude

I was packing up my bag in my 7^th grade class this evening when one of my students, Agathe, approached me.

Recently, my students had learned the present perfect tense, one of those tenses in English that I use all the time, although up until a couple years ago couldn’t tell you why I used it or what it was called. To form the tense, you have to use the past participle, something that is especially hard in a language like English where most past participles seem to be irregular as opposed to following the rule. To try to help, I had typed a list of the most common irregular past participles, their verb base and the verb in French and given each student a copy of the two-paged document (about 2000 CFA, $4 to photocopy) today in class.

When Agathe walked to me, I noticed she was holding these two pieces of paper. She gestured to them and then, slightly curtsying (as students are expected to do when talking to professors here) she said, “Thank you,” before running off to meet her friends outside the classroom.

Above average

This morning, I sat in our director’s office with my colleagues in an awkward circle interrupted by the various chairs, desks and piles of cashew nuts (It’s cashew season. There are a lot of trees at our school.). We were there to discuss the students’ conduct grade, a number out of 20 influenced by how the students have behaved and worked at school during the last semester.

I was prepared for a fight.

There aren’t a lot of steady jobs here, which, unfortunately, means that sometimes people get this steady job purely for the sake of having a steady job. Unlike I would say most of my teachers when I was in school, Beninese teachers don’t always to want to do what would be most helpful or best for their students. Despite them being the reason they have a job, students seem to be sometimes the barrier to a paycheck as opposed to the reason a teacher is receiving one.

This is going to one of those posts where my colleagues challenge the cynicism that sometimes plagues me here.

The French teacher to my right opened the discussion with his proposition for the grade each student would receive.

“I propose 18,” he said before sitting back in his chair.

If you can joke about it

I was sitting with my work partner when another one of our colleagues, Martin, came up. Kande and I had been talking about the field trip we were planning for the school, and how much each student and teacher was expected to pay to participate.

“You’ll pay for me won’t you?” Martin asked.

I paused before responding, thinking about the recent situation I had dealt with at my house: discovering that money for my community health project had disappeared. Martin and Kande were two of the five people who had helped me try to recover it initially.

“I have no money left,” I responded. “All my money has disappeared.”

He and Kande burst out laughing. I chalked it up as the next step in moving on.

New trail

It’s grade calculation time here again, which means that students are realizing that simple math does not allow for the magic that needs to happen for some of them to be able to pass their classes. The fact that usually about half a class does not have the grade needed (10/20) is rarely seen as the fault of the professor here. “The students are lazy,” is the mantra of most of the discussions that happen after it is realized that the statistics of grades this semester is no better than other semester.

I used to believe this as well. I didn’t understand why students didn’t realize that they needed to study. I didn’t understand what students did when they went home. I didn’t understand how students thought they were going to pass if they are continuing to write in French on an English exam.

The students, though, aren’t lazy. They are being raised in a culture that doesn’t place as much of a value on education as the American one to which I’m accustomed. Most of my students are of the first generation in a family to go to school. Their parents don’t speak French, they don’t know how the school system works and they don’t understand what this piece of paper with a number out of twenty means.

My students aren’t lazy. They’re trying to figure it out all by themselves. 

Taking it back

It’s not that often that I feel one hundred percent in control of my life here: I get talked into staying places longer than I intended, I get talked into going places I didn’t intend to go and I get talked into sharing things that I didn’t intend to share.

So, when someone breaks the lock on my latrine, the first thing I do the next day is head out to the hardware store, buy the part of the latch that I need to replace and, to the amazement of my neighbors, hammer the piece in myself, effectively repairing my lock in 5 minutes.

It’s the small things.

Second lap

This weekend marks the first of the two half-marathons that I will be running this year in Benin (the second is a fundraiser for our Gender and Equality programs) and the second time that I will be running this particular half-marathon.

I used to hate running in Benin. The combination of my skin tone and the doxycycline I take for malaria means that I hardly ever come back without a slight red tinge to my face and upper chest, despite how much sunscreen I coat myself with beforehand. Not to mention that Benin, in general, is a hot country. Afterward, until I take a shower, I leave a slight wet mark on any surface I touch in my house. But mainly, it’s the direction I run itself.

When I started running, I chose to run down the path that seemed the most logical to me: the red dirt road that passes directly in front of my house and winds its way into the bush. It’s actually a terrible path (it’s uphill on the way back, has little shade and gets a little washed out in parts), but once I started, I kept running it despite its major flaw of passing in front of the 2000-student high school down the street from me.

Imagine the crowds that form on the street in front of the school. Imagine teachers coming in and out of the campus on their motorcycles. Imagine 2000 high school students watching you and yelling at you as you run by. I learned quickly how to plan my runs so that I would never be near the high school while the students were changing classes.

The thing is, that recently, I’ve started not to care whether the students see me or not. Maybe it’s that my music is loud enough now that I can’t hear them. Maybe it’s that I’m running with my friend’s GPS so I know that I’m passing them at 10 kilometers per hour (about a 10-minute mile), which, for me, is not a speed at which I scoff. Maybe it’s that I’ve finally accepted that teenagers are teenagers anywhere and that (like when I was a teenager) their bark is always worse than their bite.

I’m not proud to admit that I’m intimidated by Beninese teenagers (especially the male senior year students, who are really only a couple years younger than me, if that). In some ways, this country has made me stronger and less timid than I was before I got here. In some ways, this country has made me weaker and more timid than I was before I got here. Where that will leave me in 8 months, I’m not sure.

I am sure, though, that I will be trying to outrun it.

Faking it

It was 5 minutes before I started my first class of the day when I was left in one of the most terrifying positions to be in as a teacher: two hours and no lesson plan.

Beninese people are very particular about doing things in the order in which things should be done. And at the appropriate time at which they are designated to be done. So, this morning, my director asked me to suspend calculating semester grades (what I had planned to do in class: all grades are an average of quiz and exam scores; it sounds like a waste of class time, but to do it in front of the students is the fairest way to do it.) until next Monday, because, mainly, next week is the week that has been designated as the week that grades will be calculated. 

And so, at the 15-minute break between classes, I sought out my work partner and best friend at school and person least likely to judge me for the predicament in which I had found myself. Also, he is supposed to team-teach this class with me, so half the burden was also on him.

I found that Kande had been caught in the same position I was: a class and nothing to do. “Don’t worry,” he told me as we walked together to the classroom. “We’ll find something to do.”

And so, we started class. We talked for a while, then had a student write the date and then Kande put a matching activity and told my class to recopy the activity, something that I normally don’t make my students do to save time.

I caught him in the back of the classroom.

“Do they really need to recopy the activity?”

He shook his head slightly. “No. But it will waste time.”

The first time I’ve questioned August 2014:

It’s a direct relationship between how much my friends here start telling me how much they’ve started thinking about how I’m leaving in 8 months, and how much I start thinking about the world that I’m leaving behind in 8 months. 

Sometimes you realize that all your coworkers are really still college seniors.

I was at school last night to lead my weekly English club during the two hours during the week that have been designated as time for cultural activities. Each professor at the school is supposed to be present each Friday from 5-7 p.m. to lead an extracurricular activity: football, gardening, traditional singing and dancing, journalism.

Before I started my session last night, one of my colleagues had told me that we were supposed to stop at 6 p.m. so we could all have a teacher’s meeting. I cringed (both inwardly and outwardly) at this information. I had already traveled to and from the city to visit the bank that day, which meant I had already fought with taxi drivers, spent the day in the hot sun and not taken a nap. I was ready for the weekend.

When 6 p.m. rolled around, we all dutifully let out our clubs. “Have a good weekend,” my students shouted at me as the teachers all gathered in school yard to see who would make the first move to get this meeting started.

Turns out, it was our vice principal.

He looked around at all of our tired faces, and I don’t know if he realized that we were all ready to not be working anymore, but he asked the question that would change everything about the meeting:

“To the bar?”

No access pass

One of my students, Esther, was at my house today, checking out all the cards I have stuck on my wall that people have sent me since I moved here. She flipped through them absentmindedly before asking who had written the loopy cursive on an Easter card.

It was from my grandma. And I told her that.

Her response was an exclamation at the fact that my grandmother knew how to read and write.

I’ve met Esther’s grandmother before. She’s one of my favorite people in the village, and I always stop to talk to her when I see her. What never crossed my mind during these conversations was that this was the only way she knew how to communicate.

What I’ve learned more than anything here, and what I keep learning, is what I see as the norms in my life and see as inherent and natural are not actually universal. Things that I took for granted as given are not available for everyone. Books, toys, pens, food, health, education. These are all things that I have access to on a regular basis, but not everyone finds them as equally accessible. 

Your mother doesn’t run this country anymore.

In the Central African Republic, a country currently struggling with sectarian violence and the resulting humanitarian crisis, the newly sworn-in president Catherine Samba Panza recently started she believes she was elected because the country “didn’t want any more male politicians.” 

While I can’t help but grin at this imagery (that all male politicians in the CAR are so corrupt and unable to develop their country that the voting population has thrown their hands up in the air and turned instead to the trustworthy and nurturing female politician who will gently easy the country through their current conflict and crisis) that the most powerful woman in the CAR attributes her political influence to her people wanting a leader “who could calm things, reconcile people,” stereotypes that continue to define women based on their perceived rightful and natural role as mothers and caretakers puts a slight damper on the election of a female leader of a country in an area of the world where women have to fight to be seen as more than the wife of their husband and are lucky to complete an education.

Powerful women must walk a strange dichotomy in our society. On one hand, successful women are judged as being conniving and ruthless and, to put it frankly, as bitches. On the other, when women try to curb this image, they are seen as emotional and unstable and unable to run a country or company for 3-4 days every month.

Samba Panza’s reliance on the latter surprises me. As the leader of a country that needs strength right now, she should own her abilities and power instead of becoming seen as the mother of the CAR who is responsible for focusing on the emotional support of a country, while leaving the politics, economics and development for others.

Why can’t she, and other powerful, just be praised for their effectiveness as leaders? Why can’t she just be seen as the right person to be at the head of her country right now? Why can’t the focus be on past on how she will be different from past leaders, regardless of her gender?

My point is, Samba Panza, don’t comfort your nation. Run it.

They’ve learned to not pick up the ball with their hands, amongst other things

Tonight I held the second practice for my girls’ soccer team. They passed the ball to warm up and then scrimmaged and then finished with penalty kicks.

They seemed to be getting it: there were five times as many goals scored during the match this time than last, they wanted to keep playing long past I was ready to go home and there is one girl who is starting to make her name as a goalie.

There were, however, just as many kicks out-of-bounds and rough play that dissolved into screaming matches as last time.

That this is a game and is meant to be fun seems to be the hardest thing for them to get.

Already got it covered

“But Madam,” Suzane is saying to me during tonight’s Girls Club meeting, “there are plenty of people who sell at the market or sell food who make more money than people who work at an office.”

And with that one statement Suzane shut down one of my major points of my discussion of the value of education for girls.

I had to stop for a second and regroup. I knew that education was important. I knew it was how these girls would not spend their lives how so many had spent their lives before them: mothers at a young age yielding to the demands of their husbands. But how was I supposed to convince this 16-year-old who lived comfortably on her father’s salary that what she was missing out on (not just materially) was worth not missing out on?

Suzane is smart. She’s driven. And she speaks her minds. I believe if she continues her education, she will be successful. The question is how I convince her it’s necessary when she sees people being what is generally successful everyday, without a high school degree.

Tragedy strikes

I was washing my dishes in my kitchen, as usual. And I was dancing to music through headphones as I did it, as usual. And I was little loopy since it was the middle of day and I had just woken up from a 20-minute nap, as usual.

I should have known that dancing to Beyonce while attached to a cord would be dangerous. I should have anticipated the cord getting caught on the lip of my French press. I should have reach out as I watched the glass container fall seemingly in slow motion to shatter on my concrete floor.

What’s a caffeine addict to do now?

A short list of items my director discussed at this morning’s flag ceremony:

-Students should pay their school fees

-Students should weed their portion of the schoolyard

-Students should shave their hair before Wednesday in order to meet the school’s dress code or else he will do it himself

-Students should rub lemon juice on their underarms before taking a shower so they don’t smell bad

-The upcoming exams

Always greener

The second to last day during our trip to Burkina Faso we encountered our first group of Burkina Peace Corps volunteers. Most of them were, like us, over a year into their service, and most of them, like us, seemed to be a little antsy to be back in a country where transportation is on time and stores exist where you purchase the exact thing that you were wanting to purchase.

They, though, couldn’t understand why we could want to spend our Christmas vacation in Burkina Faso. We, after having spent a week in the country, loved it and couldn’t understand why, if you lived in a country where there was Mexican food and gas stations with coffee machines inside you would ever not want to live there. They couldn’t understand why, if you were posted in a village where you had electricity on a relatively regular basis, you would ever leave.

Things are supposed to always look better when those things are unattainable. And once you have them, you tend to not appreciate them as much. For them, it was motorcycle taxis. For us, it was cities laid out on a grid system.

Throughout the trip, we kept a list of all the things that Benin did better than Burkina Faso. It was short, but I’m sure that if a Burkina volunteer traveled to Benin and did the same thing, his or her list would be much longer. I could ask when do we learn to be happy with what we have available to us instead of wanting what we can’t have? But even after 18 months living without certain things, I still dream of the day that I’ll have them again.

Called out

The Beninese culture is a loud culture. And I don’t just mean the motos that are constantly driving behind your house or the roosters that crow whenever they want or the lone man who gets a hold of a megaphone and feels the need to broadcast his thoughts to everyone in your neighborhood.

I mean that a conversation with a Beninese person can rocket from friendly chatter to screaming in a matter of seconds. I’m no longer phased when I hear my neighbor yelling because she yells almost everyday. At my girls club, it sometimes feels like I am a mediator instead of a facilitator as small disagreements can lead to a complete derailment of that afternoon’s meeting.

I hadn’t realized that I had gotten used this aspect of my life, or even that it was becoming ingrained in my personality until my trip to Burkina Faso over Christmas.

We were at the taxi station just over the border trying to find a driver who would take us to Ouagadougou. We started talking to the taxi driver like we would normally talk to a driver in Benin: we assumed he was trying to rip us off from the very beginning, so we were pissed off before we even started the negotiation.

The taxi driver stopped and looked us over.

“Did you just come from Benin?” he asked, although at 10km over the border, this was highly likely. “You people in Benin all just need to calm down. You get mad too easily.”