Tuesday, January 20, 2009

"Yes, we can" vs. "No, you can't"

Today Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States of America. I was so fortunate to be able to come to Boghé and watch the ceremony live on a friend's satellite TV (dubbed over in French). As our new president spoke of reaching out to the world, I sat between two black African Muslims. A child of three years old fussed in the corner and was reprimanded by his parents as he kept loudly calling out the names he's heard so often now: "Wah-sheen-ton! Leen-con! BARACK OBAMA!"

It is a happy day.

Now that we have begun our second trimester of school, the size of my English classes has leveled off a bit from what I was originally assigned. Here are my current numbers:

1st year (ages 10-17) : 15F + 18M = 33 students
2nd year (ages 12-19) : 24F + 48M = 72 students
3rd year (ages 13-20) : 19F + 35M = 54 students
4th year (ages 13-22) : 7F + 25M = 32 students

You can see that in each year there are more males than females, and this only becomes more pronounced in the higher levels. I'm sure you can guess the reasons: young pregnancies/marriages (as young as 12 is not uncommon), responsibilities at home, lack of importance given to girls' education.

So I have 191 students altogether. I want very much to know all their names -- this was crucially important to me as a teacher in the States. But it's quite difficult here when I see my kids each only once a week. Also, here all students are assigned numbers, so when I take roll, I am not calling out their names. It's just "Number 1? Number 2?" I don't like it. It feels a little too Auschwitz to me. But besides that, many kids have similar names. I have two girls in 1st year with the exact same first, middle, and last name. I have 10 boys named Oumar and 13 named Mamadou. It's a constant effort.


In America we have a general notion that with enough positive reinforcement, children will gain confidence in their abilities and thus achieve great things. (Look at Obama with "Yes, we can!") It is the opposite here. Lately I have been helping my sister Goggo with her French homework. She is in the 4th year of primary school. Traditionally teachers here use a lot of rote memorization, so I sit with Goggo as she painstakingly repeats the same short paragraph out of her book, over and over and over. The other night she sighed at last and asked me, "Am I getting it or not?" "Yes, of course you are! You're doing great," I told her. "No, she's not," her older brother interjected, "she's terrible. She can't do anything." The thought is that this will make the girl want to work harder and she will eventually succeed.

I disagree. I wanted to slap him.

And now for something completely different... I leave you with a fun picture of me and Amanda a few weeks ago in Nouakchott. We found a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta, which was very exciting to us. On the tables they had little napkin holders with various names of Mexican towns. This one is "Matamoros," somewhere I've been, a border town with Brownsville, TX:


Why was this humorous to me? Because the name Matamoros in Spanish means "Kill Moors." (This here in Mauritania, literally "Land of the Moors.")

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Holiday travels

Happy New Year to everyone! I have been having a wonderful vacation -- and it's not over yet. ;) December 23rd I bade so long to my Dar El Barka family, sang Christmas carols to myself as I sat on the side of the road at 6:30am to wait for the Boghé car, and made my way into town to see all the PCVs from my region of Mauritania. Our halls were decked with paper snowflakes and care-package tinsel, and we even made everyone little stockings -- stuffed, too, of course!


Then on Christmas Eve it was off to Nouakchott, our promised land. Strange that I'd been in this country over six months and still hadn't seen the capital. Lonely Planet describes Nouakchott as "hastily constructed," "lacking charisma," "discombobulating," "shambolic," "unbelievably filthy" -- but for us it is truly, to borrow phrase, a land flowing with milk and honey. Peace Corps put us all up in hotels that blew my mind... Real beds! Hot showers! Western toilets! Bathtubs! TV! Remote-control air conditioning! Fridge! Wireless internet! And don't even get me started on all the amazing things you can eat here that aren't available most anywhere else in the country -- cheese, ice cream, pizza, Italian & Chinese food. We didn't know where to begin! Plus our country director generously hosted all 120-some of us PCVs at his home for an exquisite homemade dinner.


Although Mauritania is an Islamic republic and all its people are Muslim, ex-pats are free to practice their own religion. So a group of us found the one Catholic church in Nouakchott and attended mass on Christmas morning -- what a cool experience, about 400 people from all over Africa and Europe. And I also squeezed in some time to watch my favorite "It's a Wonderful Life" on my laptop. It was about as good as Christmas could get without being home!


After all that, my training sitemates and I headed back down to PK7 to visit our old host families for a few days. When we asked the taxi driver to let us off on the side of the road, he was sure we were mistaken, because it's definitely the middle of nowhere. But as we walked through the sand, past the power plant that does not power PK7, our families spotted the white kids lugging hiking packs and came running to hug us all. They were sooo overjoyed! We were served endless tea (of course), and my family made a special trip into Rosso the next day to buy the finest fish they could afford. I am continually humbled by the amazingly selfless Pulaar people.


The next stop on our agenda was historic Saint-Louis, Senegal, the former capital of all French West Africa and now a quaint little beach town that many call a "run-down New Orleans" (no surprise, as the French influence is still quite evident, and the town hosts an international jazz festival every May). My mom asked me if Senegal is much different than Mauritania. When you take the ferry across the Senegal River, the people still speak the same language and have the same religion and come from the same families -- the border town even has the same name -- but it's an entirely different world. Immediately. Over 90% of the people are Muslim, but they are almost all black (unlike in Mauritania, where there is racial tension between the roughly equal numbers of Arabs and blacks). Dress is much less conservative in Senegal. Alcohol is not prohibited. Infrastructure, i.e. roads and available transportation, is infinitely better. And even in the smallest corner stores, there is such a variety of *things* that you just can't buy in Mauritania. Potato chips, roasted peanuts, and yes, beer -- we were impressed again and again.


It was hard to leave, but all the first-year PCVs made our way back to Nouakchott for our Early Term Reconnect conference, where I am now. We were surprised to find out about this mess in Gaza (hard to keep up with the news when you're on the road), and even more surprised to see the reaction in Nouakchott. Mauritania is one of three Arab countries to have diplomatic relations with Israel, and many people here are not too happy about that. There were some marches this week, some tires burned and rocks thrown, but nothing you all should worry about. We watched some of the demonstrations from afar, high up inside the Peace Corps Bureau (it's in the tallest building in the country). We are safe and sound, as we were assured yesterday in person by the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires to Mauritania. Just makes life a little more interesting...