a turning of the tides

What an amazing week. It doesn’t get any better. And I say this despite a long-standing love/hate relationship with peace corps… I’m completely serious, this is why I came. On the eve of 16 months in country I can say that okay, I’m starting to figure some things out. It’s never been any secret that I had trouble adjusting to society here, and I might be understating the fact if I said that Wolofs weren’t the first to welcome us with open arms into their communities but of all of a sudden I am starting to feel like I halfway belong here.

Here are some of the colorful people that have made life in Louga so enjoyable recently.
Last Saturday I taught a really small computer class (meaning that one person showed up) but it was still entertaining. The guy that I taught is one of the administrators of the school and possibly the goofiest guy I have met in Senegal. He weighs no more than 80 lbs. and has a lively personality, always exclaiming in Arabic when I show him how to change text to italics and so on. What I love about this job is that when I give the teachers something very simple to copy out and format on the computer I get such colorful interpretations. Today a short letter announcing a new class included such phrases as “decentralized development” and “powerful is my teacher Fary Sarr” (Fary Sarr being my Wolof name). How could you not love this from the Wolof version of Screech?

The following day I taught again. This time I was terrified (I literally was feeling sick to my stomach with fear in the hours leading up to the class. 30+ hard-talking older Wolof women in their first ever literacy program were going to participate in a basic business skills class. Introduced by? Fary Sarr. The mix was all wrong for an ivory-tower white girl from Indiana. And then somehow it worked. Somehow the women got it (bless their little hearts) and somehow they tolerated my mediocre Wolof, and somehow they got the answers right, at least some of the time. They clapped at the end (I should have been expecting a barrage of insults and rotten fruit) and I wanted to dance. I might have given them a butt wiggle or two.

The following day, another class. This time school dropouts, girls from age 15-20 signed up for a basic sewing school. they might be more scary than the older women. I have battled with this class for more than a year, always trying to design lesson plans that they can manage with a minimum of literacy and that will actually serve them in the work they are preparing. I’ve tried mentoring sessions, games, discussions, homework. Everything. So I resigned myself to teaching costing; thinking there was no possible way it would be understood, but at least I would feel like I was actually teaching something about businesses. The topic was awfully theoretical for them, but we muddled through it (what qualifies as a direct or indirect cost) and I was honestly so proud of them. They struggled to understand our rules and definitions for each type of cost and at the end I apologized for how difficult the lesson was. A couple of the girls honestly sat straight up and said, no, it was a fun class. Wow, who would have thought? It made me realize that maybe its not that these girls don’t like to try to analyze and study, but maybe they just never had the chance to give it a try?

Wednesday, another class. Female scholarship candidates from a local middle school. Hair extensions, tight jeans and attitudes. I started out getting blank stares in response to my pleas for introductions. I had started in French since these are the best performing girls in the middle school and ought to speak very good French. So I tried again in wolof and the room erupted. The same girls who stared out at me under heavy eyelids were spouting questions. Do you sweep? Where are your Wolof clothes? Why don’t you wear earrings? Are you Muslim? Do you pray? Can you dance? Do you sweep? Can you cook ceebujen? Do you eat rice? On a normal day I would be furious at this barrage of questions. These are all the criteria that make a “good Wolof girl” and I usually just get annoyed that I am expected to fit a mold that has nothing to do with my own identity. But I guess on this particular day, I was just happy to have won them over. I was maybe still a little disappointed that their view of the world was limited (at least in my opinion), so I proposed a club where we could get together every week and get to know each other better. I saw some other volunteers do this with success and I’m hoping that I can pull it off as well. So, if all goes to plan, we will do recipe exchanges, discussions on culture, activities for painting, singing dancing and any other number of activities. If you have any ideas please let me know! We are definitely limited because we have no budget, but we are looking for fun and educational plans.

This is really a lot for one day, so I will save news on the bird park, the Catholic women’s group and other stuff for another post. Diam ak Khewoul!