Work and Play in Burkina Faso

 Finally, captions to go with these pictures!

Voila, our computer lab. In my last post, I mentioned model school. This is where it happens, and we just finished our second week of class! Hard to believe-- time is flying here. There are four of us IT teacher trainees, and we each have our own class of beginners for 6-8 hours a week, and we share an intermediate group.

My beginning group has been great. The pace of the class has been fast. Many of them hadn't ever used a computer before, and I just gave them their first exam on OpenOffice Writer (open-source MS word). I had them enter some formatted text (so they had to use bold, italics, alignment, correct spacing, accents, etc.)-- the first part of the Wikipedia article on Bill Gates, actually. For a beginning group, I was worried that it was too difficult, but they did very well. Not perfect, mind you, but the potential is definitely there. I met with each of the students individually today to go over their score.

Speaking of grades... that's an interesting subject here. Scores are out of 20, but anything above 18 is considered truly impressive-- questions here are harder, and students aren't expected to answer every question correctly. 80% (16/20) is considered quite good. A rough translation below:

18-20: "Excellent" (A+)

16-17,9: "Tres Bien" (A/A-)

14-15,9: "Bien" (B/B+)

12-13,9: "Assez Bien" (C+/B-)

10-12,9: "Passable" (C-/C)

7-9,9: "Insuffisant" (D)

6-6,9: "Tres Insuffisant" (D-)

3-5,9: "Faible" (F)

0-2,9: "Tres Faible" (F-)

In the tradition of one of my favorite teachers, I put this list on the board at the start of class today, and presented the number of people with each score. Some of my students were genuinely concerned that there was someone in each category. Fortunately, there was only one person who didn't make at least "Passable". Of course, it was sort of a letdown that no one made "Excellent". But those are hard to come by here.

What's more exciting than the test though, is what's on the docket for next week. Instead of a second exam, I'm assigning a project that the students get to choose. Some of the older students who are about to enter the job market are opting for writing a resume. The younger kids, and the ones interested in starting their own businesses are going to do some accounting. Lastly, there are two elementary school teachers in my class, so they'll each do another "Excel" activity related to grades, as well as prepare an exam using "Word" (Quotes signify our open-source environment here). It's going to be a challenge to divide my time between the three groups, but ideally, it will give everybody some independent time to learn and explore each of the softwares on their own. In the end, it's an experiment! We'll see how it goes.

What comes after teaching IT class? Training sessions! Pictured above is my old language class. It involved making a lot of jokes in French. Now, were a bit bigger, but we don't meet quite as often as before, because our mornings are taken up by model school and our afternoons are full of tech training sessions. Some of the ones we had this week: malaria, tree planting, and teaching critical thinking. In some ways, a crash course on how to teach, plus how to do the five other "High Five" projects we are expected to undertake during our service.

In one of our earlier sessions, we covered how many years of specialized education are required here in Burkina Faso to become a teacher. It is at least 3, but often more. We are going to be entrusted with the same responsibilities and more after 11 weeks of training, a good part of which is dedicated to other topics, such as going from a novice to a passable level in French, and the "High Five" subjects as mentioned. Yes, we are all coming in with a college education, but many did not study teaching specifically, and don't have teaching experience. So how do we do it? Well, there's a cynical explanation with respect to the 3+ years, but I'll save that for another day. I focus on the positive: the bar for us is set high, but it's made exciting with the opportunities we have, and with support (Profuse thanks to the medical staff here!), we succeed. That's the same mentality that I try to bring to the IT class, and I think it works with the Burkinabe students just as well.

I mentioned the "High Five". What is that? The Peace Corps, in cooperation with the Burkinabe government came up with a program a little over a year ago to help overcome some of the biggest challenges here:

• Malaria Prevention
• HIV/AIDS Prevention
• Tree Planting
• Girls Empowerment and Education
• Small Business Development

As volunteers, we'll be expected to come up with a project related to each of these, on top of our 10-12 hours of teaching per week. This is a big shift from the previous project plan, where education (including IT) volunteers normally taught up to 30 hours a week. I forsee some transition period, where I'll spend more teaching at first, but hopefully, by the end, I'll be down to a negligible amount of teaching at the end (this is expected-- I'm the last volunteer at my site, as I think I mentioned last time). Thus, my routine will be lopsided, with my "High Five" projects coming more towards the end. I'm particularly interested in the small business development side of things, and there are a lot of possibilities in Koudougou especially in linking IT teaching to business, as computer access/literacy is expanding rapidly here. I have ideas, but those too will have to wait.

Ah, housework. I am thankful for having washing machines in the US, because doing laundry by hand here will consume your Sunday mornings. It's stressful sometimes, because we have class/training sessions six days per week, so it's hard to give up even more free time. I try to do my laundry on weekdays whenever the opportunity presents itself, because then my Sundays are free to do fun stuff!

Cleaning the room is another popular chore here. Sweeping has to be done more often, because our courtyard, like most, is dirt, and that gets tracked in despite best efforts to kick shoes off before entering. Organizing stuff isn't too hard-- I don't have many possessions to keep track of!

Since I'm starting to get more used to life here, and don't need 9-10 hours of sleep a night like I used to, I just took on a new chore: cooking for the family on Tuesdays! On the menu this past week: fried spaghetti with a tomato and goat meat sauce. It was very good-- everyone agreed with one exception-- the objection was that I didn't add salt. But salt is in everything here--I needed a break!

Here's my house (at left)! Note the panoramic photo. I've taken lots of those here, ever since I discovered that my camera had that option. I will upload the rest someday.

Did I mention I have fun here too? This picture was taken when some of us went off to climb this huge baobob tree. A group of about 10 kids followed us, and they climbed as well, in ways we didn't think were possible. One kid did acrobatics on a branch 40 feet off the ground. We were terrified.

Biking is huge here, among Burkinabe, and Peace Corps Volunteers alike. We were all given bikes in our first week here, and use them every day to get to class, and go on baobob-tree-climbing adventures. Sometimes, we bike for biking's sake, and sometimes, the bikes break. Here, I have cleverly attached another (broken) bike to the rear of my own. Note: 400 meters down the road, my chain jammed, and we had to stop this foolishness.

The brousse beckons! This is what the Burkinabe countryside looks like at the end of the dry season. The monsoons have since come, so the land is much greener. I hope to make it out for another voyage this weekend, if it the roads aren't rained out like before!