Visit

(This is from Oct 21st)
Work:

Last Friday, I looked out across my class and I saw faces lit up, honored and excited. The Peace Corps regional director for all of Africa had just left, along with Burkina Faso’s country director and an entourage of Peace Corps officials. The chatter in the room radiated, melted into the walls and poured out the door. They accepted that I needed to leave them with something before the weekend so they took a few notes, then they were gone, out the door and into the open air. The chatter magnified.

On the walk home, I was surrounded by kids tripping and scurrying along in their English. They wanted to know more, play more in the words of those foreigners who came to say hi. It had only been thirty minutes of greetings. Single file the kids had gone up to each American, greeted them then presented themselves. But it was more than just practicing their English, it was representing their country. While they surely know little of the inner workings of the Peace Corps, they recognized that an official from that big strange place, America, wanted to come and see their country, their province, their town, their school, their class. They were ambassadors, representatives of their home. What a powerful sentiment. Pride.

I was proud of them. Not only because they were well behaved but they seemed to all understand that it was really about them. Even if they did not consciously process it all, they were proud of themselves and the future they hold. That pride, that sense of importance, builds into motivation and passion. I know it will not last forever and there will be other challenges but it gives you hope. Hope is what makes an education achievable. So we’ll keep chatting along, even if in broken English.

Our curriculum for the course is fairly open, as I was handed a student’s English workbook as a teaching guide. It has no lessons, only a few dialogues and a couple of activities. Thus, the course is as we make it. In that, I can be thankful as my classes only loosely conform to the workbook. Instead, we work on learning intuitive English. Start with basics, everyday uses, and build basic rules as we go along. It’s gone something like this:

Greetings
Saying your name
Pronouns (I, You, We…)
Verbs (Imperative form, ex: Go, Listen, Be Quiet..)
Classroom Nouns (Book, Student, Teacher, Pen…) and “What is this?”
Conjugating “To Be” in the present
Plurals
Possessive (my, your, his…)
Basic Sentences
Negative Form of Sentences
Asking Yes or No Questions (Are you a door? Is he a teacher?...)

My kids have taken to much of the material and rather quickly. In the past three weeks, they have picked up the major points in all the above. My goal is to keep them motivated to learn and to make learning English as instinctual as I can. The visit from the Peace Corps high-ups plays into that. We are using the language, making it a part of our lives. Not learning the translation of things but communicating in English, catching the flow of it in our few short hours a week. Our focus is not spelling or grammar but comprehension. So far, it has had encouraging results. Hope.

Community:

I have started working with a young student from Kongoussi to teach him info-tech. I’ll call him Kid Constant for the time being. In a way, he is my test subject for my course on info-tech. In another way, he poses an interesting problem. All across Burkina there are bright young minds that are excelling in classes. More often then not though, there are bright young minds working in fields when classes are going on. It seems sad to say but it comes down to what often seems luck. Kid Constant goes to school at night (a program that meets only once a week at night) and balances time between odd jobs and his divorced parents. In so many ways, his intelligence shows. Yet, his education is lacking like so many, simply because the parents do not have either the money, will or time to invest (if not all three). It is the luck of the draw as to whether or not any given smart kid will be in a situation in which he can take advantage of that. As an educator, it’s hard to take. After all, aren’t we here to open doors, to build opportunity? Kid Constant is at least lucky in that he stumbled into my path and hopefully he’ll get something out of working together. It does make me wonder though, how many other Kid Constants are there in Kongoussi, Burkina, Africa…?

Personal:

I’ve been finding more and more motivation to do more and more as I get busier. It is as if having more to do gives me the energy to do more. It’s nice being busy. I spent the last weekend rebuilding the PC Burkina website and am much happier with its progress. That project is settling on firmer ground which led me to a meeting with a man who runs an orphanage and wants to build a website. Good work leading to motivation for more good work.