So we are now two full weeks in to the school year. I had a big plan to write a couple more posts before now and then upload them all when I got to Maroua...but then, naturally, the power went out in Meme last Thursday and has not come back...so my computer battery was dead for the last week and a half, until I got here this weekend and could finally use some electricity. It's not as bad as you would think, not having power – I put my head lamp on at like 6pm, cook dinner, read books (I've been reading like several hundred pages a day...), and am usually in bed by 8. Not too bad...for like a night or two. But it does get old. And it sucks not having my computer to watch movies and listen to music.
School has been going really well so far...my kids are great – smart, interesting, REALLY want to be there. I say “kids” but in reality the majority of my students are taller than me, and many of them are older. So instead of hanging out with a bunch of 15 year old kids, I'm really standing up in front of 30 or so men in their early twenties, trying to get them to read out loud and conjugate verbs in the past perfect. It's pretty funny.
My colleagues are really great. I'm the only woman on staff, and I feel more than a little out of place in our staff meetings (which are over three hours long and in French, by the way) as I look around the room and realize I am not just the only woman, but the only white person, and the only person who isn't a native speaker of French. It's difficult to figure out how to be professional and make friends with your co-workers when you just feel like the weirdest person on the planet. It also doesn't help when we all go around the room to introduce ourselves, and in addition to saying their names and what subjects they teach, twelve of the fourteen men I work with noted that they were “single...and looking.” Everybody has been so nice to me so far, and completely professional, but nevertheless it feels like a bit of a complicated social scene to negotiate.
People are really looking out for me though – on the first day of school my principal made a big speech to the entire school (which was actually only about 40 of our 600 students...it rained that morning, and it was Ramadan, and it actually takes a couple weeks for word to get round that school has actually started), during which he talked about school rules, cholera prevention, etc. etc...then stopped and said “Look behind me. You will see a white person. She is Miss Rose. She is from America. That is 12,000 kilometers away. She is here to teach you. She does not get paid. If you are mean to her she will go back to America.” He then told them that the first student who was mean to me would be expelled. That's support, right?
But discipline hasn't really been a big issue yet...the students are SO well-behaved, and I think it has to do with either a) not very many kids get to go to school up here, so if you have the opportunity, you REALLY want to be there; or b) it is just too hot up here to do anything but sit quietly. Either way, it's great to work with kids who listen, do their work, and are interested in what you're saying...although I'm not sure if this reflects an actual interest in learning English, or if kids are just coming to my class to see what ridiculous thing the white person will do next.
Things have been going really well in the village too...getting into a routine, getting to know some people, picking up Mandara little by little...I feel like my village is such a wonderful place, and such an amazing place to be a Peace Corps volunteer – people are so friendly, so welcoming, so helpful. Pretty much every day as I walk to school or go to the market, people (sometimes I know them, sometimes not) come up to me just to say “bonne arrivee” and tell me how glad they are that I am here. There is a wonderful expression here that people say – “on est ensemble” – “we are together”. People said this during training, and people say it to me a lot in the village. It's a way of saying welcome, and even though we are so incredibly different from each other, our minds and our hearts are in the same place. It is really nice to hear...especially when you spend so much time feeling so different and so out of place.
I've started going for runs in the morning...I didn't know if this was okay, but then decided that it would probably fall under the category of “weird things white people do that are silly” rather than “weird things white people do that are offensive”. And it's true – everybody stares...but everybody stares at me all the time anyways. Lots of people call out to greet me, or say things like “Ah! Tu fais les sports? C'est bon!” Often they even applaud – this is my favorite. In Cameroon, you do not say you are going running...you say you are “doing the sports”. This expression confused me for several weeks, as my host dad would come in in the morning, greet me, and tell me he had been “doing the sports.” Trying to make conversation, I would say “Oh, doing what sports?” and he would look at me for a minute like I was crazy, and then say, “THE sports.” Duh.
My Mandara is improving slowly but gradually...earlier this week I got home from class and my neighbors came over to bring me water (there's a pump nearby, and I pay them to fill up big jugs and bring them to my house, as they have a wheelbarrow and I am not strong enough to carry them by myself) and we hung out in my yard, pointing at things and saying what they are in different languages (Mandara, French, Fulfulde, English...). This is how we spend our time together...but I realized that afternoon that it had gotten easier. We were finding more words in common, I was recognizing some of the words they said, and found myself able even to start responding a bit in Mandara (“dyenka” – “I do not understand” – is usually the extent of my ability to respond, but still...it's a start). I also realized that hanging out with them has become easier...not because I magically learned how to speak Mandara, but just because somehow we've gotten to know each other and gotten comfortable around each other, even though we can't really have a conversation. Somehow we have figured out how to talk to each other, even though most of the time neither of us understands the words the other one is saying. I didn't know this could happen...but am feeling pretty encouraged!
Headed back to post today, keeping my fingers crossed the electricity is back. Anyways, I am healthy and happy and maybe possibly even starting to figure things out here. Miss you all, and thanks as always for all the e-mails, texts, and letters. It is always so good to hear from home.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Kar balaye?
For the record – today is September 5th, 2010. I will only have internet access maybe once a month when I go to the city, so I am trying to blog multiple times and will post them all at the same time when I have internet.
As of yesterday I have officially been in country for three months...and as of tomorrow I will have been at post for two weeks. I have spent most of my time in village setting up my house, figuring out how to feed myself, planning lessons, meeting people, collecting rain in buckets, and attempting to learn Mandara. I have also read over a thousand pages and watched an entire season of the Office. I am usually in bed by eight (especially when the power goes out, which happens pretty regularly when it rains, and it's been raining almost every day), which means I am usually up by four or five. I am loving living alone, and my house is wonderful, even though I get the occasional cockroach and my yard is full of lizards (I counted six at one time, just in my latrine...) during the day, and full of bats at night. You know how it takes awhile to get used to the sounds a house makes the first few weeks after you start living there (Kyle and I thought someone was breaking into our apartment pretty much every night our first couple weeks in LA)? Imagine lying in bed alone in your house in Africa, in total darkness because the power is out, with lizards running across your ceiling (my house has a tin roof, but underneath that is a wood ceiling, and they like to hang out in the space between) and bats flying past your window screeching. I have found that a lot of Peace Corps is choosing your battles, particularly when it comes to being afraid or disgusted. I can CHOOSE to lie in bed awake and terrified, listening to all these weird noises and imagining them to be something horrifying...or I can choose to believe that they are lizards and bats (which they usually are), choose not to be afraid of them, and go back to sleep. Usually I am capable of this.
My village is really wonderful – small, “traditional” (a PC term that I will someday unpack...here it means that most people don't speak French and haven't gone to school, live in large family compounds (multiple wives for a husband; flocks of children, chickens, and goats running around), sit on mats on the floor, wear boubous and pagne exclusively (no Western-style clothes, like in the South and bigger cities), etc.) and quiet...although also very friendly. I am in a funny position of knowing only a handful of people, but having EVERYONE know me...Last week I was at my village's market, standing next to my friend Claire (a PC volunteer in a nearby village; she is also white, but that is pretty much the extent of how similar we look) and a man I didn't recognize came up to us and said “Rose! Rose! Which one of you is Rose?” and I said “Oh, it's me.” And he shook my hand, then stopped and said “What? You don't remember me?” This happens a lot. Also, while most people here are very welcoming and seem genuinely glad to see me, I seem to have a bit of a terrifying effect on children under the age of two, who have never seen a white person before. On multiple occasions when I have stopped to say hello to people, their toddlers look up at me, their eyes get huge, and then they begin to scream in terror, burst into tears and run in the opposite direction. Their parents think this is HILARIOUS.
I have been making friends with the neighbor kids across the street...they call me alternately “Hose” and “Ross”, and are tirelessly (and so far somewhat fruitlessly) trying to teach me Mandara. They know only a few words of French and a few of Fulfulde...and I know approximately three words in Mandara, so it is quite a battle. They are very patient, though, and we make lots of hand gestures and laugh. I am pretty pumped about learning Mandara, and am in the process of finding someone (preferably over the age of 12...who also speaks French) who can give me more formal lessons. It is an Afro-Asiatic language with maybe 40,000 speakers in northern Cameroon and southern Nigeria, and a pretty exciting consonant inventory – this morning my neighbor taught me a word with a voiced implosive bilabial stop. Yeah. You're jealous. Those things are RARE. It also has tones, like Chinese, although only three of them. I have never learned a tonal language before and am pretty intimidated...but am going to take things one at a time. Also, just for the record, although my Bachelor's in linguistics is very useful here, it did not make me such a master linguist that I was able to independently document the entire phonetic inventory of Mandara (pharyngeals, bilabial implosives and all), recognize three separate tones, identify the language family, calculate the number of speakers, etc. etc. in my first two weeks here – no, my wonderful father found me a really nice overview of the language (created by a linguist from Kyoto in the late 1960's, I believe – can't find the full citation right now), and so I've been using that as a baseline to process what I hear from my neighbors. I always feel successful when I go back to the word list and find that I have accurately elicited and transcribed a word in the same way.
School starts tomorrow, so naturally instead of planning my lessons I have decided to spend my evening writing a rambling blog post about my village, the Mandara language, and now the Cameroonian educational system. So you understand what I am talking about when I talk about my classes, here is a basic overview of how a Cameroonian high school (lycee) works...at least in the Francophone regions (Anglophone has an entirely separate system, that I will not get into right now...):
The grades:
Sixieme (6th)
Cinquieme (5th)
Quatrieme (4th)
Troisieme (3rd)
Seconde (2nd)
Premiere (1st)
Terminale (Last)
Grades are opposite the American system, so the 6th graders (sixiemes) are the youngest, while the terminales are the oldest. 6eme is the equivalent of 6th grade in America, with terminale being about the equivalent to senior year of high school. There tends to be a very wide range of ages in each class, so you might have 10 year olds in sixieme sharing a desk with 14 year olds...terminale can range from 16 to 25. There is a HUGE shortage of teachers in Cameroon, so class sizes tend to be very large (100 or more students in a class), although decreasing in size in the older years as more and more kids drop out. The Cameroonian educational system is all exam-based, with large national exams (kind of like those standardized state exams we would have to take every few years in public school, except that they determine your future) at the end of 3eme, 1ere, and Terminale. The national exams cover every subject you study in school and are VERY difficult. If you do not pass, you do not move on to the next grade or graduate. This causes the classroom to be very exam-driven, with a lot of focus on copying and memorization, and not much at all on critical thinking. So while to graduate high school kids will have had at least seven years of English classes and successfully passed an exam, they may be completely unable to hold an actual conversation in the language.
I will be teaching sixieme, seconde, premiere, and terminale. Five hours a week of sixieme, then three hours each of the others. This means that tomorrow I will be alone in a room with over a hundred 10-14 year olds who speak no English. This also means that half of my classes (premiere and terminale) are exam years, and if I do not do my job well, they will not pass their exams, and will not move on or graduate high school. No pressure or anything.
Anyways, I am trying to take things one day at a time (my general Peace Corps philosophy), and come into class prepared and enthusiastic...and ready to work my pants off. I am very excited and very nervous. Also, my principal (I would like to preface this by saying that he is REALLY excellent, and I am super excited to work with him) told me yesterday that he was still working on the timetable (schedule of when I teach what class) but would bring it to my house today...It is now five o'clock and I am starting to think he is not coming. So on top of everything else, I do not know which classes I am teaching tomorrow, or when I am teaching them. This is something that would have driven me CRAZY in the U.S., but which doesn't faze me here.
This is one of the big differences I have noticed in myself here – my friends are shocked when I tell them that in the U.S., I am the person who is ALWAYS prepared, who ALWAYS has the things she needs, knows what needs to happen, how to do it, and when to be there. Here, I jump on a moto one morning to do some curriculum planning with the other TEFL volunteers...I show up at my friend Liz's house. She asks:
“Did you bring your computer?”
“...no.”
“Your USB drive?”
“...no.”
“Textbooks?”
“...no.”
“Do you even know what grades you are teaching yet?”
“Hmm...no.”
And somehow I am not worried. And somehow it all works out anyway. This total lack of preparedness has been balanced out, however, by another surprising attribute – where at home, I would get lost driving around my hometown, couldn't read a map, etc., here I am an expert navigator, and somehow always seem to end up in front of the line, leading the way to the market, to downtown, to someone's house...often through cornfields and down tiny dirt paths. There are no street names and no maps, and I have to rely exclusively on my sense of direction...and somehow I always get us there. Often I even find a shortcut. Do you believe it?
Anyways, despite the fact that I don't know what classes I am teaching tomorrow, or what time they start, I should probably do some work tonight...especially seeing as I spent most of yesterday drawing elaborate charts for my classes in different colored pens, rather than planning actual lessons. And in about 14 hours, I will be standing in front of 100 children, speaking French (yeah...first day will be in French). Yup. I should probably get to work. Hope you all are well! Much love!
As of yesterday I have officially been in country for three months...and as of tomorrow I will have been at post for two weeks. I have spent most of my time in village setting up my house, figuring out how to feed myself, planning lessons, meeting people, collecting rain in buckets, and attempting to learn Mandara. I have also read over a thousand pages and watched an entire season of the Office. I am usually in bed by eight (especially when the power goes out, which happens pretty regularly when it rains, and it's been raining almost every day), which means I am usually up by four or five. I am loving living alone, and my house is wonderful, even though I get the occasional cockroach and my yard is full of lizards (I counted six at one time, just in my latrine...) during the day, and full of bats at night. You know how it takes awhile to get used to the sounds a house makes the first few weeks after you start living there (Kyle and I thought someone was breaking into our apartment pretty much every night our first couple weeks in LA)? Imagine lying in bed alone in your house in Africa, in total darkness because the power is out, with lizards running across your ceiling (my house has a tin roof, but underneath that is a wood ceiling, and they like to hang out in the space between) and bats flying past your window screeching. I have found that a lot of Peace Corps is choosing your battles, particularly when it comes to being afraid or disgusted. I can CHOOSE to lie in bed awake and terrified, listening to all these weird noises and imagining them to be something horrifying...or I can choose to believe that they are lizards and bats (which they usually are), choose not to be afraid of them, and go back to sleep. Usually I am capable of this.
My village is really wonderful – small, “traditional” (a PC term that I will someday unpack...here it means that most people don't speak French and haven't gone to school, live in large family compounds (multiple wives for a husband; flocks of children, chickens, and goats running around), sit on mats on the floor, wear boubous and pagne exclusively (no Western-style clothes, like in the South and bigger cities), etc.) and quiet...although also very friendly. I am in a funny position of knowing only a handful of people, but having EVERYONE know me...Last week I was at my village's market, standing next to my friend Claire (a PC volunteer in a nearby village; she is also white, but that is pretty much the extent of how similar we look) and a man I didn't recognize came up to us and said “Rose! Rose! Which one of you is Rose?” and I said “Oh, it's me.” And he shook my hand, then stopped and said “What? You don't remember me?” This happens a lot. Also, while most people here are very welcoming and seem genuinely glad to see me, I seem to have a bit of a terrifying effect on children under the age of two, who have never seen a white person before. On multiple occasions when I have stopped to say hello to people, their toddlers look up at me, their eyes get huge, and then they begin to scream in terror, burst into tears and run in the opposite direction. Their parents think this is HILARIOUS.
I have been making friends with the neighbor kids across the street...they call me alternately “Hose” and “Ross”, and are tirelessly (and so far somewhat fruitlessly) trying to teach me Mandara. They know only a few words of French and a few of Fulfulde...and I know approximately three words in Mandara, so it is quite a battle. They are very patient, though, and we make lots of hand gestures and laugh. I am pretty pumped about learning Mandara, and am in the process of finding someone (preferably over the age of 12...who also speaks French) who can give me more formal lessons. It is an Afro-Asiatic language with maybe 40,000 speakers in northern Cameroon and southern Nigeria, and a pretty exciting consonant inventory – this morning my neighbor taught me a word with a voiced implosive bilabial stop. Yeah. You're jealous. Those things are RARE. It also has tones, like Chinese, although only three of them. I have never learned a tonal language before and am pretty intimidated...but am going to take things one at a time. Also, just for the record, although my Bachelor's in linguistics is very useful here, it did not make me such a master linguist that I was able to independently document the entire phonetic inventory of Mandara (pharyngeals, bilabial implosives and all), recognize three separate tones, identify the language family, calculate the number of speakers, etc. etc. in my first two weeks here – no, my wonderful father found me a really nice overview of the language (created by a linguist from Kyoto in the late 1960's, I believe – can't find the full citation right now), and so I've been using that as a baseline to process what I hear from my neighbors. I always feel successful when I go back to the word list and find that I have accurately elicited and transcribed a word in the same way.
School starts tomorrow, so naturally instead of planning my lessons I have decided to spend my evening writing a rambling blog post about my village, the Mandara language, and now the Cameroonian educational system. So you understand what I am talking about when I talk about my classes, here is a basic overview of how a Cameroonian high school (lycee) works...at least in the Francophone regions (Anglophone has an entirely separate system, that I will not get into right now...):
The grades:
Sixieme (6th)
Cinquieme (5th)
Quatrieme (4th)
Troisieme (3rd)
Seconde (2nd)
Premiere (1st)
Terminale (Last)
Grades are opposite the American system, so the 6th graders (sixiemes) are the youngest, while the terminales are the oldest. 6eme is the equivalent of 6th grade in America, with terminale being about the equivalent to senior year of high school. There tends to be a very wide range of ages in each class, so you might have 10 year olds in sixieme sharing a desk with 14 year olds...terminale can range from 16 to 25. There is a HUGE shortage of teachers in Cameroon, so class sizes tend to be very large (100 or more students in a class), although decreasing in size in the older years as more and more kids drop out. The Cameroonian educational system is all exam-based, with large national exams (kind of like those standardized state exams we would have to take every few years in public school, except that they determine your future) at the end of 3eme, 1ere, and Terminale. The national exams cover every subject you study in school and are VERY difficult. If you do not pass, you do not move on to the next grade or graduate. This causes the classroom to be very exam-driven, with a lot of focus on copying and memorization, and not much at all on critical thinking. So while to graduate high school kids will have had at least seven years of English classes and successfully passed an exam, they may be completely unable to hold an actual conversation in the language.
I will be teaching sixieme, seconde, premiere, and terminale. Five hours a week of sixieme, then three hours each of the others. This means that tomorrow I will be alone in a room with over a hundred 10-14 year olds who speak no English. This also means that half of my classes (premiere and terminale) are exam years, and if I do not do my job well, they will not pass their exams, and will not move on or graduate high school. No pressure or anything.
Anyways, I am trying to take things one day at a time (my general Peace Corps philosophy), and come into class prepared and enthusiastic...and ready to work my pants off. I am very excited and very nervous. Also, my principal (I would like to preface this by saying that he is REALLY excellent, and I am super excited to work with him) told me yesterday that he was still working on the timetable (schedule of when I teach what class) but would bring it to my house today...It is now five o'clock and I am starting to think he is not coming. So on top of everything else, I do not know which classes I am teaching tomorrow, or when I am teaching them. This is something that would have driven me CRAZY in the U.S., but which doesn't faze me here.
This is one of the big differences I have noticed in myself here – my friends are shocked when I tell them that in the U.S., I am the person who is ALWAYS prepared, who ALWAYS has the things she needs, knows what needs to happen, how to do it, and when to be there. Here, I jump on a moto one morning to do some curriculum planning with the other TEFL volunteers...I show up at my friend Liz's house. She asks:
“Did you bring your computer?”
“...no.”
“Your USB drive?”
“...no.”
“Textbooks?”
“...no.”
“Do you even know what grades you are teaching yet?”
“Hmm...no.”
And somehow I am not worried. And somehow it all works out anyway. This total lack of preparedness has been balanced out, however, by another surprising attribute – where at home, I would get lost driving around my hometown, couldn't read a map, etc., here I am an expert navigator, and somehow always seem to end up in front of the line, leading the way to the market, to downtown, to someone's house...often through cornfields and down tiny dirt paths. There are no street names and no maps, and I have to rely exclusively on my sense of direction...and somehow I always get us there. Often I even find a shortcut. Do you believe it?
Anyways, despite the fact that I don't know what classes I am teaching tomorrow, or what time they start, I should probably do some work tonight...especially seeing as I spent most of yesterday drawing elaborate charts for my classes in different colored pens, rather than planning actual lessons. And in about 14 hours, I will be standing in front of 100 children, speaking French (yeah...first day will be in French). Yup. I should probably get to work. Hope you all are well! Much love!
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