Bonjour or shall I say ne y windiga (moore for good day). Training continues to go well in lovely Burkina Faso. I did realize as I was riding my bike to model school this morning that I still haven't written about some of the everyday different things that happen here. For starters, when I ride my bike down the road, I don't really look like I'm from around here, if you know what I mean, so kids like to yell la blanche and nassara (moore for white person) at me. It's not really that threatening (most of the time), they just like to acknowledge that I'm not from around here. But I don't think anyone really needed to clarify that. Also, greetings are really important. If you forget to greet someone properly you might as well not be their friend anymore. Good greeting is the key to any social interaction. It includes not only hi, how are you, but also questions about one's family, house, and health. Some volunteers get sick of greeting people all the time because it's so different from what we experience in the US, but I kind of like it. Burkinabe who have casual/friendly relationships with each other also do a handshake where they snap each others' fingers. This is probably the best part about greeting someone here, because if you can do the handshake, you no longer seem as much of an outsider.
Another thing that threw me off was how culturally acceptable to ask children to do things (like buy a bar of soap or get you something) for you. Let me be more clear. If you wanted for instance a bar of soap from the boutique down the street, you could simply ask a kid from the neighborhood to go get it for you (after giving them the money of course). They would come back with your bar of soap and change in 5 minutes. I'm still not totally comfortable with this system, but it's merely part of the culture of respecting your elders, which is nice because everyone in a community takes care of their older people. Students even do a curtesy type thing when they come up to me to ask for permission to leave the class. That's not to say that children are always respectful, but it is different from the United States. Children definitely have more responsibility here in general. Many of them work the fields with their families and help herd and raise livestock. Girls also do an extraordinary amount of work helping to cook and wash all of the clothes. This also makes going to school harder because children don't have as much, if any, free time.
Speaking of model school, today I gave my first test. Doing discipline in English is hard enough, but in French, ridiculous. So I figured everyone knows what cheating is by the time they get to secondary school, and everyone knows when they're cheating. I told my class exactly that and then made them all get up and switch desks from their normal places. This was of course followed by a communal groan, which means that it was probably a good idea. Then I stood in the back of the room for two hours and watched them until they finished. I think they did fairly well on the exam, though I have to finish grading them tonight. And those papers are not going to grade themselves...
Another thing that threw me off was how culturally acceptable to ask children to do things (like buy a bar of soap or get you something) for you. Let me be more clear. If you wanted for instance a bar of soap from the boutique down the street, you could simply ask a kid from the neighborhood to go get it for you (after giving them the money of course). They would come back with your bar of soap and change in 5 minutes. I'm still not totally comfortable with this system, but it's merely part of the culture of respecting your elders, which is nice because everyone in a community takes care of their older people. Students even do a curtesy type thing when they come up to me to ask for permission to leave the class. That's not to say that children are always respectful, but it is different from the United States. Children definitely have more responsibility here in general. Many of them work the fields with their families and help herd and raise livestock. Girls also do an extraordinary amount of work helping to cook and wash all of the clothes. This also makes going to school harder because children don't have as much, if any, free time.
Speaking of model school, today I gave my first test. Doing discipline in English is hard enough, but in French, ridiculous. So I figured everyone knows what cheating is by the time they get to secondary school, and everyone knows when they're cheating. I told my class exactly that and then made them all get up and switch desks from their normal places. This was of course followed by a communal groan, which means that it was probably a good idea. Then I stood in the back of the room for two hours and watched them until they finished. I think they did fairly well on the exam, though I have to finish grading them tonight. And those papers are not going to grade themselves...
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