Et le travail?

Written 1 February

Last week was my best week at post to-date. I was busy every day and now I have three different project ideas.

The first project idea came about after talking to a guy who stopped by my house. He has worked with Peace Corps volunteers in the past and wanted to meet me and see if he could help with any projects I wanted to do. But through talking with him I realized that I have no idea what kinds of problems the girls of Tchamba actually face. I went to the highschool a few weeks back and asked for the enrollment breakdown: how many girls/guys are in each class. I found out that only 14% of the highschool students are girls and there are only 11 in their final year out of 91 total.

So my idea (well, I can hardly call it my idea because it's nothing new) is to start a girls' club. I figure I would invite some or all (haven't decided yet) of the girls enrolled in highschool to come hang out for a bit one day a week. We can play games, or they can bring homework, maybe I could teach a life skills lesson or two. I'll just ask them “hey, what do you you wanna do for the afternoon?” But through this club I can get to know them individually and start to ask questions that get at why there are only 11 girls about to graduate. After the problems are diagnosed, I can then start to take the necessary steps to alleviate said problems. Then, I took it a step further. Maybe in a year or two I can get the girls from my club to go back to whatever elementary school they attended and start their own girls' club as kind of a role model. This may not end up working out anything like this, but it's a spark, and it's exactly what I needed to get some stuff started.

Also, Emily, who lives in Wasarabo about 35 kilometers away, and I were talking about doing a project together. We both want to get some kids to paint a world map on the side of a building. The way it works is you take a map of the world printed on graph paper, and transfer each square individually onto a much bigger graph on a wall. And there are a ton of ways to spin it: I could illustrate the math behind it: longitude, latitude, the difference in scale between the paper, the wall, and the actual planet; or I could talk about the different geographical regions meteorologically or politically or whatever. Anyway, Emily and I figured we'd buy a bunch of paint together and I'd visit her village to help her get this project off the ground, and then she'd visit here and we'd do the same, learning from our mistakes the first time around.

And this last project idea is not my idea at all, but it's the one I'm the most excited about. Last week I met a guy at the internet cafe, and then earlier this week, he called me and invited me over his house. He said that he talked about this with a previous volunteer, but his service ended before they could get it off the ground. This guy, Kougbada, is a teacher at an elementary school. He wants to start a computer lab. He has a room, kind of like a shed in his compound but with an external door. He wants to try to get 10 computers to get students to learn how to use them. What he doesn't know is where to get funding or where to buy them and the technical stuff like that, which is what I can help him with. I figured if we get a computer lab up and running within a year, I can spend a second year teaching a computer literacy course. Stuff like how to type, how to use a word processor (bold, italics, indenting, fonts and sizes, etc...), how to do a google search or if I'm feeling really ambitious how to use stuff like excel. I know some other volunteers who have done computer literacy courses and they said you have to start at the beginning. The very beginning. Things like how to double click, what a folder is, what “delete” means.

Kougbada is a really intelligent guy. He invited me back to his house for lunch to which I went earlier this afternoon. He speaks really good English, and our conversation was about the American credit crisis and how much change I thought Obama is really going to bring. And stuff like how the grammar structure of English is Germanic but the vocabulary is very Latin-based. It was really nice to not only be able to speak English past “How are you? I am going to the market.” but to be intellectually stimulated and challenged. Hell, even if this computer lab thing falls through, at least I have a guy I can hang out with and talk about some stuff I normally can't talk about.

On a completely different note, I've been feeling great. I'm not sick or losing a ton of weight or anything like that. Although, my left big-toe nail has turned black for some reason... Meh... C'est comme ca.