My brain is very fatigued.
Today was a lot of unwinding intermixed with some buying for my house...
I feel really drained and not like writing at all. Ive been stressed because the end of my etude is coming. It is mostly done. Ive organized it into four parts with some miscellaneous excerpts.
There is the intro including who I talked to, how I did the research, and biases. Then there is the background on geography, religion, ethnicity, education, their community council. Then the next section I talk more about underlying attitudes on money, commerce, resources that have fallen apart, attitudes about vaccinating animals, that sort of thing. Then I list each health problem in order of how pressing I think it is, outline it and the reasons for it existing. Then I end with a list of activities, health related and not, in order to remedy them. Then somewhere in there Im sticking the results of my 9 small group study, plus the results of the community meeting which Im holding on Monday.
Im really proud of my work on this and the way it is coming together. But I dont know why I had to be so anal about it. Most everyone else who Ive talked to so far has not put this much work into their etude.
Why oh why am I such a workaholic....
I named my second kid in village this week. Ebouma, who lives in my courtyard, gave birth a couple days ago and the family let me name it. I named him Marcel, after the short story I never finished, about a boy who wanted to be a pig. Naming kids is addicting.
Then I watched the old woman in the courtyard wash the baby. Its the only time Ive seen the family pull out soap to be used for anything. She kept turning the baby over roughly, pouring water over its head until it finally cried. It looked more like torture than a bath.
Ive offered a number of times to help the kids in the courtyard with their homework, and this week they took me up on it. Really when you think about it, turning down the offer for free semi private tutoring from a college graduate when your teachers might only have the equivalent of an 8th grade education would be pretty stupid.
Class sizes in my village run between 50 and 90 kids per room, per teacher. Ive been told that credentials vary to teach, that in bigger towns you need better credentials. It serves to further widen the class barrier between village and town. In some places you only need an 8th grade education to teach primary school...
And in these instances, I guess its not quite like the blind leading the blind. More like the blind leading the hearing impaired...
Delphine and Sandrine are in the equivelent of 4th and 5th grade. Both of their French is pretty good, they just dont have the confidence to talk to me. Almost everyone in village understands a little French, they just dont have the confidence to speak it. I have theories on this, but I am too mentally exhausted to go into them at the moment.
A couple nights ago they came in with an old reading textbook caste off someone had given them. I felt really unconfident about correcting their pronunciation. Then the other kids came in, the ones who have dropped out of school, and broke up our study session.
Its really sad to me to see how kids slip through the cracks here. When the shock of their poverty falls away, and the guilt over what I have falls away, it is this that keeps me awake at night. Because if I lived here, I would have been one of those kids, the first grader who wrote the E too slowly, who couldnt cut the large class size or the horrendous amounts of public ridicule one must endure to socially survive the school system. That is what gets to me at the end of the day.
More and more I am becoming of the opinion, that if they made the school system free-- doubled or tripled the class sizes if they needed to, and got everyone free textbooks to share. If they god even 60 or 70 of the kids through high school, there would be major changes in this country within a generation.
Im sorry. Im just too burnt out right now to write. This is not how I meant this entry to go. ugh.
I feel really drained and not like writing at all. Ive been stressed because the end of my etude is coming. It is mostly done. Ive organized it into four parts with some miscellaneous excerpts.
There is the intro including who I talked to, how I did the research, and biases. Then there is the background on geography, religion, ethnicity, education, their community council. Then the next section I talk more about underlying attitudes on money, commerce, resources that have fallen apart, attitudes about vaccinating animals, that sort of thing. Then I list each health problem in order of how pressing I think it is, outline it and the reasons for it existing. Then I end with a list of activities, health related and not, in order to remedy them. Then somewhere in there Im sticking the results of my 9 small group study, plus the results of the community meeting which Im holding on Monday.
Im really proud of my work on this and the way it is coming together. But I dont know why I had to be so anal about it. Most everyone else who Ive talked to so far has not put this much work into their etude.
Why oh why am I such a workaholic....
I named my second kid in village this week. Ebouma, who lives in my courtyard, gave birth a couple days ago and the family let me name it. I named him Marcel, after the short story I never finished, about a boy who wanted to be a pig. Naming kids is addicting.
Then I watched the old woman in the courtyard wash the baby. Its the only time Ive seen the family pull out soap to be used for anything. She kept turning the baby over roughly, pouring water over its head until it finally cried. It looked more like torture than a bath.
Ive offered a number of times to help the kids in the courtyard with their homework, and this week they took me up on it. Really when you think about it, turning down the offer for free semi private tutoring from a college graduate when your teachers might only have the equivalent of an 8th grade education would be pretty stupid.
Class sizes in my village run between 50 and 90 kids per room, per teacher. Ive been told that credentials vary to teach, that in bigger towns you need better credentials. It serves to further widen the class barrier between village and town. In some places you only need an 8th grade education to teach primary school...
And in these instances, I guess its not quite like the blind leading the blind. More like the blind leading the hearing impaired...
Delphine and Sandrine are in the equivelent of 4th and 5th grade. Both of their French is pretty good, they just dont have the confidence to talk to me. Almost everyone in village understands a little French, they just dont have the confidence to speak it. I have theories on this, but I am too mentally exhausted to go into them at the moment.
A couple nights ago they came in with an old reading textbook caste off someone had given them. I felt really unconfident about correcting their pronunciation. Then the other kids came in, the ones who have dropped out of school, and broke up our study session.
Its really sad to me to see how kids slip through the cracks here. When the shock of their poverty falls away, and the guilt over what I have falls away, it is this that keeps me awake at night. Because if I lived here, I would have been one of those kids, the first grader who wrote the E too slowly, who couldnt cut the large class size or the horrendous amounts of public ridicule one must endure to socially survive the school system. That is what gets to me at the end of the day.
More and more I am becoming of the opinion, that if they made the school system free-- doubled or tripled the class sizes if they needed to, and got everyone free textbooks to share. If they god even 60 or 70 of the kids through high school, there would be major changes in this country within a generation.
Im sorry. Im just too burnt out right now to write. This is not how I meant this entry to go. ugh.