Working Hard (or hardly working?)

So I've told you all plenty about my life here in The Gambia, but there is one part that I have yet to really illuminate and that is my work. May sound boring, stop reading now if you want, but like everything else here, it is anything but boring.

First of all, if you're wondering what my school decided to do about solving the tree-devil problem, here are the brilliant solutions they came up with:

1)All girls are advised to cover their heads at school with a scarf, if they don't already

2) Children are asked to stay after school to pray in the front if they can.

3)Each student is required to give 10 dalasi for a marabou to come and "cleanse" the school

4) They also bought some kind of purple liquid in a water bottle to sprinkle on the girls while they are possessed. What it's supposed to do, I'm not sure...

And they wonder why it's still happening...
Last week they brought another possessed girl into the office I was sitting on, threw the purple devil water onto her hair and held her down while she screamed. She calmed down after a while but then all of the teachers had to leave to teach and I was left alone in this tiny office with this girl. By the time the teachers left she had resorted to sitting on the ground, hugging her knees, rocking, with her head scarf covering her face...old lady in "The Others"-ish. I sat as far away from her as possible, which was only like 4 feet away, peeking at her from behind my book, trying not to pee myself from being so scared. The teachers came back eventually and sent her home, but I think that hour of my life has scarred me forever.

So, being one of the three female staff members at my school, I spend most of my time sitting in an office with a bunch on young male soccer-obsessed Gambian teachers listening to them talk/argue about Gambian footbal. I throw in the occasional comment, that for a while had them believing I knew something about football. But now, I'm pretty sure they are onto me. They also assume that I don't speak much Mandinka, and I have yet to correct them because listening to them when they think I cannot understand them is more fun. I guess eventually I'll have to tell them...or maybe not.

Every Monday and Friday morning before class starts there is an assembly. They line all 1,000 students up by class, in the sun, not moving, facing us, and we sit on benches in the shade, facing them. There is usually one teacher each week who has to give the hour long assembly speech. I guess the point is to inspire the children to be better students, but no one listens. They just stare at me with their mouths open. I sit there and look around until I lock eye contact with one who doesn't look away and then have stare-offs. Some of the topics of the teacher's speeches have been: not having older friends because they will make you smoke cigarettes, the school motto (who knew we even had one??), blindness, the fact that smoking marijuana will make your face fat, if their parents don't iron their uniforms than their parents don't love them (this was said literally word for word)...I could tell you more but my focus on these speeches is usually interrupted when the first student faints. Yes, they start dropping like flies if the teachers are really getting into their talk and they are standing there longer than an hour. And this happens EVERY WEEK. I think when its my turn, my assembly speech will be on the importance of not locking your knees to avoid fainting.

The school uniforms are lavender checkered button up shirts and lavender skirts/shorts. Yea, I thought it was a joke too...they look too damn cute though.

Science club meeting. But check out those sweet
uniforms!!

I think my new biggest enemy in The Gambia may be Mr. Ceesay. He is one of the teachers at my school who, on the first day of work asked me to sponsor his son who wants to go to America to become a doctor. I played dumb because I wasnt completely sure that he was really asking me to do that, but looking back he totally was. Later, I guess just to make sure that he would never have my respect, he called me a "white lady" and a "toubab" to my face in a staff meeting. At the time I was so mad that I couldn't say anything, luckily a few teachers had my back and told him that he was being unprofessional, disrespectful, and that that my name isn't toubab etc etc...but I really wish I had thought of something at the time to put him in his place. Ever since that first day I have just ignored him whenever he approaches me because all he ever has to talk about it money. But no, me completely ignoring him doesn't deter him. He just finds someone near me and talks to them loudly about how he needs medicine or new clothes but its too expensive and he wishes he could get some money from someone...and then looks over and stares at me. I should start asking him to sponsor Alice, who is at Carolina working on her PhD, so she can become a doctor. Or ask him for money so I can have some new dresses made, or money for a plane ticket back to America.

So I have two counterparts. One is Mr. Gomez, who is the main teacher I have been working with. The other is Mr Nyassi, the head of the science department who I have been working on science club with. The other day I met with Mr. Nyassi to discuss experiments for that days meeting and I sat down at his desk to wait for him to finish teaching and I see something moving out of the corner of my eye. Yes, my friends, it was yet another goddamn spider. This time though, it was in a petri dish, but it was one of the biggest I've seen so far. Oh, and guess where he found it...under a desk. A DESK! So I had to sit at that desk for the rest of the day, praying that it wouldn't lift the lid off of the dish...which it was clearly capable of.

Mr. Nyassi and his new friend

I finally got fed up not doing anything, and have been working really hard at coming up with sustainable project ideas and starting to put them to work. It's been harder than I thought. The Peace Corps staff wasn't kidding when they said that things happen slower here. Every step I take forward I come across ten new problems that have to be worked out. Some days have been incredibly frustrating. The school already has a bunch of great programs and ideas in action, but they need help improving them, and when I try and talk to the head person about it, my ideas are all shot down because no one wants to work more or harder than they have to. But slowly I am making progress. These are the ideas and projects I have been working on so far:

--Math and Science Peer Tutoring program. Math and science are definitely the biggest challenges for students here and teachers usually cannot stay after to tutor them because they have jobs where they work second shift at other schools so my solution to this was to train the smartest students in the areas of math and science and have them stay after and tutor the students who are struggling. I have gotten so far as training the tutors. Mr. Gomez and I have come across quite a few problems so far, problems that I would have never imagined coming up, which I wont go into here, but together we have been able to work around them as best we can.

I think this program, which has been named Students Teaching Students Association (named by the tutors), will after a few terms, be a great program for the school that many students will be able to benefit from.

--I have been working with Mr. Nyassi to make the science club stronger. Before, he was basically just lecturing over things that they didn't have enough time to talk about in class. I'm trying to develop experiments that relate to things they have talked about in class, which is harder said and done taking into consideration that they have no lab, no electricity, no running water, no funds to work with, I've also been trying to plan field trips to places like the butcher shop, the MRC- british medical research center, or the Makasuta wildlife reserve.

--Mr. Gomez and I came up with the idea of making a science experiment manual using only local resources and maybe having it distributed to other schools. We haven't started on this one yet, it's been done before, but he says that he has some new ideas for a better manual. I think this idea has a lot of potential, but we'll see what happens.

--I've also been trying to make a teaching aid closet for the science teachers. I have yet to see a teacher using any kind of teaching aid at this school, the walls are bare concrete and they don't really even have the materials to make them if they wanted to. So I've talked the principal into using some of their funds to buy materials, but he told me I would have to go to the market to try and price everything. Yes, excellent idea, send the toubab who is usually charged triple for everything...and that's if I can even find it. I cant wait. The teaching aids I have made so far took hours. Try drawing an amoeba on a shitty piece of paper with an almost dried up dry-erase marker and then find it crumpled up under a desk the next day and welcome to my life.