So...life

Ok well life.   My daily life feels very similar to American daily life.  I start the day with an alarm on my cell phone, granted I have a brick cell that has snake on it, yeah to all of you who know what that means.  I get up and make coffee before anything else.  For me this means going outside, greeting my neighbors, starting a fire, boiling water and then mixing it with Nescafe instant coffee.  After making coffee I take a shower.  This means getting a bucket or 2 of water from the well and carrying it to my house then bucket bathing by lathering up and pouring cold water on myself to rise scoop by scoop.  I finish my laundry.  I put whatever clothes that are still wet from the day before out on the clothes line.  I go to work.  I walk to my school down a red dirt road with jungle on one side and houses on the other.  I’m at school from before 8 until about 2:30.  I walk home.  After getting home I drop on my stuff and go to buy things for dinner.  This means I walk almost a mile to the market to buy things to cook.   I buy the same things almost every day since they sell what they grow, not much variety.  I need to go every day or 2 because without a refrigerator things get nasty quickly.  I go home.  Again I walk….Get home and do anything from read to grade papers to go get a drink or bite to eat with my site-mate.  I make dinner if I didn’t go get food.  This means I go outside greet my neighbors and chat with them while starting a fire and cooking whatever I can create, favorites recently have been lentil chili, curried lentils, and some quinoa thanks to an awesome care package from my parents.  The sun sets around 6:30 or 7 so unless I’m doing something with site-mates I’m in bed around 8-9…  Basically the same right?  Oh wait no, no not quite.

I have been unbelievably fortunate when it comes to making friends here.  We all spend a lot of time trying to “integrate”, I think that’s just a nice way of saying we all spend a LOT of time trying to get people to like us and, if we’re really lucky, see us as more than just white people.  ANYWAY I’ve been really lucky, I have 4 whole people who I really count as friends here and, believe it or not, that’s impressive.   One is a teacher at my school, two are nuns from my school and one is a bartender in town.  Outside of these women, who I feel are friends of mine, I also have so many people all over town who not only know me, they lookout for me.  I can’t go anywhere without people greeting me by name.  One thing I hope I take home after this is the obvious care people have for each other here.  I think it’s because people here really depend on community in a way we don’t in America, but it’s awesome.  I travel every couple weekends to other volunteers’ sites.  I was in Kono a month ago, the crazy diamond/super war torn area of the country.  Tomorrow I am going to ride my bike 40 miles to my friend’s village for her birthday.  Last weekend my site-mates and I hosted our entire group here for Thanksgiving, 40 white people, small town in Africa, yeah.  My mom would have been proud or shocked if she’d seen me hosting ha ha.   Let me just say hosting people here, whole different story, well water, sleeping space yadda yadda…  It was great I loved having everyone here.  Which reminds me we have lost another volunteer from our group, we are down to 39 now from the 43 that we started with. So, yeah…

I am riding my bike a lot for an escape and for exercise.  I’ve ridden almost 300 miles in the last couple months, honestly don’t know if that’s good or pathetic, but I’m riding more and more so I’m happy about it.  It’s hard to exercise here, it’s insanely hot.  I don’t actually know how hot, I don’t have an outside thermometer, and there’s no weather channel and the idea of people here caring what the temperature is here is kinda hilarious.  When I comment to people here that it’s hot, they tell me (with a straight face) that it’s because of the sun.  Good thing they tell me, I’d be really confused otherwise.  I’m am in a constant state of too hot and sweatier than I have ever been in America, don’t worry though, the hottest part of dry season isn’t here yet, this is nothing.  Oh yeah and the well near my house is going to dry up soon, so the long walk to get water will be very, fun very soon.  Bright side to this is I am becoming much better at toting, carrying things on my head, the other day I toted a mattress almost a mile to my friend’s house.  People here tote everything, water, books, motorcycles, dressers, really anything and everything.  It really is so much easier to carry things on your head than it is to carry them in your arms, just one more reason people will think I’m crazy when I get home.  But, buckets of water over a long distance will be manageable soon.  The storms we were use too would cause emergency flooding in almost all American cities a couple times every week.  We went from ridiculous rain storms every day to nothing, it’s been weeks since the last rainfall.  It’s a different world here.  So I guess that’s some life for you. 

So this Africa...

I was going to start this post by giving a hard time to those of you who have been harassing me to write a blog (Aunt BJ, mom, dad), then I read the last one and realized how long it’s been ha ha. 

The most I can say about how things have changed since the last post is that life is really becoming normal here.  Most of the time I think this is a good thing, other times I worry that the insanity is now my normal.  It’s hard to know where to start, animal stories, people stories, school stories, culture stories, the list goes on.  For the Morrison side of my family I will write a post devoted to animal stories, I’ll give you a hint though; foot-sized scorpions, cobras, people eating ants, monkeys, alligators, oodles of lizards, awesome bright green snakes…  Obviously other people can read it too, I just think the Morrison fam will enjoy it more than anyone else ha ha.  Okay, I guess the best place to begin would be to say that I am living in a totally crazy, backwards place.  American reality doesn’t make sense here, it’s like speaking Chinese to an English speaking 5 year old.  Or Temne to a 25 year old American, oh wait that’s exactly what’s happening.  There are times when the craziness of this place makes me wonder about my own sanity.  Having said this, I must also say that I have ever been happier with what I’m doing or where I am.  So far this place is everything I imagined and then some.  On my worst day, and I’ve had some insanely bad days, you could not pay me enough to leave this place, this is really saying something since I’m living on next to nothing, ha ha.  Now that I’ve made it clear that I am happy here and really love this place, let me tell you about my life.  In.  Africa. 

I am writing this by candlelight after charging my computer for a few hours at a charging station, about a 5 minute walk from my house.  I have begun to trust people very quickly out of necessity.  I leave my most valuable possessions with strangers, and come back hours later and pay them less than 50 cents for charging (and not stealing) my things.  Yeah, just think about that for a second.  Back to candlelight, it’s kinda awesome, not much more to say about it.  Batteries needed for lanterns cost too much so I have candles.  Oh and don’t worry I’ve become very Sierra Leonean in that I take every opportunity to take my friends used bottles home to use as candle holders… I don’t know if that’s weird any more…. Awkward…

Today I finished grading my students’ final exams!!!  I can’t describe the mixed emotions involved.  Ha ha, grading is torture in a way, but I get really in to it.  I find myself cheering for my students as I grade, out loud…  I am happy and proud to announce that there was a very noticeable improvement in all of my classes compared to the midterm results!!!  I can just imagine people reading this in America thinking, yeah ok whatever, BUT I have been working my ass off trying to reach these girls.  I haven’t really talked about what I’m facing on the blog I guess so let me explain.  I am teaching 4 classes from forms (grades) 1 and 2, my students are between 12 and 16.  The first 2-3 weeks of my form 1 classes were devoted to teaching how to sound out words.  I am teaching language arts in a country where the national language is English.  Their success in every subject in contingent on their understanding and ability in English, no pressure.  Don’t worry though the national syllabus that I am supposed to be following is years ahead of anything my girls can handle.  

I’d just like to say, teaching is seriously hard.  I’m not kidding, it’s REALLY hard, but it’s amazing when you can see they understand something, or when you can see their improvement.  For example, there is this one girl in one of my classes who is obviously smart, but she’s terrible, she makes my class so much harder and can have the WORST attitude.  Well a few weeks ago I was teaching reading comprehension, for some reason my students in form 2 can read, but they take no meaning from the words they read.  Anyway, I wrote a simple paragraph from a story on the chalk board along with some easy questions about the paragraph.  I’m not exaggerating I had to walk them through it in a way you would never expect necessary.  Well this one, terrible, girl suddenly got it.  She was so excited and proud that she could find the answers inside the paragraph, I hope I never forget how happy it made me, granted 2 seconds later I had to threaten to throw her out of the class because she was trying to give the girls around her the answers.

Finding ways to discipline my classes and get them to respect me has been one of my biggest challenges.  Corporal punishment is just a reality here.  There’s no getting around it.  It’s in the home, it’s at school, according to many people here (and I do mean Sierra Leoneans) beating and flogging is the only way to teach African children, as if they are different than white kids.  Obviously I don’t beat my students, but the other teachers do, not easy to see and hear day after day.  That’s one of the things I’m here for though, to prove that you can get results without corporal punishment, it’s a whole Peace Corps thing, you don’t tell them what to do you show them the results of an alternative.  ANYWAY, when most of the other teacher beat them it’s hard to convince kids to listen to you when they know you won’t physically hurt them.  I can now, very proudly, say that through many manipulative competitions and behavioral peer-pressure scenarios I have my classes in as much control as any of the Sierra Leonean teachers, and I am still a safe place to my students.  Sorry if it sounds like I’m bragging, but I’m very proud that on some level the last 3 months have been successful.  

I guess since I’ve already talked as much as I have about school I’ll continue.  I was able to get almost 1000 text books donated to my school a couple months ago!  Only problem now is that they have joined the other 800 books in boxes on the library floor waiting for a place to put them.  The library at the moment consists of 8 shelves divided between the 10 different subjects taught at the school.  We really, really, need the books that are sitting in boxes right now.  What’s the problem you ask?  Well, most of the teachers at my school don’t currently understand how to use a library well, and don’t really understand the need for a library that is accessible to both students and teachers.  Let me just remind you, my teachers don’t have computers, know how to use the internet or how to google something, they use the outdated school encyclopedia if they want to check something.    Inside the boxes we have enough copies of text books that every student could have their own or share with one other person in class, big deal since right now the only information they get is what the teacher writes on the board.  My current project is figuring out how much building bookshelves and chairs will cost to make the library useable, then I will be asking around (possibly to you wonderful people) for the relatively small funds needed to give my girls a leg up.

The most important thing I can say about teaching is that I have come to really love my students, don’t get me wrong I still call them evil in my head daily, they constantly surprise and impress me.  They are so smart, but they aren’t being giving a chance to succeed.  They are growing up in a place where girls education comes after selling in the market, doing chores at the house and taking care of younger siblings.   Girls education is expensive here, not just because of school fees, but because of the money lost by them not being in the house, selling for the family or getting married young, sending a girl child to school here is a very real sacrifice for the family.   You might have guessed or already known, but I’m teaching at an all-girls school.  It kills me to look at how much the numbers of students drop as they increase in level.  It is awful to look at these girls who are so smart, have so much to say, have more personality then most people I’ve ever met, and know that less than half will graduate our equivalent of middle school.  I MIGHT have 1 or 2 girls who will make it to university, out of over 100.  On the bright side I get to see a side of them that most don’t.  Because it is an all-girls school they are as loud and obnoxious and insane as they should be.  In most parts of Sierra Leone women and girls defer to the men or boys in the room, makes it difficult to see who they really are or know what they really think.  My girls are not quiet, they are hellish and obnoxious, and I wouldn’t trade it.  Once a week we have something called, Language and Debate Society, it’s an opportunity for the girls to debate, and they LOVE it.  Because they enjoy it so much I am going to try to tart a debate club for them next term, I’m really excited about this, I think they will love it.  I want them to have a voice and I want them to have opinions and I want them to have the strength to stand up to and leave a man who beats them (terrifyingly and deadly common here), it might not have too much to do with Language Arts, but that is what I want for my girls, to be able to handle what will unfortunately be most of their realities in the future.

On a brighter note I would like to point out, mostly to my dad and my uncles, that of the teachers at school the only ones, other than me, who DO NOT beat the students are the Catholic nuns. Yes, I am working in a Catholic school… and I hang out with the nuns in the convent about once a week… and they’re some of my best friends here…  Sorry dad, I’ve gone to the dark side, not in the super religious way, just in the liking nuns way.  I’m sorry.

Home

I have been at site for 2 weeks now.  I can’t describe how strange that is.  It feels like I’ve been here for so much longer.  When I arrived here I’m not going to lie I had a moment, the kind of moment where you say to yourself, “What am I doing here”.  It lasted for about 30 minutes and then I was good.  It was partly because I was alone for the first time in 10 weeks, partly because I was suddenly expected to be a functioning volunteer, partly because there were herds of cockroaches and spiders the size of my hand, there were  many reasons (mostly the cockroaches and spiders though).  Anyway I went for a walk in to town to get my bearings and everything was good.  The people on the way in to town were so friendly and welcoming I forgot I was worried very quickly.

In the time since then I spent most of the first 3 days cleaning and painting my house.  I guess I’m a nester because now my house feels like it is 100% mine and I LOVE it.  I have a great house and I am so comfortable there it really is my home now.  I am so glad I took the time to make it my own place.  The biggest issue as you might have guessed were my new roommates, the cockroaches and MASSIVE spiders.  Let me be clear, I’m really not exaggerating, there were 30-40 cockroaches at any given time in my kitchen, even in the middle of the day, my bathroom had 10-20 also at all hours.  This is what I chose to focus on first, little did I know it was going to turn in to my very own bad horror movie, Attack of the Zombie Cockroaches.  Dun, dun, dun…  I wish I was exaggerating.  I sprayed the house, excessively, with insecticide and left for a few hours.  When I returned it was night time and I saw their bodies all over the place.  I really didn’t want to deal with it yet so I left them for morning.  They were dead, on their backs, legs curled up and everything.  Ok, so morning time, I go in to the bathroom and make my way around all the dead bodies.  As I am sitting on the toilet I look down and see the bodies between my feet is starting to move!  It was coming back to life.  I looked around at the rest of them and saw that many of them were starting to twitch too, I was out numbered, by a lot.  I had to act fast so I put on shoes and ran around my house stomping on the evil cockroaches.  I never want to hear that terrible popping, crunching noise again, that morning I heard enough for a lifetime. 

I have had many not terrifying experiences as well.  I love going to the market now.  It started as an intimidating, claustrophobic place, but now I love it.  It is one of the only places in town that you can interact with local women.   They all stay at their houses, which now that I am doing all my own cooking and cleaning I understand why, keeping a house running here takes all day and then some.  In the market though, after you get over the craziness, you can interact with them and it’s a lot of fun.  They know me now, I’m trying to learn their names, they know what I like to buy and help me find it.   We joke around now and it’s really become one of my favorite places to go. 

Peter, one of my site mates, and I went to find Teddy the poyo tapper the other day, it was better than ever.  We found him in the jungle and followed him around as he climbed and tapped the palm trees.  It was so cool, I can’t even tell you.  We talked with him about his life and he took us through a bunch of tiny trails through the jungle while we sipped on fresh poyo.  Watching him climb the trees was terrifying, the harness he uses is just a bunch of sticks tied into a circle with him and the tree trunk in the middle.  He leans back against it that’s how he keeps from falling out of the tree.   Scary. 

I have been getting to know the teachers that I will be working with as well.  This is nice.  I have one teacher that comes over and spends time with me on the patio and this is really nice.  I had dinner with her and her family the other day and it was great.  It can be a little intimidating to make new friends here with the differences in culture, but little things like that help a lot.  The family that share the compound with me are really nice.  They are always kind and helpful.  It is also really entertaining to be so close to them, I can watch how they are and how they do things without being involved. 

I’m going to wrap up here by saying that I am so excited to be in my new home.  It’s a great place and there are some really wonderful people around me here.  Hope everything is going well for all of you!

xo