Internship, a typical day, and an atypical surprise!

April 24^th, 2011

Just before sitting down to write a new blog post, I found an egg on my bed, on top of the mosquito net, with no idea how it got there. I asked my sister Mounasse about it and she told me that the chicken sometimes comes into the rooms and lays eggs there! Definitely an Easter surprise if ever there was one. In any case, we saved the egg and I thankfully didn’t sit on it or anything.

Time is really flying by, and I can hardly believe that I only have a week left in Potou, and then a week in Dakar after that. It’s going to be really difficult to say goodbye to my family, and already they are telling me that they’re going to miss me when I leave. I don’t want to think about that yet!! I’ve really grown close with my sisters. In addition, my communication skills have improved a whole lot since being here. My Wolof, though far from fluent, is passable, and I can usually get across what I want to say, and I can sometimes even follow conversations that my family members have between each other.

My internship is still unfortunately far from perfect. I feel like one of the major problems for me is lack of communication, and the fact that sometimes the people in positions of responsibility are not responsible at all. For example, my supervisor the principal, while a nice guy, doesn’t really have any idea what’s going on in the school, and doesn’t really tell me anything. The first Monday back from vacation, I came to school at 8 as always, and the principal told me I would be in M. Diallo’s class that day. Until that point I had been mostly just observing in classes and had taught once or twice. I get to class and sit down at a desk, thinking I will be just observing. Five minutes pass and M. Diallo isn’t there yet, and then it hits me: M. Diallo isn’t coming. I have to teach this class for two hours. I hadn’t made a lesson plan or anything, but fortunately I had some grammar review planned that I had done with the informal classes during the vacation. The class went well, despite my total lack of planning, but I was extremely frustrated with the principal afterwards.

Lack of communication seems to be a theme that has plagued my internship. I’ve had the most success communicating directly with the teachers themselves, but even then I sometimes come to class not sure if I will be just observing and occasionally helping or having the whole class to myself. For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to organize a computer training for the teachers of the primary school, and although the teachers seem to be supportive, it’s been very difficult to organize. We had it all set in place that I would conduct a training session today from 9-11 AM, so I woke up early, had breakfast, and made it to the primary school by 8:55. No one was there yet, so I waited (I’ve learned that I need to bring a book with me everywhere I go). No one showed up. I waited until 9:30 before calling the director of the primary school, who told me that the teachers were too tired from another seminar and decided not to come to the training today. However, no one thought to call me and tell me this news. It’s these organizational things that have been really frustrating, and I feel like I am often in the dark.

In addition, one of my internship frustrations has been the way that English is taught in the schools. It’s a very structured approach, and barely requires any effort or creativity on the part of the teacher. Every lesson is divided into Pre-Reading (vocabulary), While Reading (comprehension questions) and Post-Reading (grammar exercises, usually). The approach seems very canned and I don’t think it facilitates students learning very well. I know half the class probably can’t follow the lesson, but I also feel pressure from the teachers to follow this pedagogical method. In any case, there is no creativity involved. During the informal classes, I asked the students to write a story and they had a hard time stringing sentences together. One student literally paraphrased a passage from the book. I really wish that I could do more fun things with my classes, but the educational system is so structured that I don’t think the students would even understand what I was trying to do. I’m really glad that I got at least a little chance to do that with my informal classes, though. The students will remember more if they are having fun while learning, in my opinion. I taught them Rock, Paper, Scissors, and there are still students who come up to me and play it.

On a different tangent, let me describe one of my typical days in Potou:

7 AM: I wake up to my alarm or to a rooster crowing. It’s already light out, so I hop out of bed, use the pit toilet, wash my face and hands, and get dressed. Even though I have just rolled out of bed, I make sure to greet everyone I see, since it’s considered rude not to. This usually consists of “Bonjour!! Nelaw nga bu baax?” “Waaw! Nelaw naa bu baax!” (Did you sleep well? Yes, I slept very well!).

7:20-7:30 AM: Eat breakfast, which is café au lait (Nescafe, powdered milk, and sugar) and a huge piece of bread (we’re talking half a long baguette) with butter. The first few weeks I had a lot of trouble eating it all, but now I can scarf it down in five minutes flat…I think my stomach is expanding.

7:30-8 AM: Walk to school, either through the market (lots of people) or through the fields (less people, and better if I am running late).

8 AM- noon: Teach or help out in the classes

12:30 PM: Return home for my lunch break. Usually my sisters have already started making lunch, but sometimes we have to go to the boutique for miscellaneous items.

1-3: Help out cooking lunch, which is usually ceeb u weex (fish, sauce, vegetables, rice) or ceeb u xonq (same thing, but with tomato sauce). Alternately, I can drift in and out of the kitchen, and sometimes I will take this time to nap, lesson plan, or just hang out with my sisters.

Lunch: Anywhere from 2-4, we eat lunch. We have a communal bowl and I have been trying to learn to eat with my hands the way they do. There is a special technique to making a little ball of rice with your hands and shoveling it into your mouth without dropping any, which I am in the process of mastering. A few weeks ago I told my sisters I wanted to eat with them, and so now I always eat lunch and dinner with them, squeezed around a communal bowl with at least 10 other people! Even though it's crowded, I much prefer it to awkwardly eating alone with my father. I always get more than enough to eat, and sometimes my sisters will even go as far as to put food on my spoon while I am chewing.

3:30: Return to school

4-6: Afternoon class, sometimes with a break at 5 for prayer, but sometimes not (I’m not sure why this isn’t consistent).

6: Return home, rest a little bit, and take a shower if I didn’t take one during my lunch break. One thing that’s very different than the US is that the preferred shower time is during the afternoon, since the water is warmer. Also, all my sisters change clothes right after their shower, so they look snazzy at night, then they sleep in their clothes, and don’t change them again until their shower the next day. I always feel a little weird in the morning when I am wearing fresh clothes and they are all in their clothes from the night before! Also this is the time when I sometimes run errands with my sisters: to the boutique, to the mill, etc.

7 PM: Help with dinner, which is always delicious and doesn’t get boring. Sometimes we have savory things and sometimes we have sweet things, like laax or fonde, both of which are millet-based. Usually any dinner preparation involved a lot of pounding with a mortar and pestle and chopping vegetables, and these tasks are usually easy enough to be entrusted to me.

9 PM: Dinner! Again, usually around a communal bowl with the exception of a few dishes like fattaya, which are easier to serve individually.

9:30 PM: Hang out with my sisters and wait for someone to make attaaya, though usually I am pretty tired so I end up dozing off.

11 PM: Usually I will wait until I have had my first glass of attaaya before excusing myself to go to bed, while my sisters are still up.

11:30 PM: Use the internet if I have it, get ready for bed, and journal. I’m so proud of myself that I’ve been journaling every day, and now it would be weird to go to bed without it. I’m almost out of pages in my journal!

Midnight: Crawl into my mosquito net and go to sleep, only to start the whole thing over again the next day!

That’s all for now! It’s really hard to believe that I only have two weeks (now less!) left in Senegal.

Edited to add: This morning the chicken snuck into my room twice in the space of ten minutes, looking for its egg! It’s a reminder that I should probably keep my door firmly shut. Sneaky chicken.