why, hello there.

I’ve now been in village for over a month and things are looking up. I’m getting to know people, people are getting to know me, and there always seems to be something to do. With all the Chrismas and New Years parties going on (which mostly consisted of lots of music and lots of fufu. Happy New Year !), I’ve only just started to do more formal type work and I’m hoping to expand that in the upcoming weeks.
About a week and a half ago, I had a meeting with people from one of the quartiers (or neighborhoods) and that was … a good learning experience. I wasn’t entirely sure what we were supposed to be talking about or what my counterpart (Koffi) expected to accomplish, so when it was time to start the meeting and he told me I had the floor, I did my best to keep it as general as possible and ask questions to spur discussion. The goal of the meeting ended up being to decide when would be a good time to meet again, but since there was another quartier meeting going on at the same time, they thought there was an underrepresentation of voices. SO they decided we should meet the next week at the same time to further the discussion. That eneded up being last Wednesday and everyone, including my counterpart, forgot about the meeting, so it’s postponed until next week. Lesson learned : verify with people the day before a meeting to make sure it’s still on.
Last Monday I was supposed to start teaching in the CEG, but the school director wasn’t there, so for reasons I didn’t quite understand, Koffi said I should wait until Wednesday. I did and Wednesday came around and the director was still gone, but this time Koffi said that I could go teach if I wanted. So I did. It went ok. My idea was to just introduce myself, try to get the students’ names, and go over what we would be doing for the rest of the year, which is more or less what ended up happening. The plan is that I’ll be teaching Life Skills (good communication, healthy relationships, how to make good decisions, share health/HIV/AIDS information, etc) on Monday to sixième students and on Wednesday to cinquième students (roughly the equivalent of 6th and 8th grade). The English teacher and I also went around to all the CEG classes and said we would be starting an English club next week. I’m not really sure what we’ll be doing in it specificially (should I be worried that this tends to be the case in a lot of situations ?…), but I figure I’ve got a good enough grasp on the English language to be able to figure something out.
The work I’m doing is to promote young girls’ education and empowerment, but that doesn’t mean that I’m only going to be working with young girls. This is the work of the whole community and there are numberous approaches I can take, which, I’ve been told, is both the greatest strength and weakness of the program. I’m looking forward to seeing what my work ends up looking like.