“What up!”
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“This morning for breakfast I had Café Touba and it was sooooo good. I really like it.”
Christine is one of my many international kids. She’s half Cameroonian and half Canadian. She’s also a talker. In class, I constantly have to give her the look; you know that stern teacher look that somehow tells the kids to shut it. Yeah, well, that look, apparently, I don’t have. I try to give her the look, but she keeps talking. She’s a talker.
Jorge, who introduces himself as “Jorge Che”, is a revolutionary ____________ in the making. He’s not sure what he is going to revolutionize, but, well, those are just minor details. However, he may have found his true calling in the car rapide business.
Here are some pictures from our field trip last Thursday (May 28). We toured sites less visited by some of my students. My friend Almamy was our tour guide. This curriculum of observation, examination, explanation, understanding, and listening beats classroom curriculum any day of the week. My colleague and friend Tod accompanied us and took some photos as well. Check out his blog (to the right "Lariam Dreams") for more pictures.
We had a pretty good day. The primary purpose was to get them out of the sheltered environments in which they live. They are essentially aware of the disparities in life that exist in Senegal, but I wanted to throw as much evidence at them as I could. My most memorable moment was our walk-through of Fass. I'm more interested (personally) in how kids observe these differences and either adjust, adapt, or struggle. When we arrived to the buroom butig to order the ndambe one student warned me that she was a picky eater. I told her to try it and if she didn't like it, I would eat it. She ended up eating two servings. Maybe little was learned here other than she found a new desire for beans and bread in the morning, but perhaps her perception of what she thought she knew was altered.
Here are some quotes from some kids' writing assessment they completed after the field trip:
"Fas neighborhood was my favorite place...the neighborhood is full of life. People are always moving and they all know each other."
"I enjoyed seeing a neighborhood that was largely untouched by a ridiculously high standard of living...Fas allowed me to see how normal people in Dakar live, and that Dakar can be an interesting place to live. It was also nice meeting local people, seeing the houses because it showed me that even people that are not poor live far below western standards, but that this is not always a bad thing. It makes families support each other more. Communities are friendlier and more lively."
"I found that the standard Senegalese lifestyle and way of addressing foreigners is very friendly and kind. They treat you as they were your best friends..."
"I know that people tend to think that if you have less money then life is harder and you can't be as happy, but I could see there that they were all pretty happy with what they had and did what they could to have a rather normal life."
"Struggle is the word I will use to describe their life. They fight everyday to survive, but they still have their happiness. They all kept smiling like if they were taking everything in a positive way..."
"Life in Fas is very different from life in Almadies for example. It's way poorer and dirtier, but at the same time there's way more life in Fas. People are really nice and even though they are poor, they seemed very happy. I really enjoyed their food, because it made me feel like I was more 'accepted' by the people there, I guess. It made me come out of my expat 'shell' for a bit."
In the classroom, I could never have exposed the students to what it felt like to walk the streets of Fas or to taste ndambe or to sit in a 20+ person house and share a story with a mother of many.