Teaching, etc.
I’m spending a lot of my time teaching. I made a deal with the administrators that I would teach the IT classes, at least for the first term, as long as another Gambian teacher was present for every class to absorb the lesson and get used to the material. My priority is teaching the teachers, not the students. This has largely not happened, and I’m teaching almost all the classes solo. I am working on ways to rectify this situation. I teach grades 7-12, and each grade has two classes of students except for 12 which has only one, so I teach every lesson 11 times. I have planned and taught 4 lessons so far. The first two were in the classroom and covered “what is IT?” and “why learn computers.” The second lesson basically consisted of: what exports does The Gambia have? Not much. Will The Gambia be economically successful by continuing current economic activities? No. Does she have the resources required to provide IT services? Yes. Your country’s only chance for economic growth and development is IT because you don’t have any other resources. That’s why you should learn computers. The most recent lessons have been introductions to the lab and parts of the computer.
When I was teaching my “why learn computers” lesson to grade 12, the principal attended the lesson. It went rather well, and I think he was impressed, because after the lesson he indicated that he had “found” a small amount of fuel for the generator and I could use it with a few days notice.
Ah, the generator. The one we had was enormous and new, but we had no fuel for it. The educational bureaucracy, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to replace our generator with a bigger one, but still give us no fuel. The new one arrived and was installed yesterday (pic below).
I started an impromptu computer club at the lower basic school close to my family compound. There’s a very helpful teacher there that helps teach. We only have two working (old) computers at the moment, but they have a solar power setup and are expecting more donated computers soon. Attendance is wide open to anyone at all. This seems promising.
Last weekend I biked to Basse (the big-ish town across the river) to see some people, visit the Peace Corps transit house there, and do some banking and shopping. I left before 6 in the morning on Saturday in pitch black, almost got lost going out of town, and rode for about 40 minutes before it got light. The trip there was just under 2.5 hours, and it was pretty burly. I tossed the bike into a row boat operated by a dude and crossed the river to Basse. The transit house is actually pretty nice and a heck of a lot more chill than the Fajara transit house near the coast. Less people is good. There is a shower, and they even have power some of the time. Sleeping is never as comfortable when I’m not in my awesome hammock, but it was tolerable. I’ll bring the hammock next time. I met Ian, Josh, Ellie (briefly), Katie A, and Brendan there.
Ian, Katie, Brendan and I visited a pal at the MRC campus (medical research council) – they have a little slice of western civilization carved out down there – A/C and everything. Swank. We had Korean food and beers and it was glorious. I hung out there again the next night for nachos. After returning to the house, I became sick, blew up from both ends most of the night, and did not return to Diabugu the next morning as planned. I rested Monday and rode back Tuesday morning, then passed out for most of Tuesday. I was feeling pretty well by Wednesday.
At some point I probably mentioned that the big battery I got from dude for my solar power setup was bunk and I needed a new one. After one and a half months of charging the battery by solar panels I have successfully revived the battery to working condition, as well as identified the source of my problem running my laptop and inverter (separate incidents, man!). I won’t tell Jim and the Brain Trust this, because I asked those engineering dudes for help with this issue, and they’ll think I’m an amateur if they learn I was using insufficient wiring in my female cigarette lighter adapter plug for the amperage I was trying to draw. I re-wired the behotch and it works like a champ now (pic below). I can run my laptop, my inverter, two fans, two lights, and some speakers all at the same time now. I still want to get a sweet solar panel, and plan to do that asap.
I finished the Fountainhead. I would like to retract my previous statement regarding “fine literature and popular fiction,” not because It’s completely inaccurate, but because it is a low quality statement that does not provide useful information.
I thought the book was fantastic. Each of the major heroes, anti-heroes, and monuments to popular mediocrity maintain their representative accuracy and relevance 66 years later, and the ideological game of rock-paper-scisors the book’s primary conflict presents holds water, in my opinion. Egoism and nihilism hold a dynamic, equal tension until the nihilist finds reason in the ego, and flips inside out to form an ego of her own. Communalism or communism or socialism grows powerful by feeding on societal and personal mediocrity and thereby pulls the rug out from under fascism, which subsequently self-destructs. Egoism/capitalism eventually launches a frontal assault on communalism and defeats it on ideological grounds.
If they could meet, I think Henry D. Thoreau and Ayn Rand would get along.
The rainy season is coming to a close, and people tell me the cool weather is coming. I can’t wait.
Heather and I get to talk pretty much every day either by email, google chat or phone, which is awesome. It’s totally incongruous to sit outside talking with my host family while chatting on my phone to america. Heather tells me she reads this thing, so I’ll take this opportunity to conduct some empirical science: let’s see how long it takes her to notice I called her an enormous poo poo head right here on the Intermess for everyone to see. She also read the Fountainhead in like 3 days, while going to school full time(?). We try to read the same books – I know it’s adorable, you don’t have to tell me.
alternating feelings of oh man im sick, i miss home family burritos heather, and this is the best thing I’ve ever done.
School!
I taught a few classes this week. The students in a single class vary in ability from American-born native english speakers familiar with computers and the internet (2 of those) to 12th graders that can barely speak english and have never seen a computer (many of those). Needless to say, developing lessons is difficult. I will be teaching each class of grades 7-9 once each week, and 10-12 twice each week, along with the other teachers I demanded to be assigned to each class period. I’ve also been tasked with the position of Class Master for 8th grade Pink. There’s a green one too, but I’m pink. This means I take attendance, facilitate choosing a class leader and assistant, and facilitate developing a sweeping schedule for the classroom. I managed to get both a boy and a girl for leader and assistant, but the resistance to a mixed gender sweeping schedule was too great and it remained all-female.
The greatest challenge at the moment is securing fuel for the generator so that I can teach computers using… computers. I have written a lengthy letter to the administration extolling the unique opportunities of infrastructure and expertise, as well as made a speech along the same lines at the general staff meeting this morning – both aiming to encourage the budgeters to budge the budget in my favor. Frankly I doubt there’s any money in the budget for fuel in the first place, and some outside party will have to supply funds or we will have to collect them from the students directly, if we are to have power for the computer classes. This is disheartening. There is a sister school to this one in Bansang, equally well-equipped. The President (of the country) provided 10,000 liters of fuel to the school because he was impressed with their attendance and test scores. When he visited my school, which is in a Sarahule community notorious for their opposition to western education as an affront to Islam, he found one of the most expensive, well-equipped schools in the country miserably under-attended and was duly unimpressed. He gave the school nothing, in fact threatening to convert it to a military barracks if attendance did not improve.
Apart from all that uplifting stuff, I have been reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It’s definitely popular fiction not fine literature (what the hell is that?) but I like it a lot. It’s about as subtle as a super hero/villain comic book in depicting the spectrum of social, political, and philosophical structure in this country and the ultra-idealistic champions of the various terminal regions of said spectrum. I’ll reserve certain judgements until I finish it.
I attended a football game – one of the teams was the Civil Servants, on which some of my fellow teachers played. They won gloriously, and have another game tonight.
Friday was grounds maintenance day, so there were no classes, and students brought various field implements to school, such as machetes, hoes, and rakes. Each class was assigned an area of the school grounds to clear. This is what happens when there are no lawn mowers. Think that’d fly in the States?
And finally, on a more serious note – I spied my little brothers Mussa and Bubba wranglin’ this goat through my front door. Mussa is on the ground behind the goat in one of them laughing hysterically because the goat kicked him over. These boys are impervious to pain.