I have been in Bol for a month and a day. Pretty good, huh? 23 months to go! The mail truck run came yesterday. Nelson (Peace Corps Director in Chad) was supposed to come visit, but he is sick, so will come in February. I was a little disappointed, but now I have something to look forward to in February. Still, I was so happy to see Al Hadj, one of the PC chauffeurs. It’s funny how close-knit the PC team is. Even the chauffeurs, who you’d expect to somehow be less important, are such an essential part of the team. Funny how spending 10 hours in a Land Cruiser on non-roads at emotionally draining times (i.e. going to site) makes you appreciate people. So the much anticipated mail run cane and I was left with four packages and a million letters. I told myself that I was only going to open one package per day, in order to extend the joy. That lasted about an hour, and then I tore through them all in about 30 seconds. Of course, I then sat on the floor, surrounded by brown shipping paper and various American toiletries and candies, and cried, cried, cried. There was no one real reason for the breakdown, other than the reminders of home and family. Africa is hard and it seems even harder when I think about how hard it is. It’s a vicious cycle.
So what do I eat here? I eat every meal with my family because a) I have no desire to go to the market every day, spend 2 hours cooking each meal, and then eat alone and b) it reminds me of eating dinner together at home. So for breakfast we eat this local pasta that’s kind of milky oily sugary sauce. There are 4 other meals that are rotated. 1. There’s fish and rice (at least once a day) – whole fish on top of rice with a red, spicy sauce. It’s slightly ironic that I eat so much fish now, as I flat refused to eat fish as a kid because of a fear of choking on a fish bone. I should mention here that meals are served on one communal platter and you eat with your hands. So that means you grab a chunk of fish, suck the meat off the bones, and spit out the bones on the ground. Also, men and women eat separately, so I eat with my sisters. My mom eats by herself, because she is old and my sisters are l-o-u-d and young. 2. Bouille (pronounced bwee) made from sweetened whole milk, pounded peanuts and (again) rice. It’s delicious and warming on those chilly cold-season nights. 3. Boule – Hmm, what to say about boule? Boule and I have had a rocky relationship. The sorghum boule I ate in the south during training was disgusting – I could barely choke it down. But here, they make it with corn and I find myself thinking “Gee, hope it’s boule for dinner!” Boule is a congealed flour/water mixture that looks like a jello mold. Women pound the grain (sorghum, millet, rice or corn) in a big mortar and pestle to get the flour, then spend hours boiling and stirring the flour and water. It’s served with a sauce of some kind – okra (snot sauce), sheep meat, or camel meat (I’ve never chewed anything longer). You break off a little chunk, form it into a ball and drag it through the sauce. And the fourth meal is…oh; guess there’s three. So, no, I don’t get a lot of variety, but I’ve adapted and I certainly don’t go hungry. I take my vitamins and buy fruit (mangoes, papayas, guavas, bananas, oranges, yum!) on market day, so I’m not malnourished or anything. I also have a stash of peanuts and dates in my house and I drink a lot of powdered milk. Yum! I taught my sisters “yum” so now we all say it when we eat.
Teaching is going very well. It’s so fun! They had only given me 9 hours to teach per week, which left me with a lot of free time to sit on my cot and wonder what the hell I’m doing in Africa. But I asked them to give me another class, so now I have 12 hours. I teach sixieme (7th grade) and cinqieme (8th) grade. I have two classes of each. It’s a little like the old one room schoolhouse days in that I have students who are 18-19-20, etc. who have failed, or missed years of school for one reason or another. I do feel like Anne of Green Gables of Laura Ingalls Wilder when I walk out of my mud classroom and the students cry, “Goodbye, teacher!” My classrooms are all made of mud and are in pretty bad shape with huge cracks in the walls, window shutters falling off, doors half-destroyed, etc. But all the kids have paper and pens, desks, (no books though) and the classrooms have chalkboard, so that’s a plus. The rest of the students, grades 9-13, have a big 2-story (!!!) school building which is in good shape. I am so lucky to be here in Bol, where the school runs well and has good facilities. The majority of the teachers in Chad are on strike and have been since November because they haven’t been paid. They haven’t been paid! It’s a huge problem, Teacher, doctors, nurses, etc are government employees and frequently schools and hospitals will be shut down for months because the teacher, docs, etc. haven’t been paid and go on strike. I don’t know how the teachers manage to support their families with no money. But here in Bol, the teachers got paid and so school has actually been in session since October (absolutely unheard of in Chad!) I’m lucky. What is the government doing with the money from the oil? (There is an oil pipeline that runs from the south of Chad into Cameroon. The $$ were supposed to go into education.). How do you embezzle that much money? Anyway, my students are very enthusiastic and so fun! The lack of resources is challenging, but I can pretty well manage with what I’ve got (blackboard and chalk)
So far, this whole experience has been great for my classroom management skills. If I can wrangle African kids in a language I only kind-of know (French), surely I can wrangle American sophomores! Though the American sophomores aren’t nearly so enthusiastic as my Bol kids…
I have also been teaching members of my family English. My next door neighbor in the concession is the oldest son of my host dad. He lives there with his wife and 3 small kids. He works as an agricultural agent and is always impressed when I understand his talks about corn hybrids and cultivation methods, etc. He loves to teach me about the history of Chad and all it’s ethnic groups. I have a big map of Chad in my house and he flipped out when he saw it and spent 45 minutes explaining nomadic agriculture to me. He studied English all through high school and still remembers quite a bit, so it’s fun to sit and work with him.
My 16 year old bro, Ibrahim, and I do Arabic-English lessons everyday – a half hour of English and a half hour of Arabic = win/win. He has never studied English, and it’s fun to start from the very beginning. He studies Sudanese Arabic at school. Chadian Arabic is apparently the backwoods hillbilly version of Arabic. So if I went to Egypt or the Middle East with my Chadian Arabic, I’d be totally out of luck. Same with Chadian French in Paris. When I watch French news channels on my host dad’s TV, I can barely understand what’s being said.
