Well it’s been a
while, I know. I’m sorry. The past few months have been crazy BUT I am happy to
report that I survived year one of school!
Where to begin?
At the end of
April, I had a nice treat: Jessie, one of my friends from study abroad in Mali,
came to visit. I went to Conakry to pick her up at the airport, which was
interesting as it was my first time since swearing in last September. Our trips
to Conakry are very regulated now because of unrest surrounding the upcoming
elections (more on that later), so getting in was a bit of a maze. To avoid a
major artery in the city that can be “hot,” I had to wind through taking three
separate taxis and kind of guessing where I was supposed to get out of each
one. Taxis in Conakry are the major mode of transportation; they are not,
however, what you’d picture when I say “taxi.” Each takes its own fixed route,
picking up passengers along the way and dropping them off when they ask, kind
of like a bus. And, in true Guinean fashion, passengers are nice and cozy inside:
two sharing the passenger seat, and four in the back. Fortunately, over the
past 11 or so months I’ve gotten really good at asking Guineans for help, so
many helped me find my way to the Peace Corps office.
In any case,
Jessie arrived; we spent a day in Conakry exchanging money and relaxing, and
then headed to my village. I kind of forgot just how awful traveling in Guinea
is as I’ve become numb to it, so I felt pretty bad putting Jessie through a
tortuous 12 hour bush taxi ride on horrible roads, but arriving to my hut and
falling asleep under the stars (sleeping outside due to hot season) made it
worth it. Jessie spent a week in Cissela. She came to school with me everyday,
which was fun for me and for my students and the other teachers were thrilled,
announcing her presence at the raising of the flag with such pride. She came
with me for all of my daily duties, collecting water at the pump, going to
Banko (a neighboring village) for market day, and meeting with my girl’s club.
My host family (especially the petits) is still asking about Jessie everyday,
saying, “When will she come back?” All in all, she definitely fit in very well.
The one low part
of her visit was when Mariame, one of my 10th grade students, passed
away, which was certainly not easy. She’d been sick for some time and had
missed the past several months of school, but I was still shocked and upset.
Jessie accompanied me to the funeral, wearing a borrowed headscarf from my host
family, and she got to hear the utterly heart-wrenching screams coming from the
mourning mother’s mouth. Once one person starts to cry, others begin, and
there’s no shame in it at all: they are wailing. Not an easy sound to hear. Mariame’s
body arrived in a taxi from Kouroussa, a town 90k away where she’d been sent to
the hospital the night before, and several of my male students carried her out
on a board covered by a sheet. She was buried in Cissela’s cemetery, on a road
out of town. The next day, our entire school went to the mourning family’s
house to pay our respects, sitting on benches within their circle of huts. A
number of people gave speeches in Malinke: our assistant principal, the village
chief (my host father), and the village doyen. We collected money from the
students to help the family pay for the funeral costs, which can be really expensive.
(For example, the family had to pay for a taxi to drive her body back to
Cissela. No hearses in Guinea.) My principal and the other teachers are
heartbroken. Although sickness and death are certainly more commonplace here
than in the U.S., they did not take the death of a student lightly. Just a few
weeks ago I was with my principal in his office; we came across Mariame’s file
and he began to cry. There were three I.D. photos of her inside, and he said we
must give them to her family because pictures are so rare here and they’d need
a way to remember her.
In any case,
Jessie was there for all of this, which was certainly a cross-cultural
experience for her (and for me, of course). After her week in Cissela, she bid
farewell to my village and we headed to Dalaba, a city in the mountains. It
happened to be my birthday and it was really lovely – we spent the day with
several other volunteers eating ice cream, playing mini golf on a very old and
crumbling course built by some French folk, and going out to a few bars in the
evening. The next day, we headed to Doucki where I’d spent spring break. We did
the K.A.H. (kick ass hike) yet again, which was equally as exhausting but also
as beautiful the second time around. I think Jessie especially liked the guide,
Hassan; he may just be the most eccentric Guinean I’ve met. After Doucki, we
went back to Conakry and I bid Jessie farewell. Taking her to the airport was weird, she was about to head to Germany
and all I wanted to do was jump into her suitcase and go eat cheese and drink
beer and be in Europe for a little. But my time will come.
I finally made
it back to my site and swore I would avoid traveling for several weeks; two
Conakry trips in one month equals 48+ hours in a car. That week back was my
last week of classes. (Well, it wasn’t supposed to be but they moved the
national exams to 2 weeks earlier due to elections at the end of June, so we
had to quickly finish everything up.) The finale was a bit of a rush with no closure,
since both the students and the teachers were surprised that everything ended
so quickly.
The following
week was the beginning of national exams.
In Guinea (much like in France), there are three week-long exams: the
entrance exam into collège (middle school) for 6th graders, the brevet
for entrance into lycée (high school) for 10th graders, and the bac
for entrance to university for terminale (final year of high school) students.
The first week was the exam for the youngest level. Cissela’s primary school
was a testing center for the surrounding six primary schools, so we had an
influx of youngsters, several of whom stayed in the living room of my host
family’s house. My principal asked that I help out with the three-day test,
either as a surveillante (proctor) or with paperwork in the office. When I
showed up on the first day, he pulled me aside and told me the delegué, sent
from the Ministry of Education to run the exam, decided to not have me proctor,
because I was not a “Guinean national” and may have “moral problems” with how
they run exams. IN OTHER WORDS, he was saying I’d be too strict with cheating. Well…
more on that later, but I said okay and went to the office to help out with all
of the paperwork. Really makes you appreciate excel when you have to calculate
hundreds of averages and make spreadsheets by hand.
During the
moments when work slowed down in the office, I was able to walk around and see
what was going on in the classrooms. Honestly, what I saw was really upsetting.
I always knew that cheating was a problem in Guinean education, but I did not
think it would be like what I saw. I was expecting the proctors to turn a blind
eye to students cheating off of other students, but what I saw was proctors writing the answers to every question on the
board. For every subject. Everyday. In every room. The first day, I tried
to pull my principal aside and tell him what was going on in the rooms, and he
said, “Oh, that is really not good.” Yet… he did nothing about it. The problem
is just systemic. Even the delegué was in on the charade. The rules for
proctors written by the Ministry of Education are clear and what you would
expect: they are not allowed to help or explain the questions in any way, they
are not to read the answers students are writing, they are not to sit down or
stand by the door of the classroom, etc….yet I saw each of these things occur
multiple times. Needless to say, I was really upset by the end of the week. I
just felt like this system of education is so broken and it’s not going to
change anytime soon, because even the people at the top (like the delegué) are
closing their eyes to fraud. On our last day, while we were cleaning up, the
D.P.E. (the head of education in my prefecture…basically, my principal’s boss)
stopped by to check in on the exam to see if had gone well. The moment he saw a
Peace Corps volunteer was there, he was upset that I wasn’t a proctor and
insisted that I would proctor the brevet the next week. My principal told me
that this was a huge honor and that he was so excited on behalf of our school
that I’d be working for the exam.
Well, I was
very, very worried about this situation. I couldn’t turn down the position
because it was such an honor, but I was not about to stand by while such
obscene cases of cheating went on in the exam. I told myself that if I saw
anything I was really uncomfortable with, I’d walk away and tell them I
couldn’t continue proctoring for the rest of the week. The brevet was in
Sanguiana, a village about 50k east of Cissela on the route nationale. I was
planning on going there even before the proctoring position was offered,
because I wanted to accompany my 30 10th graders for the week. Getting
there was… interesting, to say the least. My school teamed up with a
neighboring village to charter a giant, American school bus to take us. About
80 people piled in, with three to a seat, people sitting on the aisles, and two
on the roof with our luggage. The bus needed to be pushed to get started, which
was quite a feat of strength by the men pushing. While the drive is only 30
miles, it took about two hours because the road is awful, and we arrived while
the sun was setting. All of my
students and my principal stayed in a big, abandoned house, sleeping on prayer
mats on the floor, but fortunately I was able to stay in another volunteer’s
hut for the week.
As for the exam.
The delegué this time around was young and meant BUSINESS. Let me just say that
my faith was restored in the Guinean education system. He was really hard on us
proctors, if only because he knew many among us would try to “help” students on
problems, or would allow cheating between students. So really, I was allowed to
be as strict as I wanted, and it was all falling under the delegué’s wishes. I
developed a bit of a reputation amongst the students, who knew that “madame”
was very strict and watched me like a hawk to see which room I was assigned to
each day, shrieking if they saw me go in their own. It was a bit tricky working
with the other proctors, as we were assigned two to a room, and they weren’t
very accustomed to my way of working. Of the fifteen proctors, three of us were
women, and I was by far the youngest. Regardless, I was happy to be part of an
exam that I can say was done, for the most part, legitimately. The other
proctors definitely allowed a level of cheating between students (chatting and
showing their neighbors answers), but it was certainly an improvement from what
I had seen the week before.
Aside from the
exam itself, I had a really wonderful time in Sanguiana. I spent my days after
the exam at my students’ lodging, helping them study for various subjects,
answering hundreds of questions about America, and taking my meals with them.
It really made me appreciate them; they are a really sweet and fun group. Every
evening at around 10PM a huuuuge group of boys would insist on walking me back
to my hut. I’m really sad that (hopefully) most of them will be off to high
school next year; the closest high school is 50 miles away but most of them go to
Conakry.
Now the school
year is officially over. And for the best part: I AM GOING TO FRANCE ON JUNE
25! My
whole family is flying out and we are spending a week in Toulouse, I’ll have
some time in Paris, and Ethan and I are taking a bus to Barcelona for a few
nights. Also, the political situation in Guinea actually had a turn for the
best; the opposition and the president finally made some compromises, but now
the elections will probably postponed til the fall. I’m not convinced these elections
will ever happen, but for the sake of Guinean democracy let’s hope they do.
I will be eating
cheese and drinking wine for my year anniversary with Guinea, and I can’t think
of a better way to celebrate!
