So the community house is coming together. Interesting enough, I lived in Burkina Faso for 2 whole years before and never saw the first lady once. I am back and within 2 weeks, I saw her twice. On October 10th we had a huge inauguration with the first lady present. It was such a nice ceremony to get the ball rolling for the academic year. All the girls, their parents, and other community members were present. It was quite nice. You can see a few pictures from the ceremony. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good shot of the first lady, but she was indeed there J.
I have been continuing to work on the community analysis and trying to understand the needs of the community house. The major concern is a water shortage. Water pressure in the town is overall pretty low, but it became pretty serious for 3 weeks, nearly the entire month of November. The community house and my house since it is in the same zone, and all of my neighbors had no running water. It was nuts. There are a few water pumps in town so we would buy water in town and fill up large containers with water to be able to continue with business as usual. The water shortage put a fork into lots of things. I was preparing to start a gardening project at the community house to help with 2 major needs, improving the value of the food served and also incoming generation. Whatever we would not use at the house could be sold in the market to help make the house more self-sustaining. Without a reliable source of water, a gardening project is out of the question. Thankfully, water is coming back as it was before, with low pressure. Apparently, there was a machine broken at the water plant and it took a little bit for them to be able to fix it. In terms of ensuring that low water pressure and also water shortages will no longer be a problem, a water tower is going to be built in the month of January. So maybe the gardening project is still a possibility, but we will see in the next few months.
Work with the girls…
I work with the dorm supervisor creating life skills training, study skills training, and planning other activities for the girls. On Thursday afternoons, when the girls are out of school, we have life chats. We talk about hygiene, decision making, self-confidence, you know, overall life skills topics. On Saturdays, I have an English club to help the girls prepare to pass their national tests. While this is a francophone country, they take English and German as high school foreign language requirements. Since I am here, they can profit from having a real English-speaker to practice with. The other days of the week during the day I help plan activities with the dorm supervisor, create study groups, address concerns that pertain to the life of the girls, etc. And in the evenings, I usual stick around to help the middle school girls with their math and English homework. The high school girls I help only with English. The way that math is notated in French, versus in English is weird and I don’t want to lead anyone into a lost hole…lol.
My hope is to also get some life skills training or some sort of conference going for the high schools in the area. I would like to work with both young ladies and gentlemen. The reality is, even if you empower a girl with lots of tools to be able to navigate the world, it is important that both the girls and the boys at the same time are learning better decision making skills, and setting life goals and plans. Heck, I have never seen a teen pregnancy with a girl doing this all on her own (let’s forget the possibility for artificial insemination for the sake of the reality here) so that means that young men need to be a part of the discussion as well. As well as get a tree planting campaign going. We will see how planning goes in the upcoming months.
Overall, work is going well and I thoroughly enjoy working with teenagers. Plus since I am a foreigner, they think I am pretty funny and interestingJ. They are a delight to work with and I am glad I am here to share in a small portion of their lives and personal development. Hopefully, I can leave some positive impression with them and also connect them with local women that they can look up to and learn from. Realistically, it will be their stories that they will likely be able to connect with and be able to see themselves reaching in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment