Projects

I was going to send this to my mom, but realized I was only talking about project ideas and that, maybe, if I shared them with readers, I would feel more compelled to follow up and do the projects I have ideas about. Let me start with current projects

1. Literacy classes- They are going well, but it is definitely a dooni dooni (slowly, slowly) project. The teachers have low literacy levels themselves, and it takes them a while to read and write the words to their students. It is amazing how much they have been able to learn thus far given that they have never been to school before. In my village, there are three signs to read. There are signs at both schools, signs at the entrance to my village, and a sign at the CESCOM. If you never saw the symbols we use for letters until you were 25, 40, or 70 in some cases, you can imagine how hard it would be to differentiate between a b, d, or p or tell the difference between an f, t, and r and so on. Most women have learned the sounds of the letters and can write them, but right now they are all trying to put the sounds together to form syllables. We have not gotten to the level of words yet. In Bambara, nearly every syllable is made of a vowel and consonant. Teachers and I repeatedly ask, b ni a, o ye mun ye ( b and a made what word)? They repeat the sounds of b and a but have not yet figured out how to put them together. I give them hints sometime. For example, n and a obviously forms na, which means sauce in Bambara so I ask the women, what do you eat every day? They say to and- and then they get a big smile on their face- na and suddenly understand the word. At any rate, this is going well enough, but we need to start sooner next year so that women have more time to study. The rainy season will be here in a month so they will soon stop studying, before they have really learned to read. Dooni dooni though.

World Map
I am working on the world map in the 9th grade classroom. I have finished painting all 9 colors, but I missed a few countries/ some were not on the map so I need to fill in the gaps, label the countries, and put up the Peace Corps logo. Then I want to have a conversation with the geography teacher to talk about ways to incorporate the map into the work he does. After this is finished, I want to do a Mali map to paint the different regions in different colors, draw in the roads and rivers, and big cities. Also, I want to do the letters and numbers in the elementary school (2nd graders can't recognize letters and their sounds) and later do more drawings in my free time, etc.

Dictionary Translations
I have translated 30 pages of Bambara/French dictionary so it is now Bambara/English. I still need to type up most of the words. I have 20 left until I finish my portion. Our goal is to get this dictionary published so English speakers can learn Bambara/ new volunteers don't have to spend their time translating the dictionary and reinventing the wheel all of the time.

Health Presentations
I had one conversation with the 7th graders, where we talked about things we could do well. We wrote our names on a piece of paper and drew pictures to show what we did well. Then each student presented their photo. It went so so because my language wasn't the best at the time, and the students are not used to using their imagination. They asked me how they might draw a picture of them cooking instead of using their imagination to draw the picture. Students are never asked to tell their opinion or use their imagination so it was very challenging for them. Plus, they were nervous to present in front of the other girls. It didn't help that the village came running when they heard a toubab was teaching a lesson at the class.
My second presentation went much better. I did a presentation, in Bambara, in front of 143 9th graders and the school director. It is called the F-chart. You show the students a bunch of pictures. The first is a picture of poop, during which you ask the students, how do you eat poop? It is amusing and gets the kids going. We talked about covering our food and water bowls, washing our hands before eating and after using the latrine, about not pooping in the fields or in the water, not getting water from dirty pumps or rivers, etc. It took about 45 minutes to complete and the kids seem to have gotten a lot out of it. Because my commune has one middle school, the students come from 6 villages. My hope is that, if I continue doing these, they will take the messages back home to their village so it reaches more people.

Future projects

Stoves
Tomorrow I am going to visit another volunteer's site. She lives in a village a little closer to the Ivory Coast than I do. I am going to work with two men in her village to make a mud stove. Right now, in my village, women just put three rocks on the ground, put their burning sticks in the middle, and put their pot on top to cook. The stove has two holes that will essentially be burners. They are side by side. You only put the burning sticks under one hole, put you carve out the area between the two burners so both sides get hot, but because their are outside walls, you don't need as much firewood to reach the temperature you want and it stays hot longer as well. Because deforestation is a HUGE problem (imagine everyone in Kansas cooking with firewood for every meal), and because women must fetch firewood (imagine going out to the country by foot to chop down trees and then carrying them back home) every day, this is a cook project to save the environment and reduce the work women do. Plus, the stove is made out of mud and dead grass so it is entirely free (only need a tomato can to make the hole between the two burners to let heat through) so everyone in my village can do it. Anyways, I am going to her village tomorrow and can hopefully build a stove and get back to my village by dark. I think I will build a model stove at my house, in my yard, so I can explain it to people. My host family is going to my first experiment. I hope they like it and tell other people in my village. Ideally, I would train a few people to do them so it is sustainable.

Neem Cream
I am also planning to start making mosquito repellent. The stuff I can make here requires a bar of soap, which I will start making too, water, some leaves from a tree, and shea butter (like the shea found in lotion). Very cheap, helps protect against malaria pretty well and people apparently like it because it is a lotion and mosquito repellent. I am going to ask the doctor to let me do demonstrations every Monday and Friday for a month when women bring their kids to be weighed. Women bring their kids each month so I could hit a lot of people in that time. Almost all women make shea of their own so all they would need to buy for this is a bar of soap so it is also a good project.

Soccer Team?
I don't have a soccer ball, but the boys play soccer everyday after school. They have two or three balls so I might ask if the teacher knows where I can buy a new ball for the girls. I have been thinking of starting a team, but the girls are so busy everyday that I don't know how many can come practice during the week. I received a bunch of soccer jerseys from the Peace Corps (a bunch just showed up in Mali in the office so they gave them to education volunteers) and need to put them to use! Feel free to send me a ball!


Village Ideas
Soon the Sikasso coordinator is going to do a needs assessment in my village to help me figure out my next big funded project. I would to build latrines but want the ideas from the villagers first. I want to do education things as well but don't really know what that would be. As it is, I am going to keep doing presentations at the school and introduce an idea to make the students try harder. You just give the top female student a scarf and the top male student a hat to wear for the week. I bought a scarf in Senegal to use and think I will donate my Jayhawk hat for the guys because I never wear it.