Lessons in Communication

It's hard to believe we are almost through February. I will definitely miss those 3 weeks of cooler (not cold, but cooler) weather. The good news about this time of year is that there are all kinds of fruits and vegetables in the marché now. Mangos have proven to be one of those fruits that you can't eat and still look dignified (at least I can't). I've more or less given up and instead am working on a permanent mango-stash.

The girls club is still going - more or less. Out of the original 70 or so we have about 25 that come for a 2-hr meeting every Friday. I use the term "meeting" very loosely. We mostly just play soccer. I had high hopes of doing 1 hr of soccer and 1 hr of group discussion on setting goals last week. (I even had a cheesey little tie-in to how the players on the soccer field need a goal to work towards.) But we were having some problems of respect with some girls interrupting me, not listening, etc. so I ended the meeting the way any overly dramatic teenage girl would: I stormed out. They have since apologized to me and since I don't think either of us handled it well, we're going to try again next week.

Now that the heat is returning we've started sleeping outside again; this means the rat hunt is back on. Even as I write this, every few minutes I hear the pitter patter of Aaron's feet racing around the house with a shovel. And I'm pretty sure our one remaining cat is pregnant because we were lazy procrastinaters and didn't get her fixed.

Aaron and I double-teamed our 3 6eme classes this week and talked to them about study skills and effective ways to prepare for a test. We talked quite a bit about the importance of understanding concepts versus just memorizing their notebooks word-for-word. I get a lot of crazy answers on tests because students tried to memorize sentences with words they don't understand: "You can avoid malaria because of invertebrates." We'll have to see on the next test if any of it got through.

We are heading to Djibo (a town about 60km away) for a 3-day seminar on HIV/AIDS and how to do AIDS sensibilisations in village. It is really a training for people from our village and not us so that they can be the ones giving the seminars in village when we return. Aaron is bringing two women from the hospital and I have asked some of the other female teachers to come. I gave them about a 4 week warning before the training, which put us right on schedule to find out whether or not they were coming the morning we are supposed to leave. They have to have permission from the school to miss three days of class which requires a written letter from Peace Corps to our regional school director. This isn't a big deal, except nobody was willing to break the news to me so they sat on that information for 3 weeks and didn't let me know until I finally asked our proviseur what the holdup was. I'm sure it will all work out somehow.

Just as a side note, I recently finished a book called "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance". I've heard great reviews of this book and had been wanting to read it for a while. But, as I told Jason, it turned out the be the worst book I ever enjoyed reading. The plot was interesting, but the writing was so intolerable I couldn't stand it. I would gladly take James Joyce and a punch to the gut over reading some of those chapters again.

Val and Keith, we finally got your package last week. Our mailman likes to toy with our emotions. This is his favorite game (and we fall for it every time): it's 4:59 pm on a Friday, the post closes in 1 minute and though mail has come today, the packages aren't ready to be picked up until tomorrow. I'm riding my bike home when the postman waves me down and tells me I have a package. He says if I go grab the slip from my box, I can pick it up tonight: what luck! So I run for the box, fumble a little with the key because I am so excited, grab the slip and start heading for the main office door. Somewhere in the 45 seconds it took me to grab my slip, he has closed the door and locked it. The post office is closed. And no, nobody can pick up packages after hours. Sometimes I hate that guy.