Corn to Cassava: Adventures with the Peace Corps

Friday, March 28, 2014

The Progressive Women’s Club of Pleebo High School

Arriving at site, Sarah and I talked a lot about what we wanted to accomplish with our time in Liberia. We both signed up for the Peace Corps with high hopes; education is important, and we hoped that we could make a difference in the lives of our students. After that, though, what were we going to do here? We quickly realized that though we were busy teaching, we also had a lot of free time to fill. While it has been great reading three or four books a week and discovering music on my iPod again, I wanted to fill my time with something that would be a little more productive.

Enter the women’s club. We decided to start a women’s club on our high school campus to give female students a place to learn, a place to study, and a place to be supported by each other. At the start of the second semester of this school year, we started The Progressive Women’s Club of Pleebo High School. We meet weekly and after five meetings, we have a group of about 40 students who attend. While our main focus is their education, we also want to have fun in the group.

Every day, Sarah and I now arrive on campus at 11:00 am, two hours before school starts. We open up the computer lab (which is no longer a computer lab – the computers are all “spoiled” and no one here has the know how to fix them) and host study hours for our club members. The girls are encouraged to attend at least one study hour a week, and with ten hours to choose from, many of them are coming for more than the required one hour. During these hours, the girls can study notes from any subject, study with their classmates, or work on homework assignments. They can also sit down with Sarah and I for extra practice or explanation in math or science.

Our meetings so far have been very introductory in focus, as we just want the girls to get to know each other better and to understand the goals of our group. Starting next week (this week is finals week), however, we are starting a unit on HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. We polled the girls on topics they would like to have workshops on and from that information, we are planning the rest of this year and next year. Topics include malaria, HIV, safe sex, career development, art, and science labs, and between Sarah and I we have the resources to teach much of this information. We are also looking into ways to involve NGOs from Harper and students from Tubman University as guest speakers on various topics during the next 18 months.

My favorite part of our meetings, however, has been the games we play or the activities we do at the beginning. The first meeting, we played the game where you tie a balloon to your ankle and try to pop everyone else’s balloon without getting yours popped. It got very aggressive and noisy, but we all had a good time :) Our last meeting, we introduced musical chairs, and with a group of 40 girls, it got rather hilarious rather quickly. We used Liberian music and the girls were dancing around the circle until the music stopped. Sarah and I would join in “small small” and that is always the funniest thing to them.

This women’s club has been the most fulfilling thing I have done in Liberia yet. Many of our students have been showing up for study hours regularly and Sarah and I can see definite changes in their behaviors in the classroom and their performance on quizzes and exams already. One student in particular was not a stand-out student in class by any means, but after coming to study hours and practicing and practicing with Sarah, she earned a 102% on her final exam for the marking period.

Today, Sarah gave this student and her friend their exams back (her friend earned an 88%, which is not typical for her). Upon receiving it, she proceeded to dance around the classroom and cheer, all with a huge smile on her face. As corny as it sounds, it gave us both chills. These students earned a grade much higher than they were expecting, and it showed them that they have the opportunity to pass an exam over material that at one time was difficult to them. It was an awesome moment :)

The funniest part about this women’s club, however, is the male students’ reaction to it. They are all asking when they can attend our “lady meetings” and why they cannot attend. We tell them that maybe one day we will have a meeting that they can attend, but until then, it is a club for the women of our school. We have opened up our study hours for them to attend if they wish, and a few students have started coming in to study before school. I think the biggest draw to those study hours is that it is a quiet place for them to study without the distractions of home or of the classroom before school. Whatever we can do to make them focus on their lessons just a little bit more is good for me :)

We have a lot of free time here at site, and with that, we try and get a little creative with our meals. Having gotten tired of some of our usual fare, we have tried to keep branching out with meals to see what we can create next.

Our best creation, in my opinion, has been a decent pancake recipe. Having depleted our stock of premade mixes, we had to come up with a “from scratch” recipe; using a recipe given to me by some of the LR-2 volunteers, I tweaked it a bit and came up with something that works well for us. Soon, however, our maple syrup was finished, and we have now moved onto peanut butter and honey. I cannot wait for the day when Sarah heads back to Monrovia (end of April) so she can pick up some more syrup.

The shop where we buy most of our goods from has also come through for us, and every day we visit, we find something new. As of late, we have found raspberry and apricot jam, off-brand Laughing Cow cheese, and mango and orange juice. We attempted to make French bread pizzas, but that was unsuccessful. With the cheese, we are now trying to come up with new recipes to try. I will keep you updated with the results :)

Needless to say, cooking here is an art, and it makes me excited to return home and try new things with a consistent heat source and an oven. Don’t take those for granted – they really are life-changing!

As we were approaching the Christmas/New Year’s season, Sarah and I were both curious as to what celebrations would look like here in Maryland County. Needless to say, celebrating these two holidays in Liberia was nothing like celebrating back in the States.

Christmas arrived, and to be honest, it was just another day in our life. The market was still open, though for only half the day, and everyone still had work to do. The market was much livelier leading up to Christmas, but that is to be expected. Giving gifts on Christmas is not really a thing here. Though there were a lot more dolls and stuffed animals to be found in our market, there was no Christmas trees, garland, or bows to decorate with.

Instead, Christmas turned out to be a day where everyone donned new clothes, did their hair in a new way (whether that be a different plait style or a new weave), and “bluffed” around town. Regina, our neighbor, knew that we were celebrating Christmas, and for “our day” she cooked us an entire duck with soup. It was so generous of her, and I’m grateful for her friendship. (Regina is Muslim and so Christmas was just another day for her.) Evelyn’s family also brought us over cabbage soup as a Christmas gift.

To reciprocate the wonderful gifts we have received from our neighbors over the prior few months, we had bought pineapples for every family. Pineapples were currently in season, and though they were plenty, they were also more expensive than other fruit available at the time. It was a gift that was well received and it was a nice way to share the Christmas spirit with everyone.

New Years arrived, and with it Sarah travelled to Monrovia for a meeting; subsequently, that left me here to defend the fort by myself for five days. I was a little apprehensive about it, but looking back, I’m not sure why I was so worried. The neighbors quickly adopted me as a part of their family, and the days passed by as fast as they normally do. While it was interesting to experience Pleebo by myself, I was so happy for Sarah to return. Lighting a coal pot and then cooking rice for just one person is the loneliest thing I have done since arriving in Liberia. I now understand why Liberian families are so large… :)

Monday, November 25, 2013

Reflections

If you had told me one year ago that…

1. …I would return to West Africa…

2. …I would feel wasteful using more than six scoops of water in a bucket bath…

3. …I would be teaching high school physics and chemistry…

4. …I would celebrate over the day we found a (sub-par) $10 bottle of wine…

5. …I would argue with a shopkeeper over buying a big bag of coal for more than $4

US…

6. …I would light a coal pot with a piece of plastic and one match in ten minutes…

7. …I would eat half of a 25-kilogram bag of rice in three months…

8. …I would be so excited to see real tomatoes or potatoes…

9. …I would lead an almost exclusively vegetarian diet…

10. …on the days we did find chicken in the market, we’d take it home and cook it, never

minding the fact it was once frozen and is now warm from the heat…

11. …I would be “cold” on nights when it hits 75 F or so…

12. …one of my best friends would be a girl from Ohio with a completely different

upbringing, musical taste, and interests than me…

13. …we would laugh over the time we literally scooped the poop out of our toilet…

14. …I could brag I helped someone kill a mouse with a shoe…

15. …I would kill a cockroach I found in my room without screaming or freaking out…

16. …I would survive without Diet Coke…

17. …I would look forward to days we ate burnt garlic bread and spaghetti with okra…

18. …I would get so excited over tuna salad sandwiches for lunch…

19. …I would walk to school in the pouring rain to ensure my students had some classes

on a rainy day…

20. …I would learn to embrace my crazy mefloquine dreams…

21. …I would regularly wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 am without an alarm clock…

22. …I would grow to love my site so much that I dreaded coming to training…

23. ...I wouldn't be able to handle thinking about leaving the students I have already

grown so close to...

…I would have called you crazy. Instead, here I am. It’s still hard for me to believe that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer in one of the most beautiful countries on this planet. Mama Liberia has embraced me with open arms, and I am so grateful for the opportunity that this has provided me.

Wheelbarrows – Versatile & Convenient

Sally, Liberia would be a haven for you. Every time I remember digging through the bins at the Goodwill outlet in Hernando, I then flash-forward to myself digging through a wheelbarrow for whatever it is I am buying that day.

For those of you who are not my sister, here’s an update. Anything that you want to buy in the market that is not tomato paste, onions, sugar, rice, or beans is found in a wheelbarrow. In fact, I’m guessing there are more wheelbarrows per capita here than in the United States. Everyone uses one, whether it is for hauling their goods to the market to sell, pushing one around selling pepper/peanuts/palm oil/footballs and mirrors around town, hauling jugs of water from the well to their house, or filling it full of dirt and hauling it to a construction site, wheelbarrows are a normal site in Liberia.

While in Monrovia, we made sure to check out Waterside Market, the biggest market in the capital city. There, we were crazy people, digging through wheelbarrows as fast as we could – buying t-shirts, tank tops, skirts, pants, whatever we could find, really. The sellers are excited to sell their goods, obviously, and they will do all they can to help you out. If they see you digging through, they will start showing you items that are your size or close to it. If you tell them you need long skirts for teaching, they will dig through the pile of skirts, showing you all the long ones they have. At the end of the day, these guys and gals know what they have to do to close a deal.

Emmanuel, a student in 10B, with his wheelbarrow.

I’m grateful for all the wheelbarrow sellers in town. Some of our favorites in Pleebo include the guy we buy our clothes-washing soap from (all we do is walk up to his barrow and he gets two bars of soap, in a bag for us, ready to go), the boys who sell oranges for cheap out of a wheelbarrow, and the guys who sell hangers (which I need more of, now that I’m going to be getting more things made of lappa). All in all, it makes shopping fun. It’s portable, convenient, and easily covered when it rains – what else could be better in the world of markets?

Thank goodness for hard drives…

While Sarah and I love Pleebo, we also love to escape a little by watching something terribly mindless. This has translated into a lot of things as of late, some of which I’d like to share with you below. During our time at site, we have watched the following:

1. Seasons 1-3 of Sex and the City

2. All of the Friends series

3. Seasons 1-3 of Workaholics

4. The Human Planet series, produced by BBC

5. The Planet Earth series, produced by BBC

6. Pretty Woman

7. Erin Brokovich

8. The Wedding Singer

9. 50 First Dates

10. Fight Club

11. Reservoir Dogs

12. The Butterfly Effect

13. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

14. The Jungle Book

15. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

16. Tarzan

17. He’s Just Not That Into You

18. Definitely Maybe

19. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

20. Lord of the Rings – Fellowship of the Ring [extended edition]

21. Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers [extended edition]

22. Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King [extended edition] (to be watched very soon)

23. Date Night

24. Baby Mama

25. Flubber

26. Space Jam

27. The Family Stone

28. The Break Up

29. Sleepless in Seattle

30. An Affair to Remember

31. When Harry Met Sally

32. One Day

33. P.S. I Love You

34. The Big Lebowski

35. Religulous

This list is non-exhaustive, of course, as we’ve had many nights when I know we watched something ridiculous and I just can’t think of it. Needless to say, I still have 3 TB of movies to watch, so if anyone has any ideas of good movies for us to watch, please let me know! The hard drive is full of older stuff, so don’t be afraid to go back a ways :)

As always, thanks for your advice!

Musings on the first marking period

With the first marking period come and gone, and the second one almost completed, I find myself marveling at the fact that I have successfully taught over 250 students for over two months. If you had told me one year ago that I would be a high school science teacher in Liberia, I would have laughed at you. And instead, here I am!

Though we have finished the first marking period, my work is far from over. Many of my students failed that first marking period, and many of them are looking to be on their way to failing the second. In my 11A Physics class, I passed only 7 out of 64 students. This was discouraging, but I know it’s because they do not try. Many of them have stepped up their game this marking period, after realizing the level of work that I expect, and they are on track to pass my class. Between all of the examples, homework problems, quizzes, and review for the final exam, there is no reason anyone should be failing my class.

Part of the problem, I think, comes from the fact that their other classes are very different from the way that we run our classes. Sarah and I don’t put up with any crap from our students; if you make a fool of yourself, we will call you out on it. If you are being rude or disrespectful, we are not afraid to move you to the front of the classroom or to send you out of the classroom altogether. Another favorite of ours has been to lecture our students after class – either in the classroom or in the hallway, where everyone can watch and get the hint that we are serious about providing them with a quality education.

My tenth graders are showing the most progress this marking period, and I could not be happier about that. My 10C and 10D classes are my favorite two classes, and they are picking up our new Physics material very very well. Teaching them every day is enjoyable to me, and on the days that I don’t want to go to school, thinking about missing their class makes me want to go. My brightest students are in those two classes, and I am excited to see what we can accomplish by next summer. Who knows – maybe I am teaching a future president of Liberia? One can never know… All I know is that it is my duty to provide them with the best educational experience I can find within myself. Here’s to the next two years.