Neighborhood Pictures

Our 9th grade students have been working on a magazine (in English!) about their lives here in Bamako -- about their neighborhood, their school, Malian politics, everyday life, etc.

Here is a selection of the photographs our students took to document life in their neighborhood. See the associated captions for a short description of what you're looking at!

View of the school courtyard. The school director recently began constructing
a new wall -- you can see the canonical bricks drying in the sun.

Picture of the first graders in their classroom.

Shot of a donkey cart as it passes by.

Neighborhood children.

Picture of an alimentation, where they sell tea, sugar, cooking oil, and other
basic necessities.

A family compound. You can see a sheep in the background, and a satellite
dish (presumably to receive TV broadcasts...?).

Drawing up water from a well.

View of the street near school, around mid-morning.

Candid shot of life in the family compound.

Women preparing food in a family compound. The young woman in yellow is
one of the photographers.

View from the front of the school. The wall has now been rebuilt, and there is a sign.
Pictures to follow soon!

Picture of the third grade in their classroom.

A good week

It has been a very good week at the library. First, as we mentioned on Facebook earlier this week, we finally got our books out of customs! We now have a total of 276 titles in our library, and a much greater diversity of content. I spotted one of our 9^th grade students who is a very talented artist paging through the image pages of a book on Surrealism during recess earlier this week. Plus, the new additions make our shelves beautifully full.

We've also instituted a new policy that makes Thursday afternoons our open drawing hours. This time is already extremely popular and we've seen dozens of students coming in to draw huts, cars, people, and one particularly lovely thank you card.

Even my least favorite moment of the week served to remind me of the importance of our work. The principal of the school insisted on taking me with him to hand back report cards to the 9^th graders. This exercise in public shaming was extremely uncomfortable to witness, but the worst part was at the end when he proceeded to ask the students who had not passed their exams “Why do you make us hit you?” and tell them they were worthless. These are the same students who continue to work on their magazine and are showing a level of focus I have not seen from them previously. I am incredibly proud of their work this week, and the experience with the report cards reinforced the importance of our mission to provide a space where students are valued and encouraged to develop their potential through creative and critical thinking rather than “encouraged” through threats and humiliation. It is an important reminder to all of us that we have a responsibility to ensure that no child, no matter where they live, is made to believe that they are worthless.

Good Questions and New Technology

As we do battle with Malian bureaucracy on several fronts trying to “officialize” our organization and get our books out of customs, our everyday interactions with students continue to remind me why my 10^th trip to customs headquarters in three weeks is worth it.

Our 9^th graders are currently working on a magazine (in English!) which we are going to send to students in the United States to tell them more about life in Mali. Aside from encouraging cross-cultural communication and understanding, this project is intended to strengthen the students' knowledge of questions and verbs in English so we started by generating a massive list of questions for their American counterparts. Some gems included:

• How do they punish students there? Do they hit kids who come late? (The subversive part of me is really looking forward to when they hear the answer to this question.)
• Are students there serious?
• Is there electricity in your neighborhood? Churches? Mosques? Paved Roads? A lot of African people? Corpses? (by which we later determined he meant cemeteries.)
• Why do Americans like tourism?
• Why do you like tanning?
• What do senators do? (I wish I knew.)
• Why aren't delinquents punished in the US? (When I asked about the reasoning behind this question they said, “Lots of rap stars brag about selling drugs but they aren't in jail.” Indeed.)
• Why do rich people and poor people live apart in the US? (An excellent question, but I was surprised to hear that they thought that rich and poor live side by side here in Mali.)
• What do you do when your parents aren't home?
• Do you have boyfriends/girlfriends? What do your parents think about that?

The best part of watching the students work on this project has been seeing how they dive into topics that are of real interest to them. They are so excited to get to tell American students about their lives and genuinely curious about the lives of American students. It is so rare that anyone asks their opinion or gives them license to share their uncensored thoughts and I am proud to be a part of it. If the students give permission, we will post an electronic copy of the magazine on this blog when it is done.

I will leave you with this photo of one other exciting moment from the week – the first time one of our new ClassmatePCs (an incredible donation from Care Innovations at Intel) was used by students! When only three of our 8^th graders had shown up by 15 minutes into their class period on Monday, we decided to reward them by shutting the door and letting them play some English learning games on the computer. All three of the students said this was the first time they had used a computer and all three seemed to have a fabulous time.

Robert and the kindergarten - Video

Things at the library are definitely starting to get into a rhythm now. Robert continues to impress us all with his patience and creativity working with the children, and we see more and more kids from the neighborhood coming in to read. Here is a little video clip of the kindergarteners' time this week (video credit to my lovely father Marty Smilkstein) – Robert was reading to them from a story about two otters named Pilou and Lalie.

Now that the day to day program is running more smoothly, our focus is shifting to the administrative challenges that need to be addressed before Neal and I leave the country in 6 weeks. Our primary concern is finding a system of financial management that gives us plenty of oversight and can be managed from afar (without being a full time job), but that also allows enough flexibility for unexpected but necessary expenditures. This is, evidently, a tall order, and we are exploring lots of options, but we would love suggestions from any of you. Financial management is not a skill set with which we have a lot of experience. But rather than reinventing the wheel, we think that through the resources of our community on several continents we can come up with a solution that will be both functional and flexible. You can comment here or email us at contact@niamakoro-education.org.

New Learning in the New Year

The students came back from break with tales of how much chicken they had eaten for New Years and excited to see the wonderful selection of new books that visiting friends had brought us. I have personally enjoyed the experience of looking over old friends like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Il pleut des hamburgers) and Clifford (renamed Bertrand) translated into French. Each new group of books also highlights how surprisingly difficult it is to come up with a selection of books that our students can relate to. For example, they are hugely amused by the concept of food falling from the sky, but don't recognize about three quarters of the food that falls in Il pleut des hamburgers. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of books to transport us and give us windows to worlds we don't see everyday, but it is also important for our kids to see themselves and their experiences in books. If anyone has any suggestions of books that might help diversify our collection, please let me know.

This week was also a particularly good one for learning at the library. Robert took over teaching the elementary schoolers and he did a fantastic job. Each lesson we do underlines how much work there is to be done (only 1 of our 4^th graders wrote a complete sentence when asked this week), but we also see small signs of progress that encourage us to keep going. In the realm of small victories, things went very well with the 7^th and 8^th graders I saw this week, usually some of the more difficult groups. In one of the 7^th grade groups there are 3 female students who never do anything that is asked of them. I think I have determined this is because they also don't understand French nearly as well of their classmates. Yesterday one completed her entire assignment (write 4 sentences in English, 1 with each of the prepositions we are studying) and corrected her own errors and one got 2 sentences done. I hope that they are slowly getting the picture that they can do this. I think that after 7 years of being called imbecile by your teachers does not provide a lot of incentive to keep trying.

Our next shipment of books remains tied up in customs, but as we continue to navigate the bureaucratic maze to retrieve them, I'm excited about what's happening here everyday.