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.