Trading Spaces: Senegal

The new school I was placed in last week hasn’t exactly worked out the way that I hoped. It is a French school for the wealthy children of Saint Louis. I new something was special about the school when I showed up and saw an overweight child. The first I’d seen in my 6 weeks in Africa. It is a very nice school and the rooms are air conditioned and the classes are small. However, I don’t really feel like I am needed. I teach with a man from Senegal who speaks perfect English, so I am not needed to sort out any difficult grammar, and I don’t actually lead the class like I did in the summer school. The kids are brand new to English so we are learning things like counting and days of the week, which could easily be taught by one of the other teachers at the school. I talked to my boss about switching to a different program, and this week, I’ve been helping with the renovating of a different school. It makes more sense for me to be helping with that project just because the need is a greater for help. I’ll still go to the French school on Fridays to have a special songtime with the kids with my guitar, but the other days of the week I will be teaching at a different school starting in October. In the meantime I am helping with a child care center Monday through Thursday.

Though the work was strenuous, I did enjoy my time renovating this week. I discovered that I’m not genetically inclined to be a construction worker. In fact, even light masonry should be avoided. There is a certain finesse to laying concrete that I was unaware existed. We also had to repair some damaged walls by filling holes with cement and build some small walls for sinks and things. After my first attempt at sculpting a small cement wall, which took me about a half hour, my employer came by and let out a long sigh before kneeling down and dexterously corrected my monstrosity and transformed it into a geometrically sound barrier. My boss then moved me to a slightly easier job which was filling in holes in the wall with cement. For a particularly large hole in the wall, you had to fling the cement with force enough so that it would stick to the existing wall, but not so much force that it splatters off of the wall completely. As you can expect, there is a learning curve. My first fling was unexpectedly good, surprising my boss and making me cocky. I tried a really big throw for my second which missed the hole completely splattering the existing wall and getting wet cement on two other volunteers. Humbled, I lessened my pace. The task was still much easier than the first, but after about a half hour my boss came by, and with another sigh, corrected all my imperfections. Shortly after this, I was moved to a different location to help haul sand. These gradual demotions were a little discouraging, but I still kept in high spirits. Whenever you see home decorating/renovating shows on TV they usually speed up the video of the work while playing some song like “I’m Walking on Sunshine” while all the workers dance about painting each other and having an absolute ball putting up wallpaper. I tried to get my fellow sand-haulers into a similar spirit. Failure. For some reason manual labor in intense heat doesn’t excite people to the point of breaking into song. Later that week, I was given a second chance with a trowel and with some coaching; I vastly improved my cementing technique, completing a few walls and a footpath. I had a good time, but not enough to inspire a career change.

I have some pictures, but I forgot my camera cord when I came to the internet cafe, so I will put them up on the next post.

Loves,
Steve