Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Radio Ga Ga

As I write, I have less than a week's time left in St. Louis. It's a strange thought. The first few months seemed to go pretty slowly, but May and June have flown by. There have been a lot of changes recently, as far as my work is concerned. I officially finished at Collège Telemaque Sow on Wednesday the 3rd of June. The exams and the 'compositions' were starting, so there was not much work left to do, apart from the marking. I was a bit sad to leave. Despite the hard work and stress of running classes there, it was a really interesting experience, and I'm definately missing it. The last lessons I ran almost all involved songs (thank you Bob Marley...) so it was really good fun towards the end. I still see my ex-pupils on my way into town most days, which is nice, although not if I'm in a hurry (long-winded Senegalese greetings have their disadvantages).

With my time teaching in the school finished, what has been occupying my time in this past month? Why haven't I written a blog entry in so long? I have other work. For the past three weeks or so, I've been doing a 'stage' (work experience) at Radio Dunyaa, a local radio station. This has been altogther different experience from working in the school, and it has been much more of a challenge for my French skills.

There are four local radio stations in St. Louis: RTS, Teranga, Dunyaa and Sud. St. Louis is a relatively small city, and no one has explained to me quite why there are so many stations. In Moray we have one, and that's bad enough. The quality of local radio here is like MFR x 4, but broadcast through twenty year-old technology. The music played generally reflects the taste of the majority of the Senegalese population: mballax, mballax and a little more mballax. There is a little bit of hip-hop for the younger generation, but it's rare.

Senegalese mballax music probably deserves a bit of explanation - it's been a big part of my overall experience of the country. It's the music that you get when you combine funk, latin and cuban music, and Senegal. Percussive and polyrythmic to the highest level, it's not the kind of music to listen to if you have a headache. The tam-tams and djembis seem to be contesting in permanent, frantic solos in each song, while staccato guitar parts and sparse keyboards try to keep some kind of melody going. For most mballax songs, in a live setting particularly, there is very little structure. It's all one big, rolling groove, with vocals sung, wailed or spoken over the top, which goes on for at least 10 minutes or until the djembi player's wrist gives in. The whole aim of the genre is to make people dance as crazily as possible. Never in my life have I seen anyone dance more crazily than Senegalese people at a good mballax concert. Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to see Viviane N'Dour (Senegal's answer to Britney Spears, only with good music) live in concert at the St. Louis Université Gaston Berger, and it was spectacular.

With my work at Dunyaa, I don't have a lot to do with the music shows. I do the news! This has many downsides - my co-workers mostly talk in Wolof, the tribal language, my boss has been to work for a total of 3 days during my 3 weeks of work, and the radio has been stopped several times in the last week because of power cuts. But still, somehow, I think I'm using my time well. Tagging along with the journalists in town most days has allowed me to see a side of St. Louis I would never have seen otherwise. We've done a number of interesting interviews, including one with the manager of an NGO devoted to helping 'difficult' young people - those with prison sentences, drink or drugs problems and most of the Talibé and ex-Talibé. We've attended some conferences, on topics as diverse as dental hygiene, the importance of information technology in developing nations, and the state of fishing in St. Louis (this was a very important one - fishing is the town's biggest industry). I've been reliably writing up stories for the daily news on all of these events - some of them have been accepted and some of them haven't. It's definately a learning experience, as far as writing in French is concerned, and several times I've had to grit my teeth as my redrafts are rejected by a cursory glance, a meaningless scribble and a "c'est pas bon".

Recently, however, things have taken a change for the better. There's less scribbling, more constructive criticism. I've also been given the task of preparing the international news section every day - formerly they just poached the stories from the BBC world service. I've been researching stories (thank you google.com), writing them and then reading them live on air every day. If you were in Senegal, in the St. Louis region, and happened to tune into 106.30 Radio Dunyaa at about 10.15am on weekdays, mine is the imitation French accent you would hear, talking about anything from the Iranien elections to Barack Obama's anti-tobacco laws. Bizarre situations like that just seem to happen in Senegal. I still haven't told you all, for example, about how I starred in a prime-time Senegalese reality TV show. That story, however, is for another time.

I'll aim to include a final update on my situation before I go. Given the rate I've written my blog entries so far that might sound a little ambitious, but inshallah (God-willing) I'll find the time.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Work, work, work!

It’s been over a month since I last wrote, and now I’m over halfway through my time working in St. Louis. The weeks go quickly here, and it’s strange to think how many have passed since I left Europe. Work has been increasing ever since I got here, but these last few weeks have really been packed full of it. Being in Senegal instead of at University, I thought I’d at least be spared the frantic revision and stress of exams. It turns out that I was wrong – I still get all the stress and hard work, but from the perspective of a teacher rather than a pupil. The 4ième classes that I teach all have exams at the end of the month. I’ve been trying to prepare the Telemaque Sow classes for their English exams; but there’s a lot of ground to cover.

I’m not a real English teacher. I have no TEFL, no degree and no real experience of teaching prior to Senegal. Despite this, at the moment I’m preparing and teaching about 14-18 hours of lessons per week, as well as helping with the lessons taught by Mrs Cissé and Mr Ndiaye, the school’s regular English teachers. It has been a steep learning curve, but I think I’m somewhere near the top of it now. Preparing a lesson is fine now, but it used to be a major worry. What do I want people to learn? How will I explain it (in French!)? How will I make them remember it? With the evening classes which I still teach twice a week, all these questions are quite easy to answer. I know what they have already been taught, and it’s so much easier to explain things when you’re working with a class of six pupils instead of sixty. Another big difference is that the students at the evening class are there because they want to learn. If anyone tells you, as an ex-teacher told me when I was on the train to Gatwick airport all those months ago, that African kids ‘love to learn’, then they really, really don’t know what they’re talking about. Considering the size of classes, everyone is amazingly well behaved, but because I don’t know how to joke with the pupils in Wolof, and I don’t like hitting them or making them kneel with their head against the blackboard for two hours, it’s quite hard to keep it that way. The best solution that I’ve found so far is to try to keep the lessons interesting, and not to give too many endless grammar rules and lists to learn. I think this approach is working. In the past week I’ve taught one 4ième class how to write a biography of American-Senegalese rapper Akon, and how to ask someone out on a date in English. As I said, we’ve got a long way to go… Classes usually last for two hours at a time, and I’ll spend most of this time talking to the class and explaining things. I usually have a couple of exercises in there, to make sure that people understand the lesson, but I don’t like to emphasize this too much. There’s no better way to lose people’s engagement with the lesson!

I still have about two weeks of teaching left before I have to stop (after the exams it’s the end of the school year). After that I still have over a month out here. How am I going to fill my time? An internship at a radio station! I’m not quite sure how this is going to work out, but I don’t expect it to be nearly as high-pressure a situation as Telemaque Sow. The emphasis is on me learning as an intern, instead of trying to do something that’s beneficial to others. Apparently I can also expect some airtime, if my French is good, and that really says something about the standard of local radio here.

I think my French should be good enough. It’s been steadily improving since I got here, and suddenly two weeks ago I found that I was able to make a class of Senegalese teenagers understand the uses of the present perfect tense, and why it’s different from the past simple. I didn’t even know that I could do it in English before. I have also made a good number of Senegalese friends, which is interesting. Three weeks ago, I went to a Ross-Bethio, a little village forty kilometres out of town with my friend Cheikh, and had a great day. I’ve also had the chance to play some Senegalese music ‘folklorique’, with Mamadoudjallo, a fellow guitarist.

My conversational French is now at the level at which I can spend a good five minutes exchanging greetings with someone without really talking about anything. In Senegal, greetings go on for a long time and if you see anyone on the street that you know (even on the other side of the street), you’re expected to give them the whole treatment before you go on your way. “Ca va? Et la journée? Et le travail? Comment va la santé? En forme ? Et la chaleur, comment tu-le trouves?” The list goes on. The Senegalese are very sociable, and it’s quite refreshing in a way. The only problem is that, in St. Louis, genuine friendliness can easily get mixed up with sleazy salesmen and chancers looking to make as much money as possible out of the ‘Toubab’. It didn’t take long to realise that anyone who comes up to you in the street and starts off the conversation with “Mon ami! Ca fait longtemps!” (My friend, it’s been a long time) definitely isn’t your friend. Recently, though, no one has really been bothering me too much on my normal route through the city centre – they probably recognise me by now.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

The Easter Holidays

Having only been working here for about two weeks, it came as a bit of a surprise to get a holiday so quickly. But yes, last week the Easter holidays began and work finished. Instead of just hanging around in St. Louis for a week, fourteen of us decided to make good use of their time by heading down to the far South of the country and seeing the sights.

School finished on Friday the 27th of March, and we left the same evening in two 'sept-places' - large estate cars which serve as long-distance taxis here. We were headed for Kédougou, 1000km or so south of St. Louis. We got there without too many major problems - only one car crash and a burst tire, and everything was fine(apart from the fact that we were seven passengers and a driver squashed into a sept-place for twelve hours).

As we travelled around Bassari country we stayed mostly in little villages and campements, sleeping in mud huts or under the stars. During the daytime we travelled around taking in the countryside from the back of two 4x4s, and walking in the hills. The landscape really is beautiful, and very different from St. Louis. Despite the heat, the region is very forested and green. The hilly landscape also made a welcome change from the slightly monotonous flatness of the North! One of the highlights of the trip was hiking to a Christian-animist village, isolated far away from any town. The people were very friendly and the village was amazing, but it was quite a surreal experience. It felt like we had stepped back in time several hundred years at least. They did have a school and a medical centre (no medicine though) but the most sophisticated technology I saw there was probably the single blackboard.

Towards the end of our trip we visited a large (over 100m) waterfall and went swimming in the pool below it. Most of the time that we were in Bassari the temperature was over 40 degrees. Our bottled water usually ended up about the temperature of freshly made tea, and real showers didn't seem to exist - so showering in a cold waterfall and then jumping into the pool was really...unimaginably wonderful. It was also one of the most beautiful places that I've ever been. The memory of it stayed with me for all the uncomfortable hours of the car ride back to St. Louis, via Dakar. This time it was the other sept-place that crashed, so the journey was marginally better than before.

We got back into town on Friday, since when I've been slowly recovering. School restarts next Monday, so I'm currently working on a small renovation project. A team of volunteers is helping to repaint a red cross centre in a slightly unsavoury shade of pink. Once that's finished we're set to move onto the renovation of a Talibé (street children) centre, so we're certainly keeping busy!

Monday, March 23, 2009

Senegal - First impressions of work

It’s been two weeks since I left Scotland, and I’m starting to get used to it here already. This may be because I’ve aclimatised to the heat, or because I’ve started teaching English classes at Collège Telemaque Sow, or because I’ve got hold of a guitar (personally I think it’s that). Anyway, the culture shock is pretty much over.
After a false start or two, I’ve started work. The teachers were on strike when I arrived, but that's mostly stopped now, and I’ve started teaching with a very nice woman called Mrs Cissé. I prepared my first lesson today, for a 4ième (mostly 14 year olds) class and it went quite well. I was asked to prepare something about politics, because we’ve just had the local elections here. So I had to try and keep a class of 58 4ième pupils interested in talking about politics, in English, for an hour. It did seem a bit of a tall order, but it worked out in the end. Now at least everyone knows what ‘censorship’ means! Next lesson I’m going to teach them how to sing some Rihanna, so that should be a bit more fun.

Last week Joe (one of the other volunteers) and I taught ‘One Love’ and ‘No Woman No Cry’ by Bob Marley to about four different classes with great success. Thank goodness for the guitar. It seems that learning English becomes a lot more appealing if it comes with a reggae rhythm. It was even suggested that Joe and I try to start an extra-curricular English club. We’ll see…

In comparison with what is available in UK schools, there are very few resources here. A classroom consists of a room, a blackboard and some desks, with two or three pupils to each desk. All of the classes I’ve encountered so far consist of between 45 and 60 pupils. I haven’t even started trying to learn the pupils’ names yet, it’s a bit daunting. I’ll go into more depth about my work when I’ve done more of it.

There’s going to be a short break for the Easter holidays (even though they mostly don’t celebrate Easter here), during which there are plans to take a trek in Bassari country to the South, and then take part in a construction-renovation project which is going to happen here in St. Louis.

Au revoir for now, and I shall try to write some more before heading off to Bassari!