International

On completion of their project, Volunteers are required to write a report to Peace Corps Partnership and the donors. Virginia’s report was so well done that I want to quote it here.

In a little tiny village, thousands of miles from any place you would imagine, just down the river from Timbuktu, thirty-eight small children run anxiously to school. By American standards you would think the teacher was handing out candy. But on this day the teacher was not there to greet the students. The door-less entrance to the one-room millet stalk school was empty. The children ran the few hundred meters to his home. They thought they needed to remind him of his responsibilities as their teacher. They were saddened to hear the news. "It’s Saturday," Alhadji Amadou yelled from under his blankets.The children of Lokkal Tokast, which is Tamacheque for "school of betterment," have been coming together since November 9, 2000. It is hard to believe that just five months ago the children entered the dirty, very organic, schoolhouse for the first time. Upon receiving their first piece of chalk, thinking it was candy, they ate it. That seems like ages ago, since now the children can read and write "idi" (dog), "ax" (milk), and share the same mild manner and eagerness to learn as any of their American counterparts. I awake in the morning to counting in Tamacheque, French and even English. Children run by my house, as if to show off, yelling "one-two-tree-fo-foive."

The morning and afternoons are long and hot but school isn’t finished until six p.m. Alhadji, the school director and teacher, then spends the mild desert nights hovered next to a kerosene lantern correcting notebooks and planning lessons for history, math, writing, reading, art and music. Between sips of green tea he looks up at the stars. As if he was given a heavenly answer he puts his head back down to the paper and feverishly writes, interrupted only by the sounds of the clanging of an old tire iron. The men are being called to the school and the women are summoned to the empty hut next to the village chief’s hut. It is ten o’clock at night, and while I am outside tying up mosquito netting and setting up my bed I greet the men and women as they make their way to literacy classes.

Two men were sent to Tahoua, a desert town a few hundred kilometers from our village of Kabey Fo, where they learned the pedagogy for teaching adults how to read, write and perform simple mathematics in their native language. Ibrahim and Aklinine returned from the training with a renewed image of themselves and an astounding confidence that surpasses the value of any training fee. The former began classes in January with about 10 men and the latter with about 10 women in February. Many evenings, I sit in the shadows of the flickering lanterns and quietly observe these men and women as they work towards pronouncing different letter combinations. The miracle occurs when the letters turn from a mumble into a real, audible word. Nothing is quite so gratifying in development work as seeing your once illiterate friend look over their shoulder at you with that grin that says, "Hey, did you hear that? I just read camel!" I nod and smile back assuredly.

In this past year I watched the lifelessness vanish from the children’s eyes, and a sense of accomplishment move into the eyes of the older men and women. The same people who used to flip through my Newsweeks upside down, now page through them showing me all the letters they know and trying to pronounce words like "cyber-space." They ask me to explain it. Although the people of Kabey Fo might not ever be able to grasp the concept of "cyber-space," what they have grasped is the desire to learn. They have come to truly understand

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