How to Sell Education

It's September; which means it's Autumn; which means that as the season changes, the foliage transforms from verdant softness to technicolor crunch whose dry and crisp flavor matches the air, which chills the body, raising the goosebumps on flesh and the zippers on jackets.

Unless you're in Guyana, less than 500 miles from the Equator, where the only change in season is that it goes from hot to less hot (and a bit cool between 3 and 5 am), buggy to less buggy, and rainy to just humid.  But if there's one September constant between my native homeland of the U.S.A. and my current equatorial residence, it's that September is when all the little kiddies go back to school.

With school back in session, it's time to kick my work here at the Imam Bacchus Library into overdrive, and start doing some heavy-duty outreach work, convince students that reading will make you cool, and parents that reading will keep your kids smart and out of trouble.  Since my last posting here, I've begun the arduous task of learning how to become a movie director, and then teaching the head librarian here everything I've learned in the last month.  Taking a page from PBS's classic show "Reading Rainbow," we're basically recording our weekly Story Hour, where the library's director, Imam, picks a theme for the week, and then reads a few books, tells a few stories, and organizes some fun artistic activity for the Nursery-Primary School-age children who come in.  Meanwhile, the librarian and I film the stories, make cute little music videos out of the activities, and then try to wrangle the bucking bronco of video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, to make a short movie out of it.

Premiere Pro is a dense, hard to wield, and unfriendly program, and figuring out how to use it is the PC equivalent to navigating the great Labyrinth and battling the Minotaur, armed with nothing but some dental floss and a q-tip.  But once we've managed to wrestle some good production value out of it, the two-phase plan is to a) upload the videos to Youtube for the world to see what amazing stuff we're doing, and b) to start broadcasting them on the local television station, to help advertise the library, while sending out our message of the value of literacy.

Now that school is back in session, the summer regulars no longer have time to show up to the library anymore, so we're also going to start bringing the library to them.  On Monday and Tuesday, for example, we'll pack a truck full of books, head out to the primary school down the road a couple miles, and set up a sort of display fair, where we can show students firsthand what we have to offer, when many of them might not have come out on their own.  We have a whole list of other projects which we will try to begin to implement over the next few months before my contract here expires, but I'll save talking about those until we've started getting to work on them.

In the meantime, I'm going to take some time now to tell you about some interesting things going on in one of my other homes-away-from-home, Mali.  The news there is remaining steadily ominous.  We've got a fog ('cause it's the rainy season there now, get it?) of political uncertainty in the south involving interim governments and conditionally-rejected offers of international military support, profoundly disturbing reports of Islamist extremists sending the northern part of the country on a fast-track to becoming "the next Afghanistan," as the media is often fond of putting it, and no end in sight to a long-standing drought and regional food crisis.  While I've been reading the headlines often enough, and I'm probably equally informed about current events in Mali as I am about those in American, which is actually saying fairly little, I've definitely lost my inside grasp on what's been going on there since the Coup.

So I'm not interested now in rehashing what a 5-minute Google News search could tell you.  No, I'd rather let you know about some of the positive influences that are continuing over in Mali, despite these times of uncertainty which try even the noblest hearts.  There are dozens of great organizations, and I'm sure most of them deserve at least your awareness, if not your support, but today, I'm picking just one particularly cool project for this post because, well I have friends who work there.

The organization is called myAgro, and while it's only just a baby, at 8 months old, they've been making some really great headway, and influencing a lot of small-scale Malian farmers.  They do this through giving loans and establishing savings programs with local farmer who sign up for the program.  According to one of their recent performance reports, they have already signed up hundreds of farmers for their program, earned thousands of dollars in savings for farmers in their program (in a country where, for millions of people, earning just one dollar in a day can make the difference between eating today or not), and continue to run a weekly program to publicize the programs and educate and interview farmers and program members around the country.  As those of you who know me might imagine, this some-time farmer, radio DJ, and cheapskate finds a lot to like about myAgro!  And of course, the founder, Anushka Ratnayake, is an awesome person who I met a few times during my last stint in Mali.  And to quote my good friend and fellow Mali RPCV, Audra, who currently volunteers for myAgro while living in Chicago, "What is really interesting with myAgro is that in the midst of all of the Malian politically instability, their programs are offering solutions for farmers to create sustainable food security for themselves."  See, we're not talking about a charity here, we're talking about a capacity-building venture, a program that doesn't give away fish, but creates fishermen.

If you want to learn more about myAgro, peruse their website at www.myagro.org, or alternatively, you could just take my word for it and head straight to their Donate Now page.  Trust me, a few bucks on your end can go a long way towards some relief in a country that needs it, and setting good examples for sustainable agricultural methods which, if spread widely enough, will encourage positive and lasting change where it's needed.  That's right, for the price of one trenta-sized double-macchiato triple-mochaccino latte caffeine jug, you could help improve farming capabilities in the most fantastic country most of you have never been to!

Well, that's it for now, folks, but keep your eyes on the blog for the continuing adventures of Lower Merion, PA's favorite globetrotting blogger...

Just Take a Look, It's in a Book...

Nothing makes me feel more like a Peace Corps Volunteer than being the lone caucasian walking through a racially disparate neighborhood with a cadre of half a dozen loud, boistrous, and totally incomprehensible dark-skinned youngsters in tow.

That's about where I was earlier today, being led by these kids from house to house along the Guyana's Essequibo Coast, visiting families to ask them about how well and how often they read.  The kids were there to show me which houses they knew were inhabited by families worth interviewing, and not just stodgy old bachelors or toothsome guard dogs.  They also gave a sense of legitimacy to my presence; a lone, out-of-place-looking stranger from a strange land asking a mother of 3 if she reads newspapers looks less peculiar when six or seven of the mother's son's friends are vouching for him.

But don't worry, there's a purpose to my intellectual lurking habits – it actually is a legitimate part of my job here.  I've been assigned the task of helping the Imam Bacchus Library, a new and growing public library in the middle of this stretch of coastline promote itself and expand its programs.  The goal is to get more people to use the library, which would in turn promote literacy throughout the community, something that seems to be lacking.  Before getting to any of that though, the last three weeks were spent observing, interviewing, and fact-finding throughout the library's greater zone of influence.  My first week here had me feeling like Billy Madison as I spent my days in nursery and primary school classrooms, enjoying story-times, reading classes, sing-alongs, art projects.  A highlight: one nursery school graduation rehearsal where the kids practiced their performance of Vitamin C's "Graduation Song," which I'm amazed actually enjoys the same role in Guyana as it does in the U.S. as the unofficial day school graduation anthem.

During this initial period, I observed what seemed to be strong foundations from the schools' end concerning reading education, but since I was only able to get a superficial glance at the end of the school year, there was no doubt that I was missing a lot.  As I began my observations of the secondary schools the next week, I began to see the outcome of the early years of education.  As one would find anywhere, there was a wide range of ability in the students, despite all coming from basically the same education background – with universal school curriculums designed by the national Ministry of Education.  There were plenty of kids who were bright, literate, and enthusiastic learners, but there were a surprising number of kids who literally could not read.  Remember my last post where I quoted that writing sample from one of the star students in the seventh grade remedial class?  That was one of the better examples from that class.  The weakest of the weak students wrote literally gibberish.  Words resembling "iggitbidf" or "luberkrad" were typical and the authors could not remember what they had actually written, and certainly couldn't read it.

My next step was to take a stab at figuring out why this could be the case, so I started asking the different constituent groups what they thought.  The results were about as uselessly varied as I'd been expecting.  Students blamed the teachers.  Teachers blamed the parents.  Parents blamed their kids.  Chickens blamed their eggs.  And I realized that this whole question probably doesn't matter all that much to me.  I'm only here for six months, I have a undergraduate degree, and I have neither the time, expertise, or interest in trying to tackle a vast issue like the illiteracy culture of this country, certainly not compared to much more qualified folks who are working on that very issue already.  Peace Corps is all about doing grassroots empowerment, not large-scale cultural overhauls.

Besides, it's not as if the system is hopeless.  As I said, there are plenty of successful students graduating schools and getting quality educations, by Guyanese standards at least, and there aren't so few of them that they would be considered outliers.  The good students share the system with the weaker ones, at least in the early years.  It's only when they enter secondary school that their grades begin to determine their placement in classes and the quality of the education they are given, since school budgets are also higher at the more selective schools.

So what am I going to do?  What I was asked to: make this library awesome!  Attacking the problem one symptom at a time seems the right way to go about my job, and since the library hired me to help encourage literacy, I'll use the library to do it.  The theory is this: Make the library more fun and give more people reasons to go there --> More people using the library most likely results in more people reading, learning, and associating positively with those things -->  More kids get into the habit of reading and self-educating, and more parents start to see this as an activity for their kids which is easy to encourage, rather than an unnecessary alternative to watching TV and playing cricket --> Attitudes towards literacy improves.

Which leads to my posse and me running around town to knock on doors and find out who does and doesn't already use the library, why they do or don't, and what we can do to change that.  My supervisor – the library's founder and head – and I have been brainstorming possible activities and allures, such as contests and "read-a-thons" like I had back in elementary school, filming the story-time hours and puppet shows we already run and have them broadcast on the public access TV station, holding literacy and computer training classes for all ages, but especially for those out of school, and creating our own homemade version of one of my favorite childhood shows, Reading Rainbow.

We'll see how far we get, but I'm hopeful that we can make the library one of the major cultural institutions of the Essequibo Coast, and transform how the people here view literacy and education.  Who knows how much potential innovation can be tapped from people who don't even know how creative they can be until they're given a chance and a reason to try?

Speaking Guyanese

Calling Guyana an English-speaking country is a bit like calling Jean-Claude Van Damme an actor.  Sure, J.C.V.D. has had a lion's share of feature films to his name and royalty checks to back them up, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find a number of them pretty Van Damme entertaning, but as for him being an actor...

So with that point snidely made, I will acknowledge that Guyana is officially an anglophone country, and pretty much everyone I have run into so far can understand most of what I say, and speaks…well, that's the tricky part.  It's English.  It's also Creolese.  It's also got a bit of Hindi, depending on where they live.  And no matter what language it actually is, who I'm speaking to will make all the difference as to whether I understand any of it or not.

My pre-arrival impressions of Guyanese accents were based on one person I knew, and another I'd heard of.  The former was Mali's Peace Corps Medical Officer, who has a peculiar but delightful mix of influences in her accent.  It has the bright, musical quality of a British accent, with some delicate calypso exoticism, and is as clearly-toned as a tuning fork.  The latter example, I've only heard of through a married couple of family friends from back home, who were speaking of a Guyanese housekeeper they once employed.  When the wife mentioned that she had a hard time understanding her sometimes because of her unique way with English, her husband replied with smiling skepticism, "That was English?"

So far, my experience listening to people here has run the gamut from our dear doctor's charming lilt to an impregnable warble which plays by its own rules – or the few it has.  The difference is in whether or not they are speaking Standard English, the kind which is taught in schools, used in official business, and spoken on the TV and radio.  Standard English mostly sounds like a mild-to-heavy accent on a slightly goofy version of what you're reading right now.  There are some Guyanese who have spent time in U.S. or have at least watched a lot of our TV shows, and have American English pretty much nailed down.

To flavor the language, there are those who use the words which technically exist, but have been collecting cobwebs in the dusty corners of "my" language's attic.  I've never heard the word "shucks!" used so many times in anything written after the 1950's than I have hanging out with locals here.  And the other day, I was asked by a bus passenger crammed in next to me if his bag was "humbugging" me, which is not only incorrect, but bewilderingly so.  (This is on par with a dear friend of mine who speaks English fairly well as a second language, and who recently praised me as "an exorbitant writer," which she insisted made sense as a complement when literally translated back into her native German.)

It's when I hear Creolese thrown into the English, as is often done here, that I get stuck and wish I was back in Mali, where I can at least understand Bambara and some of its dialects better than I can the children and drunken fishermen I've encountered here – though my dad reminded me that incomprehensibility is a common trait amongst drunken fishermen the world over.

The problem with Creolese is two-fold.  First is the warped pronunciation of their vowels, which actually shares some occasional traits with the Irish accent (Cork in particular, it sounds to me), plus whatever other ethnic influence is local to the area, be it Indian, Caribbean, or British.  "Dog" sounds like "daeg," "Thursday" morphs into "Taarsdey," "hat" is worn as a "hyat," and I can't even figure out how to spell the other sounds they use.  The other hinderance is the language itself, which has English rules tossed into a blender, along with some Hindi vocabulary in the areas with East Indian immigrant populations, and comes out sounding like the lost verses of "Day-O."

Unlike Haiti, which has standardized their version of Creole and made it their official language alongside French, Guyana still maintains English as it's only formal language, and unfortunately, not everyone knows the difference.  In preparation for my library and literacy outreach program I'll be working on while I'm here, I've been observing and interviewing a lot of teachers from Nursery school through high school, and one of the common themes that comes up is that not all the students learn to distinguish between the Creolese they speak and the English they're supposed to be restricted to in school.  In some cases, even the teachers blur or cross the line, in conversation and in lessons.

As a result, here is some of what I saw in middle-school age Remedial English writing exams.  From a more literate student in the class, there was, in immaculate handwriting, "I will like to inviting you to go fishing with us. My Father buy a new fishing boat we will go at the backdam to fishing.  A nice cook wite fish and went we finshend cook we will eat and rast a little and went we finshend we will go back fishing."  This actually sounds, to my untrained mind, like something I might hear a child say verbatim if they were to narrate this imaginary letter to me, so it's no surprise that this is how a student with poor understanding of the difference between proper and colloquial language would write.

I fear I'll have little opportunity to make headway into he local dialects here.  I'm only here for six months, and most of the people I hang out with actually do speak English fairly well, though there probably a good reason I don't spend much time with the folks I can't understand.  As for adopting my own language to fit theirs, well…no.  In Mali, I was more than happy to go around speaking Bambara, because I had no real choice if I wanted to communicate.  Just imagining myself trying to adapt my language to fit in here makes me giggle at the thought.  It's one thing to watch a Hasidic New Yorker doing a musical imitation of Burning Spear, but for me to incorporate that into everyday speech is just too much of an anatopism for my own dignity to handle.  Sorry folks, but I'm proud of my own Phluphia mumble, and I intend to keep it!

Introducing, Guyana!

Just about every person over the age of 30 to whom I informed of my impending trip to Guyana mentioned the one thing they knew about the country: Kool-Aid suicide cults.  Now granted, that was more than I knew about the place before I was accepted to work there in my latest Peace Corps Response gig.  In fact, like most of my other under-30 friends, I was barely familiar with what continent it was on.  The first thing I learned about Guyana, other than its location, was that it's distinguishing landmark was the inspiration for "Paradise Falls" in Disney's Up.  I love that movie, and I think the first 15 minute segment is one of the greatest love stories ever filmed, which is why it seemed rather unfair for the second thing I learned about Guyana to be the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in which over 900 people died of suicide poisoning at the hands of Jim Jones and his People's Temple cult.

However, the first things I saw firsthand in Guyana happened as the captain woke the passengers up at 5:00am to inform the us that we were beginning our descent, and the sky above the clouds was a brilliant psychedelic rainbow horizon, unlike anything I've ever seen.  A band of ROYGBIV stretched in a thick line across the sky, darkening down into a flat plain of tarnished-silver colored clouds.  As we descended into the clouds and the sun rose higher above the horizon, we flew through an iridescent golden-gray nebula of wisps and puffs, broke through the bottom, and saw an endless deciduous-green shag carpet, like something from the Disco era.  I've never seen, at least from that height, such thick jungle, such an impenetrable canopy of treetops which were only occasionally sliced open by the dull glitter of murky rivers.  The captain announced that we were about to land, and thanked us for our patronage, and with about four seconds and 100 feet of altitude to spare, the jungle broke and the runway began not an inch too soon.

We were picked up at the airport by Flavio, the PCR supervisor, who drove us through the capital, Georgetown, to our hotel, and then to the PC Bureau.  It was my first glimpse of anything in the Western Hemisphere south of Florida, and looked as new to me as Mali did my first time there.  Most of the houses have a similar look; squat and wide, with almost flat, barely triangular roofs, and virtually no buildings exceeding five stories, except for St Georges' Anglican Cathedral, which was once the tallest wooden building in the world.  They also drive on the "wrong" side of the road (as opposed to the right side), which was a tough transition to make in terms of not completely freaking out when I would see a car barreling straight towards us on our right side.

The next few days flew by in a tizzy of orientations and introductions to just about everyone on PC Guyana staff.  Elizabeth, the other Response volunteer who arrived with me (and also happens to come from a Philadelphia suburb near mine), and I were given the skinny on the rules and administrative issues, most of which were familiar, if slightly different from our previous PC posts.  For example, the idea of having weekends off from work and not counting towards vacation days as we travel is different from Mali where we are considered to be officially always on duty, though not necessarily always working.  We also were warned of the new social protocols we would have to get used to, such as how inviting a girl into my house is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from inviting them into bed, regardless of how innocent my intentions might be (and I am nothing if not a man of innocent intentions!).

After three days of orientation, plus a "safety and security" tour of Georgetown, I was ready to be sent off to my site.  We took a taxi to the Essequibo River, which we were then obliged to cross the water by way of a half-hour speedboat ride weaving through islands and bouncing on the waves.  We landed in a town called Supenaam, which I am disappointed to admit was not actually called Superman, and then drove off to the town of Affiance.

Affiance is located right on the coast, but sadly, the beaches are mostly just grassy mud and shallow water.  However, the whole area is absolutely gorgeous, with the strip of towns along the coast, of which Affiance is one, being just a long row of houses and businesses along a single main road, and nothing beyond that road but the sea on one side and rice fields on the other.  The palm trees are plentiful, the livestock are ubiquitous, the heavy gray rainy season clouds loom dramatically, and walking down the street, I keep getting a strong but anonymous scent of something that smells just like Mali, but with a slightly curried flavor to it, which I assume is on account of the predominantly East Indian population here.

It's been less than a week but I already have a million thoughts of this new home of mine and plenty that I want to write.  In consideration to your attention span, I think I will just leave off here, and update you all next week after I've begun my work at the Imam Bacchus Library.

But before you go, I have some great news!  If you thought something like a military coup d'etat and temporary evacuation of the executive staff meant the end of Mali Health Organizing Project, think again!  The local staff are still on the ground in Sikoroni, Bamako, carrying out their normal routines and continuing to implement their programs.  They have a weekly radio program dealing with health issues that gets heard by potentially millions of listeners.  Their Community Health Workers are still diligently making weekly visits to families to check up on the health of the Action For Health program members and training them in early intervention for illness control.  And my pet project in the short time I worked for them, the Three-Legged Stool of Nutrition, was used during a recent nutrition fair which you can see at their blog.  In order for MHOP to keep maximizing their great work, they need funding, and this month, they are running a special fundraising campaign, which you can see all the details about on their newly redesigned website, malihealth.org.  I don't like to plug things needlessly on this blog, be cause let's face it, it's mostly about shameless self-promotion, but MHOP is really a great organization with some creative and capable people running it, and they're not just working to improve the health situation in one part of Bamako, but to create a template for other similar NGOs to learn from.  So donate, already!

Going, Going, Guyana!...Soon?

Well, I must apologize: I had planned to have some new and interesting updates for you all by now, but it seems my life is too glamourous and exciting for my own good.

You may recall in my last posting here that I was given a reassignment to work on a children's' literacy outreach program in Guyana.  Now, while I have gotten some details about the position, I really don't like counting my chickens before they hatch by telling you all exactly what I'm going to be doing there before I've even arrived, since as recent events in my life can attest, sometimes instead of chickens, you get omelettes.  What I do know about the position is that I will be working in a community on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America (which includes some nice river-side real estate!).  I will initially be doing some local research about mentalities towards education and try to find out as much as I can about why illiteracy rates are as high as they are, even in students – the ones who hypothetically should be learning how to read every day.  Once I have compiled a sufficient amount of research, I will begin to develop a campaign of sorts to encourage reading and set up a program in a local library to that same end.  Basically, my job is to teach youngsters that reading is cool and knowledge is power!  So far, the best idea preliminary brainstorming has gotten me is to dig up old videos on Ebay of Reading Rainbow, one of my all-time favorite PBS shows, and I'm sure yours too!  I mean seriously, if the guy from Star Trek with the funny space-glasses can't encourage them to read, what chance do I have?

Much to my vexation though, there's been a small hiccup in this little plan of mine.  See, I'm writing this blog right now on Monday evening, May 21.  I was supposed to be settling into my new life in Guyana right now, but it doesn't look like I'll be there for another three weeks because, as I said, I'm just too awesome for my own good!  I've been using a special Peace Corps-issued passport for all my Peace Corps-related travel, which actually really just means going to and from Mali, taking various vacations, and of course, being evacuated.  On this passport, I've visited ten different countries, and crossed the borders of those countries multiple times, as many as six times for Togo back in '09.  Well, after all that flipping and flopping all over Creation, it seems that I've run out of pages for visa stamps, so before I could get my Guyana Visa, I needed to get more pages.

America baby, as much as I love you, sometimes I just wish you'd stop wasting your time on those useless extravagances like Brangelina's Baby or the Senate and take care of little ol' Humble Jake!  (No, folks, I don't mind if you start calling me that.)  All I needed were a few pages to staple into the back of my passport and now that it's taken too long to get them, I didn't get my visa yet, which means another 3 weeks or so until I get to leave.  It's not the end of the world, but it is annoying and until my date is confirmed, I'm starting to feel like those guys in the heist movies where they are told to stay in their apartment for days but be ready to move on a moment's notice when it's time for "the job" to go down (thinking specifically of Reservoir Dogs).

In the meantime, I've gotten to meet my niece, Maia "Bean" Kupchan, a 10-week-old bundle of giggles, goofy faces, and earsplitting "I'm hungry/thirsty/tired/scared/bored/confused/lonely" wails.  I've also happened upon some of my "bucket list" concerts which just happened to be in town in the same month which I wasn't even supposed to be home for (Rammstein and Mark Lanegan).  I've helped my sister Aviva out at her urban gardening program, flexing my weeding and sewing muscles, and with my extra time on my hands, I might as well go back.

I have also, with almost masochistic concern, been keeping tabs on the situation in Mali.  It breaks my heart on a pretty regular basis to see the progression of events there in the aftermath of the coup.  Human rights atrocities have become all too common in the northern half of the country as about half a dozen Tuareg Separatist rebels and Islamist Extremist groups have been fighting over towns in the Azawad region, trying to take over land and either resist or impose Sharia Law.  This is all as a result of the power vacuum left by the military withdrawal from the region when the coup started, and so far it hasn't paid off in the least.  Cpt. Sanogo and his cronies have officially stepped down and appointed a member of the old president's staff to act as interim president, but even that is tentative.

According to a Reuters report, "Hundreds of protesters entered Mali's presidential palace unopposed on Monday and said they would remain there until interim civilian president Dioncounda Traore resigned. . . The protesters tore up images of Traore and called for him to be replaced by Captain Amadou Sanogo, the officer who led the March 22 military coup. . . Soldiers positioned at the palace stood by as the civilians entered the buildings."  Within a few hours, the president himself was attacked by the mob and hospitalized.  What this means is that the most vocal citizens of Bamako are in favor of having the coup leaders maintain their globally-unpopular and so far disastrous control of the country rather than let it fall into the hands of those who were in power during the stable, yet corrupt, office of the deposed president Touré, or ATT.  I don't think that the population of Bamako is at all representative of most Malians, but I also can't think of a single nice thing I've ever heard a Malian say about ATT or the government at large.  It may be that however convoluted his methods are, Sanogo might have a bit of a point with regards to just restarting the government from scratch and giving the people something to believe in again.  It is getting harder for me to be able to tell whether I should support what my own sense of logic dictates – that the country is worse off than it has been in decades, with manipulative and hypocritical dictators running the show – or try to understand and reconcile my views with what appears to be the vocal majority.

This is a deceptively complicated issue, which has had dozens of articles written on it, so I won't waste space here just to be redundant, and instead I will just direct you to the News and to one of the best commentaries I've been reading.

Finally, I've posted the best of my photos from my latest gig in Mali, plus my Evacuation Vacation in Ghana onto my Facebook, which you can access here, even if you've never stepped foot on Facebook in your life!