If you’ve seen any of my recent Facebook updates, you probably know that the teachers in Benin were on strike since January. At first, this caused little to no problems as the teachers were mostly still teaching and were more of on a metaphorical strike if you will. Then in the middle of February the teachers realized that their methods weren’t working (surprise!) so they decided to actually strike and stop teaching. I would like to preface these stories with the clause that it may not be entirely factual/the whole truth. Anything I know about the strike has come from various professors who don’t always tell me the truth or the whole truth so it has been very difficult to figure out what is actually going on. These are my observations from my village. A lot of the northern villages seem to not be affected much by the strike and many small schools have likewise not been affected either because they hire primarily teachers who are not on a government contract and have therefore not been striking. Anyways, the school system in Benin is much better organized than I would have thought it would be but it still has a lot of problems. The teachers are not paid very well and some of the newer teachers didn’t have a signed contract with the government but more of an ‘understanding’ which involved them teaching full time and getting paid whatever/whenever the government decided it felt like it. This led to anger on the part of the teachers and they decided to strike in the middle of a school year. Also, somewhere in the strike process it became known that the President of Benin, Yayi Boni, decided to give all government workers a 25% raise (no you did not read that wrong, 25%) and after the fact decided that teachers were not included in this raise even though they are government workers. I think this is when the strike got even more serious.
So starting in February most of the teacher’s at my school were not coming to their classes. Since I am not paid, I continued to go to work as did the few non-contracted professors at my school and the administration. This led to problems because the students began to stay at home since none of their professors were coming. I know I wouldn’t walk for an hour to get to school on the mere hope that a professor might show up if I didn’t have to. Even though I told my students I was still coming, many of them did not want to come to school for just my class or took the opportunity to slack off cuz, you know, they’re kids. So even though I was still trying to teach a good portion of my students were not there which makes things difficult if you are trying to make any progress. Also, as anyone who works with kids knows, the lack of any organization or structure led to the kids I did have acting like total fools and making my life hell. Beginning in March, the government still had not responded to the strike, so the teachers got even more desperate. The non contracted professors get paid by the hour, so they were continuing to come to school to make money while the contracted teachers were striking and continuing to get paid their salary. The striking professors began to convince administrations to completely close schools and when, in the case of my school, that didn’t happen, they created even more chaos. On March 5, I went to school and taught a class from 8-10 with about half of my students. The striking professors decided to come to school and have a ‘sit-in’ of sorts. They all came to school but sat in front of the administration building and did nothing. This angered and confused all of their students, some of whom are preparing at the end of this year to take a very difficult exam that will determine if they can continue on to the final years of secondary school or university. The students could do nothing about it though and the professors seemed to think it was all a big joke and incited the students’ anger and turned it against the few professors who were in classrooms teaching (i.e. me and that one other guy). I finished my very unsuccessful attempt at an English class at 10 and went to the teacher building to get a snack. The students started yelling and ripping branches off of trees and parading around the school yard as the professors egged them on and the administration did nothing. My school director told me to wait to start my 10 o’clock class, which I was angry about at the moment but in retrospect very grateful for. In a “if we can’t learn, no one can!” moment, the students mobbed the few remaining teacher’s in their classrooms and ran them out of the rooms and then proceeded to block the entrances to the doors with old desks and tree branches. It was probably one of the saddest moments of my school experience here. The professors had convinced the students to cheer at the demise of their own education and were laughing while doing it. It was awful. Everyone appeared to me to think that this was all just so entertaining. I got up and left the school an walked home and needless to say did not come back the next day. My students told me that any teacher who tried to teach was met with the same reaction all week long. And it was the students who were keeping their classmates from learning. It was extremely frustrating.
The other frustrating thing was the lack of any clear communication from anyone on what I should be doing during this time. I was told by various Peace Corps and school administrators to go to school, stay away from school, try to teach, or go each day and see what happens. No one could give me a clear answer on when the strike would end or what was going on. I was also told by people that the school year would be extended or most likely cancelled. I waited a week for things to calm down and then went back to teach to even less students with less of an attention span. This lasted for 2 weeks until the teachers’ representatives met with the government and the government basically told them to get back to work or they would no longer be paid and probably get fired. So now the teacher’s are back at school and many of them are just beginning to calculate the grades for first semester (which ended in January) and we have no date set for any of our exams for second semester, which should be about ¾ of the way finished. I had expected to be done with school by the end of May, now I have no idea when things will finish. As you can probably tell from my tone in this note, my general attitude towards work has greatly diminished in the last few months, as has my respect for many people at my school. There are about a million things one had to have patience with while living and working in another culture but there is an end to one’s rope and I’ve found it. This is just on top of a lot of other general nonsense at school that I have managed to accept over time, but now just can’t handle.
But wait! The title of this post says I’ve been working hard! Lies! Well, not exactly but outside of school (and the Go! Go! Lobogo English Club which floundered and died as a result of the strike), I’ve been doing a radio project with my work partner that is pretty awesome. We record a message every week on various health and life skills topics and then broadcast them from a popular local radio station. They are sent out in English, French, and Saxwe to maximize comprehension. We use some free air time from my work partners English radio show he does every Sunday and have so far covered Malaria prevention, the importance of hand-washing in reducing disease, women’s awareness/rights, and family planning. It’s a really cool secondary project and I’ve really enjoyed doing it and spreading helpful information around my area. I’ve also submitted a grant proposal to paint a world map mural on one of the classrooms at my school which I am super excited about. So there’s an update on the work stuff going on in my life. For an update on nonsense, see the next post!
No comments:
Post a Comment