Saclepea, revisited

So, I've now been in Saclepea for about 5-6 days, and thus have formed a more solid opinion of it. In short, I love it: the poeple are friendly, the food choices are varied (I ate attieke the other day, something I've been missing since I left Guinea), my neighbors are awesome, kids here are pretty cool, the school is large and has a small but very functional library (that some students actually use!), etc. etc.

I've already made some friends in the community that I can tell will be strong friendships, not just superficial friendships for a few months. I think this is in large part to the size of Saclepea, it is large enough that I can find more people who I can have real conversations with. There is also a large NGO presence and so this brings in people from Monrovia who have higher levels of education who work with these NGOs but live in the general community. Then there's the ex-pat community itself, there are 5 Americans (that I know of) living in this town, all current or former Peace Corps volutneers in their 20s (I think... very early 30s at the most). This is such a different experience from what I had in Bintimodia where I was the only one around for miles. I like the change though, it's nice that I can choose to go to the water pump and hang out with the local kids on my porch, but also share that porch with Jesse, and be walking distance to 3 other Americans. I can definitely immerse myself in Saclepea when I want to by going off on my own into the town and chatting/eating with people, but it's nice that there's more than just that.

As for my school, it is a very large school made up of 5 buildings (some under construction, the others recently built). The original buildings were mostly destroyed during the war, so much the school is actually being completely remodeled/rebuilt with UN Relief money. The upside is that they were able to install wiring for a generator to have a classroom dedicated to computing (there are 15 computers that the school owns that will eventually enter this room). Also, the rooms are mostly in good shape, with functional doors, walls, ceilings and windows (something I can't say for my school in Bintimodia). The resource room is a small library with like 5 bookshelves and 3 tables, but it has a few sets of encyclopedias, a bunch of dictionaries, and lots of donated school books from the states. I've been holding office hours in there after school and yesterday I worked with 4 of my 10th graders to help them review for their chemistry and physics tests. A lot of it was mostly showing them how to use the textbooks to find definitions to words they didn't understand from their notes, etc.

My schedule for the year will be teaching one section each of 10th, 11th, and 12th grade chemistry, and one section of 10th grade physics. There are two sections for each class, so I will be splitting the duty with Mr. Wilbur, the teacher who had been handling all the chemistry classes up until now. I am hoping to convince him that we should coordinate our curriculum so that I can watch him teach and he can watch me teach - this way I can try to get him to change his teaching techniques when he continues this next year on his own. He has a background in agriculture science, but when there was no chemistry teacher at the school he stepped in and so he basically taught himself the material enough to teach it to the students. Because of this I did find some funny chemistry that the kids had been taught, but considering his background I'm very impressed with how good of a job he's done at teaching it. Hopefully he and I can get the kinks worked out and I can help him use more demonstrations in his lectures.

I haven't been given a very heavy load at the school so I will be doing other projects. I'm going to try to have regular hours at the resource center to help kids study (tutor them and guide them on how to use the resource center in my absence), and I'm going to talk to the officials in the next day or two to see if I can be useful at the Ivorian refugee school which meets in the same buildings after the regular school day is over.

Oh yeah, about that, there are lots of people here from Cote d'Ivoire, so I've gotten to continue to use my French (my neighbor, M. Diabate, is a tailor who has also become a friend and resource to Jesse and me). Yesterday when I was chatting with him in his shop, I noticed one of his workers eating attiéké, an Ivorian food that I grew to love in Guinea, so he took me to the lady who sold it. As luck would have it, it turned out she sold her food next to a rice and sauce lady from Guinea. When I told THAT lady that I had been in Guinea she asked if I spoke Malinké. When I told her I didn't but that I spoke Susu, she turned to the lady in the shack next to her, and said "Hey! Fanta! This white man speaks Susu!". It turns out Fanta speaks Susu, and was very surprised to find out that I did too. It was a very eventful afternoon for everyone involved.

Oh, and the local language here is Manno. I don't really feel the need to learn it like I did in Guinea because most everybody over the age of 5 speaks English, but I've started learning the basics (hello, what news?, I'm fine, what is your name?, etc). Of course, the first word I learned was kwi kulu which means, you guessed it, white man. At least it sounds cooler than foté did in Guinea.

I guess I could keep writing in this forever about this past week. Suffice to say that it's been very very eventful and I'm really enjoying my time in Liberia thus far. I'm not sure how teaching will be one I get in the swing of it next week, but as for the living in the town goes, I'm happy. My house is also coming together slowly, I got a bed yesterday, and tomorrow our "kitchen counter" should be finished, so we can set up our gas stove and "kitchen sink" (pictures will be up one day, I promise). We're then going to commission a kitchen table and a metal-screened pantry to keep food mouse-proof. We were lucky enough to find woodworkers just down the street from us who immediately gave us good prices and are super nice. The guys our school found us to make the beds charged us three times what it should have cost to make(each bed cost $60, it could have cost $20-30 if we'd used the guys Jesse and I found) - so we're very pleased to have met these two guys who are super friendly (they even installed a new lock on our door for free).

Anyway, this is good for now, I will do my best to keep this current.