I’ve been living in Africa for a year!

Once again I apologize for the long gaps between my blog posts. I really don’t have a good excuse this time. I was even in Senegal recently where the Internet is abundant and I couldn’t bring myself to sit in front of the computer for an hour or two. It can be pretty overwhelming to come back to the Internet after being away for a month or more. Luckily, I am now in Conakry getting some work done and I’ve had enough time to take the Internet in small doses until I could build up a tolerance again haha. It’s been so long that I’m sure there are a few things that I wanted to write about that I have now completely forgotten. Instead of summarizing the last two, perhaps three months, I will tell you about several important events over the course of several automated blog posts. There will be stories and pictures and maybe even a video! I’ll start with a school related update.

The end of school was rather chaotic this year because Guinea’s legislative elections were planned for the 30^th of June, just after the national exams usually wrap up. Because of the close proximity to elections, the government decided to move all the exams up by about 2 weeks. This changed the 10^th grade exam from the second week of June to the last week of May, giving us two weeks less to prepare our students for the exam. Luckily, I was almost finished with the math program and we were able to breeze through the last couple sections and start reviewing for the brevet blanc, a practice for the national exam that I got to write the math questions for. My students took the brevet blanc about three weeks before the actual brevet. I tried to make the questions as similar to real brevet questions as possible so my students would know what level of difficulty to expect. They did alright on some portions of the brevet blanc (biology, history) but they really struggled with my math questions and with chemistry too. After the test, I was in charge of compiling all the scores from the different sections and calculating the overall grade for the test. This is part of my job as the professeur principal for the 10eme class. If the brevet blanc was an accurate representation of the real brevet, it seemed like about 50% of my kids would pass test and continue on to lycee (high school). This was actually a pretty high percentage compared to a lot of other schools. After the brevet blanc was over, a lot of my students stopped coming to class. It was hard to encourage them to come too because the brevet blanc was their last official grade for the year. They started showing up again about a week before the real brevet for the review sessions that I had prepared. The real brevet began on May 27^th in a nearby (18km) town called Sinta that served as a testing center schools in our area. Math was On the very last day of testing so I planned to ride my bike to Sinta on Thursday, which was a non-test day and on Friday to give math reviews. I was excited to see my students show up to my reviews in large numbers accompanied by students from other schools as well. It also seemed like they had done some studying during those days they had skipped class which I guess is good haha.

After the real brevet was finished the only thing I had left to do was give the final exams for Geography and Math to my 9eme class. After I finished grading these exams I was done for the school year! It was a bittersweet moment because I was relieved to be done with the exhausting aspects of teaching, like grading, but I felt like there were still so many things I could teach my students. Luckily, some of them requested that I continue math review sessions throughout the summer and even more asked me to come to their villages and teach English which I have been doing on a daily basis since returning from Senegal. Upon my return, I also learned that 91% of my 10eme students had passed the brevet and would have the opportunity to continue on to lycee! Although I knew that some of them had probably figured out a way to cheat on a national exam, this was still a pretty exceptional success rate and I was very proud of them for putting in a lot of hard work throughout the year. I’m even more excited about my 9eme students who will get to spend a second yeah with Monsieur Ben. These are the kids who ask me to hold reviews and come during the summer even when it rains. They have great potential and I’m excited to see where they go! So long for now! I’ll leave you with a schedule of future blog post topics so you can know what’s coming. Check back once a week to see if my automated posts are working…

Geoff’s cursed keys

Feet

Senegal

Ramadan

Also, here are some pictures!

This is my awesome collection of Guinean pants! My favorite is the second from the left...

This is what the stinking wind did to the fence behind my hut. It's all fixed now though!

Aussi, le vent a decoiffe notre 10eme! We collected the pieces of the roof and a carpenter fixed it rather quickly.

Luckily the map of Guinea I'd been working on wasn't damaged

It's not finished in this photo. I finished it right before leaving for Senegal but forgot to take a picture...