Dedicate yourself

One of the toughest weeks of my Peace Corps service…yet also one of the best…

It started on Monday.  My brother Abou told me that his pen and French notebook had been stolen during class (9^th grade chemistry) while he was out of class running an errand for his teacher. No students owned up to it and the teacher couldn’t do anything to get it back. DISBELIEF. I bought a new pen and notebook for Abou and he spent hours and hours recopying 3 months of notes so that he didn’t fail the “contrôle de cahier” (notebook check) in 2 days. I lent him my flashlight so he could even stay up at night to finish in time.

On Tuesday my other little brother Issiaga got kicked out of class (5^th grade) because his hair was too long and needed to be cut. He didn’t have money to buy a razor so I got one for him. The elementary school is also requiring all students to  bring pictures of themselves to class to attach to the report cards - just one more thing that the students can not afford. FRUSTRATION. Tuesday night my little sister Hawa came home with her report card for 6th grade. She brought it over to me with a pen to sign where it said, “parent’s signature.” I guess being the only one invested in the education of these children my sister thought that I should sign there (I didn’t, I told her that her mom needed to do it). I also refused to sign it because she was failing all of the subjects. DISAPPOINTMENT.  She has so much working against her and she already has a 2 year old son. I told her that she needs to study harder and tried to explain the importance of education for her and also how she will be the one to pass on her knowledge to her son. Abou was sitting on the porch with us and I told him that, being the most responsible and smartest student of the family he needed to step up and be a role model and encourage the other children in our concession to keep going to school. I told him how DISCOURAGED I was about education in Guinea. As I was saying goodnight he told me, “Il faut pas être decouragé” – don’t be discouraged.

Wednesday. Feeling pretty down about education. I get to school and my 3 best students inform me that they won’t be in class because their family friend died the night before, but they didn’t want to skip class without telling me. SADNESS. I went to class wondering how students manage to make it this far with so many things going against them, when, 2 students from Terminale came into my class to make an announcement. They were asking students to donate whatever small amount of money they could to help another Terminale student whose hut had burned down and whose notebooks, uniform, and everything else had been destroyed. At this point I was just about ready to cry in class. Luckily I made it through the lesson. When I was finished with class and packing up my stuff Abou came into my classroom to ask for some chalk. He told me he wanted to do some math revision with our younger siblings. HOPE at last. I wasn’t sure if he was really going to do it, but when I got home a few hours later all of the kids were outside copying notes, 2 of my younger brothers and a neighbor were at the chalkboard on my porch doing math with Abou supervising their calculations. Tears of JOY. I have never seen of the kids in my family study outside of school. No one hardly noticed when I came home because they were all focused on what they were doing. HAPPINESS.

Thursday. My students, having sensed my discouragement the day before, came to me after class to talk with me. A group of 12^th grade girls and I spent about 20 minutes talking about the issues that students face and I told them they’ve made it this far and they need to do everything they can to keep going. One of my top girls wants to be a doctor and asked if I had any resources about medicine that she could borrow. She really enjoyed when we talked about parasites and wanted to know more about them. The next day I was able to give her a few copies of info that I had relating to that. FULFILMENT.

It’s easy to get discouraged working in this environment – poverty, suffering, sickness, etc... But at the same time there are so many people that are working hard to change their lives and to change Guinea and that’s what keeps me going.

Peace Corps staff reminded me of this when confronting  these hardships (I think it comes from a Buddhist saying):

1.       Accept that there will never be an end to all suffering

2.       Dedicate yourself to the end of all suffering

This is my dedication.