Front Lines

Just a short update in case you haven't been following the news (or even if you have; Guinean news doesn't tend to dominate CNN even when we don't have a human kielbasa belch as president).  This is cobbled together from the scant English-language news I've found online, poor translations of the scant French news I've found online, rumors, hearsay, and my own limited impressions, so take with an entire shaker of salt.  Warning: this isn't a fun one, might want to skip ahead if you're looking for cute kid drawings and weird food stories.

Photo by Reuters (so don't worry, Mom)

For the last three weeks, local schools in Conakry have been closed.  Teachers and students have been striking in solidarity with junior teachers who have been laid off and in protest of low salaries.  On Monday, the demonstrations grew in scale and severity, with blockades being put across the roads (apparently by strikers) and violent clashes between security forces and protestors.  Numbers vary, but around six people were killed, some of them police, and at least thirty have been injured (likely many more).  The official government line is that these protests have been illegal, a scary assertion given past governments' actions against "illegal" demonstrations.  Though an agreement was reached on Monday between the government and representatives of the teachers' union, disruptions have continued to interrupt daily life.

For the last several weeks, I've been hearing stories of a different kind about life in Conakry.  A significant problem facing the city, among many others, is the high rate of unemployment among young men, who come to the capital from all over Guinea to find a job.  Finding none, these young men, many of them university-educated, soon find themselves with little money and a great deal of time.  Unemployment and poverty, combined with bad roads, a rapidly increasing population, and lack of access to reliable electricity and water, has led to high tensions that have only gotten hotter in recent years.  Police and the military have had little luck addressing these problems or quashing protest; government employees are paid badly enough that it's common for the police to put up "security checkpoints" of their own, where they shake down passing cars to supplement their incomes.

On Monday night, one of my coworkers was picked up from the airport by a driver hired by our school.  The 10-km drive took them an hour and a half, as they were stopped at two dozen flaming barricades where they were confronted by young men demanding payment.  When they ran out of money, the driver surrendered his phone to buy them passage.  When that was gone, the men surrounded the car, pounding on the hood and the roof, trying to open the door, and trying to snap off the side-view mirrors.

My coworker did make it back safely, as did the driver, though they both still have a shaky smile and haunted expression much of the time.  They and several of our colleagues were stranded in various safe places throughout the city (mostly hotels and embassy housing), but they all made it home sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Photo by Getty Images

And me?  I didn't leave my house for two days while all this has been going on.  I feel a bit silly for drinking most of my emergency water already, but apart from a looming toilet paper crisis, I've stayed as safe as possible.  The teachers' housing is pretty distant from the worst of the unrest, and I've been looking at the guards, walls, and razor wire that I was complaining about a few weeks ago through different eyes.

For the moment, things have become quiet.  There are still reports of shots being fired, and outside the walls of the school, sometimes there is chanting that lacks the reassuring regular melody of the neighborhood mosque's call to prayer.  Allegedly the local schools reopened today as promised, but few students have returned to classes, and the streets are mostly empty (not that I've been venturing out to look).  One of my Guinean coworkers predicts that the rest of this week will be eerily quiet and periodically explosive, but by Monday things will be back to normal.  Such as it is.

Child's Play

Based on what I'd been told before arriving, I was expecting the most difficult things about working at this school would all be tied to life in a developing country: frequent power outages, periods with no running water, difficulty accessing the internet, safety, etc.  From my arrival in Conakry, however, I've been pleasantly surprised to find the people of Guinea friendly, the walk to school dusty but safe, and the housing comfortable if not exactly without excitement.  The teaching, on the other hand, was immediately way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  Working with my mentor teacher, I'm only teaching nine students (soon to be ten), and compared to the kindergarten classes I'd observed in Kansas and the kindergarten I'd taught at in Osaka, nine students sounded like...well, child's play, if that's not too clever.  I was a little anxious about starting to apply all the skills I'd been learning in my grad program related to differentiation, assessment, collaboration, etc., but classroom management would be no big deal, I figured.  Kindergarteners like me.  Kindergarteners are sweet.

That was the biggest surprise, one that had me in literal tears (the worst kind) after my first day teaching: even though there are only nine of them, classroom management was way, way harder than I'd anticipated.  During those first few days, six of the nine students would be crying, running away, or punching the other children at any given time.  I felt horrible at my job, especially with this apparent failure to keep control of the class in front of my mentor teacher.  I could come up with several reasons these students behaved the way they did, and I tried to let these ideas inform my response (not that it helped me feel much better): they came from vastly different cultures from my own, most of them have low levels of English, most are still unused to school, all of them were getting used to a new teacher and new routine halfway through the school year.

Along with my crisis of confidence, I began to have a real crisis of conscience: why was I so bothered that it was so chaotic in the classroom?  They weren't obeying me, but did I really want to be an authoritarian, a force for telling these students to sit down and shut up because I said so?  That's certainly not the teaching philosophy I'd studied for the last year and a half in my education program, and it's not what I had imagined I'd be doing as a kindergarten teacher.  And to put it bluntly, I didn't want to be the white guy yelling at a room of nine black people (children, but still people) to stop talking!

Perhaps most critically, I think I had been comparing these nine international students to Japanese kindergarteners who were in a culturally homogeneous, strictly regimented school environment.  These students are from Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, or were international school brats.  What do I know about the school or home culture these kids come from?  What if...well, what if yelling is what these students know as a sign to be quiet?  What if my mild-mannered, touchy-feely, hippie-dippy persona doesn't register as an authority figure as them?  Or worse, as a teacher?

Well, last week, this particular crisis came to a head.  I decided I didn't want to be the yelling teacher, the overwhelmed, frazzled teacher.  I wanted to be the hippie uncle teacher, the one with the dopey ponytail and the ukulele and the dumb print shirts.

Easy fix: I brought my ukulele to school.

And how did it go?  Well, a bit anticlimactically.  My students enjoy the ukulele, and they enjoy singing, and while there's still a lot of punching etc., when I can get them on board with "Down By the Bay" or "The Green Grass Grows All Around," for a minute or two, I can stop shouting and get them to behave like adorable little children instead of complete maniacs.  For now, that's enough.