Welcome to Nioro!

I sat cross-legged on the mat, eight attentive, little faces looking at me wide-eyed. Glancing down at my notebook in my lap, I carefully said the Wolof words I had learned the night before with the help of my family in Nioro. Motioning clearly, I demonstrated the activity to the kindergartners watching my every move, and their teacher who was learning my game along with them.

For as long as I can remember I have spent many hours planning and running learning centers. When I was younger, my students were a diverse mix of dolls and teddies and our classroom was my playroom in the comfort of my own home. As I’ve grown older, my role has changed with time and my classroom has expanded outside the walls of my house. I have observed and learned from other experienced teachers, and, more recently started to be the teacher myself.

But even though my early ‘students’ of American Girl dolls and imaginary friends might have made for an unconventional class, I never dreamed that I would have the privilege of teaching in a hot, colorful classroom at Adja Penda Ba School (APB) in Nioro du Rip, Senegal.

Right now we were going over shapes, colors, and matching. A game focusing on these benchmark skills (as we would say in America) was an easy way to introduce the students to small-group work, and it also allowed me to easily integrate basic English words in a very visible way. In Senegal, students don’t officially start learning English until 6th grade, but by then valuable time has been lost. Young learners’ brains are like little sponges, and while they are learning so many new words it is easy to integrate the English language when talking about colors, numbers, greetings, etc. If English is always a part of the learning process then it doesn’t feel as foreign or scary when they start learning it more seriously.

Even more importantly than my usage of English was the way I was using this activity to share ideas with my fellow teachers as to how they could use the donated materials at APB. Fortunately, the kindergarten classroom’s shelves had many resources. Colored blocks, construction paper, board games, dice, flashcards and more were available, but the English packaging and the strangeness of these items meant the teachers had not fully explored all the ways to use the tools. For me, who has had exposure to these teaching aids my whole life, coming up with different games is a much easier task.

After I spent a couple hours going through the materials, I was eager to start introducing little ‘centers’ that could be used to engage students. Unlike most kindergarten classrooms in America, the classrooms in Senegal don’t typically teach with rotating, leveled groups. While I think there is sometimes a lack of classroom community time in America, I do believe that smaller, focused groups can allow students to learn more efficiently and help teachers understand the differing levels of comprehension.

Right now I repeated the instructions and the two teachers who were sitting eagerly next to me clarified the directions for the children. For the first day I wanted to do an activity that covered a couple different skills so that I could get a general idea of students’ prior knowledge and formulate focused objectives to use later. I created a game that involved recognizing colors and matching same shapes. While the focus was to say the color in French, for the groups who understood quickly I would also share the English word. This was an easy way to introduce a third(!) language to the students because it wasn’t too abstract as they could very clearly see the color I was saying.

The game was easy and the resources were there, but it takes exposure to similar lessons plans to be able to create this activity. Although the manipulatives had been donated, they didn’t come with any usable guide book so the teachers didn’t know how to incorporate them into the classroom. For me this reaffirms the fact that perhaps the greatest gift one can give is time and knowledge. I believe that it is truly my duty, as the result of many years of high quality education, to share my experiences with others. Who I am today is the product of hundreds of carefully planned small group activities. While I may have learned my shapes and colors an ocean away, these students and teachers here have the same right to a dynamic learning experience.

Luckily, I was teaching an easy audience. Not only were the students giving me their utmost attention, but the teachers were so eager to help explain and learn the activity themselves so they could use it again in the future. It can be difficult to have someone suddenly intrude in your classroom, bringing with her changes in routine and instruction. However, the teachers here at APB were anything but possessive or defensive of their classroom. For me, a teacher who is eager to learn new forms of instruction is a natural teacher because they are motivated by the desire to help their students learn best.

As soon as I shared the ways this activity could be a type of informal assessment, they took out a notebook to start marking names of who learned quickly and who needed more help. Today, I was able to create two simpler games (shown below), and we used yesterday’s list to create the groups.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the helpfulness from the teachers. My welcome to Nioro du Rip has been overwhelmingly kind. One week ago today (I can’t believe it was that recently!) all four of us in my program who were going to internships outside of Dakar piled into a bus to be dropped off. It was no quick journey, as our advisor had to meet with each internship supervisor and sometimes we were waiting outside an organization for the supervisor to arrive or return his call.

By the afternoon I was the only student left in the bus. The roads were becoming unpaved, and tall buildings were fewer and father between. My advisor looked at me from the front of the bus to check in with how I was feeling as we bumped along. I was feeling too overwhelmed to even be nervous so I just gave him a thumbs up and told myself I could do this.

Even though we had spent the day dropping girls off at their internships, no one was greeted like I was. When we arrived at the school, I had a welcome party waiting outside. Administrators and teachers were ready to welcome me to my new home of Adja Penda Ba with open arms. Even my advisor, who has been coordinating internships for many years, was surprised at the level of teranga. When we walked into the school he turned to me and said, “Wow, Susannah! Everyone here already knows you.” As we sat in the principal’s office and discussed goals and objectives I knew that I had made the right decision of coming to Nioro.

After a week, I already feel truly integrated in my new host family in a way I never did in Dakar. Even near the end of my time in Dakar I still often referred to my Dakarese family as my “host” family, but to describe my home in Nioro the use of the word host feels out of place and distancing. When I walk in the door in the afternoon, I feel like I completely belong and am coming home. Last night, as we sat outside after dinner, relishing the breeze after a hot day, I looked down at my watch and couldn’t believe it was almost midnight. We had spent hours casually talking, learning Wolof, and just sitting together comfortably in a peaceful, restful silence. Yesterday evening spent learning how to eat with my right hand out of one bowl, sharing pictures of my American family, and sitting underneath a starlight sky while drinking ataaya will be one of the most memorable nights of my life.

And after just a few days I feel like I’m a part of my school family too. I was quickly involved in the planning of this past weekend’s school fair-- I even ran the ‘American’ game of musical chairs. Despite my protestations, I was even called upon to dance with other teachers in the last round of the dance

competition. Regardless of country, public dancing is always outside my comfort zone. But somehow, even though I was in a school thousands of miles from where I grew up, with children running around shouting in a language not my own and friends who I had met just a few days ago trying to teach me the dance moves, I still felt comfortable enough to give it a shot.

During the planning for the fair I was so impressed with the creative ways to plan limited-resource games that were both easy to manage and fun. In the days leading up to the event, I sat with other teachers during recess making fair tickets out of post-its and ink stamps, or constructing robots to be used as prizes out of miscellaneous Lego pieces. During these moments I felt so at ease in this community of dedicated educators. Sometimes in America, teachers’ lounges can have an undertone of disheartening cynicism, but at APB I am surrounded by genuine, authentic, and happy people.

Yesterday was Easter, and family holidays can sometimes allow for pangs of homesickness to creep in, but my full, thoughtfully planned day meant I didn’t feel far from home. A group of us comprised of administrators, teachers, and students headed off to visit one of the Senegambian stone circles, Site Ngayene. Dating from about 200 B.C.E. these stone monuments are believed to have been a type of funerary house. In my Senegal guidebook it had said that the Site can sometimes be hard to find and to really make the most out of it you need to visit with local guides. After reading that, it seemed like the stone circles might be too tricky to visit, but less than a week in and I already was given a full tour!

Much of the school welcome is thanks to the school’s founder, Khady Lusby, who made sure my dream of coming here became a reality. I was so touched when she even called all the way from Arlington, VA on my first night here to make sure all was well.

As we drove further from Dakar, the buildings became less complex and the roads a little dustier, but the teranga was only growing!

This week I used any time when I was not observing classrooms to go through all the available English instruction supplies so I could come up with some potential activities and lesson plans. This update is still only scratching the surface of my whirlwind of a few days, and I can’t wait to see where my Adja Penda Ba adventure will lead next.