2005-11-29 - 9:25 p.m.

November 27, 2005

The first two weeks of activities at the Girls Mentoring Center have come and gone: intense with work, laughter, stress, planning, arts and crafts, phone calls, guests, late night dinners and firecracker girls!

We officially opened the center on Monday November 14th with a short ceremony presented by the mayor, a Peace Corps staff representative, Limnaye, the school directors, and a partner NGO representative. In attendance were all the girls and some of their family members. We gave out programs in French and Arabic, and celebrated the day by sharing snacks and drinks.

Every weekend is GMC weekend. Fridays are normally dedicated to Geography and Culture, saturdays are generally dedicated to Life Skills and sundays are computer skills days. Aaron and I have been busy organizing and running Fridays and Saturdays, while Sundays are left completely to Limnaye to organize as she is the official computer skills instructor for the center: and what an amazing teacher she is!!!

The girls love it so far! They’ve been showing up regularly, actively participating, and taking notes. They seem surprised and excited that learning can indeed happen through playing, as Aaron and I have been coming up with geography-based games/activities and power-point presentations to help them grasp the material quickly and to effectively learn it.

We’re starting from the very basics of geography: peeling mandarins to see how spherical objects can be flattened out (i.e. the globe can be represented into a flat map), learning to identify the silhouettes of continents (through memory cards), learning how the continents are positioned in relation to each other (with a paper “puzzle” of the world), talking about distances, areas, population figures in relation to their known Mauritanian reality, learning about capitals and countries in North Africa (with power point presentations, memory cards, ball games, paper puzzles, etc.), focusing on cultures of each country and drawing comparisons with their known realities… it’s great to see the amazement in their eyes, to feel the excitement in their quick answers, to hear the laughter while working in teams: it’s working!

Our second day of “Life skills” was dedicated to professional women who were invited to recount their life stories, focusing in particular on their studies, careers and families. We had a total of seven guest speakers who took turns speaking, unveiling inspiring advice and tear-jerking anecdotes of their struggles and successes.

One woman was a known local science professor who recounted how she had always been at the top of her class and how for her junior high final exam she had been called into the director’s office to be explained that, by Islamic law, no woman could be higher than a man and therefore they were going to lower her final result. Her father enforced the school director’s word. In the end, two of her professors refused to sign the modified result and successfully pressured the school director to revert his decision. Her entire family moved about 250 kilometers so that she could continue her studies and despite the various difficulties that she had to endure, she successfully passed the baccalaureate exam at the end of high school and moved once again with her whole family to the capital so that she could attend university and eventually become a science professor.

Another woman recounted how, as a “slave” she was always discouraged from continuing her studies and from “dreaming” about a better future. She was given to a much older man in marriage at the age of nine and had her first child at the age of ten, after spending the whole pregnancy not knowing she was indeed pregnant and not knowing anything about child-bearing. She abandoned her studies early on and re-started once her first husband had left her. She pursued her education through alternative non-traditional courses, focusing on learning French and business skills. Today she is the regional representative for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs dealing with girls’ education and women’s rights on a daily basis, happily married in an “inter-racial” marriage and blessed with a large family.

The other guest speakers were a primary school teacher, a health worker, an NGO worker, a director working with the Ministry of Education for the office in charge of school monitoring and evaluation, and a bank teller: great role-models for promising young girls!

Life at home has been a little hectic, with all the time spent planning and preparing for the weekend as well as spent “socializing” with local friends, I’ve been struggling to keep up with laundry, dish-washing, dusting and sweeping on a daily basis… if it weren’t for Aaron helping me with everything both at home and at work I would be a complete mess by now! I am hoping the pace will slow down in a couple of weeks after we get most of the planning and preparation for the GMC down and ready… Inshallah! Aaron is doing really well, hasn’t gotten too sick so far, and has been faring amazingly well with the local language, winning the hearts of the local people who happily call out his name (“Hadrami!”) whenever they see him, trying to engage him in long-drawn cryptic conversations… poor Hadrami!

We’re planning on heading off to Mali for the holidays, Inshallah… just a few weeks away! It will be nice to be on vacation again and to visit a new country!

I wish you all a belated Happy Thanksgiving (I spent it getting henna done on my hands and feet!)

Hugs,

Jordy

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