After getting back from site, we all had a debrief at the training center and some trainees had less than ideal experiences in their communities. I felt extremely grateful that my own visit had been so amazing. The next day we spent the whole day making lesson plans for our upcoming summer school. We would be teaching summer school in Port Loko for two weeks to prepare for our actual schools.

On Saturday we had another Village Day to practice teaching and this time it didn’t go as smoothly for me. I was already in a bad mood and I had shown up to the training center late. When we got to the village the chief was a bit abrasive and then in my class not a single person wanted to participate. At the previous Village Day my class had flown through the lesson and everyone was eager to participate. I was teaching the same lesson to practice making it longer when I actually had to try to make it shorter.

On Monday summer school started. We began with morning assembly where the students had to sing a religious song such as “Good Morning, Jesus,” or, “Tell God thank you,” then they said the Lord’s prayer followed by the national pledge and the first stanza of the national anthem. First period lasted for 40 minutes followed by a five-minute break and then the second teacher taught for another 40 minutes. Afterwards we had club activities and students could choose to be in English, science, or math club.

We only had 12 students the first day which we were warned about. Students didn’t really start to show up until Wednesday. For my first class I made my lesson Thai-style by including lots of games and activities. They didn’t understand my opening game at first but started to catch on at the end which showed a lot of potential for the two weeks. On the other hand, one student slapped another in the face in the middle of the lesson so classroom management will definitely need to be worked on.

I had to wash my clothes after the first day of summer school because I was unable to over the weekend. My weekly bruk battle was getting worse and worse. This week as I was washing clothes, a neighbor woman came to sit across from me simply to stare and laugh. I normally wouldn’t say anything but I decided to stand up for myself.

“Do you want to help me?” I asked in Krio.

“What?”

“I said, do you want to help me?”

I continued staring at her waiting for her to get the hint. In my head she was going to say no and I was going to say then please stop laughing and leave me alone, but instead she shrugged and actually started walking over to me to help. For the hundredth time in this country, my heart shattered into a million pieces.

“Oh…no. You don’t have to help me. I just.. don’t want you to laugh,” I said awkwardly. Here I was trying to challenge her and she was actually going to come wash my clothes for me.

I again repeated the process with Mariatu where I would do all the hard work scrubbing away at my clothes just for her to redo them. This time I was scrubbing every part and using every tool I had: a scrub brush, a washboard, and rubbing the fabric out with my own hands. I stood over the washboard like the locals do and didn’t dare stand up to take a break. She still redid it.

“Do you see dirt on that shirt?” I asked as she was rewashing one.

“No,” she replied.

“So I already washed it,” I said.

“But not fine,” she replied. I exploded in my head.

Then later as I was standing over the washboard Mariatu began laughing.

“We don’t have washing machines here!” she sang.

“I’m handwashing them!” I said defensively.

“I know, but we don’t have machines like you,” she kept laughing.

“Well I don’t have a machine with me now, do I?” it felt like a true sister quarrel. “If you come to America, I won’t laugh at you.”

I felt bad for lashing out but was just so tired of having this same battle each week. I thought we had gotten in a huge fight but she just kept on singing and rewashing my clothes without a care in the world. I thanked her when we were done.

For the second day of summer school my two neighbors, Abu Bakkar and Ibrahim, were waiting for me outside the house. I walked out at 7:40 a.m.

“We were waiting a looong time for you!” they said.

“School doesn’t start until 9 o’clock!” I replied. It was a five-minute walk away.

They both attended my class even though only one of them was actually the appropriate age. I taught transition words such as first, next, then, after that, and finally, and also discussed how to give proper instructions. Pairs of students decided what they were going to give instructions on and then presented to the class.

I was totally blown away. I had taken the lesson from a JSS 2 handbook and they were JSS 1 students, yet they all seemed to already know the material. I was worried they were all just going to copy down the example I had written on the board but each pair had come up with something unique: how to go to church, how to wash clothes, how to cook, how to go to school, and more.

During English club that day, one of my students came up to me and asked me to be her mom. She also asked me to give her my phone so I think she was trying to go with the cute approach first before asking for what she really wanted.

After training I went to an ataya base for the first time. An ataya base is a tea and coffee shop that men tend to hang out at. We drank tea while a YouTube video played showing the wealthiest soccer players’ homes and cars. A youth soccer game was happening next door so we watched for a little bit after the ataya. The field was so small that each team was basically just kicking the ball all the way across repeatedly, but when someone finally did score, hoards of people would storm the field and cheer for whoever scored.

On Wednesday I taught my class directions and they again knew exactly what to do. During English club we had groups write their own stories and draw pictures to go along with them. I noticed they had their own standard way of drawing houses. In America kids tend to draw a square house, a triangle roof, two square windows, and a rectangle door. In Salone, kids draw a long, rectangular house, a thatched roof, and a grooved pathway leading up to the door. It’s the small things.

On Thursday when my co-teacher Paul was teaching math, one student randomly yelled, “Give us homework!” and the class erupted into cheers and screams demanding homework. Paul and I were confused but he gave out homework as they wanted. He then said they could either play a game or take a quiz and they all chose the quiz. They finished with a few minutes to spare, so a couple kids came to the front of the room to sing religious songs. During the last song as the bell was ringing, the class again exploded into dancing, singing, clapping, and stomping. It was the wildest math class I’d ever seen.

During English club my group wrote an original story about a principal who ends up in the hospital with gonorrhea, so a dog and a fox have to battle each other to decide who will be the next principal. I kept staring at their faces to see if anyone was laughing about gonorrhea, but no one did so I decided they weren’t trying to be funny…I think. When I got home that night, Mariatu and I ate chocolate cookies and popcorn and looked at the stars together.

Over the weekend some of my family members were sick with colds. I was eating breakfast alone by my room when my uncle walked over.

“We’re taking exams now at the college,” he said. “I have this cold. You have good medicine in America. Here we don’t have good medicine. Sometimes they sell fake medicine.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds and then he walked away. I felt like he was asking me for medicine but I’m wary of just handing things out, especially to people I’m not close to. I thought about it all day because it would be so simple to hand over ibuprofen, but then would I be opening the floodgates for other requests? Would I be perpetuating the stereotype that we are all rich Americans with every resource at our fingertips? In the end I didn’t give him anything and he was perfectly healthy the next day.

I also went to the college with Wi-Fi over the weekend and this time four kids came over to watch what Gabe and I were doing. I had my laptop and was attempting to post this blog (shout out to my lovely mom who posts them all for me because the Wi-Fi is never strong enough for me to do it myself. Love you!) They were all fascinated at my typing and kept reading random words. One girl sat by my legs and rubbed her hands up and down my shins remarking that there was no hair there. I sat cross-legged and one of the boys said I was sitting like a Chinese person, whatever that means.

As I was walking around on Sunday, I ran into Anne playing volleyball with a local team. I’d heard about people playing with them before and wanted to give it a try. I felt so much pressure to be good because I was representing women, Americans, the Peace Corps, and myself. The team was nearly all strong, young men with only one or two women.

So of course in the beginning I was terrible. Balls were flying all over the place and none of my serves made it over the net. But after warming up for a bit I started to improve and I miraculously returned three seriously hard hits in a row. My team was getting more excited with each save and at one point the ref even yelled, “Yeah, Fatu!” and gave me a thumbs up. When it was my turn to serve again, a little boy tried to tell me to underhand it. I said I didn’t know how and then blasted the next five serves over the net overhand. Then I stopped while I was ahead and went home (also felt dizzy from dehydration).

Our second week of summer school began and the students were getting used to us. Classroom management was getting slightly easier with practice but was still a challenge every day as students talked, stood out of their seats, hit each other, raced to the board on top of each other, and yelled answers instead of raising their hands. During language club my group scrapped the gonorrhea story and instead wrote about a school in a village that throws a concert. Phew.

At training, I’d been having a problem for a few weeks: language. The Peace Corps only wanted to teach education volunteers Krio when many of us wanted to learn our local languages. Another issue was that I felt many of us were unfairly graded on our mid-PST language checks. Only four out of 52 of us supposedly scored intermediate mid and were allowed to learn local languages. There are a lot of great Krio speakers in my group and I refused to believe there weren’t more intermediate mid scores, including myself. I majored in Spanish in college and put a lot of effort into teaching myself Thai during the year I was there. I knew my language abilities and was getting extremely frustrated that I was being restricted.

So on Monday I just walked into the Mende class and said I was learning Mende now. No questions were asked. The Krio class I had been forced to go to was still reviewing how to pronounce the word for ‘like,’ which is ‘lek.’ We learned this on the very first day and I was losing my mind at having to review it. Mende felt challenging, stimulating, and useful and I was so glad to go.

But the next time we had language class my dream was shattered. The language coordinator stopped me on my way there and asked which class I was going to. I said I was in Rashid’s Krio class, which is the truth. She said she’d heard I had gone to Ishmail’s Mende class, which was also true. In the end she said I had to keep going to Krio because if I didn’t then everyone would go to their local languages, which I said was a great thing because everyone should go to their local languages. Then I had to do a walk of shame back to Krio. ☹ But shout out to my friend Nick who encouraged me to go to Mende with him, supported every decision I made, and even talked to some staff about letting me in. You’re the real MVP.

I played volleyball again and this time a group of seven young girls watched me. They yelled my name, smiled, and waved to me when I was on the court and then I felt even more pressure to be good, even though I was glad they could at least see a woman playing a sport with a bunch of men. A little while later two of my male students from summer school ran up to the court beaming and yelling my name. They seemed so excited to see me there.

“Ms. Brittney! Ms. Brittney! You know how to play?!” they asked me. “Do you know how to play soccer too?!” I said that I did and they looked at each other with open mouths.

At school the next day, Abu Bakkar told me he had also seen me playing volleyball.

“You were wearing a blue shirt!” he said to prove it. “Women here don’t play sports because they are lazy.” Cue rant.

Abu Bakkar lives with his grandpa and that comment made me wonder what kind of conversations are going on in that house. I told him that women in Salone were definitely not lazy, especially when they spent every day cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. I said if anyone is lazy it’s the men because I always see them sitting around talking to each other and relaxing. He laughed nervously.

At summer school we started to discuss the code of conduct for exams. Cheating, or spying as they call it, is a big issue here. Students simply don’t see it as a problem. My host mom, Khadija, even once bragged to me about how when she was in college, she would read one part of the homework, her friend would read the other, and then they would sit next to each other during tests. She didn’t even say it to be scandalous, she said it matter-of-factly like that was the smart way to get through school without doing more work than you need to.

We ended summer school with a review day and then exams. My class was great at reviewing and everyone seemed to know everything. Every teacher proctored a different class’s exams and the class I was in was flawless. Not a single student tried to cheat. When I graded the exams later, many students passed and only three students received zeroes. My English club group finished by writing and drawing our village school story on a book made out of rice bags. These two weeks of teaching were very eye-opening and I think they will help me a lot when it comes to actually teaching at site.