Talking to flood victims & School starts again

Since my last post a lot has happened.  I ended up returning to Ouaga only 2 days after arriving in Ouahigouya. 

A group of volunteers (me included) ended up working with Save the Children – Canada to conduct interviews at the flood victim camps around Ouaga.  At the beginning of September Ouaga received a torrential amount of rain causing many mud brick houses to collapse and leaving about 150,000 homeless.  News article here.  For the last month the government of Burkina has housed the homeless in school buildings scattered around the city.  I was assigned to a school named Koubri that was housing 1,011 people, 425 of them children.  I was partnered with a Burkinabè and we conducted 6 focus group interviews, mostly in mooré so I was practically useless. I did manage to get the girls talking though so I guess that was something.  A quick overview of the situation:  not enough food, not enough readily available drinking water and insufficient housing.  The kids were very nervous and scared particularly about the housing problem.  They are living in a school and the first day of classes was October 1.  They knew they would have to move "somewhere else" and had no hope of going to school themselves.  

Overall the experience was very educational for me.  It was the first time I had observed relief work for displaced victims of a disaster.  I can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of aid needed after larger disasters like hurricane Katrina.

I returned to Ouahigouya on Tuesday evening just in time for our Conseil de Rentrée (start of the year teacher meeting) on Wednesday morning.  It was a very long meeting, but much better that last year.  This time I understood what was going on!  My french has definitely improved.  Then Thursday was the first day of classes.  I was hardly nervous at all compared to last year when speaking and teaching in french seemed like an insurmountable task. 

The 1^ère PC and 5^e Math students were there, so I was able to introduce myself and layout my class rules.  Unfortunately my 2^nd PC students had taken off since the "first day of classes" here is anything but that.  I believe they'll be taking a pop quiz next week in order to get them back into the right mind set for school.  Pretty sure they'll be my hardest class discipline-wise.

I'll start teaching on Monday for real, but I may be the only one.  Turns out October 5 (Mon.) is Teacher's Day.  I guess we celebrate that by not teaching.  And we won't teach December 7 – 11 because Burkina's Independence Day is being celebrated on Dec. 11 in Ouahigouya.  I'm starting to wonder how much teaching will get done this first trimester.