The Enemy of God

My first entire year of teaching is officially OVER!!!!!! It's a good feeling, and I am very happy to be at this point. It feels like a good accomplishment, a good marker, and I am excited to be able to focus on little projects I will be working on this summer - like a girls' camp in Padema and painting murals of world maps on the school walls and some other things...oh, and if anyone knows people who works with solar panels, drop me a note please! We have been in talks of a library with "electricity" (meaning solar panels) for students to be able to study at night. I will do some of my own research, but you never know if anyone reading this will have some info for me as well. And being the "American" everyone thinks I am capable of obtaining anything I want, so my colleagues have sort of indirectly insinuated that perhaps I could work on this goal for next year.

As for the end of the school year, the passing rate of students from their current class into the next year's class is between 55 and 65 percent!! Shocking for me, but normal for Burkina. Those who did not make the grade will either sit through the same grade and all the same classes next year, or they are kicked out of school because it was already their 2nd time trying to pass a class or their grade was too low to even be considered for a 2nd time around. The system is pretty screwed up, in my opinion. But in all fairness, it is also hard to teach kids on the village level because these are not kids who know French as their first language... they began learning it when they began school, so it's their 2nd language, like for me, and some kids speak even worse French than us Americans. This system also creates the huge range of ages of kids in one grade together. It is entirely normal to have 13 yr olds in the same class as 18 yr olds. It was weird at first, but as with everything else, it all becomes relative.

So the class I was "professeur principale" for had 57 students in it - which means that for those students, I had to claculate all their end-of-year overall grades and rank them and fill out their report cards. Of these 57, 31 will pass onto next year, 12 will have to repeat the class, and 14 are basically kicked out of school altogether. It is unfortunate but that is pretty much how the school system works. It's like survival of the fittest. Well, some kids can't come back due to financial restrictions because their families can't afford the school fees (about $60 would cover everything for one year) or if they are a girl, their families may just decide to take them out of school to give them away for marriage. Or some girls get pregnant and quit, too. I had two students get pregnant just at the end of the school year and I didn't see them for the last month of school so it's fairly certain they won't be back next year. However, in all those statistics that are a bit discouraging and hard to accept as someone coming from America, where education is a normal part of every child's life, there are lots of kids who are extremely motivated and who bike miles every day to get to school by 7 a.m. and who excel in school. Those kids have every bit of my respect and they are, quite simply, just amazing young people who are my favorites. I shouldn't play favorites, but I totally do.

Other than that, the extreme heat has been easing up on us. Rains are starting to arrive with hurricane-like winds and violent downpours at least once or twice a week, which means people have already begun going out to their fields to begin the planting season for next year. It also means that lots of crazy, disgusting bugs start appearing out of nowhere again. For instance, those crazy spiders I explained about last year ... the huge, hairy brown ones that are known to travel with scorpions on their backs...the one I had the encounter with my 2nd night ever in village ALONE!!! anyway, I have come across many of them these past few weeks.... But they are not worse than one particular creature I crossed in my house just this past Tuesday night!! Allow me to elaborate on another good night gone bad....

This night was a quiet night... cool breeze, starry skies, and Norah Jones playing on my MP3 player. I had just "showered" and eaten, and my neighbor had come over with her 2 little daughters to chat for a while. After they fell asleep in our laps, she got up to go home (she lives in the same row of houses as me), so we walked back across the terrace together. My other neighbors, who are students - Aziz, Yacouba and Ismael - were outside studying by lamplight, and we stopped and chatted with them for a few minutes, too. Finally I go home, brush my teeth, and as I am closing the door to lock it for the night, I spot a HUGE lizard staring at me from just behind my door, inside the house!! Now, here in Burkina there are gazillions of little chameleon/newt type lizards all over the place and you get used to them scurrying all over your walls and just everywhere... but this guy... he was about nine inches long and very fat and multi-colored orange, black and green like I've never seen before, and with a rounded reddish-gray tail which I've also never seen before. Because I didn't want to scare him into scurrying off into my bedroom or behind something, I cried out "Aziz, viens ici!!!" for my neighbor Aziz to come help me. He runs over and as soon as he sees the thing, he advises me to back away and not get too close. He will kill it immediately. He grabbed my broom and with the handle he smashed down on the lizard, which cut off his tail (which we didn't realize at the time) and prompted him to run off into my shower area! I let out a little scream of panic, and the other two boys came running over to see what was happening. After explaining, the three of them now are hunting down my new roommate, inside and then outside the house where the shower drains.

They find him hiding inside my shower area, behind the rock that is used to block the drain hole to keep reptiles from crawling up in it (obviously an extremely effective method of pest control). Eventually, with the broom handle, my heavy wooden pestle used to grind spices in a mortar, and a large branch, the 3 of them killed it. They removed him from the house and atfer spotting the lizard's tail behind the door I picked it up on a piece of paper and delivered it to the boys to dispose of. That's when I got the even scarier explanation of exactly what kind of creature this was...

In Julah they call it "Allah-jugu" which translates to "The Enemy of God"... why? you may ask... well apparently this beautifully colored animal can detach his little reddish tail and throw it at you like a stone as a defense mechanism when feeling threatened. The tail is full of some kind of poison that Ismael told me gives a person leprosy. Now, I don't really know about leprosy, I'm not a health volunteer, however I don't know if you can get it from the poison of a lizard, but I also don't care to find out.. either way it must give you some kind of crazy skin problem that people are scared of. On top of that, they said that it is a creature that, if left to grow to its full size, will grow a second head in place of that poisonous tail. So it would be a 2-headed lizard - one on each end of him - walking around, scaring all the white people. Now again, I don't know how true this is, but my colleagues have confirmed both of those extremely fascinating facts about The Enemy of God, so I don't really want to ever see one again. The Enemy of God..... in my house... how absolutely wonderful!

So after all this, to really put the icing on the cake of this evening, and as I was preparing to come down from the adrenaline rush and go to bed a second time, I catch sight of one of those crazy scorpion-carrying spiders just outside my house, too!!!!! (he was scorpion free, though)... yet again the cry for help goes out and Ismael came and smashed him to pieces. He told me those spiders are not harmful (I guess that would mean when they are sans scorpion) and that they are simply called "Jean"... like John in English. That's quaint.. just like a friendly, hairy, eight-legged, freaky neighbor, Jean. Right. Go Africa. Still full of little surprises, even after one whole year.

So anyway, who's coming to visit me??????
Just you, me, the Enemy of God and Jean - it'll be fun!!!!


I will be in Bobo and Ouaga a whole lot throughout the entire month of June for various reasons, so it would, as always, be wonderful to hear from someone... ANYONE!!!!

bisous,
poko