Yilli

This is the one that breaks my heart. Its not that there haven’t been other hard things here to witness, and its not that this is necessarily even the worst of them, but for whatever reason this time it really hit home for me. No one died. No one is sick. And no one (in this brief anecdote at least) is starving. But it’s the failing out of school of one of my best friends that stopped me in the middle of my walk to school and forced me to take a couple minutes to clear my eyes before continuing on to meet with some students.

Yilli… It’s hard to jump right into this. Yilli is 16. Smart. Sweet. Strong. Fiery. And yet with a quiet pensiveness which I wish I could better understand, unsure if its sadness, a sign of content, or just of personal reflection. She played soccer on the team with us (and plays very well for that matter). I’m not sure why she quickly became one of my favorites and close friends. Most of the other girls come from families that tend to be better off (I’ve come to realize that the correlation between empowered girls willing to play soccer and familial means is not by chance). Yilli’s family isn’t poor, by Matameye Nigerien standards, but certainly not rich either.

She doesn’t speak French as well as some of the others and though my Hausa has improved since my arrival, our friendship has always had a language gap, and yet that’s never seemed to get in our way. I stumbled across her house one day and since then have made a point of visiting her and her family as regularly as possible. At home and being the oldest of the family means that her responsibilities are enormous in terms of helping her mother with cooking, cleaning, and taking care of all her little siblings.

Having gotten to know her, I can see that while she does her part without complaining, she’s tired of living in a two room house with her four other siblings in a concession shared with another family. She often teases me about her boyfriend and wanting to get married, though I’m never sure to what extent she’s serious and to what extent it’s just to draw a rise out of me and provoke my inevitable lecture (in broken Hausa) on why she should finish school. But it seems evident to me that on many levels she’s ready and wanting to move on.

In quatrieme a student has one year left before entering troisieme and being a candidate for the Breve, the end of college examination. Yilli had already repeated the cinquieme year which happens with a lot of students, but as a result means you’ve used up your one strike, redouble again and… you go home. For the guys, that means hanging out for a few years with your friends with your fadas, drinking tea, and perhaps working in the fields, or searching for some other prospective line of work, whether its commerce, transportation, or some other niche that someone finds. But for girls, it more often than not means marriage.

Marriage means an end of childhood whether a girl is 22, 20, 16, or 12. It means that babies are soon to be on their way and in large order. As I’ve noted before, Niger’s birth rate is 7.5 per woman, and I’m inclined to believe that Matameye’s rate may very well exceed that. It means that in place of school, you’re now preparing meals for your husband. Instead of playing soccer, you’re pounding millet. Yes I’ve acknowledged that for many girls they’re already forced to contribute with that at home, but the other freedoms and parts of life that allow kids to be kids fall out. The husband rules the household, and he may or may not put limits on where and when you can leave the house, who you can see, or generally how you can live your life. So, while I know most people see marriages as happy occasions, I’ve learned to be a bit weary of them here, and am no longer puzzled at why the newlywed girl often spends her marriage day crying alongside her friends at her house.

So what am I getting at? I already said that Yilli isn’t particularly strong in French. Here, in Niger’s adopted French school system, that means you’re in big trouble. You can squeak by for a while figuring out what response the teacher is looking for on an exam and copying down what you’ve memorized, but there comes a point when that no longer will suffice. I saw after the first semester that Yilli seemed to be making significant progress with her French and she always told me that she really liked it. But three lost months of school due to strikes seem to have killed her momentum and by the end it was evident to me that it had also sacrificed much of the progress she had struggled to make. What I am not sure of and can’t figure out at this point is if Yilli was just fed up with school, wanted to leave, and thus perhaps subconsciously let things fall. Or maybe on the other hand she really did want to do well, but just had no one to help her. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

While I knew she hadn’t had a passing grade the first semester, I held out hope in the back of my head that the second would be better. I visited her about three times before her final exams to help her with math. It was clear she was behind, but when someone took the time to help her understand the concepts she got them and in just a couple days we covered a bunch of material. But regardless of my too little too late efforts I think she saw the writing on the wall much clearer than I possibly could have. I don’t know if it suddenly became real to her that she was in the final days of her academic career, and she panicked, or why she did it. I spoke with her teachers and they showed me the sheet on which she had copied her History notes and with which she got caught during the exam. Honestly, my stomach churned.

Why should I have so much sympathy for her, a cheater, you could ask? It’s because I believe it finally hit home for her, it was cheat or fail. She chose the gamble of the former and while the risk didn’t pay off, it’s doubtful that the end result of leaving school would have been any different. I can’t fault her for that in my head or my heart.

As I said, I’d just held out hope for her. Perhaps totally irrational but I wanted to believe if she could just make it through quatrieme she’d have a chance to go for the breve and just maybe, maybe…

And so, next year our soccer team will play without Yilli. I don’t know yet what her family will choose to do (choices involving a young girl’s future, while only rarely completely forced, are heavily influenced by her parents, and father in particular). But her days of going to school with her friends are over.

She’s at least made it this far, I have to remind myself. After all, the vast majority of Nigerien girls never even make it to college let alone quatrieme. But I’m not sure if that logic helps or only makes things worse. All that really says in the end is that while Yilli’s situation is personally heartbreaking for me because she’s my friend, there are others who merit the same or even more sympathy than she does. It all comes across as pretty hollow self-assurance.

What can you really do? In the United States we talk about and think of education as the glorious and magical pathway of upward mobility to success. But those concepts and realities simply don’t apply here in Niger. In the end, the school system is overcrowded, often dysfunctional, and to be honest, simply not a good place to learn for the bulk of students. But if the school system is crowded, the job market is worse. And its then that you catch a glimpse of what it means to live in the world’s poorest country.

Life here in Niger isn’t a paid 30 minute Sally Struthers advertisement on repeat. Yes there is very real and often shocking poverty here, and there have been times, as in the famine of 2004, with widespread starvation, but there is happiness and laughing and life here in abundance as well. I think that I was prepared for the extreme forms of poverty and since becoming accustomed to seeing some of those, I’ve let myself be happily caught up with all that I love about life and friends here.

Yilli reminded me that there are hardships on many levels and in many different ways that have an impact on everyone in Nigerien society. Poverty is not just about families finding food to put on their plates. But it’s also very much about opportunities and second chances. For me and most of my friends in the United States we have enjoyed the luxury of an abundance of both. Here in Niger there is little of the former and none of the latter.

Yilli will continue to be a close friend of mine and much still remains uncertain. As I said, she’s now a young woman ready to leave home and start a new life of her own. For all I know her departure from school is long overdue and she’ll be much happier to be free of it once and for all. But I will circle the end of the school year in red on my calendar and look back on it as the moment when Yilli’s childhood came to a close and, for better or worse, she entered the next chapter of life.

Yilli is the girl in the center of the photo surrounded by Mariama, Barira, and Nouria.

School's Out

Jeez. Well the school year is finally done (basically). All the students have taken their end of year exams, and this week the students wait for the teachers to calculate their grades for the year (both first and second semester since the strikes which occupied nearly all of the second semester also kept them from giving the students their first half marks… rrrr…). This is pretty big time for all of them. Their marks will determine in affect whether they’ll be told not to come back, be forced to redouble, or continue merrily along. Of course I’m fairly sure there tends to be some wiggle room for those better connected students… but I digress.

But the students while a bit on the nervous side also seem relieved to be done with a school year that was historically dysfunctional. I’ve mentioned it before but it merits repeating that the second semester lost approximately 75% of school days to teacher striking. And that sentiment of relief that the year is over is certainly shared not just by the kids but by the teachers and administration as well. It seems everyone would just as soon sweep this year under the rug and get on with it next year. Of course what that does to those students who were really hoping or really needed to make progress this year is not difficult to guess.

However, one exception to that suspicion is the wonderful Ms. Seylouba. She is the young 13-year-old girl I’ve been keeping track of who came this year to the Matameye College from one of the small surrounding villages. I was VERY nervous for her. If she has to redouble, the money that has come to help support her gets cut off. Her French is pretty weak (even in comparison to the across the board low-level of sixieme, first year, students). But she’s worked really hard this year. I shouldn’t jinx her just yet, but as I’m writing this, I’ve already heard that at least for the first semester she was ranked 7th in her class of 61! (And yes, that is just one classroom packed with over 60 students, without desks, without chairs, sitting on the sand in a small shade hangar… next year the desks will finally arrive). So, risking premature celebration, congratulations goes out to Seylouba and an emphatic “sannu da cokary” (greetings/congratulations on your effort). I’m really proud of her. She’s the one standing by herself with the blue outfit and green head wrap.

Of course the candidates… those finishing troisieme and those in terminal level of lycee aren’t yet finished. They’ve got their big exams coming up which determine, basically the future of their life, so they have a stressful few weeks coming up on them. I’m trying to help some of them prepare for the English section, but high school kids can be flakey and it’s been tough to track people down.

I passed yesterday watching their Phys Ed finals which I learned upon arrival is really just everyone coming to school all decked out in their favorite outfits (as opposed to the school uniforms they normally are forced to wear) and getting their hair done for a day of sport spectating and hanging out with friends. It was a pretty fun time. Check out Nouria sporting the shades sitting in the front. Heh heh. I love them. That’s basically a group of my soccer players with a couple others mixed in.

What was more fun though was being invited to the fete scolaire for the primaire class last saturday and getting to hang out with a bunch of them for an afternoon of playing cards, shooting the breeze, and a little dancing. They’re really really good kids. Really really smart, would certainly all be going to good colleges if they were in the U.S. They’re all around 20-21 years-old and hoping to pass the BAC next year (the end of lycee exam which determines University, there’s only one in Niger, or professional school entrance). One of my favorite parts of being here has been getting to chat with the students. I feel like I’m in a pretty unique position, just 25 and truly closer to the age of most of the students than to the teachers or other people in town who I tend to work with. So I sort of straddle the difference between being a punk kid and being a punk teacher. Anyways the point really was just that these kids are cool.

The moment that stuck out for me was seeing the girls all show up wearing their complets and later on in the afternoon deciding it was time to dance and switching into their “American” clothes. They looked gorgeous in both, but we had a really interesting conversation about conservatism in the towns. They consider Matameye to be the “bush”. And in some ways, such as its conservatism, it might be closer to the bush than to the cities. There’s a lot of variation across the country, the difference between Niamey and the real rural bush of parts of Niger is probably something like the difference between the Castro District in San Francisco versus rural Mississippi (fine, I’m exaggerating, and I don’t actually know the first thing about rural Mississippi, but the point is that it’s a big difference). They really do love “American” culture, and they were all really curious to know what people would think of them if they showed up wearing their outfits in the U.S. to which I responded that people would think they were really hot. I try to be honest. Anyways… So you can see the pictures of them in pre/post costume change.

And finally, its bizarrely and suddenly vacation time. Many kids leave town to go spend the holidays with other family members. I also am realizing that some kids parents may be affectated (if they have government jobs they can be told to pack up and shift posts with very little notice) and may not be back. For students taking exams, if they pass, they may leave as well. So it’s a bit of an odd time. I run the risk of losing a couple of my good friends, but for the most part everyone will be back at the end of vacation… So, that’s it for now, a bit of a ramble but… Hey its my blog and I’ll ramble if I want to.

Its vacation soon for me as well. And in a thick stew of nerves and excitement I’ll soon be arriving in a NYC airport near you, for a brief lap of the north east. It’ll be rushed and crazy but it’ll be great to see as many of you as possible. I apologize in advance if I’m exhausted, culture-shocked, and stressed out.