Words are strange and hard, but a definte plus....

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you." - Harold Bloom

Living without electricity and because of my own semi-introvert nature, I've been reading a lot of books while I am here. On a lot of days I come home from school and just need a couple hours to decompress after the craziness that is the Gambian school day and feel American for a bit. A lot of times I just need peace and quiet to get the droan of 60 third graders repeating "Big A, Small A, Big B, Small B..." out of my head. Much like in America, my release is immersing myself in a book and just letting everything else that is on my mind melt away. I read a lot at home, but here I just have so much more time to read because there is no electricity and often nothing else to do if you just need some me time. And while I have gotten a lot better since being here about "just being", I still can't sit around and stare at the goats for hours on end like my host dad, I need an activity. My host family here has caught on to the fact that I like to read and always poke fun at me and how much I like to read - basically they call me a dork. Reading for pleasure is still a foreign concept for most people here, no matter how educated they may be. A few people do it but not any where near on the scale that people read in other areas of the world. Reading is largely viewed as a chore, something that you are forced to do in school, and something that you need to get through the more complicated tasks of life but not something that is enjoyable and certainly not a way to spend ones free time. As a result, lots of my Gambian friends think I the way I spend my time is strange. I don't want people to think that I just sit in my hut and read all day, I don't. The majority of my free time is spent chatting with teachers at school, playing various board games, learning tie and dye, gardening, chatting with my host family, playing with or tutoring neighborhood kids, doing yoga, collecting cashews nuts or mangoes, making teaching aids for school or more chatting. But also reading. Plus it is nice intellectual stimulation and gets me away from the less then thrilling Wolof converstaions that I am capable of such as "Yanngi toog, waaw manngi toog." (You are sitting, yes I am sitting.)

I think the reason most Gambians that I encounter don't enjoy reading is for the simple reason that reading is viewed as work, not play. When children learn to "read" in the schools here they are not really taught to read. They are taught to memorize the way specific words look and then repeat them. People call this reading, even though it is not. A student can "read" if they have seen the word before but if they encounter a word that they have never seen before or do not see often, they have no clue. Most people have no grasp of the concept that individual letters have sounds that are blended together to form words. They just think sounds exist that represent a whole word. The lack of phonics instruction is one of the major challenges facing the education system here and it is just a vicious cycle of illiteracy. If the teachers can't read properly how can they teach the students to read? And if the students get promoted all the way through school and can not really read, who will be the teachers for the next generation except the very students who couldn't read in the first place? Ahhh, the challenges of education in a developing country, or any country for that matter. A lot of American schools have huge issues with authentic literacy. I can see some of the problems and gaps in the system but as of now I have no solutions. Hopefully someday....

Semi-related....I have recently started to teach my host sister Ansel to read. Ansel is an amazing and very inspirational Gambian woman. She has her own business, owns land in Senegal where she wants to build a renters compound for alternative income, is fluent in English and is just a very empowered, confidant woman. Despite all this, she is illiterate because she never went to school. Instead she helped her father and mother on the farm in order for the family to have enough money to send the other five children to school. She is semi functionally literate and has some numeracy skills because she is used to handling money and using a cell phone but has trouble with doing math quickly. Ansel is very intelligent and I really think that she will be able to catch on to reading quickly, even in our first couple of lessons I was surprised by how quickly she was grasping things. The key to her success, like in most endeavors, will be her motivation and how bad she wants it. She has always been friends with teachers and with Peace Corps Volunteers and others who could have helped her to learn to read but she was never really motivated. She says that now she is really ready and serious about learning. So hopefully we can make some progress and at least get her to a functional level of literacy so she can keep accurate books for her business, read order forms for supplies and feel comfortable with reading labels and signs and what not. At this point in the endeavour, I am cautiously optimistic about the whole process. I am starting her off with basic phonics - just letter/sound recognition and then moving on to word families and then focusing on words that are relevant to her life and work so she can see quicker results and see how helpful reading will be. But it all really comes down to her motivation and how much effort she is willing to put in it to it. By the time I leave next summer I am hoping to get her feeling comftorable with reading and keeping more organized books for the business, inshalla.