Sanji Kiliŋ*

Today marks one year since the day that I landed in Senegal along with the rest of “The Super Stage.” An event auspicious enough that my neighbor’s goat gave birth to not one, not two, but three kids under the bench behind my hut where I’ve taken to reading in the evenings. My contribution to the celebration will be a series of random tangents on my mind right now.

This morning they started laying out the foundation of the new Mosque in Khossanto. A cow was killed in honor of this occasion – I like to pretend it was for me, but I never did get my hands on any of that meat like I was promised. In addition, lets just say that a groundbreaking just wouldn’t be the same without arguments about both the location and size of the mosque by the village elders. It was a great show to be honest.

The Elders

I’ve built trenches (Brumes & Swales) around the few green things in my back yard to make watering my them with my bucket-bath water easier… so far so good.

The Latrine ants have stepped out of like for the last time! Bleach has made its way onto the playing field and I will be reviewing my IPM noted from training.

On a recent visit to Mamakhono I got at least three different people telling me, “I kurrata!” aka “You’re done,” as in you know all there is to know about Malinké.

Tonight, after giving my host dad a kola nut that I didn’t want I risked a conversation with the man. It came to a point where he clearly did not understand what I was trying to say so I mentally rechecked my language and tried again. He still didn’t get it, at that point his friend chimed in with, “He said he wants to see the place. What, do you not understand Malinké?” Take that Mr. “You don’t understand anything.”

I was showing my pictures to a guy who’s been living in my compound – he came across on of my graduation pictures where I’m with my parents he made two comments.

1. My dad and I have similar faces 
2. My mom is “Trés Belle.” That’s right mom… watch Beauty and the Beast if you don’t understand. 

A little after the graduation photo comments he detailed is plans to go to France for three months, pick up his woman friend, come back to Senegal, and when she wants to marry him he’ll pull out, “Sorry, I’m a Muslim, my family won’t let me marry a Christian.” (Sorry Mom)

Today I saw an airplane in the sky; it was weird that it was weird.

A bee stung me two days ago – that hurts! I still have a reddish spot and it’s all itchy. I left the nice tree I was sitting in because of the whole swarm coming after the stung one thing.

I biked a new way back to site from Saraya – It was amazing. Dear Adventure Racing friends come visit… actually, anyone come visit, I won’t make you bike if you don’t want to.

Albuquerque

I’ve now been in charge of a radio show all by myself. Well, someone else was there, but I wrote the script all by myself and did most of the talking and worked the soundboard (that’s what it’s called right?). I like to think that I have fans.

Dear everyone, if I see another map without a title or compass… so help me…

I think I found a home for the trees in my nursery that haven’t been eaten yet. I just need to find them protection and water.

Recent text (speaking of trees) received that made me do the happy dance: “I got you 1 orange, 2 mandarins, 1 grapefruit, 1 avocado, 1 pomegranite.”

AIDS causerie led by a woman, in Malinké, for a classroom of teenaged boys in my village. AWESOME.

Well, I’ve lost my train of thought and I really want to finish my book tonight. Thanks for reading, Year One done!

Because it's cute

Right to Sight... Do what now?*

Last week I made the trip to Tambacounda (Tamba) to help with an Eye Clinic. Another Gou volunteer, KC, and I had booked tickets on the 5am bus to Tamba, meaning that be the time we got there we would still have pretty much a full day outside of travel. Unfortunately, about twenty minutes into the ride the bus broke down enough that it became obvious that it could not make the full ride to Tamba. So, the bus turned around and we made our way back to Gou. It sounds like this all happened fairly quickly… After getting our money back in a shockingly painless procedure we made our way to the “Garage” just as a 7-Place filled up and left for Tamba. Giving us the first 2 seats on the next car, which wound up leaving Kédougou at the same time we were expecting to be arriving in Tamba.

Now, moving into the Eye Clinic – A group of American health workers by the name of “Right to Sight and Health” sent two doctors and two nurses to Tamba to do as many cataract surgeries as possible. I helped out for the second week, during the first week there was another doctor around who happened to be the father of one of my Stage-mates. She heard about the clinic which has happened in Kédougou the last two years from older volunteers, told her dad the eye doctor about it, and he contacted the Right to Sight people and the rest is history. A fun story I know little about.

Anyway, Right to Sight really has a system down and knows what they are doing and likes to work with Peace Corps Volunteers when possible. Where we come in handy is all the cutting open of the eyes. Kidding, it’s the translating. The health system in Senegal is similar to the education system in that it is made up of a lot of ‘affectés.’ Meaning the person working at the Hospital or health post is not necessarily from that place and often times their spouse is back home. There is no guarantee that they speak the local language at all, nor is there any training provided to them. Normally this isn’t an issue since a majority of the public isn’t willing to pay for medical treatment – that would be the group of people Right to Sight is looking to help most. So, we step in there to translate into the variety of local languages that the area has. My mediocre French wasn’t even that much of an issue since we were working with American doctors – They did train a Senegalese doctor using French during the first week, but I wasn’t around yet.

So I showed up for my first day on the job and went to my assigned post… the operating room! The two other volunteers and I in there weren’t there handing the doctor his tools ‘stat’ or anything, but we did had tools to the nurses STERILY and they would hand them to the doctors. Gauze and other bubble-packaged items may never be opened the same again. It’s fun to not touch the inside.

There were two set-ups in the room so two surgeries could be happening at the same time, one of them was even a training microscope so during the brief bits of down time when we weren’t fetching stuff or telling patients to lie still we would take turns watching the surgery. Here’s a little rundown:

1. “Block” eye with injection so they can’t feel anything or see anything or move their eye. 
2. Insert speculum to keep their eye open 
3. Sew a thread through the white of the eye that you can then clip to the eyebrow to keep the eye from moving around as you work on it. 
4. Burn stuff so their eyes don’t bleed 
5. Make a longer cut along the top of the iris and a tiny one on the outside 
6. Stick in the pointy thing and wiggle until you can see the cataract spin in a full circle – careful not to rip the bag! 
7. Use the squirty loop thing to pull out the cataract, which is basically a foggy lens. 
8. Make sure all the little foggy chunks are out. 
9. Insert new lens implant 
10. Make sure the eyeball is fully inflated and the implant stays where it is meant to be. 
11. Add liquid that seals the holes you cut in 
12. Take everything off/out and put a patch over the eye (unfortunately not of the pirate variety) 

That’s it! All done! Hopefully you can see tomorrow when we take the patch off. Most people were thanking us before they even got off the operating table, it was really cute; for many of them though it was their only chance to see again.

By the end of the two weeks 185 cataracts were removed thanks to the Right to Sight and Health people. The last two were relatively noteworthy in that on the last day the American doctors were doing surgery – they stayed another day to do all the follow ups and pack their equipment – it turned out that there were two women waiting for surgery that couldn’t get it… for reasons that amounted to mistakes on our part. With that in mind a group of Peace Corps Volunteers set themselves to the task of convincing / guilting the Senegalese surgeon into doing the two surgeries on Friday so the Right to Sight people would still cover part of it with their money. By the time I finished helping with the last surgery they had been successful! From what I hear it was kind of a sneak attack where he was basically left no choice but to agree to doing the surgeries without being a HUGE jerk.

For the literate and illiterate

Speaking of this Senegalese surgeon… so the American doctors taught him this new surgery technique for cataract removal. By the end of the two weeks he was a master, moving faster and (according to the American doctors) with better results than his trainers. One of the Americans was so impresses that she wanted to make sure to watch him do a few surgeries to see if she could learn anything from him! I found the whole thing really impressive.

All in all it was a really good week, a good reenergizing that I was in desperate need of. There was the added bonus of getting to see friends that I hadn’t seen in a really long time all week, and get to know a few more. Then, back to Gou, and time to explain myself to my village.

Long Time Coming*

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, and I do have a real reason for that… besides the whole living in Africa excuse. That reason being my belief in the teachings of Thumper’s father, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I’ll admit it’s an exaggeration that I haven’t had ANYTHING nice to say, but there was a rough patch there for a bit (good job support crew on that by the way). Time for a breakdown.

A major buzzword in Peace Corps is ‘Sustainable’ and if you know me at all you’re probably thinking in the environmental direction and words like ‘Eco’, ‘Renewable’, and ‘Green’ are popping up too. Well you’re wrong; we’re talking about having the projects I work on continuing after I leave Senegal (side note, I do really want those other words associated with my projects too). A well-timed example of trying to make a project sustainable is the Summer Camp from a couple posts ago. The camp started a few years ago as a PC volunteer’s project, over the years it has been transitioning more an more into the hands of ADDK. That is, if Peace Corps had to pull out of Senegal right now a Summer Camp would probably happen (albeit probably only slightly resembling what we would do).

For various reasons ranging from my shy personality to cultural traits that seem specific to my village there was a question as to whether or not any work I might be able to do there would be sustainable. That question quickly led to wondering about the need for a volunteer at that site. That’s kind of a big deal, to switch sites after spending more than half a year making the connections and earning the trust to get work done is… less than desirable. In the end my supervisor (APCD) stepped in and put everything on a new track, now it’s up to me to make it work.

So we’re back to a positive and productive place in my service. Just the baseline (host) daddy issues remain and I’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with that. There’s the additional bonus that all the stress and issues distracted me from the fact that I was missing the Holiday Season with my family in America.

Now I have people to talk to, permissions to get, seeds to collect and purchase, paints to buy as well, and I might need to refresh myself on some soccer drills. The project I want to get started ASAP is the one that is inherently not sustainable, but is the easiest to start and add to my street cred – an English Club. Get together with some middle schoolers every week or so and speak English, easy enough. I’ll probably even be able to sneak in some environmental propaganda as I refuse to give up on an anti-litter campaign. Hopefully this English Club will help me get Environmental Groups going at the primary and middle schools in Khossanto. These are the groups who are going to get the school gardens started up (and hopefully pick up some of that litter).

As for the paints and permissions, there are some big blank walls just begging for a good mural, plus I need to get some stuff tagged with the Peace Corps logo in village – there’s a Canadian Flag at the middle school right now (they funded the renovations). I’m planning on at least doing an AIDS prevention mural and a hand washing/ soap use one at the middle school. I like to paint, so hopefully more will happen too.

On a more immediate level I have managed a few small successes in my family. It’s Cold Season right now, I’m talking long sleeves at night and still sweating in my t-shirt at noon, but every morning one of my first thoughts is debating if it is worth it to put on socks or not because the sun is coming out. Cold season is giving people coughs (including me), which brings me to my small successes. COVER YOUR MOUTH! I’ve only had to remind my host father a couple times to not cough directly into the food bowl, and this last time he did it I think was because we had just had a fight and I was eating a lot. Nonetheless, it is a lot better. An even smaller success comes in the form of my little brother Ibu, he has done a lot less coughing directly into my face while we play. He even coughs into his elbow, but I think that’s just making fun of me. Hey, I’m not going to fight it, if it picks up a good habit by making fun of me it’s all good.

The next step is getting him not to cough into the food bowls either, he’s graduating from the women’s bowl and coming the bowl I eat at more often… but he’s small so when he coughs it just goes in his section. Don’t want to rush anything; I’ve got a good thing going here. If you give a mouse a cookie though… now that they are starting to cough into their hands I’m reminded how often they use soap to wash their hands. The answer is only if they use soap to shower with, which is not often, and the women when they do laundry but that’s unintentional anyway.

Donding Donding / Petit à Petit / Little by Little

My Work

There was a request for more information for more details on what I am doing in Senegal. As it turns out this is a fairly good time to talk about that, I’m just getting out of some issues at site leading to meetings with important people and a more defined role for me in Khossanto.

I’m going to take the Peace Corps mission right off of the website to make things easier for me to begin with:

Mission 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship.  The Peace Corps' mission has three simple goals: 

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. 

2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. 

3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. 

From my end this blog in and of itself is helping me reach that third goal (thanks!), and just living here takes care of the second goal. It’s that first goal that gets tricky. Peace Corps is run a little differently in each host country but in recent years the focus has been a lot more on development. It probably has a lot to do with the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals.

I think I’m getting a little off track now, so let’s get back to it… what am I doing in Khossanto. I guess I’m still working on what do I want to do there and that has to do with those issues I mentioned earlier. Whatever it is I do I want to make sure that it is sustainable in that once I leave the project will continue to be effective. A problem arises when you can’t find anyone in your community to work with. I was having problems with that for a while but quite recently we had a meeting in my village with my Senegalese supervisor and the important people of Khossanto. The meeting went very well and led to some fairly solid project ideas that I hope to get started in the next few months. I’ll highlight a few of my favorites.

SCHOOL CLUBS. I’ve wanted to form environmental clubs at the primary and middle schools in my village since before I even made it there. This will be a chance for me to really get the environmental message to the youth, which in my opinion is the most effective way to make a change happen. I’ve been uncertain how to really get these started until this meeting where a good stepping-stone was suggested at the middle school level - English Club. Some students have chosen to learn English… as a native speaker I think it is safe to say that my help would be appreciated. Get together once a week or so and chat, this gives me a chance to introduce certain environmental concepts as well as get some more work on my French and Malinké. Here’s a quick list of some topics I hope to work on in these clubs: littering is bad, all frogs won’t kill you, some insects are good for your garden, wash your hands with soap after going to the bathroom and before eating, go to the bathroom in the latrines, compost, and I’m sure more will pop up as time goes on.

WOMEN’S GROUP. My village already has a well-developed women’s’ group with a sizeable garden and previous volunteers have helped them to practice good gardening practices. Where I can help is by helping to update some of those gardening practices tailoring it to the land they are using (it happens to spend the rainy season underwater). Another more difficult thing I want to do with the women’s group is to try to help put them in contact with people who want to buy the vegetables they grow in their garden. I also want to work with them to get a tree nursery started so we can plant trees at the schools and in family compounds that will provide shade from the hot hot sun. Ideally they will also produce some kind of delicious and nutritious fruit for the village as well.

I would also like to help get latrines made throughout the village. Right now a lot of family compounds don’t have a place to go to the bathroom, kind of like if only one house in your neighborhood had a toilet. What winds up happening is that people will just do their business wherever, flies will land on it, when the flies are done there they will then land on your food. I think you can see the issue there.

The real key to everything I try to do here is working closely with people in my village.  As I mentioned before I want the projects I do to continue once I go and the only way to ensure that happens is to work with Senegalese counterparts every step of the way.  When I have pride and take ownership in my work I certainly try to keep in from falling apart, I'm hoping I can work with people like that here.  So there's a bit of an overview of my work here in Senegal.  I hope you have a better idea of what I'm doing here and, as always, keep asking questions!

Meal Time!

I decided to do a topic near and dear to my heart… Food. In this case leaning towards the way family meals work here in Senegal.

In my village there are no grocery stores or any big stores at all, only a few small corner stores about the size of two parking spaces. These corner stores are called boutique and they stock basically everything you need from cleaning supplies to small amounts of food. The trick is that they only stock a small amount of one brand of everything, which is surprisingly regular throughout the country (for example I thing there are only two different brands of tomato paste you can buy in Senegal). Khossanto, being a fairly large village also has a larger boutique where you can buy bulk items, such as your 100ish pound sack of rice that is the base of most of your meals.

Actually though, right now is harvest time, and since literally everyone in Khossanto farms, there is a lot of corn, rice, millet, and peanuts to go around. What still surprises me is that most of the harvest winds up being sold - apparently it is more cost effective to sell your harvest and buy your food. Don’t be mistaken though; we do get to eat some of the harvest mostly as snacks though.

Women do ALL of the cooking; I’ve even been scolded for trying to help because that is for the women to do. The women and girls in my family are cooking for 15 people each meal, so ultimately someone is always tending the food. However, in this case they do get a break – my host father has two wives, which effectively splits the compound into two families. They wind up taking turns with the meals, whoever makes dinner also makes breakfast and lunch the next day. This system works pretty well for my family, but it’s not necessarily the case for everyone. It is not entirely uncommon for girls to be pulled out of school to help their mom’s with the cooking and household chores.

Moving on to the first meal of the day, breakfast is usually worro, which is either a rice or corn based porridge. The corn version comes least often, thankfully, and needs sugar added to it to become bearable. The rice variety is the most common breakfast that is served and I like to add a little sugar and powdered milk to make it so I can eat enough of it. Milk powder can be expensive though for a lot of villagers so most of the time it is just the sugar, there is always money for sugar. My personal favorite breakfast, that comes the least often of all because it is a little more labor intensive, is monoo. Monoo (pictured below) is still porridge but it contains tapioca like balls made with various types of flower. Monoo tends to start off sweeter than the worro so it doesn’t need as much sugar, but it can also take peanut butter really well. Delicious.

Another breakfast treat that is easier to find in the larger villages and cities but a lot more expensive so only for the more well of or on special occasions is the bean sandwich. Bear with me hear, I remember the first time I heard about them but they are really tasty. Basically you take baked beans, drier than you normally see in the US, and put them on a fresh baguette. Sometimes with mayo, or fried up potatoes… it’s mouth watering to me at this point.

Now for lunches and dinners, generally the same meals are served, with lunched tending to be on the lighter side. Except on holidays lunch is the big deal, as in this picture, which is why that bowl is filled with meat instead of the usual basis of rice or couscous. The big bowl of meat is not an everyday thing; meat in and of itself is a rare treat so this was a pretty special holiday. The big bowl itself though IS an everyday thing.

Most families split up based on gender, sometimes a well respected woman will make it into the bowl with the men, but this is not the case in my family. We typically have 4 bowls. Grandma gets her own since she can barely leave her room, and the oldest son also gets his own since he is basically just waiting on a wife before he moves into his own compound. I eat with my host dad and two younger host brothers. The remaining 9 are women, girls, and one very young boy. They all share the biggest bowl, which does not mean the best bowl. The bowl I eat at, with the patriarch, winds up with the most vegetables and the better bits of meat whenever they show up in the meals

In order to not complicate things I bring my own spoon to the bowl, which guarantees my host father to have his own, and sometimes another spoon shows up that the older of my brothers uses. Everyone else uses only his or her right hand to eat (the left is used when going to the bathroom, keep your left had to yourself). The meals themselves are usually rice or couscous based with some kind of sauce leading to a meal that can easily be balled up in one hand and popped into the mouth. In these cases it is very okay to lick your hands – it’s still kind of hard for me to see the person I’m sharing a bowl with do. This is why I make sure to have my own spoon whenever possible. It allows me to control better when I’m getting my food from, and to avoid the areas where the boy with the runny nose has been eating or where my host dad just coughed into the bowl.

On that note, there are in fact table manners… well, bowl manners. Since there are no tables and the only chairs are really stools, bowls are typically set right on the ground. You eat from the area in the bowl directly in front of you, as everyone around you eats you wind up building rice walls separating your spaces. Those walls so eventually get broken down, but you still have your space to take food from and it is bad form to reach across the bowl for things. To accommodate this and meat or veggies that happen to show up are served in the middle of the bowl, so just reach into the middle and break of a chunk to eat. More often than not someone takes on the role of “Bowl Mom”. The Bowl Mom takes on the responsibility of using her (men can do it too, it’s usually the most respected person at the bowl) one hand to cut up whatever is served in the middle of the bowl and divide it up between everyone at the bowl. It is a polite thing for someone tosses a bit of carrot into it, or uses the back of his or her spoon to push some cabbage into your space. It can be considered disrespectful not to accept it, so you have to be careful when something you don’t want to eat shows up.

There's my summary of meal time in Senegal.  I'm sure there are things I have missed so please ask any questions you have and I will try to answer them whenever I can.

Quick Pic Post 4

Bakary Kamara - Khossanto's Blacksmith

Summer Camp… Finally*

It’s been almost a month now since camp ended, but I really want to write about it so please accept my tardiness.

For this installment of the Kedougou Leadership Summer Camp in Dindefello (my first, the thrid in total) everything got bigger. More students, more Senegalese staff, more food… more arguments… one of which was was over the fact that there was less bread than last year. Peace Corps volunteers were not as numerous as in the past and tried to take a back seat as much as possible to allow the Senegalese counterparts to take as much control of the camp as possible. It’s all part of the plan to make this be run completely by the ADDK (Association pour le Développement Durable a Kédougou/Association for the Sustainable Development of Kedougou). They could still use some help with ‘the softer side of camp,’ speaking of which, anyone know of a French version of that “Camp is for the Camper” book?

Peace Corps volunteers took on specific programmatic duties. I was in charge of the Challenge Course, Kellen took care of Sports, Eric had First Aid, Hannah was SeneGAD/AIDS, and Meera did Art and translated for me at the Challenge Course. Then there was Thomas, who planned out and ran the camp while it was happening, he also wound up paying for the camp when funds ran out with the last of his CFA before he returned to America (we plan on doing a little more budget training next year). Basically, camp would not have happened without him. The Senegalese counselors this year were working towards what basically amounts to becoming a licensed counselor. As such there were rules that kept us from being able to work with specific counselors and train them on specific areas of camp as well.

Challenge Course – Step 1: find new challenges for second and third year campers. I thought I had that taken care of based on the resources I saw from last year’s camp. I was wrong, they had all done everything I planned and prepared for. Now I’m working on grouping challenges so that there is something new to be done each year as well as the good repeats of things that are always different. Step 2: introduce challenge to campers. Simple… except their first languages are Puular OR Malinké, not both, luckily by middle school everyone can speak French which is what we tried to run the camp in as much as possible. My French, however, is limited to being a customer or responding to yes or no type questions. I can understand quite a bit of what I hear, I just have a lot of trouble producing French on my own. This is why I stole Meera (who has never done a Challenge Course) as my translator, we like to think of it as a Little Mermaid type situation. Step 3: TCCCT. This is where Meera came in even handier and the Little Mermaid of the situation really came out. The discussion after a challenge is completed, or not completed, is really the point of doing a Challenge Course. That’s where everyone learns to work as a team and all the joys I get out of doing a Challenge Course become obvious. Pretty quickly the campers figured out that we were looking for certain key words – Trust, Communication, Cooperation, and Creating Thinking (TCCCT). Once they figured them out they would just say them in the discussion times. This is where it’s good to have some experience with it, you need to ask the right questions at the right times to lead the discussion in the right direction, and to know when to back down if the group is starting to get frustrated. I by no means am an expert, but I have had experience. By the end of the two weeks I loved seeing not only the campers getting what we were talking about, but also the way Meera wound up being able to just run with the discussion on her own. This is why I do what I do.

Here’s how it worked, towards the end of the challenge I would give Meera (in English) a few questions to ask and points I thought they should get out of the discussion. She would start the discussion with all that in mind and I would just listen to what the campers were saying, most of which I was able to understand or at least get the gist of. If there was something I wanted to ask, or a point I thought they should discuss more I would just say it when I normally would, in English, to Meera, who would then say it in French. I imagine this was confusing for anyone watching since I wasn’t having anyone translate to me, but still able to guide the discussion. It’s also a matter of being able to keep the right pacing of the discussion otherwise you loose momentum fast and Meera was really helpful for that. My French comes out a lot slower – at one point when I was guiding a sub-group of campers on my own I blanked on the word for hand. After a long pause I held up my own hand, started at it, and said, “Ça c’est quoi?” (What is this?). I don’t imagine I had much credibility on my own after that.

Creative Thinking proved to be the most challenging concept for the campers throughout camp. It makes sense since (haha) in many cases it was literally beaten out of them in school. The Senegalese school system is heaving on the memorization of things, in order to be successful in school you need to know things verbatim. In this case creative thinking is almost a disadvantage. It was really interesting to see how readily the second and third years got into it and to compare that to how much the first years struggled when we did not provide a single correct answer. Again, at the end of the two weeks the change was apparent in all of the campers.

Aside: Dear Campy Friends, I have a challenge for you over the next year. I need activities that encourage/teach Sportsmanship. Tons of cheating along with sore losers and winners. We stopped things quite often to explain that it is a whole lot more fun for everyone if you follow the rules, and in the case of the challenge course when you start cheating you lose the whole point of doing it. It’s the challenges that you build off of and learn from. I’m talking really basic stuff here; the concept of sportsmanship just really isn’t there. GO! Bonus points if it’s in French and English.

So a quick wrap up on camp as a whole. I would say this year was filled with growing pains, next year it should have settled into it’s new scale and run a lot smoother. Plus, with all the certified counselors we won’t have to have the outside influence that wound up instigating a lot of the tension. The wonderful bureaucracy of it all should be simplified (see flowchart pictured here).

Unfortunately I have to end on a low note. About two weeks after camp ended, leadership camp, one of the male counselors and a couple of his friends took a moto ride out to a village. There they went to the house of one of the female campers so he could ask her parents for her hand in marriage. Reminder, these are middle school students. Also keep in mind that this isn’t as a whole culturally unacceptable; the younger generations and the more educated seem to prefer waiting until the girl is out of school until she gets married off.

Just to twist that knife in there a little more it is worth noting that this particular counselor is also a teacher. Meaning he works with kids this age all the time, and once she pops out a kid he’s allowed to take a second wife. Now, the parents do need to approve in order for this to happen. We need to be honest here; she’s a village girl being proposed to by a teacher from the city. This is a huge get for the family, not only does she get out of the village and into the city, but she also has a husband with a steady job. It’s unlikely that they will deny this union. Come to leadership camp… expand your horizons, open yourself up to new possibilities… yeah.