Women's Day

Women's Day was celebrated on March 8th, with of course, a parade. Despite cancelling classes at the lycee for everything from bilingualism to youth day to mother tongue day, there were no plans for the girls to participate in the women's day activities. Classic. So, Rose and Claire came to visit for the holiday and we took the girl's club down to march in the parade.

The pagne: got the women's day pagne made into a giant kabba so I could just ride my bike in it easily enough. OMG, I have never received so many compliments in my life as when wearing this outfit. My seconde class stood up and applauded when I walked into class. It literally resembles a giant potato sack with a ruffle down the front.... pretty sure its the opposite of a la mode, but whatever.

The girls marched in their school uniforms, and lots of other women's groups etc. marched as well. If you look closely at my feet, I'm definitely not walking in synch with the other marchers.

Butternut and I are both very pleased with the new gate situation. While she is being kept in and stray herds of cattle/goats etc. are being kept out... it has done little to deter the small children who now just climb over the wall. But perhaps even more exciting, I now have running water! I was seriously beginning to think that the whole "water tank" was just a huge joke but sure enough this huge truck rolled across the cornfields behind my house one night last week. He slung the hose over the wall and filled up my water tank... then we pumped the water up..... and nothing happened inside the house. So my neighbor, Mambih, put his mouth onto the facet and was able to suck out some water. A true friend. So he deduced there was some sort of pressure problem.... so turns out that the electrician is also a plumber and he came over to see what the problem was.... pretty much every single pipe was completely rusted through and broken so he just replaced everything. Pretty much taking care of March's rent payment as well.... I'm sure my landlord will be so pleased if he ever decides to start talking to me again.

Great success : I now have a door to my compound! Turns out my landlord is known for not really accomplishing tasks that he has promised. So, I ended up dealing directly with the builder and everything got sorted out in no time. Now Butternut can run around freely in my yard! The only problem is that there’s a bit of a gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground where she likes to partially wiggle through, so I’m worried I’m going to come home one day and just find her totally stuck in there….

Additionally, Moussa (the builder) is very nice and my new friend. He has replaced the window screens on about 90% of my windows. When he saw my “shower” situation which is basically just all my soap etc. on the cement floor he said he’d make me something to arrange this, a cadeaux!

I just came into Maroua to attend a librarian’s conference…. I had been hoping they’d give us some information about obtaining more books, best practices, etc. but instead we spent in inordinate amount of time learning how to catalog books. So I was getting in heated arguments with the other bibliothecaires about identifying the publishing date, sub-titles, etc. of random books. I was like I have done this for every research paper since the fifth grade… blurgh. However, there are a few things I’d like to try. Right now, my students aren’t allowed to borrow the books, they can only use them in the library. So, I think if I can make out cards for each book then there could be a sign out system and hopefully that’d provide greater access to the books.

This week is exams at school so I’ve got lots of grading to do. I also need to “harmonise” the next sequence with the other English teacher so that we can cover the same topics - not my favorite activity. This sequence was the first time we harmonsied, and even though we agreed on topics we ended up spending different amounts of time on everything and had a really difficult time putting the tests together. Next year I just want to have both sections of each class I teach.