Agroforestry Internship Recap: My What the Forest? Moments
There are many moments during this internship that either took me by surprise, that I did not expect, or just things that I find backwards. That is why I called this series, “my What the Forest? moments”. I have seven WTF moments to share with you, so here we go!
1. King Sie Tioye
My first element of surprise came from the fact that people started out being really nice to me, and it never stopped. After a while, everything became too much. After a few weeks, I want to start feeling like any other member of the community. I don’t think it is right to keep considering me a stranger in my own country. That would not be right, and I know that something has to change in order for me to fully integrate. It doesn’t help if everybody is just going to keep treating me like I was a total stranger. After all, I grew up four hours away from Koutoura, and there is absolutely no reason why I should be treated like one.
Sitting outside my house
Yes, it is hard for a prophet to be considered in his country, but I came a little further from home in order to make a difference, and I hope I am on the right track, or that I will realize soon enough that I am making a mistake. But I digress.
2. Mon Esclave, My Slave
This moment occurred on my first day of school; everyone I met who knew from my last name that I was from the Lobi tribe started calling me their slave. It is part of what we call "parenté a plaisanterie". It is a way to joke with people from other tribes. It reinforces the ties to our great nation, but also sets the basis for a light, and uncomplicated relationship. Because sometimes, even colleagues from the same tribe who happen to come from different villages can lose themselves in some kind of rivalry in order to determine who makes the most money, or who works the hardest. This rivalry can kill the imperative for cooperation, which is vital in public services. I am really glad my internship started with this kind of "ambiance", because we will accomplish more without any tension. The funny thing is that everybody wants to be the slave owner, and nobody wants to be the slave. So they're ganging up on me, and I am everybody's slave :). What on my moustache is going on?
As teachers do, students follow. Juliette is a student from the Toussian tribe, and she has taken this plaisentery to another level and she was having so much fun giving me a hard time, sometimes going off on some uncomfortable tangents. Now her boyfriend is jealous of me, and I have no way to fix that.
It is truly amusing to see every tribe self-proclaim their superiority over all other tribes, and they do not care what anybody else thinks.
3. Too Good for the Broom
One day while I was sweeping my front porch, a young lady I saw in class that morning walked up to me, and said, “Mister, you are not supposed to do that”. She took the broom away from me, and started sweeping the floor for me. One of her friends also came to help her, and they ended up doing my dishes for me, and moping the floor of my little two-room house. When this happens, I don’t really know what to say except to ask myself, What the Forest Just Happened?
4. American Spy
On my second day here, I had the chance to meet the teacher for Traditional Medicine. The encounter was very strange. Before the director finished introducing me to him, he interrupted and said that I cannot attend his traditional medicine class because there are a lot of secrets. From the way he welcomed me, he seemed like he had a lot of secrets to hide from Americans, and that he was assuming I was sent here to steal his secrets away. I felt like he hated me instantly. I was lucky because his attitude towards me changed the following week, when he discovered that he and I belong to the same tribe, that we come from the same village, and that he and my mother share the same family name. Now we are very close, because I let him in on the secret that what he does for a living my dad did as a hobby. After that, he decided to initiate me into traditional medicine, and to teach me a lot of things, given the fact that, from a traditional medicine standpoint, I have the genes of a phyto-therapist.
Out in the wildnerness, students are searching for certain medicinal plants
5. When Elephants Fight
I have already mentioned this WTF moment in an earlier post, but I have to say it again. There is a mix of situations in this school that makes it very difficult for the governing body to get along. This means that some important decisions drag because people are busier giving each other a hard time. This comes in the form of accusations, finding faults with everything the other person does, and in the end, it steals away the purpose of the mission they are here to accomplish. I should be minding my words in this but that is basically what happens.
I have noticed that the god of the place likes to handle all the decisions by himself, so everyone else who is working for him has to follow orders. I see very little input from the teachers in the school, and I believe that it would have made a much bigger difference in the program of my interest, which is agroforestry.
I will take the risk of generalizing also the fact that he only hires people with limited options who will obey him easily. In just six months, the students have had more than three different teachers for agriculture alone.
This could be the main reason I came into the school to find a very nascent agriculture program, and the teacher I was supposed to be learning from started taking English lessons from me. This really messed up our relationship because while I was busy considering him an equal, the pastor kind of looked up to me--I have a lot going on at such a young age... He also had little to teach me since he was following orders from someone whose plans were unknown to him.
When elephants fights, it is the grass and little things that suffer the most.
6. The Devil’s Crossing
This happened to me on a Sunday. I was out in the bush, sitting under the shade of a shea tree, and writing a report on my laptop. While I was in the midst of it all, I heard a train pass by so close to me, but I could not see it. WTF? So, I left my belongings under the tree, and started walking towards the fleeting noise. That’s when I came up to an open trench, and the railroad was right in it. No wonder the train sounded so close, and the noise sounded buried!
But something else caught my attention. It was a railroad sign with the inscription 666. In case you’re wondering, this is the biblical number of the antichrist, and I was standing right in front of it. Never in my life have I thought I would come so close to something so prophetic, yet so real! I received the shock of my life, as I stood there alone, in the heat of the summer sun, and nothing seemed to be moving. It was the longest few seconds I can recall, and I don’t know why someone would put a sign like that on the school property… Actually, the school was built much later, but still. I mentioned this incident to a few people, and I walked the pastor to the sign, to make sure I was not overreacting.
All of this is a bad coincidence. And to this day, I did not get my peace of mind and I still believe that the sign should be removed. A few weeks later, I was tempted by the spirit of vandalism, and I wanted to fade one of the digits so the sign only reads 66. But it rained like crazy and I never went back to that dreaded site. Bad, bad coincidence.
The post that gave me sleepless nights
7. Computer Guy
So I came here to intern in Agroforestry. I planned the whole internship while in Kentucky, and I assumed Koutoura was a community college of sorts, with university students my age or above. To my surprise, the student body is predominantly middle-school aged youngsters. wtf? I ended up teaching computer classes while waiting on the monsoon season which was struggling to establish itself. Before I started teaching, I did not really have a clear idea of how fragile to students were in terms of basic education. I only knew a few who answered questions brilliantly in class, but I was thinking everyone was that good, until I saw for myself that many students could not write their own names. I feel foolish for thinking that I would see university level students in this place. But wait a minute, I am supposed to teach computers to someone who can't read, is that even a thing? I think I'm in trouble!
The village tech guy, all smiling, totally unaware of the challenging work ahead.
And I needed to start managing around that first obstacle. I also saw the dilemma many teachers are facing in the school. Even the French teachers had to divide the group in two in order to achieve any acceptable progress…
Among the students who had difficulty writing their names, there are about five who, I was told, were never going to learn anything. I therefore considered them the epitome of an informal student, someone who came to Koutoura with no previous notion of the alphabet. One of the things that make me consider this internship successful is the fact that after a few months, these five students are now able to recognize the letters on the keyboard, to get a hang of typing, up to the point that they are able to type out some of the words projected from my desktop. This was a remarkable find for me because it is not easy to get to that point, since the letters of the keyboard are CAPITALIZED while most of what I make the students write is in lower case. They got special attention from me, and it paid off.
Final Words
So there you have it, my agroforestry internship in Koutoura! Not exactly what I imagined, but it all worked out, and at times, while I thought I was problem-solving like a boss, I was probably just overthinking everything. It was such a rewarding experience, and I would do it all over again if I needed to!
Christian Tioyé
