On Monday, we split the girls into 4 groups of 5 girls to go to a work shadow. I was one of the volunteer chaperones to go to my work and interview female working women. Unlucky for me, two women from my work weren’t there that day which left us with one woman to interview. The girls spent several hours the night before preparing questions so passing the four hours was easy.
My favorite question: Jeanne “How do you work all day and manage a family?”
Fatimata “I wake up at 4 to start making breakfast for the morning and preparing rice for lunch. I go to work from 8-4 and then come home, sweep the floors, wash dishes and start making dinner. Then every Sunday, my only day off of work, I do laundry for my three kids, husband and myself.” (Not to mention, laundry is all done with a washboard and bucket, sweeping is with a small hand broom and preparing food is three rocks with burning wood underneath.)
After being here this long, it is still hard to believe that this is possible. These women work sun up to sun down literally everyday with out complaining once in their life. After hearing that, it isn’t hard to see why there isn’t a large work force of women in West Africa. But at the same time it is motivating to hear that it can be done.
Because of the style of the conference, we did some of the conference in local language and then about 2/3 in French. Lucky me, I was the only volunteer who spoke good French and I was also the volunteer that had the highest language skills period so I got stuck running most of the sessions or at least translating sections of sessions. That is something we need to work on for next year. The sessions were supposed to be run in bambara but children are never taught to write in bambara, only French. So as soon as anything needed to be written, class had to switch over to French. But it worked out somehow.
We also had a student panel from the trade school where 2 student secretaries, 1 student accountant, and 2 student public health personnel came to talk to the girls. Tons of questions were asked about what is accounting? What does a secretary do? How many boys are in your classes? Where do you get money for school? How can I become a secretary? These were great questions and with the motivating answers the students gave, the girls started to open their eyes to the idea of continuing school and getting a real job.
We did tons of team building exercises including; human knot, human chair, sharks and minnows, limbo (just for fun), telephone, and name game. These girls have never been exposed to crazy games like this and they were very hesitant to trust us at first, but once we did an example and they started opening up everyone had tons of fun.
Overall the week went very well. Information was traded between the girls and volunteers about women’s roles in the house, work, Africa and America. Hopefully we opened the eyes of some of these girls that there is more to life than marrying at 16, having babies and then running a house (sadly this is normal). We showed them women that can do both, women that go to university and wait for marriage, women who were married that are now widowed or divorced and work for a living.
Playing Telephone
Human Knot
Human Chair
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