Keynote!

I gave a speech yesterday to 700 kids and 100 grownups. The head of school suggested I publish the story. And we all know how easy publishing is...

After college, I moved from the bayous of Louisiana to the Sahara.
Yes, the desert. And yes, they had camels there. I went to the West African country of Mauritania. (No, not Mauritius, which is an island off the coast of Southeast Africa.)
The northern part of Mauritania is the true desert with dunes, ergs, regs, hamadas, and of course, oases; while the southern part of the country is Sahel, which in Arabic means coast, as if it were the coast of the desert itself.

I had gone to Mauritania with the Peace Corps to teach English as a Second Language to Arabic and French speaking students. The first thing I noticed was that the schools had no books. No library. Nothing. Everyone had little notebooks and that was it.
The Peace Corps sent me on a training mission to learn how to write classroom material for kids. I took a boat, a wooden pirogue, east up the Senegal River where I lived in a thatched roof village, studying and writing. I even had my own cook who brought lunch every day in a big bowl on her head. I sat on the floor with my teachers and ate with my hands.

After training, I moved back to the Sahara to a city called Zouérate, where I was assigned to teach in a middle school. My boss was Mr. Mohammed. Imagine that! Mr. M was not exactly a teacher’s teacher. He was a number’s man like the counter guy in The Little Prince. He was paid based on the number of kids who showed up every day. A truant officer. So the only real requirement we had as teacher was to call role.
I had four classes of 36 students each and one class of… 63 students, 35 of whom were named Mohammed. No kidding.
So role call went a little like this:
Mohammed Akhmed
Here.
Mohammed Sidi.
Here.
Mohammed Ali.
Here.

There really was a Mohammed Ali. As Seuss says, there are funny things everywhere.
The head of school, Mr. Mohammed, was thrilled with my role calling because he could bank some more worthless 500-ougiyas bills.

In this oversized class there were a lot kids who were nomads. These guys watered camels and herded goats. But there had been a severe drought. Strange that the desert would be dry, right? Whole families were forced to move into the city, but they didn’t give up nomadic life, and they certainly didn’t give up the tent.
Just a little tent in the city. That’ all I want, honey!

You know how in middle school there giant kids and scrawny kids in the same class? Most of the kids I taught were between the ages of 10 and 12. Then Mr. M added the nomads. The youngest of these boys was 18.
The nomadic boys had never been to school; not only had they not been to school but they had never been inside a building. They’d never had a roof over their heads. Only a tent!
They dressed in long blue and white boubous and came to class not knowing what “class” was. They couldn’t understand why I was teaching so they sat on the floor in the back of the class and made tea and smoked. In class!

So what do you do as a teacher? What do you do with this enormous class?

In the front of the class were four girls. You know how eighth grade girls lock their arms together like Siamese quadruplets and patrol the playground at recess? There were four such girls in the front this over-packed class. Those girls worked so hard and they made me work even harder, I wrote better when I thought about them in particular. These girls worked hard not because I was a good teacher; they worked hard because they saw learning as a means to flee the country and the oppression and the sexism and start a new life in a new world.

English was their ticket out.

So what did I get out of all of this?

One the girls came up to me at the end of the year and said, “Mr. Aertker, the learning of the English makes much happiness.”

That’s good by me!