A woman’s work is never done

Today I went to a gender sensitization workshop organized and presented by cdpeace. Although it was in Temne, I managed to catch some of what was being said through an interpreter. It really made me think about the role of women here in Sierra Leone. There are beginning to be more women in positions of power here, but there is still a long way to go, but there is still a long way to go for the average woman in Sierra Leone, especially in rural areas.

One major area is work. This was really emphasized in a small group activity we did at the workshop. Each group was assigned a person (man, woman, boy and girl) and had to write down all the activities that person typically did in a day. On the list for men were the following:
- Pray
- Rest and eat breakfast
- Work
- Rest and eat supper
- Go to sleep

Although many men here do hard physical labour, the rest of the time they don’t have too much work to do. The list for a woman, on the other hand, looked like this:
- Get up and get water for your husband and children to wash
- Prepare breakfast
- Sweep the house and make the bed
- Get the children ready for school
- Go to work (working on the farm doing weeding or harvesting, petty trading activities, or perhaps an office job in a few cases)
- Go to the market to get food for meals
- Start cooking around 2 or 3 pm to prepare the evening meal
- Clean up after cooking and prepare the children for bed
- “Answer the call of your husband” – euphemism for sex
- Sleep

So, as you can see from these lists, women have many more tasks for which they are responsible than men. Women here are responsible for all domestic work and all child-rearing duties. So they clean the house, do laundry, purchase and prepare food, take care of the children, and collect water and wood for everyone’s use. They work on the farm, doing all the weeding and a lot of the harvesting work, and they process the food harvested as well (e.g. pounding rice, making palm oil, etc.).

In the workshop, the speakers talked a lot about gender roles and how we should begin to accept that men can do work considered “women’s work” and vice versa. I agree that work and the burden of work is an important area, and maybe that is where gender equality begins. But the gender inequality here of course goes deeper than just surface work tasks. In relationships, women are generally not treated as equals. The man is considered head of the household. He makes all the decisions, controls the money, and in turn is responsible for taking care of his wife (or wives – polygamy is still fairly common here) and children. Women often do not have access to money and have no say in decision-making for the household. And if the husband leaves, this can leave the woman and her children in very dire financial straits. It is still common to arrange marriages here, and to pay a bride price.

There is a lot of work still to be done to improve gender equality in the country, and I think it’s great that cdpeace is working in this area, especially in rural communities. Will one or two workshops change societal attitudes? No, certainly not. But societal change happens slowly over time, and the more people are exposed to the idea of men and women being equal, the better. So even the small things, like this workshop, can help a little bit.

Teacher workshops #2 - Using Play in the Classroom

Last weekend I finished the second set of teacher training workshops for volunteer teachers at cdpeace pilot schools in Paki Masabong and Gbonkolenken chiefdoms. Like the last set, the workshops were well attended, and I think the teachers really enjoyed them.

This set of workshops focused on using play in the classroom. They were facilitated by Delia Kay (photo at left is Delia with teachers in Gbonkolenken). Delia is from the UK and currently working as a volunteer at the Fatima Institute in Makeni. I met her in Makeni, and one day we were talking about our work and interests, and she mentioned that she was a teacher for many years in England, and was head teacher at a primary school. She also said that she was interested in doing more volunteer work with teachers while she was here in Sierra Leone. I immediately took advantage of the opportunity to ask her to facilitate some teacher workshops for us, and happily, she agreed. Since I am not trained as a teacher myself, I was happy to have someone else with actual classroom experience help me out with the training.

In the workshops, Delia set the context by talking about how students learn. She reminded the teachers that students learn not only by listening (auditory learners), but also by seeing (visual learners) and doing (kinaesthetic learners). So much of the teaching style here is teachers standing at the front of the room and talking at students, and many students just don’t learn well that way. Games are a great way to offer stimulation to different learners and also to give the kids a fun activity to do while they are still learning. Delia also talked about using games as a behaviour management tool, something which fits well in our overall efforts to eliminate the use of corporal punishment in schools.

Delia then taught the teachers a series of games they could use in their classrooms, and the teachers themselves actually played the games to see how they worked. The games they learned were Housie, Housie (hangman, but with a drawing of a house instead of a hanging man, which is really quite gruesome when you think about it), several math games involving math problems as clues (Ten Numbers and Multiplication Bingo with actual bingo cards), a couple of word/spelling games (one with homonyms and one with scrambled letters that you make into words – kind of like Boggle), and charades.

The teachers seemed to enjoy playing all the games, but my favourite by far was charades. No one had ever played this game before, so the teachers were a bit unsure of how to go about it. The things they had to act out were all animals, things like lion, frog, butterfly and monkey. To be honest, they all kind of looked the same to me when the teachers acted them out, and I had no clue whatsoever which animal they were trying to portray :-) But the teachers seemed to be able to guess, and there was lots of laughter, so it worked well for them. I have some good videos of the charades as well – they’re posted with the photos from the workshop at http://picasaweb.google.ca/clarepoulev/TeacherWorkshops2#.

Delia also mentioned a website which has many resources and ideas for primary school teachers in particular: http://www.primaryresources.co.uk.

The work has begun

As I mentioned in my last post, this last week has been busier than my first few weeks in Sierra Leone. Things feel like they are finally picking up steam. Just like with any new job, it has taken time for me to settle in, figure out what my priorities should be, get to know the people involved, and really get started on the work. Add in adjusting to a new community and culture, and it makes for a somewhat slow start. I very much appreciate the time I took at the beginning to visit various schools and communities, do language training, and more or less get adjusted, but it's great that more concrete things are now happening on the work front.

I gave my first teacher training workshop this past weekend, on Sunday. First of all, the date was originally planned for Saturday, but on Thursday afternoon we discovered that donors who built the two new schools in Maso and Makambray (from Plan) were coming to visit on Saturday. With half of the teachers attending the workshop coming from those two villages, we had to reschedule, so we moved the workshop to Sunday. Unfortunately, this conflicted with attending church services for some, so the turnout was a bit lower than it might otherwise have been. However, we still had 22 teachers attend, so I'm pleased with that.

Overall the workshop went well I think. Rather than focusing on training on learning methods (since I am not a teacher myself, I didn't feel comfortable offering that kind of training), the workshop focused on peace education and classroom management. It was really a follow up to a workshop held by PSI and cdpeace here in January. That day-long workshop focused on eliminating corporal punishment in schools (now illegal in Sierra Leone). The workshop I did yesterday offered a quick review of the key items learned at that workshop and then checked in with the teachers about how things are going in terms of the goal of eliminating corporal punishment. My role was as facilitator rather than expert, which was exactly what I wanted.

I'm generally very  impressed by the teachers here. Even though many of them do not earn salaries (our work here is primarily focused on the volunteer teachers), they are always eager to learn new skills. Some of the teachers who attended the workshop walked 5 miles on a Sunday afternoon just to be there. Teachers seem very dedicated to improving their teaching and creating a more peaceful classroom and community. At the end of our session we brainstormed about ideas for future workshops that cdpeace & PSI might offer. Among the subjects mentioned were child-centred learning techniques, using local materials as teaching tools, agricultural training, training in activities like games, sports and music, human rights training, and record-keeping and computer training. Classroom management is a major issue as well, especially with the huge class sizes here (for example, my neighbour in Mapaki, Fatmata, teaches nursery at the school in Maso and has 75 children in her class, ranging in age from 2 to 5 years old). There is obviously a great need for ongoing support for teachers here, and PSI and cdpeace are both working to meet that need in whatever way possible. It is also inspiring to hear the teachers talk about what they can do to help themselves without waiting for outside support (e.g. from government) that may never come.

Also on the work front, I have done my first few interviews for my research. I have started with interviews with my key informants - people in the community who are knowledgeable about women's health and are in a leadership role. Already some interesting findings and ideas have come up, and  I am really looking forward to starting the interviews with local women themselves, hopefully later this week. Lots of typing to transcribe interviews is ahead for me!

I will be out of touch for the next two days. Tomorrow morning I am heading to Lungi (where the airport is located) to pick up three visitors from Canada arriving late in the evening. The visitors are Jane Gloor and Nancy and Vaughn Wellington. Jane is a pediatrician and the parent of a student at Parkview school, one of the schools in Canada that is twinned with a school in Sierra Leone (Mathombo school). They will spend a week in Paki Masabong and Gbonkolenken chiefdoms visiting schools and clinics and then are planning a week of holidays.

On our way through Freetown to the airport I'm also planning to stop in to the grocery store. I'm inordinately excited about this, especially the prospect of getting my hands on some real cheese and maybe some nutella and/or some jam :) I'll report back on all my food goodies when I return to Mapaki on Wednesday.