Oatmeal

written October 26, 2010
I've just stuffed my face with a BIG ole bowl of oatmeal (and burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth while doing it). It was great! I've also had 8 Pixy Stix, a handful of Nerds and one incredibley melted Reese's. I taste America in my mouth, and it's great! I know for sure that the thing I miss the most (besides friends and family of course) is American Food. You all don't know how lucky you are to just be able to hop in a car and have your choice of making a delicous meal with yummy groceries, or just pulling through some drive-thru. You have no idea what I'd give to be able to have a burrito from Taco Bell right now.
Oh so my Dad's birthday was yesterday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!), and I celebrated by eating Nerds, lots and lots of Nerds. I also spent the entire day at the Mayor's office because they were having a meeting about this year's budget. Now why was I there you may ask? and the answer is that I have no clue. My homologue carts me along to every single meeting at the Mayor's office, and every single meeting is in Senufo, so basically that means I sit for hours in silence not knowing what is going on. I'm an Education volunteer, so it made sense when he brought me to the meeting about the running of the schools and all of the issues they were having, but there is no reason why I need to be at meetings like ones about the Mayor's budget. The meeting yesterday was more than 5 hours long!! Normally I just sit in the meetings and listen intently even though I don't understand anything just to be polite, but yesterday I gave up on politeness and pulled out my book. The funny thing is that I wasn't even the only bored one in the room! The Premiere Adjoint (2nd in charge under the Mayor) had his head on the table, and a representative from the village over was snoring!! There is only one thing that I like about attending meetings at the Mayor's office, and that is that I get to eat lunch with them, which means I get to eat rice and not Toh!!!!!!! When I eat with my host family I only get rice once or twice a week because my host dad can't afford to feed his family rice everyday, instead we have Toh or Couscous, both of which I find disgusting.
Anyway not much is going on in village right now except that both the Primary and Secondary schools got Stagiers (student teachers), so now we have enough teachers so that no classroom should be unattended, or at least that's what I would think, but is not actually the case. Yesterday, for example, I went by the Secondary school to meet the stagiers and noticed that 2 of the 3 classrooms were left unattended; only the 9th graders were being taught while the 7th and 8th graders were left alone and were fooling around. This is unbelieveable to me because The secondary school has 3 permanent teachers, 2 stagiers and the Director. Why is it that only one of them was teaching? This is something that I definitely want to change about my village. I want to point out to the teachers that their job is to teach, so during the hours of 7:45- noon and then 3-5 Monday through Friday they should be in the classroom, and that whatever else they have to do can be done during the very long lunch break, afterschool, or on the weekend!
Allow me to end this entry with something I'm very excited about: tomorrow is RICE DAY!!! at my host family's. It is also my village's market day which I love because it means I can by the Malian version of a doughnuts and boiled peanuts! yummm!