Solar Panel Project

Renewable Energy Renewing Minds

EIGHT DOLLAR KING

I make eight dollars a day and I am rich.

I do not mean figuratively rich enjoying God’s blessings anew every morning. I literally have a lot of money and often search for ways to spend it. My salary is eight dollars a day.

Two weeks after graduating from Taylor, I boarded a plane bound for Burkina Faso officially becoming a teacher with the Peace Corps. After a year’s worth of burnt candles and bucket baths, I can’t say that I miss either running water or electricity, both of which I live without.

I send a boy to the pump every other day to fetch water for my 80L cistern. He straps a yellow 20L plastic jug to the back of my bike and makes the trip four times. I pay him one dollar a week and his friends are jealous of his job.

Every other Saturday, I give a neighbor girl my dirty laundry, a packet of powdered soap and 40L of water. Also for a dollar, she happily does my laundry laboring over buckets bent-over straight-legged forehead to knees scrubbing my clothes over the washboard.

Everything I eat, with the exception of spaghetti, tomato paste and Blue Band (margarine), I buy at a farmers market to which I bike 8 km every sixth day. In absence of a fridge, my weekly diet is a function of which foods spoil first. Meat, for example, taken from slabs of cow or goat hanging from the butcher’s tree, needs to be fried and eaten within 36 hours. If kept wet, leafy greens can keep for up to 48 hours. Since meat and leafy greens spoil first, I often have meat and salad on market day – a meal fit for a king.

Day three after the market, I make a tomato or peanut sauce from scratch. Cabbage, eggplant and lentils give the sauce substance but don’t spoil like meat would. This allows me to eat the same sauce for several days cooking new only the rice, spaghetti or macaroni.

Yacouba does English exercises at the blackboard 

This brings me to day 5. Having eaten all the vegetables, I am forced to make do with peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Village peanut butter makes Whole Food’s peanut butter seem like Wal-Mart’s. The process is simple. Grind campfire-roasted peanuts at the local generator powered mill and out comes nothing-but-peanuts village peanut butter.

Waking up on day 6, I face an empty house, nothing to eat. Thankfully it’s the sixth day and I can bike to the market after teaching class.

Keep in mind that I live the most posh lifestyle in all of Loumana. The sauces I make, sauces fit for a king, would be cut and diluted many times over to fill the many stomachs of a large African family. The stomachs may be full but the bodies are left malnourished and fatigued.

I am at a loss when I discipline a student for sleeping in my class when staring back at me are eyes sunken and bloodshot seeing nothing but hunger. I try not to think of my thick and hearty sauce waiting for me at home. I tell them fatigue can be overcome by a strong mind knowing that the strongest of minds cannot function without proper nourishment. I would invite kids to eat at my home, but between my four classes, I have nearly 300 students. Even the richest man in Loumana can’t daily fill 300 stomachs.

The obstacles preventing my students from advancing in their education are sobering. Class sizes exceed 100. Overworked teachers often juggle 30 hours of class per week making a mere 200 dollars a month. From crumbling chalkboards, students copy diagrams of chemistry experiments and drawings of plants as the majority can’t afford the eight dollar textbook. Beakers and graduated cylinders are foreign objects the teachers can only explain in theory.  

It is not surprising that every year nearly half the students fail each grade. Their scholastic careers are ended if they fail a second time relegating them to a life of farming or herding.

How do you choose who to help when it can’t be everyone? One answer is to find projects that empower people to help themselves.  

The students at my school have no way to study at night. There is no electricity in Loumana rendering the homes pitch black after dark. The lack of tables and chairs leaves my students crowded around lanterns on plastic mats sprawled around dirt courtyards.

Additionally, the children must help with chores around the home. Studying is set aside until the chickens are fed and in the coup, wood gathered, cisterns full, dinner cooked and dishes cleaned. Children also help the parents with whatever their family trade may be: making soap, baking bread, butchering meet, making furniture, watering the garden. These distractions create a chaotic, not to mention dark, environment making effective study nearly impossible.

Students flood out of the afternoon's English clss

To give their students a place to study after dark, the community has expressed an interest in illuminating the village school. Since the slow-growing electrical grids of Burkina Faso are a long way from Loumana, light would have to come in the form of solar panels and car batteries.

Solar panels and other necessary equipment are no cheaper here than they are in the states. The community needs five thousand dollars to get the project off the ground. This money would light two classrooms, the on-site community library and the administration building. For the first time, students would have access to a place devoted to their studies with proper tables, desks, chalkboards and textbooks away from the distractions and duties of home. Go to my blog (gatorsinafrica.blogspot.com) for pictures and information.

Go to https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=686-148

if you are interested in helping.

The day I am writing this is a market day. After lesson planning, I look forward to enjoying my weekly meat and salad, a meal fit for an eight dollar king.