Niger Vocational Training Centre

Sorry this will be a short update- but lots of pictures at least! We have been very busy lately. Our last two classes were on conflict management, and then one on dental care! Seems funny to have them back and forth but we move around between health topics and moral topics quite freely

The interesting thing about conflict management here is …..they don’t manage it. They don’t talk about it. They won’t sit down and discuss it with the person and everything gets shoved under the rug or they use an intermediary instead of going themselves. Wow. That is like my worst nightmare!!

Try as we could, we just couldn’t seem to get them to even consider more proactive ways of dealing with the fights that happen. And we know the girls are always disagreeing and arguing! Must be such a strong cultural thing that so far we just can’t break through! Here are some pics of the skits and girls that day.

On one other note- the young girl Ramatou I wrote about a few blogs ago is going in for surgery Wednesday- so please keep her and her family in your prayers!

Djamila

Salamatou Y

My advanced math class doing modified BINGO outside in the yard.

If they get a number right, before they can circle it on their sheet, they have to correctly spell it!

Halima took a turn as the “prof” and read out the numbers and wrote them on the board.

Then just last week we talked about dental care. Not surprising, the quality of dental care here is horrific and their teeth are not a pretty sight, especially as they get older. The Tuareg women have the extra added “problem” in that culturally a lot of the women use chewing tobacco! Thankfully we are catching the girls before the age they would start that, so we can educate them against it! I showed gory photos about mouth cancer  and nasty rotted teeth and gums and it really brought it home the damage that chewing tobacco and smoking can cause.

We used eggs to show teeth and the issue of brushing and caring for your enamel. We covered eggs in dried honey and caked on dirt and they had to use brushes and a tiny bit of water and make it spic and span clean. We did 4 experiments on eggs using water for one (to show cleanliness) vinegar on one (to show acidic damage like their sauces and Coca cola and juices) we used strong Tuareg sugared tea on one (which is a part of their daily lives) and then we smeared toothpaste on another one then submitted it to the tea test as well. The girls had a lot of fun. I returned 2 days later to show what had happened to the eggs. The water one was spic and span, the two tea ones were dark and stained, although the one with toothpaste was notably less stained, and the vinegar egg had no hard shell left and was like a bouncy ball! Crazy! Try that one at home, but handle it carefully!

So that’s it for now! Only 5 more weeks before their summer break!

I’m going to be so sad!