I realize that I haven't talked much about what happens in my class for girls. Class is held every Thursday afternoon, from 3:00-4:00pm. It's a sex education class, where we talk about everything from, "how to deal with pressure to have sex" to "how the immune system fights off sexual diseases".
How do I teach when my Bambara sucks? Well, luckily, there is a lesson book written in English and Bambara and I simply follow along. Plus, I have my translator/mentee, Awa "Gaffou" to help me out. Honestly, without her, we would get nowhere.
The girls in my class seem way more interested in sex, at ages 11, 12 and 13, than I was. But, these girls also have much older boyfriends than typical American girls. These girls want to know how they can have sex without getting pregnant. They want to know if white and black people can make babies together. They think that I have the cure for HIV/AIDS. They think that Toubab men come to Africa to buy and sell African women as slaves and that Toubab women come to find African husbands. And they want to know allllllllll of my business.
The questions that these girls have are great. In the beginning, it was hard to get them to say much, but now they seem to be having fun with it. Even Awa is having fun with it. The class is really interesting and it's fun to see these girls willing to ask us these questions and to laugh about embarrassing things. It's a really good health practice for the girls to feel safe expressing themselves, even to an untrained individual like myself.
I'm really hoping that this will continue once I'm gone.
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