FLAGS FOR THE FUTURE (F4F)

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been back in Burkina for over a month now.  I’ve been keeping busy and preparing for the arrival of my family!  We had our mid-service conference a few weeks ago where we had sessions on food security, a US-AID program called WASH that works with water, sanitation and hygiene, sharing our successes, learning from our failures, and project planning for the next ten months.  We also had check-up doctors appointments and sit-down interviews with our bosses. 

Back at site I have been busy with my Flags 4 the Future project as well as preparing for the Youth Leadership and Development Conference.  Emma came back to site with me after the mid-service conference, and we got right to work making the flags for the project.  Using the grant money I received from the Gender and Development Committee here, I bought the paint and flag materials.  A stencil, which says Notre Avenir (Our Future), was used as well to make the flags.  The stencil was donated by my mom's friend, Helen Brandshaft.  The local tailors stitched the flags while we were busy painting.  By the end of the day we had made about 20, a good start!

With the flag making underway I was ready to have the first training of trainers.  I wanted to start off small to see if the project will work, to have it be more personable, and also to help manage the number of flags I need to make.  We had 3 trainers come to the formation, one from the primary school Yelboulga and 2 from the primary school Langago.  All three of the participants were members of the parents association at these schools.  With the help of a School Director and the School Board President, we led the 2 hour training on the Flags 4 the Future project.  We discussed the importance of education and how it relates to the development of a village, about the importance of educating girls and boys, where Burkina stands comparatively to the rest of the world (183 out of 186 on the poverty scale), the reasons youth do drop out of school (work in the mines, to get married, pregnancy, money problems, etc.) and prevention methods.  We then talked about how to do a door-to-door campaign, what information to cover and how to gather the data. 

The following week the door-to-door campaigns started.  These will continue weekly for the next month, or until all houses in the area have been visited.  The trained members go out in their communities, share the information they learned during the training, gather data on how many school aged children are in the family vs how many are actually enrolled and go to school, and then those families who have all their school-aged children in school receive a flag! 

The project is off to a good start.  Those families who don’t have all their children in school (the majority of the families) listened carefully and asked questions during the campaign.  One mother said she didn’t have enough money to send her child to school last year and I was able to help her plan and save money.  If she saves 300 CFA (less than 1 dollar) a month, she can enroll her daughter in October.  She then informed us that she had never thought about it like that before.  Later, a father told us a story about his twins.  He has two twin girls and only one of them goes to school.  He said the other didn’t want to go and that he tried and tried but she always refused to go.  We asked why this was and he said that on the first day of school, the teacher was calling out the names of students to come up and sign in.  The daughter, whose name is Oussanatou, thought she heard her name being called so she went up in front of the class.  The teacher, who had apparently called Oussana, not Oussanatou, hit the child for getting up without her name being called.  Oussanatou felt embarrassed and scared of the teacher and has refused ever since to go to school.  With the help of the School Board President we came up with a solution.  This October Oussanatou will be enrolled in a different school also close to their house.   Although it doesn’t solve the bigger problem, violence in school, it does help Oussanatou go to school and get the education she deserves. 

Another mother, as we were walking away, yelled across the field, did my neighbor get a flag?  She hadn’t received a flag and I think was surprised to see that her neighbor did.  Part of the goal of this project is to encourage neighbors to talk about the importance of education and together come up with ways that they can send their children to school.   Money, and the need for a child to watch the family’s cattle are two big reasons that children are not in school, but the parent’s knowledge about the importance of educating children is also missing.  I hope this project can help, even if it’s just one family!  Stay tuned for more updates, as I hope to do this project in all the neighborhoods in my village.  

N