7 February 2006 - 21:59
Last Thursday, the students that were at my house for our weekly English conversation practice told me that they weren’t going to class on Friday because of a Danish newspaper. I had no idea what they were talking about, but sure enough, all of the high school students walked out of their classes on Friday with the excuse that they needed to protest some cartoons that had been published in a Danish newspaper that defamed the prophet Mohammed. They marched around town shouting and waving sticks and then got bored and went home. Then the adults had a rally near the governor’s office on Sunday, which was much calmer and less mobile. Then the students went at it again on Monday morning after they had taken the weekend off, since protesting is a school hours-only activity for them, apparently. At first, I just laughed. What a stupid thing to protest about – some lame cartoonist a thousand miles away poking fun at your religion. Most protests in America are pretty dumb, but at least most of them are effective to the point that they get people’s attention. Whose attention were the students (or the adults in the community, for that matter) trying to attract? There are about six non-Mauritanians (non-Muslims) living in Tidjikja. I doubt they were trying to get our attention. But who outside of Tidjikja is going to listen to a rag-tag group of angry kids skipping class to walk around their town? How pathetic. I wanted to grab a soapbox and stand in front of them all and tell them what idiots they were being, that no one cared what they thought about cartoons, that they were wasting their time, and that they should be in school, getting an education so that maybe someday people would actually listen to their opinions on things like this. Then I realized that wasn’t it. They didn’t have a target audience, they weren’t doing it for anyone’s attention. These kids may not be very logically inclined, but they certainly weren’t dumb enough to think that anyone besides the school administrators would care that they were marching around town. So why? Because they were bored, disenchanted, and cynical about their prospects at the school.
I get frustrated a lot of the time with the state of the educational system here. Schools are falling apart because the government doesn’t allocate enough money to keep them in good repair, and what money is set aside for such necessities is usually pocketed at various levels in the school administration and government. There aren’t enough teachers for the number of students that attend classes, so classes end up having 40-60 students in them. Teachers aren’t paid fair wages, and they don’t care about their jobs, so they don’t show up if they can think of any half-baked excuse not to do so. Classes are taught in two languages to kids who probably only speak one of them well. Parents who probably didn’t finish school themselves don’t think it’s all that important for their kids to go either, so they don’t punish them when they skip class or meet with teachers to discuss grades. Students often cheat, bribe, and lie their way through classes. And for the kids who do care, who study, who work hard and somehow manage to overcome all of the challenges to making good grades and finish school with a decent record, what do they have to look forward to? They can go to the only university in the country in Nouakchott and get a degree that’s about as valuable as a liberal arts degree in America is (zilch). Or, if they have money, they can go overseas and get a more valuable or possibly a higher degree. Then what? If they stay overseas, they can work and make a decent living. But you have to have money in your family in the first place to do that, and most of the kids here don’t have that option available to them. Or, they could try to find work in Mauritania. But then, their options are limited. They can become underpaid teachers. Or nurses in remote health posts that aren’t even stocked with the proper medicines. Or paper-pushing office workers, lost in the inefficiency of government bureaucracies. Or small store owners, selling the same exact goods that a thousand other boutique owners in your neighborhood are selling. There are just not a lot of options available to people, whether or not you have a university degree. Whether or not you even finish high school. So why go? I wouldn’t.
