Saly

Saly

I’d heard that Saly was a nice place and a popular tourist destination, so I headed out there anticipating it would be nice, and boy was I not disappointed!!

Since the rest of the RELO office was already there, I got a ride with a couple of English teachers who were heading out there from Dakar as well. Both teachers in the car were named Abdouleye, so at least I only had one name to learn! Saly is about 60 kilometers from Dakar (that’s about 35 miles), so it wouldn’t normally take more than an hour to get there. The exit off the highway we needed was closed, so it took us a little longer, but we got there. I was surprised when we pulled up outside a 5-Star seaside resort!

The Neptune Hotel has a bungalow style set up, so there were a bunch of round bungalows, each with 4 rooms (2 on the ground floor, 2 upstairs), although I’m sure there were some family-style suites that may have taken up an entire floor, or bungalow for that matter. My suite had a sitting room, bedroom and large bathroom on the ground floor. Because it was during the week of Toussaint vacations in France, there were a ton of French families staying there.

We had arrived around 11am and happened to see Safi as we walked in, so she let us know that we would have a couple of hours to settle into our rooms before the group ate lunch at 1pm. Lunch was a set menu with 2 choices for each course (appetizer, main, dessert) and a choice of drink. I found out that would be the case for every lunch and dinner during the conference.

Lesson planning practice

I was able to see some of the people I had met over the course of the three day orientation we had, including the Access teacher who let us take over her class, Marème, the woman who does the teacher training/evaluation for the Ministry of Education, Ngueye, and the Peace Corps Volunteer, Alex. Those three, along with myself and Safi, were the only women there. The rest of the teachers were men. It’s an interesting difference in that teaching is a predominantly female dominated field in the US, while it is predominantly male in Senegal.

This conference, as I mentioned before, was for Access teachers. As I mentioned in my Orientation blog, the Access program is an after-school program for underprivileged kids (i.e. not the principle’s son or the mayor’s daughter) funded by the US government.

Senegalese Access Students

When an English teacher wants to start an Access class in their school, they go through a pretty long process to get it established, including recruiting 16 students (equally gender balanced) for the 2-year commitment. Not only do the students have to be committed to the program, their parents/guardians also have to be because these students are going to do 360 extra hours of English study over the course of 2 years, including extra lessons twice a week (usually Wednesdays and Saturdays) plus summer camps, enhancement activities such as community service, and some ‘intensive’ sessions of 4+ hours in addition to everything else (in order to get the 360 hours in).

My part of the conference was an hour and 15 minute workshop on Service Learning, Active Citizenship & Leadership training. Since that title was all they gave me as a prompt for my presentation, I wasn’t really sure where to start. I decided to start at the most basic level; with the definition of each term, especially as applied to the Access program. I used the Access handbook as a guide, and after learning more about the program, decided to gear my presentation towards how to integrate all three aspects into an enhancement activity.

I found this article, by Stephanie Harbin, about the value of leadership training for teenagers and integrated that into it as well. In the end, the presentation and discussion went really, really well. The Access teachers all participated and contributed to the discussion, which kept it lively and interesting. It apparently ended up being exactly what the directors of the conference were looking for, which was a lucky, albeit educated, guess on my part.

I was the last presenter on Thursday, and then there were workshops all day on Friday and Saturday morning as well. Because we usually only had a couple of hours in between the end of the day’s conference sessions and dinner, we never actually had time to go into the town of Saly. I’m definitely going to have to come back, since I’ve heard that it’s worth a visit. While there was very little free time during the conference, that time was usually spent with Alex, the PCV, enjoying the pool or the beach. At one point, I was enjoying the pool before dinner and just started laughing…

I couldn’t figure out how on earth it happened that I was sitting in a giant pool at a seaside resort in Saly, Senegal, but I could definitely get used to it (but seriously can’t expect anything like this to happen again, ha ha!). I definitely enjoyed myself, especially getting to know other teachers who are passionate about what they do, and in a spectacular setting.