Colleagues

My colleagues from the Lyceé Yamwaya

The school is one of the largest in Burkina Faso, with about 2000 students and 48 teachers during 1999-2000. We were lucky to have so many teachers, but even so, some classes went without teachers in some subject areas. This particular year, there were some first-cycle classes who did not get to study science. In many of the rural villages, there will be years when no students study mathematics, science, or other subjects, depending on what teachers the government can send.

An unusual characteristic of this group of teachers is that of the 48 teachers, eight of us were women. This was (and is) rare, and it is even more surprising that four of the eight were mathematics and science teachers. In Burkina Faso, it is less common than in the U.S. for a woman to work. In a country where only 1% of the population studies beyond secondary school, it is unusual to find women who have gone to the university and studied mathematics or science.

Click on a thumbnail image to see the larger photo.

	<Teachers fill out grade reports and calculate averages in large books of duplicate student grade sheets. (A few teachers have started to use computer spreadsheets to calculate averages) June 2001
Some of my women colleagues between classes> Spring 2000
	<Teachers clean up the old computer room in the hopes that some day there will be working computers in it. Fall 2000
Sylla, the computer wizard (left), along with colleagues and the proviseur (principal), talks with Amy from the U.S. Embassy the day the Embassy's old computers arrived.> Spring 2000
	<Colleagues work on the revived computers (three people working; one practicing the mouse on solitaire) Fall 2000

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