july

After returning from the whirlwind of Camp Espoir and Take Our Daughters to Work, I immediately plunged into last-minute planning for the two village science camps I planned with a nearby CHAP volunteer. The first took place in her village at the end of the month. I have such counterpart-envy. While I struggle to find people with whom I can work, she has an Affaires Sociales (Office of Social Promotion) representative and Conseil Agricole (Agricultural Consultant) clamoring to work with her. They both came to camp to help in translating and explaining some of the more difficult technical concepts.

I felt unprepared, but my worries were unwarranted. There were sixteen (relatively) motivated female CEG students who showed up (relatively) on time for the first session. I will admit that science has never been my thing. I was hesitant to take on these projects. But it has been an incredible experience. And somewhere along the way, I became Peace Corps Togo’s unofficial spokesperson for the Girls in Science initiative. Who would have thought? Definitely no one who has seen my grades in high school chemistry.

So, camp was more fun and more successful than I could have imagined. Rather than take a curriculum-based approach, our aim was just to encourage the girls’ interest in the sciences with broad-spectrum activities. We started with a general session on why girls do not pursue the sciences.

*SIDE NOTE: After completing 3e and passing the BEPC, students choose a focus for their studies in lycée. The “A” series is more of a liberal arts degree, with a concentration on languages, history and philosophy. The C/D series is the math/science track. There are very, very, very, very, very few girls pursuing a C/D track at the lycée level. Increasing these numbers is one of the central goals of the Girls in Science initiative.

Right, so we talked about why there are so few girls in Series C/D at lycée. Some of the problems include:
- There are no women in the community working in a science-based field. Without these models, girls are unaware of the opportunities
- Lack of encouragement: friends, teachers and parents will all tell girls that they should stick with The A series. Even directors have been known to discourage girls from registering for Series C/D.
- Teaching methods: As with all other subjects, the focus is theory and memorization, rather than practice and application. There are no materials for experimentation. There are not even text books. Everything they have learned has been from diagrams drawn on a chalk board. Science, especially suffers from a lack of experiential-based learning.
- CONFIDENCE: So many girls I have spoken to have told me that the only reason they would not consider a science track is that it is too hard. These are very intelligent, capable young women, but they believe that they are not as intellectually capable as their male counterparts.

Then there are, of course, the general reasons for which girls abandon school in general: early pregnancy, forced marriage, responsibilities at home, lack of money to pay school fees, sexual harassment from teachers, a failure to understand the availability of post-education work opportunities, and so on.

I digress yet again. I could ramble on about this all day, but I’ll try to get back to the point. We talked about these problems and some of the possible solutions. In the next session, we taught the scientific method, a crucial component of science education in the states that is completely lacking here. To ensure they grasped the concept, we had them perform simple experiments and work through the steps. We talked about the various kinds of graphs and performed experiments with pH paper to exemplify bar graphs and worked with heart rate to illustrate line graphs. There was a session on observation and objective description where they collected leaves from the surrounding area. Conseil Agricole was invaluable in identifying all the plants at the end and explaining their various uses in food and medicines. The most popular session was the one in which the girls used the microscopes that were so generously sent from the states. They had never even seen a microscope, much less been given the opportunity to manipulate one themselves. They finished up by working in groups to compose a sample, scientific question and to design an experiment according to the steps of the scientific method. I was floored by their creativity.