Approaching Habit

So I guess the school year has officially started. I gave my first couple of classes on Friday and they were quite underwhelming. I have at this point prepared about 2 weeks of classes and I was biting at the bit to get started into the swing of things. However, like most things in the BF the school year is slow to start and generally pretty relaxed. For instance, I was strongly advised by one of my fellow teachers not to give any factual information during the first week, and instead just have a formal chit-chat session with the students. I explained to them where I came from and why I'm here, and as far as I could tell they weren't listing to anything I was saying, they were just starring mouths agape thinking to themselves "oh my god look at that cracker". I have no fear that the novelty of my complexion will wear off fairly quickly and that this pleasant passivity will be soon replaced by the normal chaos of a burkinabé classroom. That said, I am looking forward to this next week when I get to add a little content to my lectures.

I was rather nervous leading up to this week as my homologue was not in town and I still was unaware of what my schedule would entail. However, once the whole teaching staff arrived in the big L (about 2 days before classes started) things unraveled quite well. I expressed my doubts surrounding 3ème and general concerns about the year to my homologue and the directeur and I wound up with a pretty light load. After a long talk with Koné my homologue I opted out of 3ème and they're actually getting an svt teacher from another school to trek out here 4 hours per week to give that class. Koné really put things in perspective before helping me make that decision. He explained that I should just stick to the simple task of improving my communication before
jumping into a class as hard as 3ème. He said to just take the countless hours that I would be devoting to that class and just throw them into learning french and just general communication. This will give me time to work on erasing some of those fossilized errors that seem to be so ingrained in my language.
Being an immigrant is hard and I think perhaps harder if you're expected to be some sort of town intellectual. After all, the job that I have is not only a well paying sought after occupation in burkina but also one that requires an education that is substantially beyond the reach of the average burkinabé. When they see me waltz in and begin teaching with only the most tenuous grasp of the french language its seems only natural that they would have their doubts. I may have said this before but I often times feel as though the average villager mistakes a grammatical error in french or Jula that I have committed as evidence of full blown incompetence. Undoubtedly I know many words and far more concepts that will be forever beyond the reach of the villagers without educations, but I still can't get over the fact that when I screw up a salutation or my french falters in general that I seem incapable of doing my job in their eyes.
That might seem a little melodramatic, I mean to tell you the truth I doubt anyone scrutinizes my language the way I do. I just hate to have a notion invalidated because I lack the tools to properly express it.

In other news my fellow teachers are awesome. Basically we're all 20 something males who love to drink beer and bullshit. They definitely are a breath of fresh air for me, as I was definantly in want of some other teachers both as solid french speakers to practice with and people to explain to me just how the whole school in BF thing went down. In all honesty they're really funny guys and Im looking forward to just hanging out with them. They are also great to practice french with and they don't hesitate to correct me when I make a glaring error. The english teacher here is completely hilarious- When he speaks in english to me he very much sounds like a drunken english man. The english part because thats the brand of english they study here and the drunken part because he basically throws paragraphs of indistinguishable syllables at me at a time. You can tell he's really well studied, but you can also tell that native english speakers to practice with are not very common around here. I've got my first tutoring session with him tomorrow and I'm quite excited about it. He and I are thinking about started and extracurricular english club where he would do crammer lessons and I would just talk.

I've included this picture of my house from the inside in case you were currious.