Last night was one of the hottest nights ever I think, or if less hot than some dry season nights, was both hot and humid, and neither Mary nor I slept much. Usually if it is a hot sunny day the clouds roll in at night and the rains cools things off, but there was no such rain last night. Worse, the electricity was turned off all night, so the fan I bought (did I mention I bought a fan?) was pretty useless to cool us off.

Today I am meeting with a different groupement to discuss how we might work together, and after that I have to go around and tell a bunch of people about the entrepreneurial peer educator group I am trying to start, which is having its first meeting (inshallah) next Monday evening. My APCD will be here and will sit in on the meeting, and I used that to try and encourage my organization to actually give a damn and invite some people.

And my English class will be starting in the evening the Tuesday after I return from Conakry to see Mary off, and is independent of APIC, so hopefully will actually happen. All of this resulted from me dropping by the bureau yesterday to discuss finding a building. If the building works out (is actually open) and people show up, then we will be good to go.

Having current certainly changes what I can and can’t do. Yesterday I spent some time on my computer and got Apache web server running and now I can look at web sites that I have downloaded onto my computer while I am not connected to the internet. This is primarily for law schools and any other things I might consider doing after Peace Corps, since I don’t plan on making the trip to Conakry often and I have to pay to use the internet here. This way I can just download the web site for a school and look at it at my leisure.

Yesterday we got out some of the coloring supplies (thanks mom!) and tried to color with Bintu and Papa and some other kids. The result was rather depressing and has me trying to remember my very young childhood. I’ve mentioned before that school here is very repitition based, and it is amazing how early it takes root. We wanted the kids to color whatever they wanted, but Bintu just copied what Mary was drawing, and some other kids started using the paper and crayons to right numbers over and over. Papa, who is three, was young enough to just make lines on paper, but even his lines were in rows as if he was trying to write numbers.

So what do we do in the states to encourage kids to make scribbles, stick crayons up their nose, and otherwise experiment? How do we treat them at a very young age that differs from how they treat kids here? And what can I do to encourage creativity when the kids are trying desperately to please me by drawing exactly what they think I want them to draw? How do I encourage creativity among teenagers and adults in both an business and an artistic setting? How about in the girl’s math club I want to start? I have always hated classes that were repitition based, and enjoyed much more opportunities to learn by doing, to explore on my own, to find tease out answers, and I want any classes I hold to be along that same approach, but I am going to have to find a way to reconcile the fact that the participants will invariably think that the best way to do well is to copy as precisely as possible.