Teaching Fadjine to Read

 

This is my neighbor, Fadjine.  He's 26 years old, and he works hard everyday in the fields.  The last time my village had a festival, at the start of the rainy season, he put on his nicest clothes and asked to take his photograph next to his proudest possession, his motorcycle.

 Like more than half of Malians, Fadjine is illiterate, and lately he's been asking me to teach him to read.  In Mali, learning to read is made difficult by the fact that most of the population speaks Bambara, but there are almost no written materials in Bambara.  Books, legal documents, and newspapers are all in French.  In schools, Malians learn reading and French - at the same time.  Malians speak French to varying degrees: in Bamako it is almost as common as Bambara, but in a small village like Kissa, someone who never went to school wouldn't know more than a handful of phrases. 

Fadjine doesn't speak French, but he was very persistent in asking me to teach him to read.  So one day I grabbed a paper and pencil, wrote down the letter A, and said "this is 'A,' it goes 'Aaaaa.'"  He doesn't even know the full alphabet yet, but he learns a few more letters every night. 

It's surprising how complicated reading and writing really is.  Fadjine will stare at four letters for a painfully long time, slowly repeating the letters under his breath "Behh - Aaaa - Seh - Iiii, Behh - Aaaa - Seh - Iiii."  Sometimes it will take a minute before it finally crystallizes and he says triumphantly "BASI!."  Then he attempts to write the word under where I have written it, carefully reproducing those tiny weird squiggles. 

 I write down Bambara words for him to read, reasoning that, maybe, once he knows all the sounds, he can start learning a little French.  But he has a long way to go.