When I’m wrapping up a lesson or concept in class, I ask my students, “Est-ce clair?” Is it clear? “Oui, Madame!” they shout back in unison. More often than not there’s one goofball student who responds with, “Yes Madame! I compreesh!” Volunteers hear this all the time: compreesh. It’s an English oops, a Franglais fail, that I…
Tag: peacecorps
a day in the life of a white princess
4:30am: I wake up with the same stomachache I went to bed with and run to the latrine. It’s pretty cold outside – harmattan is here. I go back to bed, wrapped in the fleece blanket I stole from the plane over a year ago. 6:30am: I wake up again to the sound of the ground…
biking through butterflies
I learned to bike when I was 26 years old on a bumpy, sandy road in Sub-Sahara Africa surrounded by butterflies. That’s the short version. The poetic version. The sarcastic version. It was a solo trip from Bouca – the rural village in Benin where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer – to…
biking through butterflies 