The students are really enjoying their hosts and visiting classes in the school.  Today they made a presentation about Amherst to two large groups of students, and the students asked lots of questions about our school and America.

While sampling authentic Senegalese cuisine at a restaurant in downtown Dakar, we were treated to a performance by a griot on the kora.  He sang about each person by name, a great honor for us.  It was a great experience, as was the food (even though some of us were a bit squeamish about fish being served with the head and tail still attached).  Vegetarianism is bit of a mystery to most people here, but we’re managing to accommodate everyone’s diet.

Tomorrow we leave for The Gambia for an eight-day stay there – we will be in a village, not a big city, so the experience will be quite different.

Thank you for helping us make the exchange program a reality!

African Scholars Program teachers, students, and parents have been conducting a variety of fundraisers to support the exchange trip to Senegal and The Gambia in 2013.  The goal was to provide a total of $10,000 in partial scholarships to students whose families could not otherwise afford $3,500-per-student cost and to subsidize other aspects of  the trip. The chart at the right shows how much we have raised.  We wish to thank the Amherst community for supporting our efforts.

Here are some of the projects we have been working on:

• Sale of African Scholars Program mugs.
• African lunches for ARHS staff, courtesy of David Jean and the Culinary Arts program.
• Grant applications to local and regional organizations.
• An African Dinner and Film Night on March 15, 2012.
• Sale of green products from Koru Fundraising.
• Another African Dinner and program on June 14, 2012, and yet another dinner on January 17, 2013!

In addition to these efforts, students have organized their own fundraisers at school to provide school supplies for needy students at our host schools.

The African Scholars Program will host a community event in the spring of 2013 to share research projects and photos from the exchange trip.  We hope you will join us for this celebration!  Thank you again for your support of the program.

ParentMeetingNovember1

Please use this blog site to post your comments on Reading the Ceiling, Prologue and Part One.  Please reflect on and connect with the novel.  The main character is close to your age.  What do you have in common with her?  In what ways is her life quite different from yours?  How do her thoughts compare with your thoughts?  Her potential futures with yours?  The original assignment sheet, which has more suggestions, is attached here: Reading the Ceiling Assignments 2.  Your first comment is due April 29, and the second, on Parts Two and Three, on May 13.

Chicken Yassa

The evening will include a sumptuous home-made meal using authentic West African recipes and a free screening and follow-up discussion of Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane’s Mandabi, the story of a man with a money order he can’t cash because he has no identity in the postcolonial bureaucracy.

The menu will offer a choice of entrees, vegetarian mafe or chicken yassa, with white rice.  Beverages will include bouye and bissap (made from baobab and hibiscus, respectively) as well as ataya, a special tea brewed and poured with great fanfare.  The principal chefs will be African Studies Program directors Oumy Cisse-Deme, a French teacher and naïve of Senegal, and Momodou Sarr, a special education teacher and native of The Gambia.

The goals of the African Scholars Program are to infuse African studies into all parts of the high school curriculum and to establish an ongoing exchange program with secondary schools in Senegal and the Gambia. The group’s fundraising activities will support students who cannot afford the full cost of the exchange as well community service projects in Africa.

The event is open to the community, but seating is limited and reservations are required.  Tickets are $15 for adults and $8 for students; preferred seating and a souvenir mug are available with an additional $10 contribution. Tickets can be reserved by e-mailing Bruce Penniman at penniman@english.umass.edu or by calling 413-253-2669.