by Aimee Molloy
After a few minutes, Molly heard the sound of laughter. “Come on out and see the thief that was breaking into your hut, Sukkéyna,” one of the boys said.
Molly cautiously crept outside to identify the culprit: a lone donkey feasting lazily on the leaves of the roof, paying no attention to the ruckus he had caused. For the next few weeks, Molly tried not to notice the giggles she inevitably heard from the young men as she passed them in the village.
The hut she’d been given was in the family compound of the village chief, a revered man named Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay, whose grandfather had founded the village around the year 1750. His title, Alaaji, was bestowed on people who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, which he had accomplished as a young man, traveling across Africa by boat, plane, and on foot over the course of an entire year. He was now in his nineties and had become a wise and respected religious leader, attracting people from across Senegal who came to Saam Njaay to study the Koran with him or receive one of his blessings.
The village chief’s compound included several individual huts inhabited by each of his four wives and their young children, surrounding a central courtyard where most of the daily activities took place under the shade of a large tree.
As Molly settled into life in the village, she and Alaaji Mustaafa Njaay passed many evenings together in the quiet on his verandah. Sitting in his hammock, adorned in an elegant prayer cap and always wearing a pair of glasses he had picked up at the used clothes market, he would speak to Molly about the workings of the village, the deeper origins of village traditions, and the important words that were key to understanding the hearts of the Senegalese. Offering her advice on how to be a strong and effective leader, he reminded Molly that she needed to let life be, to be open to its lessons, and to do the best she could in whatever it was she was setting out to do.
“A leader is like a Fulani cow herder,” he said to her one evening, imparting a lesson she would never forget. “Sometimes he will lead the herd from the front. Sometimes he will remain in the middle and be part of the herd. And sometimes he will remain behind, allowing them to move forward on their own, following their lead. Like a skilled cow herder, a good leader always knows when to be where.”
MOLLY BECAME A TRUE part of Njaay’s family, referring to him as baay (father) and his children as her sisters and brothers. In the mornings, she would join them for a breakfast of millet couscous left over from the previous evening’s dinner. In the hottest part of the afternoon, they would gather for tea in an ancient and intricate Arabic ceremony called ataaye, during which three small glasses of green gunpowder tea were prepared: the first strong and bitter, the second lighter, and the third very sweet.
“It’s like friendship,” Njaay would say, as Molly sipped her tea. “It just gets sweeter over time.”
She especially loved the evenings. Because there was no electricity in Saam Njaay, the people of the village spent most nights gathered with their children on mats placed in a circle around a bonfire in the village square. Some would drum on upside-down bowls or buckets as people danced; some stood to tell jokes or share the traditional stories of the village. The women were masters of short Wolof poems called taasu, which they recited to rhythmic clapping and dancing. Before long, they began to create special taasu just for Molly.
“Sukkéyna Njaay, xobu lem la.” (Sukkéyna Njaay is a leaf of honey.)
“Ku nu ko sexal.” (When you taste it.)
“Doo yàbbi.” (You won’t spit it out.)
Repeated over and over, their clapping would lead to frenetic dancing, legs flailing, long skirts swirling about. Then people, lost in the excitement, would fall to the ground in laughter.
When it came to developing the educational program, the first thing Molly did was remember her ultimate goal: to find out what was important to the people of the village before deciding what they needed. She knew the eventual success of any curriculum she created would depend largely on how she first engaged the residents, so for the first few months she devoted her time to getting to know the villagers and the way of life in Saam Njaay. With the help of Bolle Mbaye and Malick Pouye, her colleagues at the children’s center in Dakar who had accompanied her to Saam Njaay, she recorded the history of the village, the local legends and proverbs, and the favorite activities and songs. She learned how the young girls made traditional Wolof dolls from tin cans and rags, and camels out of palm leaves; and joined the boys in fabricating wire cars and pony carts, which they would then wheel down the sandy paths.
She learned that the entire year’s activities revolved around tending to the peanut, millet, and cassava fields. The planting of the seeds took place after the first rain in July. After the harvest in October and November, the crops were prepared and then brought to the market and sold sometime in December or January. Everything depended on the rain. Because the closest source of water was a well in a village one kilometer away, there was no way to irrigate the fields.
Molly was especially drawn to the experiences of the women. She had spent enough time in villages like Saam Njaay to know how hard women in rural Senegal worked, but to see it up close, to witness the extent of their work, amazed her still. She began to spend her days recording the activities of a woman named Kumba Sar, who was in her forties and the mother of three children, and of whom Molly had immediately grown fond.
Like the other women of the village, Kumba woke at five in the morning to walk thirty minutes or so to fetch water in the next village. She then prepared breakfast for her family, and after cleaning up the meal, she set out again, this time in search of firewood. Collecting enough to cook the day’s meals meant Kumba had to walk several kilometers in the deep heat of the afternoon. She spent the next several hours on her remaining chores: preparing the evening meal for her family, sometimes having to feed up to twenty-five people, washing the dishes, and bathing and clothing the children.
Kumba had been doing this work, day after day, since she was a child. From as early as four years old girls were expected to fully assist their mothers and aunts with these tasks, and in addition to fetching water and firewood and helping with the cooking and cleaning, they were often responsible for tending to the younger children. Molly noticed that while the women worked, the men—if they weren’t in the fields—often relaxed, and if boys were asked to help, they were given preferential treatment. The girls and women walked to the well, whereas the boys would load big tin barrels on the back of a cart and drive their carts to fill the barrels with water. At the end of the day, the best morsels of food were reserved for the elder males.
Molly understood that most Westerners who visited Senegal were often surprised, and sometimes outwardly critical, about the custom of polygamy, but Molly began to better understand how this system actually benefited women in villages like Saam Njaay. Another wife meant an extra set of hands to help with the chores. As she began to observe, the first wife would be in charge of the household for three days, including doing the cooking and cleaning. The second wife would then take over for the next three, lessening the other woman’s workload at least for a few days.
Despite how hard the women worked, it was against their custom to speak aloud about the hardships they faced. Molly knew they had learned early in life to accept their work with no complaint, to see it as an honor. But it quickly became obvious to Molly how much energy women exerted trying to keep their families healthy, to simply survive. This was no easy task, as the village faced many hardships: the lack of water, the fact that during the dry season there was no work for the men of the village, and therefore no income. Nutritional conditions were extremely poor; many children were malnourished due to the lack of a balanced diet. The nearest health dispensary was twelve kilometers away, and the only way to get there was to walk or travel by horse and cart, which most families in Saam Njaay did not own.
Molly experienced these problems in ways she had never imagined. One day, after returning from a meeting outside the village, she spotted a woman named Anta Ji
ite sitting under a tree, her boubou wrapped around her knees, which she hugged tightly to her body. Anta was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and Molly had expected her to give birth any day. She went over to say hello and noticed that Anta looked sickly and pale.
“You look terrible!” Molly said. “Are you okay?”
The tears welled in Anta’s eyes. “The baby died.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain. She came quickly, but she didn’t survive. I don’t know why. She died almost immediately.”
Molly took Anta’s hand. “When did this happen?”
“A few hours ago.”
“Where is the baby?” she asked.
“My family took her. They’ve already buried her.”
“Come on,” Molly said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“What do you mean?” Molly asked.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“We’re going,” Molly said, standing to help Anta from the ground. “We have to see that you’re okay.” On the twenty-minute drive to Thiès, Anta was silent. Molly knew that had she not insisted, Anta wouldn’t have gone to the hospital; she wouldn’t even have asked anyone to help her. She’d simply wake up day after day, knowing that her baby was buried in a field just beyond her house, knowing there was nothing she could have done about it.
It was simply part of being a woman.
10
Njàngale mi (Teaching)
Molly began to hold her classes about two months after she arrived in Saam Njaay. Because there was no room large enough to accommodate the class, the first lessons, which took place each evening, were taught in the courtyard of a family’s compound. Everyone from the village was invited to attend, and on the first evening of class, nearly fifty people arrived at the scheduled time, dragging with them restless children and large woven mats on which to sit. A large majority of the villagers had expressed interest in learning to write, both to help them secure employment beyond their village and to send letters to family members who lived in other villages. Molly’s first mission was to help her new students understand what reading is. With no books, magazines, newspapers, without even a sign hung anywhere in the village, many had never seen written text.
As far as she was concerned, the worst way to go about teaching people to read was the approach she’d observed in other literacy classes: assume the role of “teacher,” stand before a class of people who had never even held a pencil, and ask them to memorize letters. She preferred to try another approach.
“What would you like to be able to read or write?” she asked the students on the first night of class.
Kumba spoke first. “I want to write a letter to my mother. She lives in a village ten kilometers away.”
Molly asked Kumba what she’d like to say to her mother and then wrote it down.
She handed the paper to Kumba. “Now read this,” she instructed.
Kumba was confused. “But I can’t read.”
“Yes, just tell me what you just said to me. It’s all here.”
“ That’s what reading is?” Kumba asked in amazement.
The students were enthralled. “I love proverbs,” said a man named Cheikh. “I want to be able to write them down and share them.”
“Okay,” said Molly. “Let’s do that.”
She took a piece of paper and began to write. “If ten dig and ten fill in, there’s lots of dust but no hole.” She then asked Cheikh to read it back to her.
“I can read!” said Cheikh, as he looked at the paper in his hands.
To help the villagers become familiar with letters of the alphabet, Molly organized walks through the village, asking the students to identify familiar objects that resembled the letters she had shown them. The roofs of two huts became an M, the round mats the women wove were perfect O’s. Then, sitting on mats on the ground of the courtyard, the students practiced writing the shapes they had observed—first a few letters, and then a word they particularly liked: rice, chicken, tree, boubou, necklace, braids, donkey. They then placed signs around the village identifying landmarks and objects: house of Mustaafa Njaay, baobab tree, chair, mat, fence. When they were fully accustomed to holding pencils and writing letters, Molly then asked them to learn the words other people in the class had chosen, until they’d built a village vocabulary.
After just five months, the students had made remarkable progress in reading and writing. Many knew enough to not only write the correspondence they’d hoped to send but some even started recording births and deaths in the village and rudimentary minutes from village meetings.
Molly was eager to include a discussion about health and hygiene in the evening sessions, knowing that the residents of Saam Njaay faced challenges far beyond their inability to read or write. She observed just how little the villagers understood about their bodies, their health, and the transmission of germs. Even though malaria was a significant problem, many thought it was transmitted through mangoes, an understandable assumption given that mosquitoes are most prevalent at the time of the rainy season when mangoes are ripe. They didn’t understand the importance of vaccinations, or know that they could easily prevent many illnesses like diarrhea through hand washing and keeping the village clean.
She began to experiment with unusual and interesting ways of imparting the information on health. For example, she added a few drops of perfume to a small bowl of water and then passed the bowl around the class, asking each student to dip their hands into it. Although the students admitted they couldn’t see anything, they knew there was something else in the bowl because they could smell it on their hands. This something is like germs, Molly explained—invisible, but rapidly and easily shared.
How did this student of French literature know how to so effectively teach literacy, to develop innovative and highly effective learning methods? Molly arrived in Senegal with some hands-on teaching experience, first as a substitute teacher after graduating college and then as a teaching assistant in graduate school, but she also has a passionate belief in the power of education and a true, innate gift for teaching, which runs in her blood. Her mother, Ann—herself a teacher for nearly twenty years—had always deeply believed in the power of education. Wanting only the best educational opportunities for her daughters, she encouraged both Diane and Molly to do well in school, perhaps because her own pursuit of education had been so difficult. After having to drop out of college during the Depression, she refused to give up on her dream of a college degree. In 1964, at the age of fifty-one, Ann enrolled in summer classes at the University of Illinois and eventually earned her bachelor’s degree at age fifty-eight. “I gained a new respect for my mother when I saw her go, summer after summer, sitting among people in their twenties,” Molly recalls. “She was so committed to achieving her dream of receiving a college diploma. It was truly amazing.”
But for the most part, Molly taught herself to teach, fearless in her decision to try new, experimental techniques. When she started teaching in the early 1970s, working for a year as a substitute teacher, she was drawn to explore different pedagogical techniques than those that had defined much of her own education, such as rote memorization and the strict differentiation between student and teacher. She quickly came to prefer a more creative and holistic approach, which she later honed as a graduate student at the University of Illinois. Asked to teach an undergraduate course in French, she chose not to limit the lessons to grammar and vocabulary, as was expected. Instead, she transformed the class into one that explored French culture, taking her students to see French films, to study the works of French artists at the Art Institute of Chicago, to learn to cook French meals.
After arriving in Saam Njaay, she was given the book Teacher. Written by Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1963, it confirmed Molly’s idea about education. Working with Maori children, Ashton-Warner espoused what she called an organic approach to literacy, using not isolated syllables drill
ed over and over, but meaningful events in the context of children’s lives. Ashton-Warner’s approach was part of an emerging movement at the time, an approach to education meant to redefine the existing and dominant power relationships. Molly’s reading of Teacher led her to value the approaches that would become the cornerstone of her teaching techniques in Saam Njaay: dialogue, role-playing, and student-focused learning.
“After reading that book, I thought, I can do this,” she remembers. “I didn’t have to go back to the university and learn how to teach literacy. I just needed to find the best way to help people learn the things they wanted to learn.”
Her approach to education would later be reinforced by her reading of the book Women’s Ways of Knowing, in which the authors conducted a study of women’s intellectual development and contrasted it to a famous study of Harvard men in the 1950s by a researcher named William Perry. The study found key differences in how women learned, especially in their need for what the researchers termed “connected knowing.” The ideas in this book were especially relevant to the women in Saam Njaay. Their talents were innumerable. They could cook large, elaborate meals for more than thirty people twice a day. They could survive on little money and were able to use every resource at their disposal. Many could sew clothes, weave mats, or braid hair with great skill. And yet, Molly often heard the same sentiment: “There are people who are knowledgeable about things, and we women are not. We are ignorant and know nothing.”
“This used to drive me nuts,” she says. “I would say to them, ‘Look at all you do. Look at how you braid hair. In my country, people would go to school to learn that skill. They’d charge a hundred dollars for one hairdo.’ Or ‘Look at how well you cook, and how you can live on almost nothing in the harshest conditions. People in the United States would be freaked out and unable to survive with the conditions you live with every day. You aren’t ignorant. You just have bought into the idea that some people are learners and some are not.’ ”