The Future is Bright in Saint Louis

Saturday night a very special family joined us for dinner. I had been looking forward to seeing Oumou's six beautiful children  again.  Many years ago, long before the youngest, Mohammed had been born, we had visited  their home when our friend Samir welcomed us as guests. 

Samir had worked at our hotel in Saint Louis. He had been the first to welcome us on our very first trip. Each day I went for an early morning run around the island Samir would watch out for me. We had many talks about his pride for his children. The family was committed to the education of their children as their first priority. Lala is always at the top of her class, and Fadel usually is first or second in his. When ever we visited their home, all the children were proud to show us their exercise books and test results.

They chose to live in a very small, rudimentary two room house with a small sand courtyard in order to afford private school fees. Private school is not as what we would think of in Canada, but it does usually assure that the teachers show up and when they do that they do not spend much of their time on their smart phones. If one wants to advance to high school and succeed there, private school is nearly a necessity. It is not expensive, but for Samir, with fees to pay for three  children, it was a considerable burden. When the youngest at the time became old enough to be registered in school and Samir was not sure how he would cope, I began to help them out at registration time.

Two years ago Samir tragically passed away. His wife, Oumou, is not educated, and five of the children were under the age of twelve. The director of the school at first waived the fees for the older children. Due to their brilliance and promise, he did not want them to have to drop out of school. Extended family and Samir's former employer also helped out for a time. Working reselling charcoal and consumer goods, and cooking for neighbours, Oumou could earn enough to pay the rent or feed the family, but not both. Evntually the assistance trickled to a halt. Tragic stories such as this one are not uncommon here. Life, its hopes and dreams, can shatter in a heartbeat. Families adapt: children drop out of school, go to work, or the family breaks up to get parcelled out to live with and possibly serve distant relatives. This is the accepted way of things. 

But Oumou is different. She and Samir had sacrificed so much already for their children's' education. And, she is a fierce, determined mother with a will of steel.  She confided to me that her family would be separated over her dead body. So far, thanks to Oumou's perseverance and creativity and some help from Canada, all of her children continue to thrive in school and their happy family life persists, the children sheltered and protected lovingly by their mother from knowledge of the precariousness of their future.

Indeed, the optimism. and gratitude  in this family is almost shocking. When I presented the family with a Quran, gifted from a compassionate friend in Canada, Oumou was overwhelmed with happiness and expressed her belief that God has been so good to her family. So many in her situation would have a very different perspective.

The next afternoon, our dear friend Cheikh bounded joyfully to our hotel door to inform us of the birth of his second child. His wife was not due for several weeks yet and he had been anxiously preparing to return to his remote village in the bush. Their son came early, but both mother and child were healthy. Cheikh was over-whelmed with joy and gratitude, and hopes and dreams for his family.

 Cheikh works as a street-side cobbler in Saint Louis. And, just like Oumou,  he is the type of person who is optimistically willing to move mountains for his family and his community. From the example of Maison de la Gare Cheikh had the idea to build schools in the region of his village to offer local families  with little means an alternative to fulfil their wish to give their sons an education rather than send them to a daara in a distant city. The schools have become a Maison de la Gare supported pilot project to end forced begging. Most of the villages in the region have stopped sending their boys to the city to be talibés.  And, Chekh has found and returned many of the talibés from his area who were in Saint Louis back home. A happy effect of the schools is that now, for the first time,  girls are benefitting from an education  too, along side the boys.  Cheikh even thinks that with the return of young boys it will be less likely in future for girls to be  polygamously married off to older men. In fact, he is so optimistic for girls that Cheikh had hoped for a girl this time. But, of course he was just as grateful and over joyed to have another boy instead.

Despite the ever present reminder of the harshness of fate and the precariousness of happiness in the oppressive and abusive forced begging talibé system, optimism and ingenuity are alive and well in Saint Louis.