Multicultural Education...for real!

When I was at UNI and at OLLU, I had to take a Multicultural Education course. It was always compulsory to define culture. Frequently, we think of culture primarily relating to the food, dance, music and traditions within a particular people group. However, over the past few days, I’ve realized (again) that culture, which is instilled during one’s upbringing, permeates everything that we do.

After Aunty Kema’s birthday in the compound, there was a lot of trash on the ground. Since this doesn’t seem to affect people in Jalingo in the same way that it bothers me, I decided to take some initiative to have it picked up while having happy childhood memories at the same time! When I was a child visiting my Grandma and Grandpa Carter, they had an apple tree that would drop apples prematurely and result in apples scattered all over the yard. Grandma would pay my brother and I 1 penny per apple. We were excited!

Arthur and his friend LaToy are 4-5 years old and I tasked them with picking up trash and for every 10 pieces, they would get 1 naira. Since the smallest denomination that exists in circulation is 5 naira, I was probably underpaying, but they were excited to be earning money and I was excited that the trash was being collect. It was a win-win situation that I’m fairly certain had never been employed in Jalingo before but instead was a product of my American culture.

Later in the day, I decided that we needed a field trip down to the river which isn’t far from the compound, but I’d never been to that part of the shore. On the way, they had fun jumping in and out of the drainage ditch. We identified trash, talked about mango pits being seeds, looked at how seed pods from the tree drop into the ditch and dry out. We named the letters on signs, counted steps, and looked at the clouds in the sky. When we arrived at the river bed, we saw the how it was completely dry and how they bore down to pump water.

After the fun excursion, I started thinking about how I had never seen any adults go on little “outings” with kids around town. This was something that had not occurred to me either prior or during the fun but in hindsight found interesting. Believe me, there will be more field trips before I leave!