Le General

There is a person at every school called the "Surveillant General." This man is in charge of discipline at the school, so if you kick a kid out of class you send him to the dreaded Surveillant. Or in our case, Le General.

Le General is this tall, skinny, chain-smoking guy who comes up with the most creative, funniest insults you can imagine. According to him, he used to work as a bush taxi guy in Ghana and later as an elephant poacher. While I would normally call BS on that, he does speak some Ghanaian english and knows an awful lot about the price of elephant tusks. He is also Super nice and tries to teach me Moore every day.

I say all this to preface a couple of anecdotes about Burkina schools. Or maybe just my school. Or maybe just the General.

One day, I was planning to give a test in the afternoon. I had given the test copy to the secretary to type up (on the typewriter) and print out (on the... hm. I just tried to google search what this machine actually is and failed. It's not on wikipedia, at least not under "obselete printing techniques" or "ancient printing methods." My friend just suggested "printing press," but I'm pretty sure that's not right. In any case, it's the machine where you put in the typed sheet with the purple carbon copy, then you turn the crank for however many copies you need. That thing. ...Dictograph? No.) So she had printed out my copies in the morning, then left for the day and locked her office. I showed up in the afternoon to find my students waiting, and no way to get the test. I could have written it on the chalkboard except that the secretary had my original copy too. I walked over to the General's house to see if he had a key. He didn't, but he grapped a set of random keys and we set out for the office. He proceeded to show some unusual expertise in the field of lock-picking. Apparently if you use a similar key and jiggle it a lot and lift the door at exactly the right time, you can pop open the lock, as he then demonstrated. It took about fifteen seconds. On our way back to his house with the copies in hand, he jokingly requested that I not mention this particular skill to anyone.

Another day, maybe even that same week, I was sitting on a bench next to the office during a break between my classes and I heard a loud BANG from somewhere close by. Looking around, I didn't see anything, and assumed it must have been a malfunctioning moto somewhere. Several minutes later, however, who comes striding through the school grounds with a rifle and a dead bird? Le General.