Gendarme Encounter

Today is the day of the BAC – the big exams for all the students. It’s a strange year for the BAC because all government workers are on strike, and teachers did not show up for work today. How are students going to take their final exams without teachers? I don’t know, but they have to. The students of Conakry and Kindia don’t like this idea too much, and they are striking as well, apparently. They are in the streets, demanding the same things that everyone else striking is demanding – lower gas prices and major changes in the government. But the students in Siguiri are taking their tests today – tests in chemistry, math, french, english….

The reason I am writing this entry is not because there is a strike going on – that’s old news. I have no idea what changes are going to come of the strike, if any changes come at all. I am writing this blog entry to share a very very strange experience I had today while biking up to ADRA.

I was biking, as normal, up the obnoxious hill upon which ADRA decided to build its offices. I am almost at the top, almost there, but I am stopped by a man in uniform who greets me with all the wonderfully long formalities of Guinean culture. I am worried – I have never enjoyed encounters with uniformed men too much. Men in uniform around the world are there to either give you a ticket, to tell you to stop doing something, or to hit on young women like myself. So, as he greets me, I am worried. Is he going to tell me that I can’t go to ADRA? Is he going to tell me I am doing something wrong? Is he going to ask me for a bribe to simply bike past him? He pulls out a paper and asks me “comprenez vous anglais?” I say yes, I speak english, and I am American. I look at the paper, expecting to see some official document telling me something important, but it is not that – it is the BAC english exam. The instructions say, “put these words in order or please match the two categories or answer the following questions in complete sentences.” It finally hits me – this uniformed man is asking me to give him the answers to the English BAC exam! He is going to get the answers and probably sell them to the students who were inside taking the test or something. I told him that I could answer the questions but I wasn’t going to because cheating is not fair. He explained that the students have so much to study for, and they just need some help in English, everyone’s hardest subject. He told me that only a few need the answers, and that I should help them out. I said that if I gave the answers to a few of them, it wouldn’t be fair to the rest who had spent their time studying. He looked perplexed, but after a moment, he thanked me for my time and let me continue on my way up to ADRA.

Uniformed men asking me to give them high school test answers? Talk about a flawed system…..