Season for Hope, Reason for Hope

The following piece is an article that I wrote for the congregation of my parents' church (Christ the King Lutheran Church in Bozeman, Montana) in response to their generosity in funding a girls' scholarship program at the middle school in our site.  While it was written with a specific audience in mind, the sentiments and themes are general enough that I wanted to share it here.

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Although it’s hard to believe it here in Senegal, where the temperature is just starting to dip below 90 degrees for “cold season”, the season of Advent is indeed upon us.  It is a season of hope, of anticipation, of preparing the way.  In this special time of year, I would like to take the time to thank the people of Christ the King Lutheran Church and reflect on how your support for girls’ education in Senegal has become, for me, a practical demonstration of the spirit of Advent.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Annē Linn, and my parents, Ritt and Roxanne Hoblitt are members at CtK.  My husband Patrick and I are about nine months into our two years of service with the Peace Corps as health and education volunteers in Senegal, West Africa.   Early on in our time here, we became aware of a Peace Corps program known as the Michelle Sylvester Scholarship program, in which volunteers raise money to provide scholarships to nine middle school girls in their community.  Only 41% of girls in Senegal are literate, compared to 59% of boys. Middle school is a critical time, as only 18% of girls in Senegal start secondary school, compared to 24% of boys.   When we have had conversations with students about why this achievement gap exists, they offer up various theories: early marriage (the legal age in Senegal is 16, but that is not always respected),the expectation of girls to help out at home, preference given to boys if there are limited resources for school fees, parental fear that girls who go to school will have more time unsupervised and get into trouble (these fears are not unfounded—situations of poverty create power imbalances in relationships, and early pregnancy is a big issue).  With all of these issues making it difficult for girls to get educated, the scholarship program seemed a clear area for intervention in our community.

When I approached CtK about providing some funding for this program, the church agreed to fund it fully, for not the one year that was originally requested, but for both years of our Peace Corps service.  What a generous act, to meet this need two times over.  The book of Isaiah tells us “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (40:3), a command that is particularly apt in the Season of Advent, as we await the Christmas coming of our God to Earth.  In today’s world of vast inequalities between the developed and undeveloped world, where we are Christ’s hands and feet, I believe that it is through generosity such as CtK has expressed, that this highway is made.  (And in Senegal, it does happen to be in the desert.)  For, as Timothy Radcliffe expresses it, “Waiting for the coming of God is not then mere passivity.  We do not only wait with the poor, we share their struggle.  Also, we must find ways of talking which are hospitable to the lives of the poor.  We must evolve a consciousness, a way of seeing things, which does not shut them out.  We must be attentive to the experiences of the poor so that together we gestate a language in which their hopes may find expression.  Then indeed we may find words into which the Word of God may come and find a home.”

The word of God then, with its message of compassion for the poor, finds its home through your action. All the nine girls, who are selected by teachers and administration at the school based on academic performance and financial need, have their school fees paid by the scholarship, and three of the girls are selected by a Peace Corps committee to additionally receive school supplies and textbooks.  This selection is based on interviews, essays, and home visits by the volunteers.   Facilitating the scholarship program proved to be a great first project for us at our site in Saraya, a town of about 5,000 in the very southeast corner of Senegal.  It was a great gateway into working with the school, and we were able to meet some wonderful female students and their families, some of whom come from small surrounding villages and come to Saraya for the school year in order to pursue their education.  There is no electricity in these villages, and radio is the principal form of news and information, so it was very exciting for the families of our scholarship recipients to hear the recordings of the girls reading their essays on our weekly Peace Corps radio show. 

In their essays, the girls were asked to respond to the following prompts: What are your plans for your future? What do you propose to do to support girls’ education in your community?  It took many of the girls a long time to get started—they had rarely, if ever, been asked about what they wanted to do with their futures, and students in the Senegalese education system are rarely asked to think creatively or critically.  However, once they got to writing, they expressed great dreams about becoming a midwife, a teacher, even a lawyer.  In response to the second prompt, they challenged their fellow female students to overcome the many challenges they face and to take charge of the future they have imagined.  As one girl put it, “I propose to the girls of our community to go to school because our future is found at school.  If we study until we succeed, in the future we can do all that we want and do many things without any one’s help.  I advise the girls of our community to not leave school.  Now, we, the girls, can do as many things as the boys.  Our place is not just at the home anymore.  If we want to help our families tomorrow, we must fight to succeed in the future.  Our families count on us, and we are their only hope.  So let’s work together to help our families.  Studying is not difficult.  If we want to succeed we will succeed.  We are tomorrow’s future.”

The winners of the competition were selected in July, and we held an event in their honor when school started in November, complete with a presentation from a wonderful female role model who works for Peace Corps on gender issues, a ceremony of honor, and a dj for dancing afterward.  Almost 100 students, teachers and family members came, and we were able to drive home the message that girls’ education is a reason for celebration, a reason for hope.  When we visited the girls’ families to invite them to the event, we were received with great joy, and pride in their daughters.  The recognition of their achievement will go beyond the present moment and encourage these families to continue to support their daughters in their educational endeavors.  When we stood up to leave one family compound, we were told to sit back down, that they wanted to bless us before we left.  They then proceeded to pour blessings out upon us, blessings that are in turn extended unto the people of Christ the King.

In his book Half the Sky about women in the developing world, journalist Nicholas Kristof asserts, “One especially cost-effective way to do that [increase learning once in school] is to offer small scholarships to girls who do well.  A study in Kenya by Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, examined six different approaches to improving educational performance, from providing free textbooks to child sponsorship programs.  The approach that raised student test scores the most was to offer the top 15 percent of girls taking sixth-grade tests a $19 scholarship for seventh and eighth grade (and the glory of recognition at an assembly).  The scholarships were offered in randomly chosen schools, and girls did significantly better in those schools than in the control schools—and that was true even of less able girls who realistically had little chance of winning a scholarship.  Boys also performed better, apparently because they were pushed by the girls or didn’t want to endure the embarrassment of being left behind.”

What we are doing here, with the support of CtK, makes a difference.  A big one.  Girls’ education is correlated with many other aspects of development, in fact with all of the Millenium Development Goals.  It is a reason for hope.

I thank you again for your support, wish you a blessed Advent season, and leave you with this prayer:

Now is the time poised with renewed expectation

Of Emmanuel, God with us.

To know our time of proclaimed favor

We make again the pledge you ask:

“Share justly the good things I give you.

Reconcile with peace the rule of abuse.

Give courage to those who voice the words

Of lives that have been silenced.”

Send us to carry your good news

To those burdened with debt

Transform their chains into clasps of love,

Of prayer, concern, and then action.

Aware of your spirit always among us

We sustain your purpose with passions.

Increase our endeavor to do what you ask,

Of, “Where there are wrongs, they be righted.”

-Lala Winkley

One of the buildings at Lycee de Saraya, the middle school and high school in our town.  School officially started in the beginning of October, but no students or teacher arrived until after Tabaski in early November.  Now, as the peanut harvests draw to a close, more and more students are trickling in.


The nine scholarship winners selected by the teachers and administration.


Pat and Frank, our sitemate and collaborator on this project, hard at work making fancy celebration invitations for the girls and their families.

Site visit to invite scholarship winner Sokhna Keita and her family to the big celebration.  (It's hard to get people to smile in photos...they really were quite happy and offered many benedictions in our direction after this photo was taken.)


Introducing Awa Traore, Peace Corps' gender and development advocate for her talk at our Celebration of Girls' Education.

Awa leading a brainstorming session about why girls' leave school.  It was concluded that the biggest issue is  early teen pregnancy, and she talked to both boys and girls about how to take charge of their own lives and decisions rather than allowing poverty to decide for them.

The event was a hit.  There weren't enough seats in the classroom for Awa's talk, and people listened in from outside.


The textbooks we bought for our three scholarship competition winners.  These books turned out to be extremely expensive, and it dawned on us why no kids have their own books.  Students typically copy everything from the teachers' books down into notebooks to study from.


Presenting Kany Samoura with her backpack full of school supplies.


The girls and some of their family members proudly displaying their certificates declaring them scholarship recipients.  Certificates are a really big deal here.  Also in this photo are the mothers of two of the girls, who have very little education themselves.  While this scholarship is only for this year, it is our hope that it will impress on families the importance of educating their daughters and encourage them to continue to do so.