TEACHING ACCOUNTING TO ILLITERATE WOMEN

At the Avedogui primary school I sit waiting on hot concrete steps. The key for the classroom has not as yet arrived and only a few of the women have begun to arrive. It's only 10 minutes after our session was scheduled to start so I shrug and accept that we are still technically "on time."

As more and more women arrive I wonder where the key is and when it will finally arrive. It is usually the male secretary of the women's group that brings the key, sweating and in a hurry, but it is also usually around the start time and so far I have no sight of him.

After 30 minutes and the arrival of almost all the women, plus a few new faces I've yet seen, I decide to call the secretary to ascertain his whereabouts.

"Alo?" his crackly voice shouted through the weak network technology.

"Oui, Gilles, c'est Allison. Vous etez ou maintenant?" I respond with slight annoyance that his immediate answer was not the customary "Je viens." (Hello, Gilles, it is Allison. Where are you right now?)

"Je suis au village," was the actual response. No apologies in his voice. (I am out of town)

"Uh... what?" I lapsed into English with my annoyance. "Nous avons une session pour les femmes et vous avez le cles." (We have a session for the women and you have the key)

"Il y a une autre," he offered. (There is another)

Apparently, there was another secretary (what?!) for this group, though none of the women present knew of a second secretary, who had a key to the room. To Gilles it was also apparent that this mystery secretary was coming right now with the key. All we had to do now was wait; keep calm and wait.

After another 30 minutes I was finally tired of waiting and called Gilles again to find out the locale of our key. The sun was hot, the women were restless, I was finishing my "waiting book" and didn't have a reserve - we needed to get going on whatever our next move was. "Il vien," again.. not something I wanted to hear. "Je/Il/Elle/On viens," is the blanket response for "(Sub.) will come at some point in the future; though you will never know when and who it will actually be when they arrive." Anytime I hear that phrase I cringe, knowing that I am now precluded from every knowing anything for certainty.

Accepting the fate that we now had spent over an hour sitting on the sunny steps waiting for some man I have never met, and neither had the women for that matter, to bring a key to a room that we had been using, with regularity, for the past two months. What was more perturbing was that Gilles new we had a meeting and had not deigned it necessary to inform us that he would not be coming and that we had to find our own way to get the key. It is this sort of non-reliability or lack of responsibility that makes working here so difficult. Regardless of his committing to the meetings (it was he who approached me to come do the work with group) he determined it was not worthwhile to respect this commitment and allowed us to rely on him which lead us to sitting here idly waiting. I hate to say this, but it is a common theme he that men place women as second tier and therefore lack the respect normally given to colleagues when that colleague is not a male. In this instance, the man (Gilles) felt it beneath him, or perhaps did not even consider the disrespectful nature of his attitude, to inform the women of his absence from our session.

In spite of the discourtesy, I decided it was not worth the time to get here and subsequent waiting to just leave again without doing what we had all set out to. I attempted to assemble the women in some semblance of groups; there were 18 of the proper group and 6 additional women who were a part of the second group that had arrived early. With my groups assembled and two partially conversational French speaking women and paper taped to the walls in a mock blackboards I began to teach the third installment of our accounting class. Considering that the women were three thick surrounding board, holding onto their howling children trying to breastfeed and all see the board at the same time, with no place to sit (the stoop being all of two-and-a-half feet wide) and no real translator I think we moved through explanations and examples quite well using hand gestures and oratory emphasis (yelling the same word over and over again thinking repetition leads to comprehension).

More than I could accomplish in one session, however, is the physical hurdles of holding a pencil. It is amazing to consider that almost all of these women have no idea how to use one. As we were moving through the examples and I was trying to get them to understand how to fill out the incomes and expenses sheets I repeatedly had to hold their hands and teach them how to draw even a seemingly simple straight line. It's another affirmation of how truly fortunate I am growing up as an American in a developed country where I learned to use a pencil at a very young age. I stood there, helping a woman who has seen more of life's experiences than I could ever imagine, to do something I had mastered as a 6 year-old in kindergarten. Yet another "right" I have taken for granted my entire life; the abilities to write and draw.

As the sun commenced setting and the first group was wrapping up I had to address the second group (of which there were now 12 women waiting). It was simply too difficult to teach another session without seating, a place to write and, finally, no light as we had now been outside for over three hours. We scheduled our next meeting for two weeks later, not on a market day, and one hour before I would actually arrive (to make sure they are all here "on time" it is sometimes necessary to give them an extra buffer hour to get here). I left the women dispersing in the sunset to their homes and felt a quiet glow of success in succeeding over cultural hurdles within the solidarity of women's desire to succeed in the face of such adversities.