I can’t remember the name of my Junior High School.

This week was the annual Peace Corps Mauritania Health/Eco camp and the Lycee has been crawling with 5th and 6th grade girls. It’s been a hectic week. I mean, for the people that have actually been involved with it. I’ve been surfing Facebook and lying around reading.

I did help with the Eco Camp Olympics yesterday, though. I was given the crucial job of filming the girls doing their relay races, long jumps, and such. There’s a remarkable self-possession among young girls here. Maybe it’s from having been obliged to carry big basins on their heads since they were fetuses, but they move with such self-assured grace. I’m thinking specifically of sassy, sparkly 14 year old Bol host sister Achta here and her amazing runway model poise. That girl could walk.

This reflection has all been brought on by my Facebooking yesterday, when I found about 10 friends that I haven’t seen since junior high. I wish I could say that I moved with languid grace in middle school, but I think we all know that would be an absolute lie. We had just moved to the big city and I had a hard time getting used to things like crossing busy Lockwood Avenue and not tight-rolling my jeans. Please keep in mind that the tweens of suburban St. Louis were skating to Green Day and dying their hair with Kool Aid at about this time. 7th grade is a blur of tucked-in X-Files tee shirts and playing Blackjack for pistachios at the lunch table, but 8th grade was better. I cut my hair off into a bob, wore a lot of vests, and got really into playing saxophone. Sure I still clutched my Trapper Keeper to my chest in the halls and lived in awe and fear of the cool kids, but I had come into my own as a band kid and become friends with a group of shamelessly nerdy oddballs.

I’m making it sound like girls in this part of the world just sashey around all fabulous and bubbly, compared to American girls. But girls here have it B-A-D, which I know I’ve written about in other letters and don’t want to get in to now because it makes me so sad and angry. I always tried to encourage my students, but what is one American girl’s encouraging voice among so many others cutting them down? Bleh.