He runs... he strikes !

It was the school cross-country race today. All teachers and staff had to be present, even those on their day off, which happened to be my case. We were sent into the undergrowth to cheer the students on and to give out water and sugar where necessary. However, there was a strike the day before and today – they plan to go on for three months if they need to – the water bottle delivery hadn’t arrived, so there was no water to give out.

The sports teachers had done a good job staggering the race-starts of 1300 kids, so we cheered them all on, shouted, clapped and reassured the ones who were having difficulties. I took plenty of photos, which I’ll put on the school computer network tomorrow, and I’ve printed the odd one off for kids who asked me to. I took plenty of portraits of kids I don’t know, just because I liked their expressions, and I took a few photos of groups of kids to show you how colourful it all is.

  

     

  

When the time came to go home, I’d been hearing shouts and shrieks from the school. The shouting was coming from the nearby roundabout, a roundabout I had to negotiate to get home. There were a good hundred people on the roundabout with bricks and sticks, breezeblocks blocking the entries to the roundabout and a burning tyre in a plastic bin. Mostly kids on the roundabout itself, a lot of young people and the odd adult. One of whom told me to hurry up, but by the time I got halfway round, two kids had decided to stop me going any further and put their feet up against the car, shouting to their friends to come and stop the car. I think I was lucky though, as I heard another shout going up behind me, calling the kids away. I’m pretty sure a few of them recognized me as their teacher and let me pass.

They’re striking at the moment for several things. It started as a teachers’ strike, as they’re getting rid of some 14,000 jobs next September and have done so every year since 2007. On top of that, student teachers have even more problems than last year, because they’re now doing a full teaching service with training on top. There are too few qualified teachers to replace absentees, so they’re digging up all sorts of replacements who are often just there to earn a few euros. At the beginning of the year, the deputy asked us to refer to him any friends or family with two years of university after the Baccaulauréat – a degree is three years here, so that could be anyone from students to professional degrees – and as P was looking to work in Mayotte with me, I offered the head his references. P has worked for years in an office, buying and selling aeroplane parts, and the deputy head’s reaction was “He can work as a maths teacher if he wants”. They’re dragging people in from all over the place, teaching them neither how to teach a subject nor how to control a class.

Another thing they’re striking about is the price of living here. Everything is about three times the price of French products, because it’s all imported, but they know that M’Zungus (white people) are generally paid extra to come and work in the French island territories. It’s called a prime d’éloignement, it’s an extra 11.5 months’ salary per year (basically double salary) and its prime function is to allow us to buy plane tickets back to where our home is. Local Mayotte-born teachers don’t have that, because they live and work in the same area. If they went to France, they would have this extra money and French teachers wouldn’t. However, many prices here are also calculated on the reasoning that the customers will be mostly white and paid double, which is unfair for the locals. They’d like to reduce the price of imported goods or be allotted some extra money to pay for it all, like in Paris where you receive a prime à la vie chère, a bonus to compensate for the price of rent and food.