Robertsport YEP Center

March 21, 2010
Robertsport, Liberia/ Monrovia, Liberia

We did our final pilot training session on Friday at the Robertsport vocational training center--the YEP (Youth Education Pack) center under NRC. While half of our group had taken the trainees to the local market to do a market assessment, I stayed behind to do some informal interviews with staff and students at the center. The tailoring class was packed, though I later gathered that not all the students in the room were tailoring students. I think some were just hanging out there to avoid the sun. The teacher was a thin weather-beaten man somewhere between 35 and 45 years old. Over his thin upper body hung a tie-dyed collared shirt. He told me the tie-dye class had made the fabric and he stitched the shirt for himself. He proudly showed off the clothing his students were working on, mostly dresses and pants for toddlers. When I admired the sewing machines, he lamented the fact that he only had 5 working machines for the 20 students in the class. The sewing machines were foot-pedal-powered. While most of the students were girls, he has two boys in his class.

The masonry students were cocky and boldly called two of us over to talk to them. They were hard at work building “a square”, as one laughingly told me. They construct house frames and other practice tasks each day and knock them down after so they can practice another one the next day. One flirtatious 16-year–old told me his father lives in Philadelphia. When I asked him why he’d chosen masonry as a vocation, he said it was easy to find a job, though not in Cape Mount (their county) so he’d have to leave the county to find work.

Over at the pastry class, a group of girls huddled around large mixing bowls making shortbread. They showed me the dye they use to color the cake yellow and everyone laughed when the bottle leaked and dyed my fingers bright yellow. When I again posed the question “why did you choose this vocation?” one girl told me it was “fast money” because they could bake bread or cakes and sell them that day. Another girl giggled and just said “I love pastry!”

The hairdressers had come back from their day at agriculture class. Each vocation takes agriculture class once a week and after class they have free time to hang out at the center. There is a large field next to the center where the youth learn to grow three types of cassava along with other vegetables. This is considered a core skill that they all learn along with literacy, numeracy and accounting. This center also offers classes in human rights and peace education, but we weren’t able to see any of those classes in action.

A little girl sitting with her mother, who is herself a young cosmetology student, stared at me for a moment and then asked, “Is that your real hair?” Pointing to the long braid down my back I told her yes, and looked up at the braids hanging posted on the wall, weaves to use in their classes. All the children of mothers in the vocational training programs had intricate hairstyles thanks to the plethora of aspiring hairdressers training there and looking for willing practice subjects.

The carpenters… well, they were a trip. I walked over the group of young men off to the side, working around a few sawhorses and piles of wood, hoping to snap a picture of the carpentry class for use in our video. The minute the guys saw me and my camera they started posing and demanded I photograph each of them with the table, or stool, or bench they’d made. They then proceeded to pose for me “in action”, sawing wood or hammering a nail. I now have about 30 photos of shirtless teenagers posing goofily with their tools. Boys are boys everywhere.

The day rounded out with a “cultural performance” including singing by some of the more outgoing and charismatic students, if not the most in-tune. Finally two boys stood up and sang/rapped a song about the NRC (“N-R-C, we pray for you, N-R-C, we pray for you….”) and ended it with the little 14-year-old dancing with Nora, which as usual made everyone’s day.