ISO Community,

It indeed has been a challenging weekend, and I thank everybody for following our lead and making sure our students (and us) are safe during this uneasy time. As this community has shown, over and over, during my time working with everybody …. “The Tougher the times! The Tougher the People!” Time and time again, we have shown what a resilient community we are here at the International School of Ouagadougou.

As all of you are already aware, the situation is still uncertain. I have therefore asked our Principals to put in place a week of distance learning (we hope not to use all five days and get the “all clear” to return to campus sooner). Our Principals and teachers will be reaching out to you, and, in some cases, our students later on this afternoon.

As we don’t know much confirmed and official information regarding, what is “more likely than not”, a Transition of Power here in Burkina Faso, we should all continue to follow the advice one of my colleagues gave me today: “Hang in there mate and raise your head only when the dust settles”. We hope the dust settles sooner rather than later.

One final logistics note: the school facility will remain closed tomorrow, and teachers will unfortunately be doing their distance learning instructions from home. We hope to have a better understanding of the situation in the next 24 hours so we can open our campus first to our teaching team — we have learned from past experiences over the years — as we are able to do a much better job with online instruction when we are in our classrooms or offices.

Have a safe and uneventful Sunday, and I look forward to checking in with many of our students tomorrow, to see how they are doing. To help them (and you) through this stressful time, our Lower School Principal, Mr. Horton, recommends positivepsychology.com to assist with our students’ social emotional health until we can do so personally when the Ministry of Education allows us to return to campus.

Stay Say

Jeff