Hello World
It’s been awhile, and you are all due for a new update. I’m in Ndioum now, yesterday we had a big training seminar for our teachers. It seemed to go really well, it was a seminar about changing the ways the teachers teach, just getting creative and adding hand on activities- in particular to discuss environmental health. For example, having the children create a garden and discuss mathematics within the garden. My boss Mamadou came up to teach the seminar, he did a really good job and I think some of the teachers really enjoyed the seminar. It was a pain in my arse to get the teachers to the seminar, we had to leave my village really really early and I had to go around and wake people up- because I am now people’s mother?! I dunno it was kind of frustrating but at once we got there we were the first group to get there and we were coming from the farthest places, so way to go on our part. Not only were we the first, we were also early- what up!! So today, I’m going to be touring an NGO called Tostan’s office/house. The other volunteers and I are interested in having a Girls Camp this summer, to teach them leadership roles, and the man at Tostan offered us to hold it at the office, so we want to go take a look and discuss everything in greater detail because we want to have this camp for maybe 5 days, nothing is planned in great detail- that’s our goal for today hopefully. I want to come to Ndioum just to hide out for a little while, I think some couch potato time is necessary.
I’ve got some couch surfers staying with me in village Friday night, that’s going to be exciting! I love visitors!! Friday afternoon I’ve got my 3rd English class but this time I separated the classes so this is the oldest class at the school I’m doing a lot of work with this class so I know a lot of their names and hopefully I’m building bonds with them. Saturday afternoon will be the second oldest class (these classes are all at the primary school). Teaching English has been going pretty well, but like I’ve said I’ve only had 2 classes. The first class I showed up, and so did 70 students. It was the 2 oldest classes and I was sooo overwhelmed, with that many students every 5 seconds I had to ask someone to be quiet. I only wanted to teach them for an hour just to get introductions, but we went on for 2.5 hours- holy damn. The next day there were only 40 students, but they were just as talkative so I ended class after 1.5 hours, I just got way too tired of screaming be quiet. A kid went and grabbed the teacher’s whip and handed it to me and instructs me to hit them when they start getting out of line. It hurt that a kid would think that’s the only way to deal with unruly children; I of course declined and made an announcement that I will not hit them but I will kick them out of my class, and I will only remove them out of my class because the class and I discussed what we would do with loud students and they insisted kicking them out. I don’t want to kick kids out- that makes me sad.
Other than the English class I’ve also started a boys group and a girls group, we meet at different times and the kids just play around do theatre, music, dance, and hopefully we will have discussions- that’s the real reason I started the group but now we’ve just got to have a nice light environment, because it’s going to be hard to get the kids to open up, especially the boys, yikes. My environmental club isn’t going so well just cause it’s hard for the kids to take the initiative to do the work; so they normally wait until I suggest things to be done, or I get mad that no one is watering the garden then they all start…flooding it? It’s a strange dynamic. I don’t have any of the teachers helping me with any of my work, well I don’t really have anyone in the village helping so that’s really frustrating and I feel like that’s why I run into a lot of these issues.
So work is exciting, because it’s there and that’s reassuring. The Cas de Sante process will be starting very soon hopefully once I return to site, according to my brother the village has collected all of their cash contribution so I can now withdraw the money from the bank and the process can begin, yay! I feel like for this project I’m going to be holding their hand through the whole process because I’m nervous of something going wrong and the village not getting a health post because they spend some of the money for something else and we’re over budget- I’m assuming we’re still going to run into this problem but if I’m in control I can blame myself and take responsibility for my actions – it’s kind of hard expecting that from others.
That’s all. Loves and hugs.
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