Teaching...

Lately I have really been loving teaching. Many of us came into the education program in S.A. with little or no teaching experience, and I am still a firm believer that Peace Corps is a great opportunity to discover the teaching profession with limited experience. During my teaching English internship in France while I was studying abroad, I began to find that I just really really enjoyed planning lessons and being in a classroom. I was definitely still skeptical of doing it as a full-time career, hence why PC has been a great way for me to entertain this idea without committing long-term.

This came to mind today because of the particularly successful lessons in my English class I have had this week. On Monday I decided to give them a listening and reading comprehension exercise from their book on Nelson Mandela’s famous speech from when he was released from prison in 1990. It was a pretty difficult passage and I was worried it would be too advanced for the class (especially with a few learners who are still at the phase of sounding out their words in Setswana). It actually turned out great and the class ended up enjoying it a lot! I decided to stick with this for the rest of the week and do a similar exercise with MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech. It was nice to show them the parallel between the histories of South Africa and the US, and they were all really surprised to hear that A) black people live in America too (they consider Obama to be “coloured” and not black) and B) that we had a similar history of oppression and revolution.

One thing that’s really fun about teaching ESL is that you can incorporate a lot of other subjects into lessons depending on what you’re teaching. My lessons this week included new vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension, history of SA and the US, human rights, as well as a little geography (MLK’s speech references a lot of the southern states). Fun stuff!

One of the downsides of becoming more sure of teaching as a career for me is the recent increase in thinking about my post-PC future and making plans – and if you haven’t noticed already, I’m kind of an over-planner. With this has also come a recent re-obsession with French. I have been reading as many French books as I can (thanks to my fam for sending some!) and reading French news from lemonde.fr. I know, I’m a huge nerd… feel free to mock me as much as you want! I just can’t help it! Being in a country where I only really understand 1 (and a half, if you count my limited understanding of Setswana) of the 11 languages spoken makes me miss living in France, where I am continually challenged but can understand and communicate quite well. I guess I probably should have fought harder to be placed in Francophone Africa… but there’s no use in pondering the “what if” scenarios… SA is pretty cool too. I am really excited at the prospect of teaching French when I return though, even if it is a ways away… it’s nice to feel like I’ll have some direction after all this.

On a side note, I am going to Kuruman this weekend for a Peace Corps Cinco de Mayo party that will probably rock my whole world, and from there going to Pretoria for yet another week. This time it is for GTOT (General training of trainers), where a group of us will plan sessions for the incoming group of education volunteers who arrive July 15! Crazy to think that soon enough we will have been here for a year and meeting the new group of volunteers!

*** Speaking of which, any new PCVs headed to South Africa this summer... feel free to leave a comment! I know I was fairly fixated on reading peace corps blogs before I came to help with my packing, so i understand…

winter in may!

So I know I mentioned in my last post that the weather had changed, but after months and months of 80-100 degree weather, I don’t know if I really got my point across. It. Is. Amazing. I find that my whole demeanor has changed… turns out I’m just kind of a cold weather kind of girl. The crazy thing is really how abruptly it has changed…. I can safely say it is not just cooler here but actually cold. As in, I have taken out two extra blankets for my bed and comfortably hang out in my room in fleece pants and a hoodie. Granted, it is nowhere near the awesomeness of snowy Colorado winters – a season which apparently has decided to last all the way into May this year! In any case, the South African winter will do for now, and I know it’s only going to get colder for June/July. Bring it on!

I just got back from yet another trip to Pretoria. Peace Corps has been keeping me pretty busy outside of my site, which is not something I had really expected. Actually this time it was mostly my fault, since during PST I volunteered to be the warden for my region of Northern Cape PCVs. Being a warden basically means I get to keep track of when my volunteers leave their sites, so that in the case of any sort of emergency I will be able to contact people. I will also have to organize a consolidation in regional towns if PC ever feels we are unsafe in our region. The warden system is actually pretty cool…. Peace Corps works in some fairly unstable countries and is able to evacuate volunteers from their sites in all sorts of crises. Lucky for us consolidation or evacuation are not likely to ever happen as SA is a pretty stable democracy, but it’s nice to have the system in place just in case! And really if something ever did happen here, our villages would likely be much safer than any town or city.

I shouldn’t complain about going to Pretoria that much… it’s really an enjoyable time! We stay at a backpackers in town and I usually get the chance to meet and hang out with volunteers from other groups. It also means being able to go out at night, go shopping in malls, and get delicious food… on this trip we had really awesome Indian food and some good sandwiches. It will never be less weird to go back and forth between the incredibly developed first-world Pretoria and my tiny tiny village and it always takes a few days of adjustment.

I have been talking with other volunteers lately about a kind of “rut” we feel we’ve been in lately. I am still really happy at my site and feel very comfortable with my life here, but it’s just now starting to weigh on me how incredibly hard the “work” aspect of Peace Corps can be. I think maybe part of it is that I am more invested in my projects and seeing results, making it that much more frustrating when plans fall through, projects are postponed, and meetings are cancelled. Even harder to deal with than that is just the teachers’ general lack of motivation and excitement to do anything that could potentially improve their school. Of course raising learners’ scores is a nice idea, but when it comes to doing actual work it is extremely hard to get people moving. I guess this is all part of the “cultural adjustment” process… sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m in Africa, which means doing about the exact opposite of what I would think is the logical and efficient way to do something.

For example, take our library project. I have been in the village for almost 9 months and the lack of any sort of library was one of the immediate tangible areas where I saw I could help. We had a storage room full of dusty old books (some never opened) and an empty classroom. Put them together and we have the start of a library, right? My school agreed we could use a library, but it took my first couple MONTHS just to convince them that we should take the books out of storage and start using them at all. Their logic is that the kids will destroy and steal the books, and they can’t read anyways, so why should they use them??? Yes, silly from our American standpoint… but after a couple months of fighting to at least display the books somewhere I began to clean out the storage room. So then I spent a month or so sorting them, and we now have nice piles of books sorted by learning area and level. But nowhere to put them. So then I start pushing for one of our 2 empty classrooms to be made into our official library. But, of course, they disagree for another couple months because that classroom is being used for storage. Moving the books out of the storage room and into the classroom and putting the junk that is “in storage” into the storage room was a surprisingly difficult concept to explain. But after some more pushing they seem to agree and we begin that process. The next problem is that we still had piles of books and a classroom, but no shelves of any nature. And we are most definitely still working on this one. We have been asking for donations for wood to build shelves from local business, along with asking the community for anything they can give, neither with any luck so far. On a positive note, after a few months of community meetings and pushing the idea of a library, we officially have a volunteer librarian from the community. She is great and has come everyday so far, even when there has been nothing to do… so that’s a good sign! Our next step is raising money to fix up the room, get tables and chairs, build shelves, get burglar bars and doors, and to ship over more appropriate books. I’m going to look at getting at least 1 computer donated too… so if any of you have ideas let me know!

[I think I could also use the example of the use of corporal punishment here, as it is the thing that frustrates me the most and the thing that will likely NOT change. But, I feel I have done enough complaining about this issue in my blog already ☺]

So in any case, this is all just such a huge learning process of how incredibly long it takes for things to get done here, and it has really taught me to manage (in some cases lower) my expectations. Which is sometimes really hard to do when you have a vision of what could be done how things could change. But alas, this is not just the case in Africa but really a fairly standard way things happen for PCVs around the world. Just have to keep moving forward!